9 ms·
Transporting food generates whopping amounts of carbon dioxide
- xyst 4y agoyet another reason why vertical farming will become the future. Build the vertical farms in cities and skip the CO2 intensive process of transportation from the traditional farm to the grocery store/distributor/farmers market. Imagine living in a building where a vertical farm exists below grade. Retail, restaurants, and bodegas on the street level. Finally, residences and commercial in the upper floors. Literally straight from “farm” to table.
- chroem- 4y agoYeah, just burn terawatts of fossil fuels to generate light for growing your crops instead of using solar energy and natural photosynthesis.
- jka 4y agoI don't know much about the power consumption and efficiency of vertical farm lighting and heating; can you share any references about them? One thing that does occur to me is that artificial lighting wouldn't be limited by the passage of the sun, so crop growth could potentially continue 24 hours a day.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoVertical farming is far less resource intensive, using LEDS powered by solar or wind and gravity flow designs. I posted this in another comment but here is very brief video talking about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk I have other resources should you wish and I ton of personal experience. I have 3 Hydroponic systems (1 off the shelf, 2 custom designed by me) and 2 Aquaponics systems. The custom ones took 3 months to recoup the costs of materials vs the cost of produce, though the liquid fertilizer is a cost and input that I don't love. I've switched most of my effort to Aquaponics (Aquaculture - raising fish, which provides a natural fertilizer), I have 1 microsetup growing herbs and microgreens that has been running for 1 year. Only inputs are water and fish food, I clean it 1 once every 3 months since the plants act as a natural filter to clean the water.
- zdragnar 4y agoThe original comment suggested putting the farm below apartment buildings ("below grade" means underground). It's extremely costly to provide sufficient light to grown plants, as photosynthesis isn't terribly efficient. Natural sunlight is significantly stronger than what people tend to expect. Not only that, but you would need to move massive amounts of air to keep the plants happy, plus the humidity from being underground and all the water they need. Beyond that, you need to go quite a bit underground to feed a sufficient number of people, which isn't always feasible depending on the type of soil and water table, etc Final note, most plants do better not getting 24 hours of light. They can only grow just so fast and need to photosynthesize just so much. That's a lot of work (meaning higher prices for people who need to eat) for very little gain.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoBelow ground has trade offs, it's easier to use gravity flow designs but you lose all natural sunlight. Most of the time rain catchment systems on roof top vertical farms or free standing green houses are easier to design. There are already a bunch of vertical farms in commercial operation. The Netherlands in particular is leading the science here but in the US a number of farms exist. Vertical farming uses around 90% less water and solar/wind/hydro power for LED's is extremely doable. You are wholly incorrect about the amount of work required and amount of resources. It does take smart design to work however.
- crummy 4y agoWhat's the efficiency loss for light>solar panel>LED>plants vs light>plants?
- jaegerpicker 4y agoWrong question to ask, PPFD's is the correct measure. It's not a direct energy comparison. Photosynthesis is a chemical reaction of Chlorophyll reacting to certain but not all light wavelength's (Red and Blue being the major ones) plus the distance from the light source. The amount of watts the the sun generates is NOT what grows plants. LED's can produce the same light wavelength's but much closer and with no obstructions. The question isn't about LED's power generation, it's how much power does it take for an LED to cover an area. Obviously a LED can't compare to pure Solar efficiency on a watt by watt basis but it doesn't need to.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoThis is completely misinformed, there are tons of vertical Hydroponic and aquaponic farms already in production that are thriving at much lower resource costs. Solar panels powering LED's and gravity flow water make a massive difference. For example: One is being built minutes from my house https://verticalharvestfarms.com/locations/westbrook-maine/ https://verticalharvestfarms.com/locations/westbrook-maine/ Also The Netherlands are leading the world at this type of farming, here is a short video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk
