Larry Ellison's half-billion-dollar quest to change farming

Hubris is laziness. They know better but are too lazy to put in the hard work to do better. It's much easier just to help yourself and screw everyone else. It's hard for anyone else to stop them.

A lesson I had to learn when I was first in charge: when deciding a course of action, ask myself, 'would I accept that from a subordinate?' If you report to no one, it's hard to hold yourself to the same or, if you are doing it right, higher standards. That is the corruption of power.

If you really want to see a person's character, give them power.

and no error will really cost them that much, anyway.

Just breaking the law is not disrupting. Disrupting requires broad support from the public, which is aware that laws are being broken and are fine with it - meaning the particular laws in place are ripe for questioning at the very least.

Uber isn’t what it is because they broke the law, but because the vast public approve of their actions.

The industry is already in agtech 2.0 for plants and animals. There's no need for billionaires. We already do fully automated control, robotics, sensoric and harvesting. Farmers are rich enough to do it by themselves, and it scales easily.

Just vertical farming is a bit too expensive still, but with animals it's already vertical.

You know billionaires personality traits are probably normally distributed in most aspects, except they have a (much) higher tolerance for risk. So do homeless people.

Musk (in business and government), Zuckerberg, Trump, much of the cryptocurrency industry, ... it's everywhere.

> Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble

This seems like more a characteristic of "winner take all (or most)" capitalism rather than a characteristic of innovation.

A new technology potentially creates a new market opportunity and you have everyone bum-rush it as quickly as possible with as much money as possible in the hopes of being the new monopolist.

At any rate, this Ellison play wasn't about an innovation. It was about muscling into a mature market he didn't understand (an "eating-the-world play" to use SV lingo).

Lots of money surly helps, just pointing out that we as a species can also advance in other situations.

Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble.

In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox).

There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.

Real question: what is "SV"? I missed the anachronym ref.

https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html

One major irony here is if the stated goal is improving agriculture and you've got half a bil to play with the most obvious move would be spin up an equipment manufacturer to compete with John Deere. Pressuring them to halt their ongoing war against their own customers would have a measurable impact on rural suicide rates.

Uber is an iffy case.

Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.

Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry.

And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.

Uber was a better consumer experience, but I don't know that it's really a "better solution" than taxis.

It was unprofitable until literally this quarter, and the majority of that profit was, I believe, earned from food delivery services.

In a sense the invention of farming itself was a bunch of neolithic hackers fooling around with nature, which they knew almost nothing about, until they got it right.

I don't agree that Uber was a better solution than taxis.

They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.

Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.

Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.

It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.

The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.

It worked out for Uber because the taxi industry was, in most parts of the world, a monopoly, inefficient and often riddled with corruption and criminal acts.

You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.

Computer science experts literally built both of those things.

what exactly did FB and twitter "disrupt"?

Well no, that is not how you surpass a local maximum. You randomize. Random, not informed.

Not a farmer, but I think it's a mistake to say that farmers haven't modernized.

I saw some videos about more modern farms, and they utilize drones, GPS, and a whole litany of other bits of modern tech to help with the farming stuff.

I agree that it needs to be farmers leading the change, but I don't think that the farming world is as primitive as people seem to think it is.

Exactly. It's companies like John Deere who automate their combines, not software/automation companies learning how to make combines, that have been (and I expect will continue to be) successful.

This hasn't been true in practice. For example, farmers did not lead the small sat revolution that's democratized the use of satellite imaging for farm management. They did go "wow!" when the option was presented to them, but technologists saw the use case (and its immense utility) before most of their customers did.

You mean we can’t grow food asking an LLM?

Margins start improving fast when you turn that fruit into booze. Licensure of course is an issue but many americans are making good money today selling moonshine locally without any of that.

Music industry version goes something like: how to get a million dollars making music? Spend 100 million

I grew up in NW lower Michigan. Cherry and other fruit tree country. Orchards need a lot of labor to maintain to get marketable fruit. I've seen several go wild and become deer feed. Also, they don't really scale as the grow as you need to spend more on infrastructure. Orchards now plant dwarf rootstock. This results in trees that bear fruit quicker but don't grow much larger that a human can pick by hand. They need a lot of care (water and pruning) relative to larger trees but the economics of the larger trees don't work as well as they take many years to bear fruit and then they need the infrastructure to prune and harvest because they are so big. It's not a simple thing at all.

You can always count on someone thinking doing some unscalable thing and it being "easy" will scale for an actual operation that needs to make money.

Farming is only easy for the people that have never farmed before.

You should tell all the PhD agronomists at ISU they are wasting their lives before it's too late.

Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.

I once lived in a house that had an apple tree in the back yard. Tons of apples at the start of the season.

But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard.

It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.

> For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.

What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning.

On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.

Scaling crops is not like scaling software.

Perfect showcase of aforementioned city boy hubris, equating a small home garden with some trees to a modern day farming operation.

Growing 100 potatoes is not even in the same stratosphere of complexity and logistics as growing 100,000 potatoes.

As long as you have a dozen potatoes, some human poop, a sample of earth soil for necessary nutrients and bacteria, and rocket fuel to burn to make water, it should be pretty easy.

> There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley

Meh results oriented thinking. Elon revolutionized rockets and electrical vehicles with 0 previous domain knowledge.

In another timeline both concepts fail and he's just another clueless guy who blew a bunch of money on ideas outside his domain - doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.

There is indoor lettuce I can buy at my supermarkets that is "zero pesticide" (you can just google it and find several, don't want to post any sort of links to products here).

I suspect it's hydroponic.

what's the real progress, though?

I'm a midwesterner originally and I'm genuinely curious what you're referencing.

All the companies in this space go out of business. Who in the Midwest is doing well?