🚜 Farms, but 50-stories tall

By 2050, the world’s population will increase by 2.2B and 68% will live in cities, up from 55% now.

That’s a problem for food, which, unlike people, is staying still. In the US, for example, ~100% of lettuce grows in California and Arizona. The result: distance, time, and distribution account for 20%-35% of produce costs.

This imbalance is particularly notable in China, where rapid urbanization means the country now has 21% of the world’s population but just 9% of the arable land.

The solution: Build farms up

The next generation of farms are indoors and vertical. “Vertical farms” work like parking garages.

Many don’t use soil; they use materials and sensors that mimic natural environments.

Because they can operate 24/7 and recycle water, the efficiency is f*cking ridiculous: 350x the traditional farm harvest with just 1% of the water.

Midway through this year, indoor farming VC investments were already up 403.4% YoY to $2.7B.

Where’s this happening?

Globally. Major projects can be found in:

• Newark, where AeroFarms has a 70k-square-foot facility growing ~2m pounds of produce annually.
• Abu Dhabi, where the government is offering $150m in incentives for vertical farmers to come build.
• China, where plans are in place for a 51-story office tower doubling as a vertical farm that’ll produce enough crops to feed 40k people each year.

Sounds great. What’s the catch?

Economics, as always

It’s not cheap to build a high-tech super-farm, and it doesn’t make sense to grow every plant in one. One Cornell professor calculated a loaf of bread made from indoor-grown wheat would cost $11.

Costs will likely drop over time. At the same time, innovation will rise.

In 2012, ~60% of traditional farmers were older than 55. Last year, 70% of vertical farmers were younger than 40.

That’s not to say that older folks can’t innovate, but that younger folks are bringing some new ideas to a ~10k-year-old industry.

(Have any thoughts about vertical farms? Let us know here.)

Things are not going g-r-r-r-eat for Kellogg’s, maker of Frosted Flakes and other cereals, as its unionized workers remain on strike.

The strike includes ~1.4k workers

They’re members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) and work in cereal plants in Michigan, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania.

BCTGM and Kellogg’s were unable to negotiate a new contract before their old one expired on Oct. 5, per CNBC. Union members have been on strike since.

What’s the issue?

The main beef is that employees are classified as either “legacy” or “transitional,” depending on seniority.

Transitional employees make ~$12/hour less and receive less desirable health and retirement benefits, per HuffPost.

Previously, transitional employees could account for 30% of Kellogg’s workforce. Kellogg’s wanted to remove that cap, which BCTGM opposed.

The union also rejected an offer that let workers move to the higher pay level after 4 years but was limited to only 3% of a plant’s headcount.

Workers also want:

• Better hours: Workers say they worked extreme overtime — sometimes 16-hour days, 100+ days in a row — amid the pandemic, during which cereal consumption reached record highs.
• Better pay: The latest rejected offer gave legacy employees a 3% raise — but that’s lower than inflation.

What’s happened since?

Kellogg’s says it’s made 6 offers. After the union rejected the last one in early December, it announced it would replace striking workers, which President Biden said left him “deeply troubled.”

Meanwhile, people in support of the workers began spamming application sites with bogus resumes.

Autodesk’s move to the cloud has already been credited with pulling the industrial world into the future.

Now, the company is giving those same companies the tools to build the future themselves.

We spoke with Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost about the company’s big bet on Forge, its cloud development platform.

First — what the heck is a cloud development platform?

Forge is powered by APIs, which are best described as software intermediaries that allow 2 applications to talk to each other.

Autodesk has long offered its own applications to customers, but with Forge, it’s taking a page out of Amazon’s AWS playbook, allowing 3rd parties to build apps on top of Autodesk products.

The biggest implication, according to Anagnost, is that companies will be able to build verticalized applications that serve more specific needs than Autodesk’s core products.

Some examples include:

• Digital Twins: Moicon uses Forge to build digital twins for manufacturing companies — giving more visibility into factory operations and allowing teams to boost performance
• Integrating AR & VR: Resolve uses Forge to combine 3D design models with VR, where construction teams can hold immersive meetings to improve designs

As more companies use Forge…

… the platform will offer customers more features and more ways to tailor Autodesk’s software to specific projects or outcomes.

In other words, Autodesk’s platform play could soon become just as important as its move to the cloud.

(A roundup of our best reads from the last couple weeks…)

🥾 Feature story: Who gets left out of ‘bootstrapping’?

🗣️ The hottest new buzzword is…

🕵️ Employers are spying on workers… to their own detriment

🏓 The national pickleball gold rush

📱 What the heck is smishing?