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Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to

• UpToTheSky 3y ago
  Going by that logic, no technological progress would take place at all.
  • datpiff 3y ago
    Progress is part keeping-the-things-that-work, part dropping-the-things-that-don't
    • szundi 3y ago
      And adding new ones
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water. Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Nature does have decent pest control, but the way we do farming does basically everything to circumvent it. If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.
  • tfourb 3y ago
    If nature wouldn't have great pest control, there wouldn't be any nature. The whole point of evolution is for living things to get better at resisting pests (also avoid being eaten and mate more successfully). Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
    • biorach 3y ago
      > there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability Much as I like these approaches, unfortunately mostly they are currently a long long way off the productivity of conventional agriculture by any metric (yield/area, yield/animal etc) If you've got some specific examples of regenerative systems that out-perform conventional in terms of productivity please post some links.
      • tfourb 3y ago
        Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less? A concrete example would be New Forest Farm: about 40 hectares in Wisconsin farmed entirely without chemical fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides or external irrigation for more than two decades. The owner is arguably more commercially successful than the neighboring corn farmers and according to his data, he produces similar amounts of calories/ha with a considerably lower energy input and comparable labour requirements. He has written a couple of good books and you can find plenty of youtube videos of him (Mark Shepard).
        • biorach 3y ago
          > Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less? Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional. I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy. Again, if you've links to highly productive _widely deployed_ regenerative systems please post them. As I've said in another comment Mark Shepard's work is very interesting, but it's an isolated case, a prototype. The trick is replicating it widely - it remains to be seen if that can be done.
• logi2mus 3y ago
  Yes so true, I guess there is more money in autonomous robots for additional control like weed suppression!
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty? If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them. E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm. If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    It is not even flying them in vs vertical farm. But vertical farm vs more traditional greenhouse solutions. Where you can do all the circulation control, but also can use natural light and don't need large concrete structures. There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I've always thought it a bit odd that they picked up steam first in the U.S. for this reason. The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or some other city-state.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • CharlieDigital 3y ago
        > a bit odd that they picked up steam first in the U.S. for this reason My sense is that it was riding a wave of "local" and "farm to table". If you're in a city like LA or NY where there's a lack of space AND local demand for a premium priced product that can be delivered year round AND more awareness/marketability for such products (local + sustainable), the economics are different than versus growing a commodity product in Boise, Idaho. It's like the farmers in Asia that grow super premium fruits (Japan and Taiwan come to mind). It only makes sense in the context of a market that will pay the price premium.
• weberer 3y ago
  >pest control The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
  • guerrilla 3y ago
    and spending all your savings on fungicide instead.
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      Tell me more.
      • mikro2nd 3y ago
        Not the original commenter, but I guess they were referring to the fact that closed (indoor) grow environments universally suffer from fungal (and algal) disease problems. A lovely example of this is the germination rooms/tanks of malting plants where Barley gets germinated over a few days (2-3) before being dried/kilned to make brewing malt: they all have an on-going battle against fungi and algae, much of which battle takes the form of fungicides/algacides, chlorine washes, strong acids, etc. and they never "win" a permanent victory. The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...
      • AlexandrB 3y ago
        "PM" (powdery mildew) is a huge problem in indoor grows[1]. It's especially bad in the Marijuana industry where it completely ruins the plants' suitability for sale (potentially lethal if inhaled/smoked), but it affects many other plants as well. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdery_mildew https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdery_mildew
  • luma 3y ago
    These are not clean rooms and invasive pests absolutely do make their way in and then have to be dealt with.
    • 3y ago
• lyu07282 3y ago
  There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from poor to rich countries using cheap fossile fuel powered gigantic ships IS the most profitable way to make most of the food we eat, BUT that doesn't mean it also makes the most sense to do it this way. There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.
  • JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    That ship has sailed? The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc. Techno-farming cost more, in fuel and resources. And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century. It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
    • lifeonlars 3y ago
      > The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century. This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress. A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education. Far from being dependent on either the profit motive or global trade, they are largely public goods, have overwhelmingly been provided outside of private enterprise, and do not in the main depend on goods being transported globally.
      • JoeAltmaier 3y ago
        The distribution of goods is vital to every part of that? Making it cheap enough to reach every citizen of Earth is what shipping containers have made possible.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  > Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life. Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control. Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants. We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
  • tfourb 3y ago
    There are plenty of great projects and commercial regenerative farms that have demonstrated that exploited and degraded soils can be made productive again in a matter of years with little to no external inputs in terms of fertilizer and water. The Work of Ernst Götschl (syntropic agriculture) comes to mind in tropical climates, or Mark Shepard in mid-west US.
• im3w1l 3y ago
  I reckon it's not based on economic sense. Rather it's about aesthetics. It feels good to look at your vertical farm, it's a nice little hobby to maintain I'm sure, and a certain pride to eat your own produce. And so people try to rationalize this and work backwards into an explanation for why it's a logical thing to do, but really it's just about that warm fuzzy feeling of having your own vertical farm.
• Alex3917 3y ago
  Cows are usually started outdoors and then finished indoors. There's no reason why farming couldn't follow a similar hybrid approach. That way you could e.g. grow tropical crops in New England, but still not have to pay for the majority of the required resources.
  • mikeg8 3y ago
    Explain how you create a tropical environment in New England that doesn’t require an incredible amount of resources to mimic the temperature, humidity, soil conditions, required to bear profitable products
    • George83728 3y ago
      Traditional 19th century greenhouse technology accomplishes this just fine; tropical fruits grown in temperate climates isn't wizardry. The problem is transportation of foods actually grown in the tropics has become much cheaper, so the economic niche for greenhouse grown tropical foods has narrowed considerably. And of course, using LEDs and solar panels instead of plate glass roofs makes it worse... (Incidentally, most tropical soil is notoriously poor, so getting the soil right is one of the easier parts.)
    • svnt 3y ago
      Hear me out, first you get some cows…
• pif 3y ago
  > sun light for crying out loud. Spot on! Plants without solar lights are for labs, not for food.
• tagami 3y ago
  Fertility isn't "free". You pull nutrients out of the soil whenever you harvest.
  • tfourb 3y ago
    Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil life that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant, if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture. If fertility isn't free, who the f*ck would something like succession happen, which is the norm in nature and can turn barren land into perennial forests. EDITED TO ADD: This is the reason why agriculture before the advent of chemical fertilizers (in the 1900s) was even possible. You'd simply rotate your crops so that they'd create a balanced nutrition profile in the soil without the need to add a lot of external fertility. Edge cases like the Nile floodplains excepted.
    • biorach 3y ago
      >> Fertility isn't "free". You pull nutrients out of the soil whenever you harvest. > Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil live that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant, That's inaccurate and simplistic. _Some_ plants generate _some_ nutrients in the soil. The most common example being legumes (in symbiosis with bacteria) fixing atmospheric nitrogen into a form essential for plant life. However all plants have complex nutrient needs. So even those that contribute something to the soil will remove other nutrients. In the example of legumes, to simplify, if the whole plant is harvested, they will have made a net contribution of nitrogen, but the soil will still be depleted of e.g. Phosphorous and Potassium. > if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture. It's not a dumb approach, it can make sense. And it does not "destroy" the soil. Yes it _can_ cause leeching, soil erosion and depletion of some nutrients, but all these ill effects can be dramatically lessened by good practice. In Europe we have soils that have been tilled intermittently for millenia and are still productive.
• smileysteve 3y ago
  Irrigation; the Colorado River Basin and California River basins would like a word, irrigation is not free. The US also also have a number of places where the soil has given way because of poor farming practices. Also, the dust bowl.