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Grain farming goes indoors

60 points by blacksqr 4y ago

pasttense01 4y ago
"with the first successfully grown indoor wheat." I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.
- schiffern 4y ago
  As usual, actual numbers for water/land/pesticide use (5%/3%/0%), but the only mention of electricity use is the fraction of green power. Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it. We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green energy production, not enormous new energy sinks. "Just use green power" isn't the get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card people think it is.
  - theiz 4y ago
    And don’t forget the energy and materials you need to build something where you can actually grow things indoors. Total waste of so many things here. We know that we can grow stuff in greenhouses. We know wheat is a cheap commodity too, where it is hard to gain a profit on. What are they trying to accomplish here?
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      Dunno. In some places agriculture is fried with climate change at the gates so trying things to regain control over culture conditions could worth it. Could be useful also for keeping isolated varieties non contaminated with genetically modified pollen. Just in case something go wrong with that.
  - pard68 4y ago
    Not to mention plants are peak "green energy". There is a very real irony to the indoor farming movement.
    - credit_guy 4y ago
      Not so fast. If you replace outdoor crops with forests, they'll sequester much more CO2. In principle you can replace many acres of outdoor crops with one acre of greenhouse crops: with electric illumination you can make plants grow during nighttime, and with controlled temperature you they can also grow during the winter. Irrigation also needs much less water in a greenhouse (because plants lose a lot of water via transpiration, and in a humid environment they transpire less). Not to mention that you can recycle the water in a greenhouse. Irrigation is a big component of the energy expenditure of crops, but not the only one. All other components will decrease. Fertilizer, pesticides, tilling: you just don't need huge tractors to go miles and miles to the fields. You can have much smaller machines doing the job on the spot. I'm not saying greenhouses are the solution to all the world's problems, but they shouldn't just be discarded outright.
      - forgetfreeman 4y ago
        Eliminating those huge tractors injects a huge amount of inefficiency into your harvest operation.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        How? Electrical equipment moving on rails seems more efficient than driving diesel tractors around on tires on dirt.
        forgetfreeman 4y ago
        Really? On what grounds? A modern combine can harvest 30 acres of wheat in an hour, and can be trivially reconfigured to handle a variety of bulk grains. Your task is now to match or better that without resorting to a monstrous pool of starvation-wage labor and without raising the price of grain to the level of a luxury good.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    outdoor farming already uses green power - a giant fusion reactor in space, if you would believe it.
    - mkl 4y ago
      It also uses a lot of non-green power to plant, spray, harvest, and transport.
      - LegitShady 4y ago
        you have to plant, spray, harvest, and transport even the indoor stuff.
        mkl 4y ago
        You don't need to spray because you control the environment, you don't need to transport as far, and planting and harvesting won't use fossil fuels (unless that's your only source of electricity).
        forgetfreeman 4y ago
        Harvesting won't use what? Are you proposing we, as a species, revert to harvesting the equivalent of a few hundred million acres of cultivated land by hand?
        mkl 4y ago
        It's indoors, probably on many narrowly spaced floors, so you're hardly going to use a combine harvester! There would be some much smaller electrically-powered robotic system.
        forgetfreeman 4y ago
        So now we're proposing to replace an insanely efficient harvesting system that has been refined and perfected over the course of the last century with what? Rasberry Pi's and some off the shelf stepper motors? Best of luck with your endeavor.
  - snordgren 4y ago
    As an example, if we use solar to generate the electricity to power the indoor farm, the panels will take up roughly 20-40% of the sun's energy, depending on the panel. So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land. The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      This seems like a good point: just building greenhouses, providing full control of water usage and easy mechanical access, delivers all the value without the inefficient trip through solar panels and LEDs. On the other hand, wind power would not use up cropland, and the solar panels could be on non-crop land, or water. Stacked grow trays might be more efficient to operate on. The new Frankenstein rice that does CD4 photosynthesis, and also makes carotenes, seems like a good choice to grow in them. Maybe it can be persuaded to make protein, in the bargain.
    - lathyrus_long 4y ago
      It's more complicated than that, since the wavelength distribution matters--we can effectively transform green photons that the plant would have reflected into red or blue photons that it will absorb. (The plant still benefits from some green light, but less than in sunlight.) We can also supply each plant with its exact optimal PPFD and DLI. For example, lettuce may be grown under shade cloth, deliberately wasting much of the incident sunlight, because the extra light won't make it grow faster and will make it taste bitter. In a vertical farm, we can just set the LED current and spacing wherever we want. I've heard that 1 m^2 of modern solar panels will support >1 m^2 of a low-light crop (like lettuce, unlike grain) under modern LEDs. I haven't done the math myself, and this obviously varies with climate. I think vertical farms (growing entirely by artificial light) are still uneconomic vs. greenhouses almost everywhere, per my other comment here. Supplemental artificial light in a greenhouse is of course highly economic in many climates, and Dutch growers have been using it for decades. The cost to heat or cool a vertical farm should be lower than for a greenhouse with equivalent growing area, since it's got lower surface-area-to-volume ratio and doesn't need to be transparent. That may be important for stuff like high-end strawberries, where tight control of the day-night temperature swing enables higher sugar content. I again wouldn't expect a useful benefit for grains, though.
  - AYBABTME 4y ago
    Food is localized. I'm in Korea now. There's very little arable land here, and vegetables are expensive. It could easily turn into a case of there simply not being available to everyone, simply because there's just not enough. However if the price rises enough to justify the cost of growing it locally in vertical farms, this secures access to greens to everyone. My in-laws are trying to do this at home and even just for their own needs: vegetables are becoming so expensive that it's more affordable to grow them on their balcony. Vertical farming is something they want to do to allow them to improve and maintain their diet at an sustainable cost (that of electricity). And energy is more efficient to import than greens, since it's fungible. Vertical factory farms make a ton of sense here.