- chroem- 4y agoUS farmland occupies 895 million acres (3.6M km^2) [1]. Average solar irradiance on most US farmland is about 200 W/m^2 [2]. By being generous and assuming vertical farming is 100x more efficient than natural photosynthesis, the energy requirements come out to 7.2 terawatts of generating capacity. In contrast, the US currently has 1.1 terawatts of generating capacity. [3] Vertical farming isn't just uneconomical: it's completely absurd. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-land-in-farms-in-the-us-since-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-lan... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance [3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThanks for doing the numbers, it’s interesting that in 50 years people are predicting annual TW installs of global solar capacity. So maybe a technology for the future if storage and distribution gets solved.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoExcept none of that matters, Solar Irradiance has very little to do with actual photosynthesis. You are measuring Watt's as a pure energy source, that's useless in this case. Photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD's) are what's important, that's the amount of light wavelengths that the plant needs to absorb to power photosynthesis. Here is a definition from another source, I'll post the link at the bottom: PPFD is a measure of photosynthetic active radiation, PAR for short. PAR is not a measure of anything itself but is more of a description. PAR light is all the visible wavelengths of light which cause photosynthesis, found within the 400-700 nanometer range. PPFD is a ‘spot’ measurement that tells you how many photons from the PAR range hit a specific area of your canopy over time. It is expressed as micro moles per square meter per second (μmol/m2/s). For this reason, PPFD is the most accurate measure of light power. First, unlike other measures, it considers the entire spectrum of light that plants see. PPFD also takes into account the amount of light that will actually reach the plant instead of focusing only on the point of origin. A light source can be very bright and powerful, but if it is too away from the plant, or obstructed in some way, the plant won’t be getting all the light it needs for photosynthesis. PPFD controls for this kind of inaccuracy. With LED's you can place the plants much closer to the light source and control the color spectrum along with the obstructions 24/7. It allows you to grow indoors at an extremely efficient rate. Your formula has almost nothing to do with indoor farming. https://www.freightfarms.com/blog/indoor-grow-lights#:~:text=LEDs%20(light%2Demitting%20diodes),same%20consistent%20and%20directional%20light https://www.freightfarms.com/blog/indoor-grow-lights#:~:text.... Here are some additional sources: https://archipel.uqam.ca/1619/1/1998_025_Gendron.pdf https://archipel.uqam.ca/1619/1/1998_025_Gendron.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1066711/pdf/plntphys00572-0025.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1066711/pdf/pln... https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Hanson7/publication/283601390_An_optimal_sampling_strategy_for_determining_CO2_exchange_rate_as_a_function_of_photosynthetic_photon_flux_density/links/566ae06608aea0892c4baafb/An-optimal-sampling-strategy-for-determining-CO2-exchange-rate-as-a-function-of-photosynthetic-photon-flux-density.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Hanson7/publicatio... https://www.horti-growlight.com/en-gb/par-ppf-ypf-ppfd-dli#:~:text=The%20Photosynthetic%20Photon%20Flux%20Density,a%20given%20surface%20each%20second https://www.horti-growlight.com/en-gb/par-ppf-ypf-ppfd-dli#:.... https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/photosynthetic-photon-flux-density https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/... Quick summary: PPFD measures the amount of light wavelengths that the plant captures that kicks off the chemical reaction of Chlorophyll. Red and Blue lights are the vast majority of wavelengths that interact with Chlorophyll. That's a major reason why the solar irradiance measure of pure Wattage is irrelevant.
- cosmolev 4y agoWhy living in a city in the first place? Imagine living in a small town near the farm.
- cgb223 4y agoBecause if everyone moves to the small town, it won’t be a small town anymore
- hurril 4y agoSo sad there's only the one small town.
- LadyCailin 4y agoDistributed workplaces bring their own problems. Are you supposed to also uproot and move every time you get a new job?
- mistrial9 4y agowatch out for a few thousand guys on horses though; more recently, ranchers vs. farmers; this decade in North America, pay rent to Lord Gates, farm-meister
- lm28469 4y agoI doubt the maths check out, you'd have to grow shit extremely fast to feed people year round. In ultra dense cities I really doubt it's possible.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoAquaponics and Hydroponics average 3-4x the growth rate and grow 24/7 (though you do need to provide lightless hours for proper fruiting). It's 100% viable and there are commercial operations right now.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoEspecially when you use Hydroponics and Aquaponics, which are MUCH more efficient than traditional farming. Fresh fish/seafood and produce minutes after harvest is are completely different and better class of food!
