Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricw | Hacker News Reader

Farming is an interesting one, particularly with regards to the quoted statistic of 40%.

From a technological perspective this has already been largely solved. Developed countries typically have 1-3% of the population working in agriculture. This is only possible because of large scale efficiencies, that allow 1-3% of the population to feed the rest.

So am genuinely curious: what are you envisaging? How to market this technology to the world or make it more accessible? Or make agriculture even more efficient and even further reduce the number of people in farming?

View on HN

> By 2050, we will need to feed more than 10 billion people, requiring a 70% increase in global food production.

http://www.farm2050.com/

> We see the potential for Precision Farming to lift crop yields 70% by 2050 and create a $240 billion market for farm tech

Goldman Sachs, July 16 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/0kbn7fmqcopmh2n/GSR_071416_172225....)

It's kind of a common misconception that farming in its current state is working. Farmers who run a factory model basically live on government subsidies. The ecological destruction that accompanies this model is also entirely unsustainable. Soil dies, water is polluted, species go extinct, crops and animals are highly vulnerable to pathogens (which leads to antibiotic resistance), greenhouse gas emissions are through the roof, etc. Also, it encourages a horrible diet of cheap grains and meat. Diet-related disease is the number one cause of human death; where we simultaneously have obesity and starvation. And flavor sucks.

So I imagine YC's goal in adding this to the RFS is to promote companies exploring sustainability, quality, and fairness in food. Btw, this is the focus for my application.

this. The thing is that we've designed these systems (of governance, regulation and technology) that appears to have solved the problems of food, but we really haven't- bee population loss, inefficient subsidies, free-trade and over-protectionist trade, soil degradation, pollution, food contaminations, hunger, etc., etc. are still big problems.

The thing is that the system is inordinately more complex than we had originally thought (not just about input/output sheer production volume of commodities, i.e., pork belly, orange juice concentrate) -it's about a system that is sustainable and non-exploitative in the big picture.

I see the different factions currently working against each other for goals that should be synergistic.

-decrease hunger => increase crop yield with industrial farming tech

-non-gmo => grow only organic crops, anti-big business

-fair-trade => crop specialization for export to 1st world

But there's no reason why any and all of these groups couldn't be more aligned, and I think some of it is a question of scale and vision- no one has yet described to me the Elon Musk level vision of what a humanistically designed food system should look like and what all of humanity should be shooting for.

There's a lot of misinformation campaigns from the "anti-GMO" companies and crowd who get in the way of an "Elon vision" for the industry. Most anti-GMOers don't even realize that transgenics occur in nature, while making their signs that foreign DNA is food = frankenfood.

GMO is not inherently bad, but the goals of most companies working on GMO seeds are profit over all else. This means they select for compatibility with pesticides, fertilizers, and monocrop annual planting. Perennial wheat, for example, could be an incredible ecological success for GMO. But it wouldn't have the built-in annual demand for seeds. The concern over GMO is misplaced--people should be debating the accompanying practices that are pushed by the industrial system. When Bayer buys Mansanto, that should be a huge f*cking red flag.

The big vision for the future doesn't need to be entirely novel. The great cuisines were born out of a conversation with nature. Highly local, distributed, diverse farming systems < 50 hectares with an emphasis on soil health should be the model. We just need to make it easier for people to collaborate on these kinds of projects. Entrepreneurs and farms on this scale are mostly constrained by up-front resource requirements. Once ecological systems mature, they are far more profitable than the factory model.

I don't think the big vision of production needs to be novel, but I could envision, if not GMO, then genetic analysis / breeding to start re-localizing what kinds of crops are being grown. I think there are plenty of ways you can take old-fashioned seeming systems and practices and modernize them, maybe with more careful data collection to help it along.

I do think that if this system will ever really work on a larger scale then a big vision will be needed to reimagine the kind of distribution system you would need to efficiently bring the product to the customer; Getting rid of the cold chain and reducing the amount of food waste on the way. A lot of the assumed ways people buy and eat food are shifting with gen x/y/z. The supermarket is a dead zone of product placement kickbacks and corn. What comes after that?

You're spot-on about bringing genetic analysis into breeding and re-localizing. [Steve Jones][1] is an awesome breeder who is doing this in Washington's Skagit Valley.

I see there being a higher participation in local food production. There are already people who want to do it but can't afford the upfront cost. As really good food becomes more available, I think it will drive more interest in growing. It was only 8 generations ago that participation in farming in the U.S. was 90%, and now it's down to 1%.

For the people who don't grow or collaborate directly with growers to get food, I see the responsibility falling to chefs to insist on working with local ingredients. Maybe self-driving cars will also usher in a new system of delivery for getting ingredients from local farms to households.

[1]: http://css.wsu.edu/people/faculty/stephen-s-jones/

Hm this is interesting. One question would be if any of these approaches is scalable outside a single climate / area- exportable into a repeatable system that will help breed crops given the inputs of a specific local ecosystem.

I hear some good stuff coming out of academic style research but nothing that goes beyond small studies for a given local climate, nothing disruptive/commercial. Maybe it's just unsexy and doesn't have that 100x potential, but it's sometimes hard to understand why monsanto et.al have such a monopoly going.

Why assume that Monsanto etc isn't also capable of using data to figure out what works best?

I'm sure they do, but their mo seems to be vendor lock in / price fixing vs. open ecosystem. Nothing wrong with making a profit, but I feel that plenty of their practices are criminal / actively harmful. One of the powerful things about the Elon narrative is that some of the underlying motivations are humanitarian. Monsanto may claim to be interested in feeding the world but it's clear that they don't really have any real interest in doing this beyond making good PR.

I believe it's totally possible to be profitable in some of the areas monsanto works in and not be so... evil

Which practices of theirs do you find distasteful?

Here's one summary that's rather bland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases

And here's one that's more... opinionated: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0101-02.htm

I agree. In underdeveloped countries however, the number of people working in agriculture is much closer to 90%. The tech clearly exists to improve productivity in these countries, but the problems are (mostly) political and economic. In particular, dumping from the US distorts local commodity prices. This makes investment in new technology impossible for local producers. This is an area where lots of technologically advanced people have been working for a long, long time. If the advantage that YC/SV can add to ag is software and sensors, things are actually pretty advanced in that field (self-driving tractors have been around for 10+ years), just the perception is that farming is still low-tech. If YC believes a startup can provide new ways of thinking about some of these non-tech problems in the space, then there might be an opportunity to make significant improvements, especially in developing countries.

Another unmentioned issue: if we brought farming technology rapidly to underdeveloped countries and increased efficiency to western levels, how would these countries handle 80+% of the population being effectively jobless?

At least for the medium-term: birth control.

Increasing efficiency to western levels won't happen overnight. It still takes time for the market to develop, and there would be several cycles of commodity prices collapsing which would squeeze out less efficient participants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com