7 ms·

For the love of dirt just go outside and plant some vegetables. With half the loving care that you put into your tech you can have a beautiful productive garden

For the love of dirt just go outside and plant some vegetables. With half the loving care that you put into your tech you can have a beautiful productive garden. My mother is an amazing gardener because she pays careful attention to her crops and applies reasoning and careful experimentation to grow her knowledge. Have patience, read up, and dig in. You can grow things yourself too. Perhaps I’m becoming a Luddite...

arethuza 8y ago
Rocket is pretty easy to grow as well - if I can manage to grow decent quantities of it outside in Scotland then it must be pretty easy to grow!
PyroLagus 8y ago
If you have a house with space for a garden and the time to dedicate gardening, sure. You can grow some things in an apartment even, but not much. Taking the labor, time, and space requirements out of food production is a huge deal, especially today. If computerized farming means fresher and cheaper vegetables in the city, why shouldn't we use that?
- steve918 8y ago
  Power efficiency for one.
  - eyko 8y ago
    There's a table in the article about the Net carbon emissions of indoor vs outdoor farming, claiming a total of 1.1 for outdoor vs 1.0 for indoor.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      I wouldn't trust that table. 1) I redid the calculations using the numbers shown in the table. With more decimal places, it's 1.054 for outdoor and 1.036 for indoor. The actual penalty for outdoor growing, using their own input numbers, is more like 1.7% than 10%. Presenting the results rounded to 1 decimal place is misleading. 2) The only reason indoor comes out ahead at all is that they gave indoor lettuce a 0.18 kg credit for sequestered CO2 and gave the outdoor lettuce no credit. Plants absorb CO2 while growing regardless of whether they are indoor or outdoor. In the case of lettuce, there is no long term sequestration anyway; the plant matter is soon converted back to CO2 when it's metabolized by humans or microbes. Setting both indoor and outdoor sequestration credits to 0, indoor has a CO2 footprint of 1.253, significantly larger than outdoor's 1.054. The original source for the table is cited as a blog article from the Breakthrough Institute titled "Don't Count Out Vertical Farms." I tried going back to the original source to see if the numbers were misrepresented here, or if they had more justification in the original, but the Breakthrough Institute appears to have removed the article from their site. Existing links to it 404 now.
      - mikeyouse 8y ago
        Looks like they changed the link along the way: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food/vertical-farms-raise-yields-but-what-about-emissions https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food/vertical-farms-raise...
        philipkglass 8y ago
        Thanks. It appears that the sequestration credit for vertical farming presumes that agricultural land formerly used for lettuce will be converted to a forest. That's questionable but not crazy. It gets worse when you look at the footnotes. They assume that the electricity going to the vertical farm is produced at the Swedish average carbon intensity per kWh. Sweden is far below the OECD average for electrical energy carbon intensity: http://www.compareyourcountry.org/climate-policies?cr=oecd&lg=en&page=2 http://www.compareyourcountry.org/climate-policies?cr=oecd&l... Only Switzerland, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway have low enough electrical carbon intensities for vertical farming to have a smaller carbon footprint, even conceding the re-forestation assumption.
- hjk05 8y ago
  Go to Ikea and but a system, no need for robotics or PID controllers, complex webbased control console or any of that. Just plastic planter and a light, you’ll have fresh lettuce with little trouble in no time.
michaelbuckbee 8y ago
This advice is good but geographically bound. It's hard to grow veggies year-round in Minnesota. It is not great to transport oranges and warm weather crops hundreds or thousands of miles (both for carbon impact and quality).
- gatherhunterer 8y ago
  Onions, leeks and tubers can be harvested all winter. Gourds stay fresh for a long time even without refrigeration. Of course there is such a thing as planting season but it is perfectly feasible to be an avid gardener in a cold climate. No one is asking you to grow oranges but there are heirloom tomatoes and many other summer crops that can thrive in Minnesota. Having the soil be almost unusable all winter is good for the soil. It’s some of the best dirt in the world. If New Yorkers who don’t own a single inch of outdoor property can grow tomatoes then so can anyone anywhere in the midwest.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    Sure, like you can just go out there with a pick-axe and try and get your potatoes because the ground is frozen solid.
    - gatherhunterer 8y ago
      Aside from being a shallow dismissal this comment demonstrates an unmistakable unfamiliarity with the subject. How one can have such a strong opinion on something they know so little about is beyond me. Frozen dirt is brittle and easy to dislodge, it is only difficult if you need to dig a post hole or something of limited width.
      - astrodust 8y ago
        You clearly have not experienced an actual winter, just some weak-sauce facsimile, the sort you might get in northern Virginia. If I wanted to get potatoes right now from the back yard dirt I'd have to remove about two feet of hard-packed ice and snow, then chisel into dirt that may as well be concrete. At least solid ice and concrete respect a pick. Wet, frozen dirt just shrugs it off. Let me remind you that this year in places like Minnesota it was -60°F outside. Good luck getting anything out of the ground in those conditions. Even a backhoe is going to have trouble. I'd suggest using dynamite, but at those temperatures even dynamite won't work without being heated up first.
Pfhreak 8y ago
It's not mutually exclusive. I basically tore out my lawn and grow veggies every year, but I also grow other stuff indoors. There are times I want lettuce but don't want to worry about sudden cold snaps, for instance. Or get my seeds started indoors before transferring them outdoors. And the study that suggests indoor grown can be less carbon intense is super interesting.
ivanhoe 8y ago
Going outside is great if you own a yard, but it's totally doable inside too. One doesn't really need a lot of tech to grow vegetables indoor, some hydroponic systems like Kratky method require just a minimal initial effort and zero technology (just some light source, e.g. a window facing south, a little water and some fertilizers). Or even simpler, if you own an aquarium you can grow organic lettuce on top of it, I did that for a while with a lot of success. It's also helping the fish by filtering the water, so it's totally a win-win situation.
tropo 8y ago
The real win here is toxins and sanitation. A big dirty secret is that organic crops fail at both. Farmers buy special organic pesticides, for example toxic plant juice. The fertilizer is often poo. These indoor farms are kept bug-free. They should also be free of rats and birds. If a bird craps on your lettuce, there is no way to really fully sanitize that without destroying the lettuce. You can wash it so that it looks nice and people will eat it, but you will never make it safe. The farmers themselves are also a problem of course, particularly the lowest-paid workers who often don't get proper treatment for diseases and often don't really understand or care about sanitation. Indoor farms allow an easier transition to automation, which would greatly reduce this disease risk.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
It's hard to do by hand, what a commercial grower does at enormous scale. Sure you can have (a few) tasty vegetables, but nothing like enough for your entire diet? It takes like 400 sq ft to grow enough vegetables for one person-year. That would be a lot of work.
restalis 8y ago
Lacking technology to do things any better would excuse us for having that kind of attitude, but we happen to do have technology. We'll need the knowledge and experience of growing stuff on a mass scale artificial environments.
nategri 8y ago
Your phrasing "loving care" brought to mind a relevant poem: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weeke...
reaperducer 8y ago
For the love of dirt just go outside and plant some vegetables Or even do it inside. I mostly work in climate inhospitable to farming, so I can't have a garden in my yard. But I still grow radishes, wheatgrass, and other small edible things in mason jars between the monitors and gadgets on my desk at work. That's how the office found out one of my coworkers is terrified of crickets.

