Posted on 06/19/2023 7:37:45 AM PDT by Twotone
The hype around AI-powered vertical farming has come crashing down as profitability remains elusive and funding dries up, pushing several startups into bankruptcy or restructuring.
AeroFarms, an early pioneer in vertical farming, filed for bankruptcy last week after building a huge facility in Virginia that drained its cash.
Kalera, a local vertical farming company in Florida, also filed for Chapter 11 protection in April after struggling for months.
Furthermore, AppHarvest, which operates high-tech greenhouses, is facing lender threats and a sharp drop in its shares. The firm has warned it could become “bankrupt or insolvent” if the issue is not resolved.
vertical farming is just a concept. it has endless potential. packing shelves into a costco style warehouse is just stupid. they deserve to go bankrupt.
— Diamond Bay Research (@dbrgeo) June 10, 2023
“We really were in a hype cycle,” Vonnie Estes, vice president of innovation for the International Fresh Produce Association, told Bloomberg in an interview. He added:
“There was a lot of money that rushed in without really understanding that this is actually just farming.”
Investors Compared AI-Powered Vertical Farming to Software Firms
Investors viewed vertical farming as a modern and innovative industry, using robotics and AI to conserve water, combat food insecurity and save the environment.
They compared these companies to software firms, pushing valuations into the stratosphere.
However, investors began to scrutinize profitability as interest rates increased.
Furthermore, a vertical farm’s ability to gain meaningful market share on a national scale is still years away.
(Excerpt) Read more at business2community.com ...
Running the Oliver Douglas version?
““There was a lot of money that rushed in without really understanding that this is actually just farming.””
Growing food is farming? And it’s hard? Who knew?
That’s twice in 10 minutes. I swear, people are getting dumber before my eyes.
“Vertical” farming is ENERGY INTENSIVE.
If YOU have to provide the costly energy instead of God’s FREE SUNLIGHT, then you are going to fail...................
Some of the most productive and profitable farmers in America are right down the road from me. They know how to farm. They know business. They are Amish. What needs to be recognized about the failures mentioned in this article is they are neither farmers or businessmen. They are ideologues.
One of my favorite words in Spanish...lechuga (lettuce).
If we stopped using prime ag land to build wind farms, solar farms, and growing corn for ethanol, we wouldn’t even have to think about “vertical” farming. There’s plenty of land all over the USA suitable for growing food.
Is the “vertical” farm fetish about the future day when we have to feed 10 or 15 billion people on earth? What’s driving this? The WEF kooks?
Vertical farming? instead of buying acres of land, they build greenhouses?
How many greenhouses do they need to build to produce the same amount of lettuce they could grow on 20 acres? per an internet search the average per acre yield is 26,000 heads of lettuce.
Prime, irrigated farmland near me sells for about $15,000 acre, so that would = $300,000. Industrial greenhouses cost about the same per unit.
Maybe they should have done some basic math to see if it their idea was cost effective.
AI, artificial intelligence, is still at the level of “garbage in, garbage out”, that has plagued computer programming since its inception. No matter how much autonomy the AI may have already achieved, it still cannot know what it does not know. The necessary cross-checking within its memory banks does not discover the gaps in its programming.
True self-awareness is still several steps away, as the design is lacking in certain aspects of curiosity, a trait of the human mind and many higher animals that has never been fully researched.
Know what AI is and what it isn’t. There is an explosion of hype of late because of hopes that will power the stock market.
AI is software that learns. That’s it. Nothing more. It learns something after the code was written and adjusts the code for what was learned. It doesn’t have magnificent insight into truths of the universe. It simply learns from operations.
1) ChatGPT is nearly all superb interpretation of questions and hyper fast reading of websites to get an answer. The ONLY learning that goes on is if you ask “Will Betelguese going supernova place Earth in any danger?” And then if you ask “What about Rigel?” it will remember you just asked about Betelguese. It won’t reply “What ABOUT Rigel? What about it? What are you asking?” It will remember your IP address’s previous question and learn from it to realize you are asking about a Rigel supernova.
But that’s it. That’s the only learning. It just remembers your previous question.
2) If there is nothing to be learned, AI is merely interpreting your question, and doing so extremely well. This is not AI.
3) Why would AI do anything great for a farm? If it survives 20 years it might learn from having applied fertilizer in some quantity to some portion of the farm and if it was worth it in cost versus increased yield. THAT would be AI, but farmers do this all the time. There’s nothing extra there.
4) People who ask ChatGPT religious or political questions are just playing games — or as likely they are helping Google. Google LOVES media to report about religion from ChatGPT. You have to understand . . . this is an enormous threat to advertising, which is Google’s primary money source. You go to the chat.openai.com site and you ask a question, you will get an answer. A good answer if the question is factual. You won’t get a screenful of ads. You’ll simply get the answer to your question. Google declared all their internal red alerts because of this.
“We really were in a hype cycle.” That’s the entire Green movement in a nutshell.
in other words,
it looks cute when the professor does it in his way-overfunded greenhouse but in reality, some things will always need to be done the right way.
Just sayin'....
What is the cycle of such lettuce?
How many crops a year can that farm grow???
I have purchased the products of Lef Farms in Loudon, NH multiple times. They run an indoor automated greenhouse. I first saw it on the local TV program. They got bought by Bright Farms.
https://www.brightfarms.com/farms/new-hampshire/
They sell to several super market chains here in the northeast. I like it because the lettuce is coming from a local “farm”. Even in the middle of January. Instead of Central or South America.
I buy fresh vegetables at the local Hispanic markets, like Megamart. They are so much larger and fresher there, and neither the chain supermarkets, the local farmer’s markets, nor the expensive gourmet markets can come close to their quality. I had a conversation with one of the produce clerks and he told me that the distributor who supplies them gets its produce from McAllen, Texas, from which I assume they are grown in Mexico. He also said that they insist that it be only three or four days from harvest to the shelf.
In that case, you need to watch the video of the fools lighting a bull's horns on fire, then the bull kills one of the fools. The human species gets dumber by the minute.
Exactly. Thats why they should have done their ROI calculations.
Well lettuce pray then
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