I am not a fan of Larry so take the next sentences as an odd way to confirm bias and maybe this is why I am responding to it now..
Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Isn't this rehashing the disrupt-vs-reform issue? I guess I am concerned that people are surprised every time someone like Ellison does it.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
Is it laziness, or is it hubris? In a world where some people are told what they do is so good they essentially have infinite wealth, it's hard to convince them that any specific decision they make is an error.
Hubris is laziness. They know better but are too lazy to put in the hard work to do better. It's much easier just to help yourself and screw everyone else. It's hard for anyone else to stop them.
A lesson I had to learn when I was first in charge: when deciding a course of action, ask myself, 'would I accept that from a subordinate?' If you report to no one, it's hard to hold yourself to the same or, if you are doing it right, higher standards. That is the corruption of power.
If you really want to see a person's character, give them power.
For me, “disrupt” is forever tainted by all the startups whose only real innovation was aggressively breaking the law until they were too big to police.
Just breaking the law is not disrupting. Disrupting requires broad support from the public, which is aware that laws are being broken and are fine with it - meaning the particular laws in place are ripe for questioning at the very least.
Uber isn’t what it is because they broke the law, but because the vast public approve of their actions.
We used to see innovative disruption that would grow the pie. Generating large and broad benefits, and capturing a fairly small fraction for the company.
it's been dead for a few years now. At this point it's just standard monopoly behavior -- weasel in, take over, dominate and extra maximum value until real competition happens or the government/regulations come into play.
I remember taxis before Uber/Lyft. They had a whole series of problems.
Predicability - You wouldn't know how much the fare would be when getting into a taxi. In addition, driving indirect routes to charge more and claiming the ride cost more than the normal fare were common scams. Uber/Lyft tells you the price before you order the ride.
Ease of payment - taxis had card machines pre Uber but the machines were frequently "broken" unless the rider spent time arguing that they had no other way to pay. Then, in a miraculous turn of events, the machine recovered.
Accountability - If a taxi driver stole from you, you had essentially no chance of finding them again, especially as a tourist. Uber/Lyft stores this information and surfaces aggregate reviews.
Sometimes, or oftentimes, the law is used against the citizens. Ride sharing is a real improvement in a lot of european countries.
I suggest watching this with subtitles, while it is a comedic skit taken to the extreme you can see how taxi drivers were viewed before ride sharing apps disrupted the taxi industry.
Uber broke the law that protects traditional taxi drivers from having competition under the guise of passenger safety (taxi drivers have the same driver's license as any other driver, no additional safety certs). The public was way too happy to use Uber and that's why it's now forbidden where I live (a country in central EU).
Any time a billionaire demonstrates interest in the disruption of a critical industry, I get nervous. Humans are just too damn susceptible to the “product is subsidized until the disruption is firmly entrenched” play, especially when the feedback loop to uncover deficiencies in the new approach is measured in years and decades.
I think a baseline for both disrupt and reform is an understanding of the problem space and existing solutions first, maybe more-so for successful disruption.
You know billionaires personality traits are probably normally distributed in most aspects, except they have a (much) higher tolerance for risk. So do homeless people.
I don't understand how you define the categories. I took "Usually ..." as referring to more trivial matters and the issues I raised are not at all trivial.
How many of those were outsiders walking in and spotting the solutions none of the so-called experts could, or whatever? It's a short list, to the point that I'd call the entire notion effectively a myth, not much better than chance and probably more often having to do with huge amounts of money being thrown at it, not outsider status or brilliant computer nerds or tech business jerks being magically good at other fields.
Off the top of my head, I would count Google, Google Translate, Google Maps, Netflix, OpenAI, Uber, PayPal, Amazon, and SpaceX in the category of outsiders creating a massively influential product.
You are free to pick apart the companies and their origins to decide if they are enough of an outsider for you.
Uber specifically needs to be removed from that list. The business model is 'drain investor money to undercut existing business and then abuse contractors and employment laws to attempt to make a profit after'. There isn't much innovation anymore, most cab companies have similar apps and experiences now.
This is a list of general technology. Musk, Zuck and Trump specifically (the post I was replying to) have had little impact on much of this list.
3d printing, iphone, google, crispr, netflix have little to nothing to do with them.
Honestly why is CRISPR in this list, that is from scientists and labs not tech billionaires and busniess.
Cloud computing has been impacted a lot by Zuck and invented/reinvented by Bezos yes (not that Bezos was in the list I replied to).
Google Maps and Translate were both bought and innovation happened outside the space we're talking about.
Spacex and Electric Vehicles. Musk got onboard after the fact and used money and influence to push the existing path forward. The telling part is once that path is done things derail quickly when Musk is the one coming up with ideas (cybertruck, booring company etc..)
I think that if you know the current state of the art you have a higher chance of making an incremental improvement. I don't know if it changes your odds of coming up with a revolutionary improvement. We just recently had the story of the student who developed a faster hash lookup because they didn't know it would be impossible.
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble. The point is that there is a competition for the best solution in terms of money.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
> Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble
This seems like more a characteristic of "winner take all (or most)" capitalism rather than a characteristic of innovation.
A new technology potentially creates a new market opportunity and you have everyone bum-rush it as quickly as possible with as much money as possible in the hopes of being the new monopolist.
At any rate, this Ellison play wasn't about an innovation. It was about muscling into a mature market he didn't understand (an "eating-the-world play" to use SV lingo).
No, there aren't. There are no examples of this. The exact reason humanity didn't develop economically for tens of thousands of years was because of the very ideas that you have, almost every human has.
Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.
> The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted.
I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.)
Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy.
I vaguely recall the NeXT marketing materials touting their first machine was 3M. Sounds like this is where the seed for NeXT was first planted.
Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for."
Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!"
"Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too."
"A what?"
"A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation."
Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education.
Some of the people listed in the "Whats a Megaflop" post went over to NeXT with Jobs.
The weirdest part to me, especially with that kind of money, is the lack of bringing in external expertise. There are a lot of ag experts that are up to date on the latest greenhouse, climate, and plant science. Many colleges in the US started as agriculture schools and still have strong agriculture programs. With Ellison's money it is baffling why they didn't bring in a team of these experts to point out the basics like "use ag tech from similar climates", "test ag tech in smaller facilities first", and "gather local farming knowledge". Why in the world would someone put a medical doctor in charge of an ag tech venture?
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
One major irony here is if the stated goal is improving agriculture and you've got half a bil to play with the most obvious move would be spin up an equipment manufacturer to compete with John Deere. Pressuring them to halt their ongoing war against their own customers would have a measurable impact on rural suicide rates.
There will always be a way to explain the events that enabled the disruption and that doesn't take away from the achievement.
Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet.
It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
I wasn't discounting the achievement. Just pointing out the achievement was the result of domain-experts, not random people with a lot of capital and a can-do spirit.
You need a lot of capital in order to acquire the domain experts. The main question, once you have the capital, is whether you can correctly identify an expert, and set them up to be functional/productive
Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry.
And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
There has been massive innovation in the area in the last forty years or so. This isn't leapfrogging but attempting to scale up what is known to already work.
Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment.
And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding).
Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
> Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries
The Dutch built their agriculture industry on the back of the environment - they have massive problems keeping nitrogen runoff under control enough to pass EU-wide legal limits, and the question on how to transform the ag economy has crashed two governments by now. Continuing as-is is blatant cheating against other EU countries that do keep their nitrogen emissions under control, but any kind of reform will threaten people with very deep pockets.
No, they didn't. They had an industry before there were EU-wide limits. The stuff about nitrogen emissions ignores the fact that no other country outside the EU has done what they did.
This cultish "EU is the world" mentality is tiresome.
And the other thing, Uber became super popular because it was subsidized by VC money and fares were cheap.
Now that it's established... it isn't generally cheaper than taxis, it just has a slightly better app, though in many places that's not true anymore.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you know how the taxi groups lobbied against public transportation, for example to airports? AWESOME, now there aren't just a bunch of local SMBs doing that, now there is an international mega corp doing that too.
Yeah, uBer was better and cheaper. Because it was subsidized from every angle. Cheap fares for riders, higher pay to drivers. Now it's either worse or about the same as Taxi's used to be. There's definitely some benefits to Uber especially when travelling. For local rides though, for me, at least, it's no longer better than taxis used to be, but the problem is now all the taxis are gone. It used to be that calling a taxi was unreliable, but they were generally available just by going outside and standing around for a few minutes.
Ah, I forgot to mention something. The enshittification has begun. Uber needs ever growing profits every year. Those will come from... lower pay for its drivers. Higher fares. Other various microagressions (ads in cars, ads everywhere).
In a sense the invention of farming itself was a bunch of neolithic hackers fooling around with nature, which they knew almost nothing about, until they got it right.
I don't agree that Uber was a better solution than taxis.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
Feels like you didn't book a taxi before Uber. Going up to them (no apps back then) and maybe they were or weren't legit, they were expensive, and they would sometimes tell you a price and then charge your differently at the end of the journey, getting annoyed if you challenged it, and you had to pay cash, and you couldn't easily speak to your driver or see where they were on the route to you...so much worse.
The last time I caught an Uber dude intentionally ignored my directions and missed a turn, then just kept cooking off into the countryside with me in the back seat. At 20 over the posted speed limit. At 3am. I spent an unbelievably tense 5 minutes seriously wondering if I was being abducted. I got home but seriously what the fuck.
I literally described my experience of booking a taxi before Uber. Many of the local services also had apps that showed the location of the car and a fixed price before Uber was available here.
Booking a courtesy car is different to most instances of getting a taxi, though. Getting a taxi is far more often things like "going to the line of taxis outside the club and negotiating prices with them" or "I landed in a foreign country on a business trip or family visit and I need a taxi to my hotel, and I don't have a local credit card". Before Uber, these things were far, far worse on average than they are now.
It worked out for Uber because the taxi industry was, in most parts of the world, a monopoly, inefficient and often riddled with corruption and criminal acts.
You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.
Yes it has. I mean, it hasn't worked out in every case, but between Tesla (Ford/GM/Chrysler), SpaceX (Boeing/Lockheed Martin), TikTok (Youtube), Moderna (Pfizer/Merck/GSK/Sanofi), Uber (Taxi industry/Medallion system/Dispatch companies), Stripe (PayPal/Visa/Mastercard), AirBnB (Hilton/Marriot/Expedia/Booking.com), and OpenAI (Google DeepMind/IBM Watson/Academia), I think there's enough of a case to be made that being young and ignorant of the existing incumbent entities has worked out in a couple of cases.
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
One of the beloved early figures in modern agriculture had no money and no formal education, yet his work developing improved plant varieties earned him international fame.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
There’s also a ton of money being spent on ag tech. My parent company spends billions per year on ag tech. We have drones tracking cows in fields, sensors tracking animals, mixing food, feeding them, monitoring them… tons of other stuff (I’m not on that side of things). This is one of the subsidiaries: https://www.microtechnologies.com/
It's remarkable because there are a ton of vertical farming setups in and around large cities in unremarkable warehouses that got this right, but they're having issues with small greenhouses and $500mm.
There is an argument for the blank restart, intentionally ignoring all knowledge gained up to now, to possibly get past a local maximum.
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.
There’s something to be said for fresh perspectives, sure. There’s also something to be said for hiring farmers to teach you how to run a greenhouse. You need to know the rules before you break them.
Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted.
It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
What he wants is automated food production in his creepy autonomous Hawaii sub-nation, which fits with all the other Atlas Shrugged "hidden valley" dreams of the SV ultrarich.
He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations.
it wasn't a philantropic or revolutionary attempt. it was his venture to grow his luxury fruits for money- which is struggling because he is hiring friends with no agricultural background.
I've seen this time and again in this space. Thick out the MiT openag project. Same thing, nonsense.
The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
Not a farmer, but I think it's a mistake to say that farmers haven't modernized.
I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff.
I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.
I'm saying the exact opposite. Farmers now are required to have modernized. I'm saying that (modernization) doesn't mean they don't view themselves first and foremost ad farmers.
These tech folks don't. They'll say they're a software developer working on agtech.
It's a totally different mindset, it has nothing to do with the technical details.
Ah, my father in law was a farmer, grew wheat, corn, soy beans, but sometimes raised chickens. Along with the corn, when he fed the chickens anchovies from Chile he noticed rapid growth, called the little fish a growth factor.
Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!
>soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost.
Which points to the irony of all this. The real goal of the “project” is not better nutrition or more efficient farming, is a marketable product. You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly.
>not every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.
That would be relevant if the livestock were grassfed but in the modern world where Soybeans from brazil are shipped to UK to feed cattle or From USA to Australia to feed pigs that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Soybeans is pretty much one of the best crops for feeding animals because it fixates all the nitrogen it needs, unlike 95% of other grain crops. The only thing more efficient to grow fertilizer wise is alfalfa, which is what most cows are fed, but would not be any good for feeding pigs or chickens because it is hard to digest like grass.
What most people tend to forget is the scale of factory farming. About
30,000,000 cows 130,000,000 pigs and 8,000,000,000 chickens are killed yearly in the US alone. You can imagine that they cannot be just grassfed besides the fact that pigs and chickens do not eat grass so they are fed soy that could fed to humans, animals are not magic machines that turn air into food, the only thing capable of converting nitrogen water and sunlight into protein are plants, any step in the middle generate loses, animals need energy for their vital processes so the rate of conversion of fed-to-edible calories is aprox. Poultry:11% pigs:10% Beef:1%
(I could cite the sources if anyone wish to investigate more)
All this is just the efficiency aspect of it, let’s pretend they don’t need water or create any waste.
Exactly. It's companies like John Deere who automate their combines, not software/automation companies learning how to make combines, that have been (and I expect will continue to be) successful.
This hasn't been true in practice. For example, farmers did not lead the small sat revolution that's democratized the use of satellite imaging for farm management. They did go "wow!" when the option was presented to them, but technologists saw the use case (and its immense utility) before most of their customers did.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Farmers certainly didn’t launch satellites or write the software on them, but I don’t think anyone would expect or want that.
Long ago, when I was young though, the first satellite imaging I saw was at my uncles farm. This was dedicated equipment in his home office with a simple UI with ridiculously high res satellite imagery of all the nearby land. This was way beyond anything a PC was capable of at the time. Definitely felt like he was on the bleeding edge.
is a "composite radar loop" that stitches together several ground based radars tuned to detect water.
Grain farmers in the wheat belt here, and elsewhere, can generally get by fine w/out sat data as long as they can have their cloud data.
What most (large) farmers heavily rely on today though is GPS - sat based positioning. That'll often be projected onto high res local imagery .. which can often come from an air photo survey or sat photography AND | OR high res vector data showing fence lines and boundaries but no actual image data (they can see out the window of the tractor after all).
The point - are any of those folks that lead the small sat revolution running successful farms now?
No.
It's hubris to think that one skillset subsumes another just because one uses the other.
The food those sat folks eat whole developing said revolution- growm by farmers, so they are the onea that enabled the sat revolution. We can do this all day.
Most of that early work sourced "the good images" from air survey photographs.
Early tech leaders (ERMapper, LizardTech, famously fought it out over "infinite" image formats with "unlimited" resolution) in Earth resource mapping that integrated air, sat, geophysical, etc. data absolutely had significant members that came from farming families and retired to farm ownership.
"Running a successful farm" has a high business and tech element these days, and certainly did in the 1980s, growing ever since.
There are overlapping skillsets here, it's entirely possible to be able to fly a cropduster or drape lowlevel air survey lines, higher photographic runs, and understand, run, and own a farm, and have some mathematical and programming chops.
Unsurprisingly a number of those pioneers had overlapping skills.
Easy to grow plant. Hard to make living, if you don't subsidise it with other work or income.
Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general.
Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
Margins start improving fast when you turn that fruit into booze. Licensure of course is an issue but many americans are making good money today selling moonshine locally without any of that.
