Earlier quoted context omitted.
If any of those things happened our food needs would likely be diminished anyway
No more steak, that's for sure.
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Grain farming goes indoors
41–50 of 124 posts
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#42I can see this being practical for a Mars colony, but only in other places if there is a large supply of low-cost energy and limited agricultural space, plus limitations on food imports. Perhaps Iceland, using geothermal energy would be a good place to try a large model installation?
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same way every hydroponic system saves water. Recirculation. Traditional soil growing literally pours the water on the ground, where most of it evaporates, and what doesn’t sinks into the soil and becomes unrecoverable on any reasonable timescale.
Depends how deep your well is. Sometimes around here, the water table is closer to the ground than your basement floor is…
It’s not the depth. It’s the rate of draw vs replenish.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#44Am I missing something with this whole square foot fetish? I get that vertical farms can be great in cities for reducing shipping issues. But how many cubic feet are used is more interesting to me. Sure, it costs money for land. It also costs money to build vertical infrastructure. It seems that only in urban areas are the costs for land so prohibitive as to make the infrastructure costs look reasonable.
Nice pun. But crop cultures are substantialy 2D things. You cannot economically grow them in multiple layers (like you can mushrooms). You need to put enough solar energy onto that surface, so it cannot be excessively vertical.
Grain storage and transportation have been perfected through literally millennia. Grain can be stored for years and there is no premium to collect for fresh, just collected grain (unlike vegetables, for instance).
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#45This really doesn't seem cost-effective. Yeah on the one hand you're getting an increase in your output but on the other, you're getting a massive increase in costs. Traditional farming is dirt simple - you put the seeds in the dirt and the plant grows, then you harvest the plant (plus irrigation, plus fertilisation, plus pesticide use, etc). The cost, once you have the land, is the cost of the seed you're using (plu…
"With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow. " With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for th…
> … way more efficient than the sun.
How many kilowatts hours of generated power do you have to put into the sun to get a certain output of photons?
None you say? Interesting…
This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Just use the land to produce something more valuable than grain and trade that for the grain you need.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
outdoor farming already uses green power - a giant fusion reactor in space, if you would believe it.
It also uses a lot of non-green power to plant, spray, harvest, and transport.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#47This really doesn't seem cost-effective. Yeah on the one hand you're getting an increase in your output but on the other, you're getting a massive increase in costs. Traditional farming is dirt simple - you put the seeds in the dirt and the plant grows, then you harvest the plant (plus irrigation, plus fertilisation, plus pesticide use, etc). The cost, once you have the land, is the cost of the seed you're using (plu…
"With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow. " With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for th…
> And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage,
Please expand on this if you would. The seeds would not necessarily need light to germinate but certainly you would not be able to grow beyond the energy contained in the seed which had to come from somewhere.
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#48Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water is actually scarce and getting more scarce every year, particularly in agricultural areas. There are article about this pretty much every year now.
How would this venture bypass the water issue? Because, I think this venture will also require similar quantity of water.
From the article: "In addition to the mobility of indoor farms, vertical farming has the capacity to grow food with 95% less water and 97% less land, according to the USDA"
Re: Grain farming goes indoors
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not to mention plants are peak "green energy". There is a very real irony to the indoor farming movement.
Not so fast.
If you replace outdoor crops with forests, they'll sequester much more CO2.
In principle you can replace many acres of outdoor crops with one acre of greenhouse crops: with electric illumination you can make plants grow during nighttime, and with controlled temperature you they can also grow during the winter.
Irrigation also needs much less water in a greenhouse (because plants lose a lot of water via transpiration, and in a humid environment they transpire less). Not to mention that you can recycle the water in a greenhouse.
Irrigation is a big component of the energy expenditure of crops, but not the only one. All other components will decrease. Fertilizer, pesticides, tilling: you just don't need huge tractors to go miles and miles to the fields. You can have much smaller machines doing the job on the spot.
I'm not saying greenhouses are the solution to all the world's problems, but they shouldn't just be discarded outright.