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Grain farming goes indoors

modernfarmer.com

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Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#71

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…

Eliminating those huge tractors injects a huge amount of inefficiency into your harvest operation.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#72

Post by moloch-hai »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #71
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…

Eliminating those huge tractors injects a huge amount of inefficiency into your harvest operation.

How? Electrical equipment moving on rails seems more efficient than driving diesel tractors around on tires on dirt.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#73

Post by forgetfreeman »

uxhacker wrote: post #68
forgetfreeman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern logistics systems are so efficient transportation costs are a rounding error for bulk commodities. How's the energy grid looking in Sudan these days?

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#74

Post by forgetfreeman »

mkl wrote: post #63
LegitShady wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Harvesting won't use what? Are you proposing we, as a species, revert to harvesting the equivalent of a few hundred million acres of cultivated land by hand?

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#75

Post by moloch-hai »

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…

Fusion will not help.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#76

Post by forgetfreeman »

moloch-hai wrote: post #72
forgetfreeman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating those huge tractors injects a huge amount of inefficiency into your harvest operation.

How? Electrical equipment moving on rails seems more efficient than driving diesel tractors around on tires on dirt.

Really? On what grounds? A modern combine can harvest 30 acres of wheat in an hour, and can be trivially reconfigured to handle a variety of bulk grains. Your task is now to match or better that without resorting to a monstrous pool of starvation-wage labor and without raising the price of grain to the level of a luxury good.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#77

Post by moloch-hai »

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…

I don't understand "artificial photosynthesis". Glucose in the water?

Elsewhere you write "electrocatalysis-based artificial photosynthesis". Wires clipped to the roots?

Solar Foods, in Finland, has a strain of Xanthobacter agilis that eats hydrogen, nitrogen, and CO2, and produces tasty protein (70% by dried weight) and carotenes. Their plan is to electrolyse water for the hydrogen, using renewable power.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#78

Post by aclatuts »

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…

You are assuming a single-story building growing only one level of crops per floor. It should be feasible to have 2-3 crops for each floor, which cuts down the required space. For example, the Tesla gigafactory has 229 acres of floor space, and it is high enough for two floors with 2 levels of crops per floor, so 629 would have to be built. The factories could be built in desert areas. Also, the world would be very interesting if 17.4 million acres of land were returned to nature.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#79

Post by jacknews »

It seems like a lot of effort to grow the entire plant when we just want the grain, or in fact mostly just flour.

I'm sure there will be a better way to make those with yeast, or cell culture.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#80

Post by moloch-hai »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #76
moloch-hai wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Electrical equipment moving on rails seems more efficient than driving diesel tractors around on tires on dirt.

Really? On what grounds? A modern combine can harvest 30 acres of wheat in an hour, and can be trivially reconfigured to handle a variety of bulk grains. Your task is now to match or better that without resorting to a monstrous pool of starvation-wage labor and without raising the price of grain to the level of a luxury good.

As I understand it, the stacked greenhouse is automated, so no labor, starvation-wage or otherwise.
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