What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture - <AUTHOR> http://thinkingagriculture.io/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-understand-about-agriculture/ <comment><USER4> My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years.

I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now)

Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd.

\- You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms

\- It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinate. More if it gets periodically polluted at an increasing rate.

\- Large majority Agrarian populations exist because the countries are stuck in a purgatory of <1 MWh/capita annum whereby the country doesn't have scaleable nitrogen and steel manufacturing.

\- Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are some of the highest satiety lowest input to output ratio produce. High efficiency.

\- In civilizations where you are at < 1MWh/capita annum - there is not enough electricity to produce tools for farming, steel for roads, and concrete for building things. The end result is that the optimal decision is to have more children to harvest more calories per an acre.

\- Property, bankruptcy, and inheritance law have an immense influence on the farmer population of a country.

I remember telling some "ag tech" VCs my insights and offering to introduce my father who has an immense amount of insight on the topic from having grown things for as long as he has....My thoughts were tossed aside.

<comment><USER5> > 1MWh/capita annum

Oh this is fascinating! I never thought of this but of course energy consumption per capita is going to be an indicator of how industrialized a country is. I briefly checked the two countries I am a citizen of (Canada, Hungary) and counterchecked with one of the poorest countries I know of (Chad) and the numbers are as expected: 14.6, 4.1, 0.013 (oof).

<comment><USER6> Now think about what it means to do with less energy.

Energy availability is wealth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because:

\- You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) \- It focus on being biodiverse \- It builds forests

So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning.

This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs.

There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE)

<comment><USER8> what advice would you offer to another developer that longs to get into agriculture?

<comment><USER9> If you are wanting to do it as a commercial venture, then livestock (particularly beef if you are in the US) is about the only way to go unless you can purchase vast tracts of land and the equipment to run it.

If you are considering vegetable farming commercially, don't unless it is an extremely boutique product like truffles or exotic mushrooms, the economies of scales are crushing. The other option that is still viable is small plot that produces and end product. e.g you own a vineyard but you are not selling grapes you are selling wine. You own a pepper farm but your end product is hot sauce. Those are still viable for small plot.

The best thing you can do with a decent tract of land is to plant it full of expensive hardwoods such as black walnut and occasionally prune the trees to promote straight growth for lumber.

I have 7 acres and I planted 4 of it with African Ebony, one of the most expensive woods in the world. They are not native to my area so there is no issue with harvesting them and they require little in the way of care. They will provide a nice cushion for my children when they mature given that a single tree is worth between $300,000 to $1,000,000 (at current market) depending on size and quality of lumber. I planted about 50 trees per acre. The math is pretty self evident and it is the best use of land agriculturally if you are looking to maximize profit via small plot agriculture.

My wife uses some of the other land for personal farming but that is her gig, I grew up on a farm (citrus) and after NAFTA swore I would never scratch a living out of dirt again. I told her she was on her own with the vegetable farming other than helping her with where to plot certain vegetables and when to plant them.

<comment><USER10> What changed after NAFTA, if you don't mind my asking?

<comment><USER9> I mentioned this in another post on another topic but there was immigration reform in the 70's and 80's that opened up migrant work to the conglomerate farms. Which drove down prices most family farms where able to survive this onslaught but it kicked the legs out of any cushion they had. They then lobbied for NAFTA which allowed them to buy up tracks of farmland in Mexico that could not survive due to the new Mexican labor shortage created by the US workforce immigration reform, they then moved production to Mexico, drove prices down to an unsustainable level for small plot farmers, those farmers bankrupted, the conglomerates came in and bought up the small tracts that where now available, they then parceled those tracts together. Then they lobbied for more immigration reform and brought in workforce for their new US farms and that is why you do not see an American field worker nowadays. It's not because they do the jobs that we don't want. It's because they systematically destroyed the opportunity to do so and hold the cards to keep wages suppressed. If wages go up for farm hand work in the US, they shift scale to Mexico, if Mexico is unstable they shift scale to the US.

Most of the politicians on both sides of the isle where and are complicit in it because they view food pricing as a national security issue. The government has a vested interest in keeping the price of food and necessities low as people tend to become pretty violent when they are starving. That being said, it was a huge transfer of middle class wealth to large conglomerations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author here has a good premise, although glosses over many things. Yes, "vertical farming" is over-hyped. That said, the author didn't mention weather or pesticides/fertilizers at all. Statements such as "Current agriculture doesn't need an artificial energy source" are plain wrong. Producing fertilizers takes quite a bit of artificial energy and the bulk of the corn and soybean farmers the author is pointing to are the ones heavily using them. And to completely ignore weather and climate is to ignore the single most important variable factor in farming.

It's also a very US-centric view. There is a ton of innovation happening in other world markets, especially with smallholder farmers. Especially around financing.

The author completely ignores financing (even saying there is no VC money in agriculture which is false), which with larger farmers is actually one of the biggest issues for farmers today. Given that farm equipment is getting bigger and more costlier, a lot of thought goes into financing that equipment. Insurance is also a huge deal, and there's certainly a lot of room for streamlining the process of insuring crops and obtaining payouts.

<comment><USER12> I would like to build on top of your point:

\- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.

\- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.

\- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.

\- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.

\- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.

\- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.

<comment><USER13> >Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.

Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking about the largest desalination project in human history by orders of magnitude.

As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity of 500 million cubic meters per year.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Israel#Seawater_desalination)

As of 2015, the US used ~450 million (edit: fixed from billion) cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation.

[https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water- resources/science/i...](https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water- resources/science/irrigation-water-use?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt- science_center_objects)

Obviously not exactly a fair comparison for numerous reasons, but it gives a sense of the scale we're talking about here.

<comment><USER14> > As of 2015, the US used ~450 billion cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation

I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be 450 million cubic meters.

Your source says this: "For 2015, total irrigation withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d"

So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound so outrageous. Israel is a small country.

<comment><USER13> Ah you're right, I read the wrong line in the wolfram alpha output. That does make it seem less crazy. It would still be a crazy project but not "entire GDP of the US" crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A really great non-profit focused on more sustainable agriculture is The Land Institute. Generally people also don't also understand that some advancements in agriculture take decades or even centuries.

One example of an advancement from The Land Institute is their focus on domesticating a perennial cousin of Modern wheat. This is no small task given humans have been domesticating modern wheat for thousands or years. Although the cousin still yields relatively less grain, it has significantly deeper roots, is much more resistant to weeds and big in turn requiring less pesticide and can harvested with existing equipment. With time it's not unreasonable to think it would have comparable yields to modern wheat.

They have a number of projects and been focusing on sustainability since 1976.

[https://landinstitute.org/](https://landinstitute.org/)

<comment><USER16> +1 to The Land Institute. To give others context, perennials require much less input than their annual cousins, both in terms of labor and also petrochemicals.

The other big benefit is carbon sequestration. Perennials typically root far deeper into the soil, giving prairies enormous amounts of (carbon sequestering) root mass. This also has benefits in terms of erosion control — soil loss is one of the biggest, not talked about threats to society.

Finally, perennials can help — again through extensive root systems — improve water capture, recharging aquifers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Of course they don't understand it, their field is technology. Agriculture requires years of specialisation and most people here if they do have a degree are computer scientists, doctors, biologists, etc. But it's rare to find someone who has genuine passion and knowledge of agriculture. It is far removed from the city lifestyle and it is incredibly hard to break into, both for land reasons and because it's a hard job.

Moreover, agricultural sciences is probably just not a very commonly pursued degree for people in the city (citation needed).

So that brings me to my main point: disrupting an industry is usually done by people who want money when all the other good ideas have been taken. There is nothing wrong with this, but the cost with this fast paced approach is that the oldest and most complex industries like agriculture are going to put you in your place if you haven't done the work to understand them.

<comment><USER18> Specialization sure, but science is universal.

Unless agriculture is built on trade secrets or art, you can contribute.

This is one of my criticisms of Medical. It's not a science or the barrier to entry would be significantly lower, and as a result cost would be lower.

Degrees are good, but not necessary if you can do math and get experience.

<comment><USER19> So, in my grad program in ag, we had a Bay-area ML startup come in to give a seminar on how they were revolutionizing agriculture. The presented their findings on how to increase yields (which they claimed could only be understood from their algorithm).

The problem they were diving into was well understood, and has been researched to death for the last 100+ years. And they had the relationship backwards, not understanding their "input" to increase yields was actually a response to low yields. They were the opposite of helpful, but rather a waste of our time.

