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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?

#201

Post by cmrdporcupine »

oblio wrote: post #153
olly67 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If that were true modern industrial agriculture would self-destruct within 5 years.

IMHO modern industrial agriculture isn't using the soil ( in the strict definition of soil) anymore. It is basically just using the ground as a growing medium and then providing the nutrients that the soil would provide through applications of nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium.

Every year I watch the sand from the farm next door runoff in spring rains into the ditch, which ends up in the creek across the road, which then runs down into Lake Ontario. There's no soil left. On almost all the farms here. But they can still grow things through 'artificial' means.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#202

Post by dredmorbius »

philliphaydon wrote: post #183
mikro2nd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We run trains over multiple kilometres with overhead wires why can’t we do it with tractors???

Trains are linear. Tractors and harvesters are areal.

You square the delivery line requirement.

A 1,000 km electric traction rail line needs 1,000 km of cable. (Or 2,000 km for a two-tracked system.)

A 1,000 km * 1,000 km area of farmland with power gridded every 100m has 10k * 10k or 100,000,000 km of delivery cable.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#203

Post by audunw »

mikro2nd wrote: post #128
rmason wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a word no. I spent twenty years as a fertilizer agronomist and I'm very familiar with the costs of producing a crop. The numbers simply do not work. Even when they tried in Detroit and got buildings for five cents on the dollar they couldn't make it work. The investors funding these enterprises do not understand agricultural economics. I keep investigating these stories looking for some kind of 'breakthrough tech'…

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…

Is this really that important though? I haven't numbers that indicate that farming machinery is such a big share of the oil consumption.

My thoughts on these things is, if we can cut 90% of gasoline/diesel use with BEVs and PHEVs, then the last 10% could feasibly be fueld by renewable hydrocarbons. The development after that is up to the markets.. probably pure BEV will be preferred over time as batteries get better and we develop new solutions.

Why would you need three to five packs? A pack can generally charge as fast as it can discharge.. you should only need two if you have a fast charging system.

The problem is if the machines is only used part of the year. For the cost of a battery pack to make sense, it should be used as much as possible. If it's idle for large parts of the year and it can't be used for anything else, it'll be hard to justify the cost. Maybe they can double as grid storage?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#204

Post by ryanmercer »

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.

Harvesting absolutely matters about time. 1-2 days can make a difference and many farms don't actually own the combines, there are companies (often families) that have fleets of combines and go from farm to farm during harvest season harvesting from sun up til sun down and moving on to the next client as quickly as possible not unlike the companies that do the same with bee hives.

Combines are EXPENSIVE, you can easily drop 600k USD on ONE combine and a class 9 (over 500 hp, basically the biggest) combine with a skilled operator will harvest 10-15 acres an hour depending on the crop, quality of the field, soil moisture etc. With over 900 million acres of active farmland in the U.S. alone...

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#205

Post by ryanmercer »

tomp wrote: post #194
AngryData wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I've been wondering recently if there's some way we could "hijack" this sort of signaling mechanisms that plants seem to have... E.g. artificiall encourage the crops to ripen sooner (i.e. when we want them to). The next step would be, to figure out how to grow just the parts of the plants that we need. I'm guessing internally, plants use some kind of hormone-like signalling mechanism that lets different parts of the…

I was thinking about this while driving Wednesday. I'm in a strength sport and have lots of friends in strength sports and a recent conversation with someone made me think "hmmm, we need to figure out the AAS for crops, what's the test-e dbol equivalent".

I think the problem is though, plants are pretty damn finicky and have relatively narrow conditions that will result in proper growth and fruit/vegetable production. The tiniest soil imbalance, too much sun, too little sun, too much water, too little water and blah.

The more important task at hand right now though is proper land management, we're quickly headed for another dust bowl, we are heavily relying on groundwater and depleting groundwater sources here in the U.S. (and especially in countries like India) and farmers are killing themselves at record rates.

We're about to be up shit-creek with a hole in our canoe in the next decade or two.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#206

Post by usrusr »

dmihal wrote: post #181
usrusr wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does it need to be drones? Would it be possible to use a very large cable system, similar to those TV cameras in football stadiums?

I like the idea, might be the best method to provide power to a consumer moving on a defined 2D surface.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#207

Post by gepi79 »

rmason wrote: post #106
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…

In a word no. I spent twenty years as a fertilizer agronomist and I'm very familiar with the costs of producing a crop. The numbers simply do not work. Even when they tried in Detroit and got buildings for five cents on the dollar they couldn't make it work. The investors funding these enterprises do not understand agricultural economics. I keep investigating these stories looking for some kind of 'breakthrough tech'…

"no" to what ?

IMO nostromo is right in all points and probably even agrees with you.

IMO expensive vertical farming in cities works for expensive vegetables and spices but not for crops.

IMO indoor farming is the future of food production because it is efficient (perfect indoor climate, water, automation, less pests and pesticides, less herbs and herbicides) and allows genetic engineering of food producing plants or microbes without risk of contamination of or by the environment.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#208

Post by jcranmer »

xg15 wrote: post #162
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.

So: CO2 for meat from NZ: Shipping + last mile CO2 for locally produced meat: last mile How is meat from NZ producing less CO2 than locally produced?

You're using one (18-wheeler) truck for all of the different kinds of food for the last mile in terms of distribution center-to-supermarket, but one (pickup) truck each for the different sources for the farm-to-farmer's market. Not to mention that the distribution center is likely closer than the farms.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#209

Post by tzahola »

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…

Good idea. If we could control those drones via a blockchain-based AI, it could be a killer product!

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#210

Post by nradov »

rorykoehler wrote: post #78
busterarm wrote: post #56

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw "Vertical Farming Won't Save The Planet"

The title of that presentation is ‘turning fossil fuels to food’. Fossil fuels are over, finished so the video is probably not forward looking. I will watch it later anyways ...

Fossil fuels will continue to be heavily used for hundreds of years, although the rate of consumption growth may start to trend down.
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