Great advice, perhaps I can share some personal experience.
I had a similar experience working with a large agricultural company, where we developed a track-and-trace system to manage their entire workflow. This system provided them with insights into all aspects of their processes. They gained full insight into their margins, mass-balance and quality control, from field to fork.
Our agreement included the agreement that we would own the system, with the option to eventually resell the system in the market, ensuring we could establish a company to support the system after development was completed. As you don't want to loose the knowledge after the system is finished and don't want to have a complete team of developers on your payroll.
We only developed the components that were crucial to the business process, relying on existing software packages, such as the accounting system, and ensured seamless integration between them.
One approach that worked really well for us was working on-site and providing support to the people using the system. This was invaluable in resolving issues that users were experiencing, and it also kept us focused on delivering quality—otherwise, we would be the ones responsible for providing support.
Please note that if you begin development, don’t expect the first version to be the final one. This was a major pitfall for us. The first version was good but not future-proof. Only after developing the second version, essentially a complete redesign and redeveloped from scratch, did we achieve the best solution for the business.
Ensure you maintain an open dialogue with the development team and allow for quick iterations. For us, a significant challenge was aligning expectations. Budgets were tight, and expectations were high, which created a high-pressure environment, that worked great for us and helped us focus. However sometimes this led to a lack of appreciation for our work, as expectations where not met. Keep in mind that developers think differently from business owners. We addressed this by having a technically proficient, data-savvy production manager in the company who understood most of our challenges and helped realign expectations.
Unfortunately for us, the company we built this system with didn’t respect our contract, preventing us from distributing the system and killing future opportunities. This resulted in legal action, which didn’t end well for us, as the company was much larger. We were naive in thinking we could make it work, assuming it would be in the best interest of both parties, but they didn't share the same intention.
Interesting article, however not as unique as the author presumes. We have an even larger naviduct [1], that also acts as a lock between two large lakes in the Netherlands.
Since I started working as a freelancer, I'm using PaymoApp [1], it's great for managing projects and tracking time for these projects. You can easily invoice these hours to your clients, with based on the projects you have defined. The best part for me is the ability to easily track time for my projects, as I'm working on different projects.
For accounting, PaymoApp doesn't offer full accounting services. I just started using Snelstart [2] a by and for Dutch market developed accounting platform. The best part of this application, is the integration with my accountant, he can monitor my administration 24/7 and this saves me time and money.
Depending on your usecase, a quick setup would be to use https://auth0.com/ They have a lot of documentation and samples to get started.
We have implemented it for authentication with a Asp.Net Core webservice, with a REST based API. Authorization is also possible, either by working with the JWT token scopes, or using the Auth0 app_metadata.
The volume weight ratio of leafy greens, is much higher compared to tomatoes. Second the shelf life of leafy greens is lower compared to fruit crops.
In respect to transportation costs, shelf life and transportation distance, it makes sense growing these crops near their distribution points.
Second not to forget the benefit of CO2 reduction in urban area's, as there is less and less space for nature in urban areas.
The only downside is the energy usage, this has been reduced using LED lighting, but is still compared to traditional greenhouse or open-field growing.
According to some researches[1], city residents already generate less CO2 per capita, because they live in a densely packed area and can use resources efficiently (e.g., subways). It makes much more sense to keep people closer to each other and keep farms farther away. (After all, cabbages only have to be transported once in its lifetime. Human beings move in and out every single day.)
This is true, but it's offset by the suburban sprawl around them. Not everyone who works in the city, lives in the city, so there's longer commutes, etc.
I have read some Dutch research which showed tha tomatoes grown in Spain had significantly lower CO2 emissions than the same tomatoe grown in the Netherlands, including the transport to the market, which I think was in the Netherlands. I have the paper (in Dutch) lying around somewhere.
The main reason was that the Dutch heat and light their horticultural crop and the Spanish did neither (or much less). The Durch have significantly higher yield per sqm, which is necessary, as their infrastructure (greenhouses, land) is much more expensive. It is slowly changing, as the Dutch are building low energy greenhouses now, but I am not certain if it is fast enough. The greenhouses in place are relatively expensive infrastructure to replace and the profit margins are negligible at the moment.
