Grain farming goes indoors
modernfarmer.com
Grain farming goes indoors
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Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#2"with the first successfully grown indoor wheat."
I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY
Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#3I guess I could see some use cases in places that can't farm grain but still want some farmed locally for strategic or protectionist reasons. But on a pure cost basis I don't see how this will ever be competitive with growing grain under open skies in suitable locations, and then shipping it where you need it. At least not on earth.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#4"with the first successfully grown indoor wheat." I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.
As usual, actual numbers for water/land/pesticide use (5%/3%/0%), but the only mention of electricity use is the fraction of green power.
Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it.
We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green energy production, not enormous new energy sinks.
"Just use green power" isn't the get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card people think it is.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#5I don't understand what problem this is meant to actually since. We have no shortage of land or water in most of the world. Aside from some tiny cases like nuclear bunkers or space colonies this remains a pet project.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#6Anyone know how many acres of solar panels you would need to power one acre of LEDs to grow the wheat?
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#7We wrote a short paper estimating and analyzing this sort of thing, and the numbers don't add up:
https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf
Maybe there's something different in this specific technique, but they need to publish detailed numbers before it's believable.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#8Hmm, nice thing from an experimental point of view, but I very much doubt there will be any practical use of this tech anytime soon unless one happens to have supply of free energy.
They say>grow food with 95% less water and 97% less land
What about energy, and other inputs(like fertiliser)? I bet just hauling food from wherever it grows well will be much cheaper than growing it indoors for a long time.
Unless... Someone finds a way to harness sun's energy in a much more efficient way than plants do it. I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1%. If we could capture this light with 25% efficiency (doable), then we illuminate plant with efficiency of 80% in some way by giving them only the right wavelengths so their conversion of said light into calories is (a lot)higher than 5% we may be onto something there. Until then... Not really.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#9"with the first successfully grown indoor wheat." I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.
As usual, actual numbers for water/land/pesticide use (5%/3%/0%), but the only mention of electricity use is the fraction of green power. Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it. We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green e…
And don’t forget the energy and materials you need to build something where you can actually grow things indoors.
Total waste of so many things here. We know that we can grow stuff in greenhouses. We know wheat is a cheap commodity too, where it is hard to gain a profit on. What are they trying to accomplish here?
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#10For general interest;
Let's call Western Australia a small cog in feeding the world demand for grain.
* WA produces on average 13 million tonnes of grains (cereals, oilseeds and pulses) each year. Grain exports generate more than $4 billion (five year average) for the WA economy each year
* The state's grain production area, known as the 'wheatbelt', covers seven million hectares across the south-west corner of the state.
* 7 million hectares ~ 17.3 million acres
Assuming a factor 30 (greater than the 26 stated in the article) increase in production ...
It would take 233,000 hectares (576,600 acres) powered, piped, under a roof, with artifical light to achieve the equivilant production.
[1] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains
[2] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/west...
etc.