As with anything, it helps to know the current state of knowledge before you jump into contribute. An understanding of math doesn't get you there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I spent a few months at a consulting company working with a precision agriculture startup, and my mind was totally blown when I first learned how much technology goes into agriculture these days. I feel like a lot of tech people have a mental image of outdoor farming still being somewhat primitive (I certainly did!) which could cause the misconceptions mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER21> For a small peek watch this simple farmer dig a hole, put a seed in, and put dirt on top: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As)

<comment><USER22> Or think that every pistachio that goes to market has been visually inspected and individuals sorted, and has been for the last 25 years.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqK5667B5As)

<comment><USER23> Did you mean to post a link to a YouTube video demonstrating that? Your link is a dupe of the parent.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for letting me know

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My PhD is in sustainable agriculture, and I have 18+ years experience in both field and greenhouse ag. Ironically, unlike many here, I went from agriculture to data science/programming.

One thing missed by a lot of the comments: Indoor systems tend to be incredibly fragile affairs. If you've ever been in a well managed commercial greenhouse, you will notice a ton of sanitation procedures. There are greenhouse pests and diseases which are never an issue in the field, in large part because there is an entire ecological system of checks and balances working out in a field. Even in modern intensive ag fields. The truth is an agricultural field is an amazingly complex system which we don't fully understand (we are only starting to explore soil ecosystems and plant roots). Vertical farms are disconnected from this, though the costs might not be obvious. As a consultant, I watched a "trendy" aquaponics startup crash and burn because they underestimated this.

</comment><comment><USER24> With twenty years previous experience as an agronomist I can tell you that this article is right on.

You want to know cropping ag's biggest problem? Too much data. Farmers are collecting all sorts of data - soil samples, weather station data, aerial infrared photos and yield monitor data to name a few. But there are few tools that give actionable information from all that data. Actionable in prescribing something that results in a positive ROI.

Now as an agronomist who soil sampled, walked the field multiple times every year and sometimes even rode the combine with the farmer I was able to do that - sometimes.

Someday it will happen but it's my opinion that AI is a long, long way from performing that job. But I do hope I live to see it.

<comment><USER25> Out of interest, what kind of prescriptions would you hope data could make? Are you talking about coming up with new ideas for production or further optimisation for what already exists?

<comment><USER24> Farmers were told to collect all this data back in the early nineties at the beginning of what was called the precision farming movement. They bought the sensors, collected the data and they're still waiting.

They're looking for the data to point at problems that could be solved to make them more money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

It should come as no surprise that programmers who spend all day thinking about the theoretical problems they might run into may be bad at understanding current limitations and bottlenecks in the real world. This doesn't just apply to agriculture. Think of how many startups you know aimed at addressing problems that seem imaginary outside of the bay area.

At the same time, I think we underrate the benefit of naive amateurs throwing themselves into industry. If Stripe actually fully understood the amount of work they had to do to get to the other side of a complex, messy, and competitive market, I'm going to guess they never would have done it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you haven't read about the Green Revolution [1], you probably should.

Basically, this is was a series of technological developments in the early 50s and 60s that completely revolutionized agriculture. High-yielding seed varieties, fossil-fuel fertilizers, chemical pesticides, etc. During the Green Revolution, the proportion of common feedstocks that are edible grew from 4-5% to 40-50%, and the number of humans that can be supported on earth by a typical 2000-2500 calorie diet grew from ~1-2B to 10+B. Most of the things we hate about modern agriculture - pesticides, GMOs, monocultures, Monsanto's dominance, the loss of small family farms, coupling between agriculture and fossil fuel extraction - came about because of the Green Revolution. But without it, 80% of the world population would be dead or never born.

Agriculture isn't really in need of Silicon Valley style disruption, because it happened in the 50s. We currently produce enough food on earth for everyone to have a 3000+ calorie daily diet, and we could increase the world population by 50% _with current food output_ and still have enough to eat. The problems with agriculture today mostly concern distribution and tail risks - we produce plenty, but it's allocated inefficiently (wealthy people eat veal and foie gras, poor people struggle to get enough basic grains) and it could be wiped out by a blight or supply chain disruption. Silicon Valley doesn't really help with these problems, and if anything exacerbates them.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution)

<comment><USER24> Norman Borlaug was my hero. A man most Americans never heard of did more to help people in the twentieth century than any other person. He was more impactful than Elon Musk without all the publicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Traditional agriculture has "solved all of the scale problems" through the use of pesticides, destructive monocultures, and disruption of the natural water cycle. It's also built on the idea that diesel is cheap both for the tractors to farm in the midwest and the trucks to deliver goods to markets around the country. Should any of those fragile pillars collapse due to regulation (not likely), major environmental catastrophe (pretty likely), or disruptions in the global fossil fuel economy (possible), solutions like vertical farming start making a lot more sense.

</comment><comment><USER29> This has the infuriatingly common fatal logical flaw of wrapping "farming" in one giant layer of abstraction and comparing indoor vs outdoor at the broadest scale.

Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. "Farming" has always meant thousands of different things, and for _some_ of those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is not an assertion, we all know there's a very robust one right now.

Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like debating cars vs bicycles as if we have to pick one.

If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very well spent: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk)

</comment><comment><USER30> I find this story odd because it seems like it's over-emphasizing the large scale/ low manual labor crops. In other words, the article is talking about inexpensive, long shelf life crops:

> The Midwest in the United States has close to 90M acres of corn, 85M acres > of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat.

Maybe I've got this entirely wrong, but my understanding is most vertical farming focuses on producing highly perishable fruits and vegetables which often still require a fair amount of manual labor and where being close to market is a benefit.

I haven't yet seen large scale vertical gardens being commercially successful yet, but if they do, I'm certain they won't be producing corn, wheat, or soybeans.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's only so much that can be grown and mechanically harvested, and the US surely excels at producing maize, wheat, or soybean, but vertical farms don't try to compete with those. The production of other crops does not happen in the US that much, but it also operates at a rather spectacular scale - <USER2> relying on poorly paid laborers abroad.

<comment><USER32> There's a need for automated harvesting machines for a few remaining crops - apples, lettuce, etc. The big field crops - wheat, corn, etc. have been fully mechanized for decades if not centuries.

There are vision guided fruit picking machines. They're too slow, too fragile, and need too much supervision. But they mostly work. What they need now is good practical mechanical engineering. The 2016 version:[1] The 2019 version.[2] When they get about 2x faster, have half the parts count, and can be routinely pressure-washed, they'll be ready. The "AI" part is done.

One of the simpler automated systems is automatic weeding. Machines come in several forms, but the most successful seem to be wide implements towed behind a tractor. Deere has some of these. They recognize weeds with cameras and do something about them. Some stomp or pull, some zap with electricity or a flame, some squirt on an overdose of fertilizer. It's "organic", too; no pesticides. You can get this as a service in a few areas.[3]

[1] [https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU](https://youtu.be/mS0coCmXiYU)

[2] [https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ](https://youtu.be/-PtqZA2enkQ)

[3] [https://www.robovator.com/](https://www.robovator.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was blocked as a suspected bot by the wordpress site, so I'll post here...

I think this discussion requires a bit more nuance. Of course classic row crops like corn, wheat, soy, oats, etc., are unlikely to ever make sense for indoor crops. But that's not what any of these businesses are tackling. Instead they are focused on high value fruits and vegetables, herbs, and fresh greens. You only have to look at the agricultural success of the Netherlands to see that these crops can be grown for profit at scale, indoors. During the winter months they augment the greenhouses with light, but they are also taking advantage of the sun as much as possible. In greenhouses you can grow with far less water, and you can produce fresh, local food that doesn't have to be cooled and shipped nearly as far. I'd like to see an honest comparison that looked at a tomato and a handful of fresh cilantro being sold in NYC or SF from a local greenhouse with augmented light versus comparable produce shipped in from Mexico or somewhere else warm.

I think there are also many good arguments for shifting our diets away from the commodity crops and towards more fruits and vegetables, so as the world gets wealthier and more people seek diverse, healthy foods, we might see new models that make increasing sense.

<comment><USER34> I immediately thought of the Netherlands as well. As I understand it, they began vertical farming more crops thinking that they would be the R&D department for world agriculture, because they could get results faster, and then it would go into "production" in conventional farms, but were surprised to discover that they could (in some cases) compete for the production as well.

