The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms. Employing aquaponics technology to cultivate microgreens such as kale and mustard, the controlled-environment agriculture business was supplying Whole Foods Market in the New York City area.
Getting off the ground with a farm in Brooklyn, in 2020 Upward Farms revealed a new growing facility in the same borough. At the time, the company said it had just received $15m in fresh funding, including from Wyoming-based venture-capital investor Prime Movers Lab, taking financing to $20m.
“It is with a heavy heart that we are announcing that Upward Farms is closing its Brooklyn headquarters farm and will cease to operate in the vertical-farming sector,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matthew La Rosa wrote on the opening page of their website.
“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex – as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged.”
Vertical or indoor controlled-environment farming is capital intensive, requiring external funds to finance the technology and running costs, including artificial lighting in some cases to supplement daylight. Most, if not all, companies involved in the sector are unprofitable in what is still a relatively nascent industry requiring scale and investment to remain viable and compete with traditionally grown crops.
I suppose US$ 20 million is a small price to pay to discover that raising salad greens in a high rise in New York City with artificial light and pumped-in irrigation isn’t a viable business model. When the company raised its last, doomed, round of financing, it issued the following to the press.
Scale, productivity, and efficiency in the industry have remained limited by biology. What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.
Isn’t it wonderful that now, in the Roaring Twenties, there are computer programs that can automatically generate bullshit like this? — “biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel”, indeed.
A woman in south-west France, who received a telephone bill of nearly 12 quadrillion euros, has had the real amount she owed waived — after the company admitted its mistake.
Solenne San Jose, from Pessac outside Bordeaux, said she received a huge shock when she opened the bill for 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros (£9.4qn).
This is nearly 6,000 times France’s annual economic output.
She had requested her account be closed after losing her job last month.
The former teaching assistant said she “almost had a heart attack. There were so many zeroes I couldn’t even work out how much it was”.
The phone company, Bouygues Telecom, initially told her there was nothing they could do to amend the computer-generated statement and later offered to set up instalments to pay off the bill.
In the end, the company admitted the bill should have been for 117.21 euros only, and eventually waived it altogether.
“vertical farming” because if you build up rather than out the Sun will oblige you by changing the angle of PAR incidence. And, besides, who needs calories when you can just eat garden greens and extend your life with calorie restriction? Brain take too much power? No problem. Shut it down.
I was dealing with the misallocation of capital to these morons over ten years ago and ended up writing a blog post:
The Algasol photobioreactor patent is just one of a list of techs that The Great and The Good, if they were serious about technological civilization’s footprint, would long ago have thoroughly investigated if not invested in. It is all but certain in my mind that the real reason “global change” is promoted as an issue is its promise of centralizing power – regardless of whether it is a real threat.
If the Devil Klaus is for it, you can bet that the problem announced is A) not an actual problem and B) that some monied interest is about to make more money.
Given the mysterious shortages of controlled substance pharmaceuticals, it’s fortunate Jan’s hospice ended in September '22 with her death because nowadays even hospice care is randomly denied access to morphine for patients in the death throes. I say mysterious because, while everyone has an opinion, no one knows what is causing these random “shortages”.
One pharmacist told me this is affecting even antiobiotics and thyroid medications – not just controlled substances!
WTF???
Here’s a theory:
Several years ago I learned that the forward-deployed cartel soldiers on US soil in the guise of “doing jobs Americans won’t do” have a plan for the collapse that involves gaining military control of all pharmaceutical warehouses in the urban areas. With China supplying the raw materials for Fentanyl to the cartels, maybe what is going on is merely a reflection of the increasing control the cartels have over Washington DC. I mean, if your “national security” is more interested in controlling your own population than it is in controlling access to your territory, it only makes sense that the “roll-up of criminal organizations” would, at some point, flip the definition of “criminal organization” so that cartels are doing a roll-up of the criminal government.
Why bother gaining military control of the warehouses if you can get control of the civilian government, start manufacturing pharmaceuticals – all pharmaceuticals with China supplying the raw materials – and force everyone into the formerly black market to legitimize the new, foreign, government?
Basically, a school shooting is how any 5-cent terrorist can get worldwide media attention. In contrast, if media coverage focused on the firstresponders, a different type of people would get ideas instead.
Ironically, the shooting happened at the school named after the founder of the main Communist newspaper in Serbia, one that also incited the 90’s Balkan wars.
CNN covered that because the first responder was unarmed and pitted his life against a proven murderer in the process of mass murder. This is not unlike the Hollywood movie trope in which a single heroic individual defeats an entire gang – sometimes an armed gang – in close combat. The message in the former case is that no one needs to be armed – just heroic. The message in the later case is that no one should think about the asymmetric war going on in civilization whereby populations of congenital individualists are systematically digested by populations of congenital collectivists.
Somehow I kind of knew this was going to happen before too long. From Markets Insider, 2023-05-03:
A $1 trillion platinum coin could prevent the US government from defaulting on its debt without making inflation worse, according to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.
The idea behind the coin is for the Treasury use its authority to mint platinum coins and create one with a face value of $1 trillion that gets deposited at a Federal Reserve account to pay bills while lawmakers remain deadlocked on lifting the debt ceiling.
Some economists have criticized a $1 trillion coin as “unworkable” and an unrealistic solution that could worsen inflation.
“But it wouldn’t be that at all,” Krugman said in a Twitter thread on Wednesday. “The Fed would surely sterilize any impact on the monetary base by selling off some of its huge portfolio of US debt,” he said, suggesting the Fed would likely sell $1 trillion worth of government bonds.
The last time these poindexters floated the idea of a trillion dollar coin (it was proposed in 2011–2012, endorsed then by Krugman [who may be the only person on the economic scene who is more consistently wrong about more things than Jim Cramer—it was Krugman who predicted in 1998 that the Internet would have no greater impact on the economy and society than the fax machine] and Jerry “the blimp” Nadler), the national debt was “only” around 15 trillion, so a trillion dollar coin sounded pretty impressive. Now it’s double that, so maybe they’ll start thinking of making it a fiver this time.
(a) The Secretary of the Treasury may mint and issue only the following coins:
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(k) The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.
There are precise specifications for the size, weight, composition, and denomination for all other coins, but since the U.S. did not mint platinum bullion coins at the time, that was left to the discretion of the Secretary. Well, as one of my computer science professors said in 1968, “Give a programmer a glitch and he’ll try to drive a truck through it”, it appears that much the same can be said for crackpot economists and politicians. Platinum is the only metal for which this loophole exists, so that’s what they proposed.
