It is still more expensive than exploiting illegal immigrants in southern Spain.
Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
61–70 of 224 posts
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#62Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else. all They grow are great salad crops. Thats about it. If you're going holistic, you can farm fish at the same time. But that introduces a load of complications. Look, if you want to make the world a better place you need to: 1) come up with a simple system that can create good quality soil (think…
Vertical farms start with salads ('crunchy water') because they are easy crops to start such a process with. Once established and verified they will for sure move away from just leafy greens. The typical plan for a startup in this domain runs in the decades, not just a few years, and they're pretty capital intensive compared to software start-ups. Think of the salad producing vertical farm as you would of an MVP for a SaaS company and it makes more sense.
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#63Earlier 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…
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor Correlation ≠ causation. I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest. Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses. This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops…
Amount of sunlight also makes a difference.
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming. Is this a real thing? Interesting! I wonder if, much like food additives, we could figure out what particular nutrients would be required to impart a specific flavor to produce.
It's likely only genetics that determine taste. Abiotic Soil contents probably have no contribution.
Genetics defines a potential not an outcome, so it lets us with defining the methods to leverage this potential.
Moreover, our taste is only loosely related to the plant optimum. Some prefer sweetness, acidity, softness, juicyness ...
The soil, undersoil and climate have great impact on naturally grown plants. See wine.
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#65Earlier 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…
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 a…
> "chemicals to be produced and disposed"
I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language. Most of the time it's used, it doesn't mean anything at all.
What is actually used? Fertiliser, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'.
Do they need to be disposed of? Not really, plants use them up. If you are disposing of them, you are disposing of your money, because you paid for them.
The whole point of these greenhouse or vertial systems is that they are closed off, so you don't have runoff like you do in the open field, and you don't need pesticides because pests don't get in.
There are 99 problems with this 'tech bro' solution, but chemicals is not one of them.
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#66Earlier 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…
> - 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 care…
> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil.
Growing up on a farm in Germany, this is just what I would call decent farming and this is not rocket science. The knowledge how to do this is there and imho it does not involve some "tech disruption". Agriculture, at least in Germany, is highly mechanized/technized and in the end it does not matter if you look at conventional/"industrial" or ecological/bio-farming.
You need to take care of nutrients, humus creation, ... . This involves "artificial" fertilizer, regularly taking soil samples, to check what nutrients are there, crop rotation, etc... Sure you can just "raid" the soil and move on after ten years, but good luck finding new area in Germany to farm on ;-) And this is more or less independent of scale of farming.
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#67I'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…
1. How many of these points can be achieved, and to what relative quality, with greenhouses?
2. Given sunlight is ~1 gigawatt per square kilometre, and given the light level plants need, to the extent that this allows winter production of:
(a) staple crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes: this will need implementation of all the improvements to the global power grid that eco-optimists like me call for and which eco-pessimists claim will never be sufficient, and because the energy has to come from elsewhere in winter they will be lacking exactly the same sort of independence they have now with food imports. (I don’t count this as “not independent” because if I did then no city would be, no apartment would be, no non-farmer would be).
(b) high-value non-staple foods such as lettuce, kale, peppers: it doesn’t provide enough calories for food-independence.
While absolutely you could put a small unit the size of a shipping crate in every village and have the local shops stock it’s lettuce output on their shelves, I see this as a fantastic solution to e.g. greening the Sahara [0] and terraforming the Moon/Mars, but mainly only a cash-crop thing in industrialised nations on Earth.
[0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#68Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else. all They grow are great salad crops. Thats about it. If you're going holistic, you can farm fish at the same time. But that introduces a load of complications. Look, if you want to make the world a better place you need to: 1) come up with a simple system that can create good quality soil (think…
> 5) make a system of payments that allows both mixed crops (ie fruit/lumber/nuts) as well as livestock and arable.
I don't understand that statement. Is that a tech/internet software payment solution ? Or do you mean that a farmer/breeder should be able to use his fields/pastures for either livestock and agriculture ?
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#69Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else. all They grow are great salad crops. Thats about it. If you're going holistic, you can farm fish at the same time. But that introduces a load of complications. Look, if you want to make the world a better place you need to: 1) come up with a simple system that can create good quality soil (think…
6) reduce waste, stop feeding meat instead of people
Ain't this the truth. It's an incredibly inefficient way to feed the human race. And to boot, there's fewer starving livestock then there are starving humans.
Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
#70I'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…
The answer is very simple: Food is what is called strategic interest for a given country. Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food. E.g It is said that "Arab's spring" was about "people wanting freedom". It was really about food being ultra expensive in the north of Africa and specul…
> Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food.
That doesn't mean your country has to grow it. A much better solution for individual food security is food stamps.
If your country has problems with a temporary lack of food one of the easiest things to do is to import more and if nesacery subsidize it. Famines tend to come from broken economic and political systems like imperial UK in Ireland and communist USSR, they both refused to import more food during a famine and in fact exported a lot food