Turns out land is still cheap and sunlight still generally free.
The idea is to remove weather as a risk for farming. It’s remarkably hard making reliable predictions for yields with climate change on the horizon.
Yes that’s the idea, but perhaps it’s not actually a good idea.
I think the plummeting market price per pound of cannabis in Colorado is an interesting case. It has become so cheap that the cost of goods for indoor grown cannabis is higher than the market price. The outdoor growers are the only ones with a favorable balance of costs and product price for the long run.
Anyone want to buy some used lights?
I never understood the economics of those Agtech.
The margins on vegetables are shit.
Consumers won’t care that each of your potatoes had it’s own email addresse, a twitter account and was monitored by an AI.
Farmers are not just redneck assholes who needed some MIT grad to tell them how to increase yield, there’s already a huge agro industry and research and we’ve reached a point where the yield of carrots and others is pretty much already maximised. Assuming they are genius and get a 1% yield improvement that would be enormous.
A farm hand cost $25k a year, and engineer cost $150k and you haven’t priced in the tech and the building…
So you basically get a business where the cost of operation is about 20 time higher (and that’s conservative) than a guy with a plot of land and a tractor for sensibly the same yield (if not worse) and zero product differentiation in the market.
Well, I guess they just figured out the economics…
Our climate is changing and we need research like this to ensure that we can still grow food productively in regions where weather is causing crops to fail.