It makes total sense to me that this would not be the case for every crop (probably not corn, wheat, or soy for example). But I would also be surprised if vertical farming made sense for NO crops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The problem with industrial outdoor farming isn't the efficiency, it's the toxic pesticide applications, the environmental pollution in air and soil getting in the crops, and lack of nutritious crop diversity leading to inefficient food supply chains. Growing plants with coal indoors isn't a solution either but hyper-efficient indoor and vertical farming is getting closer by the day and more funding needs to go into new evidence based controlled environment farming techniques. Check out [https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc](https://youtu.be/VIrXQo00OWc) for an example of what hyper efficient indoor farming looks like.

</comment><comment><USER36> I really like this video series from Exa Cognition on Vertical Farming that goes over many of the issues the article posts.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnCQuwCtqJg) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyAeqdkkbw)

And here's a video from Techno Farm he mentioned

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEfyPlyJfKA)

<comment><USER37> really good videos, although an honest breakdown of costs is what will help with the naysayers

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> As a consumer, I don't care a tiny bit about making my food less expensive (by making production more efficient). Food is already very cheap.

I care very very much about reducing the suffering of farm animals. I do not want to become vegan (for health reasons), but the guilt I feel because of my contribution to animal suffering is one of the worst parts of my life.

Please, please, smart young technologists out there: figure out some cool technology to make it possible to raise farm animals efficiently while also ensuring that they live comfortable, decent lives.

<comment><USER39> Not everything is a technical problem. No technical solution is going to make the cheapest way to get animal parts in our fridges involve the animals living fulfilling lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized mass agriculture is incredibly efficient and already highly automated. It's kind of fantastic. (And very challenging to compete against.)

The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance.

The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion problems that stem from single species field that are barren (re: nothing actively growing) for 30-40% of the calendar year (in North America)."

(Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just switching them off for 1/3 of the year.)

Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than creating it we're gonna have a bad time.

An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For concreteness, check out what these folks are doing: [https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance](https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance)

This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who have converted it into a really cool food forest with chickens and lots and lots of different crops.

Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without involving hundreds of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but it couldn't compete with mechanized agriculture.) What kind of automation could help with that?

<comment><USER19> Fallow fields are essential to maintaining soil health, a successful practice going back 10k years. Additionally, some of the "barren" fields are actually being used to alternate crop - it is a technique to grow crops with limited natural water. Modern best-practices avoid a lot of erosion by using no-till or low-till systems.

<comment><USER40> I read up and watched some videos in re: "syntropic agriculture" last night. Ernst Götsch's farm produces crops all year w/o any inputs and with continuous improvement of the soil quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Several weeks ago, I finally looked up what "permaculture" is all about, and it blew my mind away.

It works even better than modern agricultural processes. The ideas are inherently distributed and decentralized, and when implemented along the ethical principles, bypasses many of the wealth inequality. It builds up resiliency through diversity (something the tech world is only starting to explore with Kubernetes and containers). It goes beyond mere "sustainability" and into regenerative processes. These are very practical ideas that have had 50 years of implementation proving out those design patterns.

It requires a different way of thinking about how we grow and get our food.

My techie friends all love it when they see these ideas, and yet, the development of permaculture design tracks the development of the personal computer, internet, and smartphone. But it is also big blind spot. Many of the design patterns are low-tech or no-tech (which, not depending upon a supply chain, is much more resilient).

Dwarf Fortress is a lot of fun, but I have found that applying and implementing permaculture design is a lot more challenging and rewarding.

</comment><comment><USER42> Weirdly, the thing I find missing most from this discussion is _finance_.

If we take the premise that information is valuable (decrease inputs, improve yields) and that equipment is valuable (automation), then there's a very real return to be gained by using these valuable products. What's nuts to me is that we would ever ask the _farmers_ to bear the risk of these products. I mean, sure they could I suppose (better returns overall!), but it concentrates all the risk in the worst places.

I feel like there's a much better opportunity here for a targeted financial product. "Implement our methods with our data, and we'll skim a percentage of your profits." Imagine if the risk of buying a new tractor was gone, because it was provided by the company. The risk of data integration was also gone, because it's guaranteed to work with the provided tractor. And the risk that the data is crap is also gone, because the financing and return risk is borne by a diverse number of institutional investors. Almost like weather / crop insurance, but much much bigger.

For the farmer, the sale is simple: Do our thing, and you don't have to worry about paying for stuff that may not be valuable. You might make slightly less total profit in the good years as the price of offloading that risk.

For the investors, it's also a great story: look at these great startups! Wouldn't you like a piece of that productivity and return?

...and maybe the startups are wrong, and the equipment doesn't work, and everyone learns a lot while they go bankrupt. Everyone except the farmer, who offloaded the risk.

Surely this is a thing that _someone_ is working on?!? I'm sure it's available in bits and pieces, but a unified financing and operational solution seems like it would be a slam dunk.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why did the title get changed from the article's title ("What Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand About Agriculture")?

<comment><USER44> Because Silicon Valley thinks nowhere else matters, and likes to pretend its parochial local monoculture is never a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I would hope that the savviest of SV or startup folks recognize that the actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the thing that they are trying to innovate on.

Rather it's the disastrous logistics chain and resultant waste, leading to overproduction and augmentation of our food system, is the problem trying to be solved.

<comment><USER46> > actual planting, growing and harvesting of crops isn't the thing that they > are trying to innovate on.

There are enormous problems there, such as a heavy reliance on human labour for picking and processing.

The problem with going after waste reduction is that the tab for that is picked up through subsidies. The inefficiency is in policy.

<comment><USER47> The problem with human labor in agriculture is that we've already spent a lot of effort to remove humans, the jobs that are left are really hard to automate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> About two years ago, I started with a much fancier AgTech with Hydroponics. Went all the way to the YCombinator interview in Mountain View (the last one for Indians), and rejected with something in the lines of "not advanced enough".

Spent time researching, talking, and more researching about the core problems of Agriculture in India. It is one sector where everyone loves to toss and play around, the most politically involved and abused, with huge numbers but contributing less than 20% of the total Indian GDP. Everyone seem to have a vested interest -- both good and bad.

At times, I'm shit-scared that I'm trying to help solve something so massive and gigantic that if I can make an iota of difference, it would be huge.

Of course, my hammer is Technology and I'm trying to find just the precise nail-heads to hit, one at a time.

<comment><USER49> You seem like the right person to ask about this.

My sense was that hydroponics were so expensive that they really only made sense for one crop: marijuana. If your plant is selling for $1000, then spending $50 per plant to increase its yield and 'baby' it so that it sells for $1200 makes sense. But for most plants, it doesn't make economic sense. (Tomatoes, maybe. But they're going to have to sell for a higher price point, in more expensive markets).

Is that accurate? I'm an amateur so if this is uninformed, feel free to correct me.

<comment><USER50> There are lots of really expensive products that can be cultured indoors, are perfectly legal, and aren't drugs

<comment><USER49> I'm not being dense here - I really thought there weren't? Like the core problem with ag as a business is that it's very low margin and it's extremely hard to make money.

I can only think of a handful: marijuana, fancy tomatoes at Whole Foods, maybe coffee or vanilla (?) beans... but even there, notice how there's either fierce competitive pressure, or it's possible to easily overwhelm the market (vanilla beans have to compete against synthetics). I mean there are surely some I'm forgetting, but it's a small number, and I thought that deterred VC investment.

For your staples - corn, soy - that's still much cheaper to grow outdoors, so hydroponics can't win that market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not strictly relevant to the article, but I'm not excited by the efficiencies as much by the idea that it might offer a space-efficient option for me to have my food grown locally.

Food production at the moment is very much out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I don't have a feel for what monoculture are developing in the food industry, I don't have a feel for what the supply chain risks are. If food ever stopped flowing in from wherever it comes from to my city, I'd be in trouble.

It isn't totally rational, but I dream of being able to invest in food grown a few blocks away from me. If it only cost double existing prices that'd be a solid win.

<comment><USER52> I'm not sure how prevalent this is around the world, but in my city we can register for produce baskets. In spring, I register on a website and I choose and pay in advance of the whole season a local farmer (less than 50 km away), who comes once every week to distribute his baskets a few streets away. The produced is freshly picked the same morning, it varies from week to week, it's a small family farm and I know it doesn't contain any pesticide or artificial fertilizer.

<comment><USER53> That's common in small town or exurban areas in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> How does vertical farming compete with traditional row crops? I have never seen a proposal to grow wheat in a skyscraper. It has always been higher value fresh foods like lettuce and spinach.