Except it's not especially hard? I, and I'm sure many of us, have decent little home gardens.
For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
I grew up in NW lower Michigan. Cherry and other fruit tree country. Orchards need a lot of labor to maintain to get marketable fruit. I've seen several go wild and become deer feed.
Also, they don't really scale as the grow as you need to spend more on infrastructure. Orchards now plant dwarf rootstock. This results in trees that bear fruit quicker but don't grow much larger that a human can pick by hand. They need a lot of care (water and pruning) relative to larger trees but the economics of the larger trees don't work as well as they take many years to bear fruit and then they need the infrastructure to prune and harvest because they are so big.
It's not a simple thing at all.
You should tell all the PhD agronomists at ISU they are wasting their lives before it's too late.
Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.
I once lived in a house that had an apple tree in the back yard. Tons of apples at the start of the season.
But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard.
It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.
That's just circling back on "city boy tries to grow a plant". Your garden provided you with both fruit and meat. You were just unwilling/unable to harvest the meat.
> For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning.
On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.
I’ve gotten one persimmon in ten years: the squirrels wait until the start of November when all of the other food is gone and eat all of them a week or two before they ripen.
Potatoes are not a good counter example because they are indeed stupidly easy to grow and scale. You can easily grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes per year indoors with fairly small potato boxes going through a few harvests per year. The main limiting factor is energy costs - you'll end up paying more per kg of potato than you would if you just bought them at the grocery store.
But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
Potatoes are easy to grow, however even if you grow 1000 lbs of potatoes per year, at farm sale prices that is worth like $130. So how much of that $130 did you spend on growing them, and how many hundreds of thousands of pounds would you have to be able to harvest and transport to make your salary - the fertilizer and equipment maintenance costs?
All but the largest corporate megafarms are happy to make just a few percent profit on their investment, its one of the lowest return investments out of any industry. And it isn't a stable return either, that is the average over a few decades, with year-to-year yield and profit varying up to 30%.
If you want to survive on all plants you grew yourself, potatoes are a good choice for the bulk of your calories and nutrients, but if you want to make any actual money off of it, the scale of operations needed quickly grow to massive proportions that makes it anything but easy.
I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable.
Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly.
And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.
As long as you have a dozen potatoes, some human poop, a sample of earth soil for necessary nutrients and bacteria, and rocket fuel to burn to make water, it should be pretty easy.
If you can’t think of reasons why it would be harder than that, consider that you might want to read up on the problem first before saying it’s easy. For example, you’re assuming compatible soil (no), nutrients (also no), and the absence of toxins (again no).
Another way of looking at: have humans over-wintered in Antarctica without relying on outside inputs? That’s a much easier problem on multiple scales (oxygen, soil, temperature, water, etc.) so I wouldn’t take any mars proposal seriously before they’ve sent the same equipment to Antarctica and survived longer than the proposed mission.
Antarctica isn't this great example people think it is. International treaties require people leave it in as close to its natural condition as possible.
Taking a piss outside is illegal, even peoples crap has to be collected and shipped back home. Any sort of development is essentially impossible.
And that article is an interview with the hipster cartoonist who wrote a largely junk science book on Mars..
Multiple countries have bases in Antarctica, so it seems unlikely that a spacecraft-sized addition to the 50 acre McMurdo station is the proverbial straw on the camel’s back for a continent’s environment. Reusing human waste shouldn’t be a problem, either, since the proposals are to use that as fertilizer - it’s awfully expensive not to use everything that you shipped between planets!
And, yes, I linked to a best-selling popular science book at the level of the conversation here. I should note that the book has two authors, and the first one isn’t the illustrator but the professional biologist. You’re welcome to provide dissenting views if you want, I’m sure they wouldn’t claim to be the last word on the topic.
It's far below the level of discussion here or anywhere where there is discussion with varying views. The reason is that the book is broken in near to every single argument it makes, often intentionally by relying on misleading arguments or assuming the lack of knowledge of the reader -- knowledge which, crucially, I'm fairly certain they themselves had or should have had with even cursory level research on the topic. In a forum with debate those arguments rapidly emerge.
So for instance, their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant.
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way which isn't the initial event, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is because it's so different than the conditions to which we prepare for -- more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
I wanted to dig into more of their arguments but this is already fairly lengthy. If you mention what you found most compelling, I can offer the data (or, as in this case, logic) to the contrary.
Also, I failed to respond to the Antarctica thing. There are small scale greenhouses in Antarctica ensuring the hundreds of people wintering there each year retain access to nice fresh veggies and the like without any external inputs. [1] It's not exactly novel technology, nor difficult to scale.
Right, which is both well known and not the question at hand. The point remains that a closed loop hasn’t been demonstrated under much easier conditions on earth and therefore it’s clearly not the easy task the person I replied to described it as.
All travel in and out of Antarctica is cancelled during the ~7 months of winter. So all of that is being done without external inputs during that time frame. A permanent (or at least practically permanent) closed loop is probably not possible because of the countless treaties. It severely limits what can be built, which local resources can be utilized, and even what you can do with your own waste.
The Antarctic treaties allow for the development of greenhouses, etc., for scientific research purposes (in areas that have already been developed).
And scientists residing there have tried to make a closed-loop system for decades now. They haven't succeeded yet. It's a lot harder to do than fiction and Hollywood would have you believe. Importantly from the Martian colonization perspective: it's irrelevant that the scientists in Antarctic can't use local resources to build their closed loop, because that's part of proving the Martian concept, where there aren't any usable local resources.
You're going to need to cite that because to my knowledge there's been 0 efforts towards any sort of long term self sustainability on Antarctica. The most I know of are the efforts to reduce diesel consumption, but that's probably more gesturing towards this 'green' political stuff than any effort at self sustainability.
And saying there are no usable local resources on Mars is ignorant of basic plans - sunlight, regolith which can be processed, hydrated minerals, CO2, water, and more. In the longer term the other various minerals and metals will also be highly useful, but those I listed are valuable right off the bat and easily accessible.
That's not about long-term sustainability. It's just the doing away with diesel stuff, which is largely irrelevant.
And you're spewing nonsense on Mars - all of the resources I mentioned are obviously directly accessible with minimal energy requirements. The one thing you're right on is that solar will never be a primary source (at least not without extensive and heavily redundant battery backups) because of intermittency and unreliability.
Fortunately we have the Sabatier reaction. [1] CO2 + H2 => methane + water. Given the atmosphere on Mars is about 96% CO2 and H2 is readily extractable from the vast water ice resources (or even the dirt if necessary), we've got access to basically endless methane on Mars. And on Mars we'd love to dump as much as we possibly can into the atmosphere. Early expeditions will also probably bring along some largish radioisotope generators again for the sake of emergency power generation. In a domain where one failure means everybody dies, redundancy is nice.
I think your vision of Mars is based on Hollywood.
The Sabatier reaction is inefficient; as Wikipedia notes, it requires 17 MWh to produce a single ton of methane, not including the energy costs associated with electrolysis of local water sources for the H2. Hydrogen represents about 1/4 of the weight of methane, and so you'd need another roughly 0.4 MWH for the electrolysis, for a total of 17.4 MHh to produce 1 ton of methane.
Each MWh is roughly the energy needed to power 1000 homes. That's not some "largish radioisotopes." That's a full-scale power plant. We don't have many power plants that can produce that sort of output but which are light enough to launch into space or simple enough to be assembled on-site. Solar (the easy option) would require a minimum of 15-20 acres on Mars, and approximately 120 tons of solar panels, not including wiring and other supporting infrastructure. We don't have any spacecraft capable of taking that much weight, so that's multiple orbital launches and multiple spacecraft just to get the solar panels to Mars, and we haven't even started discussing the weight or other equipment needed to get the solar panels down to the surface, let alone transport the habitat modules or other equipment, or the astronauts and colonists making the journey.
TLDR: Mars is a pipe dream with current technology.
I assume you're basically trolling here, but as I mentioned, obviously the radioisotopes would be for emergency power generation - life support in the highly improbable case of all other power sources simultaneously failing, not as a driver for industrial level manufacturing. You're also far off on solar estimates, probably in part because that Wiki page hasn't been updated in well over a decade and solar tech has rather change in the interim. You're looking at ~590W/m2 solar irradiance at Mars' equator, so production of something like ~100W/m^2 with typical consumer panels and perhaps 150W/m^2 with high end panels. So that's in the ballpark of ~0.1 acres for a MWh of production.
Hollywood, so far as Mars is concerned, is mostly based on the Martian which is a hard sci-fi and phenomenally well researched book. The mistakes it made, inadvertently and intentionally, only make Mars colonization even easier than demonstrated. For instance the raging dust storm of the movie (and book) does not exist (and was an intentional fib). Low atmospheric pressure means the most fierce dust storm would have all the force of a very light breeze. And similarly his adventures to extract water from the rocket fuel were completely unnecessary as it turns out the seemingly barren regolith is surprisingly moist at 2-11% water by mass, an unintentional mistake as this was only discovered after the book was published.
It’s done with at least two external inputs (air, water) and far more resource availability than a Mars mission would have. A long-term closed loop isn’t banned by treaties - McMurdo alone is like 50 acres and a hundred buildings, something the size of a plausible interplanetary mission at our current technology level is not going to dramatically exceed that footprint.
Again, I’m not saying it’s inconceivable that it could be done, only that it’s harder than the sales guy would have you believe.
Mars has more than sufficient resources to provide practically endless air and water as well.
Beyond that I think you're also on a red herring here. There's no plan for a long-term closed loop on Mars to begin with. In the distant future most likely, but complete self sustainability is not practical in short to mid term timeframes. That would require essentially duplicating absolutely all forms of industry on Mars which probably will happen but only in the very distant future. In the interim a Mars colony would be receiving regularly shipments from Earth, and those return trips would also enable colonists, who decide it's not for them, to also return to Earth.
Neither Antarctica or Mars should be a problem, as long as you have sufficient energy source, and bring some soil & nutrients with you. After all, people make money growing weed indoors with only electrical lights. My country has freezing and dark winters, yet we enjoy fresh tomatoes all around the year, grown in heated greenhouses with extra artificial light.
I’m not saying it’s beyond possible, only that it’s not “easy”. If someone is saying that we can colonize Mars, it’s orders of magnitude easier to send the same payload to Antarctica and see if it works somewhere that, say, a failure in the air processing system can avoid loss of life by opening the windows.
I've worked in many an ag company: All the ideas Sensei supposedly has are in in way innovative: places like Monsanto/Bayer had been trying to do work in those directions a decade ago, and it's not as if they were short of people that understand agriculture. But as far as I am aware, most of the efforts in those companies have been scaled back.
The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.
That seems like a perfectly fine way to start a disruptive venture. Tesla started as a way to grow luxury EVs for money, except real experts got acquired.
Yeah seems like you'd want to either copy, poach, or acquire the talent at Oishii, no? They look like they know what they are doing, although it's not consumer cheap yet, and the economics might never be.
While I disagree with a majority of Larry Ellison's opinions, this is a venture that I think must be celebrated regardless of failures. There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley that this one must get its due promotion. The front of agriculture and innovation is difficult but none of the technology is being used to sow hate amongst ourselves.
Why does Silicon Valley need to be doing the innovation here?
Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
Even beyond green, it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It's not quite as cooperative as the digital, but rather more relevant.
Meh results oriented thinking. Elon revolutionized rockets and electrical vehicles with 0 previous domain knowledge.
In another timeline both concepts fail and he's just another clueless guy who blew a bunch of money on ideas outside his domain - doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
As a former agronomist this makes as much sense to me as starting a database company where no one understands databases. Without an agronomist how do you know what could be possible from what is clearly impossible?
Didn't China burst this bubble already? Vertical farming, etc. Western aligned farming is currently in a big downturn due to BRICS constantly breaking production records. And they are using Chinese machinery. The world is catching up to American farming yields. China is decoupling from American farming and they have been investing a lot in all the infrastructure for that.
American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis)
There are a lot of Chinese doomsayers out there, about how they are about to collapse (zeihan). Then this, farming, or Deepseek comes out. I think their demise is over exaggerated.
Deepseek or whatever farming tech they may be developing don't amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to their looming demographic collapse.
China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration.
The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
Ellison's strength, I felt like, has always been in the field of sales and ruthless contract negotiation rather than technical innovation - a "golden touch" that doesn't benefit disruptive scientific innovation, but might instead prove more fruitful if applied to an a mature technology that just needs to proliferate out there in the world.
There was an interesting article on him linked from The Diff newsletter today. It seems a large part of his strengths are strategic M&A.
"1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition.
2. It works.
3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year.
4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4
6. Divest losing tens of billions in the industries where this strategy doesn’t work (see adtech, oracle data cloud - few billions in acquisitions just closed down
not even sold)
7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures
I'm fairly blown-away at the mission statement:
“improve human nutrition and preserve the environment by growing food indoors"
Adding a building doesn't improve the environment, so for starters you're in the hole, for energy, you're in the hole (pending solar and thermal recovery, each with environmental impact of their own)...
Larry, let's talk. There's for sure a use for greenhouses, sensors, all the tech, but let's focus on the soil.
There is indoor lettuce I can buy at my supermarkets that is "zero pesticide" (you can just google it and find several, don't want to post any sort of links to products here).
It's axiomatically-speaking the one of the only few ways to make it happen.
"zero pesticides" implies no bugs/insects around to need spraying it in the first place, and doing that requires (A) a clean environment + (B) no regular soil (regular soil may have insect eggs / fungi in them).
The only things that come to mind are hydroponics & hydrogel agriculture.
Seeing lots of "he knows nothing about farming", sure he might not know as much about farming as the farmers who live it day to day. But he has money and access to bring farmers along for the journey and build something better.
A lot of true disruption comes from people you'd never expect to have had an impact, because they aren't myopic to the pre-conceived challenges of that industry.
The real game changer for farming would be direct synthesis of food, avoiding using plants for energy or CO2 capture. But this is tough to make work economically. The easiest target would be single cell protein, for example ICI's Pruteen or more recently Quorn. Perhaps if renewable electricity continues to decline in price it will become more feasible.
Is this a joke about conventional mechanized farming working well enough as it is or has there been serious progress in the AgTech sector? The last time I read of it the big developments were hydroponics and tractors that burned weeds with a laser beam.
There's been real progress, and Larry's got a long history of gutting people who make real progress because he just thinks of anything sitting on a database as a way to push Oracle licenses while increasing his personal net worth.
A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
Results don’t need to be dramatic or come right away. Even failure is a learning experience. Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.
> A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
Is it? It feels like the same money could be given out to thousands of people who actually understand farming to run little experiments. That's how America is supposed to work. Relying on Larry Ellison to succeed in a field he has no experience or instincts by throwing money at it seems like a terrible strategy.
People underestimate how much our regressive tax structure and lax antitrust enforcement are holding back innovation. If we didn’t allow such massive wealth concentration, we'd see more competition and breakthroughs.
Right, of course, excessive concentration of wealth is the only thing preventing another Bell Labs or Xerox PARC from bringing us tomorrow's future today.
Even Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are two different entities.
These days Bell and Xerox would maybe merge to "consolidate their market position" and fire half of the researchers to show cost savings at the next board meeting.
I hear a lot about how ahead of their time they were and how everything since is based on them.. But it seems like newer things since then are all being built on the shoulders of a generation of thousands of giants instead of a generation where we can only identify 2.
You’re missing the point. It’s not a simple ‘high taxes bad, low taxes good’ binary—it’s a spectrum. The U.S. has a tax structure that allows wealth to concentrate at the top while failing to enforce competition, which actually stifles innovation. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan—despite having higher taxes—consistently drive innovation.
Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
The issue isn’t just tax rates—it’s whether a system allows new players to compete or just protects entrenched monopolies. The U.S. is increasingly choosing the latter.
> Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
And you can't think of anything the US innovates in?
Your evidence / anecdotes aren't really sufficient to prove the claim .
It does. If you identify "innovation" differently. The American meaning of "innovation" is finding a way to force ten million people to pay you a dollar each. European innovation is, like, Mastodon, where you specifically cannot be forced to pay a dollar. This tends to not pay as well. This is because America selects for people who can get paid lots of money much more strongly than Europe does.
How exactly would one "hoard" money these days? Even if it's just sitting in a bank, that still translates to getting lent out at whatever interest rate that bank charges.
Per the article it sounds like the entire operation took place on his company-town Hawaiian island of Lanai, so...kinda, yeah, that is what I think. I'm sure he had a small staff, but my instinct is that most of the expenses were capex and self-dealing.
The article specifically says that he had tech CEO's running the project.
The mistakes they made also seem pretty fundamental to farming; things like:
1. they didn't consider that a greenhouse designed for the desert wouldn't work in Hawaii
2. solar panels need to be installed differently depending on their location and never see the theoretical power generation in practice
3. immature/mature plants were growm right next to each other in a way that spread pests
4. they bought marijuana greenhouses without considering that it is grown so differently from other standard crops.
This is pretty basic stuff that should have been caught by someone with knowledge of agriculture. This seems to indicate that while they had a really smart team, they made the mistake of assuming that general AI/robotics would map 1:1 to the problems of agriculture.
The success rate of university research should have been the ultimate warning sign that you shouldn't dump half a billion into "solving agriculture." Progress in established fields like agriculture is expensive, time consuming, and (usually) incremental.
The thought that you could do all of that at once and outcompete an approach that has been refined for thousands of years is wild. Kudos to them for dreaming big, but I just don't see why they thought they had an edge here outside of "AI can solve any problem" hubris.
He's throwing money at someone. Probably someone roughly as deserving (in the grand scheme of things) as farmers are.
So I'd say that it's good that he's throwing his money instead of hoarding it or doing some ruthless exploitation or something with oil pumping.
Expecting billionaires to spend their money in any way that benefits someone other than them is unrealistically high bar. We should apploud them if they at least manage to do less harm.
A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
It is much more efficient for society in the form of its government to fund research. We should not leave it up to rich people to decide whether or not research is conducted.
Until this administration funds were spent at the behest of Congress and allocated through procedures that were set up. There is no evidence of widespread misuse of those funds. Of course having an asshole concentrate power in themselves will lead to bad governance.
There are no instances in the history of the world where the wealthy, out of the goodness of their hearts, have solved hunger, childhood education, funded research programs at scale, provided safe drinking water, etc. These things are handled by government. Government is far more efficient at this than hoping rich people act in the public’s best interest.
However, there is a plethora of instances where the wealthy have addressed these issues, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but in search of revenue.
Rich people didn’t feed the poor. They didn’t provide universal k-12 education. They didn’t fund enough universities to provide higher education for the masses. They didn’t provide clean water. They didn’t get rid of smog or acid rain. They didn’t band together to start space research or build the highway system.
But there are a few instances where a rich person spent a trivial amount of their wealth to fund a project or two in the interest of humanity.
Mass hunger was solved by government. Not charities. There are instances where charity fed someone but the issue was solved when government did something. Nothing works better at scale than good governance.
Government's ability to publicly fund research is directly related to how much it can collect in taxes.
With wealth being hoarded by individuals at unprecedented rates and taxes lower than they've been at almost any time in the country's history, there has certainly been a shift away from public research toward private research.
Is it? Is government really structured to do this funding in an efficient manner? Or do we end up with atrociously useless investments that are made as vehicles for delivery of pork barrel spending?
The top .1% fund very little research. Therefore it is much more efficient for society in the form of government to fund research. We should not rely on the benevolence of a few rich assholes to have research programs.
I wasn't addressing the question of quantity of funding, but rather the efficiency of the funding. Is the research valuable, or is it just pretend-value from spending intended as pork? A lot of government funded research is of that kind. More generally: the market has a way of evaluating research value (did it lead to profit) while the government's actions have no reality check. They depend on the wisdom of officials who inevitably have conflicts of interest.
Simply determining the value of something is difficult. This is a big part of why communism didn't work -- it's impossible for central planners, however wise, to figure out. The communists piggybacked on price signals from other countries but that's not a great substitute for ones own market generating the price signals.
Absent price signals, determinations of value inevitably get corrupted by other interests. Look at the long, sorry history of NASA's manned space program. Value there has become "does this deliver $$$ to my district".
My dad worked on Mercury and Apollo. The first put men in space and the second put men on the moon. There was a shit ton of spin offs from this. We got a step up on GPS because some grad students were saying what if after recording Sputnik ephemerides.
Research doesn't work by central planning. Grants to researchers is competitive. There's corruption not because of the scientific method but rather because of the human condition.
Your view of this is very politicized. I'm done here.
The manned space program was entirely political, so complaining about politicization is hilarious.
Apollo was a national potlatch. It was "look how rich and successful capitalism is; we can put 4% of the federal budget into a pile and set it on fire, we're so good." Spinoffs are an unjustifiable myth. To the extent we can know, they'd have occurred anyway (ICs, for example). The most important thing to remember about Apollo is we didn't go back, which is clear evidence it wasn't needed. But to a true space fan, like a true communist, space programs can never fail, they can only be failed.
It's great if you treat Larry like a toddler. Anything a toddler tries is great.
Larry is an adult last I checked :)
What people find distasteful in my circles is when rich people do nothing to solve systemic problems within society and instead go about acting as benevolent do-gooders selectively handing out resources to causes they feel an affinity for.
When rich folks act this way - we end up with a bored and cruel aristocracy and piss poor working people, like England. I don't think that's good for anyone.
Whatever your commitments, seeing a rich person fail is kinda definitionally humorous. Something is funny often because of juxtaposition, contradiction. It is why it is the emperor who has no clothes, not the poor beggar; or why its "your momma" and not you yourself.
I agree with this, even if it has a little XKCD "struggle no more; I'm here to solve it with algorithms" energy[0].
I think Bill Gates is much better at finding people with the right expertise who are already solving a problem and just adding more funding and I think the results speak for themselves.
> but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
That something is throwing AI and robots at dirt as if there's some kind of labor and knowledge gap in farming that needs a rich guy to throw tech at it.
I think how Larry Ellison has decided to run Oracle is both atrocious, and his own choice. I think him experimenting with better agriculture is awesome and even failing in it can lead to progress as now we have ruled somethings out.
USAID spends ~$2B p.a. on food from US farmers, I assume the presumption that without that backdoor subsidiary farms making less money will be cheaper. Though total output value is ~$200 p.a. so that’s %1, but price is set at the margin so actual loss could be greater.
I think this loss might already be less than the loss from the effects of ozempic.
Edit: looking at total US farm subsidies from taxpayers is around $30B which is ~%15.
Will see if I can scrounge up some links, but farmers are paid (just an example, there are many environmental and other programs) federal money to do stuff like leave strips of land uncultivated to reduce fertilizer run-off from fields. These payments are stopped and farmers are left to foot the bill. Also, technically, if a contract is for 3 years and a farmer is 1 year in but decide to stop because the money isn't coming in, now the farmer is in violation!
Most farmers are petty involved in year to year fluctuations and financing things so hard to know how many would stick it out in hopes of legislation….
No one should have the wealth he does. We sneer that people look up to him for spending a small part of his wealth to benefit others when he should not have enough money to fund $500 million science projects.
I’d like people to sneer and get angry over the fact that he does have the money. In Les Miserables when the rich man gave the begger a penny the bishop says, “Look at monsieur buying a penny’s worth of paradise.”
Evidently I disagree. Apparently not enough people are angry enough. We elected a man who accepted $30 billion in brides the day before his inauguration and his supporters don’t care.
If you want to make an argument against billionaires, you should start by being numerate.
A billion and a million (the actual number for inauguration donations) are very different numbers, and if you mix the two up accidentally, it mean your world model is horrifically broken. One is plausible, one is absurd in this context.
He owns an entire 90,000 acre Hawaiian island and multiple mega yachts.. they’re not sneering because he tried, they’re sneering because he’s delusional that he thought that one of the oldest and largest sectors of the economy just needed an untrained rich guy to fly in and save the day.
Yes, they are sneering because he didn't buy another mega yacht instead.
> one of the oldest and largest sectors of the economy just needed an untrained rich guy to fly in and save the day
This is just investing. There are many old moribund sectors of the economy that could use investors not focused on quarterly profits. This is not a controversial statement in any other context, you just don't like it because it's Ellison doing it.
I don’t care one way or another to be honest - he’s free to waste his money however he wants. It’s just amusing after all his proclamations about reinventing farming and changing agriculture that they’re stuck at the level of early 2010s Dutch greenhouses..
It’s a shame that rather than just hire experts and give them access to the unlimited funding to advance the field he attempted to reinvent the wheel with ‘disrupters’ but it is what it is
> ...an investment that could improve life for billions of people.
This is the problem I have with startups/tech that intend to revolutionize farming: it's rarely to improve life for people, but rather to increase profits. Perhaps Ellison does, indeed, intend to use this farming tech to help bring food to hungry people around the world - and that would be great! But I'm skeptical; Larry's never struck me as an altruistic dude.
he could've just given the half billion to poor people and relieved the immiseration of thousands of people. instead he set a pile of money on fire because of ego
There's no punishment occurring at all. There's just people saying stuff, waiting to see how billionaire overlords decide to proceed, perhaps hoping they get lucky and ruthless enough to join that class.
When wealthy people spend a lot of money on big toys, all it does is kick money down to the rest of us.
When wealthy people start tinkering with stuff like our food supply, in the past that has had big consequences for humans (think things like the Dust Bowl or Various British-led famines, or the Holomodor and/or great leap forward if that's your bend).
A lot of us are aware that it's not great to have one human with an outsized influence working on large systems about which they have little expert knowledge or personal experience:
those folks can do things that have great consequences for our lives while experiencing no repercussions themselves.
For instance, I'm pretty sure some asshole is going to try to fix global warming by unilaterally deciding to change the albedo of the planet, and that'll cause massive problems. They will smugly claim that at least someone is "trying" something (instead of adjusting the ecocide of the planet by the forces that created their wealth) and when it goes wrong they will just retire to their lair in Montana or wherever and tell themselves that at least they didn't buy another great big toy.
There are some niche applications where innovative greenhouse technology, AI and similar tech can contribute to better agriculture.
But this "tech think" completely misses the point, when it comes to Agriculture. We already have all the technology we need to convert Agriculture from a major emitter to a CO2-dump. We could dramatically increase current and future arable land by using known sustainable farming techniques without loosing or even while enhancing productivity per hectare.
Especially the idea that we need ultra-productive greenhouses in urban settings is plainly speaking stupid and ignores basic economics. Land is actually quite plentiful, even directly adjacent to major agglomerations and (with the right tools and techniques) can be highly productive without capital intensive tech projects.
Innovation is needed much more in terms of giving producers the right incentives to farm sustainably – at the moment much of government subsidies and trade incentives has a directly opposite effect.
Of course it would be nice, if a farmer could use a $2,000 drone to weed their fields pesticide free by employing AI, etc. But the real holy grail would be to get a farmer to use known techniques to drastically reduce fertilizer and pesticide use while increasing the diversity of crops and the carbon content of his soil.
My first thought in looking at this headline was "let me guess, he was going to try and solve hyper-local biological/environmental problems with off the shelf AI and robots". Sure enough, that was the subheadline.
The killer app would be to figure out how to genetically engineer good plant flesh economically in a bioreactor.
Imagine strawberry,pineapple,etc slurry production by the metric ton. With the only input into the facility being atmospheric gasses and electricity.
There would also be huge room for optimization in such a process, such as introduction of antifreeze proteins (as some fish have) to allow storage of various fruit at freezing temperatures without loss of quality.
Ellison's purchase of the island also included several resort hotels and homes. It's likely the income from those does a lot to cover his $500 million loss in farming. (It's curious the article says nothing about his yield from that side of the island.)
In the end, it's likely that Ellison's grand farming enterprise on a luxury resort island was always just a promotional stunt and was never intended to be sustainable or profitable. His strategy was to employ none of the resources essential to any business' success, like knowing your market or hiring staff who know even the basics of the trade (farming). Instead he hires supercomputer architect Danny Hillis to reinvent agriculture? Sure. What could go wrong?
Don’t have a WSJ account so can’t read the article, and the archive link posted doesn’t work for me. It sounds like this was a greenhouse based business? What I’m excited by (perhaps naively so) are the startups using robots to zap weeds and do other things to reduce chemical usage. Anyone know the status of these companies, and if there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the approach?
I think the approaches usually fail because commercial farming with chemical fertilizer is pretty efficient and optimized to work at a large scale.
A lot of agtech startups (think vertical farming) just don't get this. They don't understand where the inefficiencies are, or how their approach loses efficiency at commercial-farming scale, or how the approach doesn't integrate with other necessary machinery, etc.
Vertical farming might be having trouble but a very closely related cousin, the Dutch greenhouse, is doing fantastically. The differences are subtle because Dutch greenhouses have been used to vertically farm crops as well (though not separated in the same way that vertical farms are) and use artificial lighting. The subtle differences matter and that's why iteration in the space is so good.
The surface level discussion in this thread griping over Ellison's approach is probably the least interesting aspect of agtech to discuss but is the one that most people have an opinion on and generates the most engagement which is why this thread is filled with it.
Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corporate tactician overshadows whatever accomplishments he had as a database developer.
My career started in the 2000s. Oracle was already a bit of a cancer then. It was Oracle or MS SQL for "real" databases. There were technologies that had been exciting in the 90s but were already choked out by the duopoly like InterBase and Foxpro.
There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys.
My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
Bought by Microsoft who gradually nudged users to move to Access or SQLServer until they could quietly take it out back a shoot it in the head about 20 years ago.
My vague memory of it is that MS discontinued it because it detracted from their plans with MS Access on the low-end, and MS SQL Server on the high end. I think, maybe, that it may not have fit in with Visual Basic very well.
yeah if you remember way back then the whole concept of ORMs came about to make changing a RDBMS backend feasible. I'm not sure the plug/play RDBMS dream was ever 100% realized but that whole wing of webdev tech was driven by the desire to avoid Oracle's extortion based licensing.
51 year old software developer here and through my entire career Oracle was seen among the developers I know as something you'd sometimes be forced to use because a non-technical person at your company agreed to pay so much for a license that it would be too publicly embarrassing not to use it.
It wasn't seen as an inherently bad piece of technology, it was just massive overkill (too expensive, too high maintenance) for a lot of the solutions it ended up being used for because of the effectiveness of Oracle's sales organization.
I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.
In the late '80s, I was in the Air Force. Directive from the top was that all military projects should standardize on Oracle DB, "because it is portable", and projects should use AT&T mini computers (wat?)
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
Oracle systems made job applications an incredibly arduous process by mandating a person re-enter dozens of fields of information for every different employer running the system. Basically you had to create an account and profile for every single job because every company had their own Oracle implementation. I recall the torture well.
In the 90s, the only two databases you really heard about (at least in my industry, banking) were Sybase and Oracle. Where is Sybase now?
I'm not a dba, but Oracle was effectively the default, and it worked reliably and did what you needed it to do. I think maybe Sybase was faster in certain circumstances.
Oracle was a pretty big player in those days. And I don't think most people even remember Larry was a developer...his legacy will certainly be as a ruthless businessman with a penchant for take-no-prisoners sales and ruthless license enforcement.
How does s.o. in his 80s look this well? Even considering the possibility of plastic surgery. Even on his 2010 photo in wikipedia he looks so insanely younger, perhaps 45 or something...
