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Vertical farming does not save space
71–80 of 464 posts
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#72> Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels.
Solar panels don't have to be on land; they can be on buildings. Moreover, they don't have to be on land that is arable. Moreover, solar is not the only way to avoid fossil fuels in the quest of electricity.
Also, it's cheaper to transport electricity from a distant electric farm, than vegetables from a distant vegetable farm.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a solution for taking trucks off the road and avoiding waste from spoiled produce. It's not a solution for saving land.
If a vertical farm scales up and sells their produce to a super market, dont they still have to package up all the food and ship it on trucks before it gets to the end user?
My local supermarket has hydroponics on site and sells them there.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#74Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. In that case, there’s not much sustainable about it. This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only sources of…
The other thing to remember is that there is a lot of land that isn't suitable for farming for one reason or another that can be used for solar.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#75A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding the goals of vertical farming. It’s not to save space, we have more than enough of that. It’s to stop produce from being shipped hundreds of miles on trucks which greatly increases greenhouse emissions and results in less fresh produce.
Transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in our food’s supply chain. When you hear about beef having such a big carbon footprint it’s also accounting for the massive footprint of transporting all that beef as well as it’s food. If you can cut that down you would be greatly reducing the carbon footprint of your food.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, they do. 100% correct, 100% missed the point.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can put farms in the desert. Some of the most productive farmland is in deserts. Arizona and California are both noted for producing large quantities of high-quality cotton.
and those productive farms also use copious amounts of water that isn't available otherwise. (IE: piped in from rivers far away causing no shortage of ancillary problems: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-o... )
It comes with its own set of problems, but deserts are not dealbreakers for agriculture as the GP suggests.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understood the point to be more about the energy inputs. The gist of it is: plants are more efficient at capturing energy from the sun directly than indirectly via solar panels -> light bulbs -> plants (which seems obvious, when you state it that way). The only thing that makes vertical farming make any financial sense, today, is the access to cheap (subsidized) fossil fuels.
> plants are more efficient at capturing energy from the sun than solar panels -> light bulbs -> plants are This is a counterintuitive misconception that I mention elsewhere in this thread. Plants aren't optimized for raw sunlight utilization, because that's not the bottleneck for growth or survival. Plants deliberately reflect away 90% of the sun's energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency ) b…
> deliberately reflect away 90% of the sun's energy
They'll have that same efficiency with artificial lighting too… At least until our grow lights stop emitting light in the green spectrum (not something I expect to see anytime soon).
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#79This classic example is why some journalists need some real good education in Economics.
How many sq feet of land do you need to grow say 1000KG of wheat ? That number would widely vary. In Nevada that number would be really really huge compared to say fertile soil of Kansas. But with a vertical farming that number can be made much more uniform all across the geography. With a vertical farm someone in Nevada might put to use the vast empty land they have to produce wheat.
At the end of the day, success of vertical farming would come from such efficient usage of land and in my opinion even if authors narrow case of growing wheat using solar panels comes to fruition would still lead to more efficient use of land
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#80Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. In that case, there’s not much sustainable about it. This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only sources of…
Yes, please include the cost of nuclear power in the considerations.
(The joke here is that the true cost is undefined because we here in the US have no method to store the long-term hazardous waste it produces. Current cleanup costs for just the military reactor waste are estimated at $500B, for civilian reactors the costs are said to be higher.)