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

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

#171

Post by avianlyric »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #138
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…

KaiserPro had good rebuttals to some of your points[1] so I won't repeat those, but here are some more: > - 250x less water Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0. > transport Bulk transport is incredibly efficient. IIRC, many food products spend…

> Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0.

Funny thing about rain, it comes from these things called "clouds", not the internet variety, but the type that blocks the sun.

Places with the perfect amount of both sunlight, rainfall, humidity and temperature all year round is extremely rare (you may also be familiar with the concept of seasons). Places with year round sun don't tend to have much rain (looking at you California), places with year round rain don't tend to get sun. There are of course exceptions to this, rainforests come to mind, but to farm there you need to remove the forest, which reduces the amount of rainfall (less water is evaporating from trees and foliage) plus all the other issues that come with deforestation.

Additionally farming has negative impact on the local water cycle, farmed land significantly increases surface runoff, contaminating local water sources with fertiliser and suspended dirt.

All in all, even using water falling from the sky isn't "free" from an environmental perspective. We should be focusing on making more food with less environmental impact worldwide, not returning to the Victorian approach of digging up and mechanising land, environmental impact be damned.

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

#172

Post by saargrin »

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…

and how are you gonna ship fertilizers and ship out highly time sensitive produce from africa where theres no political stability and no roads,no qualified manpower and no law infrastructure?

also ,do you think it makes much sense flying cabbage to Holland from africa?

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

#173

Post by brendoelfrendo »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #127
tzumby wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes

OK, but that's a varietal difference, which is one of the factors that the poster identified as being important - no? Unless your parents are actually growing San Marzano tomatoes.

Yes, it's a varietal difference. Obviously there's some personal preference here, but California grown San Marzano-style tomatoes (not true San Marzanos as that's a protected designation of origin) can be just as good. Canned tomatoes also just taste better in some applications, like pizza, so they're always going to be better than GP poster's parents' home-grown fresh tomatoes.

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

#174

Post by Darmody »

imtringued wrote: post #94
Darmody wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both objectives can be worked on at the same time. I don't really like that argument. We could say "let's end hunger first then focus on computer games, or beer, or vacations, etc". Ending world hunger is way more important than those things but you can't expect we stop doing them to focus on something that is already being addressed but is very complex.

You can't solve world hunger on the supply side. There will always be more hunger afterwards.

I know but that's not my point.

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

#175

Post by avianlyric »

KaiserPro wrote: post #46
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…

> - 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. 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.

Isn't this exactly what vertical farms solve in a single move? The automated part is extremely hard to do in a field, wind, rain, UV and sheer sq footage all work against you. We pretty much nailed automated warehouses at this point, vertical farms are just a re-implmentation of that technology for agriculture.

Humanity has spent close to 10 millenia at this point improving and optimising agriculture. I think it fair to say that we've made all of the major breakthroughs for farming in a field at this point, and if we want to see a step change in food production efficiency and reliability (which we need if we intend to feed 8-12 billion mouths) then we need to start looking beyond traditional farms.

We know there won't be enough arable land in the world to feed everyone in world 50-100 years from now using any currently known techniques, and climate change is only making that worse by reducing the amount of arable land available. Being able to build high efficiently (both in terms of land and energy) farming systems is incredibly important.

Being able to move to a system where almost all of the energy input is electricity opens up a whole world of new possibilities. Allowing us to build farms almost anywhere without regard for the local climate, and with our electricity production becoming increasingly carbon neutral it'll allow these farms to have little to no environmental impact on the world.

One your other points:

> 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.

True but we know how to build controlled environments inside of factories. Just look at microprocessor fabrication. This is a completely solved problem already.

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

Modern building insulation is basically magic. Once you get it hot the first time, the energy to keep it hot is negligible. Additionally you can site these farms near natural geothermal sources etc, you don't need to put them in perfect climates. Same applies for electricity, put them near hydro, wind or even solar farms. Pick a place where the input resources are easily and readily accessible.

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

#176

Post by the8472 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #86
jacquesm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Salads are economic to produce because they have no calories. Calories = Light (energy) + Fertiliser. Efficiency of an LED is like 40%, and Photosynthesis efficiency is like 2%. In other words calories are expensive and ineffieicent to produce through artificial lighting, no amount of 'startuping' will change that. Also nothing here is new, we've had greenhouses, artificial lighting, hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponi…

> no amount of 'startuping' will change that.

Well technically, if you could increase the photosynthesis efficiency then it might. There are projects that aspire to do just that. If the results are somewhat fragile and wouldn't survive in the wild then this could work in combination with greenhouses or vertical farms. But yeah, that's quite speculative and until it happens I agree that the energy budget doesn't make much sense.

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

#177

Post by ben_w »

Kye wrote: post #135
ben_w wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pes…

>> "[0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97 " I don't think it's "greening the Sahara" so much as "trying to keep the last bits of green." This is on the Nile.

It looks to me like it’s about 200km from the Nile.

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

#178

Post by adamnemecek »

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…

Also you can stack these infinitely. You can turn 1 acre into 10 acres by stacking 10 on top of each other.

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

#179

Post by inglor_cz »

KaiserPro wrote: post #46
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…

> - 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…

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

Depends on location. For example, Iceland has a lot of geothermal heat, but natural climate unsuitable for agriculture.

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

#180

Post by lhopki01 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #163
ajmurmann wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we could properly account for this negative externality. To me the ideal state for every inch of land is it being a wildlife refuge. To that end I'd love to see a tax that gets charged for using land for anything else. I think it would drive a lot of improvements like vertical farming

As a counter example, raising grass-fed cattle on native prairie in Montana is much more "natural" than a wildlife refuge. The natural state of that land was maintained by massive wandering herds of bison. The massive bison herds and their apex predators generally don't exist any more, so a wildlife refuge can be far less "natural" than grazing land.

Wouldn't it be wonderful though if we could reintroduce them?
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