4 ms·

And "pound of produce" is an almost meaningless metric.

• Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Yup; in additiona it needs e.g. calories per m2 and cost. In the article I see a lot of leaves (very low caloric count) with a lot of employees around it in lab coats - that just can't be profitable. It can't compete with thousands of acres of high-calorie products like corn or potatoes harvested by just one guy in a combine. At the moment (According to a quora post, https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-can-be-fed-year-round-off-of-one-acre-of-crop-growing https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-can-be-fed-year-round-...), right now we use 0.5 acres of farmland per person; I'm sure that can be optimized a bit so let's say 0.25 acres per person, or ~1000 m2. That's an area of 30x30 meters. The Empire State Building, to name a random example, is ~130x57 meters, or about 7500m2 (very rough calculation). Therefore, you can feed about 7.5 people per floor. Give or take, very rough back of the napkin calculation. 7.5 people per floor isn't a lot and it's very expensive. Maybe useful for colonizing Mars where money isn't that big of a deal, but definitely not feed-the-world level scaling.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • thinkcontext 8y ago
    Calories per m2 is not a useful metric, dollars per m2 is the appropriate one. They are not attempting to feed the world, they are attempting to get premium leafy greens to market quickly.
    • anoncoward111 8y ago
      Accurate. Personal health has completely bypassed the calorie as a useful metric btw. You can't survive on a diet of 1,800 calories of vegetable oil per day