101–110 of 464 posts
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Mirrors take up space too.
Might be significantly higher efficiency overall though vs. putting solar panels on the same roof?
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. 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.
> 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. This doesn't have to be the case. Plants don't use all the sunlight that hits them, because available light isn't generally the bottleneck in plant growth. Note how most plants are green, whic…
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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.
It's such an important point that's the core value proposition of vertical farming. Arable.land is unlikely to keep up with the combination of population growth and climate change. That's the whole point of the exercise! Solving that problem!
Vertical farming in its current form doesn't save space. I use regular recycled containers, milk jugs, cans etc. with a DIY mount on one of the walls of my house. Last season's harvest was about 80-90 pounds of tomatoes, multiple harvests of beets, lettuce, spinach and herbs. The wall is almost 20 ft x 20 ft. Even if my spacing is double that of regular farming, that's still a lot of space saved. Sure, not all crops can be vertically farmed, but plenty of them can be and thereby saving precious land.
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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.
Surely it is easier and cheaper to make the land arable or a greenhouse or whatever than equivalent vertical farm + solar. KISS
A 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 foo…
We have a shit tonne of land. And we already grow vastly more food than we need. So why do we care? Aside from maybe building farms on Mars, what is the expected use of this tech?
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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.)
1. We have nuclear waste already 2. We will continue to have nuclear waste if we want to have nuclear weapons 3. You can store all the waste you need to store in a football field ( https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... ) Nuclear waste management is messy, but it's something we need to solve no matter what. It is now a sunk cost we have to deal with because of what we have already done and wh…