4 ms·

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 la

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.

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.