this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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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...
Oh give us a couple of decades to screw up the environment enough we can't grow outside.