12 ms·

My Empire of Dirt

63 points by fendrak 16y ago

todayiamme 16y ago
This article reminded me of something I've always wanted to do before I grow old; make an automated farm. What drives me crazy is the idea of an integrated system that gives me high quality produce at the maximum possible efficiency. If we use something like hydroponics then we can precisely control the nutrients the plants get. Further, since they grow inside a greenhouse we don't need to use any pesticides at all. Further, we can control the amount of light they receive to optimize for maximum growth, and by stacking such units one on top of the other than we don't have to worry space at all. So a massive 500 acre farm can be theoretically reduced to a one acre farm with 500 decks of plants in an efficient arrangement. In fact, someone else way smarter than me has already though of this and developed the idea to quite a long extent (see: http://www.verticalfarm.com/ http://www.verticalfarm.com/). Has anyone over here ever tried something like this? Are there more awesome people like Mr. Howard?
- cullenking 16y ago
  To address one of your points, just because the crop is inside a greenhouse (or even indoors!) does not mean you won't get pests. Anyone who has had fungus gnats or spider mites even in their far-spaced house plants can attest it happens :(
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Well, once you go indoors you have a lot more control over this. Think quarantine scenario since this is basically what we're talking about. Nothing gets in that hasn't been cleared.
    - mhb 16y ago
      Those vegetables are going to be pretty expensive.
      - loewenskind 16y ago
        When you're talking about what you put into your body, which is directly related to the quality of life you're going to have (you may not see the effects of this right away but you will see it), then I don't think cheap should be our first concern. Having said that, it wouldn't have to be insanely expensive either. It depends on the scale, right?
  - todayiamme 16y ago
    Yes, but as loewenskind pointed out. It is exactly like quarantine. think about it this way if we can keep entire football fields dust free for years at a time to fabricate micro-processors then surely we can do this? Something that really amazes me is that technology has been pushed to limits that we can't imagine. Who would have thought that we are now engineering things 100 atoms apart? Unbelievable.
    - eru 16y ago
      > [...] then surely we can do this? There's a difference between technologically possible, and economically feasible.
- khafra 16y ago
  To address another concern with vertical farms, you'll need to use low-sun-requirement crops; most modern stuff optimized for quick growth with maximum solar and NPK input simply won't grow in those conditions--like expecting full voltage from a vertical photovoltaic panel.
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  The big problem with sterility is taste and nutrition. It turns out that many of those vitamins and flavor compounds that we like are natural fungicides, pesticides, and preservatives. That's part of the reason why a home-grown tomato tastes so good--it's spent its whole life fighting off attackers while the bland industrial tomatoes have been protected by farm chemicals. A sterile greenhouse or vertical farm would create produce that was bland and less nutritious. You might be able to trick your plants into fighting by introducing controlled stressors (like a weakened pathogen, maybe?) into the "farm."
weak 16y ago
The author, Manny Howard, was on the Colbert Report tonight. This guy was incredibly deadpan, one of the more enjoyable Colbert guests that I can remember.
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dylanz 16y ago
Permaculture FTW
thunk 16y ago
Title is a reference to NIN's Hurt, (beautifully) covered by Johnny Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=relat...
- hartror 16y ago
  Nice, NIN fan here and I really enjoyed that cover :)
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  More trivia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)#Music_video_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)#Mus... Read the Reznor quote.
  - mortenjorck 16y ago
    Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. To have your own work transformed in such a profoundly moving way has to be among the greatest possible creative experiences.
petercooper 16y ago
Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. And it's bad for the environment too based on the studies Superfreakonomics quoted. Why? It turns out transportation is a minor contributor to food related emissions: Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent. You need the book to go into full detail but the crux of it is that large, optimized farms are significantly less destructive to the environment on a proportional basis than small, local farms. The people behind the study said that cutting out one meal of red meat and dairy per week would have a better result than eating entirely locally produced food. Some quotes here: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-excerpt/story?id=8848071 http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce...
- redcap 16y ago
  Red meat certainly takes a lot of energy to produce, and may well be environmentally beneficial to cut it from your diet if that's your thing. Personally I stay away from beef because my genes have decided that I have more than enough iron, thank-you-very-much. However, there's surely some benefit from growing food in your own backyard - you do cut down on the (admittedly minimal transport costs), and doing something physical outside has got to be good for you - even if it is a few pots outside if you live in a high-rise. Here's hoping you don't cut your finger off doing so.
  - khafra 16y ago
    I associate "localvore" with "farmer's market," not with "vegetable garden." Vegetable gardens sound unambiguously good to me, whereas 50 pickup trucks making 50mi trips to a farmer's market might be worse than 1 semi truck making a 500mi trip to the grocery store.
- kleiba 16y ago
