http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27012397/high-tech-farming-poised-change-way-world-eats

excerpt - TRACY -- Investors and entrepreneurs behind some of the world's newest industries have started to put their money and tech talents into farming -- the world's oldest industry --
with an audacious and ambitious agenda: to make sure there is enough food for the 10 billion people expected to inhabit the planet by 2100, do it without destroying the planet and make a pretty penny along the way.

Silicon Valley is pushing its way into every stage of the food-growing process, from tech tycoons buying up farmland to startups selling robots that work the fields to hackathons dedicated to building the next farming app.

"The food sector is wasteful and inefficient," said Ali Partovi, a Bay Area investor with large stakes in sustainable agriculture startups. "Silicon Valley has a hubris that says, 'That's stupid. Let's change it.'"

The booming activity around the so-called "ag-tech" sector has led experts to predict that its growth, in terms of the number of new startups and venture capital investments, will in another five or so
years outpace today's hottest technologies. In the third quarter this year, venture capitalists and private equity firms invested $269 million into 41 deals in agriculture and food startups, the highest dollar
amount ever in that sector and double the amount invested during the third quarter last year, according to data from the Cleantech Group. Since 2009, investments into this sector have grown an
average 63 percent every year.

"It's going to be bigger than cloud software, it's going to be bigger than Big Data, because everybody eats," said Paul Matteucci, a partner with U.S. Venture Partners and founder of Feeding 10 Billion,
a nonprofit center to help ag-tech entrepreneurs. "And it's going to be completely entrepreneur led."

Dozens of companies are creating technology to make farmland more productive and farming more efficient, using robots to trim lettuce or software to calculate grass production for cattle grazing.
Others are tapping technology to find substitutes for meat, cheese and eggs, so less land is used to raise livestock, fewer greenhouse gas-spewing trucks are used to transport them, and fewer
animals are subject to inhumane slaughter. VCs have propped up startups such as Hampton Creek, which sells mayonnaise and cookies that use plant products instead of eggs, and
Impossible Foods, a Redwood City company making hamburgers and cheese without meat or dairy.

And Silicon Valley isn't just making technology for farms -- some of its highest-profile investors are buying farmland to have a hand in how farmers work their fields and influence the type of food
that's available for future generations of consumers. San Francisco-based Farmland LP, which buys farms and converts them into organic pasture that crop farmers and cattle and sheep
ranchers share, has attracted some of the valley's wealthiest investors, including Partovi, early PayPal investor and entrepreneur Scott Banister and former Facebook and Zynga executive
Owen Van Natta. But the draw is more than a happy vision of free-roaming cows -- many investors see farmland as a safe investment to balance volatile tech investments.

looking for a long-term investment?  want to innovate a new product?

How about Aeropoinics?

.


Let me know how that goes for you...

People should really only invest in things they understand.

Modified soils and grow mediums.
Hydroponic tech has been at it for decades.
They hold moisture and nutrients and still maintain the necessary aeration properties.

The whole local sustainable trend is huge. Transportation, storage, waste all costs associated can be reduced.

 

lab grown beef

Want farmers to produce more food, show it in the price.  Nothing spurs innovation like profitability.

Im all for technology and efficiency but current irrigation techniques are not very wasteful. They were 50 years ago when we still did flood irrigation.

There isnt much that i see can be done on a large scale for a competitive price. Ive seen this my entire career. Every year some new things are shown at the large ag expos and everybody loves them.

Then they see the price.

Things that work on a 12 acre test plot or 50 acre test farm seldom scale up well.

Im excited to see more advances made but i know that in my area of large farms and some of the largest dairy farms in the world, most of this wont be affordable for us for 20 years.

Farming and dairy farming on large scale farms is still a numbers game, big tractors, big yields, big parlors, low waste, big production, low overhead.

I imagine there is a lot of areas in fruit and vegetable farming probably. As far as what we have in my area i dont see it. The biggest thing out here would be figuring out how to pump water cheaper from deeper as all of our wells are drying up.

Irrigation systems that equally irrigate rectangular fields.  

Fields are rectangles...irrigation runs in circles.  

It is a problem that can be fixed...

Well, people do always have to eat.

Not all fields are square.  Rectangular irrigation would be fucking retarded.

Aquifer depletion is going to be a huge issue going forward.

I'm actually surprised it hasn't become a national political issue already.

Go ahead. Impress me.

Come up with some gizmo that keeps the birds off the fruit, the bugs off the bushes, and the damn weeds from coming up like...weeds.
I'd LOVE to park the sprayer, and not have to dink with propane cannons, as long as the replacement gizmo is worth the coin in the long run.


Plain old drip irrigation is hard to beat if it is laid out with enough capacity to stay ahead. It's the constant labor required to maintain it that is a PITA and expensive.
Come up with shit that works in the real world, and is economically advantageous as well as durable enough to last for generations, and it will be adopted immediately.
Direct, Root zone irrigation combined with no till is a helluva concept, that just lacks economically feasible equipment, maint and installation.


There is plenty of room for advancements in post harvest tech., and there is no shortage of new techy gizmos hitting the market every year.
They all fail, because they were designed by dweebs, that cannot fathom the real world, or the real world conditions that make their expensive new gizmos choke.
The better innovations always come from the guy working in the field, figures there has to be a better way, and comes up with a more elegant and efficient gizmo.

I wish the geeks luck!!

