211–220 of 369 posts
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
But there are also a whole lot of benefits to producing food yourself: resilience, diversity of food crops, taste.
Also, people often enjoy the process, which effectively lowers the economic cost of doing it yourself.
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Isn't the point of being smart human beings is that we do things better than what occurs in nature?
That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.
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I think "cup" is one of these American units, it's about 236ml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit) . American legal cup ? metric cup ? Canadian cup ? or one of the other ones. Even if you narrow it to just the roughly the US you still have 4 + metric , so 5 different options. and that doesn't even account for people just using the cup they have to hand. It's not a rant at you, it's frustration with non-specific, arbitrary units.
But, wow apparently the FDA rounds cups in nutrition labeling to be exactly 240ml “legal cup”, which I agree is super annoying. It’s 1.4% more.
“For purposes of nutrition labeling, 1 cup means 240 mL, 1 tablespoon means 15 mL, 1 teaspoon means 5 mL, 1 fluid ounce means 30 mL, and 1 ounce means 28 g (21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii))”
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in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots from being eroded by rainfall. in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could jus…
Just a mild pruning: in natural/wild environments (I.e. not the sterile labs of monocultural agronomy), plants actually cooperate in the resources department, because each species and stage of maturity has different needs and resource extractive capacities. They’ll “use” their root systems and mycorrhizal connections (which are only reliably present in wild soil) as a medium of exchange. We do plants a disservice by…
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I was told that water beads on leaf surfaces act as lenses, creating burnt spots on the leaves. So water at night.
I was told to water at night because it doesn't make much sense to pour water on the ground only for it to evaporate before it goes where it's needed.
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help rich first world people be more cognizant of food and agriculture. Which in turn will help them make better choices with the food they buy. This can only work against calory-dense inudstrial food, which arguably is the larger problem than efficiency in large parts of the world.