The fact that billionaires can own thousand of hectares of Hawaiian lands, that was annexed by US against the Hawaiian natives people will, with many of them currently do not have proper land and housing is pretty disturbing [1].
[1] Hawaii: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
Farming is an old human activity and it took us thousands of years to work out how to do it competently. We had to invent Haber-Bosch fertilizers and genetic engineering to get us to basically permanent surplus.
Honestly not surprised this is so hard. The area was pineapple plantation for years, and the plantation owners were not great stewards of the land. No amount of money can fix decades of shitty land stewardship. It’s just time and effort.
What is it with tech bros thinking they can successfully operate in "deep" industries like agriculture where every last bit of efficiency has already been squeezed out over the past 100-150 years? In fact, arguably, there's way too much efficiency, and quality of the produce has suffered quite a bit by now.
Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking. All infastructure is an additional overhead cost. Yoru robot, your highrise, the soil testing kit...
the short of it is just that if there is no linear increase in yeild, your tech product will probably fail. Most of this nonsense comes from tech bros who have never farmed and don't have the common sense to ask a farmer what they actually need.
Incorrect. I worked for an Ag tech company for almost a decade. Ten years ago, farmers were downloading high resolution satellite imagery of their fields directly to their GPS enabled precision sprayers so that the spray rate would adjust continuously based on the vegetative index of the land they were over. I don't know what state of the art is today, but I imagine it would surprise folks who aren't in the field.
Right. There's a lot going on. Lots of stuff is measured that didn't used to be be. A big controversy is over who owns that data. Deere tries to own it.
Vision systems for weeding are effective. Instead of spraying everything, cameras look down as the sprayer is pulled behind a tractor, and only weeds get sprayed, or zapped, or hammered.
Uses far less pesticide. Deere and others sell this. Deere prefers to sell this as a service, where farmers pay fees when the vision system is enabled.[1] There are a bunch of autonomous robot startups with similar systems, but none seem to have grown much.
Tomato picking robots have been demoed since at least 2018, but still aren't used much.
There are at least half a dozen startups. It's not hard to do with off the shelf robots,
but not cost-effective yet.
Automated cow milking is used in New Zealand and Australia. Those countries have extensive agriculture but not much of an underclass, so they have to pay workers real money.[2]
Automated meat cutting is also used in those countries.[3] Mostly lamb, which isn't a big thing in the US. Fully automated beef lines don't seem to be available yet, although the company that builds the lamb systems is getting there.
Vision-based sorting is automated, fast, and cheap.[4] That's why when you buy packed berries, there are no bad ones any more.
All the big field crops - corn, wheat, hay, soybeans, cotton - were mechanized decades ago,
of course.
> Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking.
Ag is much more than farming, and farming is much more than dirt.
Ag is very much ready - past ready - for disruption. The biggest blocker there is that "traditional" SV startups can't make a dent; their business models don't suit it well. Farmers - even mega-corporate ones - are cautious. It's a mature market with low margins, so they aren't going to make a capital investment in what they see as unproven technology.
To succeed in agtech you pretty much have to exude the opposite vibe that startup founders usually have.
Early 80's, in college, we had the Cyber mainframe, and PDP 11/70. The Cyber was used for computer classes (comps sci [Fortran, Pascal], infosystems [COBOL]), engineering classes (SPICE, Aeronautical Engr had some Fortran IV stuff the had to slog through), statistics runs (SPSS - lot of the sciences used that)), the school had some back office software running on it (you noticed during registration, the machine was noticeably loaded). PDP was used mostly for introduction CS classes, and it had a public game account (very nice Star Trek program on that one).
Outside of a TERAK and a Textronix 4050 series computer in the Math lab, there were no real microcomputers on campus, no "public" ones used for teaching.
The first micro computer lab on campus, was in the Agriculture school. They had a full lab with 9 Apple ][ computers, all running, I guess, a sophisticated software package for computing feed and what not. We were there to play Wizardry, of course, my good friend was the lab tech.
But it was just interesting how the Ag school was a pioneer in the personal computing space at an, ostensibly, school known for its science and engineering programs (though it was also know for its Ag and Architecture schools).
Why do you think ag needs disruption? Ag has had the latest tech applied to it since the dawn of civilization. Any tech you can think of is already being used there.
The thing is, there are some hard numbers and some fundamental truths which someone is going to have to find answers for:
- peak oil is happening (or has happened)
- current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (not an inconsiderate portion of which is fertilizer runoff into waterways and oceans)
- in the past century the bony fish biomass has plummeted to below the weight of shipping tonnage in the world's oceans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
As I've noted before, my grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry that my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer viable.
> current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy
The phrase "up to" is doing heavy lifting there.
In particular, this would be production of beef. Production of grains is much more efficient, as is production of poultry, fish, or pork.
It should be noted that in the US, agriculture uses a very small fraction (about 1%) of total primary energy consumption (not counting the sunlight being used by the plants). We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it.
> Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms.
So seeing as modern industrial agriculture only exists because of the Haber-Bosch process and pesticides, but those are counted as indirect inputs, your phrase "primary energy consumption" is also doing a fair amount of heavy lifting.
And that's not counting all of the supply and cold chains needed to get that food to your supermarket. All these hydroponic/indoor-fresh-greens startups are largely about breaking even on the product-to-market side of things.
Primary energy consumption is the right metric here, since it's a 1:1 accounting of inputs to HB, chemical manufacture, and fuels for vehicles. Not a whole lot of electrical input there.
In any case, the amount is small compared to society as a whole, and today's energy intensive agriculture could be sustained even with entirely renewable inputs, although at a cost. It's a small problem compared to shifting the larger economy off fossil fuels.
Not saying it's not the right metric, I'm saying the "1.9% to agriculture" number isn't including fertilizers, chemicals, or supply chains so the food isn't rotting in your silo. It does include fuel for tractors on the farm though.
"Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms. Overall, about three-fifths of energy in 2016 used in the agricultural sector was consumed directly on-farm, while two-fifths were consumed indirectly in the form of fertilizer and pesticides."
It's ambiguous, so I regret posting the link. Usually in energy accounting, "indirect" means "accounting puts it into a different category, but we acknowledge that other category wouldn't be making it if the demand for them wasn't here in this category and we differentiate it so we don't double-count it". Scope 1 vs Scope 2 & 3 in carbon-reporting land, if you will.
Combining primary and indirect energy is possible, I suppose, but it's not how it's usually done? So I gave a shit link, emissions reporting is dead for at least the next 4 years, and so none of this matters anyways cause we're just burning our way into prosperity for the foreseeable future.
Transparent aluminum requires a production process, too.
There are polycarbonate hurricane panels.
Reflective material on one wall of the wallipini greenhouse (and geothermal) is enough to grow citrus fruit through the winter in Alliance, Nebraska. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538
Glass allows more wavelengths of light through than plastic or recyclable polycarbonate; including UV-C, which is sanitizing
Hydrogen peroxide cleans out fish tanks FWIU.
Various plastics are food safe, but not when they've been in the sun all day.
To make aircrete, you add soap bubbles to concrete with an air compressor.
/? aircrete dome build in HI and ground anchors
Catalan masonry vault roofs (in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Arizona,) are strong, don't require temporary arches, and passively cool most efficiently when they have an oculus to let the heat rise out of the dome to openable vents to the wind.
North Carolina is ranked 4th in solar, has solar farms, and has hurricanes (and totally round homes on stilts). FWIU there are hurricane-rated solar panels, flexible racks, ground mounts.
> Using the concept of potential natural vegetation, Miyawaki developed, tested, and refined a method of ecological engineering today known as the Miyawaki method to restore native forests from seeds of native trees on very degraded soils that were deforested and without humus. With the results of his experiments, he restored protective forests in over 1,300 sites in Japan and various tropical countries, in particular in the Pacific region[8] in the form of shelterbelts, woodlands, and woodlots, including urban, port, and industrial areas. Miyawaki demonstrated that rapid restoration of forest cover and soil was possible by using a selection of pioneer and secondary indigenous species that were densely planted and provided with mycorrhiza.
Mycorrhiza spores can be seeded into soil to support root network development.
The guy makes $20 billion / year just sitting still. I'm sure he'll be fine. It's just play money at that point. The equivalent to one of us denting our Prius.
I mean even I make passive 10% dividends on my investments every year.
https://archive.ph/osGTZ
I am not a fan of Larry so take the next sentences as an odd way to confirm bias and maybe this is why I am responding to it now..
Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Isn't this rehashing the disrupt-vs-reform issue? I guess I am concerned that people are surprised every time someone like Ellison does it.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
[edited]
Is it laziness, or is it hubris? In a world where some people are told what they do is so good they essentially have infinite wealth, it's hard to convince them that any specific decision they make is an error.
Hubris is laziness. They know better but are too lazy to put in the hard work to do better. It's much easier just to help yourself and screw everyone else. It's hard for anyone else to stop them.
A lesson I had to learn when I was first in charge: when deciding a course of action, ask myself, 'would I accept that from a subordinate?' If you report to no one, it's hard to hold yourself to the same or, if you are doing it right, higher standards. That is the corruption of power.
If you really want to see a person's character, give them power.
and no error will really cost them that much, anyway.
For me, “disrupt” is forever tainted by all the startups whose only real innovation was aggressively breaking the law until they were too big to police.
Just breaking the law is not disrupting. Disrupting requires broad support from the public, which is aware that laws are being broken and are fine with it - meaning the particular laws in place are ripe for questioning at the very least.
Uber isn’t what it is because they broke the law, but because the vast public approve of their actions.
We used to see innovative disruption that would grow the pie. Generating large and broad benefits, and capturing a fairly small fraction for the company.
My sense is this is in decline
it's been dead for a few years now. At this point it's just standard monopoly behavior -- weasel in, take over, dominate and extra maximum value until real competition happens or the government/regulations come into play.
Uber broke the law and used VC money to subsidize their fares. It's not complicated. They bought the support.
I remember taxis before Uber/Lyft. They had a whole series of problems.
Predicability - You wouldn't know how much the fare would be when getting into a taxi. In addition, driving indirect routes to charge more and claiming the ride cost more than the normal fare were common scams. Uber/Lyft tells you the price before you order the ride.
Ease of payment - taxis had card machines pre Uber but the machines were frequently "broken" unless the rider spent time arguing that they had no other way to pay. Then, in a miraculous turn of events, the machine recovered.
Accountability - If a taxi driver stole from you, you had essentially no chance of finding them again, especially as a tourist. Uber/Lyft stores this information and surfaces aggregate reviews.
> I remember taxis before Uber/Lyft
Yeah? So do I. I really wish we still had them everywhere, but thanks to Uber, you can pretty much only get a cab in Manhattan.
I take a cab over an Uber any time its practicable, it's almost always cheaper. For the same price as an Uber, my cab driver gets a really nice tip.
Sometimes, or oftentimes, the law is used against the citizens. Ride sharing is a real improvement in a lot of european countries.
I suggest watching this with subtitles, while it is a comedic skit taken to the extreme you can see how taxi drivers were viewed before ride sharing apps disrupted the taxi industry.
https://youtu.be/UWc9-z8QpXw?si=2MQJ96IZ_eqxJi0A
Uber broke the law that protects traditional taxi drivers from having competition under the guise of passenger safety (taxi drivers have the same driver's license as any other driver, no additional safety certs). The public was way too happy to use Uber and that's why it's now forbidden where I live (a country in central EU).
The public was happy to use Uber because they cost significantly less than cabs did, because of the VC money.
Any time a billionaire demonstrates interest in the disruption of a critical industry, I get nervous. Humans are just too damn susceptible to the “product is subsidized until the disruption is firmly entrenched” play, especially when the feedback loop to uncover deficiencies in the new approach is measured in years and decades.
I think a baseline for both disrupt and reform is an understanding of the problem space and existing solutions first, maybe more-so for successful disruption.
No one with a half billion lying around is lazy in anything they do. Hubris, arrogance, or disrespectful are better descriptives here
You know billionaires personality traits are probably normally distributed in most aspects, except they have a (much) higher tolerance for risk. So do homeless people.
> Isn't this rehashing the disrupt-vs-reform issue? I guess I am concerned that people are surprised every time someone like Ellison does it.
... how often does that happen? Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service.
Musk (in business and government), Zuckerberg, Trump, much of the cryptocurrency industry, ... it's everywhere.
That's a great list of examples that fall well under "Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service."
Is there examples of the alternative?
I don't understand how you define the categories. I took "Usually ..." as referring to more trivial matters and the issues I raised are not at all trivial.
In no particular order:
* 3d Printing
* Cloud Computing
* The iPhone
* Google
* Google Translate
* Google Maps
* CRISPR
* Netflix
* SpaceX
* Electric Vehicles
* OpenAI
* Drones
You may not include Uber in that list, but I would. I vividly remember taxis before Uber.
How many of those were outsiders walking in and spotting the solutions none of the so-called experts could, or whatever? It's a short list, to the point that I'd call the entire notion effectively a myth, not much better than chance and probably more often having to do with huge amounts of money being thrown at it, not outsider status or brilliant computer nerds or tech business jerks being magically good at other fields.
Off the top of my head, I would count Google, Google Translate, Google Maps, Netflix, OpenAI, Uber, PayPal, Amazon, and SpaceX in the category of outsiders creating a massively influential product.
You are free to pick apart the companies and their origins to decide if they are enough of an outsider for you.
Uber specifically needs to be removed from that list. The business model is 'drain investor money to undercut existing business and then abuse contractors and employment laws to attempt to make a profit after'. There isn't much innovation anymore, most cab companies have similar apps and experiences now.
This is a list of general technology. Musk, Zuck and Trump specifically (the post I was replying to) have had little impact on much of this list.
3d printing, iphone, google, crispr, netflix have little to nothing to do with them.
Honestly why is CRISPR in this list, that is from scientists and labs not tech billionaires and busniess.
Cloud computing has been impacted a lot by Zuck and invented/reinvented by Bezos yes (not that Bezos was in the list I replied to).
Google Maps and Translate were both bought and innovation happened outside the space we're talking about.
Spacex and Electric Vehicles. Musk got onboard after the fact and used money and influence to push the existing path forward. The telling part is once that path is done things derail quickly when Musk is the one coming up with ideas (cybertruck, booring company etc..)
I think that if you know the current state of the art you have a higher chance of making an incremental improvement. I don't know if it changes your odds of coming up with a revolutionary improvement. We just recently had the story of the student who developed a faster hash lookup because they didn't know it would be impossible.
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution.
This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble. The point is that there is a competition for the best solution in terms of money.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
> Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble
This seems like more a characteristic of "winner take all (or most)" capitalism rather than a characteristic of innovation.
A new technology potentially creates a new market opportunity and you have everyone bum-rush it as quickly as possible with as much money as possible in the hopes of being the new monopolist.
At any rate, this Ellison play wasn't about an innovation. It was about muscling into a mature market he didn't understand (an "eating-the-world play" to use SV lingo).
Lots of money surly helps, just pointing out that we as a species can also advance in other situations.
Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble.
In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox).
There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.
No, there aren't. There are no examples of this. The exact reason humanity didn't develop economically for tens of thousands of years was because of the very ideas that you have, almost every human has.
Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.
Real question: what is "SV"? I missed the anachronym ref.
Silicon Valley
"<insert semi-fact taken out of context regarding something you don't know about>
We are fixing this."
https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html
> The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted.
I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.)
Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy.
(I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
I vaguely recall the NeXT marketing materials touting their first machine was 3M. Sounds like this is where the seed for NeXT was first planted.