From an environmental point of view it is tricky, as the Dutch use a lot less pesticides on their horticultural crop than the Spanish do. So it us not all obvious what is better or worse. Although I read recently that in total the Dutch use more pesticides than any other European growers, but I think that is on outside crops, not those in the greenhouse.
> Does that mean the 'buy locally' idea has little climate impact?
No, buy locally has a large climate impact - only not in the direction you think. Local uses much more energy than non-local.
Local has no environmental benefits whatsoever - only negatives.
The only thing it has going for it is some nebulous social benefits of knowing your farmer.
I avoid local because it means the produce was grown not in the climate where it grows best, but rather forced (i.e. lots of extra resources) to grow near me.
Even if it's in season doesn't mean your climate is the best place to grow it.
If it was the best place, then it would be competitive on the open market, and produce from your area would be the primary produce on the market - without any hokey social movements.
That's only true if you want to claim that the "best" place to grow $randomFruit cannot be more profitably used doing $randomThing. Downtown San Francisco could be the world best microclimate for tomatoes but it still probably wouldn't be worth using the land for that instead of an apartment.
The farmer pulling a turnip trailer thirty miles to the local Friday Farmer's market with an F350 dually can easily consume more energy and produce more CO2 per turnip than one shipped at industrial scale half round the world. The "last mile" can often be the least efficient.
This can theoretically be more efficient than growing plants under sunlight. Chlorophyll mostly absorbs light in the 400nm to 700nm band which is about half of all the photons that hit lights. Even in that band ~24%[1] of the energy in them in lost due to the higher energy photons (closer to the 400nm side) being converted to lower energy photons.
So right there plants are only 25% efficient at collecting energy from photons. This is why you see indoor plants grown under red LEDs. Modern commercially available solar panels are about 21% efficient so that is actually getting close to plant can do (I'm not going to include inefficiencies in power conversion right now). Solar panels in the high 40% efficiency range exist, but they are crazy expensive and only used on things like satellites.
So using current (very advanced) technology we could actually get about double the plant output per area land by using the most advanced solar panels we have to collect light energy to power LEDs.
You're ignoring land use. You can't build a huge conventional farm in the middle of the city. You can, however, cover all the buildings with solar panels. This gives you land that supports a high population and grows food in the same place. Heck, since you're using LEDs you could put the vertical farms underground, giving every resident access to fresh vegetables right in their own building.
Well, my buddy and I were considering using for our automated hydroponics system, a wood pellet stove. It would provide heating, as well as saturate the air inside with more CO2.
Higher CO2 would, we believe, increase photosynthesis, decrease growing season, and make better tasting plants. We would use a tiny bubbler and a feedline from outside for O2 rich air for the fishes.
I had a similar experience working with a large agricultural company, where we developed a track-and-trace system to manage their entire workflow. This system provided them with insights into all aspects of their processes. They gained full insight into their margins, mass-balance and quality control, from field to fork.
Our agreement included the agreement that we would own the system, with the option to eventually resell the system in the market, ensuring we could establish a company to support the system after development was completed. As you don't want to loose the knowledge after the system is finished and don't want to have a complete team of developers on your payroll.
We only developed the components that were crucial to the business process, relying on existing software packages, such as the accounting system, and ensured seamless integration between them.
One approach that worked really well for us was working on-site and providing support to the people using the system. This was invaluable in resolving issues that users were experiencing, and it also kept us focused on delivering quality—otherwise, we would be the ones responsible for providing support.
Please note that if you begin development, don’t expect the first version to be the final one. This was a major pitfall for us. The first version was good but not future-proof. Only after developing the second version, essentially a complete redesign and redeveloped from scratch, did we achieve the best solution for the business.
Ensure you maintain an open dialogue with the development team and allow for quick iterations. For us, a significant challenge was aligning expectations. Budgets were tight, and expectations were high, which created a high-pressure environment, that worked great for us and helped us focus. However sometimes this led to a lack of appreciation for our work, as expectations where not met. Keep in mind that developers think differently from business owners. We addressed this by having a technically proficient, data-savvy production manager in the company who understood most of our challenges and helped realign expectations.
Unfortunately for us, the company we built this system with didn’t respect our contract, preventing us from distributing the system and killing future opportunities. This resulted in legal action, which didn’t end well for us, as the company was much larger. We were naive in thinking we could make it work, assuming it would be in the best interest of both parties, but they didn't share the same intention.