What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years.<p>I&#x27;m an industrial systems eng. w&#x2F; a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now)<p>Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd.<p>- You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms<p>- It takes 10-14 kwh&#x2F;1000 gallons of water to desalinate. More if it gets periodically polluted at an increasing rate.<p>- Large majority Agrarian populations exist because the countries are stuck in a purgatory of &lt;1 MWh&#x2F;capita annum whereby the country doesn&#x27;t have scaleable nitrogen and steel manufacturing.<p>- Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are some of the highest satiety lowest input to output ratio produce. High efficiency.<p>- In civilizations where you are at &lt; 1MWh&#x2F;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.<p>- Property, bankruptcy, and inheritance law have an immense influence on the farmer population of a country.<p>I remember telling some &quot;ag tech&quot; 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.