Comment on James Dyson reveals the future of farming
LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
600G of strawberries retails for £4.50 (Tesco). If this whole setup cost only a million pounds, a producer would have to grow 133,333,332G worth of strawberries to pay it off, and this assumes nothing breaks (ever) and that there is some way to harvest that many strawberries without paying labor, packaging, licensing, and other costs. I feel like this was a cool tech demo but that’s about it
samc@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Not saying I disagree, but out of curiosity I looked up the yield of a conventional strawberry field, which is apparently 15-25 tons per hectare, or 11-18% of your threshold.
I agree that this would likely never be economically viable for strawberries, as I imagine it’d cost way more than £1M for a “hectares worth” of this setup.
More importantly, I don’t consider strawberries vital to our food security, unlike Dyson
sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 3 weeks ago
I think the price will come down now that they have a proof of concept.
samc@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Yes, but it’s still competing with a field full of dirt. So the value add has to be pretty substantial to justify any cost.