41–50 of 464 posts
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exactly... you can have a farm in the middle of the city and a solar farm in the middle of the desert...
We also have problems with environmentalists who oppose solar in the desert here in California. I don’t think they have been successful judging by the amount of solar installations I’ve seen here.
It's interesting if you want to support 50B people on Earth, but the resources required to build it out mean it isn't really even a viable solution for restoring farmland to wildland without massive amounts of mining.
Mine produced ~4 bags over 6 weeks for an energy cost of ~$5 and a negligible amount of water. I think I can get the per-plant cost down to ~$0.50 once I start using my own seeds, so around $10 over 6 weeks to replace 4 bags of salad at around $3 each... a grand savings of $2. We're moving around 4 bags of greens a week between 2 adults, so I'd need to 6x that to replace all the greens we're eating, which gets the savings up to ~$2/week.
The cost savings is negligible -- I do it because it's neat and I like having a houseplant I can eat. It's also MUCH easier for a residential system to offset its energy usage than a commercial setup (I have way more square footage on my roof than I would ever "grow" inside my house).
The calorie argument is more compelling, but how many thousands of years did it take for people to get wheat so calorically dense? I think it's going to take time to develop nutrient-rich crops specifically tailored for indoor farming.
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Say a plant needs 1/10th of actual full sun during the day, could you theoretically remove the electricity step entirely but "just" (putting "just" in quotes because I'm sure it wouldn't be easy) having some sort of fancy mirror setup on a 10 storey building to send 1/10th of the sunlight hitting the roof to each floor?
Mirrors take up space too.
Assuming it has to be powered by solar panels is a bad assumption.
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Interfering with the hydrologic cycle can impact soil quality and may result in bunch of biome effects. It can also have good effects instead of bad effects, though. It really depends on the local dynamics.
>Interfering with the hydrologic cycle can impact soil quality and may result in bunch of biome effects. Sure but people also need to eat.
This article is more about indoor farming than vertical farming (is it even vertical if there's only one row?). I grow lettuce indoors. It serves as a nice houseplant and fresh source of salad greens for lunch. It's fairly new, so the cost isn't that much different than just buying lettuce. Once I start building my own "pods" instead of buying the brand-name pods, though, I expect it'll be a bit cheaper than buying 4…
Vertical farming mostly feels like a solution in search of a problem. It uses relatively expensive technology to produce low-value products. Putting seeds in the ground, tilling, and waiting is absurdly cheap compared to building growhouses. For some perspective, what farms actually do extend growing seasons is put "greenhouses" around cold-sensitive crops like tomatoes, but a "greenhouse" in this case is a wire hoop…
It's not a solution for saving land.