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Grain farming goes indoors

modernfarmer.com

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Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#51

Post by credit_guy »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #15
defrost wrote: post #10

For 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 s…

To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers. You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine. You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.

It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#52

Post by LegitShady »

mkl wrote: post #46
LegitShady wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you have to plant, spray, harvest, and transport even the indoor stuff.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#53

Post by defrost »

credit_guy wrote: post #51
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers. You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine. You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.

It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...

That's a truly insane local climate changing amount of ad-hoc greenhouses, although it appears the bulk crop is leafy greens and organic growers market produce.

Grains are different beast again, you want millions of tonnes cheaply with efficient bulk acerage harvesting etc.

Thanks for the link, if I hadn't seen it I might not have believed it.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#54

Post by lightedman »

peteradio wrote: post #47
lightedman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It's a form of artificial photosynthesis - electrocatalysis-based artificial photosynthesis.

We don't need sunlight, or light at all. We can mimic its effects and induce the biological mechanisms to work. For a fodder grass, you only need a few weeks from germination to harvest.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#55

Post by lightedman »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #38
lightedman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre." https://i.imgur.com/FFKWNy8.jpg I've been doing this for almost a full decade, so can say with quite a lot of certainty that you can safely put your suspicions to rest. We even have tech to grow various crop types to harvest stage without needing light at all.

Could you explain the picture?

The picture is me over a decade ago, doing microscopic analysis of live plant tissues growing under targeted-spectrum LED lighting in a vertically-stacked hydroponics building, and proving the viability of the very technology being discussed in the thread article.

This isn't even new tech. We've been using it since the 90s. The LEDs are new, everything else is exactly the same as it was back then. Maybe better nutrient profiles.

On the other side of the picture, behind the camera, was a grass-growing system that didn't require light for the grass to grow at all. We were doing artificial photosynthesis over there.

What's REALLY the big thing here is the NFT hydroponics technique being utilized.

https://i.imgur.com/uRkKe.jpg

Even several decades ago, you got great yields on regular land using far less water. Not even multiple stacked systems.

Now that we have good LED tech, stacked grow systems indoors makes a lot of sense. 1/8 of an acre to produce what 1 acre does, using much less in the way of resources. Water? Hugely reduced depending on the hydroponics system. Yields? Comparable or greater in a reduced footprint. Energy usage? Think about all that fuel those tractors you no longer need are burning to till soil, harvest crops, and do general field work on top.

Everything slowly combines to become an economically and ecologically-sound system.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#56

Post by timmaxw »

lp4vn wrote: post #35
timmaxw wrote: post #22

I just can't see how this can replace conventional farming at scale. Currently, outdoor farming uses 4.62 billion acres [1]. The article says indoor farming has 25x the yield per acre. So that would be 177 million acres. Today, there are only about 44 million acres of total buildings in the world [2]. So to replace conventional farming, we'd need to build 4x as many buildings as currently exist; what's the environmen…

That's until they manage to stack vertically six layers of planted wheat, then you have 156x the yield per acre. You don't need to move all farming indoors either to create a big impact, if some countries manage to move indoors only 20% of the farming for instance, that's already a huge change by any possible measure, be it environmental, economic or geopolitical. And also your remark about the energy cost doesn't se…

But if you stack six layers, each layer needs its own set of LEDs, or else the lower layers wouldn't get any light; so the energy usage per unit of wheat is the same.

(In fact, if you look at the photos and video on https://www.infarm.com/vision, it seems like they're already doing multiple layers, each layer with its own set of LEDs; so the energy-usage-per-acre is probably already significantly more than direct sunlight.)

> And also your remark about the energy cost doesn't seem correct, if that were true any kind of indoors agriculture would be too expensive to be possible.

My understanding is that commercially-viable indoor agriculture works by focusing on expensive foods that are not very energy-dense, like fresh leafy greens. According https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0706-x, the cost of electricity to grow fresh leafy greens indoors is 1% of what they can be sold for. But to grow tomatoes, the cost of electricity is 18% of the selling price; and to grow grains, the cost of electricity is 10,000% of the selling price!

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#57

Post by timmaxw »

lightedman wrote: post #25
timmaxw wrote: post #22

I just can't see how this can replace conventional farming at scale. Currently, outdoor farming uses 4.62 billion acres [1]. The article says indoor farming has 25x the yield per acre. So that would be 177 million acres. Today, there are only about 44 million acres of total buildings in the world [2]. So to replace conventional farming, we'd need to build 4x as many buildings as currently exist; what's the environmen…

"but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre." https://i.imgur.com/FFKWNy8.jpg I've been doing this for almost a full decade, so can say with quite a lot of certainty that you can safely put your suspicions to rest. We even have tech to grow various crop types to harvest stage without needing light at all.

Sorry, but I'm still quite skeptical; I'm going to need you to make a specific case, not just ask me to trust you because you're in the vertical farming industry.

> so can say with quite a lot of certainty that you can safely put your suspicions to rest

I took a closer look at https://www.infarm.com/vision, and it seems that the way they achieved 25x the yield per acre was by stacking multiple layers. So each layer needs its own set of LEDs. How bright is each layer of LEDs, compared to sunlight? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency, only about 45% of sunlight is in the part of the spectrum that plants can use; so if you grow crops with purple LEDs, you could use only 45% as much energy as sunlight. But if you're getting 25x the yield-per-acre by having 3 layers, then you're using 3*45%=135% as much energy-per-acre as sunlight.

I admit I'm not an expert, and these numbers are very rough estimates. Feel free to point me to a source that gives more specific numbers for yield-per-acre of an energy-intensive crop; number of layers used; and electricity usage per layer per acre.

> We even have tech to grow various crop types to harvest stage without needing light at all.

It's physically impossible to produce food without an energy source. So if you're not using light as the energy source, then what are you using? And if you look further upstream, where is the energy ultimately coming from?

> Energy usage? Think about all that fuel those tractors you no longer need are burning to till soil, harvest crops, and do general field work on top.

According to https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Agricultural_energy_..., the total energy use of the agricultural sector worldwide is roughly 2,000 to 3,000 terawatt-hours per year. That includes fossil fuels too, not just electricity. So the energy used to run a tractor is tiny compared to the amount of sunlight falling on the field.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#58

Post by usrusr »

credit_guy wrote: post #51
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers. You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine. You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.

It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...

Those are a long shot from the level of climate control the vertical farming crowd is talking about though. On a spectrum between untouched nature and isolated artificial growing environment the Almeria installations aren't that far from the best-prepared open sky setups.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#59

Post by patmcc »

pasttense01 wrote: post #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.

I hope they meant "first indoor wheat grown and sold commercially at competitive prices" or something, because yah certainly research and plant breeding have been done indoors (at least partially) for decades.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#60

Post by forgetfreeman »

Pfffft. Indoor grow startups around the globe that focus on significantly higher roi products than simple grains are tanking on energy costs and investment in the space is headed for the exits. I mean I get hustling for dumb money buy is any money really this dense?
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