<comment><USER54> Most likely terrible. You need to gather electricity in one place, send it to the farm, emit some light, plant will absorb 5% of that light, and then 5% of that 5% will end up in the final product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm not "silicon valley," but only a single programmer who has an interest in agriculture. The author is talking about large scale farms. What about small scale farmers? In my experience with those farmers, they don't typically have the access or money to afford tech. Do you not think there's an opportunity to create cheap tech tools—automation and robotics—for small scale farmers?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is. But its hard to recoup any profit for the same reason you don't hear about iPhone's/premium tech in poor countries/region. Money just isn't there. Also, as pointed out, most farms are larger and getting larger. Small farms and small farmers will (in general) be aggregated (according to history at least).

<comment><USER55> I don't have any data to support this, but hasn't farm consolidation already happened? In my area, the small scale movement is only growing. That's based on observation and no data.

Edit: I realize that a small scale farm doesn't "scale" like VC business wants so it's not even in the conversation about venture capital. But small business will always (hopefully) be a viable endeavor for somebody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA), basically underwater, and the second largest exporter of agriculture in the world. Denmark is similar although at a far smaller scaled.

The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale. Huge country, basically no-one lives there in population density terms (tbf, Australia is the same size and even less dense though...so not an outlier). The future will be about doing more with less, and the US is an example of doing less with more.

Simple. The room for innovation is still huge.

Saying vertical farming is overhyped is probably correct too. But that ignores the fact that this is essentially what Netherlands has been doing for two decades. Their ag research programmes have focused on minimising resource use for a long, long time. And it does work...it is working already, and has been for a long time. Call it overhyped or whatever but it is happening already (the level of hype is correlated to funding or whatever...this just works).

<comment><USER37> US agriculture is one of the most advanced in the world, its agricultural incentives and economics however ... are not. Subsidy to certain crops over others and do not even want to get into the health impact aspects.

<comment><USER56> Yep, I left that out and it is definitely a huge factor.

Europe definitely has the same issue with subsidies but the CAP program actually works on the volume planted, so Netherlands gets royally screwed (and the big inefficient producers in France/Spain and, more recently, Eastern Europe...where there is huge corruption in CAP...get the lion's share) because they minimise resources (and don't have many to begin with).

I understand a certain level of subsidy to boost security...but the unintended consequences are huge.

<comment><USER57> I think you should note this is export, not production. The Netherlands has a very small population so they export what they grow. Clearly they're not capable of producing anything on the scale of the USA, China etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> A lot of the points around efficiency of traditional farming vs vertical farming are valid points. Over time however, you would expect vertical farms to catch up to the level of sophistication of traditional ag. The two practices are not like for like and shouldn't be compared as such - <USER3> farming is still in the 80:20 phase of development where as traditional agriculture is now in the hyper optimisation phase after 000s of years squeezing for incremental improvements. The primary benefits of urban vertical farming come from things like:

\- Reduced transportation costs and emissions to people buying them due to being located close to urban centres

\- No dependency on natural climate/weather, you can never have a bad yield!

\- No need for pesticides that can get into the water table and damage local environments

\- Allows for high accuracy estimations of yields that can build better forecasting models for supermarkets etc.

</comment><comment><USER59> I currently work as a developer for a company that develops a "black box" (as we call them in the business) for the AG industry. We develop the systems the author was referring to that provide: auto-steer/guidance, and application control for tractors.

I am not sure if that makes my perspective unique or not, but as a general rule of thumb I would tell anyone looking to get into the "dirt work" (growing) of the AG business to change their minds. In fact, I would tell them to run for the hills. Most farmers in America (aside from the huge co-ops) operate at a loss each year, and only survive due to subsidies, at least here in America.

That being said, if you are interested I can say for sure there is a LOT of money to be made developing the systems I currently work on and/or contracting yourself out to companies like mine for existing work we can not handle in house.

</comment><comment><USER60> Robotics on traditional farms is where it's at. Weed/Pest killing, fertilizing/watering, and tilling robots will cut down on fertilizer/water usage and will alleviate the need for GMO and pesticides.

I hope to run a droid farm in 10 years like uncle Owen Lars. I just don't want to be charred at the end :D

</comment><comment><USER61> > Current agriculture doesn't need an artificial energy source

I agree that vertical farms have their limits for producing certain important products like grains, but current agriculture does require a massive artificial input in the form of petroleum based fertilizers (via the Haber- Bosch process) - to say nothing of large amount of diesel used to transport agricultural products from rural growing areas to market in urban areas.

The transport could in theory be electrified, but the fertilizer can't at this point be produced in another way. Vertical farming can use far less fertilizer due to its precision. Again, not that it doesn't have downsides. For example, if vertical farms are powered by fossil fuels, they could be even less efficient and more carbon intensive than traditional agriculture.

<comment><USER62> The energetically expensive input to the Haber-Bosch process is hydrogen. At present hydrogen is predominantly manufactured by steam reforming of fossil fuels, which produces CO2 as a byproduct. Hydrogen can also be produced cleanly by water electrolysis powered with clean electricity.

I actually think that Haber-Bosch plants will predominantly use clean electrolytic hydrogen before farm machinery becomes predominantly electric. Farm machinery has a very slow replacement cycle. Some of my farming relatives are still running diesel powered machines built in the 1930s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What this article doesn't understand is that some people like myself would like to have fresh vegetables that are bred for nutrition and taste, not something that's been bred for maximum shelf life.

From big Agg, When those big optimized over fertilized tasteless tomatoes arrive, I'm not excited.

But, those local farmers markets sometimes come up with superior tasting products. I once tasted an early girl tomato from a local farmers market and it tasted like nothing else.

some people want quality of quantity.

Besides when it comes to freesh produce there's not much choice right now. I mean, we have gazillion different varieties of frozen stuff in the freezers, but only 1 kind of cucumber to choose from,etc.

</comment><comment><USER64> This article compares growing food like wheat locally and rightfully points out how insane that would be in terms of land required. Growing some specialized foods locally is what others have suggested but I still find this extremely misguided.

First, as a citizen of a large city, if we are going to give valuable land to a large building is it really beneficial to make it a farm? Making space for housing (whether affordable or regular apartments) seems more appropriate for most cities.

Second, as a consumer, would I really prefer the building crop to a the crop of a farm about an hour or two away from the city? Probably not (and especially not if tower fruit is more expensive).

<comment><USER65> Most of the US is does not have high land prices because they are not space constrained; it's basically just the west coast [0].

[0]: [https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home- prices/](https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Think about it. The biggest legacy of the hippies is that their critique of food and agriculture evolved into the mainstream's. (Well, that and same process with nuclear engergy.) The problem is it's incoherent mix, then and now. We have jumbled together:

\- Nostalgia. First this was yeoman farmer nostalgia. Now there is also pre- agricultural nostalgia. Primitivism is coherent, but only once you embrace what it really entails, which paleo dieting absolutely does not.

\- Anti-monpolization. Great idea.

\- Corperations-are-bad-so-their-means are bad. Cargill might be bad, but that doesn't mean combine harvesters are.

\- Concern about environmental externalities. Good idea.

\- Concern about nutritional externalities. Good idea. It's crazy we gave 0 fucks about supply chain risk and other security concerns, but focus on cranking out carbs in a way that only global armageddon justifies.

GMO hysteria among heirloom lovers is a funny small example: please just say biodiversity is good, and tons of GMOs or tons of hierlooms will be good, and purely golden rice or purely sweet delishious apples not so much.

Even "locavorism": Guess what? it takes like <5 days to transport anything within continental US, easy. If your non-California produce sucks, it's not because distance, per-se, it's because warehousing.

\</comment><comment>

Now, back to the question at hand, I absolutely don't believe your average Ag wantrepreneur is immune to the current in the larger culture. I mean think about it, modern gourmet-mediocre-----fancy food culture is per-dollar, easily the Bay Area's biggest cultural export, ahead of anything SV ever did.

So what might an Ag startup look like instead? Well, conquering externalities

\- without changing government policy \- still making a profit \- at a scale to actually matter

is just some liberatarian wet dream so let's not worry too much about that.

I would rather worry about the bullshit job problem. Average person is spending all their time doing useless shit, or not being paid enough doing useful shit. Ag is super efficient putting everything else into stark relief (well, super efficient when they aren't over-leveraged looking like fools and Daddy USDA bails them out). How about we give people lifetime food for a portion of their earnings?! Just like Worry-Free but fiancialized. Could actually work, certainly given today's "10 years no profit is fine" model.

<comment><USER66> Basically anyone thinking agriculture disruption should read about the Hutterites[1] rather than get caught up with some vert ag thing.

Hutterites have major capital expenses (unlike Amish), and yet they are farmers. Income-portion subscription model maybe doesn't so crazy if you consider employees can live off the surplus food on one hand, and so the subscription can largely go into capital and operational expenditures.