  This is not true. The book you cite, 'SuperFreakonomics,' by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, apparently misquotes the original research on which they base their claim. Here's a quote from the book[1]: "Even the 'locavore' movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn't help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions." But compare that to how one of the two authors of the original study, Christoph Weber, actually summarizes their findings[2]: "The point of the paper was to say that yes, you can lower your footprint by eating local foods, but you can do more on average by eating differently. It’s not that eating local is a crock." In that light, it seems as if Levitt and Dubner either misunderstood the paper by Weber and Matthews or preferred to portrait it in a light that helps make their own book look profound and surprising. [1] http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-excerpt/story?id=8848071 http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce... [2] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es900427m?cookieSet=1 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es900427m?cookieSet=1
jgershen 16y ago
What I really enjoyed about this article was hearing how difficult his experience really was -- and you can tell he A) actually knows what he's talking about and B) is still understating the difficulty. I've always assumed that I would "know how to survive off the land" -- my outdoor self-confidence pretty much comes from time backpacking in the Scouts as a kid, and from reading a lot of Heinlein. And I have power tool experience, and I can do physical labor. How hard could it be? So at the beginning of the article, I was thinking "this seems incredible, I would love to do something like that." In the middle, I was beginning to appreciate how horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be. And by the end, I was realizing that if I absolutely had to live off the land on my own, without society to bail me out, I would almost certainly screw something up and starve. I think almost all of us would. Anyway, you might have already known that. But for some reason this article hit just the right note to make me aware of the arrogance I've always had about how hard surviving via subsistence farming would really be. I'm going to go eat some cereal now and get back to work on the startup in the morning.
- barrkel 16y ago
  I thought he was being way too ambitious. If I had to make something like that work, my focus would be on potatoes and possibly a cow for milk, but it would of course depend on more land, the correct climate and probably better timing. He seemed dead-set on eating meat every day, which seems to me to have been very unrealistic, especially with such a tiny amount of land, unless he was cheating and using bought grain etc. to feed the animals.
  - eru 16y ago
    You can probably go for eating eggs every day.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
  horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be. I seriously doubt that he knew what he was talking about. The biggest problem in subsistence farming is the risk you take. All the knowledge you need is out there: we've been growing food for thousands of years and are still researching how to get better at it. Yes, it requires hard physical labor, but beyond that, it's not at all difficult on a small scale. You want to have a small garden? Find a bit of land and prepare about 3'x3' of it: Dig it up, turn the soil over and make sure it isn't too sandy (add mulch if it is) or clayey (add sand if it is). If the area regularly gets flooded, then build a small wall around it and fill with dirt so you have a 3x3' raised bed that will drain properly. Then plant one row each of squash, potatoes (for the experiment you can just cut an eye out of a potato you would eat and plant it) and tomato seeds. Potatoes go about 3" deep, squash and tomatoes about 1/2" deep. If you're in the Northern US you might need to use tomato plants instead of seeds since it's already July. If you want to, you can build a no-effort compost heap next to it: just dump your organic kitchen waste in a pile next to the garden. At the end of the growing season, work the pile into the soil and it will get more fertile every year. Check daily to make sure the soil doesn't get too dry (water in the evening) and pull any weeds you see. Don't do any more than this and you'll be eating squash, tomatoes and potatoes in three months. With a plot only 3'x3' it will take only a few minutes a day. It's that easy.
yardie 16y ago
The author started way too fast and was surprised he would burn out so quickly. If you are trying to set up a small self sustaining ecosystem you don't dump everything in all at once. Anyone that's done an aquarium will tell you that. You start with one thing, stabilize it, add another thing, stabilize, rinse and repeat. After reading this the only lesson he learned was how to waste $11,000. Off the mark he's growing tomatoes, corn, potatoes, eggplant, raspberries, etc. Nothing is mentioned about the watering and fertilizing cycles of the plants. Which is pretty damn important. And these aren't the easiest vegetables, except maybe the tomatoes and the cale. I've started my own little terrace garden this summer and so far I've learned getting started is expensive and no matter how smart you think you are, read the directions. I basically spent $200 last month on what basically amounts to soil, pots, hand tools, and seedlings. And this is only to grow herbs. My objective is to get out from under the thumb of my local grocery store. Last time I went shopping they were charging $3 for a bag of lettuce! If things work out by the end of summer I won't be paying for something like that again.
- mncaudill 16y ago
  And in 2 or 3 years' time, you'll break even!
  - yardie 16y ago
    Possibly. But the point isn't about breaking even it's about having lettuce that isn't washed in pesticides and fertilizer. Which for me is priceless.
- mhb 16y ago
  You may be interested in this DIY Earthbox: http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-your-own-earth-filled-box/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-your-own-earth-fill...
- eru 16y ago
  Why did you have to spent $200? Would you give a small breakdown? My housemates and I have recently started growing stuff in our garden. We did not have to buy soil and pots, only some seeds and tools.
jkndrkn 16y ago
Nice Nine Inch Nails reference ^_^

