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You want organic and efficient? How about hermetically sealed "vertical" robot-operated farms in skyscrapers? No pests, so no pesticides.
by JulianMorrison 10y ago
You want organic and efficient? How about hermetically sealed "vertical" robot-operated farms in skyscrapers? No pests, so no pesticides.
- D_Alex 10y agoYou would not believe how hard the "no pests" thing is in real life. It only takes a few insect eggs to start an infestation. It is hard enough to do that on a "sack of grain" scale, let alone on industrial farm scale. Only way AFAIK that pest infestation are successfully forestalled in large food storages are through refrigeration or inert or even toxic atmospheres. Both of these will not work if you are actually trying to produce food.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoWell, the atmosphere only has to be non-toxic to plants, if you are actually using robots to sow, tend, and harvest. CO2/Nitrogen mix perhaps? Compartmentalization and lack of toing-and-froing by humans would help too.
- ddebernardy 10y agoPlants need oxigen to breath, too.
- roel_v 10y agoThe whole question is whether, when you include the energy inputs such a system require, it's more efficient. The jury's still out. Many people don't consider food grown in substrates with 'artificial' (concentrated) nutrients to not be 'organic'. I don't personally care about labels so much, but my point is that it's not clear at this point which direction is a) viable, in the long term and b) the 'best' (or rather, we don't even know what our optimum function looks like, let alone that we know what system is best)