It sounds dual to "lifetime cut of earnings to pay for college", since education is considered the ultimate personal capex, and food the ultimate personal opex. But considering the rat-race nature of bullshit jobs, and the basic income studies, a lifetime free from fear starvation could well kick one up the hierarchy of needs enough to learn far more efficiently. So food indefinitely is actually pretty good personal capex from that perspective.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites)

<comment><USER66> Final thing is remote work + medicare-for-all could make SNAP-for-all less inferior to $$-for-all, in that housing and healthcare, the big rent-seekers drains are decapitated, raising food costs as a portion of household budgets back where they should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I used to work at Climate. Always fun seeing ag tech come up in articles. The wealth of knowledge available to farmers in the US, as the article points out, is staggering. We're very efficient here on the production end of things.

</comment><comment><USER68> Go to YouTube and search "operate a combine" if this is new to you.

Our farmers are computer literate.

</comment><comment><USER69> No, this is untrue.

I cannot speak to "Vertical Farming" and silicon valley types, but I live in the heart of a modern agriculture zone. It is catastrophic.

The environmental devastation is breath taking. Yes there is a lot of industrialisation, but of the wrong things and at a very high, and completely externalised, price. Instead of innovating farmers are using technology to do what they have always done, just more of it.

The enormous cash flows generated (but not profits, land prices take care of that) have corrupted the political system and farmers use their power to fight off any innovation that would reverse this catastrophe.

</comment><comment><USER70> One of the exceptions:

[https://www.waterbit.com/](https://www.waterbit.com/)

Takes advantage of current massive farm scale and extant automation, simply increasing yield by adding precision to watering.

</comment><comment><USER52> I believe I've never actually eaten soy, and I rarely eat corn. I'm also pretty sure the amount of wheat humans eat is less than what we feed to poultry and livestock.

The author seems to conflate the purpose of the "modern row-crop farmer" (which is mainly to repay their huge debts and to feed cows and chickens), and the solution touted by vertical-urban-aqua-dome-whatever-ponics: to provide year-round, local, fresh and varied types of plants to feed humans.

<comment><USER71> You've probably eaten more corn than you know.

1:Corn has made its way into everything: a Washington Post article

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how-c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/14/how- corn-made-its-way-into-just-about-everything-we-eat/)

<comment><USER52> This articles points out that this is a very american-centric reality. If you cook your own food from basic ingredients there's almost no corn reaching you directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I want: an autonomous, EV brush mower to take care of the scarily steep slopes of our native upland prairie restoration project.

<comment><USER72> You mean... Goats?

<comment><USER16> Lol, that's great. Would love to have grazing animals in the future but we're not quite ready to take care of them yet. Also involves decisions on fencing etc. I have been warned a LOT about goats and their ability to destroy everything, and evade even the tallest fences.

<comment><USER72> You're right, goats can be trouble makers. We use sheep to mow our lawn and they are very easy to deal with. They won't go over a 2 foot fence and don't need a lot of maintenance. Water, occasionally some mineral rich feed, and a shear.

<comment><USER16> Sheep is what I'd like to get eventually. I LOVE that Hawaii's giant solar farm incorporated sheep into their design, as the method of keeping the panels clear of vegetation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> My response was too long, so I put it in my blog. [https://www.yorch.co/what- i-think-about-food-production-and-...](https://www.yorch.co/what-i-think- about-food-production-and-distribution-chains-inefficiency-a-response/)

I think the author has great points, but is not the full picture.

</comment><comment><USER74> "90M acres of corn, 85M acres of soybean, and 30M acres of wheat. Brazil has as much, and usually more, soybean acreage grown every year in their breadbasket "

We need to drastically reduce agricultural land-use.

That's what indoor farming will be good for, and especially synthetic foods, beyond meat, etc.

</comment><comment><USER75> What numerous Netflix documentaries and now Covid has revealed is that ag industry is perhaps too efficient from a people perspective. Those people closest to production carry a disproportionate risk of the supply chain with very little compensation. This is problematic in that it creates funnels too close to the raw materials that can break without adequate redundancy.

Where ag industry is less efficient is in material usage like fertilizer, water, and waste products. For example it takes about 18 gallons of water to produce one avocado fruit and there are concerns about a future shortage of phosphorus. Then there are also the environmental footprints as well.

For what it's worth the loss of resource efficiency inversely drives land use efficiency. When resource inputs/outputs are a concern land use is compressed to consolidate management concerns while land use concerns relax when resources are more abundant.

One segment that really seems to nail resource efficiency, at least in North America, is commercial lumber but then they operate on long time horizon unlike edibles.

</comment><comment><USER76> This article is at too high a level of abstraction. It doesn't make sense to talk about the huge, almost almost entirely automated farms that grow crops like corn and soybeans in the same way as the farms that grow fruits and vegetables that are still mostly picked by hand.

</comment><comment><USER77> The biggest opportunity for disruption is the checkoffs.

>These types of programs represent an already existing framework of farmers 'paying' for this type of knowledge. This model has proven scalable, even more so with the internet and social media making information readily available. Note this doesn't prevent bad information from being shared, but since savvy farmers will try and eventually ignore unprofitable methods, one can assume this is an efficient system.

No. It is one of the most wasteful systems I've ever seen. Take one look at the reports they put out to justify their existence and you'll see that it is filled with ridiculous math, where ROI is based on outputs instead of outcomes. The data being collected is junk, all the vendors are super-insidery and collaboration is a political minefield at best. There's so much room for improvement you could throw a dart at any of the checkoff 5-year ROI reports and blindly hit an area to innovate on.

</comment><comment> seph-reed I always thought vertical farming was about developing strategies that will be essential in space under the guise of figuring out how to make cities less dependent on external resources.

</comment><comment><USER78> Robotic weeding and tile lines with irrigation control are startup worthy. The former Bosch is heavily invested, the latter a VC will gobble up AgriDrain.

</comment><comment><USER79> Farming is not a sustainable use of land. The article of the author assumes the massive scales of land use for farming is an invariant, but it is a massive contributor to species extinction and global warming.

Vertical farming is as important as solar is to the future sustainability of the human race.

<comment><USER80> Other than soil depletion, it's perfectly sustainable. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Of course, we also figured out how to revitalize soil a long time ago, vis-a-vis ruminant fertilization and crop rotation. But the soil nutrients are supplemented with artificial fertilizer these days for efficiency.

<comment><USER81> We haven't been farming as we do today for 10,000 years. The green revolution was exactly that, a fundamental revolution in the way to grow crops.

You can't be farming sustainably if you are depleting the soil. Preserving soil health is a fundamental aspect of sustainable agriculture..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> I was just expecting a page with the word 'anything'

<comment><AUTHOR> They know there is money to be made :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I thought that this was a great & succinct article.

</comment><comment><USER84> I bookmarked that site, I hope they keep posting.

</comment><comment><USER85> Vertical farming is performance art.

Just like Organic and Permaculture and many of those growing ideas.

That's ok, so are most cafes and many things in society.

But if you call it agriculture you are not getting it.

</comment><comment><USER86> According to the author, "hyper efficient" is throwing 40+% of the food in the trash, while slowly increasing prices YoY.

Yeah right

</comment><comment><USER87> What's referred to as "modern farming" is in fact kind of grossly inefficient, destructive, and hopelessly dependent on subsidies as well as a handful of companies supply pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals needed to squeeze some life out of a dying and eroding soil. We "perfected" that over the last century or so and it's used to mass produce only a comparatively small number of staples. I grew up in an era that was probably peak industrial scale farming (i.e. the seventies and eighties last century). A lot of stuff you find in a supermarket today was simply unknown or considered exotic at best. Bread came in two varieties: brown and white. The flour came from a factory. A lot of the stuff you put on top came out of a tube or a jar. James May (from Top Gear fame) has a hilarious Youtube channel called food tribe where he satirically highlights some seventies era sandwich recipes.

This type of farming scales only at the cost of variety, quality, the environment, and our health. Contrary to self serving studies, having less pesticides in your food intake is probably good for you. Also, less corn syrup in your life is definitely a good thing. And more variety in your diet is probably not a bad idea either. In a nut shell "modern farming" is a great way of feeding the poor and a core reason why obesity and poverty is a common combination in modern economies. All the cheap food is great at keeping you alive but not necessarily optimal for a long lifetime.