But wikipedia lists Paul Berg as the inspiration.from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT:
Some of the people listed in the "Whats a Megaflop" post went over to NeXT with Jobs.The weirdest part to me, especially with that kind of money, is the lack of bringing in external expertise. There are a lot of ag experts that are up to date on the latest greenhouse, climate, and plant science. Many colleges in the US started as agriculture schools and still have strong agriculture programs. With Ellison's money it is baffling why they didn't bring in a team of these experts to point out the basics like "use ag tech from similar climates", "test ag tech in smaller facilities first", and "gather local farming knowledge". Why in the world would someone put a medical doctor in charge of an ag tech venture?
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
One major irony here is if the stated goal is improving agriculture and you've got half a bil to play with the most obvious move would be spin up an equipment manufacturer to compete with John Deere. Pressuring them to halt their ongoing war against their own customers would have a measurable impact on rural suicide rates.
I think the likes of Uber & Starlink might have to disagree.
Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect
Uber is an iffy case.
Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.
There will always be a way to explain the events that enabled the disruption and that doesn't take away from the achievement.
Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet.
It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
I wasn't discounting the achievement. Just pointing out the achievement was the result of domain-experts, not random people with a lot of capital and a can-do spirit.
You need a lot of capital in order to acquire the domain experts. The main question, once you have the capital, is whether you can correctly identify an expert, and set them up to be functional/productive
Hasn't this worked out in a few cases? Maybe Uber as a better solution than taxis as an example?
Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry.
And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
There has been massive innovation in the area in the last forty years or so. This isn't leapfrogging but attempting to scale up what is known to already work.
Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment.
And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding).
Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
> Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries
The Dutch built their agriculture industry on the back of the environment - they have massive problems keeping nitrogen runoff under control enough to pass EU-wide legal limits, and the question on how to transform the ag economy has crashed two governments by now. Continuing as-is is blatant cheating against other EU countries that do keep their nitrogen emissions under control, but any kind of reform will threaten people with very deep pockets.
No, they didn't. They had an industry before there were EU-wide limits. The stuff about nitrogen emissions ignores the fact that no other country outside the EU has done what they did.
This cultish "EU is the world" mentality is tiresome.
Uber was a better consumer experience, but I don't know that it's really a "better solution" than taxis.
It was unprofitable until literally this quarter, and the majority of that profit was, I believe, earned from food delivery services.
And the other thing, Uber became super popular because it was subsidized by VC money and fares were cheap.
Now that it's established... it isn't generally cheaper than taxis, it just has a slightly better app, though in many places that's not true anymore.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you know how the taxi groups lobbied against public transportation, for example to airports? AWESOME, now there aren't just a bunch of local SMBs doing that, now there is an international mega corp doing that too.
Yeah, uBer was better and cheaper. Because it was subsidized from every angle. Cheap fares for riders, higher pay to drivers. Now it's either worse or about the same as Taxi's used to be. There's definitely some benefits to Uber especially when travelling. For local rides though, for me, at least, it's no longer better than taxis used to be, but the problem is now all the taxis are gone. It used to be that calling a taxi was unreliable, but they were generally available just by going outside and standing around for a few minutes.
Ah, I forgot to mention something. The enshittification has begun. Uber needs ever growing profits every year. Those will come from... lower pay for its drivers. Higher fares. Other various microagressions (ads in cars, ads everywhere).
In a sense the invention of farming itself was a bunch of neolithic hackers fooling around with nature, which they knew almost nothing about, until they got it right.
I don't agree that Uber was a better solution than taxis.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
Feels like you didn't book a taxi before Uber. Going up to them (no apps back then) and maybe they were or weren't legit, they were expensive, and they would sometimes tell you a price and then charge your differently at the end of the journey, getting annoyed if you challenged it, and you had to pay cash, and you couldn't easily speak to your driver or see where they were on the route to you...so much worse.
The last time I caught an Uber dude intentionally ignored my directions and missed a turn, then just kept cooking off into the countryside with me in the back seat. At 20 over the posted speed limit. At 3am. I spent an unbelievably tense 5 minutes seriously wondering if I was being abducted. I got home but seriously what the fuck.
I'm a New Yorker. We used Uber because it was cheaper. Now I can't get cabs anywhere besides Manhattan.
I literally described my experience of booking a taxi before Uber. Many of the local services also had apps that showed the location of the car and a fixed price before Uber was available here.
Booking a courtesy car is different to most instances of getting a taxi, though. Getting a taxi is far more often things like "going to the line of taxis outside the club and negotiating prices with them" or "I landed in a foreign country on a business trip or family visit and I need a taxi to my hotel, and I don't have a local credit card". Before Uber, these things were far, far worse on average than they are now.
It worked out for Uber because the taxi industry was, in most parts of the world, a monopoly, inefficient and often riddled with corruption and criminal acts.
You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.
Yes it has. I mean, it hasn't worked out in every case, but between Tesla (Ford/GM/Chrysler), SpaceX (Boeing/Lockheed Martin), TikTok (Youtube), Moderna (Pfizer/Merck/GSK/Sanofi), Uber (Taxi industry/Medallion system/Dispatch companies), Stripe (PayPal/Visa/Mastercard), AirBnB (Hilton/Marriot/Expedia/Booking.com), and OpenAI (Google DeepMind/IBM Watson/Academia), I think there's enough of a case to be made that being young and ignorant of the existing incumbent entities has worked out in a couple of cases.
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
Disruption doesn't come from "experts".
Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.
Computer science experts literally built both of those things.
what exactly did FB and twitter "disrupt"?
They are making the world a better place.
Teenagers?
One of the beloved early figures in modern agriculture had no money and no formal education, yet his work developing improved plant varieties earned him international fame.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
https://lbcas.com/burbanks-life
There’s also a ton of money being spent on ag tech. My parent company spends billions per year on ag tech. We have drones tracking cows in fields, sensors tracking animals, mixing food, feeding them, monitoring them… tons of other stuff (I’m not on that side of things). This is one of the subsidiaries: https://www.microtechnologies.com/
It's remarkable because there are a ton of vertical farming setups in and around large cities in unremarkable warehouses that got this right, but they're having issues with small greenhouses and $500mm.
There is an argument for the blank restart, intentionally ignoring all knowledge gained up to now, to possibly get past a local maximum.
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.
There’s something to be said for fresh perspectives, sure. There’s also something to be said for hiring farmers to teach you how to run a greenhouse. You need to know the rules before you break them.
Well no, that is not how you surpass a local maximum. You randomize. Random, not informed.
One of the early proponents and perhaps a driver, was Dickson Despommier, who just passed.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/
Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted.
It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
What he wants is automated food production in his creepy autonomous Hawaii sub-nation, which fits with all the other Atlas Shrugged "hidden valley" dreams of the SV ultrarich.
He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations.
He doesn't care squat about the world in general.
it wasn't a philantropic or revolutionary attempt. it was his venture to grow his luxury fruits for money- which is struggling because he is hiring friends with no agricultural background.
I've seen this time and again in this space. Thick out the MiT openag project. Same thing, nonsense.
The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
> To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
Yes.
That is not to say that farming is not due for some revolutionary redefining.
But it will be farmers leading the change, not software people
Not a farmer, but I think it's a mistake to say that farmers haven't modernized.
I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff.
I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.
I'm saying the exact opposite. Farmers now are required to have modernized. I'm saying that (modernization) doesn't mean they don't view themselves first and foremost ad farmers.
These tech folks don't. They'll say they're a software developer working on agtech.
It's a totally different mindset, it has nothing to do with the technical details.
Ah, my father in law was a farmer, grew wheat, corn, soy beans, but sometimes raised chickens. Along with the corn, when he fed the chickens anchovies from Chile he noticed rapid growth, called the little fish a growth factor.
Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!
>soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost.
Which points to the irony of all this. The real goal of the “project” is not better nutrition or more efficient farming, is a marketable product. You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly.
> You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly
I hear that a lot.
Apart fom the nutritional benefits of eating meat, notr every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.
Where I live the land is well suited for grazing sheep, and not well suited for cropping
Cattle crammed into feed lots is a sad thing, I am not advocating it. I am advocating an approach sensitive to the needs of the land and people
>not every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.
That would be relevant if the livestock were grassfed but in the modern world where Soybeans from brazil are shipped to UK to feed cattle or From USA to Australia to feed pigs that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Soybeans is pretty much one of the best crops for feeding animals because it fixates all the nitrogen it needs, unlike 95% of other grain crops. The only thing more efficient to grow fertilizer wise is alfalfa, which is what most cows are fed, but would not be any good for feeding pigs or chickens because it is hard to digest like grass.
Animals are grass fed around me. There is some supplementary feeding, but mostly hay made in summer for winter.
The economics of farming do not stack up, here, with feed from off the farm.
Mostly sheep, a smattering of beef.
What most people tend to forget is the scale of factory farming. About 30,000,000 cows 130,000,000 pigs and 8,000,000,000 chickens are killed yearly in the US alone. You can imagine that they cannot be just grassfed besides the fact that pigs and chickens do not eat grass so they are fed soy that could fed to humans, animals are not magic machines that turn air into food, the only thing capable of converting nitrogen water and sunlight into protein are plants, any step in the middle generate loses, animals need energy for their vital processes so the rate of conversion of fed-to-edible calories is aprox. Poultry:11% pigs:10% Beef:1%
(I could cite the sources if anyone wish to investigate more) All this is just the efficiency aspect of it, let’s pretend they don’t need water or create any waste.
The only people who think that farming is "primitive" in a modern economy have only themselves to blame for being completely uninformed.
Exactly. It's companies like John Deere who automate their combines, not software/automation companies learning how to make combines, that have been (and I expect will continue to be) successful.
This hasn't been true in practice. For example, farmers did not lead the small sat revolution that's democratized the use of satellite imaging for farm management. They did go "wow!" when the option was presented to them, but technologists saw the use case (and its immense utility) before most of their customers did.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Farmers certainly didn’t launch satellites or write the software on them, but I don’t think anyone would expect or want that.
Long ago, when I was young though, the first satellite imaging I saw was at my uncles farm. This was dedicated equipment in his home office with a simple UI with ridiculously high res satellite imagery of all the nearby land. This was way beyond anything a PC was capable of at the time. Definitely felt like he was on the bleeding edge.
I'm saying that none of those satellite companies are running successful farms.
Satellite imaging is not farming.
Name one farmer who doesn’t use satellite weather imagery
The data layer most grain farmers rely upon is often ground based radar showing rain bearing clouds ..
eg, this: http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR581.loop.shtml#skip
is a "composite radar loop" that stitches together several ground based radars tuned to detect water.
Grain farmers in the wheat belt here, and elsewhere, can generally get by fine w/out sat data as long as they can have their cloud data.
What most (large) farmers heavily rely on today though is GPS - sat based positioning. That'll often be projected onto high res local imagery .. which can often come from an air photo survey or sat photography AND | OR high res vector data showing fence lines and boundaries but no actual image data (they can see out the window of the tractor after all).
Hi, we farm, and we use radar, not satellite based imagery.
You completely missed the point.
The point - are any of those folks that lead the small sat revolution running successful farms now?
No.
It's hubris to think that one skillset subsumes another just because one uses the other.
The food those sat folks eat whole developing said revolution- growm by farmers, so they are the onea that enabled the sat revolution. We can do this all day.
Most of that early work sourced "the good images" from air survey photographs.
Early tech leaders (ERMapper, LizardTech, famously fought it out over "infinite" image formats with "unlimited" resolution) in Earth resource mapping that integrated air, sat, geophysical, etc. data absolutely had significant members that came from farming families and retired to farm ownership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....
"Running a successful farm" has a high business and tech element these days, and certainly did in the 1980s, growing ever since.
There are overlapping skillsets here, it's entirely possible to be able to fly a cropduster or drape lowlevel air survey lines, higher photographic runs, and understand, run, and own a farm, and have some mathematical and programming chops.
Unsurprisingly a number of those pioneers had overlapping skills.
You mean we can’t grow food asking an LLM?
"city boy tries to grow a plant" is a whole genre of hubris that is always entertaining.
Easy to grow plant. Hard to make living, if you don't subsidise it with other work or income.
Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general.
Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
Margins start improving fast when you turn that fruit into booze. Licensure of course is an issue but many americans are making good money today selling moonshine locally without any of that.
"how do you grow a winery with a small fortune? Start with a large fortune"
- silicon valley joke since at least the dot com bubble
Music industry version goes something like: how to get a million dollars making music? Spend 100 million
Except it's not especially hard? I, and I'm sure many of us, have decent little home gardens.
For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
I grew up in NW lower Michigan. Cherry and other fruit tree country. Orchards need a lot of labor to maintain to get marketable fruit. I've seen several go wild and become deer feed. Also, they don't really scale as the grow as you need to spend more on infrastructure. Orchards now plant dwarf rootstock. This results in trees that bear fruit quicker but don't grow much larger that a human can pick by hand. They need a lot of care (water and pruning) relative to larger trees but the economics of the larger trees don't work as well as they take many years to bear fruit and then they need the infrastructure to prune and harvest because they are so big. It's not a simple thing at all.
You can always count on someone thinking doing some unscalable thing and it being "easy" will scale for an actual operation that needs to make money.
Farming is only easy for the people that have never farmed before.
You should tell all the PhD agronomists at ISU they are wasting their lives before it's too late.
Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.
I once lived in a house that had an apple tree in the back yard. Tons of apples at the start of the season.
But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard.
It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.
That's just circling back on "city boy tries to grow a plant". Your garden provided you with both fruit and meat. You were just unwilling/unable to harvest the meat.
I'm not sure it's legal to kill deer in Berkeley, but they were also very cute.
It's coming right for us!
If you are disappointed, you didn't plant enough.
> For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning.
On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.
I'm on the east coast. I have 5 apple and 3 pear trees. I'm lucky to get 5 fruit by the end of summer due to squirrels.
I’ve gotten one persimmon in ten years: the squirrels wait until the start of November when all of the other food is gone and eat all of them a week or two before they ripen.
Scaling crops is not like scaling software.
Perfect showcase of aforementioned city boy hubris, equating a small home garden with some trees to a modern day farming operation.
Growing 100 potatoes is not even in the same stratosphere of complexity and logistics as growing 100,000 potatoes.
Potatoes are not a good counter example because they are indeed stupidly easy to grow and scale. You can easily grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes per year indoors with fairly small potato boxes going through a few harvests per year. The main limiting factor is energy costs - you'll end up paying more per kg of potato than you would if you just bought them at the grocery store.
But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
Potatoes are easy to grow, however even if you grow 1000 lbs of potatoes per year, at farm sale prices that is worth like $130. So how much of that $130 did you spend on growing them, and how many hundreds of thousands of pounds would you have to be able to harvest and transport to make your salary - the fertilizer and equipment maintenance costs?
All but the largest corporate megafarms are happy to make just a few percent profit on their investment, its one of the lowest return investments out of any industry. And it isn't a stable return either, that is the average over a few decades, with year-to-year yield and profit varying up to 30%.
If you want to survive on all plants you grew yourself, potatoes are a good choice for the bulk of your calories and nutrients, but if you want to make any actual money off of it, the scale of operations needed quickly grow to massive proportions that makes it anything but easy.
I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable.
Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly.
And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.
can't wait to watch the failures of agriculture on mars. well actually nevermind because people will die.
As long as you have a dozen potatoes, some human poop, a sample of earth soil for necessary nutrients and bacteria, and rocket fuel to burn to make water, it should be pretty easy.
If you can’t think of reasons why it would be harder than that, consider that you might want to read up on the problem first before saying it’s easy. For example, you’re assuming compatible soil (no), nutrients (also no), and the absence of toxins (again no).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01158-6
Another way of looking at: have humans over-wintered in Antarctica without relying on outside inputs? That’s a much easier problem on multiple scales (oxygen, soil, temperature, water, etc.) so I wouldn’t take any mars proposal seriously before they’ve sent the same equipment to Antarctica and survived longer than the proposed mission.
