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It's not a question of pioneering, it's a question of base resource inputs. Tesla can promise an electric car but they can't promise one that costs less than th

It's not a question of pioneering, it's a question of base resource inputs. Tesla can promise an electric car but they can't promise one that costs less than the lithium and metals required to manufacture it, let alone the cost of labor. Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible. Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California. It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
endominus 6y ago
Speaking of base resource inputs, I would be concerned with the soil erosion inherent in intensive farming methods. By every estimate I've seen of the rate of topsoil depletion[0], we'll reach a crisis point in agriculture within half a century. Could vertical farming, perhaps paired with a less pollutative energy source like nuclear power, stave off that eventuality? I know a lot of people push organic farming as the solution, but it doesn't appear to be productive enough to feed a growing global population. [0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1052831 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1052831
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  You still have the problem that you need to be able to grow plants beyond lettuce and strawberries. No one is growing cereal grains or root crops vertically. It’s not economical viable.
  - swiftcoder 6y ago
    Why is that, exactly? Potatoes, Carrots, Corn, Mushrooms... All grow fine in buckets. All grow fine hydroponically. I'm not sure I see an obviously barrier preventing all of these from being vertically farmed.
    - jonathankoren 6y ago
      Quite simply, the energy and capital costs of growing bushel of wheat are more than the bushel price of wheat. This difference isn’t just a little, but a lot. If I’m reading the table right in page 19 of the appendix linked, it’s as bad as 37x in 2019, and only projected to fall to 4.6x by 2050. Paper https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131 Appendix https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/2002655117.DCSupplemental/pnas.2002655117.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/200265511...
sandspar 6y ago
This might be a stupid question, but could a vertical farm use systems of mirrors to direct sunlight to the crops? That way the vertical farms can collect sunlight from a wide area. Maybe the mirrors could be positioned in such a way as to take up less ground space overall than an equivalent flat farm.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  If the sun shines sideways then you don’t need mirrors. (In many places in the North, at this time of year, the sun occasionally shines sideways.)
- lmm 6y ago
  That doesn't seem very plausible: fundamentally all accessible sunlight hits the ground somewhere or other (until we start talking about space mirrors and things like that), so while you can use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (as solar thermal plants do) you can't really beat collecting x amount of solar radiation from y square meters of ground. You can build a tall structure that collect the sunlight hitting the side of it, but obviously that's going to block said sunlight from a correspondingly large area of ground in its shadow; at extreme latitudes where the sunlight mostly comes in sideways you get more concentrated sunlight that way (at the cost of an even bigger shadow), but I doubt it'd be worth the overhead.
- akiselev 6y ago
  Mirrors can neither increase photosynthetic efficiency nor reflect more light than they receive, so to get an equivalent amount of light you'd need a massive structure of mirrors the size of the fields you replace. There might be some clever optimizations possible, but between cooling to keep the plants from burning and occlusion from nutrient delivery systems, it'd be a very large net loss once capital costs are figured in
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible. Actually, they do: subsidies distort the hell of out the price discovery mechanisms in Markets. At no point in time can a farmer sell a 1lb(~1/2Kg) of tomatoes at the hieght of season for for $1 or less, much less in the off-season. And yet they do because of the distortions in correctly pricing the inputs, transport and labour as a result of wanting to remain on the crop insurance and subsidy program. This is seen the World over in various ways too, in the EU farmers are paid to let their fields go fallow and orchids entirely neglected for seasons; it's one of the biggest reason why Farming as a profession has an average age of 60+ World wide as any younger person not born into the Lifestyle or from a Legacy Farming family will quickly see how impractical it is to operate with this system in what amounts to near subsistence levels of poverty. As an outsider going into the Industry for culinary and ecological activist reasons it's incredibly daunting when you realize that in 100 years we created a system in which less than ~2% of the World's population feeds the ~98% and how fragile this system is and how much of a miracle it hasn't blown up in our faces long ago. It's maintained by fanciful economic machinations and make-believe accounting created by Nation-states to essentially keep a slave labour class in place and avoid peasant revolts due to mass hunger to the detriment of everyone--and that often breaks down, see EU dairy farmer protests in 2012/13/20, and the widespread Indian suicides in the early 2000s and now the farmer revolts happening in New Dehli. Not to mention the amount of subsidies there are for multinationals to sell processed junk into the Market and sold to children school programs at an inflated prices that have resulted in lots of disease and have actually made the average population shorter: a possible inference and consequence of undernourishment due to consuming nutrient deficient food. The Tesla model, while only slightly relevant due to State and Federal subsidies for EVs, is not painting as good as a picture as an analogy for the reasons you think if you have an understanding of either or both Industries: I happen to have worked in both. But suffice it to say that up until recently (Federal subsidy of $7500 expired in 2019) in the US where most Tesla deliveries take place--specifically CA-- and where most of the fruit in the US is grown in (Central Valley) it is safe to say that EXACTLY both of those things happened to a certain degree.
- hef19898 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

