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I would like to build on top of your point: - Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the wa
by Justsignedup 6y ago
I would like to build on top of your point:
- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.
- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.
- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
- dx034 6y agoAlso, indoor and especially vertical farming can save precious land. Maybe the US has enough land for farming, other countries certainly do not. Rain forests burned to make space for soy or palm oil are proof of that.
- vkou 6y agoWhat is the calory output of vertical farming? The only things I ever see grown in those vertical farms are low calory, short-shelf-life leafy greens, and the occasional bland tomato. Greens are nice and all, but calories are what keep us alive. Until they can produce calories, I will continue seeing them as a pointless distraction.
- dzdt 6y agoI had the impression indoor farming is heavily hoping to pivot to marijuana.
- vsareto 6y agoThat's easier to secure vs. a field of marijuana so there might be other reasons besides growing.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoCalory-dense foods are more economic to ship long distances though. From a 'power plant to plate' energy conversion viewpoint, leafy greens that don't ship well are probably the best things to grow in urban farms, assuming people will eat them anyway.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOutside of North Korea, humanity in 2020 has no shortage of calories.
- vkou 6y agoI believe that in 2020, we may have a shortage of calories if we were growing all of them in a sustainable manner. I will also note that in 2020, we have no shortage of leafy greens.
- BurningFrog 6y agoI think this all hinges on your definition of "sustainable". If you count using fossil fuels to make fertilizer as unsustainable, you're probably right. But that is very debatable.
- vkou 6y agoSure, we can quibble about all day. But consider my second point. If there is no caloric crop sustainability crisis in our future, then there is definitely no leafy green sustainability crisis looming on the horizon. The problems that vertical farming of kale solves are... Not very impactful ones. If all the kale in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of us wouldn't even notice.
- BurningFrog 6y agoI think we can agree to be unconvinced about vertical farming.
- Aunche 6y agoRain forests are being burned down because these areas are poor and farming is the simplest way to make money starting from scratch. Multi-million dollar vertical farms don't help.
- newyankee 6y agoForget even about money, sometimes if you cannot participate in the 'official' economy and have no prospects, you need bare minimum capacity to cultivate land and feed yourself and your family. This is what happens in developing countries.
- kickout 6y agoSave land? Most land in the US is doing NOTHING, or has little potential for anything other than carbon sequesteration
- imtringued 6y agoThat land is quickly abandoned. Rain forests are burnt because once you drain the soil of nutrients (takes less than 3 years) you can just move on to a different plot. Conventional farming reuses soil by adding fertilizer to artificially replace the missing nutrients.
- dx034 6y agoIf you look at satellite images of Indonesia, you'll see that much of it is now just palm oil. Most of that area was burned at least a decade ago. It would be nice if they'd abandon it, presumably a new rain forest could grow over the next century or so. But they continue to grow monocultures.
- xxpor 6y ago>Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power. Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking about the largest desalination project in human history by orders of magnitude. As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity of 500 million cubic meters per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Israel#Seawater_desalination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in... As of 2015, the US used ~450 million (edit: fixed from billion) cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation. https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/irrigation-water-use?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/i... Obviously not exactly a fair comparison for numerous reasons, but it gives a sense of the scale we're talking about here.
- credit_guy 6y ago> As of 2015, the US used ~450 billion cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be 450 million cubic meters. Your source says this: "For 2015, total irrigation withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d" So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound so outrageous. Israel is a small country.
- xxpor 6y agoAh you're right, I read the wrong line in the wolfram alpha output. That does make it seem less crazy. It would still be a crazy project but not "entire GDP of the US" crazy.
- jedberg 6y agoIsrael coastline: 171 miles US coastline (not including Alaska): 5,800 miles So the US has 33 times the coastline. It sounds like we're only one order of magnitude off to meet those desal needs. ps. If we include Alaska, which is another 6,600 miles of coastline, we could again halve that need.
- infogulch 6y agoMost of these sound reasonable, but I've never bought into the "grow vertically" idea. It seems to ignore physics. Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts) proportional to surface area. Plants naturally grow on the surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much. And that's ignoring the added complexity and logistics (read: overhead) of maintaining a system that stacks plants on top of each other, which would surely obliterate whatever 2-digit% efficiency bonus you can eke out of stacking. The universe doesn't work like Minecraft. Chemical and water use reduction seem to be a pretty good outcome, as well as being able to ignore seasonality. I would like to see some numbers on farm equipment (in?)efficiency before throwing that out as a fact. Color me skeptical but it doesn't seem obvious at all that rebuilding a 10000-acre greenhouse every 20 years will necessarily produce less greenhouse emissions than running a few tractors. Or even that harvesting food in a greenhouse takes less energy than doing it with a tractor.
- Someone 6y ago“Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much“ That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn’t even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely not true close to the poles. I don’t know whether it’s profitable, but I would think the economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the sky, greenhouse heating cheap, imports expensive) are different from those in Equatorial Guinea.
- infogulch 6y agoNo, it assumes that power is delivered based on surface area with respect to the sun. Vertical/3d farming can't work more than ~2 plants deep, where "depth" is measured as the number of plants between a given plant and the sun. Sure, build it vertically on the north pole, but it's still gonna be essentially "flat". You can't magically get power deep into a 3D farm when there 20 other plants on every side that would get the light first.
- dejj 6y ago> water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean If you're thinking pipes, the water might become toxic after 500km or so.
- datavirtue 6y agoAnd they can be run in the case where a super volcano has blown its top and is blocking out the sun for a year or two.