51–60 of 99 posts
I am skeptical about the reusability of the media. How hard is it to clean all the dead roots out of it? How do you sterilize it for reuse?
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Urban farming only makes sense for high value, easily perishable produce. Fresh herbs, leafy greens, tomatoes, and other salad ingredients can be produced with higher quality when they are harvested and used on the same day, and when the plants don't have to be bred for shipment-and-storage durability. The real benefit is superior flavor and texture for quality-focused, price-insensitive eaters. Note that this produc…
Source? AFAIK traditional artificial light sources do indeed dissipate much more energy for the same amount of 'useful light', and also produce so much heat that they cannot be placed near the plant. Is artificial light mandatory in urban farming? Aren't some (non fiber-optics-based) "light tubes" able to transmit light along with the necessary UV?
I don't really understand the whole "urban agriculture" crowd. People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
I think I read an article at one point that most "urban agriculture" and indoor farming tools were originally funded with the expectation that they would only be valuable for cannabis production. Because while you could grow tomatoes and lettuce indoors if you wanted to, it's really only economical to produce cannabis. I think that's still true today.
I own 20 ZipGrow towers and have become quite disillusioned with them across 3 growing seasons. The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem. You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants. Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced: - pump dying - Leak in base causing all…
I own 20 ZipGrow towers and have become quite disillusioned with them across 3 growing seasons. The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem. You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants. Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced: - pump dying - Leak in base causing all…
It's worth mentioning that the facebook forums for hydroponics farming are full of people trying to sell these things second hand with no explanation 'why'.
I don't really understand the whole "urban agriculture" crowd. People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
If (a really big IF) solar panels can get efficient enough while LEDs also become more efficient, in theory plants grown indoors being fed by LEDs attuned to the precise portions of the spectrum they need with the whole thing powered by the solar panels, you could get a better yield than outdoor growing. Figure out cost effective fusion, things get even better. But neither is the case right now. As far as the urban a…
That 1200 watts is only really covering a 6 by 6 foot square worth of growth area at about 35 watts a square foot at 200 lumens per watts. It could be slightly larger but only if you want most plants to grow extremely slow or be really weak, and you can go up to 50 watts per square foot before requiring supplemental CO2 but not all plants like that amount of light.
Converting that to 1 acre worth of coverage, which is what is about what is needed to feed a single human for one year, you are looking at about 1,500,000 watts running 12-18 hours per day. That is a ridiculous amount of energy. Even assuming you can get away with 1/3 of that area by super careful and efficient growth year round that is still a half million watts in lighting costs alone. Not to mention all the other work and costs.
I don't see indoor farms being good for anything other than extreme specialty plants or extremely fragile plants until we can pull essentially limitless energy out for far cheaper than we can get even with fossil fuels.
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I it was intended to be solar roads.
I was imagining salad roads.
I have yet to see salad roads, but would love to see it. Diversity is "weed" edibles would be awesome.
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Food production in US is increasingly consolidated into hands of large agriculture corporations. Why not decentralize, make the system more robust to shock (look what's happening with grocery stores today)?
The grocery stores are low on stock because of selfish people panic buying, not because there's not enough food. The supply chain is still functioning normally.
And that's sort of the problem. The normal centralised supply chain optimises for normal usage patterns, and adapting to abnormal usage patterns causes widespread issues in the short term.
A decentralised supply chain is (at least in theory) better able to adapt to local distrubances.
I don't really understand the whole "urban agriculture" crowd. People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
Second, it's climate change which is making outdoor farming more and more difficult by the year, as well as a push towards higher efficiency. Also, having a garden (or being around nature, things growing) has been clinically shown to reduce stress in humans.
Third, it's MUCH less climate impact to transport renewably sourced electrons over a regional grid than it is to transport decaying produce in cold storage to a grocery store. Free sunlight is still cheap, but creates dependence on the seasonality (frequency, duration) which means a variety of crops are totally non-viable in certain hemispheres. Full outdoor growing has a much higher level of exposure to pests, requiring pesticides -- whereas indoor growing under lights gives you a higher level of defensibly without that risk.
I own 20 ZipGrow towers and have become quite disillusioned with them across 3 growing seasons. The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem. You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants. Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced: - pump dying - Leak in base causing all…
Soil is an amazing technology.