63 points by fendrak 16y ago

This article reminded me of something I've always wanted to do before I grow old; make an automated farm. What drives me crazy is the idea of an integrated system that gives me high quality produce at the maximum possible efficiency. If we use something like hydroponics then we can precisely control the nutrients the plants get. Further, since they grow inside a greenhouse we don't need to use any pesticides at all. Further, we can control the amount of light they receive to optimize for maximum growth, and by stacking such units one on top of the other than we don't have to worry space at all. So a massive 500 acre farm can be theoretically reduced to a one acre farm with 500 decks of plants in an efficient arrangement. In fact, someone else way smarter than me has already though of this and developed the idea to quite a long extent (see: http://www.verticalfarm.com/ http://www.verticalfarm.com/). Has anyone over here ever tried something like this? Are there more awesome people like Mr. Howard?

cullenking 16y ago
To address one of your points, just because the crop is inside a greenhouse (or even indoors!) does not mean you won't get pests. Anyone who has had fungus gnats or spider mites even in their far-spaced house plants can attest it happens :(
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Well, once you go indoors you have a lot more control over this. Think quarantine scenario since this is basically what we're talking about. Nothing gets in that hasn't been cleared.
  - mhb 16y ago
    Those vegetables are going to be pretty expensive.
    - loewenskind 16y ago
      When you're talking about what you put into your body, which is directly related to the quality of life you're going to have (you may not see the effects of this right away but you will see it), then I don't think cheap should be our first concern. Having said that, it wouldn't have to be insanely expensive either. It depends on the scale, right?
- todayiamme 16y ago
  Yes, but as loewenskind pointed out. It is exactly like quarantine. think about it this way if we can keep entire football fields dust free for years at a time to fabricate micro-processors then surely we can do this? Something that really amazes me is that technology has been pushed to limits that we can't imagine. Who would have thought that we are now engineering things 100 atoms apart? Unbelievable.
  - eru 16y ago
    > [...] then surely we can do this? There's a difference between technologically possible, and economically feasible.
khafra 16y ago
To address another concern with vertical farms, you'll need to use low-sun-requirement crops; most modern stuff optimized for quick growth with maximum solar and NPK input simply won't grow in those conditions--like expecting full voltage from a vertical photovoltaic panel.
jtbigwoo 16y ago
The big problem with sterility is taste and nutrition. It turns out that many of those vitamins and flavor compounds that we like are natural fungicides, pesticides, and preservatives. That's part of the reason why a home-grown tomato tastes so good--it's spent its whole life fighting off attackers while the bland industrial tomatoes have been protected by farm chemicals. A sterile greenhouse or vertical farm would create produce that was bland and less nutritious. You might be able to trick your plants into fighting by introducing controlled stressors (like a weakened pathogen, maybe?) into the "farm."