    - lathyrus_long 4y ago
      The objections are to vertical farms for grain, not vertical farms in general. Leafy greens are ideal candidates for indoor growing by artificial light, since they need relatively little light and are quickly perishable. The savings in transportation and waste may thus offset the costs of electricity, lights, and other capital equipment. I think even those economics are usually marginal now, and such vertical farms are usually profitable only if they can sell their produce at a premium due to real or perceived better quality (outside unusual locations like the far North). But there's still room for improvement in LED efficiency, automation, etc., so maybe it will cross over. The economics for grain are much worse--the plants need much more light, and the product is easily dried, stored, and transported. The processing is also highly automated already. Here's an article with some (dismal) numbers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117
- mickdeek86 4y ago
  Also, early grain breeding trials (before field testing) at least since Borlaug. Walk past any university greenhouse in the Midwest and peek inside
- patmcc 4y ago
  I hope they meant "first indoor wheat grown and sold commercially at competitive prices" or something, because yah certainly research and plant breeding have been done indoors (at least partially) for decades.
- PicassoCTs 4y ago
  The assumption is that those field outdoors will work in the future. That is were your price point linear graph is wrong.
wongarsu 4y ago
I guess I could see some use cases in places that can't farm grain but still want some farmed locally for strategic or protectionist reasons. But on a pure cost basis I don't see how this will ever be competitive with growing grain under open skies in suitable locations, and then shipping it where you need it. At least not on earth.
sinoue 4y ago
Anyone know how many acres of solar panels you would need to power one acre of LEDs to grow the wheat?
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  My rough estimate would go like this - 20% efficency of solarpanels - 1000W/m² sun under good conditions (at the equator) -> we get 200W/m² from solar panels - 600 W/m² energy needed for the plants - 60% efficency of the LEDs (both from the paper linked in another comment) 600/0.6 = 1000 W elecricity needed per m² 1000/200=5 So for 1 acre LED farm, we need 5 acres solar panels, if I made no major misstake. Add to that further losses from energy transformation and you see that solar panel powered, it makes even less sense. If you want to grow grain indoors, because for example outside is a dessert, but sun, you just would use windows, (mainly to keep your water). This project only makes sense in space or very remote areas with other good sources of energy.
  - mickdeek86 4y ago
    Your desert idea tracks (many of the biggest greenhouses already are) but to keep the majority of the water, you would dehumidify it from the exhaust air. There are systems for this, I saw a couple in NW Mexico when I worked in greenhouse hydroponics in a past life
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
barathr 4y ago
We wrote a short paper estimating and analyzing this sort of thing, and the numbers don't add up: https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf Maybe there's something different in this specific technique, but they need to publish detailed numbers before it's believable.
- imtringued 4y ago
  The way vertical farming works is that you use some sort of plant that has a massive surface to volume ratio and then just spread out the growing light on as big an area as possible. This strategy will get you very expensive "leafy greens" and inexpensive cannabis and no grains at all because the "growing lights are more efficient than natural sunlight" calculation no longer works because grains actually grow better if they are exposed to intense (sun)light which is expensive to produce in a vertical farm. (from my own memory and it also happens to be a lazy summary of the paper)
LatteLazy 4y ago
I don't understand what problem this is meant to actually since. We have no shortage of land or water in most of the world. Aside from some tiny cases like nuclear bunkers or space colonies this remains a pet project.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Water is actually scarce and getting more scarce every year, particularly in agricultural areas. There are article about this pretty much every year now.
  - cute_boi 4y ago
    How would this venture bypass the water issue? Because, I think this venture will also require similar quantity of water.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      The same way every hydroponic system saves water. Recirculation. Traditional soil growing literally pours the water on the ground, where most of it evaporates, and what doesn’t sinks into the soil and becomes unrecoverable on any reasonable timescale.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        Depends how deep your well is. Sometimes around here, the water table is closer to the ground than your basement floor is…
        jonathankoren 4y ago
        It’s not the depth. It’s the rate of draw vs replenish.
    - lightedman 4y ago
      We can drop water requirements up to 99% for some crops versus traditional land farming using hydroponics. You get a sealed environment where water doesn't just get lost.
Roark66 4y ago
Hmm, nice thing from an experimental point of view, but I very much doubt there will be any practical use of this tech anytime soon unless one happens to have supply of free energy. They say>grow food with 95% less water and 97% less land What about energy, and other inputs(like fertiliser)? I bet just hauling food from wherever it grows well will be much cheaper than growing it indoors for a long time. Unless... Someone finds a way to harness sun's energy in a much more efficient way than plants do it. I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1%. If we could capture this light with 25% efficiency (doable), then we illuminate plant with efficiency of 80% in some way by giving them only the right wavelengths so their conversion of said light into calories is (a lot)higher than 5% we may be onto something there. Until then... Not really.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  > I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1% This is why I’m in favour of turning farmland into suburbs/exurbs. As you cover your roof in solar panels and plant a few trees, you’re collecting more energy than the farmland did before. And if you’re like me, using most of the backyard as pretty high intensity agriculture and food scrap management (and if I could get away with it, some fertilizer I usually flush to the city for processing…). The average flower garden has more biodiversity than any corn or wheat field.
defrost 4y ago
