The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops • Hacker News Board

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#41

Post by ilaksh » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 11:27 PM UTC

jmgreen wrote: post #36

ilaksh wrote: post #13

Maybe work on high tech ways to grow high value foods like sweet potatoes, soybeans and wheat indoors. Aeroponics with additional support structures maybe.

Jason here, CEO at Edenworks. Sweet potatoes, soybeans, and wheat are very much the purview of traditional big ag. They're highly commoditized, which actually makes them not very valuable. Compare a pound of flour (not even wheat crop itself @ $0.50 retail) to a pound of salad greens ($10-15 retail) or a pound of basil ($15-45). The reason the latter products are so expensive is because they're delicate. They don't t…

OK, sorry, the word "value" is the issue here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/why-salad-is-s...

Salad greens are not very nutritious. They are good business though.

Its very very tough to do (impossible with current techniques), but local/little/vertical/urban/high tech ag needs to take on big ag in commoditized foods if we are going to increase food security and decrease water and energy usage.

Sweet potatoes, soybeans, and wheat are the type of staples that provide a good source of calories and nutrition.

Its sort of like Tesla saying they can only focus on luxury vehicles. At first that's true, but at some point the tech needs to break through to the larger market in order to make a big impact.

I don't expect you or any other high tech growers to take on that challenge though, because it is very difficult research and engineering and marketing and extremely hard (next to impossible) to make the numbers add up with so much commodity competition. But our current agricultural approach for commodities wastes water and land.

Until we get to that point its mainly just hipster wankery (like Tesla).

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#42

Post by rwallace » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

tcdent wrote: post #38

jmgreen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Jason Green, CEO at Edenworks. And aquaponics evangelist. Here's why we think aquaponics is the best solution to global protein (and vegetable) production. Tilapia are protein producing machines. They convert 1.1-1.3 lbs of feed to 1 lbs of protein in 9 months (some factors like temperature, feed rate at different stages of life, and other things affect this ratio). But here's the real kicker--by providing the ni…

Aquaponics is great from a numbers perspective. But so is Soylent... Myself, and other conscious humans, conscious of the consciousness in animals, are concerned about quality of life (this is not the same thing as Veganism). One example of a solution I deem unacceptable is raising rabbits for meat in stacked cages in an urban garage. (This has been advocated numerous times among various alternative food groups and I…

That's one thing I like about the idea of producing protein-rich food by the methods described in the article: it has the potential to cut down on the perceived need to subject caged farm animals to a lifetime of torture.

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#43

Post by lifeformed » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

tcdent wrote: post #12

rmah wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not use these techniques where land is cheap instead of on expensive urban rooftops?

Transportation has a large impact on the varieties and quality of food available. Excessive handling creates waste and even drives your shopping habits; damaged fruits and vegetables don't last as long on the shelf so you have to pursue 'fresh' food regularly. Growers choose varieties based on transportation before taste or health. It's not uncommon for someone harvesting their own root vegetables or apples to store…

Seems like it'd be easier to improve upon that transportation bottleneck instead of something as drastic as restructuring the whole system and growing in urban areas.

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#44

Post by tcdent » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 2:17 AM UTC

lifeformed wrote: post #43

tcdent wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transportation has a large impact on the varieties and quality of food available. Excessive handling creates waste and even drives your shopping habits; damaged fruits and vegetables don't last as long on the shelf so you have to pursue 'fresh' food regularly. Growers choose varieties based on transportation before taste or health. It's not uncommon for someone harvesting their own root vegetables or apples to store…

Seems like it'd be easier to improve upon that transportation bottleneck instead of something as drastic as restructuring the whole system and growing in urban areas.

Seems like it would be harder to re-engineer food transportation to be virtually shock-free. You'd have to revolutionize all packaging, sorting, loading and transport for each product.

Even handling when picking has an impact on shelf life; field workers aren't encouraged to be lax with their time.

As opposed to the alternative, where you walk a few steps to your garden and pick, sort, pack, transport, unpack a few minutes per day yourself.

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#45

Post by gus_massa » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 2:39 AM UTC

jmgreen wrote: post #35

asciimo wrote: post #23

Aquaponics proponents rarely mention that you have to feed the fish. The fish are essentially filters that reduce other matter (mostly other fish) into nitrates. An efficient system would remove these inefficient filters and add nitrates directly to the soil. Yes, you can eat the fish. But it takes 240 days to raise (feed) a tilapia to 1 lb of weight. There are cheaper and faster sources of protein. For example, soy…

I'm Jason Green, CEO at Edenworks. And aquaponics evangelist. Here's why we think aquaponics is the best solution to global protein (and vegetable) production. Tilapia are protein producing machines. They convert 1.1-1.3 lbs of feed to 1 lbs of protein in 9 months (some factors like temperature, feed rate at different stages of life, and other things affect this ratio). But here's the real kicker--by providing the ni…

I don't understand some of your claims:

> They convert 1.1-1.3 lbs of feed to 1 lbs of protein in 9 months

They eat 1.1--1.3 lbs of food each month during 9 months, that is 9x1.1 -- 9x1.3 = 9.9 -- 11.7 lbs in total and produce 1 lbs of protein? Or the eat in total only 1.1--1.3 lb of food during the 9 months an produce 1 lbs of protein?

> But here's the real kicker--by providing the nitrogen that crops need

The fishes don't fixate nitrogen. They can "free" some nitrogen compounds in their food, but the nitrogen compounds have to come from somewhere. IIRC only some bacteria can fixate nitrogen naturally, (i.e. transform some unuseful nitrogen from the air into useful nitrogen compounds, that may be used to build proteins). Some plants, like soy, are good host for these bacteria, but I never heard that fishes have a similar symbiotic relation.

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#46

Post by minthd » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 1:13 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #34

minthd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with growing vegetables and berries outside of cities in greenhouses?

They store shorter and lose a lot more nutrition in transit. They are more expensive to harvest but are more caloric dense in a given area. Its why raspberries are like 5 dollars a pound but bananas are 50 cents. One has a much longer shelf life.

But driving from the outskirts of a city to the inside, is just a 1 hour journey.

Re: The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops

#47

Post by profinger » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 1:32 PM UTC

jsolson wrote: post #18

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aquaponics uses much less water than traditional agriculture. And the plants don't require as much (any?) fertilizer because of the fish. And if people can pick their own vegetables, or pick them and sell/use them the same day, extremely locally, then you can select for taste instead of for transportation resilience. It's well beyond feel-good.

Possibly as or more importantly, you can pick only what you need. A huge fraction of the food produced today is simply thrown away.

On top of that just picture most of today's people. "Well I'll take 10 of these tomatos and sell 8 of them! Muahah!"