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Grain farming goes indoors

modernfarmer.com

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Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#61

Post by snordgren »

schiffern wrote: post #4
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.

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…

As an example, if we use solar to generate the electricity to power the indoor farm, the panels will take up roughly 20-40% of the sun's energy, depending on the panel.

So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land.

The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#62

Post by forgetfreeman »

credit_guy wrote: post #50
pard68 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That may be the principle but it's obviously flawed inasmuch as every square inch of cultivation needs its square inch of sunlight equivalent to grow. So now you're stuck with the energy cost of cramming (the sun) x (your stack depth) into your grow facility. You can certainly save on other inputs like water, but you lose the only free input available to agriculture, namely sunlight.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#63

Post by mkl »

LegitShady wrote: post #52
mkl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need to spray because you control the environment, you don't need to transport as far, and planting and harvesting won't use fossil fuels (unless that's your only source of electricity).

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#64

Post by forgetfreeman »

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…

Ok so let's run with this a bit. The US uses on average 90 million acres of land annually for grain production. If we stack 10 deep we'd need a 8-10 story structure the size of Vermont.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#65

Post by forgetfreeman »

MPSimmons wrote: post #24
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 what if you _couldn't_ farm outdoors, because your outdoor farm is now a dust bowl, or a desert, or a recently inundated coastal plain, submerged by sea water? Financial practicality is not a concern if this is the only way a region has to make food.

Congratulations, you have just indirectly solved global warming via a massive reduction in the global population.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#66

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

credit_guy wrote: post #50
pard68 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The big deal here is the yield; the field outside my window yields 6 tonnes/hectare/year on a good year. The article mentions 117 tonnes/hectare and I assume it's on a yearly basis.

I can't imagine the production being more energy efficient than a regular field, but it sure saves space. I can imagine places like Singapore would benefit greatly since it could produce food locally.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#67

Post by forgetfreeman »

lightedman wrote: post #55
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nutrie…

Not so fast, you just skated right past capital requirements for build out, maintenance costs, and the sun. There was an article posted in here not two weeks ago detailing how the entire stacked grow startup industry is imploding due to increases in energy costs and I'm quite certain you haven't figured out how to grow tomatoes in pitch blackness.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#68

Post by uxhacker »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #62
credit_guy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That may be the principle but it's obviously flawed inasmuch as every square inch of cultivation needs its square inch of sunlight equivalent to grow. So now you're stuck with the energy cost of cramming (the sun) x (your stack depth) into your grow facility. You can certainly save on other inputs like water, but you lose the only free input available to agriculture, namely sunlight.

This would not be the case if you where growing the wheat in a tropical climate where wheat would not normally grow.

For example think of Sudan. Most of the current supplies need to be shipped by ship and then expensively transported inland.

But Sudan has lots of sunlight.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#69

Post by moloch-hai »

snordgren wrote: post #61
schiffern wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

As an example, if we use solar to generate the electricity to power the indoor farm, the panels will take up roughly 20-40% of the sun's energy, depending on the panel. So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land. The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?

This seems like a good point: just building greenhouses, providing full control of water usage and easy mechanical access, delivers all the value without the inefficient trip through solar panels and LEDs.

On the other hand, wind power would not use up cropland, and the solar panels could be on non-crop land, or water. Stacked grow trays might be more efficient to operate on.

The new Frankenstein rice that does CD4 photosynthesis, and also makes carotenes, seems like a good choice to grow in them. Maybe it can be persuaded to make protein, in the bargain.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#70

Post by forgetfreeman »

lightedman wrote: post #54
peteradio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You aren't violating basic physics and thermodynamics being what they are please explain simply where the additional energy comes from?
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