Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#61

Post by _rpd » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

grizzles wrote: post #50

nostromo wrote: post #28

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of…

Can't mirrors/fiber optics/windows instead of walls solve #2?

In the end you need just too much collection area - more than the square footage of each floor put side to side. It's easier to put the 'collection area' somewhere remote as solar panels and bring in the light as electricity. The energy cost isn't that big a deal compared to the labor cost.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#62

Post by oh_sigh » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:16 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #28

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of…

Regarding #2, I wonder if it may be possible to get greater than 100% efficiency here by panels absorbing a wide spectrum of light, but only emitting on the certain frequencies that are generally most beneficial for growing/fruiting plants?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#63

Post by markdown » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:21 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #51

shalmanese wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?

Meat (aside from fresh fish) is rarely flown.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#64

Post by mdorazio » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:27 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #51

shalmanese wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?

I think the parent comment is referencing the huge economies of scale you get on shipping things in bulk with respect to CO2 emissions. If you have 1,000 legs of lamb in a shipping container, the per-leg CO2 cost is low in comparison to one leg of lamb in a car, even if the distances are very different. A heavy truck gets maybe 6mpg compared to your car getting 25, but if the truck is carrying 1000x more items, the truck would have to go ~250 times farther to break even.

I'm not sure how it breaks out for air cargo (probably not great), but ocean and rail are both more efficient than trucks.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#65

Post by conception » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:29 AM UTC

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #54

shalmanese wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

While I could believe that this is true, I would love to see some evidence to back up this claim. You would also need to account for the entirety of emissions, including, as a previous commenter said, other emissions involved in the supply chain.

It's not true sadly. http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air...

If you go with a to of lamb for simplicity thats 10g/km. It's about 10km so 100,000g. The truck is like, let's go on the high end 100g/km and what, 100km? That's still only 10kg of co2. Unless of course I'm missing something.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#66

Post by mygo » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:29 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #41

dalbasal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points all. The aesthetic appeal of this sort of indoor farming, and the space-age-ness gives the topic a tendency to over-excitement. I'd also add (4) Mostly, urban/vertical/cubicle farms produce high quality/price leafy herbs & veg. It's not replacing vast cereal fields. That's a very small portion of agriculture overall, definitely by land use but also by most measures. All that said, the are real space-age-i…

Also, for these fast growing, relative high margin produce, having fresh product out of season that is near-local, I think has a demand.

I believe that this is a relatively reliable marker for whether 5-star restaurants will be in the area. quick on-demand access to fresh, never-frozen, produce. They also tend to go for out-of-season / exotic produce, which is doesnt need to be grown in end-world-hunger quantities.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#67

Post by mythrwy » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:31 AM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #18

xanthopan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. OTOH, it also means there's now a need for manual pollination.

1. Leafy greens don't need pollination. It's in your best interest to avoid flowering if you want product anyone will eat. 2. Very few food plants are dioecious, and the ones that are (like asparagus and dates) are either ones where the fruit don't matter or are not likely to be grown indoors

While #1 (and your general point) is correct monoecious crops still have to be pollinated if the product is a fruit or seed. The stone fruits for instance are monoecious with male and female parts of flower on same plant unlike marijuana or dates where plants are either male of female. But this isn't leaf crops as you mention.

In some species pollination occurs generally just with wind or movement (rather than insects), for example corn where the pollen falls down from flowers above onto the silks which are the female portion (sort of a vaginal canal if you will, i.e for every corn seed there is an attached silk). Or tomatoes which have closed flower and generally always self pollinate as the flower is blown or shaken with a very small amount of cross pollination on occasion. Pretty cools setup with these type of plants, massive reproductive efficiency through mostly self pollination but a little bit of crossing occurs as the occasional foreign grain of pollen gets from another plant so there is genetic variation.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#68

Post by woah » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:32 AM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #62

nostromo wrote: post #28

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of…

Regarding #2, I wonder if it may be possible to get greater than 100% efficiency here by panels absorbing a wide spectrum of light, but only emitting on the certain frequencies that are generally most beneficial for growing/fruiting plants?

That would require the solar panel to be more efficient at capturing solar energy than a plant

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#69

Post by flukus » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:34 AM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #64

mulmen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?

I think the parent comment is referencing the huge economies of scale you get on shipping things in bulk with respect to CO2 emissions. If you have 1,000 legs of lamb in a shipping container, the per-leg CO2 cost is low in comparison to one leg of lamb in a car, even if the distances are very different. A heavy truck gets maybe 6mpg compared to your car getting 25, but if the truck is carrying 1000x more items, the t…

The problem is that's only amortizing on side of the equation. If you were to pick up that leg of lamb and a dozen other things on the way home from work then the additional CO2 cost from the lamb itself is negligible.

It's like saying cars produce less emissions than bikes by including the manufacturing costs of the bike but not the car.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#70

Post by rorykoehler » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #28

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of…

Industrial farming is ravaging the land that could otherwise be used for ecologically positive purposes. What you say looks simple on the surface however when you take a holistic view of the biosphere much of it needs to be further interrogated.