For general interest; Let's call Western Australia a small cog in feeding the world demand for grain. * WA produces on average 13 million tonnes of grains (cereals, oilseeds and pulses) each year. Grain exports generate more than $4 billion (five year average) for the WA economy each year * The state's grain production area, known as the 'wheatbelt', covers seven million hectares across the south-west corner of the state. * 7 million hectares ~ 17.3 million acres Assuming a factor 30 (greater than the 26 stated in the article) increase in production ... It would take 233,000 hectares (576,600 acres) powered, piped, under a roof, with artifical light to achieve the equivilant production. [1] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains [2] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/western-australian-wheat-industry https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/west... etc.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers. You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine. You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-almeria.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...
    - defrost 4y ago
      That's a truly insane local climate changing amount of ad-hoc greenhouses, although it appears the bulk crop is leafy greens and organic growers market produce. Grains are different beast again, you want millions of tonnes cheaply with efficient bulk acerage harvesting etc. Thanks for the link, if I hadn't seen it I might not have believed it.
jonathankoren 4y ago
I’m skeptical. The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it. Vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are mostly water and can be sold at tremendous markup. I don’t see anything here that changes that economic reality. Even if they were able to double wheat production to 4 crops a year, I don’t that’s enough to make it viable. Most telling is this passage: >It’s a tradeoff, says Frederick Smith, a regenerative food consultant. “You replace field-based risk with cost-based risk,” he says. “Having control of [variables such as water and temperature] eliminates a lot of potential risks, and that really appeals to investors who don’t understand farming as much and are looking to invest in something at scale.” This makes it sound like that investors that understand they market and biology, are staying away, and instead meme investors are who they’re trying to attract. That ain’t good.
- lightedman 4y ago
  "The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it." It makes a ton of economic and ecological sense if you actually break it down. Damn shame the article fails to do so. We knew it made sense a decade ago when I got brought into the field to improve upon the lighting aspects for several companies.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Those companies aren't exactly profitable today.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    No dude. It does not make economic sense to grow cereal grains. This has been studied multiple times. It costs $20 to grow enough wheat for a single loaf of bread. https://thehydroponicsplanet.com/can-cereals-be-grown-hydroponically/ https://thehydroponicsplanet.com/can-cereals-be-grown-hydrop...
noice122 4y ago
Pretty cool. Maybe one day someone will invent a way of growing food where the supply of sunlight and water is fully automated and at near zero cost, and a way to reduce the building costs.
giantg2 4y ago
Am I missing something with this whole square foot fetish? I get that vertical farms can be great in cities for reducing shipping issues. But how many cubic feet are used is more interesting to me. Sure, it costs money for land. It also costs money to build vertical infrastructure. It seems that only in urban areas are the costs for land so prohibitive as to make the infrastructure costs look reasonable.
- TillE 4y ago
  All the city farming tech stuff requires some kinda cyberpunk megalopolis scenario to be remotely practical. Or maybe a nuclear post-apocalypse. It's cool or whatever, but most of the world has quite a lot of arable land.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Nice pun. But crop cultures are substantialy 2D things. You cannot economically grow them in multiple layers (like you can mushrooms). You need to put enough solar energy onto that surface, so it cannot be excessively vertical. Grain storage and transportation have been perfected through literally millennia. Grain can be stored for years and there is no premium to collect for fresh, just collected grain (unlike vegetables, for instance).
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Grains can be stored for years but it isn't economical to store more than one year's harvest for farmers. They use their grain bins to smooth out the demand over a year.
joegibbs 4y ago
This really doesn't seem cost-effective. Yeah on the one hand you're getting an increase in your output but on the other, you're getting a massive increase in costs. Traditional farming is dirt simple - you put the seeds in the dirt and the plant grows, then you harvest the plant (plus irrigation, plus fertilisation, plus pesticide use, etc). The cost, once you have the land, is the cost of the seed you're using (plus labour, plus machinery, plus water rights, plus everything else). With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow.
- lightedman 4y ago
  "With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow. " With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for the setup. LEDs are way more efficient when using properly-targeted wavelengths for the crop - way more efficient than the sun. And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage, without any light whatsoever. Look up H2OFarm on BBC Countryfile, if the video of that company still exists on the BBC site.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    > … way more efficient than the sun. How many kilowatts hours of generated power do you have to put into the sun to get a certain output of photons? None you say? Interesting… This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Just use the land to produce something more valuable than grain and trade that for the grain you need.
    - lightedman 4y ago
      If you get down to the actual physics of it all, plants waste so much actual sunlight. It's actually more efficient to harvest the sunlight, store it, and convert back into photons using efficient targeted-wavelength LEDs to just put the amount of light that will get used where it needs to go, and use the remaining power for other things like pumps or atmospheric conditioning. Nuclear incandescence efficiency - 93 lux/wH - approximately 14% overall efficiency at 6500K. LED efficiency - narrow-band wavelengths make measuring lux at any wavelength other than green useless, so we stick to overall conversion efficiency, which ranges from ~35% in the red to ~80% in the blue, then we get to phosphor-converted white LEDs using a blue base, which can be compared again to the nuclear incandescence above, and these reach over 200 lux/wH at 6500K, and that was with Cree MK-R LEDs a decade ago. Then you get into photosynthetic efficiency, which is absolutely dismal in the low single-digit percentage range. I'll leave the extra math to you. Suffice to say, it's more efficient with decade-old tech to store the sunlight and convert as needed.
aaron695 4y ago
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timmaxw 4y ago
