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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?

#251

Post by regularfry »

contravariant wrote: post #228
hanniabu wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in this field. I'll list a few points for it. 1) Pesticide free. There's a lot of chemicals that go into growing crops and they contaminate our bodies, water, and soil. 2) Sun is free, but sun exposure and temperature aren't consistent year round. 3) Shipping may be cheap, but the time of travel from the farm to the table is long. Growing locally increases the amount of time a plant can be on the shelf or…

>7) In hydroponics you can control the taste of the product by the light spectrum and nutrients. Some customers ask for specific tastes, which is something farms can't provide. I think you're selling farmers short there, I reckon quite a few of them could affect the taste of their produce, but can't because the market just buys from them in bulk with no regard for taste.

So what you're saying is that small batch sizes allow varied products to be produced at low cost with a low overheads? Wonder where I've heard that before...

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#252

Post by regularfry »

audunw wrote: post #203
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…

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…

You also need a third in case one of the first two goes pop, and because batteries don't like being left on the shelf fully charged (or discharged), it needs to be actively cycled through. That's N+1 redundancy; N+2 means four in total assuming you can charge as fast as you can discharge.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#254

Post by vackosar »

oh_sigh wrote: post #62
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…

Regarding #2, I wonder if it may be possible to get greater than 100% efficiency here by panels absorbing a wide spectrum of light, but only emitting on the certain frequencies that are generally most beneficial for growing/fruiting plants?

I guess that it may be possible. The plants probably have hard time optimizing for this and just eclipsing or poisoning other plants is better strategy for them.

You would however be also limited with efficiency of the lamps.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#255

Post by vackosar »

Gravityloss wrote: post #101
nicholas73 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You could generate chemically costly preproducts for the plant synthetically too to help its efficiency. Things like increasing CO2 and providing at least nitrogen. But while you are at it, you could directly to synthetic food... Hydrogen, methane, formaldehyde, sugars.

Sounds like the best solution mid term, before we'll be uploaded to computers. :)

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#256

Post by mygo »

FrozenVoid wrote: post #107
mygo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that this is a relatively reliable marker for whether 5-star restaurants will be in the area. quick on-demand access to fresh, never-frozen, produce. They also tend to go for out-of-season / exotic produce, which is doesnt need to be grown in end-world-hunger quantities.

Why a restaurant wouldn't run their own private vertical farm where they would control the quality and amount of supply? That would remove supply volatility and transport costs entirely, and even some bulk products can be produced at smaller scale organically.

like these?

http://m.wtol.com/toledonewsnow/pm_/contentdetail.htm?conten...

https://www.circa.com/story/2017/12/20/food/a-vertical-%20fa...

anyway, I’m not a big fan of the use of indoor farms with artificial lighting. The sun provides the energy that plants need to us at no cost but it’s costly to produce the energy from LED’s. I’m more in favor of the use of greenhouses on rooftops, and urban restaurants getting as much produce as possible sourced from local urban farms, and creating that economy. But hey, people are definitely doing it with LED’s on-premise and making it work for them.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#257

Post by jcranmer »

saalweachter wrote: post #243
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…

I'm occasionally boggling that there's no electric farm equipment, since it at least suffers from one fewer problem than electric cars: you're mostly driving around in a finite area. You might need to plumb a dozen or so charging stations at various fields, and have the equivalent ability to essentially carry a five gallon jug of electricity to a tractor in a field when you run out accidentally, but you're not drivin…

> I would guess the average farm tractor in the fields today in the US is 20-30 years old.

It's actually surprisingly hard to find hard numbers on this topic, but the numbers I've seen have generally suggested that the average age is more like 10-20 years old. The hard numbers I've seen do say that about 10-20% of tractors are less than 5 years old.

Realistically, the difficult part of electric tractors isn't the mileage but rather the fact that you're consuming far more power per mile. You're looking at measuring fuel consumption of around 10 gallons an hour, instead of about 1.5 gallons an hour for a car. Also, you're going to want to work the tractor for as much sunlight as you can muster, and you want to charge back up only overnight. So you'd want an equivalent not of a 200 mile range car but more like a 2500 mile range car, that can fully charge overnight.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#258

Post by slothtrop »

hanniabu wrote: post #248
slothtrop wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>6) Soil type and exhaustion. Only certain type of plants can be grown in certain soils and environments and only for so long before the soil is exhausted of nutrients. Wouldn't this also be true for vertical farming?

Not if done with hydroponics. The water is frequently dosed with nutrients to keep the proper levels.

>dosed with nutrients

Forgive me for the possible ignorance, but that sounds like just a different means of addressing the same problem of having to add nutrients to the soil. Don't we add fertilizer/till/change soil? Why is it better to dose with nutrients?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#259

Post by xg15 »

jcranmer wrote: post #208
xg15 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But food doesn't grow in distribution centers. At some point you have to transport the food out of the farm. That would result in the following chains (simplified):

Local: Farm -(1)-> Farmer's market -(4)-> Consumer's home

National: Farm -(1)-> Distribution center -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home

International: Farm -(1)-> Harbor/Distribution center of producing country -(2)-> Harbor/Distribution center of consuming country -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home

Where (1) is the farmer's pickup truck, (2) is a massive high-seas-capable container vessel, (3) is the 18-wheeler and (4) is the consumer's audi.

Yes, (2) and (3) may be vastly more efficient in CO2 per transported item - but it doesn't change the fact that they happen in addition to (1) and (4).

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#260

Post by hanniabu »

slothtrop wrote: post #258
hanniabu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if done with hydroponics. The water is frequently dosed with nutrients to keep the proper levels.

>dosed with nutrients Forgive me for the possible ignorance, but that sounds like just a different means of addressing the same problem of having to add nutrients to the soil. Don't we add fertilizer/till/change soil? Why is it better to dose with nutrients?

It's not the same. It's much easier to do dosing with water since they're soluable and can be evenly dispersed. The different in medium with dirt makes this much hard. There will also be build up of unused nutrients that throw off the proportions. The build up of nutrients and non-uniform distribution can make the crops vulnerable to various side effects including nutrient burn. This build up in hydroponics is mitigated by periodically flushing and replacing the water system.
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