Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

Post by rusk » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:13 AM UTC

tremon wrote: post #145

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…

I disagree with your point 3): the reason shipping is considered cheap, has to do with low fuel expenses and people ignoring other costs like pollution. Since cargo ships travel over 90% of their time in international waters, they are not bound by any pollution laws and can get away with burning the dirtiest (and thus cheapest) fuel they can find. For example, international shipping accounts for 8% of the global SO2…

Post by oblio » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

olly67 wrote: post #75

T2_t2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment Has it? I thought that the worst thing for the environment was subsistence farming.

>Has it? I thought that the worst thing for the environment was subsistence farming. Who says that subsistence farming is bad? I've always heard that large-scale industrial agriculture is bad because it destroys the soil. Or that it breaks the soil up so it then blows or washes away.

Post by brainwad » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #144

mikro2nd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would also have to wean us off meat, including poultry. Not all meat, sure, but the bulk is cereal-fed in CAFO factory operations. Similarly you'd have to wean us off most of the dairy produce and dairy-derived food we like, because grass-fed is not going to produce the quantities we've grown accustomed to. Then you'd have to wean us off bread and beer, and a whole host of extracted starches and sugars that are u…

Most meat will be lab grown within a decade. Livestock meat will become a luxury

Post by hvidgaard » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

jsilence wrote: post #94

nordsieck wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

Post by oblio » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

XalvinX wrote: post #143

sinnet11 wrote: post #60

A biggest problem with farming these days is labor. Period. Growers (farmers) cannot manage 6000 acres of land. They rely on their crop consultants to tell them where to spray and what they need to spray. Once you start automate these tasks, e.g. crop scouting, then the grower and the consultant can use data to spray less and produce a higher quality crop.

If Trump gets his way, expect this 'problem' to reach critical levels, since the vast majority of it is done by undocumented people from Mexico, Central and South America. If every illegal immigrant was thrown out tomorrow, the price of lettuce would go to $15 a head, and nearly every other type of produce not automated would also skyrocket. Most fruit and many vegetables require a lot manual labor to grow, harvest a…