I just can't see how this can replace conventional farming at scale. Currently, outdoor farming uses 4.62 billion acres [1]. The article says indoor farming has 25x the yield per acre. So that would be 177 million acres. Today, there are only about 44 million acres of total buildings in the world [2]. So to replace conventional farming, we'd need to build 4x as many buildings as currently exist; what's the environmental impact of _that_? But the real deal-breaker is energy. Outdoor farming gets energy naturally from sunlight. Indoor farming is powered by LED lights. LEDs could be more efficient than sunlight by only emitting the frequencies that are most useful for plants; but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre. So let's estimate it's exactly as bright as sunlight. To light 177 million acres exactly as bright as sunlight, you'd need somewhere around 3,000,000 terawatt-hours per year. For comparison, global electricity consumption is around 25,000 terawatt-hours per year [3]. So to replace conventional farming, this would need about 100x as much electricity as the current global electrical grid can supply! So until we get fusion power, I doubt this is practical. [1] https://www.producer.com/news/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-expected/ https://www.producer.com/news/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-e... [2] https://guidehouseinsights.com/news-and-views/the-global-building-stock-is-expected-to-exceed-183-billion-square-meters-in-2026 https://guidehouseinsights.com/news-and-views/the-global-bui... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
- MPSimmons 4y ago
  But what if you _couldn't_ farm outdoors, because your outdoor farm is now a dust bowl, or a desert, or a recently inundated coastal plain, submerged by sea water? Financial practicality is not a concern if this is the only way a region has to make food.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    If any of those things happened our food needs would likely be diminished anyway
    - greesil 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
I can see this being practical for a Mars colony, but only in other places if there is a large supply of low-cost energy and limited agricultural space, plus limitations on food imports. Perhaps Iceland, using geothermal energy would be a good place to try a large model installation?
II2II 4y ago
One thing people seem to be ignoring is that this research is useful because it creates a controlled environment in which to explore the variable affecting crop yields, even if the stated application has very limited practical value. Also keep in mind that many technologies take a considerable amount of time to develop before they are of any value at scale. Take something that I presume most people on this forum are intimately familiar with: computers. It is not too difficult to find people mocking historical figure for claiming the world only needed a handful of computers, yet those claims made sense in a historical context: early computation devices were mechanical, electromechanical, or tube based. They were huge, slow, and seen of little value outside of performing a calculations in very specific domains. Even science fiction authors of the era had a difficult time imagining them as anything but hulking machines that may have controlled everything, yet were only accessible to a few. Attitudes may have shifted when transistors entered the picture, and shifted even further when integrated circuits were developed, yet it wasn't until the mid-70's until people started imagining what we have today. Even so, they were a novelty to most people until the mid-90's. We are talking about half a century in going from something that we would recognize as a computer until they were adopted by society as a whole. And that is ignoring the fact that people have been trying to develop calculating machines for centuries. Research is good, even if the vast majority of it ends up leading to dead-ends, simply because we don't have sufficient imagination to determine what will be useful in the future.
- simon_000666 4y ago
  This is true - and I think what’s also being missed here is the potential to further this research for producing grain off-world. Growing crops in space or other planets will be a heavily optimized and controlled process so it’s good to explore these possibilities here on earth even if it doesn’t yet make commercial sense.
- HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
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forgetfreeman 4y ago
Pfffft. Indoor grow startups around the globe that focus on significantly higher roi products than simple grains are tanking on energy costs and investment in the space is headed for the exits. I mean I get hustling for dumb money buy is any money really this dense?
jacknews 4y ago
It seems like a lot of effort to grow the entire plant when we just want the grain, or in fact mostly just flour. I'm sure there will be a better way to make those with yeast, or cell culture.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Starch synthesis via enzymes inside bio reactors.
simon_000666 4y ago
One wonders, given that most grain is milled into flour if precision fermentation might be a better solution to this particular problem of producing what is essentially just a mix of proteins and starches.
- mythrwy 4y ago
  What would the fermentation feedstock be? Wheat?
jimnotgym 4y ago
I suppose this will be handy if you were trying to grow wheat on the moon, or Mars. Still find it weird that you would not allow in natural light?
- hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
  It could be cheaper to build the way they did it. Greenhouses are really expensive, and they get hot in the summer so need sophisticated ventilation systems. Another part to why they did it that way is they might want to stack more layers of crops in the future.
ankaAr 4y ago
I'm from Argentina. Our incomes comes basically from agriculture and livestock, we export almost all (we produce food for 10 times our population, estimated) Anyway I'm very sure that in some years the country incomes will plummet, because the technification. We are not doing anything against the fact that climate change, wars and technology are driving us to a point that every country can grow their own meat or grain on their own land. Now farming this indoor is expensive, but in few years importing will be higher, and the technology to produce that indoor, on your own land will be cheap. Now, we are having a really bad bad drought that cut our income expectation by 40%, soy beans prices will be really high this year, other things like wheat, corn, etc maybe will be not affected because our market is Latin America (prices will be for them). Cattle is dying becaue ethe lack of water, but anyway we are so stupid country that we don't have the number of livestock we had decades ago. So, now could sound stupid, not in the future, and definitely not if you can think about permanent bases on Mars for example.
Havoc 4y ago
Very surprised that makes any sort of sense on any level frankly
gmuslera 4y ago
How much protection will they get from external weather? What about soil quality in the middle/long run? If weather becomes unreliable or far more extreme, indoor farming may be a better bet than hoping than a flood, a drought or other extreme weather events don't happen before harvesting.

