We now have the technology to dramatically reduce the price of organic food. Here’s how.
The Cost of Weeds
Much of the premium you pay for organic produce is because of weeds. We choose organic to avoid the toxic residues from herbicides, but the farmers still need to stop undesirable plants from choking out their crops.
Weeding organic brassicas and direct-seeded crops is particularly expensive, as critical passes must be done by hand. It’s labor-intensive work that is difficult to staff.
But now we have mature plant identification technology and precise guidance systems that can run on inexpensive hardware. We have affordable robotics that can zap, snip, or fry weeds, row after row, without anyone bent over in the sun all day.
The total cost of growing organic broccoli, onions, or carrots is between $7k to $10k per acre, according to UC Davis cost studies for organic vegetables. Weeding pressure varies widely between crops and seasons, but expensive hand weeding is required for many organic fields.
Broccoli farmers expect to pay up to $1,000 per acre for weeding, while onion farmers expect to pay at least that much, but often double.
Carrot farmers regularly pay the most to remove weeds. Up to 35% of their costs go to laborers often crawling through their fields on their knees, pulling weeds by hand.
A precise AI-empowered weeding platform can provide immediate savings to organic farmers, who could pass that along to the customer.
The Bigger Expense
Weeding is a significant expense, but it is not typically the primary farming cost. For many crops, whether they’re organic or conventional, the largest farming expense is the harvest.
Strawberries, zucchini, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and many other crops are hand-picked. Over 50% of the cost of farming this produce goes to pay for the harvest.
Crops such as zucchini and peppers are too delicate to be harvested with industrial machines. Plants like strawberries and tomatoes may have both ripe and immature fruit at the same time, so the picker must select only what is ready for harvest.
Industrial farming equipment doesn’t do soft hands and discerning eyes. So people are tasked with working long hours in the sun doing the repetitive work of picking produce by hand.
But now a delicate grip can be automated. We can build machines that recognize if a strawberry is ripe and pluck it without crushing it.
If we can efficiently automate weeding, harvesting, and planting these crops, we offset the majority of the farmers’ costs.
Farmers Cost ≠ Consumer price
The problem is, our real goal is dramatic reduction in the price of organic food. Even if we reduce the farmers’ costs by 70%, the customer will only see a fraction of that savings.
When you buy a head of broccoli at the store, you’re paying for transportation, refrigeration, logistics, packing, spoilage, the store’s overhead, and the farmer.
The percentage that goes to the farmer varies greatly. Around 35% of the price of broccoli ends up in the farmer’s account, according to USDA Economic Research Service price-spread data.
Carrot farmers get one of the largest cuts because carrots have a long shelf life and don’t need refrigeration or much processing. If we entirely automated the carrot planting, weeding, and harvesting, we might see a 40% drop in carrot prices.
But if a broccoli farmer had the same cost reduction, we might only see a 25% price drop.
The real economic magic will happen if you can automate these tasks with inexpensive technology.
AI-directed laser weeding systems already exist. But they can only move the bar so far because they are 20 ft wide and cost $1.2 million.
That price is only reasonable if a farmer has hundreds of acres to weed. And that’s true for a lot of farming equipment.
Equipment Shapes Incentives
A low cost AI farming platform could foundationally change where and how we practice agriculture.
Industrial farming equipment only makes sense if you have a huge farm. You can rent this equipment, but only in areas with other huge farms.
Since farmers need the space, farms are typically far away from the folks who will be eating their produce. They rarely meet their customers. They usually don’t have a relationship with the retail store that sells what they grow.
Big farms typically sell to a distributor (middleman) who pays the farmer a fraction of what the customer’s price will end up being.
And that’s how industrial farming equipment results in farmers taking such a small cut of the price, while John Deere eats further into their profits. With the dubious distinction of being both capital-intensive and low-margin, it’s no surprise that so few people are signing up to be farmers.
The Better Ag Business
If your farming equipment isn’t as wide as a highway and doesn’t cost as much as a private jet, the constraints shift, along with your needs and relationships.
SPIN (Small Plot Intensive) farmers like Curtis Stone have demonstrated this effect. SPIN focuses on high yields from small plots using low capital investment, often in suburban neighborhoods.
Instead of using large & expensive equipment, they use affordable walk-behind tractors and hand tools. This allows them to farm in populated areas where they can maintain relationships with their customers and skip the middleman.
The Equipment Shapes The Farm
Large tractors require farmers to plant in single file rows 40 inches apart. SPIN farming equipment is designed for densely planted beds, starting every 40 inches and running 30ft+, allowing them to grow up to 8 times more produce on an acre than traditional farmers.
SPIN farmers regularly net north of $50k on an acre or less. They’ve been known to set up on vacant urban lots and borrowed yards, delivering their produce directly to local restaurants by bike.
You can see the superior agricultural business model emerging as we stack:
- 100x less Capital cost
- 8x higher production density
- No middlemen
The customer benefits include:
- Fresher produce, which has
- Higher nutrient density,
- Heirloom varieties
- Knowing where their food comes from.
That’s the farming model we need to expand.
Automating SPIN With AI Robots
It’s been farming has an eight step process the farmer repeats across all garden beds. If we can create an affordable robotics platform that can automate most of the 8 steps, we can flip the script on agriculture.
Imagine if you can make six figures farming borrowed land with equipment cheaper than a Corolla.
Being a farmer would become a lucrative career path you practice in populated areas. It would no longer be a backbreaking job. And since the cost of entry is so low, there’s a low commitment level and you could easily pivot away from it later.
Much of the job would be delivering fresh food to happy customers. Instead of being alone on a country farm, you’d be out feeding your community.
The only way to dramatically reduce the price of organic food is to cut out the layers of cost due to industrial scale agriculture, move the farms to where there are hungry people, and create smart farming equipment that incentivizes becoming a farmer.
When agriculture becomes that local and that automated, organic produce will stop being a luxury. Healthy food shouldn’t be only for the upper class.
If we want everyone to enjoy organic fruit and veg, or to declare food a basic human right, we will need to apply this new technology to automate a form of agriculture that grows food where we find hungry people.