Betteridge's law of headlines is relevant here.
Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
81–90 of 291 posts
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#82I still think it's quite cool. Even if it's crazy expensive right now, producing food factory-style in a very controlled environment should allow us to "software"-ize the entire process. Food as code. Which removes a big cost: thinking. Thinking is expensive.
Maybe we could grow food in a shipping container in a controlled environment. Then we can put a very precise cost on the production of food and deploy it anywhere, relying a lot less on weather and water availability. The ability to estimate costs accurately is itself very valuable.
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#83Maybe food in caves after The Event. Such as potatoes ;)
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#84There'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.
the amount of farmland area you could substitute with urban vertical farming is neglible. way below one percent.
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
we ( http://www.mywildeye.com/ ) are doing a lot of IoT stuff on the west coast of California, New Zealand, and Australia in the agricultural space. You can do a lot lot better with water usage simply by understanding what your water is doing.
You can do better but you will never beat hydro
yield of hydroponic wheat is significantly lower than conventional production in soil. Prof. Bugbee and team worked on this at NASA.
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The chart assumes you are moving 1 ton of material, so its 20kg of co2 to ship 1 ton of lamb 100km.
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#87There'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…
Would land and shipping both be cheap if we ceased to externalize a lot of the cost of each?
Both land use [1] and shipping [2] contribute significant fractions of our society's carbon budget.
[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/285/5427/574
[2] https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/shipping-emission...
That said, I'm not so sure about 2-story, LED-lit warehouses for growing food either...
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
in our model calculations the energy costs are in the same ballpark like labour. thus energy costs are the main culprit.
transporting "the light" from elsewhere to the crop has a ~90% loss (20% - 25% solar efficiency times transport losses of 20% times LED efficiency of 40% - 50%). so you need ten times the area elsewhere to be space efficient on a premium priced area.
also viewed from crop product pricing the economics simply don't add up. there are much more profitable things you can do on urban real estate.
(I'm working in the field of agricultural economics)
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would require the solar panel to be more efficient at capturing solar energy than a plant
Aaand this is true! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency 1-2% of best plants vs 22% of best commercial panels! :)
But you are not getting rid of the low plant efficiency. any other losses will simply come on top. nothing beats direct sunlight.
Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?
#90There'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…
The other big problem with this story is that they are looking at the retail price in the store and comparing it to a retail price that doesn't include the food distribution system. Farmers get a ridiculously small percentage of the retail price on food. The price per pound in a store is usually comparable (same order of magnitude) to the wholesale price per ton. The production cost for this tech is probably at least…
Totally agreed. And on top of that: ~70% of the farmland is used to produce animal fodder. Beef production is straining our agricultural system. If we ate less beef, we'd be able to farm the rest much more sustainable, even if it would be with lower yields.