60 points by blacksqr 4y ago

"with the first successfully grown indoor wheat." I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.

schiffern 4y ago
As usual, actual numbers for water/land/pesticide use (5%/3%/0%), but the only mention of electricity use is the fraction of green power. Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it. We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green energy production, not enormous new energy sinks. "Just use green power" isn't the get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card people think it is.
- theiz 4y ago
  And don’t forget the energy and materials you need to build something where you can actually grow things indoors. Total waste of so many things here. We know that we can grow stuff in greenhouses. We know wheat is a cheap commodity too, where it is hard to gain a profit on. What are they trying to accomplish here?
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    Dunno. In some places agriculture is fried with climate change at the gates so trying things to regain control over culture conditions could worth it. Could be useful also for keeping isolated varieties non contaminated with genetically modified pollen. Just in case something go wrong with that.
- pard68 4y ago
  Not to mention plants are peak "green energy". There is a very real irony to the indoor farming movement.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    Not so fast. If you replace outdoor crops with forests, they'll sequester much more CO2. In principle you can replace many acres of outdoor crops with one acre of greenhouse crops: with electric illumination you can make plants grow during nighttime, and with controlled temperature you they can also grow during the winter. Irrigation also needs much less water in a greenhouse (because plants lose a lot of water via transpiration, and in a humid environment they transpire less). Not to mention that you can recycle the water in a greenhouse. Irrigation is a big component of the energy expenditure of crops, but not the only one. All other components will decrease. Fertilizer, pesticides, tilling: you just don't need huge tractors to go miles and miles to the fields. You can have much smaller machines doing the job on the spot. I'm not saying greenhouses are the solution to all the world's problems, but they shouldn't just be discarded outright.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      Eliminating those huge tractors injects a huge amount of inefficiency into your harvest operation.
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        How? Electrical equipment moving on rails seems more efficient than driving diesel tractors around on tires on dirt.
        forgetfreeman 4y ago
        Really? On what grounds? A modern combine can harvest 30 acres of wheat in an hour, and can be trivially reconfigured to handle a variety of bulk grains. Your task is now to match or better that without resorting to a monstrous pool of starvation-wage labor and without raising the price of grain to the level of a luxury good.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  outdoor farming already uses green power - a giant fusion reactor in space, if you would believe it.
  - mkl 4y ago
    It also uses a lot of non-green power to plant, spray, harvest, and transport.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      you have to plant, spray, harvest, and transport even the indoor stuff.
      - mkl 4y ago
        You don't need to spray because you control the environment, you don't need to transport as far, and planting and harvesting won't use fossil fuels (unless that's your only source of electricity).
        forgetfreeman 4y ago
        Harvesting won't use what? Are you proposing we, as a species, revert to harvesting the equivalent of a few hundred million acres of cultivated land by hand?
        mkl 4y ago
        It's indoors, probably on many narrowly spaced floors, so you're hardly going to use a combine harvester! There would be some much smaller electrically-powered robotic system.
        forgetfreeman 4y ago
        So now we're proposing to replace an insanely efficient harvesting system that has been refined and perfected over the course of the last century with what? Rasberry Pi's and some off the shelf stepper motors? Best of luck with your endeavor.
- snordgren 4y ago
  As an example, if we use solar to generate the electricity to power the indoor farm, the panels will take up roughly 20-40% of the sun's energy, depending on the panel. So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land. The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    This seems like a good point: just building greenhouses, providing full control of water usage and easy mechanical access, delivers all the value without the inefficient trip through solar panels and LEDs. On the other hand, wind power would not use up cropland, and the solar panels could be on non-crop land, or water. Stacked grow trays might be more efficient to operate on. The new Frankenstein rice that does CD4 photosynthesis, and also makes carotenes, seems like a good choice to grow in them. Maybe it can be persuaded to make protein, in the bargain.
  - lathyrus_long 4y ago
    It's more complicated than that, since the wavelength distribution matters--we can effectively transform green photons that the plant would have reflected into red or blue photons that it will absorb. (The plant still benefits from some green light, but less than in sunlight.) We can also supply each plant with its exact optimal PPFD and DLI. For example, lettuce may be grown under shade cloth, deliberately wasting much of the incident sunlight, because the extra light won't make it grow faster and will make it taste bitter. In a vertical farm, we can just set the LED current and spacing wherever we want. I've heard that 1 m^2 of modern solar panels will support >1 m^2 of a low-light crop (like lettuce, unlike grain) under modern LEDs. I haven't done the math myself, and this obviously varies with climate. I think vertical farms (growing entirely by artificial light) are still uneconomic vs. greenhouses almost everywhere, per my other comment here. Supplemental artificial light in a greenhouse is of course highly economic in many climates, and Dutch growers have been using it for decades. The cost to heat or cool a vertical farm should be lower than for a greenhouse with equivalent growing area, since it's got lower surface-area-to-volume ratio and doesn't need to be transparent. That may be important for stuff like high-end strawberries, where tight control of the day-night temperature swing enables higher sugar content. I again wouldn't expect a useful benefit for grains, though.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  Food is localized. I'm in Korea now. There's very little arable land here, and vegetables are expensive. It could easily turn into a case of there simply not being available to everyone, simply because there's just not enough. However if the price rises enough to justify the cost of growing it locally in vertical farms, this secures access to greens to everyone. My in-laws are trying to do this at home and even just for their own needs: vegetables are becoming so expensive that it's more affordable to grow them on their balcony. Vertical farming is something they want to do to allow them to improve and maintain their diet at an sustainable cost (that of electricity). And energy is more efficient to import than greens, since it's fungible. Vertical factory farms make a ton of sense here.
  - lathyrus_long 4y ago
    The objections are to vertical farms for grain, not vertical farms in general. Leafy greens are ideal candidates for indoor growing by artificial light, since they need relatively little light and are quickly perishable. The savings in transportation and waste may thus offset the costs of electricity, lights, and other capital equipment. I think even those economics are usually marginal now, and such vertical farms are usually profitable only if they can sell their produce at a premium due to real or perceived better quality (outside unusual locations like the far North). But there's still room for improvement in LED efficiency, automation, etc., so maybe it will cross over. The economics for grain are much worse--the plants need much more light, and the product is easily dried, stored, and transported. The processing is also highly automated already. Here's an article with some (dismal) numbers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117
mickdeek86 4y ago
Also, early grain breeding trials (before field testing) at least since Borlaug. Walk past any university greenhouse in the Midwest and peek inside
patmcc 4y ago
I hope they meant "first indoor wheat grown and sold commercially at competitive prices" or something, because yah certainly research and plant breeding have been done indoors (at least partially) for decades.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
The assumption is that those field outdoors will work in the future. That is were your price point linear graph is wrong.

