Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

eater.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 291 posts

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#211

Post by stevesimmons »

shalmanese wrote: post #45
ggm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) Shipping is cheap. No, thats an externality you don't care about. Its not cheap in social consequence terms. hauling food by road from centralized warehouses is a twofold sin. Firstly, its food miles and NO, CO2 and other burdens. Secondly, its why e coli spreads across the USA: too much centralisation of distribution. "cheap" food is actually at root, the problem. It needs to be affordable, but high quality. We'r…

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.

> If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

If you want to attack CO2 costs, 90% of lamb's CO2 production occurs on the farm. Only 10% is from processing, distribution, retail, cooking, and waste disposal [1].

Let's charitably assume 1/3 of the post-farm CO2 emissions are from distribution and half of those could be saved by producing closer to the point of consumption.

So farm production only needs to be 1.8% (=(10/3/2)/90) more efficient in NZ for it to be net beneficial.

Presumably NZ is particularly efficient for lamb, otherwise it wouldn't be such a major export.

[1] To pick one reasonably creditble data source, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... which ends with this graph: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f...

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#212

Post by ryanmercer »

antisthenes wrote: post #15

Clearly not, because there's nothing inherently new in arranging shelves vertically. It's almost as comical as alluding that the hanging gardens of Babylon disrupted ancient farming and were used for the production of food.

Like tathougies said, it's all about water management. You need an input of roughly 594,000 gallons of water for 1 acre of corn with a yield of around 200 bushels (11,200 pounds of corn).

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#213

Post by nradov »

hangonhn wrote: post #7
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #2

We already produce too much food.

I think one idea is to produce good, healthy food closer to where people are instead of producing it from far away and then having to deal with transportation and preservation of food. It would allow urban dwellers cheaper and more available access to healthy foods.

Food transportation is a solved problem. There is zero evidence that this would make food cheaper or more accessible.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#214

Post by Faaak »

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

Electricity energy may be, but you'd still need to pay for the network, ancillary services, etc...

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#215

Post by Faark »

vanderZwan wrote: post #196
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…

Point two is why I'm so disappointed in many of my friends from back when I studied physics who are really into this idea. Like, it's basic thermodynamics, guys! If we want to make agriculture sustainable we should try to break even energy wise, not waste even more with the physical equivalent to more layers of abstraction!

I've read a few times vertical farms use LED that only emit very specific wavelengths. The solar panel on the roof would capture energy on spectrum unused by plants, making the sun light => electric energy => LED light thingy not as bad as it seems intuitively. Is that possible?

Though i'd guess semi transparent solar panels above fields capturing light plants wouldn't use could be even more efficient, if it will ever exist.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#216

Post by tomp »

ryanmercer wrote: post #205
tomp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> plants [...] have relatively narrow conditions

Are you sure about that? Evolution would certainly strive for adaptability... Of course, evolution went through the window when humans started interfering (breeding etc), but still, just looking outside, plants seem to survive (and thrive) in relatively uncontrolled environmental conditions with wild weather swings and varying care (fertilizers, weeding, etc).

On the other hand, I can hardly keep a house plant alive, so there's that.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#218

Post by replies_to_all »

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'…

Hey, I'm in Ag too, I knew a guy that, until last year, was making $1/2M a year going around the country setting these guys up (CropKing).

I asked him how profitable his customers were, he said he had never seen anyone make any money other than the weed guys.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#219

Post by ryanmercer »

tomp wrote: post #216
ryanmercer wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> plants [...] have relatively narrow conditions Are you sure about that? Evolution would certainly strive for adaptability... Of course, evolution went through the window when humans started interfering (breeding etc), but still, just looking outside, plants seem to survive (and thrive) in relatively uncontrolled environmental conditions with wild weather swings and varying care (fertilizers, weeding, etc). On the o…

>Are you sure about that?

I see you've never gardened, or even had a house plant.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#220

Post by 11235813213455 »

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…

2) it could be a greenhouse
Post reply on HN