- JamesBarney 4y agoYou have to use really weird definitions of efficiency for that to be the case.
- jaegerpicker 4y agoIn what way? Photosynthesis is about light wavelength's and water is easy to be more efficient since the plants are in water instead of soil. There are numerous successful commercial operations already. Also I've posted a ton of detail on the measurements elsewhere in this thread. When people measure efficiency most measure Wattage from the Sun and that's completely irrelevant.
- imtringued 4y agoVertical farming is incredibly inefficient. You need massive amounts of real estate where land is expensive, you need fusion reactors as an energy source and it doesn't even compare to the space and energy efficiency of using bioreactors for artificial starch synthesis.
- gruez 4y agoThere was a recent story on a vertical strawberry farm in New Jersey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454883. The quoted price (from the comments), is $20 for 8 strawberries. That's an order of magnitude higher than the strawberries at the supermarket. That does not bode well for the future of vertical farming, unless there's some miraculous breakthrough in cost effectiveness expected. As it stands right now you're better off buying conventional strawberries and spending the rest on carbon offsets.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoYou drastically, drastically overestimate just how many calories are derived from vegetables. You also drastically underestimate the amount of protein humans need to survive and thrive. If meat were so easy to replace with agriculture, humans would've already adapted to do that because meat is, as everyone likes to remind us, energy-intensive to raise.
- pawsforthought 4y agoWe really don’t need much protein: 0.8g per kg of bodyweight for typical sedentary adults [1], none of which needs to be sourced from animals. Perhaps even worse than the energy requirements of animal agriculture is its land use. Today, a staggering 50% of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, of which 77% is used for animals (this does include arable land used to grow fodder) [2]. (By comparison, pre-industrial society used ~4% of habitable land for farming. Of course, we’re far more numerous so we couldn’t expect to revert to that now.) Vertical farming is most surely not the solution. We just need to end the grotesque industrial slaughter that we’ve become utterly perversely normalized to. There is more than enough land on Earth for us all to eat in abundance, just not on omnivorous diets. [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26797090/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26797090/ [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
- KennyBlanken 4y agoAnd where exactly do you think cattle and chickens and pigs get most of their calorie? Answer: vegetarian sources. Grass, grain, crap veg, and food waste from nearby breweries and such. Where do you think the vast majority of calories come from in most of the world? Grain and vegetables. 20% of the world's calories come from just rice alone. The problem is mostly cattle, and it's not just "energy." They require massive amounts of land, fertilizer, and water to raise compared to even other forms of protein: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-times-more-resources-poultry-dairy-eggs-pork-180952103/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-... > The team calculated that beef requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer and 11 times more water compared to those other food sources. That adds up to about five times more greenhouse gas emissions. > To further put these findings into perspective, the authors also ran the same calculations for several staple crops. All told, on a calorie-to-calorie basis, potatoes, wheat and rice require two to six time less resources to produce than pork, chicken, eggs or dairy. So that means that calories from beef require about sixty to one hundred and eighty times as much land, twelve to thirty six times more fertilizer, and twenty two to sixty six times more water. Look at how much rice you can buy for the cost of a 1lb of the cheapest form of beef - ground - and compare the calories per dollar. 1lb of ground beef is a little under $5 and provides at most 784 calories. 156 calories per dollar. 1lb of rice is around 25-30 seconds per pound. Let's round up to 50 cents to make it sporting. 589 calories per pound (also, 12g of protein.) 1178 calories per dollar. Rice provides almost eight times as many calories per dollar. Now consider that beef in the US is heavily subsidized (because...drumroll please...it wouldn't be price competitive with other food sources!)
- Ekaros 4y agoI have long considered wouldn't it be just simpler to electrify the transport? Or maybe build tracks for it... Vertical farms just don't add up very well. You either use same land for more traditional growing, even greenhouses or replace it with solar panels... And then there is energy input of building those farms. Probably out of reinforced concreate.
