3 ms·
Crops in fields are subject to pests, infections and flooding; look at East Africa, South Asia and China at the moment for examples. It's a lot easier to achiev
by brippalcharrid 6y ago
Crops in fields are subject to pests, infections and flooding; look at East Africa, South Asia and China at the moment for examples. It's a lot easier to achieve food security when your food production is industrialised and hermetically sealed in a relatively small area. Not depending on precipitation and being sheltered from hail/frost is also an advantage once you have sufficiently cheap energy that enables desalination on a mass scale. And while it isn't a pressing issue at the moment, it would certainly be preferable not to have to use half of the world's habitable area for agriculture (that tends to be heterogeneous so that it can be done efficiently at scale) with millions of acres used to grow grain with nitrate fertilisers and pesticides and to use it for stuff that's more biodiverse, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing instead.
- tomcam 6y ago> It's a lot easier to achieve food security when your food production is industrialised and hermetically sealed in a relatively small area. Citation? Sounds good in theory but many problems could arise, such as molds, fungus, or complete wiping out of a monoculture from disease.
- brippalcharrid 6y agoThe environments can be compartmentalised and sterilised between crops; if it's a sealed environment and the only inputs apart from the seeds are sterile (via UV treatment of water, for instance), there's far less risk of disease, and by carefully controlling the handling of the seeds (and ensuring that there's a reasonable degree of genetic diversity amongst them) that also reduces the risk of widespread crop failures. It's also far easier to monitor and continuously test crops in a controlled environment like that, and it wouldn't need to be just a few massive factories; there could be a large number of smaller ones that were geographically distributed.
- tomcam 6y agoSo, no citation. It appears we are both guessing.
- brippalcharrid 6y agoI don't have any peer-reviewed papers to hand on this particular subject (they may not even exist yet), but I welcome your feedback on the reasoning that I gave as to why I think that this is, fundamentally, a solvable problem.
- tomcam 6y agoI absolutely believe you could be right. Would love you to be. I literally was looking for citations. I also know these problems are difficult and my own experiments were discouraging--which has absolutely no bearing on what's possible.