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What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

thinkingagriculture.io

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Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#311

Post by njarboe »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #216
Gatsky wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment, thanks. HN just keeps delivering. It is almost impossible to believe how much embedded technical knowledge is lurking here. You could colonise Mars with it.

> HN just keeps delivering. It is almost impossible to believe how much embedded technical knowledge is lurking here. You could colonise Mars with it. Of course, in this context you should be prepared for the possibility that if you could tap all that expertise what you'd actually get is "reasons that colonizing Mars actually can't work". ...hopefully not, of course, but beware mixing hopes and dreams and reality.

Something as complex as colonizing Mars would really need to be tried before anyone should claim to have expertise on if it's possible. It looks like our current technology and knowledge is up to the task, so I'd say it's worth seeing if humanity can do it.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#312

Post by vkou »

BurningFrog wrote: post #306
vkou wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that in 2020, we may have a shortage of calories if we were growing all of them in a sustainable manner. I will also note that in 2020, we have no shortage of leafy greens.

I think this all hinges on your definition of "sustainable". If you count using fossil fuels to make fertilizer as unsustainable, you're probably right. But that is very debatable.

Sure, we can quibble about all day.

But consider my second point. If there is no caloric crop sustainability crisis in our future, then there is definitely no leafy green sustainability crisis looming on the horizon. The problems that vertical farming of kale solves are... Not very impactful ones. If all the kale in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of us wouldn't even notice.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#313

Post by ethbro »

youngtaff wrote: post #297
ethbro wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to belittle the difficulty, but as someone who just drove from WY to WI over the last couple days... east of the Mississippi is drastically wetter than western MN+.

Yeh, there's a chicken and egg situation… Having trees increases rainfall but need to grow the trees with little rainfall first!

"The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind."

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#314

Post by BurningFrog »

vkou wrote: post #312
BurningFrog wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this all hinges on your definition of "sustainable". If you count using fossil fuels to make fertilizer as unsustainable, you're probably right. But that is very debatable.

Sure, we can quibble about all day. But consider my second point. If there is no caloric crop sustainability crisis in our future, then there is definitely no leafy green sustainability crisis looming on the horizon. The problems that vertical farming of kale solves are... Not very impactful ones. If all the kale in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of us wouldn't even notice.

I think we can agree to be unconvinced about vertical farming.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#315

Post by tathougies »

imtringued wrote: post #288
tathougies wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no not really. Plants only absorb two wavelengths of light. It's currently more efficient to convert sun into solar power via panels and then to light LEDs supplying only the wavelengths that plants use. Despite the seeming inefficiency here, the fact is that plants are even more inefficient at absorbing light not at the right wavelengths than solar panels.

Even if artificial lighting and natural lighting were equally efficient you would still have to cover the same number of acres in either solar panels or plants. In other words, the denser your vertical farm the more land it consumes. Clearly vertical farming is meant for some really exotic situations in which you might have access to electricity but are in an environment in which you can't grow the plants you want. T…

Well, it's more efficient (I forget by which factor). So, if the factor were 2, you would need 1 acre of solar panel for every 2 acre-equivalents of planting space. Since you're okay with going vertical, the acre-equivalent could be much less than an acre. So yeah... electricity being much easier to transport than produce, it would actually make more sense to cover a large part of unpopulated area with solar panels, and then farm in very very small portions of the earth.

From an environmental perspective, this is certainly a 'win'. Reducing the amount of land needed for agriculture is a win to both consumers and the environmentalists and the farmers.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#316

Post by _fq4v »

trickstra wrote: post #296
tathougies wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amateur hydroponicist here. It depends on what you mean by 'vertically'. You can certainly grow potatoes in containers that are stacked vertically. You can also grow them hydroponically. However, the issue I've noticed in the hydroponics community is that no one is interested in growing potatoes. That is really the problem with these vertical ag startups and such. They focus on ridiculous foods like greens, which --…

Do you have a blog or a youtube channel where we could follow your endeavor?

No not really unfortunately. I'm not great at that kind of thing.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#317

Post by primroot »

hosh wrote: post #285
manicdee wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human input is providing the moisture trap (the concrete lid on the ground preventing water vaporising into the air), so of course plants will thrive there once the level of lime leeching out is low enough to be tolerable. But in the end you have several tons of concrete covering tens of square metres of ground, to allow one or two square metres of cereal grains to grow. That is not particularly efficient use of…

I'm not sure why you think the plant will only grow with a concrete lid on the ground. That plant thrives in the marginal spaces in the sidewalk with poor soil quality, and can probably do better if allowed grow in the lawns where we normally cultivate inedible, ornamental grass. Furthermore, there are several techniques to help trap moisture that does not require a concrete lid. I'm in the Phnoenix desert, and I use…

That's right. I've seen purselane thriving along with other weeds away from any concrete, growing taller and with bigger leaves during the first month of rains. A week later someone comes with a machete, and that's the end of it. I do think however that most edible weeds require some sort of disturbance that human presence tends to bring.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#318

Post by armandhammer »

ineedasername wrote: post #273
kumarski wrote: post #158

My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years. I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now) Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd. - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms - It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinat…

What is it about vertical farms that prevents calorically dense foods? Also, I know something like lettuce would not be dense, potatoes probably dense, but is there a cutoff/metric, e.g., calories-per-gram for this determination? Thanks for the insights!

I'd imagine it's sunlight / artificial light + growth to harvest time. It takes energy input to make food calories, there's really no getting around it with technology. The only way to increase the calories in the harvested food is intense direct light in a short time, or less intense (shaded) light over a longer time. In vertical farms, that's a higher cost of production.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#319

Post by dx034 »

imtringued wrote: post #295
dx034 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, indoor and especially vertical farming can save precious land. Maybe the US has enough land for farming, other countries certainly do not. Rain forests burned to make space for soy or palm oil are proof of that.

That land is quickly abandoned. Rain forests are burnt because once you drain the soil of nutrients (takes less than 3 years) you can just move on to a different plot. Conventional farming reuses soil by adding fertilizer to artificially replace the missing nutrients.

If you look at satellite images of Indonesia, you'll see that much of it is now just palm oil. Most of that area was burned at least a decade ago. It would be nice if they'd abandon it, presumably a new rain forest could grow over the next century or so. But they continue to grow monocultures.

Re: What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture

#320

Post by pas »

xxpor wrote: post #305
pas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So with indoor farming let's say you'd only need 5-10% of that, right? That suddenly makes it basically the same magnitude.

We'd only need 5-10% of the water? That might be possible, I don't know enough about it to say for sure. I could see us needing somewhat less just due to evaporation differences, but I'd think plants need basically the same amount of water to do what they do regardless. How do we get down to 5-10%?

I don't know how, but a different post claimed that indoor farming needs 97% less water. I imagine it has something to do with using a closed loop. (And the remaining percents are obviously due to imperfections, and the actual water content lost due to the removal of the produce from the loop.)
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