Antarctica isn't this great example people think it is. International treaties require people leave it in as close to its natural condition as possible.
Taking a piss outside is illegal, even peoples crap has to be collected and shipped back home. Any sort of development is essentially impossible.
And that article is an interview with the hipster cartoonist who wrote a largely junk science book on Mars..
Multiple countries have bases in Antarctica, so it seems unlikely that a spacecraft-sized addition to the 50 acre McMurdo station is the proverbial straw on the camel’s back for a continent’s environment. Reusing human waste shouldn’t be a problem, either, since the proposals are to use that as fertilizer - it’s awfully expensive not to use everything that you shipped between planets!
And, yes, I linked to a best-selling popular science book at the level of the conversation here. I should note that the book has two authors, and the first one isn’t the illustrator but the professional biologist. You’re welcome to provide dissenting views if you want, I’m sure they wouldn’t claim to be the last word on the topic.
It's far below the level of discussion here or anywhere where there is discussion with varying views. The reason is that the book is broken in near to every single argument it makes, often intentionally by relying on misleading arguments or assuming the lack of knowledge of the reader -- knowledge which, crucially, I'm fairly certain they themselves had or should have had with even cursory level research on the topic. In a forum with debate those arguments rapidly emerge.
So for instance, their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant.
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way which isn't the initial event, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is because it's so different than the conditions to which we prepare for -- more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
I wanted to dig into more of their arguments but this is already fairly lengthy. If you mention what you found most compelling, I can offer the data (or, as in this case, logic) to the contrary.
Also, I failed to respond to the Antarctica thing. There are small scale greenhouses in Antarctica ensuring the hundreds of people wintering there each year retain access to nice fresh veggies and the like without any external inputs. [1] It's not exactly novel technology, nor difficult to scale.
[1] - https://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/antarctic-weather-stat...
Right, which is both well known and not the question at hand. The point remains that a closed loop hasn’t been demonstrated under much easier conditions on earth and therefore it’s clearly not the easy task the person I replied to described it as.
All travel in and out of Antarctica is cancelled during the ~7 months of winter. So all of that is being done without external inputs during that time frame. A permanent (or at least practically permanent) closed loop is probably not possible because of the countless treaties. It severely limits what can be built, which local resources can be utilized, and even what you can do with your own waste.
The Antarctic treaties allow for the development of greenhouses, etc., for scientific research purposes (in areas that have already been developed).
And scientists residing there have tried to make a closed-loop system for decades now. They haven't succeeded yet. It's a lot harder to do than fiction and Hollywood would have you believe. Importantly from the Martian colonization perspective: it's irrelevant that the scientists in Antarctic can't use local resources to build their closed loop, because that's part of proving the Martian concept, where there aren't any usable local resources.
You're going to need to cite that because to my knowledge there's been 0 efforts towards any sort of long term self sustainability on Antarctica. The most I know of are the efforts to reduce diesel consumption, but that's probably more gesturing towards this 'green' political stuff than any effort at self sustainability.
And saying there are no usable local resources on Mars is ignorant of basic plans - sunlight, regolith which can be processed, hydrated minerals, CO2, water, and more. In the longer term the other various minerals and metals will also be highly useful, but those I listed are valuable right off the bat and easily accessible.
Sample on long-term sustainability efforts in Antarctica: https://en.mercopress.com/2009/02/18/zero-emission-energy-se...
Mars has lots of resources. They're simply not usable with current technology without extreme amounts of energy.
Mars also gets significantly less sunlight than Earth (43%), so solar isn't going to solve the problem.
That's not about long-term sustainability. It's just the doing away with diesel stuff, which is largely irrelevant.
And you're spewing nonsense on Mars - all of the resources I mentioned are obviously directly accessible with minimal energy requirements. The one thing you're right on is that solar will never be a primary source (at least not without extensive and heavily redundant battery backups) because of intermittency and unreliability.
Fortunately we have the Sabatier reaction. [1] CO2 + H2 => methane + water. Given the atmosphere on Mars is about 96% CO2 and H2 is readily extractable from the vast water ice resources (or even the dirt if necessary), we've got access to basically endless methane on Mars. And on Mars we'd love to dump as much as we possibly can into the atmosphere. Early expeditions will also probably bring along some largish radioisotope generators again for the sake of emergency power generation. In a domain where one failure means everybody dies, redundancy is nice.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
I think your vision of Mars is based on Hollywood.
The Sabatier reaction is inefficient; as Wikipedia notes, it requires 17 MWh to produce a single ton of methane, not including the energy costs associated with electrolysis of local water sources for the H2. Hydrogen represents about 1/4 of the weight of methane, and so you'd need another roughly 0.4 MWH for the electrolysis, for a total of 17.4 MHh to produce 1 ton of methane.
Each MWh is roughly the energy needed to power 1000 homes. That's not some "largish radioisotopes." That's a full-scale power plant. We don't have many power plants that can produce that sort of output but which are light enough to launch into space or simple enough to be assembled on-site. Solar (the easy option) would require a minimum of 15-20 acres on Mars, and approximately 120 tons of solar panels, not including wiring and other supporting infrastructure. We don't have any spacecraft capable of taking that much weight, so that's multiple orbital launches and multiple spacecraft just to get the solar panels to Mars, and we haven't even started discussing the weight or other equipment needed to get the solar panels down to the surface, let alone transport the habitat modules or other equipment, or the astronauts and colonists making the journey.
TLDR: Mars is a pipe dream with current technology.
I assume you're basically trolling here, but as I mentioned, obviously the radioisotopes would be for emergency power generation - life support in the highly improbable case of all other power sources simultaneously failing, not as a driver for industrial level manufacturing. You're also far off on solar estimates, probably in part because that Wiki page hasn't been updated in well over a decade and solar tech has rather change in the interim. You're looking at ~590W/m2 solar irradiance at Mars' equator, so production of something like ~100W/m^2 with typical consumer panels and perhaps 150W/m^2 with high end panels. So that's in the ballpark of ~0.1 acres for a MWh of production.
Hollywood, so far as Mars is concerned, is mostly based on the Martian which is a hard sci-fi and phenomenally well researched book. The mistakes it made, inadvertently and intentionally, only make Mars colonization even easier than demonstrated. For instance the raging dust storm of the movie (and book) does not exist (and was an intentional fib). Low atmospheric pressure means the most fierce dust storm would have all the force of a very light breeze. And similarly his adventures to extract water from the rocket fuel were completely unnecessary as it turns out the seemingly barren regolith is surprisingly moist at 2-11% water by mass, an unintentional mistake as this was only discovered after the book was published.
It’s done with at least two external inputs (air, water) and far more resource availability than a Mars mission would have. A long-term closed loop isn’t banned by treaties - McMurdo alone is like 50 acres and a hundred buildings, something the size of a plausible interplanetary mission at our current technology level is not going to dramatically exceed that footprint.
Again, I’m not saying it’s inconceivable that it could be done, only that it’s harder than the sales guy would have you believe.
Mars has more than sufficient resources to provide practically endless air and water as well.
Beyond that I think you're also on a red herring here. There's no plan for a long-term closed loop on Mars to begin with. In the distant future most likely, but complete self sustainability is not practical in short to mid term timeframes. That would require essentially duplicating absolutely all forms of industry on Mars which probably will happen but only in the very distant future. In the interim a Mars colony would be receiving regularly shipments from Earth, and those return trips would also enable colonists, who decide it's not for them, to also return to Earth.
Neither Antarctica or Mars should be a problem, as long as you have sufficient energy source, and bring some soil & nutrients with you. After all, people make money growing weed indoors with only electrical lights. My country has freezing and dark winters, yet we enjoy fresh tomatoes all around the year, grown in heated greenhouses with extra artificial light.
I’m not saying it’s beyond possible, only that it’s not “easy”. If someone is saying that we can colonize Mars, it’s orders of magnitude easier to send the same payload to Antarctica and see if it works somewhere that, say, a failure in the air processing system can avoid loss of life by opening the windows.
Sabatier reaction also rocks in this context. CO2 + O2 => methane with water as a byproduct.
So all you really need is hydrogen. And conveniently part of the water you produce or harvest can be split into H2 and O2.
The absurd convenience of such things realllly makes one think more deeply about the simulation hypothesis.
i hope this is sarcasm because this is exactly what i'm talking about. i will not be joining you on that endeavor but more power to you. good luck!
I am not sure why you got downvoted but probably they did not watch 'the Martian'.
At least someone got the reference, thank you.
I've worked in many an ag company: All the ideas Sensei supposedly has are in in way innovative: places like Monsanto/Bayer had been trying to do work in those directions a decade ago, and it's not as if they were short of people that understand agriculture. But as far as I am aware, most of the efforts in those companies have been scaled back.
The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
That seems like a perfectly fine way to start a disruptive venture. Tesla started as a way to grow luxury EVs for money, except real experts got acquired.
"Luxury fruits" lol way to go framing eating fruit as negatively as possible. Not that I have qualms with what you say otherwise.
Is he planning this for the former Dole fields on Lanai?
Yeah seems like you'd want to either copy, poach, or acquire the talent at Oishii, no? They look like they know what they are doing, although it's not consumer cheap yet, and the economics might never be.
While I disagree with a majority of Larry Ellison's opinions, this is a venture that I think must be celebrated regardless of failures. There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley that this one must get its due promotion. The front of agriculture and innovation is difficult but none of the technology is being used to sow hate amongst ourselves.
Very few things "must be celebrated regardless of failures".
That is such a weird thing to say. People should just give up?
You've got that famous quote from Edison about failing at make a light bulb.
Or you think everyone who studies cancer and doesn't cure it should think of themselves as failures?
God forbid you have a kid who wants to get better at something and you tell them to not bother because they're already a loser.
Why does Silicon Valley need to be doing the innovation here?
Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
Is Silicon Valley doing the innovation?
They have farms in Hawaii and Ontario with an office in LA.
> There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley
Zero
I applaud Larry for trying here
He doesn’t have to answer to anyone
Even beyond green, it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It's not quite as cooperative as the digital, but rather more relevant.
> it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs.
It would be nicer if it was not saddled by hubris and a lack of domain knowledge
It would be great if it were not such a colossal waste
Meh results oriented thinking. Elon revolutionized rockets and electrical vehicles with 0 previous domain knowledge.
In another timeline both concepts fail and he's just another clueless guy who blew a bunch of money on ideas outside his domain - doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
As a former agronomist this makes as much sense to me as starting a database company where no one understands databases. Without an agronomist how do you know what could be possible from what is clearly impossible?
Didn't China burst this bubble already? Vertical farming, etc. Western aligned farming is currently in a big downturn due to BRICS constantly breaking production records. And they are using Chinese machinery. The world is catching up to American farming yields. China is decoupling from American farming and they have been investing a lot in all the infrastructure for that.
American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis)
https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agr...
https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-...
Netherlands as well, one of the smallest countries in the world but the 3rd largest agricultural exporter in the world.
There are a lot of Chinese doomsayers out there, about how they are about to collapse (zeihan). Then this, farming, or Deepseek comes out. I think their demise is over exaggerated.
Deepseek or whatever farming tech they may be developing don't amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to their looming demographic collapse.
China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration.
The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
Ellison's strength, I felt like, has always been in the field of sales and ruthless contract negotiation rather than technical innovation - a "golden touch" that doesn't benefit disruptive scientific innovation, but might instead prove more fruitful if applied to an a mature technology that just needs to proliferate out there in the world.
There was an interesting article on him linked from The Diff newsletter today. It seems a large part of his strengths are strategic M&A.
"1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition.
2. It works.
3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year.
4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4
5. GOTO 1."
https://www.notboring.co/p/who-is-larry-ellison
6. Divest losing tens of billions in the industries where this strategy doesn’t work (see adtech, oracle data cloud - few billions in acquisitions just closed down not even sold)
7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures
I'm fairly blown-away at the mission statement: “improve human nutrition and preserve the environment by growing food indoors"
Adding a building doesn't improve the environment, so for starters you're in the hole, for energy, you're in the hole (pending solar and thermal recovery, each with environmental impact of their own)...
Larry, let's talk. There's for sure a use for greenhouses, sensors, all the tech, but let's focus on the soil.
> Adding a building doesn't improve the environment
Depends how concerned you are about pesticides.
Exactly
Show me any farm that doesn’t use them
I’ll wait
There is indoor lettuce I can buy at my supermarkets that is "zero pesticide" (you can just google it and find several, don't want to post any sort of links to products here).
I suspect it's hydroponic.
> I suspect it's hydroponic.
It's axiomatically-speaking the one of the only few ways to make it happen.
"zero pesticides" implies no bugs/insects around to need spraying it in the first place, and doing that requires (A) a clean environment + (B) no regular soil (regular soil may have insect eggs / fungi in them).
The only things that come to mind are hydroponics & hydrogel agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel_agriculture
Seeing lots of "he knows nothing about farming", sure he might not know as much about farming as the farmers who live it day to day. But he has money and access to bring farmers along for the journey and build something better.
A lot of true disruption comes from people you'd never expect to have had an impact, because they aren't myopic to the pre-conceived challenges of that industry.
The real game changer for farming would be direct synthesis of food, avoiding using plants for energy or CO2 capture. But this is tough to make work economically. The easiest target would be single cell protein, for example ICI's Pruteen or more recently Quorn. Perhaps if renewable electricity continues to decline in price it will become more feasible.
Don't tell Larry about all of the startups in the Midwest who are actually making progress on this.
Why don't you tell us about all them?
Is this a joke about conventional mechanized farming working well enough as it is or has there been serious progress in the AgTech sector? The last time I read of it the big developments were hydroponics and tractors that burned weeds with a laser beam.
There's been real progress, and Larry's got a long history of gutting people who make real progress because he just thinks of anything sitting on a database as a way to push Oracle licenses while increasing his personal net worth.
what's the real progress, though?
I'm a midwesterner originally and I'm genuinely curious what you're referencing.
All the companies in this space go out of business. Who in the Midwest is doing well?
Are those actually big developments or just incremental ones?
A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
Results don’t need to be dramatic or come right away. Even failure is a learning experience. Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.
> A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
Is it? It feels like the same money could be given out to thousands of people who actually understand farming to run little experiments. That's how America is supposed to work. Relying on Larry Ellison to succeed in a field he has no experience or instincts by throwing money at it seems like a terrible strategy.
People underestimate how much our regressive tax structure and lax antitrust enforcement are holding back innovation. If we didn’t allow such massive wealth concentration, we'd see more competition and breakthroughs.
Right, of course, excessive concentration of wealth is the only thing preventing another Bell Labs or Xerox PARC from bringing us tomorrow's future today.
I don’t understand the sarcasm. More competition in the marketplace would create more innovation: I don’t think this should be controversial.
Even Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are two different entities.
These days Bell and Xerox would maybe merge to "consolidate their market position" and fire half of the researchers to show cost savings at the next board meeting.
I hear a lot about how ahead of their time they were and how everything since is based on them.. But it seems like newer things since then are all being built on the shoulders of a generation of thousands of giants instead of a generation where we can only identify 2.
It's a different time. I don't think we can compare the old Bell Labs/Xerox PARC vs Larry Ellison.
The Larry Ellison.
People have been saying that these concentration of wealth will end up hoarding our basic needs and we've seen that already with Housing.
First they come for your House, next they come for your Food.
Right, because so much innovation comes from places with super high taxation in Europe. Give me a break.
You’re missing the point. It’s not a simple ‘high taxes bad, low taxes good’ binary—it’s a spectrum. The U.S. has a tax structure that allows wealth to concentrate at the top while failing to enforce competition, which actually stifles innovation. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan—despite having higher taxes—consistently drive innovation.
Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
The issue isn’t just tax rates—it’s whether a system allows new players to compete or just protects entrenched monopolies. The U.S. is increasingly choosing the latter.
