What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
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 forestsSo 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