I'd go 1 level deeper than that. Agriculture isn't a real market at all. It is closer to govt infrastructure contract work, than selling a commodity. There are no wins, juts minimized losses.
Govts decide farming subsidies, allowable environmental damage & even exploitative immigrant labor practices based on the prices their voters would be willing to pay. This means that an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency will likely lead to reduced subsidies rather than increased profits. Also, the value of food is subjective. Increasing lobster or caviar supply will decrease its perceived desirability just as fast. So infinite scaling laws stop applying pretty quickly.
The one agricultural industry that is ripe for disruption is the fake-DOP industry. A lot of European premium processed DOP goods are expensive because they are manual labor intensive. If you can train some minimum-wage laborers in a 3rd world nation to do the manual labor, then you can sell practically-perfect Parmigiano-Reggiano or Jamon-Iberico for a fraction of their price. As of now, all the fake DOP products are vastly inferior (it isn't rocket science) and still incur huge labor costs because they're still produced in 1st world countries.
Premium sausages, Premium cheeses, Premium sliced meats are ripe for disruption. It won't replace these products in top-tier $$$-$$$$ restaurants. But the more numerous $-$$ restaurants would be salivating at the prospect of such a replacement.
I am already seeing some of this. ~~Columbian~~ (Colombian) Burrata is both cheaper and a better product for US customers due to faster supply chains. I'd like to see more of this from developing and underdeveloped countries with the right climate, soil and water table.
For those unaware: DOP == "Protected designation of origin", or in Italian, "Denominazione d'Origine Protetta". Effectively a form of terroir or appellatian
From a bakery equipment maker: "To meet the burgeoning demand for products that look and taste hand-crafted, bakers had to go back to the drawing board with their ingredients and OEMs had to retool their equipment to handle the different types of dough used to make these products. The success of this effort can be seen in the bakery department of your average grocery store."
How artisanal bread is really made.[1]
I didn't know Tetra Pak made machinery for artisanal cheese automation, but they do.[2]
I strongly disagree. Food manufacturing is a process with a massive amount of variables, which we can neither model nor control for in a factory.
Every batch of supplies is slightly different. The flavor trends vary by season, and even in the most controlled environment, things go wrong. Additionally, cooking/food manufacturing often involves extra 'learned' steps that aren't properly documented or understood.
It is not that cooking/food-manufacturing can't be automated. But perfect automation of it requires so many sensors, so much multivariate optimization, incredible amount of manual verification and so much modelling.... that it quickly becomes cheaper to just have manual labor balance those all by feel. As someone who worked in highly automated manufacturing lines, the machines we work with all are all faulty in their own little ways. Being able to have an intuition for what just-right looks like and being able to reproduce it manually, has continued to be a difficult problem for all manufacturers. This is doubly true with food, where the scientific processes for certain things are still unknown.
I have tried aged American Parmesan cheese blocks and they are objectively worse. Barbeque seems like the most automatable process, yet nothing comes close to a a real pitmaster's brisket. Sometimes the main task of food preservation is simply keen inspection & disposal of bad batches, which remains economically un-automatable.
Artisanal products aren't always better (sometimes you need steel extruded dried spaghetti & dusty parmesan), but they are often different & hard to reproduce with a machine.
Govts decide farming subsidies, allowable environmental damage & even exploitative immigrant labor practices based on the prices their voters would be willing to pay. This means that an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency will likely lead to reduced subsidies rather than increased profits. Also, the value of food is subjective. Increasing lobster or caviar supply will decrease its perceived desirability just as fast. So infinite scaling laws stop applying pretty quickly.
The one agricultural industry that is ripe for disruption is the fake-DOP industry. A lot of European premium processed DOP goods are expensive because they are manual labor intensive. If you can train some minimum-wage laborers in a 3rd world nation to do the manual labor, then you can sell practically-perfect Parmigiano-Reggiano or Jamon-Iberico for a fraction of their price. As of now, all the fake DOP products are vastly inferior (it isn't rocket science) and still incur huge labor costs because they're still produced in 1st world countries.
Premium sausages, Premium cheeses, Premium sliced meats are ripe for disruption. It won't replace these products in top-tier $$$-$$$$ restaurants. But the more numerous $-$$ restaurants would be salivating at the prospect of such a replacement.
I am already seeing some of this. ~~Columbian~~ (Colombian) Burrata is both cheaper and a better product for US customers due to faster supply chains. I'd like to see more of this from developing and underdeveloped countries with the right climate, soil and water table.