> Germany leads in engineering and automotive tech (Siemens, BMW, Bosch). Sweden produces global tech giants like Spotify and Klarna. Denmark is a leader in renewable energy (Vestas, Ørsted). Japan? It revolutionized robotics, semiconductors, and high-speed rail while fostering companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nintendo.
And you can't think of anything the US innovates in?
Your evidence / anecdotes aren't really sufficient to prove the claim .
It does. If you identify "innovation" differently. The American meaning of "innovation" is finding a way to force ten million people to pay you a dollar each. European innovation is, like, Mastodon, where you specifically cannot be forced to pay a dollar. This tends to not pay as well. This is because America selects for people who can get paid lots of money much more strongly than Europe does.
> That's how America is supposed to work.
Where did you get that?
It's just the default argument someone uses when they have nothing of substance to offer to the conversation
It's not like the money vanishes into thin air, wealthy people throwing their money at anything is a desirable outcome vs. say hoarding it.
How exactly would one "hoard" money these days? Even if it's just sitting in a bank, that still translates to getting lent out at whatever interest rate that bank charges.
> How exactly would one "hoard" money these days
They buy real estate and sit on it. Since land taxes are so low, you can make money without actually doing anything with the land.
Finite resources (mostly, peoples' time) are expended.
they call that "velocity" of money? it means a rate at which money circulates in some wider way.. it is well-known in some theory circle IMO
So just because it's better than nothing we should consider it good enough?
If all the wealthy would band together to spend their money on convincing every farmer to write software instead, then we'd all starve
As if he personally ran this without people who knew a few things?
Go look at the success rate of university research. This sounds like someone who hasn’t been part of research.
Per the article it sounds like the entire operation took place on his company-town Hawaiian island of Lanai, so...kinda, yeah, that is what I think. I'm sure he had a small staff, but my instinct is that most of the expenses were capex and self-dealing.
The article specifically says that he had tech CEO's running the project.
The mistakes they made also seem pretty fundamental to farming; things like:
1. they didn't consider that a greenhouse designed for the desert wouldn't work in Hawaii
2. solar panels need to be installed differently depending on their location and never see the theoretical power generation in practice
3. immature/mature plants were growm right next to each other in a way that spread pests
4. they bought marijuana greenhouses without considering that it is grown so differently from other standard crops.
This is pretty basic stuff that should have been caught by someone with knowledge of agriculture. This seems to indicate that while they had a really smart team, they made the mistake of assuming that general AI/robotics would map 1:1 to the problems of agriculture.
The success rate of university research should have been the ultimate warning sign that you shouldn't dump half a billion into "solving agriculture." Progress in established fields like agriculture is expensive, time consuming, and (usually) incremental.
The thought that you could do all of that at once and outcompete an approach that has been refined for thousands of years is wild. Kudos to them for dreaming big, but I just don't see why they thought they had an edge here outside of "AI can solve any problem" hubris.
He's throwing money at someone. Probably someone roughly as deserving (in the grand scheme of things) as farmers are.
So I'd say that it's good that he's throwing his money instead of hoarding it or doing some ruthless exploitation or something with oil pumping.
Expecting billionaires to spend their money in any way that benefits someone other than them is unrealistically high bar. We should apploud them if they at least manage to do less harm.
[flagged]
A lot of people are going to sneer at this because they like seeing rich tech people fail, but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
It is much more efficient for society in the form of its government to fund research. We should not leave it up to rich people to decide whether or not research is conducted.
Is it? Do you think the POTUS will do a better job directing funds to worthy causes, and not friends and allies?
Until this administration funds were spent at the behest of Congress and allocated through procedures that were set up. There is no evidence of widespread misuse of those funds. Of course having an asshole concentrate power in themselves will lead to bad governance.
Surely both the government and rich people can fund research. One doesn't preclude the other.
There are no instances in the history of the world where the wealthy, out of the goodness of their hearts, have solved hunger, childhood education, funded research programs at scale, provided safe drinking water, etc. These things are handled by government. Government is far more efficient at this than hoping rich people act in the public’s best interest.
However, there is a plethora of instances where the wealthy have addressed these issues, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but in search of revenue.
Rich people didn’t feed the poor. They didn’t provide universal k-12 education. They didn’t fund enough universities to provide higher education for the masses. They didn’t provide clean water. They didn’t get rid of smog or acid rain. They didn’t band together to start space research or build the highway system.
But there are a few instances where a rich person spent a trivial amount of their wealth to fund a project or two in the interest of humanity.
> Rich people didn’t feed the poor.
Al Capone's soup kitchens?
Mass hunger was solved by government. Not charities. There are instances where charity fed someone but the issue was solved when government did something. Nothing works better at scale than good governance.
Government's ability to publicly fund research is directly related to how much it can collect in taxes.
With wealth being hoarded by individuals at unprecedented rates and taxes lower than they've been at almost any time in the country's history, there has certainly been a shift away from public research toward private research.
Is it? Is government really structured to do this funding in an efficient manner? Or do we end up with atrociously useless investments that are made as vehicles for delivery of pork barrel spending?
The top .1% fund very little research. Therefore it is much more efficient for society in the form of government to fund research. We should not rely on the benevolence of a few rich assholes to have research programs.
Vastly most of basic research is publicly funded.
I wasn't addressing the question of quantity of funding, but rather the efficiency of the funding. Is the research valuable, or is it just pretend-value from spending intended as pork? A lot of government funded research is of that kind. More generally: the market has a way of evaluating research value (did it lead to profit) while the government's actions have no reality check. They depend on the wisdom of officials who inevitably have conflicts of interest.
> A lot of government funded research is of that kind.
A lot of everything is of that kind. Larry's folly is of that kind. Most defense spending is of that kind. Most startups are of that kind.
BTW, my brother was one of those officials, judging grants at the NSF in DC. But that was only after a career in physics at Sandia.
Simply determining the value of something is difficult. This is a big part of why communism didn't work -- it's impossible for central planners, however wise, to figure out. The communists piggybacked on price signals from other countries but that's not a great substitute for ones own market generating the price signals.
Absent price signals, determinations of value inevitably get corrupted by other interests. Look at the long, sorry history of NASA's manned space program. Value there has become "does this deliver $$$ to my district".
My dad worked on Mercury and Apollo. The first put men in space and the second put men on the moon. There was a shit ton of spin offs from this. We got a step up on GPS because some grad students were saying what if after recording Sputnik ephemerides.
Research doesn't work by central planning. Grants to researchers is competitive. There's corruption not because of the scientific method but rather because of the human condition.
Your view of this is very politicized. I'm done here.
The manned space program was entirely political, so complaining about politicization is hilarious.
Apollo was a national potlatch. It was "look how rich and successful capitalism is; we can put 4% of the federal budget into a pile and set it on fire, we're so good." Spinoffs are an unjustifiable myth. To the extent we can know, they'd have occurred anyway (ICs, for example). The most important thing to remember about Apollo is we didn't go back, which is clear evidence it wasn't needed. But to a true space fan, like a true communist, space programs can never fail, they can only be failed.
[dead]
It's great if you treat Larry like a toddler. Anything a toddler tries is great.
Larry is an adult last I checked :)
What people find distasteful in my circles is when rich people do nothing to solve systemic problems within society and instead go about acting as benevolent do-gooders selectively handing out resources to causes they feel an affinity for.
When rich folks act this way - we end up with a bored and cruel aristocracy and piss poor working people, like England. I don't think that's good for anyone.
> Improving agriculture is a worthy goal, even if it’s not immediately successful.
That very much depends on the cost. History is littered with tragically failed experiments in improving farming ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_farming are some of the worst and most well known, but there are many others).
Whatever your commitments, seeing a rich person fail is kinda definitionally humorous. Something is funny often because of juxtaposition, contradiction. It is why it is the emperor who has no clothes, not the poor beggar; or why its "your momma" and not you yourself.
I agree with this, even if it has a little XKCD "struggle no more; I'm here to solve it with algorithms" energy[0].
I think Bill Gates is much better at finding people with the right expertise who are already solving a problem and just adding more funding and I think the results speak for themselves.
[0] https://xkcd.com/1831/
It's pretty obvious to me that this is all about profits and public image, it's not like they suddenly started to give a damn about other people.
Bill Gates also lost money on greenhouses [0][1]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/bill-gates-green-tech-fun...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/iron-ox-lays-off-50-amount...
> but I think it’s great that he’s trying something.
That something is throwing AI and robots at dirt as if there's some kind of labor and knowledge gap in farming that needs a rich guy to throw tech at it.
I think how Larry Ellison has decided to run Oracle is both atrocious, and his own choice. I think him experimenting with better agriculture is awesome and even failing in it can lead to progress as now we have ruled somethings out.
Few people are truly all bad or all good.
[flagged]
Can you please post links to some of that cheap farmland available right now because of DOGE?
USAID spends ~$2B p.a. on food from US farmers, I assume the presumption that without that backdoor subsidiary farms making less money will be cheaper. Though total output value is ~$200 p.a. so that’s %1, but price is set at the margin so actual loss could be greater.
I think this loss might already be less than the loss from the effects of ozempic.
Edit: looking at total US farm subsidies from taxpayers is around $30B which is ~%15.
Will see if I can scrounge up some links, but farmers are paid (just an example, there are many environmental and other programs) federal money to do stuff like leave strips of land uncultivated to reduce fertilizer run-off from fields. These payments are stopped and farmers are left to foot the bill. Also, technically, if a contract is for 3 years and a farmer is 1 year in but decide to stop because the money isn't coming in, now the farmer is in violation!
On a related note: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162502
I think the idea is that farm subsidies potentially being cut would make land available. That would take time.
It might not take a long time; many farmers are on a knife's edge in terms of solvency.
Most farmers are petty involved in year to year fluctuations and financing things so hard to know how many would stick it out in hopes of legislation….
Granted this is all a hypothetical.
also a few suicides.. the process does take time
[dead]
[flagged]
Don't punish people for trying.
No one should have the wealth he does. We sneer that people look up to him for spending a small part of his wealth to benefit others when he should not have enough money to fund $500 million science projects.
But he does. That’s the reality. So how would you rather he spend it?
I’d like people to sneer and get angry over the fact that he does have the money. In Les Miserables when the rich man gave the begger a penny the bishop says, “Look at monsieur buying a penny’s worth of paradise.”
There's no shortage of people sneering and getting angry and billionaires and their money.
Evidently I disagree. Apparently not enough people are angry enough. We elected a man who accepted $30 billion in brides the day before his inauguration and his supporters don’t care.
If you want to make an argument against billionaires, you should start by being numerate.
A billion and a million (the actual number for inauguration donations) are very different numbers, and if you mix the two up accidentally, it mean your world model is horrifically broken. One is plausible, one is absurd in this context.
He got $30 billion in bribes from his crypto coin pump and dump. Instead of making assumptions inquire.
Oceangate's Titan is the shining beacon of how millionaires and billionaires should strive to improve the world.
[dead]
He owns an entire 90,000 acre Hawaiian island and multiple mega yachts.. they’re not sneering because he tried, they’re sneering because he’s delusional that he thought that one of the oldest and largest sectors of the economy just needed an untrained rich guy to fly in and save the day.
Yes, they are sneering because he didn't buy another mega yacht instead.
> one of the oldest and largest sectors of the economy just needed an untrained rich guy to fly in and save the day
This is just investing. There are many old moribund sectors of the economy that could use investors not focused on quarterly profits. This is not a controversial statement in any other context, you just don't like it because it's Ellison doing it.
I don’t care one way or another to be honest - he’s free to waste his money however he wants. It’s just amusing after all his proclamations about reinventing farming and changing agriculture that they’re stuck at the level of early 2010s Dutch greenhouses..
It’s a shame that rather than just hire experts and give them access to the unlimited funding to advance the field he attempted to reinvent the wheel with ‘disrupters’ but it is what it is
> ...an investment that could improve life for billions of people.
This is the problem I have with startups/tech that intend to revolutionize farming: it's rarely to improve life for people, but rather to increase profits. Perhaps Ellison does, indeed, intend to use this farming tech to help bring food to hungry people around the world - and that would be great! But I'm skeptical; Larry's never struck me as an altruistic dude.
I did not make any claims about altruistic intent. This is an empirical statement about the outcome of the startup if successful.
The majority of the success of modern society has come from allowing these self-serving motivations to help everyone.
I don't get where this moralistic perspective that everything has to be done selflessly for some greater good has come from.
> Larry's never struck me as an altruistic dude.
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
he could've just given the half billion to poor people and relieved the immiseration of thousands of people. instead he set a pile of money on fire because of ego
> Don't punish people for trying.
There's no punishment occurring at all. There's just people saying stuff, waiting to see how billionaire overlords decide to proceed, perhaps hoping they get lucky and ruthless enough to join that class.
When wealthy people spend a lot of money on big toys, all it does is kick money down to the rest of us.
When wealthy people start tinkering with stuff like our food supply, in the past that has had big consequences for humans (think things like the Dust Bowl or Various British-led famines, or the Holomodor and/or great leap forward if that's your bend).
A lot of us are aware that it's not great to have one human with an outsized influence working on large systems about which they have little expert knowledge or personal experience:
those folks can do things that have great consequences for our lives while experiencing no repercussions themselves.
For instance, I'm pretty sure some asshole is going to try to fix global warming by unilaterally deciding to change the albedo of the planet, and that'll cause massive problems. They will smugly claim that at least someone is "trying" something (instead of adjusting the ecocide of the planet by the forces that created their wealth) and when it goes wrong they will just retire to their lair in Montana or wherever and tell themselves that at least they didn't buy another great big toy.
Agtech is still very much a field: imaging, genomics, etc. Its just a very difficult problem; half a billion is chump change in biology
There are some niche applications where innovative greenhouse technology, AI and similar tech can contribute to better agriculture.
But this "tech think" completely misses the point, when it comes to Agriculture. We already have all the technology we need to convert Agriculture from a major emitter to a CO2-dump. We could dramatically increase current and future arable land by using known sustainable farming techniques without loosing or even while enhancing productivity per hectare.
Especially the idea that we need ultra-productive greenhouses in urban settings is plainly speaking stupid and ignores basic economics. Land is actually quite plentiful, even directly adjacent to major agglomerations and (with the right tools and techniques) can be highly productive without capital intensive tech projects.
Innovation is needed much more in terms of giving producers the right incentives to farm sustainably – at the moment much of government subsidies and trade incentives has a directly opposite effect.
Of course it would be nice, if a farmer could use a $2,000 drone to weed their fields pesticide free by employing AI, etc. But the real holy grail would be to get a farmer to use known techniques to drastically reduce fertilizer and pesticide use while increasing the diversity of crops and the carbon content of his soil.
My first thought in looking at this headline was "let me guess, he was going to try and solve hyper-local biological/environmental problems with off the shelf AI and robots". Sure enough, that was the subheadline.
The lesson of Larry Ellison’s misadventures in farming – TechCrunch, 23/2/2025
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/the-lesson-of-larry-elliso...
Works where archive.ph is blocked:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/larry-ellison-s-h...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zDBe7
Well, I hope he hires an engineer. There is even such a thing as an agricultural engineer - Susan Grill (one of the WSJ article commentators).
The killer app would be to figure out how to genetically engineer good plant flesh economically in a bioreactor.
Imagine strawberry,pineapple,etc slurry production by the metric ton. With the only input into the facility being atmospheric gasses and electricity.
There would also be huge room for optimization in such a process, such as introduction of antifreeze proteins (as some fish have) to allow storage of various fruit at freezing temperatures without loss of quality.
I already have this in production. Interested?
PS: Please, don't tell anyone that it is all starch, sugar and artificial color/flavor :)
We'd name it Slurry Red or Slurry Yellow, right?
Maybe Slurry Green for the melon flavor.
