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Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

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Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#91

Post by nicholas73 »

llukas wrote: post #71
woah wrote: post #68

Earlier 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! :)

This is not exactly correct. The link explains why by breaking down the stages of efficiency loss. The solar panels only mitigate the first step, so you are look at 22% vs 47% for plants. Then, the 22% is not including losses from converting the electricity to lighting (or heck, the energy to create those panels in the first place).

LEDs can select the most favorable wavelengths however so maybe it can approach parity again.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#92

Post by jsilence »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #82

I 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 anywhe…

Humans have been farming for thousands of years. A lot of the required thinking has been done and the results are beeing taught by agricultural schools. Sustainable integrated farming is possible today. Our department is in a project researching why these methods are not more widely adapted by the farmers (project in Germany).

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#93

Post by mulmen »

markdown wrote: post #63
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?

Meat (aside from fresh fish) is rarely flown.

That’s not really the point. Unless you go grocery shopping at the (air)port something else brings the goods to your store.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#94

Post by jsilence »

nordsieck wrote: post #11
pascalxus wrote: post #4

Why don't they just do it without all those expensive lights and equipment, that's where all the biggest expsenses are. Just straight hydroponics with vertical farming. am i missing something? EDIT: I mean, do it outdoors with vertical farming, either on rooftops or around offices or parks or just outside the city (better there than 6000 miles away). the vertical aspect of it would still help reduce costs since real-…

1. Clean room farming means no need for pesticides 2. LED lights are pretty efficient, and they provide another avenue for optimization (e.g. color, intensity, timing, etc.). Whether or not those optimizations are financially effective is probably situationally dependent. 3. LED lights provide latitude independence. No idea if this is a serious reason, but I could see it being of interest to Iceland.

1. is a common misconception/myth. even if you manage to keep the bugs out, which is really hard and expensive, you still have to deal with fungii. good luck with trying to filter out those.

2. LEDs are not more efficient than double ended sodium light lamps. max efficiency seems to be around 50%. So the other half goes to heat waste which has to be managed. climate control and especially temperature control is an issue in indoor farming.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#95

Post by mulmen »

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…

> 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.

How does the lamb get from the port to the grocery store? Is the port not roughly equidistant from the point of sale as the local farm? How is the “fancy organic farmers market” less efficient to ship to in the last mile before the point of sale?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#97

Post by mulmen »

tathougies wrote: post #77
mulmen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The black leaf thing is interesting. Is that an oversimplification or do plants really only absorb visible light?

Plants only absorb very particular aspects of light. As far as I remember, it's only visible light, yes. More information here: http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7A.html Hydroponic lighting is optimized for those particular wavelengths in the ~450 nm and ~650 nm peeks. Some plants absorb additional wavelengths, and could likely be targeted with other lights. The key though is that chlorophyll are like mitochon…

That’s really interesting, thanks for the explanation. Makes me think of tuning LED lighting the same way a mechanic might set spark timing. Obviously in reality the right lighting for a plant is known but it’s neat to be able to see the effect.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#98

Post by throwaway2048 »

rorykoehler wrote: post #73
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…

There is a pretty good case to wean us off cereals. They aren’t the best diet health wise. We only consume so much because they are calorie dense and easy to grow.

you have to replace those calories with something, and it makes no sense if the something has 100x the production costs for what returns exactly?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#99

Post by lightedman »

rorykoehler wrote: post #74
keithnz wrote: post #47

Earlier 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

There are plenty of crops which are actually more wasteful and yield less (or hit an ROI wall which is unfavorable) when grown in hydro rather than in regular soil. Wheat is one, corn is another, barley is another (however, the two smaller grasses, just as fodder grass, are quite efficient when grown hydroponically and indoors, with a rapid turnaround time.)

Hydro isn't a fix-all solution for crops.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#100

Post by mcbits »

nicholas73 wrote: post #91
llukas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaand this is true! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency 1-2% of best plants vs 22% of best commercial panels! :)

This is not exactly correct. The link explains why by breaking down the stages of efficiency loss. The solar panels only mitigate the first step, so you are look at 22% vs 47% for plants. Then, the 22% is not including losses from converting the electricity to lighting (or heck, the energy to create those panels in the first place). LEDs can select the most favorable wavelengths however so maybe it can approach parit…

I wonder if it's really necessary to convert the light to electricity as an intermediate step. I'm imagining a filter that's mostly transparent but has a fluorescent coating to convert UV to visible light that the plants can use, effectively brightening the sun in the useful part of the spectrum. Unfortunately Google is giving me the wrong kind of results for "fluorescent filter".
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