arethuza 8y ago

Rocket is pretty easy to grow as well - if I can manage to grow decent quantities of it outside in Scotland then it must be pretty easy to grow!

PyroLagus 8y ago

If you have a house with space for a garden and the time to dedicate gardening, sure. You can grow some things in an apartment even, but not much. Taking the labor, time, and space requirements out of food production is a huge deal, especially today. If computerized farming means fresher and cheaper vegetables in the city, why shouldn't we use that?

steve918 8y ago
Power efficiency for one.
- eyko 8y ago
  There's a table in the article about the Net carbon emissions of indoor vs outdoor farming, claiming a total of 1.1 for outdoor vs 1.0 for indoor.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    I wouldn't trust that table. 1) I redid the calculations using the numbers shown in the table. With more decimal places, it's 1.054 for outdoor and 1.036 for indoor. The actual penalty for outdoor growing, using their own input numbers, is more like 1.7% than 10%. Presenting the results rounded to 1 decimal place is misleading. 2) The only reason indoor comes out ahead at all is that they gave indoor lettuce a 0.18 kg credit for sequestered CO2 and gave the outdoor lettuce no credit. Plants absorb CO2 while growing regardless of whether they are indoor or outdoor. In the case of lettuce, there is no long term sequestration anyway; the plant matter is soon converted back to CO2 when it's metabolized by humans or microbes. Setting both indoor and outdoor sequestration credits to 0, indoor has a CO2 footprint of 1.253, significantly larger than outdoor's 1.054. The original source for the table is cited as a blog article from the Breakthrough Institute titled "Don't Count Out Vertical Farms." I tried going back to the original source to see if the numbers were misrepresented here, or if they had more justification in the original, but the Breakthrough Institute appears to have removed the article from their site. Existing links to it 404 now.
    - mikeyouse 8y ago
      Looks like they changed the link along the way: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food/vertical-farms-raise-yields-but-what-about-emissions https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food/vertical-farms-raise...
      - philipkglass 8y ago
        Thanks. It appears that the sequestration credit for vertical farming presumes that agricultural land formerly used for lettuce will be converted to a forest. That's questionable but not crazy. It gets worse when you look at the footnotes. They assume that the electricity going to the vertical farm is produced at the Swedish average carbon intensity per kWh. Sweden is far below the OECD average for electrical energy carbon intensity: http://www.compareyourcountry.org/climate-policies?cr=oecd&lg=en&page=2 http://www.compareyourcountry.org/climate-policies?cr=oecd&l... Only Switzerland, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway have low enough electrical carbon intensities for vertical farming to have a smaller carbon footprint, even conceding the re-forestation assumption.
hjk05 8y ago
Go to Ikea and but a system, no need for robotics or PID controllers, complex webbased control console or any of that. Just plastic planter and a light, you’ll have fresh lettuce with little trouble in no time.

