51–60 of 236 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and spending all your savings on fungicide instead.
Tell me more.
> By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform. I think this is MBA for they farmed animals
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…
>pest control The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…
There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from po…
And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty? If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them. E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm. If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually natu…
It is not even flying them in vs vertical farm. But vertical farm vs more traditional greenhouse solutions. Where you can do all the circulation control, but also can use natural light and don't need large concrete structures. There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or some other city-state.
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…
Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water. Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…
> Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators…
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…
By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty? If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them. E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm. If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually natu…
There are some extreme exceptions like the United Arab Emirates etc. but they are home to only a fraction of the world population and building a city like Dubai in a desert was probably not a great idea to begin with.
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off…
>pest control The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
A self-contained solar powered cargo-container-sized box that can create calories with minimal top-ups of material might make some marginal areas habitable.
We take so many things for granted, like air and sunlight. I think the Biosphere 2 project was the only one that tried to figure out just what we need to support life in a closed system. It was horribly expensive and it looks to be horribly inefficient - 8 people to make the food and oxygen, and 3.14 acres of land. What we do currently for the space station is to ship them 1000 pounds of stuff every month per person.