I applaud him for trying and spending his own money at this.
Ellison's purchase of the island also included several resort hotels and homes. It's likely the income from those does a lot to cover his $500 million loss in farming. (It's curious the article says nothing about his yield from that side of the island.)
In the end, it's likely that Ellison's grand farming enterprise on a luxury resort island was always just a promotional stunt and was never intended to be sustainable or profitable. His strategy was to employ none of the resources essential to any business' success, like knowing your market or hiring staff who know even the basics of the trade (farming). Instead he hires supercomputer architect Danny Hillis to reinvent agriculture? Sure. What could go wrong?
[flagged]
Don’t have a WSJ account so can’t read the article, and the archive link posted doesn’t work for me. It sounds like this was a greenhouse based business? What I’m excited by (perhaps naively so) are the startups using robots to zap weeds and do other things to reduce chemical usage. Anyone know the status of these companies, and if there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the approach?
I think the approaches usually fail because commercial farming with chemical fertilizer is pretty efficient and optimized to work at a large scale.
A lot of agtech startups (think vertical farming) just don't get this. They don't understand where the inefficiencies are, or how their approach loses efficiency at commercial-farming scale, or how the approach doesn't integrate with other necessary machinery, etc.
Vertical farming might be having trouble but a very closely related cousin, the Dutch greenhouse, is doing fantastically. The differences are subtle because Dutch greenhouses have been used to vertically farm crops as well (though not separated in the same way that vertical farms are) and use artificial lighting. The subtle differences matter and that's why iteration in the space is so good.
The surface level discussion in this thread griping over Ellison's approach is probably the least interesting aspect of agtech to discuss but is the one that most people have an opinion on and generates the most engagement which is why this thread is filled with it.
I'm no fan of Ellison, but better to be putting money into this than entertainment, social networks, the Metaverse, or even AI.
I just find it funny how tech executives couldn't even make and run a stable wifi network.
Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corporate tactician overshadows whatever accomplishments he had as a database developer.
My career started in the 2000s. Oracle was already a bit of a cancer then. It was Oracle or MS SQL for "real" databases. There were technologies that had been exciting in the 90s but were already choked out by the duopoly like InterBase and Foxpro.
There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys.
My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
What ever happened to foxpro?
Bought by Microsoft who gradually nudged users to move to Access or SQLServer until they could quietly take it out back a shoot it in the head about 20 years ago.
Fox Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Development was finally discontinued in 2007.
My vague memory of it is that MS discontinued it because it detracted from their plans with MS Access on the low-end, and MS SQL Server on the high end. I think, maybe, that it may not have fit in with Visual Basic very well.
yeah if you remember way back then the whole concept of ORMs came about to make changing a RDBMS backend feasible. I'm not sure the plug/play RDBMS dream was ever 100% realized but that whole wing of webdev tech was driven by the desire to avoid Oracle's extortion based licensing.
51 year old software developer here and through my entire career Oracle was seen among the developers I know as something you'd sometimes be forced to use because a non-technical person at your company agreed to pay so much for a license that it would be too publicly embarrassing not to use it.
It wasn't seen as an inherently bad piece of technology, it was just massive overkill (too expensive, too high maintenance) for a lot of the solutions it ended up being used for because of the effectiveness of Oracle's sales organization.
I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.
In the late '80s, I was in the Air Force. Directive from the top was that all military projects should standardize on Oracle DB, "because it is portable", and projects should use AT&T mini computers (wat?)
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
Oracle systems made job applications an incredibly arduous process by mandating a person re-enter dozens of fields of information for every different employer running the system. Basically you had to create an account and profile for every single job because every company had their own Oracle implementation. I recall the torture well.
In the 90s, the only two databases you really heard about (at least in my industry, banking) were Sybase and Oracle. Where is Sybase now?
I'm not a dba, but Oracle was effectively the default, and it worked reliably and did what you needed it to do. I think maybe Sybase was faster in certain circumstances.
Sybase was bought by SAP in 2010.
Fair enough. I don't think I heard anyone mention it after the millenium though, other than "It's legacy, get rid."
Oracle was a pretty big player in those days. And I don't think most people even remember Larry was a developer...his legacy will certainly be as a ruthless businessman with a penchant for take-no-prisoners sales and ruthless license enforcement.
How does s.o. in his 80s look this well? Even considering the possibility of plastic surgery. Even on his 2010 photo in wikipedia he looks so insanely younger, perhaps 45 or something...
Not sure why the headline has been editorialized.
"Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust"
Equivalent to a beginner betting $500 on red. Let's see what happens.
The fact that billionaires can own thousand of hectares of Hawaiian lands, that was annexed by US against the Hawaiian natives people will, with many of them currently do not have proper land and housing is pretty disturbing [1].
[1] Hawaii: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
https://youtu.be/j8DxdibHibU
Farming is an old human activity and it took us thousands of years to work out how to do it competently. We had to invent Haber-Bosch fertilizers and genetic engineering to get us to basically permanent surplus.
Honestly not surprised this is so hard. The area was pineapple plantation for years, and the plantation owners were not great stewards of the land. No amount of money can fix decades of shitty land stewardship. It’s just time and effort.
What is it with tech bros thinking they can successfully operate in "deep" industries like agriculture where every last bit of efficiency has already been squeezed out over the past 100-150 years? In fact, arguably, there's way too much efficiency, and quality of the produce has suffered quite a bit by now.
Ag is a harsh mistress.
Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking. All infastructure is an additional overhead cost. Yoru robot, your highrise, the soil testing kit...
the short of it is just that if there is no linear increase in yeild, your tech product will probably fail. Most of this nonsense comes from tech bros who have never farmed and don't have the common sense to ask a farmer what they actually need.
> Tech is a poor fit for agriculture.
Incorrect. I worked for an Ag tech company for almost a decade. Ten years ago, farmers were downloading high resolution satellite imagery of their fields directly to their GPS enabled precision sprayers so that the spray rate would adjust continuously based on the vegetative index of the land they were over. I don't know what state of the art is today, but I imagine it would surprise folks who aren't in the field.
Right. There's a lot going on. Lots of stuff is measured that didn't used to be be. A big controversy is over who owns that data. Deere tries to own it.
Vision systems for weeding are effective. Instead of spraying everything, cameras look down as the sprayer is pulled behind a tractor, and only weeds get sprayed, or zapped, or hammered. Uses far less pesticide. Deere and others sell this. Deere prefers to sell this as a service, where farmers pay fees when the vision system is enabled.[1] There are a bunch of autonomous robot startups with similar systems, but none seem to have grown much.
Tomato picking robots have been demoed since at least 2018, but still aren't used much. There are at least half a dozen startups. It's not hard to do with off the shelf robots, but not cost-effective yet.
Automated cow milking is used in New Zealand and Australia. Those countries have extensive agriculture but not much of an underclass, so they have to pay workers real money.[2]
Automated meat cutting is also used in those countries.[3] Mostly lamb, which isn't a big thing in the US. Fully automated beef lines don't seem to be available yet, although the company that builds the lamb systems is getting there.
Vision-based sorting is automated, fast, and cheap.[4] That's why when you buy packed berries, there are no bad ones any more.
All the big field crops - corn, wheat, hay, soybeans, cotton - were mechanized decades ago, of course.
What else is actually working?
[1] https://www.deere.com/en/technology-products/precision-ag-te...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o515XdtU7NM
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZIv6WtSF9I
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsnOu1Y8odQ
> Tech is a poor fit for agriculture. Dirt is cheap, relatively speaking.
Ag is much more than farming, and farming is much more than dirt.
Ag is very much ready - past ready - for disruption. The biggest blocker there is that "traditional" SV startups can't make a dent; their business models don't suit it well. Farmers - even mega-corporate ones - are cautious. It's a mature market with low margins, so they aren't going to make a capital investment in what they see as unproven technology.
To succeed in agtech you pretty much have to exude the opposite vibe that startup founders usually have.
Little anecdote sort of along this line.
Early 80's, in college, we had the Cyber mainframe, and PDP 11/70. The Cyber was used for computer classes (comps sci [Fortran, Pascal], infosystems [COBOL]), engineering classes (SPICE, Aeronautical Engr had some Fortran IV stuff the had to slog through), statistics runs (SPSS - lot of the sciences used that)), the school had some back office software running on it (you noticed during registration, the machine was noticeably loaded). PDP was used mostly for introduction CS classes, and it had a public game account (very nice Star Trek program on that one).
Outside of a TERAK and a Textronix 4050 series computer in the Math lab, there were no real microcomputers on campus, no "public" ones used for teaching.
The first micro computer lab on campus, was in the Agriculture school. They had a full lab with 9 Apple ][ computers, all running, I guess, a sophisticated software package for computing feed and what not. We were there to play Wizardry, of course, my good friend was the lab tech.
But it was just interesting how the Ag school was a pioneer in the personal computing space at an, ostensibly, school known for its science and engineering programs (though it was also know for its Ag and Architecture schools).
Farmers aren't cautious. They'll all quickly jump on something like a new hybrid seed variety if it increases yields. This isn't a "vibe" issue.
Why do you think ag needs disruption? Ag has had the latest tech applied to it since the dawn of civilization. Any tech you can think of is already being used there.
Aren't most of the developments in this sector targeting labor costs rather than yield?
If tech means generic webshit sure
This seems like maybe all the tech bro's should have also hired some some farmers. Even to consult.
Seems like a lot of self inflicted wounds. So not an indicator that these farming techniques 'wont work' but more 'these guys can't manage a project'.
baron aura quests are fascinating
The thing is, there are some hard numbers and some fundamental truths which someone is going to have to find answers for:
- peak oil is happening (or has happened)
- current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (not an inconsiderate portion of which is fertilizer runoff into waterways and oceans)
- in the past century the bony fish biomass has plummeted to below the weight of shipping tonnage in the world's oceans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
As I've noted before, my grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry that my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer viable.
> current industrial farming techniques burn up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy
The phrase "up to" is doing heavy lifting there.
In particular, this would be production of beef. Production of grains is much more efficient, as is production of poultry, fish, or pork.
It should be noted that in the US, agriculture uses a very small fraction (about 1%) of total primary energy consumption (not counting the sunlight being used by the plants). We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it.
1.9% according to this USDA link https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...
But,
> Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms.
So seeing as modern industrial agriculture only exists because of the Haber-Bosch process and pesticides, but those are counted as indirect inputs, your phrase "primary energy consumption" is also doing a fair amount of heavy lifting.
And that's not counting all of the supply and cold chains needed to get that food to your supermarket. All these hydroponic/indoor-fresh-greens startups are largely about breaking even on the product-to-market side of things.
Primary energy consumption is the right metric here, since it's a 1:1 accounting of inputs to HB, chemical manufacture, and fuels for vehicles. Not a whole lot of electrical input there.
In any case, the amount is small compared to society as a whole, and today's energy intensive agriculture could be sustained even with entirely renewable inputs, although at a cost. It's a small problem compared to shifting the larger economy off fossil fuels.
Not saying it's not the right metric, I'm saying the "1.9% to agriculture" number isn't including fertilizers, chemicals, or supply chains so the food isn't rotting in your silo. It does include fuel for tractors on the farm though.
I believe it IS including those. From the link:
"Large amounts of natural gas are required in the manufacturing of fertilizer and pesticide, so these amounts are categorized as indirect energy consumption on farms. Overall, about three-fifths of energy in 2016 used in the agricultural sector was consumed directly on-farm, while two-fifths were consumed indirectly in the form of fertilizer and pesticides."
It's ambiguous, so I regret posting the link. Usually in energy accounting, "indirect" means "accounting puts it into a different category, but we acknowledge that other category wouldn't be making it if the demand for them wasn't here in this category and we differentiate it so we don't double-count it". Scope 1 vs Scope 2 & 3 in carbon-reporting land, if you will.
Combining primary and indirect energy is possible, I suppose, but it's not how it's usually done? So I gave a shit link, emissions reporting is dead for at least the next 4 years, and so none of this matters anyways cause we're just burning our way into prosperity for the foreseeable future.
Almonds also are notable for requiring a great deal of energy (mostly for transporting water for irrigation).
“People, no offense, don’t really love cucumbers. There wasn’t as sustainable a market for it,” Agus said.
Maybe stick to "secret" warrantless surveillance on US citizens.
Notes for Lanai island from an amateur:
Hemp is useful for soil remediation because it's so absorbent; which is part of why testing is important.
Is there already a composting business?
Do the schools etc. already compost waste food?
"Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207
Canadian greenhouses? Chinese-Mongolian-Canadian greenhouses are wing shaped and set against a berm;
"Passive Solar Greenhouse Technology From China?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=FOgyK6Jieq0&
Transparent wood requires extracting the lignin.
Transparent aluminum requires a production process, too.
There are polycarbonate hurricane panels.
Reflective material on one wall of the wallipini greenhouse (and geothermal) is enough to grow citrus fruit through the winter in Alliance, Nebraska. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927538
Glass allows more wavelengths of light through than plastic or recyclable polycarbonate; including UV-C, which is sanitizing
Hydrogen peroxide cleans out fish tanks FWIU.
Various plastics are food safe, but not when they've been in the sun all day.
To make aircrete, you add soap bubbles to concrete with an air compressor.
/? aircrete dome build in HI and ground anchors
Catalan masonry vault roofs (in Spain, Italy, Mexico, Arizona,) are strong, don't require temporary arches, and passively cool most efficiently when they have an oculus to let the heat rise out of the dome to openable vents to the wind.
U.S. state and territory temperature extremes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe... :
> Hawaii: 15 °F (−9.4 °C) to 100 °F (37.8 °C)
> Nebraska: -47 °F (−43.9 °C) to 118 °F (47.8 °C)
"140-year-old ocean heat tech could supply islands with limitless energy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38222695 :
> OTEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
North Carolina is ranked 4th in solar, has solar farms, and has hurricanes (and totally round homes on stilts). FWIU there are hurricane-rated solar panels, flexible racks, ground mounts.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20092018/hurricane-floren...
"Sargablock: Bricks from Seaweed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188180
"Turning pineapple skins into soap and other cleaning products" https://www.businessinsider.com/turning-pineapple-skins-into...
"Costa Rica Let a Juice Company Dump Their Orange Peels in the Forest—and It Helped" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui... https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...
Akira Miyawaki and the Miyawaki method of forest cultivation for reforestation to fight desertification by regreening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki :
> Using the concept of potential natural vegetation, Miyawaki developed, tested, and refined a method of ecological engineering today known as the Miyawaki method to restore native forests from seeds of native trees on very degraded soils that were deforested and without humus. With the results of his experiments, he restored protective forests in over 1,300 sites in Japan and various tropical countries, in particular in the Pacific region[8] in the form of shelterbelts, woodlands, and woodlots, including urban, port, and industrial areas. Miyawaki demonstrated that rapid restoration of forest cover and soil was possible by using a selection of pioneer and secondary indigenous species that were densely planted and provided with mycorrhiza.
Mycorrhiza spores can be seeded into soil to support root network development.
/? Mycorrhiza spore kit: https://www.google.com/search?q=Mycorrhiza+spore+kit
> Miyawaki studied local plant ecology and used species that have key and complementary roles in the normal tree community.
It also works in small patches; self-sufficient "mini forest"
/? Miyawaki method before after [video search] https://www.google.com/search?q=miyawaki%20method%20before%2...
[dead]
I guess something other than a lawn mower is required to change farming
The guy makes $20 billion / year just sitting still. I'm sure he'll be fine. It's just play money at that point. The equivalent to one of us denting our Prius.
I mean even I make passive 10% dividends on my investments every year.
TL;DR tech bro's underestimate the difficulty of farming. News at 11.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
[flagged]
You don’t need billions of dollars to be an arrogant tech bro, just look around at Hackernews.
fair point