6 ms·

Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables which make up only small amounts of agriculture. It’s way too expensive for the crops

Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables which make up only small amounts of agriculture. It’s way too expensive for the crops that provide most of the calories consumed by humans or animal feed: wheat, maize, soy

hanniabu 4y ago
> Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables That's only true if it's in the city or other location with high cost/sqft land
tekno45 4y ago
imagine if we can reclaim all the land that salad and veggies use and replace it with good grains? solutions aren't always mutually exclusive.
- yuliyp 4y ago
  ... that'll be a drop in the bucket. cereal grains alone use more than 10x [1] the amount of land used for vegetables. Add in other large users (coarse grain / oil crops) and it's over 20x, meaning you'd get like a 5% increase by replacing all vegetable land with grains. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop
  - tekno45 4y ago
    thanks for sharing, thats pretty good data. can't disagree with that. seems like even more reason to not use the land for things that can be grown vertically/hydroponically. But definitely something i'll be reading more on, thanks for the resource.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  It wouldn't be particularly nutritionally useful, and you'd be able to grow grain for a couple of years before your soil turned into dust. That's why America starved in the 1930s.
- kingkawn 4y ago
  Ahhh, a reductionist solution that erases cultural heritage while solving no meaningful problem. How original!
jschveibinz 4y ago
Animal feed, along with fresh water and land usage is a major issue, as you have suggested. Less animals for human consumption = less feed, water and land required for animals. This opens up resources and agricultural land for vertical farming specifically for human consumption. Humans currently consume 55% of the calories from agriculture, with animals at 36% and the rest for biofuels. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Water usage is an exaggerated concern because people misuse statistics. There are places where water usage _is not a concern at all_. In Iowa we take rainwater and pipe it to rivers faster, the opposite of irrigation. A gallon of fresh water "saved" in agriculture in Iowa is meaningless. More than is necessary comes from the sky. Water usage is a problem where people are trying to grow things where there isn't enough water (i.e. much of California), in those places agriculture needs to be more selective about what it grows and needs to grow less as to not overburden water sources. In Iowa though half the state would be standing water much of the year if we didn't actively drain our fields, griping about how much water growing corn "uses" is absurd in that situation.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    Yes, but dumping oil based fertilizer on fields to produce government subsidized "biofuel" is still ridiculously stupid.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Rainwater isn't the only form of water, farmers in Iowa pump groundwater too, and those aquifers are becoming seriously depleted in a lot of the plains states. This is causing pretty serious drops in groundwater levels in a lot of areas and won't be sustainable indefinitely. https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/wss-gw-depletion-us-map-trend.png?itok=dSuNrKyA https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/... https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/groundwater-decline-and-depletion https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

hanniabu 4y ago

> Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables That's only true if it's in the city or other location with high cost/sqft land

tekno45 4y ago

imagine if we can reclaim all the land that salad and veggies use and replace it with good grains? solutions aren't always mutually exclusive.

yuliyp 4y ago
... that'll be a drop in the bucket. cereal grains alone use more than 10x [1] the amount of land used for vegetables. Add in other large users (coarse grain / oil crops) and it's over 20x, meaning you'd get like a 5% increase by replacing all vegetable land with grains. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop
- tekno45 4y ago
  thanks for sharing, thats pretty good data. can't disagree with that. seems like even more reason to not use the land for things that can be grown vertically/hydroponically. But definitely something i'll be reading more on, thanks for the resource.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
It wouldn't be particularly nutritionally useful, and you'd be able to grow grain for a couple of years before your soil turned into dust. That's why America starved in the 1930s.
kingkawn 4y ago
Ahhh, a reductionist solution that erases cultural heritage while solving no meaningful problem. How original!

jschveibinz 4y ago

Animal feed, along with fresh water and land usage is a major issue, as you have suggested. Less animals for human consumption = less feed, water and land required for animals. This opens up resources and agricultural land for vertical farming specifically for human consumption. Humans currently consume 55% of the calories from agriculture, with animals at 36% and the rest for biofuels. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

colechristensen 4y ago
Water usage is an exaggerated concern because people misuse statistics. There are places where water usage _is not a concern at all_. In Iowa we take rainwater and pipe it to rivers faster, the opposite of irrigation. A gallon of fresh water "saved" in agriculture in Iowa is meaningless. More than is necessary comes from the sky. Water usage is a problem where people are trying to grow things where there isn't enough water (i.e. much of California), in those places agriculture needs to be more selective about what it grows and needs to grow less as to not overburden water sources. In Iowa though half the state would be standing water much of the year if we didn't actively drain our fields, griping about how much water growing corn "uses" is absurd in that situation.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  Yes, but dumping oil based fertilizer on fields to produce government subsidized "biofuel" is still ridiculously stupid.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Rainwater isn't the only form of water, farmers in Iowa pump groundwater too, and those aquifers are becoming seriously depleted in a lot of the plains states. This is causing pretty serious drops in groundwater levels in a lot of areas and won't be sustainable indefinitely. https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/wss-gw-depletion-us-map-trend.png?itok=dSuNrKyA https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/... https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/groundwater-decline-and-depletion https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...