wongarsu 4y ago

I guess I could see some use cases in places that can't farm grain but still want some farmed locally for strategic or protectionist reasons. But on a pure cost basis I don't see how this will ever be competitive with growing grain under open skies in suitable locations, and then shipping it where you need it. At least not on earth.

sinoue 4y ago

Anyone know how many acres of solar panels you would need to power one acre of LEDs to grow the wheat?

hutzlibu 4y ago
My rough estimate would go like this - 20% efficency of solarpanels - 1000W/m² sun under good conditions (at the equator) -> we get 200W/m² from solar panels - 600 W/m² energy needed for the plants - 60% efficency of the LEDs (both from the paper linked in another comment) 600/0.6 = 1000 W elecricity needed per m² 1000/200=5 So for 1 acre LED farm, we need 5 acres solar panels, if I made no major misstake. Add to that further losses from energy transformation and you see that solar panel powered, it makes even less sense. If you want to grow grain indoors, because for example outside is a dessert, but sun, you just would use windows, (mainly to keep your water). This project only makes sense in space or very remote areas with other good sources of energy.
- mickdeek86 4y ago
  Your desert idea tracks (many of the biggest greenhouses already are) but to keep the majority of the water, you would dehumidify it from the exhaust air. There are systems for this, I saw a couple in NW Mexico when I worked in greenhouse hydroponics in a past life
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barathr 4y ago

We wrote a short paper estimating and analyzing this sort of thing, and the numbers don't add up: https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf Maybe there's something different in this specific technique, but they need to publish detailed numbers before it's believable.

imtringued 4y ago
The way vertical farming works is that you use some sort of plant that has a massive surface to volume ratio and then just spread out the growing light on as big an area as possible. This strategy will get you very expensive "leafy greens" and inexpensive cannabis and no grains at all because the "growing lights are more efficient than natural sunlight" calculation no longer works because grains actually grow better if they are exposed to intense (sun)light which is expensive to produce in a vertical farm. (from my own memory and it also happens to be a lazy summary of the paper)

LatteLazy 4y ago

I don't understand what problem this is meant to actually since. We have no shortage of land or water in most of the world. Aside from some tiny cases like nuclear bunkers or space colonies this remains a pet project.

jonathankoren 4y ago
Water is actually scarce and getting more scarce every year, particularly in agricultural areas. There are article about this pretty much every year now.
- cute_boi 4y ago
  How would this venture bypass the water issue? Because, I think this venture will also require similar quantity of water.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    The same way every hydroponic system saves water. Recirculation. Traditional soil growing literally pours the water on the ground, where most of it evaporates, and what doesn’t sinks into the soil and becomes unrecoverable on any reasonable timescale.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Depends how deep your well is. Sometimes around here, the water table is closer to the ground than your basement floor is…
      - jonathankoren 4y ago
        It’s not the depth. It’s the rate of draw vs replenish.
  - lightedman 4y ago
    We can drop water requirements up to 99% for some crops versus traditional land farming using hydroponics. You get a sealed environment where water doesn't just get lost.

Roark66 4y ago

Hmm, nice thing from an experimental point of view, but I very much doubt there will be any practical use of this tech anytime soon unless one happens to have supply of free energy. They say>grow food with 95% less water and 97% less land What about energy, and other inputs(like fertiliser)? I bet just hauling food from wherever it grows well will be much cheaper than growing it indoors for a long time. Unless... Someone finds a way to harness sun's energy in a much more efficient way than plants do it. I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1%. If we could capture this light with 25% efficiency (doable), then we illuminate plant with efficiency of 80% in some way by giving them only the right wavelengths so their conversion of said light into calories is (a lot)higher than 5% we may be onto something there. Until then... Not really.