Me too. We've  got wells that used to put out 800 to 1200 gpm that hit 250 and were shut down.

The water use is staggering when you convert acre feet into gallons. Or you figure that a cow drinks 20 to 50 gallons a day and multiply that by the cows at a feedlot or dairy.

Ive been in ag all of my life and it scares the crap out of me.

 




























 

WE have a huge potable water problem.  Our future isn't going to be limited by food.  It will be limited by drinkable water.

Water is only limited by energy. Break the energy problem and the oceans are yours.

I dont need a link for wikipedia. My business depends on the aquifer. Im well familiar with the problems we face. I live in that terrible red spot where there is no water left. We are drier than a shoebox full of fried dogshit.

20 to 40 percent loss is a pretty high number for current times. That was true not too many years ago. Most properly managed modern sprinklers dont lose that much from the studies ive see.

To say that the cost of converting to drip irrigation is a "deterrent" for many farmers is absurb. Putting drip irrigation on a large farm isnt even a vague possibility. It would be the equivalent of you thinking about taking a rocket ship to the grocery store to buy unicorns and telling your wife that the only "deterrent" is finding the proper trailer to store the unicorns behind the rocket.

Does it work great on some small test farm somewhere where profit doesnt have to be turned? Sure i bet it does.

Could we make it work on a 5000 or 30000 acre farm here? We all know the answer to that.

I think ill see desalinated sea water pumped from the ocean to kansas before i ever see drip irrigation on a large farm.

Lots of irrigation is being abandoned and they are going back to dryland. Thats the end result when the water is gone.

In lots of the Central Valley (which is where Tracy is located), flood irrigation is still how it's done. And it's horrifically inefficient.

I wouldnt argue that. Flood irrigation evap rate can approach 50 percent easily. It pisses me off to even see it when i drive by. We have just a little of it left in the counties where water is plentiful. Most of it was gone 20 years ago. Even longer than that is a lot of counties.

Meat even Hindus can eat, maybe



 

Nothing wrong with technology and research, but I highly doubt they'll be "changing the way the world eats" anytime soon.

Making things more efficient and wasting less water:  Good.



This part:

" Others are tapping technology to find substitutes for meat, cheese and eggs, so less land is used to raise livestock, fewer greenhouse gas-spewing trucks are used to transport them, and fewer animals are subject to inhumane slaughter. VCs have propped up startups such as Hampton Creek, which sells mayonnaise and cookies that use plant products instead of eggs, and Impossible Foods, a Redwood City company making hamburgers and cheese without meat or dairy. "

Wishful thinking if you're trying to apply it to large scale operations.  Your only market for this kind of thing is hipsters.

Once they perfect this, where are the 30 million illegals that do jobs on farms that Americans won't do going to work?  This is racist and must be stopped.  It is the white devils plan to keep minorities down and on welfare.

Idiots. As the ice caps melt, water will flow downhill to the populated areas.

Edit: On a more serious note we can't get the turd world to use 20th century farming techniques, there is no way in hell they are going to use High-tech 21st century farming methods. Let the savages starve.

Yeah, near me it's heavy flood irrigation.
Partly because tweakers and the like will rip out irrigation pipeline and smash/grab pumps and their wiring to sell for more meth, partly because it's how it's been done, I imagine.

Breadbasket of CA...and using WAY more water than needs to be used for irrigation.

 

It has, to a point.

I'm sure some people won't want to hear this, but if an area doesn't have enough water above ground for farming, they shouldn't be farming there. Irrigating farmland from wells is not sustainable.

 










 

Exactly!

This bio-dome level "farming" they've tested this stuff on (if its physically been tested and not done on a computer model) wont cut it in the real world.
Farming and ranching means farmers and ranchers out there analyzing everything and putting in long hours of hard work. No ammount of technology is going to fix that.

Geeks wanna play farmer

Dont get me wrong, technology and improvements in the process have been great but there isnt a whole lot else left on the labor end thats feasable. Nobody's getting off the tractor any time soon.

So....what you're saying is that we just need to figure out how to make a rectangular circle.

 

Genetic engineering is where any substantial improvement in farming will be made.
Developing a type of corn that requires 30% less water for the same yield for instance. Or maybe a breed of livestock which produces more meat for the same amount of feed.


But genetic engineering is icky.

No worries as we can melt icebergs .or maybe we can do something crazy like turn sea water into useable water.
I foresee mass starvation on plant earth or really shitty 100% processed food in the future.

Genetic improvement in animals, mammals specifically, takes forever.  It's pretty easy to get 1 million samples in the plant world, in the beef world that's a much bigger proposition.

 

They make linear irrigation systems, very costly.

And inefficient and stupid.  Circles are the most effective use of space.  Just because you can't "square them off" doesn't mean that other land isn't useful.

BS.  My water table is from a local river, it is about 8 feet down and will not run dry unless the river does.

These same people hate GMOs.

That's where the farmers grow their mary wanna.



 

Fly over the mid-west...you'll see a ton of circular fields with "dead" areas between circles.



 

You tell Stutz all about farming and the midwest.



 

Just saying I've seen a shit ton of circular crop fields....



 

I live on a pivot corner.  I guess grass is "dead" from 35k ft.

He's seen in from the air man, he's an expert. You're like totally clueless.



 

He probably saw my blingy pants and hates me now.

Probably. I'll probably be able to see them from I-80 next time I go through.