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Grain farming goes indoors

modernfarmer.com

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Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#81

Post by imtringued »

LegitShady wrote: post #29
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…

outdoor farming already uses green power - a giant fusion reactor in space, if you would believe it.

That means we would have to build our own fusion reactor on Earth or on Mars. Sure, it would be worth it on Mars since you don't have any other choice but on Earth? Anyone who thinks that is arguing in bad faith.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#83

Post by simon_000666 »

II2II wrote: post #40

One thing people seem to be ignoring is that this research is useful because it creates a controlled environment in which to explore the variable affecting crop yields, even if the stated application has very limited practical value. Also keep in mind that many technologies take a considerable amount of time to develop before they are of any value at scale. Take something that I presume most people on this forum are…

This is true - and I think what’s also being missed here is the potential to further this research for producing grain off-world. Growing crops in space or other planets will be a heavily optimized and controlled process so it’s good to explore these possibilities here on earth even if it doesn’t yet make commercial sense.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#84

Post by imtringued »

barathr wrote: post #7

We 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.

The way vertical farming works is that you use some sort of plant that has a massive surface to volume ratio and then just spread out the growing light on as big an area as possible. This strategy will get you very expensive "leafy greens" and inexpensive cannabis and no grains at all because the "growing lights are more efficient than natural sunlight" calculation no longer works because grains actually grow better if they are exposed to intense (sun)light which is expensive to produce in a vertical farm.

(from my own memory and it also happens to be a lazy summary of the paper)

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#85

Post by imtringued »

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.

You mean the Mad Max universe or Mars?

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#86

Post by imtringued »

aclatuts wrote: post #78
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 i…

He assumes 30 layers of plants... Reread his comment.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#87

Post by imtringued »

nine_k wrote: post #44
giantg2 wrote: post #16

Am 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 veget…

Grains can be stored for years but it isn't economical to store more than one year's harvest for farmers.

They use their grain bins to smooth out the demand over a year.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#89

Post by imtringued »

lightedman wrote: post #31
jonathankoren wrote: post #12

I’m skeptical. The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it. Vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are mostly water and can be sold at tremendous markup. I don’t see anything here that changes that economic reality. Even if they were able to double wheat production to 4 crops a year, I don’t that’s enough to make it viable. Most telling is this pass…

"The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it." It makes a ton of economic and ecological sense if you actually break it down. Damn shame the article fails to do so. We knew it made sense a decade ago when I got brought into the field to improve upon the lighting aspects for several companies.

Those companies aren't exactly profitable today.

Re: Grain farming goes indoors

#90

Post by AYBABTME »

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…

Food is localized. I'm in Korea now. There's very little arable land here, and vegetables are expensive. It could easily turn into a case of there simply not being available to everyone, simply because there's just not enough. However if the price rises enough to justify the cost of growing it locally in vertical farms, this secures access to greens to everyone. My in-laws are trying to do this at home and even just for their own needs: vegetables are becoming so expensive that it's more affordable to grow them on their balcony. Vertical farming is something they want to do to allow them to improve and maintain their diet at an sustainable cost (that of electricity). And energy is more efficient to import than greens, since it's fungible.

Vertical factory farms make a ton of sense here.

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