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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?

#171

Post by maxerickson »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #168
mikro2nd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing: There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I, for one, can't wait to get an electrically powered car I don't have to drive. But the thing I'm not seeing is electrically powered farm machinery. I think people underestimate just how hard that problem is. These machines, when they're working at peak times of the year (planting time, harvest) are requi…

My forecast is that heavy diesel engines (excavators, farm equipment, ships, maybe trains) will be replaced by hydrogen power. Either fuel cells in the 100-800 kW class, or gas turbines for the megawatt to tens of megawatt applications. For the latter, you might need to blend hydrogen with e.g. ammonia to slow down combustion, but we'll get there.

Everything is easier with methane and even compressed natural gas has better storage density than liquid hydrogen (liquefied natural gas destroys hydrogen in energy per unit volume).

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#172

Post by usrusr »

rusk wrote: post #147
cjrp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (admittedly, very long) cable?

The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ... Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used. Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable f…

Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they would be lifting?

If this is possible at all, it could be an important base technology for a very wide range of new application fields.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#173

Post by AngryData »

typeliftr wrote: post #161
mikro2nd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing: There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I, for one, can't wait to get an electrically powered car I don't have to drive. But the thing I'm not seeing is electrically powered farm machinery. I think people underestimate just how hard that problem is. These machines, when they're working at peak times of the year (planting time, harvest) are requi…

Asking out of genuine curiosity, does it actually matter if harvesting takes 5 or 10 days? If electricity is cheaper, it might make sense for the job to take a bit longer but be cheaper? Human labour is not involved (with automated vehicles) so price should only be dependent on actual power consumption.

Yes, something like letting your crops get rained on just before harvest can ruin them and make them rot in storage. Although purposefully planting crops with slightly different yield times could alleviate the problem. Currently though crop harvests are a huge rush to get all of it collected as soon as possible because it all tends to ripen around the same time, if a few plants ripened or finished it usually causes surrounding plants of the same species to ripen too.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#174

Post by rusk »

usrusr wrote: post #172
rusk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very long cable sounds like a good enough reason to me ... Agricultural land is typically in remote areas, and equipment needs to be driven for miles often to get to where it's being used. Even if, lets say you do take the hit of the upfront costs introduce a heavy-duty power-grid to service all your land (thousands of hectares on many of the large-scale cases) - then you're still going to have to run the cable f…

Someone needs to run the numbers for a modular chain of wire-carrying drones: if you get rid of the batteries, what length of cable could a drone carry? How much power would that cable be able to transmit, how much of that power would be consumed by the cable-carrying drones? Just how light could we make the power electronics to feed the drones from the (obviously, for weight reasons) high voltage power lines they wo…

That sounds crazy.

The kind of heavy duty cabling you're talking about would be very very heavy.

Now, you're not only talking about powering your combine harvester or whatever but also an army of heavy duty drones?

LOL

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#175

Post by AngryData »

roel_v wrote: post #124
jaskerr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have data, but I do have anecdotal evidence to contradict #1. I live in upstate NY, where farm land is cheap (in relative terms). We are seeing an influx of Amish, who can no longer afford land in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (To be clear, they might be able to afford land, but at such a cost as to risk the enterprise and family. The Amish won't do that.) We are also seeing new farmers moving here from states such…

" where farm land is cheap (in relative terms)" To put this into context for me, what cost do you call 'cheap'? And that land they're being outpriced from, how much does that sell for? For comparison, agricultural land in the Netherlands is around 50-60k euros (60-70k USD) per hectare, so about half that per acre; in Belgium it's a little bit less but not much. When I look at those prices and do some back of the enve…

I don't know about that guy's area, but near me in Michigan, which has a similar climate as NY, you can find decent land for $9K per hectacre easy, possibly cheaper.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#176

Post by [deleted] »

mikro2nd wrote: post #163
cjrp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via a (admittedly, very long) cable?

Very long cables at normal supply voltages (240V/380V) suffer too much voltage drop over any distance (say) >150m. Remember that we're talking of multi-kilometre distances, not a mere hectare or two. Not only that, but anyone who has used an electric lawnmower on a larger area will tell you that cables are a fucking hazard to navigation when you're trying to move a machine trailing a cable. They constantly get tangle…

[deleted]

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#177

Post by AngryData »

T2_t2 wrote: post #57
pippy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vertical farming will only be economically viable with near free power and massive transport taxes. Nuclear power would be the only realistic viable option. Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment, vertical farming would be a smart choice for humanity. but sadly with out current perceptions of nuclear power and the stranglehold that globalism has, it will likely never happen.

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

Near 60% of the world's total crop yield is the direct result of artificial fertilizer, which uses methane/natural gas as a base reagent + large amounts of power. If it wasn't for the artificial fertilizer it wouldn't be that bad for pollution, but at the same time we would be looking at near 3x or more the amount of farmland to grow the same amount of crops.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#178

Post by AngryData »

brohee wrote: post #148
Arn_Thor wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Depends where you live. In a lot of the world's biggest cities in terms of population you've got to travel really far to find land. Probably still cheaper to transport the goods into town than grow it locally, but that comes at the expense of freshness, time, and taxing a freight network that could be used to transport other things. Not to mention places like the Vatican, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc, which don't rea…

To address your point two : a crystalline Si PV panel has 25% efficiency, and the best white leds are about 45% efficiency. So the sunlight->panel->led->light conversion does waste ~90% of the sunlight. This is made less bad by not lighting plants with white light but purple light, but clearly solar panel on the roof, plants indoor don't make much sense. Now, the reasoning is completely different if the electricity i…

Im sure it depends on the plant, as im basing this on weed growing info, but with the top economical growing LEDs take 35-50 watts per square foot. With vegetative growth possible down to 11 W/sqft but at a much slower rate.

At a cost of atleast $2 a per watt for lights (possibly up to $4 a square foot for industrial/commercial electrical rating) and assuming 35 watts per square foot, a 2000 square foot grow space, you are looking at $140,000 in LEDs alone. plus 70KW for 16 hours a day(+10% more for supply inefficiencies), that's about 1200 kilowatt hours of power needed to supply daily. Not sure how many panels that is but it has to be a lot.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#179

Post by gitgud »

rorykoehler wrote: post #80
vilhelm_s wrote: post #48

According to [1], lettuce grown by California farmers cost 993,567,000/84,000 = $11,900 per acre. According to this article, electricity and power costs $216,000 for a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm, or $313,000/acre. It seems hard to make that competitive. [1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

Electricity will essentially be free within 30 years

Based on what?... I have always thought that nuclear fusion would make electricity almost completely free though

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#180

Post by bewo001 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #168
mikro2nd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing: There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I, for one, can't wait to get an electrically powered car I don't have to drive. But the thing I'm not seeing is electrically powered farm machinery. I think people underestimate just how hard that problem is. These machines, when they're working at peak times of the year (planting time, harvest) are requi…

My forecast is that heavy diesel engines (excavators, farm equipment, ships, maybe trains) will be replaced by hydrogen power. Either fuel cells in the 100-800 kW class, or gas turbines for the megawatt to tens of megawatt applications. For the latter, you might need to blend hydrogen with e.g. ammonia to slow down combustion, but we'll get there.

I've read somewhere that bio fuels make a lot of sense for powering agricultural machinery, while they'd be disastrous if we tried to power all cars with them.
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