The promise of actual modern farming is vastly more efficient use of resources (water, energy, chemicals, the environment), more variety, better freshness, nutritional value, cost, being able to grow it closer to the place of consumption, etc. It has nice side effects like being less taxing on the landscape and environment and generally being associated with things that give people warm fuzzy feelings, which they tend to attribute some $ value to. I other words, modern farming is what modern farmers want to do because that's where the money is.

If you look at the value chain in farming, it's clearly a very tiered market. At the very bottom you have the basically inedible stuff that is destined for animal fodder and industrial processing. It's by definition low margin and high volume. Farming practices in this space tend to be very destructive. It's cheap only because the epic cost of cleaning up the mess is not factored in (that's for the next generation to worry about).

One level up you have the stuff we actually can eat that is mass produced at razor thin margins for the industrial production of food. It's the bottom of a value chain where most of the money is made by industries using the produce as the input for their food products.

Then we get more into niche farming where quality of production, production process, and the produce is the key goal. This is the stuff consumers pay extra for to get because it tastes good or makes them feel good. Whether it's organically produced spelt flour hand ground by some bearded hipster or some japanese beer fed and massaged Kobe beef; this is high value, high margin, produce. Any farmer with a clue wants to be here because that's where the money is. High margins and everybody thinks your cool. The only problem is that it doesn't quite scale to feeding the planet. But nevertheless this sector has exploded in the last few decades.

And then you have actual high tech modern farming which does the former but in a smarter way such as to maximize quality and yield while minimizing cost. Vertical farming fits in here because it gets you fresh stuff pretty much straight from the farm into your shopping basket. The reason it's currently applied mainly at the top end of the market is simply because that's where the money is right now. But there's no reason for this stuff not to eventually gobble up the rest of the market. There's probably a lot of stuff that will fail to scale or to deliver but inevitably some it will work pretty much as advertised.

In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves with shaving of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on producing glorified pig food. There are no 10x returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom. Selling fresh basil to city dwelling hipsters on the other hand is a thing short term but hardly the end goal.

<comment><USER88> > In any case, you won't find silicon valley involving themselves with shaving > of a hundredth of a percent on a tiny margin on producing glorified pig > food. There are no 10x returns doing that. It's a race to the bottom.

Full disclosure, current employee. Farmers Business Network (fbn.com) is in SV operating in this space. Farmers take on huge amounts of risk, and we're helping them better their bottom lines. We try to make them more efficient (you can spray less of X here), save the money on their inputs, and help them find better prices when they go to market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I do have an interest in vertical farming.

But solely because I want a farm, and land in Brazil is crazy expensive.

But if I had a 1000 hectare farm I would gladly use it in a sustainable non-SV tech but still tech way.

</comment><comment><USER90> In these days, whenever I hear a news that Google launches some services, I always ask myself this question - when this service will be abandoned?

I can't imagine what would happened on their stock price if they didn't acquire YOUTUBE.</comment>


Show HN: Interactive Penrose tiles - <AUTHOR> http://etisab.github.io <comment><USER2> I like the interactive processing canvas and penrose tiling is always cool. The interface / external html could use some more feedback about what is going on.

Site repo: [https://github.com/etisab/etisab.github.io](https://github.com/etisab/etisab.github.io)

Penrose repo: [https://github.com/etisab/penrosetiler](https://github.com/etisab/penrosetiler)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. What in particular did you find difficult or non- obvious about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Could anyone explain what's going on? (I.e. how my mouse position influences the shape?)

<comment><USER4> It's using Y position of the mouse to determine the size of the tiles.

[http://etisab.github.io/penrose.js](http://etisab.github.io/penrose.js) \- see the processing.draw call.</comment></comment>


Branch - <AUTHOR> http://www.branch.com

<comment><USER2> This looks cool - but I literally have no idea what this product/service is/does.

Cool video, but tell me what you do.

</comment><comment><USER3> So it's a web-wide Pinterest?</comment>


Ram Dass has died - <AUTHOR> https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ram-dass-dies/ <comment><USER2> I did some work for him about 15 years ago -- helping him set up an ecommerce store with oscommerce. Really really bright guy, amazing staff that shared his values, and a quaint little office space where they'd send the books and other things out.

Really pleasant guy.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's an earlier article discussed on HN that kind of summarises who he was

The Unified Theory Of Ram Dass [https://www.gq.com/story/the-unified-theory- of-ram-dass](https://www.gq.com/story/the-unified-theory-of-ram-dass)

HN nov 18 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18558488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18558488)

<comment><USER4> From the GQ article:

> ... with his former life as a 29-year-old clinical psychologist on the > faculty at Harvard named Dr. Richard Alpert. He'd been the pride of an > esteemed Jewish family in Boston, with an impressive résumé (gigs at > Stanford and Berkeley, a corner office and sterling reputation at Harvard) > and all the trappings of success that came with his swinging young > professorship, including a blue Mercedes-Benz, a Triumph motorcycle, a > sailboat, a single-engine Cessna airplane, a live-in girlfriend in an > apartment on one side of town and a live-in boyfriend on the other.

Maybe I'm out-of-touch with Harvard compensation ranges ... but is this practical given solely his salary or would he have need to supplement his income with family wealth or other income sources?

<comment><USER5> He had family money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extricating awareness from the identification with thought & sensation." \- Ram Dass

</comment><comment><USER7> To any podcast listener I highly recommend: Ram Dass Here and Now.

It along with reading the Bhagavad Gita certainly changed my life and mindset forever.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9I4SVWpfdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9I4SVWpfdM) I guess?

<comment><USER7> yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Richard was a beautiful soul who recognised, embraced and embodied the primacy of love. His life was his message.

</comment><comment><USER9> he kept taking lsd trying to to recreate that specific feeling the trip can give you only to later learn you can get to that place without the drugs.

i had no idea he had a debilitating stroke. imagine being someone who's life is defined by your good ability to articulate ideas hard to explain and communicate with anyone and then instantly turn to someone who has trouble expressing your thoughts. and doing that 20 years. man getting old fucking blows

<comment><USER10> I wonder if the chronic LSD use and the stroke were related.

<comment><USER11> There's absolutely no scientific basis for that, besides that I don't think he used LSD much if at all past the hippie period. Certainly not regularly (and there are people who have used LSD weekly for years with no apparent damage)

<comment><USER12> the nyt obituary mentioned that he used it a couple of times a year into old age

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No Apple right?

Be Here Now got Steve to India for a year. A year in India is a long time.

And back he came, and so came Macintosh.

There is a connection. Think different. India can do that to you. Along with blowing your mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> Of all the bogus teachers of the 60-70s, Ram Dass was the real thing. He overcame a lot, thanks to the example of Neem Karoli Baba. _Be Here Now_ was consonant with and a testimony to The Perennial Tradition.

We live in times where that tradition - except where it's still living amongst people close to the Earth - is completely blanketed by bogus substitutes and diversions. Too bad, because we could sure use a macrodose.

</comment><comment><USER15> Through that article I looked into an organization Ram Dass was involved in called Social Venture Network which seems to have rebranded as Social Venture Circle.

The article seems to mistakenly say Ram Dass founded it (he's not mentioned in their wikipedia article at all) and a post on his blog seems to just say he "started to hang out with them" but it still seems like an interesting organization. Does anybody have any experience or thoughts on it or their initiatives?

I believe this is the current website: [https://www.svcimpact.org/](https://www.svcimpact.org/)

</comment><comment><USER16> "Be Here Now" absolutely clusterfucked my brain when I first read it, on LSD.

This is sad news, but who knows what is beyond death's door? He was done of the few who not only sought out Death's address but also mapped out the neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER17> This hit like a truck. I don't feel sad, but I do feel strongly about it. Hope he met death in peace and excitement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here. I surprised myself by shedding a few tears, but they were happy tears for a man and life well lived. His living example and teachings helped me in many ways over the years, starting with the practice of living in the moment or "Be Here Now" up to his talks on subjects like addiction. Here he discusses his own addiction to food and the anxiety behind it: Overcoming Addiction & Attachment - Ram Dass [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV7PyQDod40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV7PyQDod40)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's fascinating to me, how this demographics on HN is really generally clueless (except with a few exceptions), have NO CLUE to what happened in the 60's clueless. I guess it's just a generational thing.

That was probably one of the most incredible mind fuck earthquakes to blow up our society and rebuild it.

But I guess that's history. And each generation has it's own. Today we have Justin Bieber. Then we had Hendrix.

Times sure have changed. :-)

<comment><USER18> 9/11 and the financial crisis seemed pretty earthquake as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I never understood the fascination with these gurus. They repackage old ideas and dress them up a bit before using them to lure in weak-willed and gullible devotees. Most, and Ram Dass was no exception, were incredibly flawed people, albeit intelligent and charismatic, with clear psychogical issues.

