this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
177 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59347 readers
5016 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I never understood the economics of those Agtech.
The margins on vegetables are shit.
Consumers won't care that each of your potatoes had it's own email addresse, a twitter account and was monitored by an AI.
Farmers are not just redneck assholes who needed some MIT grad to tell them how to increase yield, there's already a huge agro industry and research and we've reached a point where the yield of carrots and others is pretty much already maximised. Assuming they are genius and get a 1% yield improvement that would be enormous.
A farm hand cost $25k a year, and engineer cost $150k and you haven't priced in the tech and the building...
So you basically get a business where the cost of operation is about 20 time higher (and that's conservative) than a guy with a plot of land and a tractor for sensibly the same yield (if not worse) and zero product differentiation in the market.
Well, I guess they just figured out the economics...
Perfect example of why worrying about the economic logistics in the face of climate collapse is complete fucking bullshit