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"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

"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.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        As I understand it, the stacked greenhouse is automated, so no labor, starvation-wage or otherwise.
- 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.

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.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        As I understand it, the stacked greenhouse is automated, so no labor, starvation-wage or otherwise.
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.