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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

> "I've patented the design, the greenhouse and the trellises, but what I'd like to be able to do is reduce the production costs, make it very much available to a lot of people to actually buy these greenhouses and grow them for themselves."

Hmmm..

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I'm not understanding what about this is patentable? Greenhouse as a geodesic dome surely isn't (and isn't a particularly important design detail anyway). The trellises just look like standard hydroponics to me - is there something novel about their design that I'm missing?

This doesn't seem any different from growing <arbitrary crop> in a greenhouse using hydroponics and automated climate controls. Not novel, just not previously economically viable (as far as I know).

Is it the fact that the trellises rotate?

It's probably not that difficult to get a really, really narrow patent on some aspect of how the thing is designed, etc. So it might be something with pretty restricted scope or something fairly easy to work around?

It's apparently a partnership with a big industrial automation company [1]. Perhaps they filed the patent? It sounds like the sort of thing a big corp would try. There is another group doing this, but seem to be unrelated [2].

If there is a patent, I can't find it anywhere (I tried the US and Aus). Nothing obvious under the author's name, or "vanilla" or "geodesic" in the Australian repository. Quite annoying, this is one of those stories that looks really interesting, but all you can find is the regurgitated press release from all the news companies that picked it up.

[1] https://www.se.com/au/en/about-us/press/news/2019/newcastle-... [2] http://vanillaaustralia.com/about-us/

I feel like I wasted a lot of time figuring out how to search Australian patents to come to the same conclusion you did, but I guess it at least taught me something new? Just trying to find anything to understand what makes this so special. I don't know why I felt inclined to spend so much time on it, but I'm a bit of a gardening nut, and really wanted to see what was patentable that could help in food production like that. Can't find anything beyond the marketing fluff, unfortunately.

The article says he has yet to harvest a single vanilla pod from his plants. It very much looks like he intends to primarily create a business selling his greenhouses, rather than actually producing vanilla, which is a long and involved process, you won't simply harvest processed vanilla pods from the magic domes.

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