Scoundreller 4y ago
> I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1% This is why I’m in favour of turning farmland into suburbs/exurbs. As you cover your roof in solar panels and plant a few trees, you’re collecting more energy than the farmland did before. And if you’re like me, using most of the backyard as pretty high intensity agriculture and food scrap management (and if I could get away with it, some fertilizer I usually flush to the city for processing…). The average flower garden has more biodiversity than any corn or wheat field.

defrost 4y ago

For general interest; Let's call Western Australia a small cog in feeding the world demand for grain. * WA produces on average 13 million tonnes of grains (cereals, oilseeds and pulses) each year. Grain exports generate more than $4 billion (five year average) for the WA economy each year * The state's grain production area, known as the 'wheatbelt', covers seven million hectares across the south-west corner of the state. * 7 million hectares ~ 17.3 million acres Assuming a factor 30 (greater than the 26 stated in the article) increase in production ... It would take 233,000 hectares (576,600 acres) powered, piped, under a roof, with artifical light to achieve the equivilant production. [1] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains [2] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/western-australian-wheat-industry https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/west... etc.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers. You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine. You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-almeria.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...
  - defrost 4y ago
    That's a truly insane local climate changing amount of ad-hoc greenhouses, although it appears the bulk crop is leafy greens and organic growers market produce. Grains are different beast again, you want millions of tonnes cheaply with efficient bulk acerage harvesting etc. Thanks for the link, if I hadn't seen it I might not have believed it.

jonathankoren 4y ago

I’m skeptical. The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it. Vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are mostly water and can be sold at tremendous markup. I don’t see anything here that changes that economic reality. Even if they were able to double wheat production to 4 crops a year, I don’t that’s enough to make it viable. Most telling is this passage: >It’s a tradeoff, says Frederick Smith, a regenerative food consultant. “You replace field-based risk with cost-based risk,” he says. “Having control of [variables such as water and temperature] eliminates a lot of potential risks, and that really appeals to investors who don’t understand farming as much and are looking to invest in something at scale.” This makes it sound like that investors that understand they market and biology, are staying away, and instead meme investors are who they’re trying to attract. That ain’t good.

lightedman 4y ago
"The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it." It makes a ton of economic and ecological sense if you actually break it down. Damn shame the article fails to do so. We knew it made sense a decade ago when I got brought into the field to improve upon the lighting aspects for several companies.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Those companies aren't exactly profitable today.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  No dude. It does not make economic sense to grow cereal grains. This has been studied multiple times. It costs $20 to grow enough wheat for a single loaf of bread. https://thehydroponicsplanet.com/can-cereals-be-grown-hydroponically/ https://thehydroponicsplanet.com/can-cereals-be-grown-hydrop...

noice122 4y ago

Pretty cool. Maybe one day someone will invent a way of growing food where the supply of sunlight and water is fully automated and at near zero cost, and a way to reduce the building costs.

giantg2 4y ago

Am I missing something with this whole square foot fetish? I get that vertical farms can be great in cities for reducing shipping issues. But how many cubic feet are used is more interesting to me. Sure, it costs money for land. It also costs money to build vertical infrastructure. It seems that only in urban areas are the costs for land so prohibitive as to make the infrastructure costs look reasonable.

TillE 4y ago
All the city farming tech stuff requires some kinda cyberpunk megalopolis scenario to be remotely practical. Or maybe a nuclear post-apocalypse. It's cool or whatever, but most of the world has quite a lot of arable land.
nine_k 4y ago
Nice pun. But crop cultures are substantialy 2D things. You cannot economically grow them in multiple layers (like you can mushrooms). You need to put enough solar energy onto that surface, so it cannot be excessively vertical. Grain storage and transportation have been perfected through literally millennia. Grain can be stored for years and there is no premium to collect for fresh, just collected grain (unlike vegetables, for instance).
- imtringued 4y ago
  Grains can be stored for years but it isn't economical to store more than one year's harvest for farmers. They use their grain bins to smooth out the demand over a year.

joegibbs 4y ago

This really doesn't seem cost-effective. Yeah on the one hand you're getting an increase in your output but on the other, you're getting a massive increase in costs. Traditional farming is dirt simple - you put the seeds in the dirt and the plant grows, then you harvest the plant (plus irrigation, plus fertilisation, plus pesticide use, etc). The cost, once you have the land, is the cost of the seed you're using (plus labour, plus machinery, plus water rights, plus everything else). With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow.

lightedman 4y ago
"With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow. " With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for the setup. LEDs are way more efficient when using properly-targeted wavelengths for the crop - way more efficient than the sun. And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage, without any light whatsoever. Look up H2OFarm on BBC Countryfile, if the video of that company still exists on the BBC site.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > … way more efficient than the sun. How many kilowatts hours of generated power do you have to put into the sun to get a certain output of photons? None you say? Interesting… This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Just use the land to produce something more valuable than grain and trade that for the grain you need.
  - lightedman 4y ago
    If you get down to the actual physics of it all, plants waste so much actual sunlight. It's actually more efficient to harvest the sunlight, store it, and convert back into photons using efficient targeted-wavelength LEDs to just put the amount of light that will get used where it needs to go, and use the remaining power for other things like pumps or atmospheric conditioning. Nuclear incandescence efficiency - 93 lux/wH - approximately 14% overall efficiency at 6500K. LED efficiency - narrow-band wavelengths make measuring lux at any wavelength other than green useless, so we stick to overall conversion efficiency, which ranges from ~35% in the red to ~80% in the blue, then we get to phosphor-converted white LEDs using a blue base, which can be compared again to the nuclear incandescence above, and these reach over 200 lux/wH at 6500K, and that was with Cree MK-R LEDs a decade ago. Then you get into photosynthetic efficiency, which is absolutely dismal in the low single-digit percentage range. I'll leave the extra math to you. Suffice to say, it's more efficient with decade-old tech to store the sunlight and convert as needed.

