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

Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

singularityhub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 224 posts

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#41

Post by rat87 »

user568439 wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

>- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.

This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#42

Post by dan-robertson »

user568439 wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

It’s also good for the environment when land can be left to become wild instead of being actively farmed. The environment in the U.K. was greatly damaged during the Second World War when a lot of land that wouldn’t normally be farmed was farmed intensively, and that intensive farming continued after the war, greatly decreasing the land that was available to wildlife. Birds like nightingales which used to be reasonably known in the countryside now have vastly contracted populations in the U.K.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#43

Post by rat87 »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #14
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce? Do we really need a repeat of the supply chains breaking down again to answer this question? African farmers were dismayed when their bumper crops were rotting in their fields because they couldn't export the crops or even sell the excess locally [0]. Livestock farme…

> It's hard to imagine that people haven't learned the value of having a robust local food supply chain, which is the one thing that I had hoped we had learned after the shortages and panic buying created during the 1st wave of COVID.

This seems like a worst case scenario, and it still seems like an overblown issue. I would say its usually much easier to just import produce if your country is not good at it. Use large ships and regulate them to be more energy efficient then they are now.

It seems like we need solutions to panic buying

---

Bitcoin in general doesn't seem very useful, making use of the captured heat is cool and better then wasting it but wouldn't it be easier just to not mine bitcoun

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#44

Post by shmageggy »

tremon wrote: post #31
user568439 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

On top of that: this style of farming is additive to other uses of the same land area, not exclusive. Having a traditional 100-acre farm demands a loss of 100 acres of land in opportunity cost. Vertical farming allows to use the same land for residential or commercial development, or it allows for 100 acres of food production in only 10 acres of land.

This is a big one, and we should aim for rewilding in the reclaimed space. Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of habitat loss and thus biodiversity loss.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#45

Post by LoSboccacc »

user568439 wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

all these mechanical parts will cause pollution both in their production and their disposal.

365 days of production will also require some heavy fertilization cycles, so more chemicals to be produced and disposed.

I don't see that talked much and might very well come ahead with the efficiency of scale in having all these thing stacked instead of dispersed over a large tract of land, but these thing are an important aspect and hopefully what will come out of this deployment is some hard data about the impact they have.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#46

Post by KaiserPro »

user568439 wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

> - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop

yes, but you are spending money and carbon on re-creating sunlight.

> Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs

Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria.

> - Good for the environment to save so much in transport

None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit.

> - Independence from other countries

Actually this is the only real selling point. Theoretically you _could_ grow crops that are difficult to cultivate in your climate.

> - 250x less water

Yes, but I am sceptical. It should use less water than an open field, but the same as a greenhouse. if it truely is 250 less water then great. But I suspect thats clever comparison. There are ofcourse low cost ways to save water, like multch, or constricting water supplies and frequency just after germination.

Look, the problem I have is that a lot of these systems are basically hype machines. They are invented by tech bros who've just discovered that nature exsists. But instead of looking at the vast reams of research they head straight for the vertical/hydro/LED segment.

What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world

Up until that point, your just pissing dollars into the wind and wasting everyone's time inveting solutions to problems that are not actual problems.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#47

Post by martimarkov »

rat87 wrote: post #41
user568439 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

>- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil. This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad

But in a situation like the current pandemic with borders being closed this would provide a good alternative to buying from other countries. Another global pandemic might be even more damaging and might infect plants rather than humans.

Also -> distributed cultivation. You don’t have a single point of failure.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#48

Post by rat87 »

bumbada wrote: post #39
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, but at the same time, it's preparing for a future where the borders and international shipping may be impossible, where overpopulation means we can no longer use land for farming, and where farmland becomes unusable or at least unpredictable due to climate change. Plus something about colonizing space. It's far future and dystopian, but not improbable. Anyway, it's not the most efficient way to grow food; I liv…

It is not far future and it is not dystopian. Anyone that have lived in China or India knows how much people those places have. There is already a tremendous pressure from the food those countries demand on the world. Chinese fishing fleet just obliterates anywhere they go, and they are destroying the Amazon forest in Brazil and Argentina with soya(proteins for pigs) plantations and equatorial jungles for Palm Oil. A…

> Anyone that have lived in China or India knows how much people those places have.

Both India's and China's population is expected to fall significantly, It's Nigeria where large growth is still expected.

The pressure isn't necessarily so much from the people but from the appetite and trends and increase in spending money.

Unless you invent really good fake pork and fake fish made of vegetable protein you can grow in vertical farms that won't necessarily help

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#50

Post by baq »

Darmody wrote: post #26
user568439 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

- Price will go down in the future - Similar farms can be built on Mars. - Diversity of crops in places where it would be complicated otherwise

> Similar farms can be built on Mars.

I'm an Elon fanboi but please let's start with desertified populated regions first so we have time to build a Mars colony without having to deal with civil wars

Post reply on HN