Dass bounced around between gurus that exploited women and men before returning to the US to do much the same. That, the drugs, and the lies over the years just makes whatever he says unpalatable.

<comment><USER20> Let's drill down,

Why go to gurus to listen to ideas or ideology, that you can read in books and practice at your home?

Why go to college when you can learn anything from books or by working on it (as profession or hobby)?

Why go to tax planner when you can file taxes on your own?

In World, where information is asymmetric, (and we lack time to acquire information or expertise) we need help. They are our references/guides, with assumption and hope of good faith (No fiduciary agreement)

This is classic Principal Agent Problem.

Does Principal has flaws? Yes. Do they always work in good faith? No.

Simply put, What to do with information/guidance one receive is their prerogative and life/lifestyle of these people is theirs.

Should we appreciate ideas more than the people behind it? Yes. Will we ever do it? No.

<comment><USER4> I know you want to "drill down" but your choice of comparisons is not apt.

Why do people go to Tarot card readers? It is almost certainly possible to study as much about Western esotericism and ritualistic practices as it is to study about ancient Indian religions. You have the same asymmetry of knowledge (Tarot card reader took the time to acquire expertise which you don't have time to). You have the same person/idea division (maybe your Tarot card reader _is_ a drunkard and a philanderer but he can sure read those cards).

I think we have some weird prejudice when it comes to Indian spirituality. For some reason we bend over backwards to give it the benefit of the doubt that we deny to other traditions. You want to compare Indian Gurus to college professors and tax planners. The truth is they are closer to psychics and spirit mediums.

<comment><USER20> I feel you completely missed my argument here, which ended with,

Does Principal has flaws? Yes. Do they always work in good faith? No.

Simply put, What to do with information/guidance one receive is their prerogative and life/lifestyle of these people is theirs.

Should we appreciate ideas more than the people behind it? Yes. Will we ever do it? No.

———

One does not have to "follow" these gurus, be it Indian or otherwise. But I also believe, one should have open mind to listen to all ideas. Eventually, What one doss with these ideas is one's choice. It has nothing to do with bending over backwards.

<comment><USER4> > one should have open mind to listen to all ideas

Maybe you missed my argument then? Why not keep an open mind about Tarot, astrology and the healing power of crystals? At least in the West, these ideas are ridiculed outright and the ideas behind them mocked by the association. Yet the "love is the answer" surface of most Guru philosophy has almost the exact same philosophical centre as the esoteric roots of those practices. For some reason while most feel no compulsion to defend western esotericism they do insist people have an open mind about Indian spiritual ideas.

To be clear - I have no care at all what someone wants to study. My point is that there is a drastic difference in how we treat these ideas within popular culture. Spiritual teachers that peddle Indian ideas are treated significantly differently than spiritual teachers that peddle western ideas. As far as I am aware there is no basis for this. With your attempt to compare Indian spiritual teachers to accountants and professors you just provided an opportunity to highlight this difference. I know of no one who would allow such a comparison for a Tarot card reader.

<comment><USER20> What one study, listens or believe is their choice, regardless of the medium through which one acquire that learnings (be it a professor or guru. By your argument all professor and accounts are almost always correct because?)

Also, just because something is science does not make people believe it (for the most part of our civilization earth was flat and for many global warning is hoax) Similarly, just because something is NOT science does not make people NOT believe it too.(the whole world of placebo is not science that has shown to work for many)

cheers,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "It's entirely possible, as far as I'm concerned, psychedelics are another yoga" Ram Dass in "The Only Dance There Is" page 47. Published 1970

November 26, 2019 The FDA is fast-tracking a second psilocybin drug to treat depression [https://www.popsci.com/story/health/psilocybin-magic- mushroo...](https://www.popsci.com/story/health/psilocybin-magic-mushroom-fda- breakthrough-depression/)

<comment><USER22> Richard Alpert (before becoming Ram Dass) on LSD experience in the interview from the 1960s:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P3TrGCMHNU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P3TrGCMHNU)

And Timothy Leary in the interview from 1966:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBg3BVDVHM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBg3BVDVHM)

What seems extremely impressive now, is how clear their thinking was, and how confident they felt in the importance of what they have to share.

And it wasn't something one could have just found in the books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What an amazing person. He has somewhat been my guide and mentor although I have never met him personally. He will always be in my heart. Hope he achieves whatever he hoped for in his afterlife.

</comment><comment><USER24> A good man. He will be missed.

I recommend his "Be Here Now". Such a fine book.

</comment><comment><USER25> This was posted on Twitter:

"I encourage you to make peace with death, to see it as the culminating adventure of this adventure called life.

It is not an error.

It is not a failure.

It is taking off a tight shoe which you have worn well."

\- @BabaRamDass

</comment><comment><USER26> > Curious to see how a spiritual adept would react to LSD, Alpert gave > Maharaj-ji a whopping dose. It had zero effect on the holy man.

This is oversimplified and maybe a bit misleading.

Ram Dass's own account[1] of giving Neem Karoli Baba the "Yogi Medicine" is more colourful and to me suggests that there was some effect and that the Baba was able to tolerate it for the first hour, after which Ram Dass was possibly not present with the Baba for further observations.

[1] [https://www.ramdass.org/ram-dass-gives-maharaji-the-yogi- med...](https://www.ramdass.org/ram-dass-gives-maharaji-the-yogi-medicine/)

<comment><USER17> Your comment is leaving out the last part, which is crucial:

 _And then we waited. After some time he pulled the blanket over his face, and when he came out after a moment his eyes were rolling and his mouth was ajar and he looked totally mad. I got upset. What was happening? Had I misjudged his powers? After all, he was an old man (though how old I had no idea), and I had let him take twelve hundred micrograms. Maybe last time he had thrown them away and then he read my mind and was trying to prove to me he could do it, not realizing how strong the "medicine" really was. Guilt and anxiety poured through me. But when I looked at him again he was perfectly normal and looking at the watch.

At the end of an hour it was obvious nothing had happened. His reactions had been a total put-on. And then he asked, "Have you got anything stronger?" I didn't. Then he said, "These medicines were used in Kullu Valley long ago. But yogis have lost that knowledge. They were used with fasting. Nobody knows now. To take them with no effect, your mind must be firmly fixed on God. Others would be afraid to take. Many saints would not take this." And he left it at that._

<comment><USER26> I left out the whole thing, actually, but my opinion took that into account. I get the impression that Ram Dass was a bit of a Karoli Baba fanboy and certainly the drug had enough of an effect that Karoli Baba felt something, even if he didn't outwardly show it; or perhaps Ram Dass was too starry-eyed to note it as such.

<comment><USER27> Well it teaches us a couple things.

The same narrative replays with many successful people - Bruce Lee (Jiddu Krishnamurthi), John Lennon, Brian Josephson (Mahesh Yogi), Steve Jobs etc etc. And from there it becomes myth for the rest of the population.

Taking drugs/performing a ritual/chanting a prayer/meeting yoda (authority figure) etc - is people trying to cope with something that has happened in their life.

Therapy options weren't great back then, and people had to work out by themselves, what we take for granted in a modern psychology textbook today, all while going through some traumatic life event.

Even today it's not straight forward to do and it becomes easy to poke holes in the path people took and even currently take. Which then leads to defensiveness and reactions, which further misguide and mislead everyone.

It also points at the need of some smart people for an Authority Figure to validate whatever new narrative they are trying to rebuild about themselves and the world after they go through some trauma and their existing narratives break down.

<comment><USER26> I didn't intend to come across as poking holes into Alpert's telling of the Karoli Baba/LSD story. If anything, Alpert told it seemingly without deliberate exaggeration.

It's the retelling of the story in this oversimplified version (as I've even heard Sam Harris tell in a podcast) of a Himalayan Yogi taking LSD with no effect that I wanted to highlight as incorrect, in the sense that it diverges significantly from Alpert's own account.

And yes, I also think he was a bit overly enthusiastic about Karoli Baba at the time. Don't we all act like that at many points in our lives?

<comment><USER27> Agree. I was just adding some context about these narratives. And I really have no issues with anything you have said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> touch base here: "Be here now" transformed my brainz too. afaik Ram Dass is well and alive, and will be for many years to come

</comment><comment><USER22> "When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying 'You are too this, or I'm too this.' That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."

– Ram Dass

<comment><USER29> I get the concept of appreciating people for what they are, but I don't know what to do with this knowledge. Maybe I can apply it to an eccentric neighbor, but how would I apply it to an unproductive employee, lying partner, or self- destructive friend.