aaron695 4y ago

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timmaxw 4y ago

I just can't see how this can replace conventional farming at scale. Currently, outdoor farming uses 4.62 billion acres [1]. The article says indoor farming has 25x the yield per acre. So that would be 177 million acres. Today, there are only about 44 million acres of total buildings in the world [2]. So to replace conventional farming, we'd need to build 4x as many buildings as currently exist; what's the environmental impact of _that_? But the real deal-breaker is energy. Outdoor farming gets energy naturally from sunlight. Indoor farming is powered by LED lights. LEDs could be more efficient than sunlight by only emitting the frequencies that are most useful for plants; but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre. So let's estimate it's exactly as bright as sunlight. To light 177 million acres exactly as bright as sunlight, you'd need somewhere around 3,000,000 terawatt-hours per year. For comparison, global electricity consumption is around 25,000 terawatt-hours per year [3]. So to replace conventional farming, this would need about 100x as much electricity as the current global electrical grid can supply! So until we get fusion power, I doubt this is practical. [1] https://www.producer.com/news/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-expected/ https://www.producer.com/news/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-e... [2] https://guidehouseinsights.com/news-and-views/the-global-building-stock-is-expected-to-exceed-183-billion-square-meters-in-2026 https://guidehouseinsights.com/news-and-views/the-global-bui... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption

MPSimmons 4y ago
But what if you _couldn't_ farm outdoors, because your outdoor farm is now a dust bowl, or a desert, or a recently inundated coastal plain, submerged by sea water? Financial practicality is not a concern if this is the only way a region has to make food.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  If any of those things happened our food needs would likely be diminished anyway
  - greesil 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

I can see this being practical for a Mars colony, but only in other places if there is a large supply of low-cost energy and limited agricultural space, plus limitations on food imports. Perhaps Iceland, using geothermal energy would be a good place to try a large model installation?

II2II 4y ago

One thing people seem to be ignoring is that this research is useful because it creates a controlled environment in which to explore the variable affecting crop yields, even if the stated application has very limited practical value. Also keep in mind that many technologies take a considerable amount of time to develop before they are of any value at scale. Take something that I presume most people on this forum are intimately familiar with: computers. It is not too difficult to find people mocking historical figure for claiming the world only needed a handful of computers, yet those claims made sense in a historical context: early computation devices were mechanical, electromechanical, or tube based. They were huge, slow, and seen of little value outside of performing a calculations in very specific domains. Even science fiction authors of the era had a difficult time imagining them as anything but hulking machines that may have controlled everything, yet were only accessible to a few. Attitudes may have shifted when transistors entered the picture, and shifted even further when integrated circuits were developed, yet it wasn't until the mid-70's until people started imagining what we have today. Even so, they were a novelty to most people until the mid-90's. We are talking about half a century in going from something that we would recognize as a computer until they were adopted by society as a whole. And that is ignoring the fact that people have been trying to develop calculating machines for centuries. Research is good, even if the vast majority of it ends up leading to dead-ends, simply because we don't have sufficient imagination to determine what will be useful in the future.

simon_000666 4y ago
This is true - and I think what’s also being missed here is the potential to further this research for producing grain off-world. Growing crops in space or other planets will be a heavily optimized and controlled process so it’s good to explore these possibilities here on earth even if it doesn’t yet make commercial sense.
HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
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forgetfreeman 4y ago

Pfffft. Indoor grow startups around the globe that focus on significantly higher roi products than simple grains are tanking on energy costs and investment in the space is headed for the exits. I mean I get hustling for dumb money buy is any money really this dense?

jacknews 4y ago

It seems like a lot of effort to grow the entire plant when we just want the grain, or in fact mostly just flour. I'm sure there will be a better way to make those with yeast, or cell culture.

imtringued 4y ago
Starch synthesis via enzymes inside bio reactors.

simon_000666 4y ago

One wonders, given that most grain is milled into flour if precision fermentation might be a better solution to this particular problem of producing what is essentially just a mix of proteins and starches.

mythrwy 4y ago
What would the fermentation feedstock be? Wheat?

jimnotgym 4y ago

I suppose this will be handy if you were trying to grow wheat on the moon, or Mars. Still find it weird that you would not allow in natural light?

hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
It could be cheaper to build the way they did it. Greenhouses are really expensive, and they get hot in the summer so need sophisticated ventilation systems. Another part to why they did it that way is they might want to stack more layers of crops in the future.

ankaAr 4y ago

I'm from Argentina. Our incomes comes basically from agriculture and livestock, we export almost all (we produce food for 10 times our population, estimated) Anyway I'm very sure that in some years the country incomes will plummet, because the technification. We are not doing anything against the fact that climate change, wars and technology are driving us to a point that every country can grow their own meat or grain on their own land. Now farming this indoor is expensive, but in few years importing will be higher, and the technology to produce that indoor, on your own land will be cheap. Now, we are having a really bad bad drought that cut our income expectation by 40%, soy beans prices will be really high this year, other things like wheat, corn, etc maybe will be not affected because our market is Latin America (prices will be for them). Cattle is dying becaue ethe lack of water, but anyway we are so stupid country that we don't have the number of livestock we had decades ago. So, now could sound stupid, not in the future, and definitely not if you can think about permanent bases on Mars for example.

Havoc 4y ago

Very surprised that makes any sort of sense on any level frankly

gmuslera 4y ago

How much protection will they get from external weather? What about soil quality in the middle/long run? If weather becomes unreliable or far more extreme, indoor farming may be a better bet than hoping than a flood, a drought or other extreme weather events don't happen before harvesting.