weak 16y ago

The author, Manny Howard, was on the Colbert Report tonight. This guy was incredibly deadpan, one of the more enjoyable Colbert guests that I can remember.

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dylanz 16y ago

Permaculture FTW

thunk 16y ago

Title is a reference to NIN's Hurt, (beautifully) covered by Johnny Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=relat...

hartror 16y ago
Nice, NIN fan here and I really enjoyed that cover :)
jokermatt999 16y ago
More trivia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)#Music_video_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)#Mus... Read the Reznor quote.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. To have your own work transformed in such a profoundly moving way has to be among the greatest possible creative experiences.

petercooper 16y ago

Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. And it's bad for the environment too based on the studies Superfreakonomics quoted. Why? It turns out transportation is a minor contributor to food related emissions: Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent. You need the book to go into full detail but the crux of it is that large, optimized farms are significantly less destructive to the environment on a proportional basis than small, local farms. The people behind the study said that cutting out one meal of red meat and dairy per week would have a better result than eating entirely locally produced food. Some quotes here: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-excerpt/story?id=8848071 http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce...

redcap 16y ago
Red meat certainly takes a lot of energy to produce, and may well be environmentally beneficial to cut it from your diet if that's your thing. Personally I stay away from beef because my genes have decided that I have more than enough iron, thank-you-very-much. However, there's surely some benefit from growing food in your own backyard - you do cut down on the (admittedly minimal transport costs), and doing something physical outside has got to be good for you - even if it is a few pots outside if you live in a high-rise. Here's hoping you don't cut your finger off doing so.
- khafra 16y ago
  I associate "localvore" with "farmer's market," not with "vegetable garden." Vegetable gardens sound unambiguously good to me, whereas 50 pickup trucks making 50mi trips to a farmer's market might be worse than 1 semi truck making a 500mi trip to the grocery store.
kleiba 16y ago
This is not true. The book you cite, 'SuperFreakonomics,' by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, apparently misquotes the original research on which they base their claim. Here's a quote from the book[1]: "Even the 'locavore' movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn't help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions." But compare that to how one of the two authors of the original study, Christoph Weber, actually summarizes their findings[2]: "The point of the paper was to say that yes, you can lower your footprint by eating local foods, but you can do more on average by eating differently. It’s not that eating local is a crock." In that light, it seems as if Levitt and Dubner either misunderstood the paper by Weber and Matthews or preferred to portrait it in a light that helps make their own book look profound and surprising. [1] http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-excerpt/story?id=8848071 http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce... [2] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es900427m?cookieSet=1 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es900427m?cookieSet=1

jgershen 16y ago

What I really enjoyed about this article was hearing how difficult his experience really was -- and you can tell he A) actually knows what he's talking about and B) is still understating the difficulty. I've always assumed that I would "know how to survive off the land" -- my outdoor self-confidence pretty much comes from time backpacking in the Scouts as a kid, and from reading a lot of Heinlein. And I have power tool experience, and I can do physical labor. How hard could it be? So at the beginning of the article, I was thinking "this seems incredible, I would love to do something like that." In the middle, I was beginning to appreciate how horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be. And by the end, I was realizing that if I absolutely had to live off the land on my own, without society to bail me out, I would almost certainly screw something up and starve. I think almost all of us would. Anyway, you might have already known that. But for some reason this article hit just the right note to make me aware of the arrogance I've always had about how hard surviving via subsistence farming would really be. I'm going to go eat some cereal now and get back to work on the startup in the morning.

