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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And the other thing, Uber became super popular because it was subsidized by VC money and fares are 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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….
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> ...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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
After extorting thousands of Oracle customers and buying part of Hawaii, cursory agricultural research is the least he could do to give back to the society he leeches off of. Sorry, did I say "give back" by accident? If Ellison got results he'd use the same strategy he deploys at Oracle to prevent it from ever actually helping anyone.
This sort of private sector waste is going to drive America back into the clutches of progressive taxation. Our "innovation" isn't helping anyone anymore.
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.
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."
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. 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).
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
"<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
Hasn't this worked out in a few cases? Maybe Uber as a better solution than taxis as an example?
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.
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.
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 are 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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Scaling crops is not like scaling software.
"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
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.
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.
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..
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 am not sure why you got downvoted but probably they did not watch 'the Martian'.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Finite resources (mostly, peoples' time) are expended.
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
Surely both the government and rich people can fund research. One doesn't preclude the other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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In the meantime, he can buy up all that cheap farmland from the farmers who tank right now because of DOGE.
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
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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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's sad watching people sneer at Ellison lose half a billion on an investment that could improve life for billions of people.
If he had spent half a billion on a megayacht like nepobabies in the Emirates, nobody would have blinked. Don't punish people for trying.
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.
Oceangate's Titan is the shining beacon of how billionaires should strive to improve the world.
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> ...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.
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.
I did not make any claims about altruistic intent. This is an empirical statement about the outcome of the startup if successful.
> Larry's never struck me as an altruistic dude.
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
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
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
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.
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.
We'd name it Slurry Red or Slurry Yellow, right?
Maybe Slurry Green for the melon flavor.
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.
I'm no fan of Ellison, but better to be putting money into this than entertainment, social networks, the Metaverse, or even AI.
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.
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.
What ever happened to foxpro?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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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?
After extorting thousands of Oracle customers and buying part of Hawaii, cursory agricultural research is the least he could do to give back to the society he leeches off of. Sorry, did I say "give back" by accident? If Ellison got results he'd use the same strategy he deploys at Oracle to prevent it from ever actually helping anyone.
This sort of private sector waste is going to drive America back into the clutches of progressive taxation. Our "innovation" isn't helping anyone anymore.
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.
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."
Almonds also are notable for requiring a great deal of energy (mostly for transporting water for irrigation).
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. 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.
> 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
Aren't most of the developments in this sector targeting labor costs rather than yield?
If tech means generic webshit sure
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...
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I guess something other than a lawn mower is required to change farming
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.
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.
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You don’t need billions of dollars to be an arrogant tech bro, just look around at Hackernews.