VCs bet on ‘indoor farming,’ lasers that monitor crops and Soylent drinks

http://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-firms-plant-roots-in-farm-belt-1428348765

by drussell • 11 years ago

70 43 11 years ago

wsj.com

timdorr• 11 years ago

Non paywall link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

thangalin• 11 years ago

Still pay-walled.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Silicon+Valley+Firms+Plant+R...

Click the first link.

eyeareque• 11 years ago

Can we have a no paywall link rule?

xeromal• 11 years ago

It's a bit of a quandry because WSJ is a good publication and not a pay wall in some cases. If you google the article title and click the link, it works!

gregpilling• 11 years ago

From the article (thanks @timdoor) :

"Freight Farms’s repurposed shipping containers, packed with LED lights, sensors and hydroponic systems and producing lettuce and herbs, are appearing in vacant lots and alleys. The sealed containers can yield about 500 full heads of lettuce a week, year-round—even in Minnesota and Canada, where some of the 25 units sold so far by Freight Farms now operate. Co-founder and Chief Executive Brad McNamara said the units sell for $76,000 each and require no pesticides."

- locally, a head of lettuce is $1.25 (Tucson, Arizona close to lettuce growing areas) - 500 a week makes $625 a week, or $32,500 a year in revenue - average $2706.25 per month revenue. - a 5 year lease with $1 buyout on $76,000 would be $1580.80 a month based on terms I used to sell capital equipment for.

$2706.25 - $ 1580.80 = $1125.45 per month, before paying employees, electricity, and cost of location.

What does lettuce cost in other areas?

dshanahan• 11 years ago

Lettuce is about that in farmers markets in Vancouver, certain places in SF. I think the nuances of micro-markets make it hard to make any blanket statements but these types of food production innovations are starting to change the game.

mcpherrinm• 11 years ago

In parts of remote northern Canada where food needs to be flown in, a head of lettuce might cost $5. But land is essentially free. It might make a lot of sense in a situation like that, especially if it's owned by a local nonprofit who just want some food for the locals.

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

$2706.25 - $ 1580.80 = $1125.45 per month, before paying employees, electricity, and cost of location.

If it makes half of that in profit per month, the interest rate on it would be better than a lot of offerings on the market. Also, the no pesticides might add a market premium.

brianbreslin2• 11 years ago

Wholesale or retail? A head of organic lettuce (which is what you're comparing to) is about $3 in florida. MAYBE $4 if its a fancy looking variety other than iceberg.

notatoad• 11 years ago

Locally, a head of lettuce ranges from $1.25-ish in the summer for a good full crisp head of lettuce to $4 in the winter for a little wilted tasteless thing, and the lettuce from the "eat locally" CSA program is even more. If they can do good fresh lettuce for a couple dollars year round, they should be able to make some money.

A 40' container probably shouldn't even require one full time staff to harvest, it could be feasible for a grocery store to operate one of these. Dedicate a few staff hours per day, sacrifice a few parking spaces.

cloudwalking• 11 years ago

$1.25 isn't wholesale though. I wonder what the supermarket is paying.

chiph• 11 years ago

And then there's spoilage, and returns by customers (some people will return anything to a store..)

nl• 11 years ago

I find this very interesting. A bit of Googling found a number of sites that attempt to calculate the best vegetables to grow at home in terms of cost-to-buy[1]. It turns out that lettuce is a pretty good choice, since I suspect it sells better than the few items above it on the list.

[1] eg http://www.cheapvegetablegardener.com/most-profitable-plants...

lukeqsee6• 11 years ago

I work at a precision ag startup in the Midwest. I can speak from inside the industry: it's an incredibly exciting time.

We have more people asking us to build tools than we could ever build, and most of the tools are basic management level. We haven't even scratched the surface of applying algorithms to the loads of data being created. I think over the next few years data + machine learning will make things like pesticide application, irrigation, fertilizer, and planting incredibly more efficient. The cool part is the growers have the tools to apply these algorithms as they're produced (tractors, combines, planters are almost all able to support variable rate applications). All we need is the ability to capture, analyze, and start applying the data.

Feel free to ask if you're more interested in what the industry looks like from the inside.

mycroft-holmes• 11 years ago

We have more people asking us to build tools than we could ever build

What are a few examples?

lukeqsee6• 11 years ago

Our current product was just released to address the needs of one market (scouting companies, if you aren't familiar with the term: http://www.farms.com/precision-agriculture/crop-scouting/). We are also building a general-purpose platform for handling the data (and partial visualization) of the farmer, e.g., field geolocation data, various data layers, etc.

The first addresses one market. The second addresses the entire market at a high-level. Most individual markets (such as seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, etc.) need specialized solutions.

For instance, fertilizer companies and growers would love a tool that lets them take in all of their data and using known models (which exist in theory in academia) apply that information to allow them to apply correctly across a field. A myriad of individualized solutions for locales, crops, and the ilk are just begging to be built. And that's just fertilizer, one of the many cycles in crop production.

Large and small corporations are asking us to do work on various pieces of that huge pie, but we have to specialize or our fairly small team would be impossibly overloaded.

brianbreslin2• 11 years ago

I would love to hear about what you guys are doing. I think thats a huge underrepresented field (outside of monsanto/cargill).

lukeqsee6• 11 years ago

We are specializing on one stage of the crop-growing cycle: pest management.

In order to do that, we started by building a hardware tool to deploy in fields to monitor moth population. That's how incredibly specialized this industry requires: one part of the cycle and for one pest merits an entire company being started.