michaelbuckbee 8y ago

This advice is good but geographically bound. It's hard to grow veggies year-round in Minnesota. It is not great to transport oranges and warm weather crops hundreds or thousands of miles (both for carbon impact and quality).

gatherhunterer 8y ago
Onions, leeks and tubers can be harvested all winter. Gourds stay fresh for a long time even without refrigeration. Of course there is such a thing as planting season but it is perfectly feasible to be an avid gardener in a cold climate. No one is asking you to grow oranges but there are heirloom tomatoes and many other summer crops that can thrive in Minnesota. Having the soil be almost unusable all winter is good for the soil. It’s some of the best dirt in the world. If New Yorkers who don’t own a single inch of outdoor property can grow tomatoes then so can anyone anywhere in the midwest.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Sure, like you can just go out there with a pick-axe and try and get your potatoes because the ground is frozen solid.
  - gatherhunterer 8y ago
    Aside from being a shallow dismissal this comment demonstrates an unmistakable unfamiliarity with the subject. How one can have such a strong opinion on something they know so little about is beyond me. Frozen dirt is brittle and easy to dislodge, it is only difficult if you need to dig a post hole or something of limited width.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      You clearly have not experienced an actual winter, just some weak-sauce facsimile, the sort you might get in northern Virginia. If I wanted to get potatoes right now from the back yard dirt I'd have to remove about two feet of hard-packed ice and snow, then chisel into dirt that may as well be concrete. At least solid ice and concrete respect a pick. Wet, frozen dirt just shrugs it off. Let me remind you that this year in places like Minnesota it was -60°F outside. Good luck getting anything out of the ground in those conditions. Even a backhoe is going to have trouble. I'd suggest using dynamite, but at those temperatures even dynamite won't work without being heated up first.

Pfhreak 8y ago

It's not mutually exclusive. I basically tore out my lawn and grow veggies every year, but I also grow other stuff indoors. There are times I want lettuce but don't want to worry about sudden cold snaps, for instance. Or get my seeds started indoors before transferring them outdoors. And the study that suggests indoor grown can be less carbon intense is super interesting.

ivanhoe 8y ago

Going outside is great if you own a yard, but it's totally doable inside too. One doesn't really need a lot of tech to grow vegetables indoor, some hydroponic systems like Kratky method require just a minimal initial effort and zero technology (just some light source, e.g. a window facing south, a little water and some fertilizers). Or even simpler, if you own an aquarium you can grow organic lettuce on top of it, I did that for a while with a lot of success. It's also helping the fish by filtering the water, so it's totally a win-win situation.

tropo 8y ago

The real win here is toxins and sanitation. A big dirty secret is that organic crops fail at both. Farmers buy special organic pesticides, for example toxic plant juice. The fertilizer is often poo. These indoor farms are kept bug-free. They should also be free of rats and birds. If a bird craps on your lettuce, there is no way to really fully sanitize that without destroying the lettuce. You can wash it so that it looks nice and people will eat it, but you will never make it safe. The farmers themselves are also a problem of course, particularly the lowest-paid workers who often don't get proper treatment for diseases and often don't really understand or care about sanitation. Indoor farms allow an easier transition to automation, which would greatly reduce this disease risk.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

It's hard to do by hand, what a commercial grower does at enormous scale. Sure you can have (a few) tasty vegetables, but nothing like enough for your entire diet? It takes like 400 sq ft to grow enough vegetables for one person-year. That would be a lot of work.

restalis 8y ago

Lacking technology to do things any better would excuse us for having that kind of attitude, but we happen to do have technology. We'll need the knowledge and experience of growing stuff on a mass scale artificial environments.

nategri 8y ago

Your phrasing "loving care" brought to mind a relevant poem: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weeke...

reaperducer 8y ago

For the love of dirt just go outside and plant some vegetables Or even do it inside. I mostly work in climate inhospitable to farming, so I can't have a garden in my yard. But I still grow radishes, wheatgrass, and other small edible things in mason jars between the monitors and gadgets on my desk at work. That's how the office found out one of my coworkers is terrified of crickets.