Thinking more about this, the forest is like a busy sidewalk full of people, but the people in our lives are more like the beautiful tree in the back yard that we take care of.

<comment><USER30> In practice, you deal with the unproductive employee, lying partner, etc. the same way you always have. You still need to protect your own interests and not let people take advantage of you.

But it means you don't let it _affect you emotionally_ in the same way. While most people have a kind of internal monologue that goes "why are these people so bad, why is the world wronging me, I didn't do anything to deserve this, why does life suck so bad sometimes, it's all these people's fault" you instead learn to just accept that the world has these people and not to waste emotional angst on them. You deal with them as necessary and then move on _internally_ without anger, hatred, etc.

<comment><USER31> I used to lose my shit at underpeforming co-workers all the time and then a more experienced guy pulled me aside and gave me a quote that was intended to do the same thing as Ram Dass's tree quote:

"Nobody comes to work to do a bad job."

What I realized that judging other people narrowed my vision so that I couldn't see any options. All I could see was that they were bad people who were going to hurt the project.

When I could hold off on personalizing other people's performance then I could start to spot other reasons and sometimes even figure out constructive solutions. Maybe the other person is not delivering the code I need because they were given competing priorities.

So, yeah, as you say, you still have to deal with these situations. I just found that I could see many more options for how to deal once I stopped being so judgmental.

<comment><USER32> If a man is crossing a river And an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man He will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, He will shout at him to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, he will shout again, And yet again, and begin cursing. And all because there is somebody in the boat. Yet if the boat were empty. He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat Crossing the river of the world, No one will oppose you, No one will seek to harm you.

<comment><USER33> If you think someone would hold their tounge because their car got hot by an empty one, i got some youtube compilations to enlighten you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "If there is an enduring figure emblematic of the consciousness revolution of the 1960s and 70s, it is arguably the Harvard professor and LSD researcher- turned-spiritual leader born Richard Alpert but known the world over as Ram Dass."

</comment><comment><USER34> I think HN needs an obituaries section. I'm not kidding.

</comment><comment><USER35> "RAM" in headline should not be all caps, right?

</comment><comment><USER36> > LSD-75

lsd-25

...

> Curious to see how a spiritual adept would react to LSD, Alpert gave > Maharaj-ji a whopping dose. It had zero effect on the holy man.

This is so unlikely. Either the drug was no good, or Maharaj-ji was on something that negates the effects of LSD (anti-depressants, benzos, barbiturates, etc.)

<comment><USER37> Theory: It had no effect because his sadhana already crossed the zone of consciousness LSD moves one to.

In advanced meditation alot of "effort" is spent on ignoring ephemeral phenomena including the kinds of visual and auditory phenomena LSD induces. An expert meditator at his level would likely be able to move freely into the "LSD Frequency" and out again with no drugs required.

<comment><USER38> I call bullshit on that. Besides the rampant charlatanism that infects the "expert" meditator community, my own multi-decade experience with meditation tells me that anyone who compares it to LSD or other strong psychedelics doesn't know what he's talking about.

You could be meditating for 10 years and not come anywhere near close to what 1 hit of LSD unveils about the mind and "you".

<comment><USER26> To be fair, we have no way to disprove anything about another person's subjective experience. Someone could have a special aptitude or talent in "meditation", broadly speaking. Our own accomplishments may not be any indication.

<comment><USER39> In same context, I never understood how did we conclude sugar is sweet ? Does my 'sweet' feeling is same as yours ? Crazy paradox.

<comment><USER26> Everyone's experience of sweetness may indeed be different, but at least the standard way to induce the experience of sweetness is ubiquitous and immediate. Just taste sugar. Decades of meditative experience is far less commonly found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Spirituality and philosophy are for people who can't get into actually important fields related to science, right?

<comment><USER7> Science will not help you with:

* Dealing with your own death or death of loved ones.

* Finding meaning and purpose to life.

* Dealing with anger.

* Coping with trauma.

* Coping with adversity.

* Dealing with addiction.

* Coping with social anxiety, acceptance or isolation.

* ...

<comment><USER41> Psychology / psychiatry aren't sciences?

<comment><USER7> Reading all the psychology books in the world will not help one who is going through one or more of these issues.

Calling them soft sciences is the most generous categorization they deserve.

<comment><USER42> I disagree. Reading about psychology can provide you with a framework for understanding your own thought patterns and the behaviour of others. It's also often helpful to know that what you're going through isn't uniquely catastrophic; that it's part of the human condition which others have experienced and worked through. These may not work as fast or effectively as a therapist - especially in the acute phases - but they'd help considerably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> His name is Ram, not RAM. I find this kind of headline editorializing inapropriate given the circumstances.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know what happened there. I certainly didn't do that intentionally. I thought I just copied the title. I think I did and then the magazine revised their headline. Mods, please fix it.

<comment><USER17> It's likely HN's common error fixer. You and the magazine probably did nothing wrong, don't worry.

<comment><USER44> ahh yes, this is a computer oriented site and the abbreviation for random access memory may have it own special place it the spell checker.

<comment><USER45> Scunthorpe strikes again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Prediction: resurgent Hindutva and global projection of Indian economic and cultural influence will result in a global awakening to the wisdom contained in ancient Vedic traditions. We might even see Sanskrit learning centers outside language departments like Oxford and Chicago.

I think the best place to start is probably with the Ramayana. And the age old question troubling sages for ages: Why does Ram banish Sita?

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ramayana](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ramayana)</comment>


A word about systemd - <AUTHOR> https://skarnet.org/software/s6/systemd.html <comment><USER2> I have a quibble with the following statement:

 _" It's as if we had learned nothing from the mistakes of the past 20 years."_

My quibble is it's as if we had learned nothing from the mistakes of the last _40_ years, not 20. The problem I see with the whole discussion/argument around systemd is it ignores there's two philosophies in computer science, which for convenience sake I'll call the Unix way and the Windows way. I believe the reason so many people, especially us old-timers, are railing against systemd is because it adheres to the Windows way. The problem is there's a lot of Windows people who've now migrated over to Linux and so they love it. It's like Linux has been gentrified and we've all been kicked out of our homes. At least that's why I think people are so intensely emotional about this subject.

As for me, I've decided the hell with it. If Linux now wants to follow the Windows way and adopt systemd - there's nothing I can do about it. It's not even really my fight. I had nothing to do with the creation or maintenance of Linux, GNU, the init tools, etc. Though it's all free I've decided to vote with my time and usage - and that now goes to BSD. So long as BSD follows the Unix way I'll stick with it. Maybe you'll join me, maybe you won't. You use what you want to use and I'll use what I want to use. Peace.

<comment><USER3> How is having every single daemon implement setuid, chroot, logging, privilege dropping and so on "unix way"?

Right now, every biggish daemon has to implement the same old logic in a slightly different way. How many logging systems and files do you know?

I am totally looking for more programs to use systemd's socket activation. This is the true Unix way -- a server should do only one thing (serve), and not worry about logging, uids, and other system peculiarities.

(yeah, we could do it with daemontools as well.. but no one did the hard job of converting thousands of packages to daemontools)

<comment><USER2> The biggest problem with systemd is it purported itself to be an init system - and then set out to do a whole lot more. That's where it abandons the Unix way, as far as I'm concerned. But you like it and the Linux community overall seems to like it. That's fine. That just means I'm no longer in synch with the Linux community - I'm not aligned with their vision - so I'm leaving it. I no longer have any hard feelings about it. I don't feel my 25 years of using Linux have been "wasted." It worked well for what I needed it for but now it's time for me to move on. So I am.

<comment><USER3> I am not sure who said that systemd was just an init system. While the very first blog post did call it so, it is certainly not described as such now:

        Package: systemd
        Description-en: system and service manager

"systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1" (from [https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/))

In any case, Linux is not systemd yet. You still have Arch and Gentoo at least. You will miss out the latest security features, but presumably you would not want to do this anyway.

<comment><USER4> > In any case, Linux is not systemd yet. You still have Arch and Gentoo at > least.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? Arch has used systemd as the default for over six years now ([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd)), and switching to something else is not officially supported (although technically possible).

<comment><USER5> It is possible, indeed. (-:

* [https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh](https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> moderators: can you add [2016] to the title? [https://web.archive.org/web/20160308042800/https://skarnet.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160308042800/https://skarnet.org/software/s6/systemd.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Software people will never learn to argue to the point and to provide comparisons without sprinkling insults to the other party.</comment>