[carbadtraingood]

They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with.

It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down.

So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.

[rexreed]

Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.

[pkrein]

Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state.

Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.

[rexreed]

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

[bshipp]

I've worked in agriculture my entire life, and seven weeks is a pretty good turnaround for fixing these types of problems. the next batch of issues they're likely to encounter is handling product with variations in moisture content that further bungs the system. Then it will be incorporating new feedstock from other crops.

Agriculture is the intersection of industrial mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over time as situations are encountered that exceed previously theorized boundaries/ranges.

I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can be planned for in advance.

[AlotOfReading]

Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather than a traditional industrial company and there's a recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather than places like the Midwest or even central valley. Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already lives in the bay.

[hinkley]

Why you wouldn’t do ag tech in Chicago is beyond me.

[0xbadcafebee]

Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

[hinkley]

There are less drastic options than Kansas that would work fine. Chicago has an international airport. Indianapolis as well (though it’s not listed in Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is). St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports besides those I’m less familiar with, but if you’re planning to process corn waste what you need is rail access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of the midwest and still maybe be able to find Bulgogi for lunch. The Quad Cities, Peoria, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Omaha.

[krallja]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_International_Air... ?

[stonemetal12]

The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.

[rexreed]

John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour, IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from starting an agtech company where the resources are if they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

To be honest, to me it sounds like a dream job.

[dbcurtis]

Oh for heaven’s sake. You can find a whole bunch of talented mech e’s and ag e’s all over the corn belt that already live there and like it. John Deere in Waterloo is just one name of many. My nephew works at Ag Leader (he’s an EE). There is a lot of ag engineering talent in the midwest, it is silly to try to recruit it here in Sili Valley.

This is like the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street light because the light is better than whete he dropped them.

[hinkley]

“Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?”

“I believe he did, Bob.”

[9dev]

If you rely on material that is scarce in one location but widely available in another, wouldn't it make sense to test where the material is abundant..?

[failrate]

They did.

What do you think the article was about?

Ordinarily, I do not reply to these kind of comments, but this article is receiving a lot of them along these lines. The comment breaks down to "Why did you not predict everything that could possibly go wrong before you started this new tech project?"

I hope that it is clear that it would be impossible to identify every problem before field testing. Even in commercial manufacturing, you will run up against novel problems and have to engineer a solution onsite, even though we have had factories for about 250 years.

When they start testing in a different state or country, they will discover a new crop that breaks their system and will go though this process once again. But now, they are more experienced, and it will probably be easier.

[carbadtraingood]

Wheat straw is a common agricultural waste product across the US, and if they can solve processing that they still win. It's not that they tested A for a product that will only process B. They tested A for a product that will eventually process A and B and C and...

Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now they've done that?

[liminvorous]

They want to be able to process both the material they prototyped with and the material they started with (straw) and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs), and probably any kind of plant matter that has less structural integrity than say, timber.

[truffdog]

Probably they want to handle wheat waste and corn waste long term. Seems like there should be plenty of both to go around

[ComputerCat]

Yeah it's definitely a bit peculiar. You'd think they could have done some more research into the makeup of the material they'd be processing, get a good understanding of the needs of the machinery...

[SV_BubbleTime]

I’m starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything completely careless to the historical realities of business where you have a product and process before investing tons into a system.

It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.

[rexreed]

Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't they be where their customers or resources are? Building something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and experience. This seems more like a university research project than a serious concern?

[pkrein]

Our customers are technology companies based in the Bay Area, check out the home page: https://charmindustrial.com

We delivered 90% of permanent carbon removals globally last year: https://twitter.com/charmindustrial/status/14511691760646430...

[tclancy]

Wouldn’t the reverse question then be, why hasn’t someone in the Midwest done this already?

[bluGill]

There are other companies working on similar things in the Midwest. It is a complex problem that farmers are very interested in because they see potential dollars.

https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-iow... https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid

[sumtechguy]

They may have already used that material for something else?

[seunosewa]

Like animal feed. Or tilling it into the soil to increase organic matter.