nelsonic
commented
5 years ago Companies that control the world’s food supply: https://youtu.be/Iq-Qsy3mnd4
One of the Agribusiness Mega-Corporations will either invest in or buy Iron ox.
The existing investors https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/iron-ox will want the biggest payout and that won’t mean independence for the company... It will mean selling (out) to the highest bidder. It will mean that” intellectual property” for automated food production will continue to be concentrated in the hands of the elite and economic rent will be extracted from the people.
YCombinator is funding the distopian future for personal gain. 😢
ALL Technology related to the “base” of the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs should be Open Source/Hardware.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45769107/the-world-s-first-fully-autonomous-indoor-farm
everyone wants to be the first to claim full autonomy. having a carefully choreographed robot in a tightly controlled warehouse/lab is not "fully-autonomous" by any stretch of the imagination. they have automated some of the more tedious work of moving plants (seedlings) from nursery to grow-bed, but in no way is this fully automated. The BBC's Dave Lee (and producers) are clearly going for the headline as opposed to the facts. 🙄
The company featured in this video is "Iron Ox" http://ironox.com
To be clear: I think it's a good thing that Iron Ox are trying to make their farm commercially viable! But I feel they are attempting to "solve" the wrong problem! Building warehouse size robots is good for making the founders and investors rich(er). But it perpetuates the "agribusiness" model where growing is concentrated in the hands of the few who then continue to extract "rents" from consumers.
I favour the distributed/decentralised micro-growing approach where each community collectively owns their own means of growing grows their own produce on-site. This virtually eliminates "food miles", packaging and waste.
We will be exploring this further in the very near future! 😉 https://github.com/dwyl/home