- _Microft 4y agoThe bar chart "food transport and production emissions" is misleading. If they had shown the charts at the same scale, the bars in the left one would only be 40% as long as they are now (range: 0-0.8 vs 0-2).
- ajkjk 4y agoyeah what the heck was the point of that? just undermines the whole article.
- shafyy 4y agoHere's Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data debunking this claim: https://twitter.com/_HannahRitchie/status/1538937558675202048 https://twitter.com/_HannahRitchie/status/153893755867520204... Basically, they make up a non-standard definition of food miles to include everything like fertilizers, pesticides and machinery. Emissions from food transport are negligible for most foods (except for foods that is transported by planes for long distances, because of very short shelf life, but that's rarely the case) [0]. The best way to cut GHG emissions from food is and will always be to cut out meat and dairy. 0: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#food-production-is-responsible-for-one-quarter-of-the-world-s-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#foo...
- staplers 4y agoThis contradicts data from the EPA. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
- verve_rat 4y agoThat link doesn't seem to contain any information about food miles, it is irrelevant to this discussion.
- galangalalgol 4y agoI have never been able to find any consistency in the data around food sustainability in general. Some meta studies using the same data rank GHG per 100g of protein vastly differently. Milk in particular moves pretty far up or down the list. Somehow cheese always stays at the bad end. Shrimp moves up and down a lot too. Fish and chicken swap around a lot. Pork is usually right above those two. And eggs are always at the bottom of the animal proteins as far as impact. Beans and pulses are always at the bottom. I keep meaning to get some red lentils, I have troubles with all the beans and pulses I've tried, but red lentils supposedly lack whatever it is that messes with some people.
- epistasis 4y agoFrom that thread: > If we want to count these emissions from moving fertilizers, tractors etc. around as 'food miles' then the logical conclusion would not be 'eat local'. > Instead, 'eat from countries that manufacture fertilisers & pesticides' so they don't have to export elsewhere. When I walk to the farmer's market by my house, I always shudder at all the cars that have driven there and parked. The quantity of emissions from driving a personal gasoline vehicle is really staggering compared to any food related emissions. And it's really shocking that people are so ignorant of the toll their personal vehicles take. I think that if people had to manually lift all the fuel that they pumped into their cars, maybe even for one filling per year, they would get a better feel for just how bad driving is. And the CO2 is far heavier than even the fuel, pre combustion. A 20 gallon refill of a tank is 400 pounds of CO2, a fifth of a ton. If we even legalized corner stores for US neighborhoods, we could probably start driving down emissions.
- qwertyuiop_ 4y agoThis coordinated PR seems to be leading to let’s eat bugs from our backyard.
- goldforever 4y ago
- MrRobotics 4y agoOnce robotics develops further, it would be interesting to have an organization that uses small mobile farming robots to tend gardens in people's yards and produce fruits and vegetables for personal or local consumption. This could enable people during certain times of the year to eat food that is local, fresher, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly. I know a lot of people that have personal gardens but don't grow much since it's too time consuming for them.
- drewcoo 4y agoWhat would they pay for these robots? What would it cost to hire a part-time gardener now?
- mr_toad 4y agoDecreasing population density means longer trips to the supermarket to get all the other things that people need. You’d save more carbon by getting rid of back yards, having high density housing, and having people walk to the shops.
- UncleEntity 4y agoOr have the robot gardener walk to the shop for you… what’s a few extra miles to a robot who would just be sitting around anyway?
- metadat 4y agoUntil the robots are getting assaulted, molested / raped, and robbed. Or stolen outright and scavenged for parts or scrap. How does this end well?
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThat's why having something like the rehydration machine from bttf would be great. Water = volume and weight.
- goldforever 4y ago
- kodyo 4y agoBuild nuclear power plants and leave everyone alone.
- sebazzz 4y agoWell, CO2 or not. It is crazy that we export certain foods to foreign countries, and then import the same type of food from other foreign countries from the other side of the globe. I'm not talking about a specific type of apple, but just things like green beans that are exported here to Germany (for example) and that we import green beans from Columbia for internal consumption.