Investors Rebrand the Hole as Sustainable Waste Management
SAN FRANCISCO, California — Silicon Valley investors have found a potentially revolutionary business opportunity after Mexican agricultural authorities confirmed that avocado producers destroyed up to 52 tons of pest-infested fruit, as Reuters reported.
The opportunity is called burying things.
For thousands of years, farmers have gotten rid of damaged produce by digging a hole and putting it in the ground. Technology investors believe the practice could become a multibillion-dollar industry once somebody adds an app, a subscription tier and the words “artificial intelligence.” A startup called AvocaGone has closed a $300 million round to do exactly that, charging farmers to perform an activity they already know how to do.
Agricultural Waste Technology: Investors Discover Dirt Is Scalable
AvocaGone’s pitch describes its product as an integrated, vertically optimized, soil-based produce retirement solution. Farmers traditionally call this a hole.
A pitch deck obtained by a reporter lays out the plan on slide nine, under the heading “Market Opportunity.” It lists the addressable market as “every farm that has ever had a bad year” and describes the product moat as “the ground.” Slide eleven, “Retention,” reads in full: “Farmers will always have losses.”
The platform would let growers schedule crop disposal, monitor burial progress and receive a notification when the avocados have successfully entered the soil. For an additional monthly fee, farmers could unlock premium features, including photographs of the hole.
Investors were reportedly enthusiastic.
“The agricultural waste market is enormous,” one venture capitalist said. “Every year, farmers lose valuable crops. Until now, nobody has figured out how to make their losses more profitable for us.”
The company’s marketing emphasizes that customers will never own the burial software. They will only rent access to it, which lets the business collect recurring revenue from agricultural disasters.
Subscription Shovels: Mexican Farmers Are Not Buying It
In Michoacán, growers met the proposal with understandable skepticism. They have already absorbed heavy financial losses from the pest discovery, and under pest-elimination procedures affected avocados have to be discarded in ways that prevent further infestation.
A technology executive suggested farmers could improve efficiency by installing sensors on every discarded avocado. The sensors would track temperature, soil moisture, decomposition rates and the farmer’s emotional condition. One farmer asked whether the sensors would restore the money he had lost. The executive said the basic subscription didn’t include financial recovery, but that the feature would arrive in a future software update.
The Terms of Service
The user agreement for the AvocaGone app runs 41 pages. Section 14(c), titled “Outcomes,” states that the company “makes no guarantee that any avocado will remain buried” and that “photographs of the hole are provided for informational purposes only.” A separate clause makes the farmer responsible for “any hole-related disputes arising after hole completion.”
Sustainability Consultants Discover the Avocado Has a Carbon Footprint
The episode has also drawn in sustainability consultants. Growing avocados takes land, water, labor, transportation and supplies. Destroying a harvested crop means all of those resources were spent without producing their intended economic benefit. That’s a serious problem, and fortunately consultants have built an expensive vocabulary for it. The EPA’s guidance on composting and food waste doesn’t use any of these terms, which the consultants consider a gap in the federal approach.
Instead of calling the process waste, they recommend calling it accelerated agricultural resource redistribution. Instead of saying farmers are losing money, they prefer involuntary participation in regenerative circular agriculture. Instead of saying thousands of avocados were buried, they suggest announcing a major investment in decentralized organic material sequestration.
The avocados stay underground. The consulting invoice stays above it.
Government Agencies Ask for Documentation of the Hole
Pest controls exist to protect healthy orchards and valuable export markets, and nobody disputes that letting a dangerous insect spread would be worse than destroying contaminated fruit. The trouble starts when crop destruction grows an economy of its own. Contractors have to be hired. Equipment has to be run. Transport has to be arranged. Compliance has to be shown. Bills have to be paid. At the end of it, the farmer receives confirmation that his produce has been successfully converted into a financial loss.
One economic adviser suggested simplifying the process. “Instead of making farmers spend money destroying contaminated crops, the government could take the crops and mail them to the economists who say farming is easy.” The proposal was dropped when officials realized economists are unlikely to accept payment in beetles.
America’s Food Industry Wants a Piece of the Burial Business
Restaurant executives have shown interest too. If customers will pay extra for guacamole, perhaps they’ll pay extra for responsible avocado disposal. One restaurant floated a $2.95 Sustainable Avocado Remembrance Fee on every order. For $5.95, a guest could sponsor an avocado burial. For $12.95, a guest could receive a personalized message from the deceased produce.
A text message from one of the startup’s backers, forwarded to a reporter, shows how the company views the market: “These people already pay extra for ethically sourced napkins. The hole is an easy sell.” The company estimates huge demand among consumers who already pay more for organic packaging and water served in glass bottles shaped like water bottles.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has not commented on the round.
The Farmer Still Gets the Bill
What’s astonishing about Mexico’s avocado disaster isn’t that pests destroy crops. Farmers have fought insects since agriculture began. It’s how many industries can find a profit in somebody else’s loss. Tech companies can sell software. Consultants can sell strategies. Restaurants can add surcharges. Agencies can generate compliance requirements. Investors can fund an exciting new company built around digging holes.
The farmer already did the hard part. He grew the avocados, harvested them and hauled them. Then he paid to destroy them.
Silicon Valley’s great innovation is figuring out how to charge him every month for the hole.
Five Humorous Observations on the Burial Startup
- Three hundred million dollars. For a hole. My uncle dug a hole for free and all he got was a fence.
- The startup’s moat is “the ground.” That’s it. They’re defending a competitive advantage that’s been around since the dinosaurs, and somehow the dinosaurs never got a Series B.
- Photographs of the hole are a premium feature. I’d like to meet the guy who looked at a hole and said, “People will pay monthly for a better angle.”
- Forty-one pages of terms and conditions for burying fruit. The avocado has less paperwork than the person who ate the avocado at brunch.
- They want to put sensors on every avocado to measure the farmer’s emotional condition. Pal, I can tell you his emotional condition. He’s got a hole in his orchard and a consultant in his kitchen.