4 ms·

Let me know when truly calorie-dense foods like potatoes, corn, and wheat are finally profitable to grow indoors. All I see thus far is lots of LED-fed salad.

perrygeo 3y ago
It would be interesting to see the EROI on these vertical farms. My guess is that dozens of calories (mostly originating from fossil fuels) go into every food calorie produced. If you want to convert petroleum to food, there are far more efficient ways to do it.
- lifeonlars 3y ago
  A ratio of fuel calories to food calories isn't that useful a metric unless you have similar numbers for all the conventional methods of producing food at scale. It's not like 1 is a goal: we can't eat fossil fuels (or solar energy), and we know that eating either plants or animals is never going to yield all the energy they absorbed during their lives.
  - perrygeo 3y ago
    There are similar numbers for conventional farming, and historical estimates too. There's a whole field of study on the EROI of agriculture. And yes, for all of human agriculture until roughly the industrial revolution, the EROI was over 1. By definition. 1 unit of labor + sun better equal at least 1 unit of food! When solar energy is the only external input and all mammalian labor provides the rest (which must be fed by the same crops that you're trying to grow), if you got less crop calories than it took to run the farm, you and your livestock would be dead.
    - lifeonlars 3y ago
      Since the choice is not between these new types of farming and pre-industrial-revolution agriculture, that comparison doesn't matter much.. And even pre-industrial agriculture had specific elements which had a yield of less than 1 by this metric, in order to make specific things that humans wanted to eat. Since most humans don't like a diet of grass and oats, the huge excess calorie yield from those crops could subsidize low-yield farming of vegetables, meat and other delicacies.
LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
Only the marketers are saying it's a panacea. Vertical farming (defined as the inefficient use of indoor farming, versus greenhouses which are an efficient use of indoor farming) is not a good replacement for most sorts of food production. It's a potentially competitive way of producing the most delicate and high-value items as close to the customer as possible. It could make it possible to sell some foods, like apricots, in the city which are otherwise impossible to ship because they have to be picked soft. Often though, there is roof space available where high-value crops could currently be grown efficiently in greenhouses and it's not being looked at because of the VC focus on tech and growth.

perrygeo 3y ago

It would be interesting to see the EROI on these vertical farms. My guess is that dozens of calories (mostly originating from fossil fuels) go into every food calorie produced. If you want to convert petroleum to food, there are far more efficient ways to do it.

lifeonlars 3y ago
A ratio of fuel calories to food calories isn't that useful a metric unless you have similar numbers for all the conventional methods of producing food at scale. It's not like 1 is a goal: we can't eat fossil fuels (or solar energy), and we know that eating either plants or animals is never going to yield all the energy they absorbed during their lives.
- perrygeo 3y ago
  There are similar numbers for conventional farming, and historical estimates too. There's a whole field of study on the EROI of agriculture. And yes, for all of human agriculture until roughly the industrial revolution, the EROI was over 1. By definition. 1 unit of labor + sun better equal at least 1 unit of food! When solar energy is the only external input and all mammalian labor provides the rest (which must be fed by the same crops that you're trying to grow), if you got less crop calories than it took to run the farm, you and your livestock would be dead.
  - lifeonlars 3y ago
    Since the choice is not between these new types of farming and pre-industrial-revolution agriculture, that comparison doesn't matter much.. And even pre-industrial agriculture had specific elements which had a yield of less than 1 by this metric, in order to make specific things that humans wanted to eat. Since most humans don't like a diet of grass and oats, the huge excess calorie yield from those crops could subsidize low-yield farming of vegetables, meat and other delicacies.

LawTalkingGuy 3y ago

Only the marketers are saying it's a panacea. Vertical farming (defined as the inefficient use of indoor farming, versus greenhouses which are an efficient use of indoor farming) is not a good replacement for most sorts of food production. It's a potentially competitive way of producing the most delicate and high-value items as close to the customer as possible. It could make it possible to sell some foods, like apricots, in the city which are otherwise impossible to ship because they have to be picked soft. Often though, there is roof space available where high-value crops could currently be grown efficiently in greenhouses and it's not being looked at because of the VC focus on tech and growth.