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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scaling crops is not like scaling software.

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.

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.

what's the real progress, though?

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

Right, of course, excessive concentration of wealth is the only thing preventing another Bell Labs or Xerox PARC from bringing us tomorrow's future today.

Right, because so much innovation comes from places with super high taxation in Europe. Give me a break.

It's just the default argument someone uses when they have nothing of substance to offer to the conversation

Finite resources (mostly, peoples' time) are expended.

How exactly would one "hoard" money these days? Even if it's just sitting in a bank, that still translates to getting lent out at whatever interest rate that bank charges.

So just because it's better than nothing we should consider it good enough?

If all the wealthy would band together to spend their money on convincing every farmer to write software instead, then we'd all starve

they call that "velocity" of money? it means a rate at which money circulates in some wider way.. it is well-known in some theory circle IMO

The article specifically says that he had tech CEO's running the project.

The mistakes they made also seem pretty fundamental to farming; things like:

1. they didn't consider that a greenhouse designed for the desert wouldn't work in Hawaii

2. solar panels need to be installed differently depending on their location and never see the theoretical power generation in practice

3. immature/mature plants were growm right next to each other in a way that spread pests

4. they bought marijuana greenhouses without considering that it is grown so differently from other standard crops.

This is pretty basic stuff that should have been caught by someone with knowledge of agriculture. This seems to indicate that while they had a really smart team, they made the mistake of assuming that general AI/robotics would map 1:1 to the problems of agriculture.

The success rate of university research should have been the ultimate warning sign that you shouldn't dump half a billion into "solving agriculture." Progress in established fields like agriculture is expensive, time consuming, and (usually) incremental.

The thought that you could do all of that at once and outcompete an approach that has been refined for thousands of years is wild. Kudos to them for dreaming big, but I just don't see why they thought they had an edge here outside of "AI can solve any problem" hubris.

Per the article it sounds like the entire operation took place on his company-town Hawaiian island of Lanai, so...kinda, yeah, that is what I think. I'm sure he had a small staff, but my instinct is that most of the expenses were capex and self-dealing.

Government's ability to publicly fund research is directly related to how much it can collect in taxes.

With wealth being hoarded by individuals at unprecedented rates and taxes lower than they've been at almost any time in the country's history, there has certainly been a shift away from public research toward private research.

There are no instances in the history of the world where the wealthy, out of the goodness of their hearts, have solved hunger, childhood education, funded research programs at scale, provided safe drinking water, etc. These things are handled by government. Government is far more efficient at this than hoping rich people act in the public’s best interest.

Until this administration funds were spent at the behest of Congress and allocated through procedures that were set up. There is no evidence of widespread misuse of those funds. Of course having an asshole concentrate power in themselves will lead to bad governance.

The top .1% fund very little research. Therefore it is much more efficient for society in the form of government to fund research. We should not rely on the benevolence of a few rich assholes to have research programs.

Vastly most of basic research is publicly funded.

USAID spends ~$2B p.a. on food from US farmers, I assume the presumption that without that backdoor subsidiary farms making less money will be cheaper. Though total output value is ~$200 p.a. so that’s %1, but price is set at the margin so actual loss could be greater.

I think this loss might already be less than the loss from the effects of ozempic.

Edit: looking at total US farm subsidies from taxpayers is around $30B which is ~%15.

Will see if I can scrounge up some links, but farmers are paid (just an example, there are many environmental and other programs) federal money to do stuff like leave strips of land uncultivated to reduce fertilizer run-off from fields. These payments are stopped and farmers are left to foot the bill. Also, technically, if a contract is for 3 years and a farmer is 1 year in but decide to stop because the money isn't coming in, now the farmer is in violation!

On a related note: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162502

I think the idea is that farm subsidies potentially being cut would make land available. That would take time.

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