91–100 of 124 posts
"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.
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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?
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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…
The economics for grain are much worse--the plants need much more light, and the product is easily dried, stored, and transported. The processing is also highly automated already. Here's an article with some (dismal) numbers:
Still find it weird that you would not allow in natural light?
I suppose this will be handy if you were trying to grow wheat on the moon, or Mars. Still find it weird that you would not allow in natural light?
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?
I've heard that 1 m^2 of modern solar panels will support >1 m^2 of a low-light crop (like lettuce, unlike grain) under modern LEDs. I haven't done the math myself, and this obviously varies with climate. I think vertical farms (growing entirely by artificial light) are still uneconomic vs. greenhouses almost everywhere, per my other comment here. Supplemental artificial light in a greenhouse is of course highly economic in many climates, and Dutch growers have been using it for decades.
The cost to heat or cool a vertical farm should be lower than for a greenhouse with equivalent growing area, since it's got lower surface-area-to-volume ratio and doesn't need to be transparent. That may be important for stuff like high-end strawberries, where tight control of the day-night temperature swing enables higher sugar content. I again wouldn't expect a useful benefit for grains, though.
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…
Do you know why strawberries from California are available at the supermarket all year round? It's because farmers and breeders found a gene that made strawberries daylight neutral, meaning they didn't have to go through a "winter" season to produce fruit again. Plants will keep bearing fruit all year round.
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…
Also with vertical farming, you have to think in terms of vertical and time dimensions. You have no more seasons and you get to harvest throughout the year. And you can stack vertically. So, it can be pretty efficient in terms of land usage depending on how high you stack.
As for energy and light needs. Yes, it would need lots of energy but nowhere near what you think. Your back of the envelope math is talking about acres which isn't that useful of a metric for your energy needs. This is the fallacy in your argument. It's not about the light emitted but about the light delivered to the plant. Which depends mainly on the distance to the plant of the light source.
You can actually grow herbs with a kitchen light LED. I've done so. They sure aren't anywhere near as bright as the sun or particularly efficient. But it works. You just have to put them pretty close to the plant to minimize the light losses. That's the whole point of a vertical farm: minimize the losses by maximizing the light usage. Lots of low energy LEDs centimeters away from the plant are much more efficient than big light sources a meter or so away. And what happens to the light that "misses" the plant? Very simple it either gets absorbed by something and turned into heat or reflected by something back to the plant. And of course you'll find lots of reflective surfaces in vertical farms for that reason. Ultimately a lot of it gets transformed into heat. Some of that is useful. Plants grow faster at higher temperatures. And some of that is a cooling problem. Which takes more energy.
Vertical farming feasibility is mainly going to be a function of price and availability of energy. And as energy is the most costly component, yields measured in tonnes per mwh are a more sensible way to think about the feasibility than tonnes per acre. Acres are not that useful as a metric for measuring energy usage. They are useful for traditional farms mainly because land is expensive and you can't stack your crops on it. But it's a useless notion for measuring vertical farm production. How do you even measure acres in a 3 dimensional environment?
So the real feasibility just depends on cost per mwh. As that comes down, a lot of things become feasible. Including vertical farming all sorts of things. It's a cost curve. Right now energy is to costly and yields are to low. There's a point where those curves cross and things become feasible.
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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.
Plants also don't use the light while they are just sprouting. Plants don't use light after you harvest them. And most importantly, plants don't use light where they are not.
If you have vast areas of desert, you can mount lots of solar panels. Lots of places are somewhat between pure Dunes-type desert and Ukrainian-type super fertile chernozem. In a semi-desert place, you might be better off just installing solar panels and building indoor farms. Think of places like Arizona, or Nevada, or, why not, Sudan.
[1] https://bioslighting.com/grow-light-spectrum-led-plants/grow...
Anyway I'm very sure that in some years the country incomes will plummet, because the technification. We are not doing anything against the fact that climate change, wars and technology are driving us to a point that every country can grow their own meat or grain on their own land.
Now farming this indoor is expensive, but in few years importing will be higher, and the technology to produce that indoor, on your own land will be cheap.
Now, we are having a really bad bad drought that cut our income expectation by 40%, soy beans prices will be really high this year, other things like wheat, corn, etc maybe will be not affected because our market is Latin America (prices will be for them). Cattle is dying becaue ethe lack of water, but anyway we are so stupid country that we don't have the number of livestock we had decades ago.
So, now could sound stupid, not in the future, and definitely not if you can think about permanent bases on Mars for example.