endominus 6y ago

Speaking of base resource inputs, I would be concerned with the soil erosion inherent in intensive farming methods. By every estimate I've seen of the rate of topsoil depletion[0], we'll reach a crisis point in agriculture within half a century. Could vertical farming, perhaps paired with a less pollutative energy source like nuclear power, stave off that eventuality? I know a lot of people push organic farming as the solution, but it doesn't appear to be productive enough to feed a growing global population. [0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1052831 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1052831

jonathankoren 6y ago
You still have the problem that you need to be able to grow plants beyond lettuce and strawberries. No one is growing cereal grains or root crops vertically. It’s not economical viable.
- swiftcoder 6y ago
  Why is that, exactly? Potatoes, Carrots, Corn, Mushrooms... All grow fine in buckets. All grow fine hydroponically. I'm not sure I see an obviously barrier preventing all of these from being vertically farmed.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    Quite simply, the energy and capital costs of growing bushel of wheat are more than the bushel price of wheat. This difference isn’t just a little, but a lot. If I’m reading the table right in page 19 of the appendix linked, it’s as bad as 37x in 2019, and only projected to fall to 4.6x by 2050. Paper https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131 Appendix https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/2002655117.DCSupplemental/pnas.2002655117.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/200265511...

sandspar 6y ago

This might be a stupid question, but could a vertical farm use systems of mirrors to direct sunlight to the crops? That way the vertical farms can collect sunlight from a wide area. Maybe the mirrors could be positioned in such a way as to take up less ground space overall than an equivalent flat farm.

gorgoiler 6y ago
If the sun shines sideways then you don’t need mirrors. (In many places in the North, at this time of year, the sun occasionally shines sideways.)
lmm 6y ago
That doesn't seem very plausible: fundamentally all accessible sunlight hits the ground somewhere or other (until we start talking about space mirrors and things like that), so while you can use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (as solar thermal plants do) you can't really beat collecting x amount of solar radiation from y square meters of ground. You can build a tall structure that collect the sunlight hitting the side of it, but obviously that's going to block said sunlight from a correspondingly large area of ground in its shadow; at extreme latitudes where the sunlight mostly comes in sideways you get more concentrated sunlight that way (at the cost of an even bigger shadow), but I doubt it'd be worth the overhead.
akiselev 6y ago
Mirrors can neither increase photosynthetic efficiency nor reflect more light than they receive, so to get an equivalent amount of light you'd need a massive structure of mirrors the size of the fields you replace. There might be some clever optimizations possible, but between cooling to keep the plants from burning and occlusion from nutrient delivery systems, it'd be a very large net loss once capital costs are figured in

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible. Actually, they do: subsidies distort the hell of out the price discovery mechanisms in Markets. At no point in time can a farmer sell a 1lb(~1/2Kg) of tomatoes at the hieght of season for for $1 or less, much less in the off-season. And yet they do because of the distortions in correctly pricing the inputs, transport and labour as a result of wanting to remain on the crop insurance and subsidy program. This is seen the World over in various ways too, in the EU farmers are paid to let their fields go fallow and orchids entirely neglected for seasons; it's one of the biggest reason why Farming as a profession has an average age of 60+ World wide as any younger person not born into the Lifestyle or from a Legacy Farming family will quickly see how impractical it is to operate with this system in what amounts to near subsistence levels of poverty. As an outsider going into the Industry for culinary and ecological activist reasons it's incredibly daunting when you realize that in 100 years we created a system in which less than ~2% of the World's population feeds the ~98% and how fragile this system is and how much of a miracle it hasn't blown up in our faces long ago. It's maintained by fanciful economic machinations and make-believe accounting created by Nation-states to essentially keep a slave labour class in place and avoid peasant revolts due to mass hunger to the detriment of everyone--and that often breaks down, see EU dairy farmer protests in 2012/13/20, and the widespread Indian suicides in the early 2000s and now the farmer revolts happening in New Dehli. Not to mention the amount of subsidies there are for multinationals to sell processed junk into the Market and sold to children school programs at an inflated prices that have resulted in lots of disease and have actually made the average population shorter: a possible inference and consequence of undernourishment due to consuming nutrient deficient food. The Tesla model, while only slightly relevant due to State and Federal subsidies for EVs, is not painting as good as a picture as an analogy for the reasons you think if you have an understanding of either or both Industries: I happen to have worked in both. But suffice it to say that up until recently (Federal subsidy of $7500 expired in 2019) in the US where most Tesla deliveries take place--specifically CA-- and where most of the fruit in the US is grown in (Central Valley) it is safe to say that EXACTLY both of those things happened to a certain degree.

hef19898 6y ago