barrkel 16y ago
I thought he was being way too ambitious. If I had to make something like that work, my focus would be on potatoes and possibly a cow for milk, but it would of course depend on more land, the correct climate and probably better timing. He seemed dead-set on eating meat every day, which seems to me to have been very unrealistic, especially with such a tiny amount of land, unless he was cheating and using bought grain etc. to feed the animals.
- eru 16y ago
  You can probably go for eating eggs every day.
HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be. I seriously doubt that he knew what he was talking about. The biggest problem in subsistence farming is the risk you take. All the knowledge you need is out there: we've been growing food for thousands of years and are still researching how to get better at it. Yes, it requires hard physical labor, but beyond that, it's not at all difficult on a small scale. You want to have a small garden? Find a bit of land and prepare about 3'x3' of it: Dig it up, turn the soil over and make sure it isn't too sandy (add mulch if it is) or clayey (add sand if it is). If the area regularly gets flooded, then build a small wall around it and fill with dirt so you have a 3x3' raised bed that will drain properly. Then plant one row each of squash, potatoes (for the experiment you can just cut an eye out of a potato you would eat and plant it) and tomato seeds. Potatoes go about 3" deep, squash and tomatoes about 1/2" deep. If you're in the Northern US you might need to use tomato plants instead of seeds since it's already July. If you want to, you can build a no-effort compost heap next to it: just dump your organic kitchen waste in a pile next to the garden. At the end of the growing season, work the pile into the soil and it will get more fertile every year. Check daily to make sure the soil doesn't get too dry (water in the evening) and pull any weeds you see. Don't do any more than this and you'll be eating squash, tomatoes and potatoes in three months. With a plot only 3'x3' it will take only a few minutes a day. It's that easy.

yardie 16y ago

The author started way too fast and was surprised he would burn out so quickly. If you are trying to set up a small self sustaining ecosystem you don't dump everything in all at once. Anyone that's done an aquarium will tell you that. You start with one thing, stabilize it, add another thing, stabilize, rinse and repeat. After reading this the only lesson he learned was how to waste $11,000. Off the mark he's growing tomatoes, corn, potatoes, eggplant, raspberries, etc. Nothing is mentioned about the watering and fertilizing cycles of the plants. Which is pretty damn important. And these aren't the easiest vegetables, except maybe the tomatoes and the cale. I've started my own little terrace garden this summer and so far I've learned getting started is expensive and no matter how smart you think you are, read the directions. I basically spent $200 last month on what basically amounts to soil, pots, hand tools, and seedlings. And this is only to grow herbs. My objective is to get out from under the thumb of my local grocery store. Last time I went shopping they were charging $3 for a bag of lettuce! If things work out by the end of summer I won't be paying for something like that again.

mncaudill 16y ago
And in 2 or 3 years' time, you'll break even!
- yardie 16y ago
  Possibly. But the point isn't about breaking even it's about having lettuce that isn't washed in pesticides and fertilizer. Which for me is priceless.
mhb 16y ago
You may be interested in this DIY Earthbox: http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-your-own-earth-filled-box/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-your-own-earth-fill...
eru 16y ago
Why did you have to spent $200? Would you give a small breakdown? My housemates and I have recently started growing stuff in our garden. We did not have to buy soil and pots, only some seeds and tools.

jkndrkn 16y ago

Nice Nine Inch Nails reference ^_^