Because hardware is really hard to get right, and then to scale, we've started developing software products in parallel. What that means is like just about every other provider in the space, we had to develop a general purpose platform to allow growers to even see their data (farm, field level management and visualization). Luckily, we have a contract with a regional company to build that tool while maintaining the IP. We're just now starting to get that right, so that we can move on to solving interesting problems in the space (we just released our first product built on the platform for scouting companies, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331917).

Thankfully the data problem is in the slow progress of being solved thanks to http://openag.io/. Hopefully in the future, new companies only need to develop awesome solutions to particular problems and allow those to be integrated with a variety of data storehouses. Unfortunately, that's a long way off.

arthurcolle• 11 years ago

do you work at farmlogs? its the only one I've heard of.

lukeqsee6• 11 years ago

I don't. But if things go as planned, you'll be hearing about us soon. :)

jashmenn• 11 years ago

Another Ag founder here and this is totally true. There's a lot of groundwork to lay before we can start applying state of the art algorithms to ag.

For example, a few months ago my co-founders and I built a computer vision system that could count fruit (predicting yield is important because produce spoils quickly). The growers we've shared it with love it but most don't have the infrastructure to use the data in their operations. It's hard to respond quickly when everyone is emailing spreadsheets.

Adoption of tech in ag has been slow, in part, because farmers are already very good at their jobs. Many of them have been working the same crop on the same land for decades so there has been some skepticism about what new information can be learned from "just another sensor."

But change is in the air. The water is running out, there's a huge labor shortage, and every farm employee now has a smartphone.

If we can spend the next year or two getting farm operational data online then there is a huge amount of value that can be unlocked with even relatively simple algorithms (not to mention deep learning etc.)

In fact, we don't really have any other choice. Software can bring in the next green revolution and that makes this a really exciting time.

lukeqsee6• 11 years ago

Absolutely agree. Everything you just said I've heard or experienced in just a few months.

There's a lot of groundwork to lay before we can start applying state of the art algorithms to ag.

We have experts in algorithms, embedded systems engineering, computer vision, software engineering, sensor technology, and robotics at our company (along with a few other specializations). But before we can utilize that talent to its fullest, we have to build the foundation. So that's what we, and a whole bunch of other really talented companies, are doing: building the foundation. Hopefully in a few growing seasons we can start to really apply what we've learned.

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

>All we need is the ability to capture, analyze, and start applying the data.

Who owns the data?

lukeqsee6• 11 years ago

That is a worthy and unanswered question in the industry. I'm personally hoping that the data becomes free and open (OADA is an attempt to support that); I believe, along with at least a few of my colleagues, that the "secret sauce" is in the algorithms and tools to utilize the data.

We shall see.

nether• 11 years ago

I drink Soylent regularly but I think you'd be insane to make it more than 30% of your daily calories. As Michael Pollan said, we've got decades of research behind baby formula but it is still inferior to breast milk. Soylent also still naively follows FDA daily reference intakes. Not saying that they're totally off the wall, just that they contain many deficiencies as pointed out by the MealSquares team: http://www.mealsquares.com/nutrition-facts.html

sowhatquestion2• 11 years ago

I think you'd be insane to make [Soylent] more than 30% of your daily calories

You can't make claims like this without context. There's 85th-percentile health, and then there's 99th-percentile health. Plenty of foods, including Soylent, can help people attain or maintain that more modest level of health. Now, if you were an Olympic athlete requiring 99th-percentile health, I agree you'd be insane to make Soylent more than 30% of your daily calories. But if you're an average person eating the Standard American Diet, you are currently insane from a health standpoint, and switching to Soylent would make you a lot less so. And among all the options you might have for improving your diet, it is among the cheapest and lowest-effort.

It amazes me how people can fail to recognize that nutrition is a part of a larger economic problem of time and resource allocation. There are real tradeoffs to be made! Perfection is rarely attainable or even desirable except in special cases!

Rob Rhinehart, for his part, has always been honest about this. The Soylent team has looked at including things like antioxidants and digestive enzymes--things you'd get from whole foods but not from Soylent's processed ingredients--but they concluded that there's just not enough information to determine the types and quantities of these substances that are necessary to improve health. I think this lack of information is no accident. It's easier to research core nutrients whose deficiency will cause clear symptoms than it is to research nice-to-haves like antioxidants whose presence may cause slight performance improvements at the margin. Soylent is designed to reflect the state of nutritional knowledge. As that knowledge improves, so will Soylent. While I have bought MealSquares and enjoy their product, I prefer Soylent's approach to one that pretends our knowledge is more complete than it really is.

jsprogrammer7• 11 years ago

Perfection is rarely attainable or even desirable except in special cases!

I question what definition of 'perfection' you are using if you believe that it is only desirable in 'special cases'.

If you can attain '99th-percentile health', why would you settle for '85th-percentile health', even if it is marginally (or substantially) better than your current health.

bmj• 11 years ago

* But if you're an average person eating the Standard American Diet, you are currently insane from a health standpoint, and switching to Soylent would make you a lot less so. And among all the options you might have for improving your diet, it is among the cheapest and lowest-effort.*

I have been skeptical of Soylent's claims, and I'm often troubled by the concept that we need to somehow "fix" food, but this comment makes quite a bit of sense. I would rather a person suck down Soylent instead of Twinkies, Doritos, and other highly-processed, barely-food stuff that is sold these days.

rdlecler1• 11 years ago

The Dow Jones data they site is way off. We calculated a lower bound of $2.36B from a compilation of 264 financings in 2014. You can access the (free) report here: http://agfunder.com/reports/agtech-investing-report-2014

AGERPoint was also one of the companies mentioned in the article. Their campaign is also currently listed on our site.

VCs bet on ‘indoor farming,’ lasers that monitor crops and Soylent drinks

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