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One of the "answers" is vertical farming, which as the article notes, eats a shittone of electricity. Its a bit disappointing that the article doesn't mention
by KaiserPro 3y ago
One of the "answers" is vertical farming, which as the article notes, eats a shittone of electricity.
Its a bit disappointing that the article doesn't mention landscape management, mixed use arable or general tree coverage for water retention
- gabereiser 3y agoIt’s coming down drastically too with LED full spectrum grow lights. You can now run a row on 100Wh. Way better than the 1.2kWh before.
- Faaak 3y agoDon't take it wrong, but it's hard to be credible when you mix power and energy
- gabereiser 3y agoIndeed I only specified energy consumption, not power.
- fellowmartian 3y agoUltimately, you cannot make it use less energy than the amount of calories you want to put in. It’s a viable technology but only if you have cheap energy or if transportation costs go ballistic, there’s no way to beat thermodynamics on this.
- BariumBlue 3y agoQuick math: where I live, a kilowatt-hour costs 12 cents. A kilowatt-hour has 860,421 calories. Even with inefficiencies, seems pretty doable to me.
- sp332 3y agoThat helps, but the losses in solar panels means it’s never going to be close to just putting the plants outside.
- imtringued 3y agoThere is a perverse incentive in vertical farming. There is no logical reason to farm indoors while the land outdoors is still arable. This means any form of pollution that makes land less arable increases the relative profitability of vertical farming. Accelerated desertification is good for your business because then you can collect solar energy or wind energy there with little resistance. My expectation is that if this technology was widely deployed in the Sahara, any afforestation attempts would be cut short because they step on the toes of the vertical farming guys.
- Ekaros 3y agoI still don't get why vertical with all the support(probably concrete) needed versus just going with green houses. Maybe with semi-reflective surfaces.
- atyppo 3y agoIs all that much support needed? Maybe for crops grown on trees or something, but in videos I’ve seen about indoor farming [1], there hasn’t been much other than basic metal cages with containers spaced out. [1]: https://youtu.be/gW-21CHDkIU https://youtu.be/gW-21CHDkIU
- 40yearoldman 3y agothis looks like a good way for humanity get fuxked. Not only will individuals loose the ability to farm, it will be locked up in companies. Who will likely make it illegal for others to do the same. Beyond that we will likely loose access to all strains of plants that’s can grow well outside. As a safe guard. Humanity needs a super farm that is isolated and trains and maintains the old ways.
- KaiserPro 3y agoThere are so many problems with vertical farming, but doing it in the sahara is even more problemattic. First you still need water, and its not like its a closed system, so you'll get significant losses. Then you need to either think about heating and cooling (it gets really cold at night and super hot in the day) or build under the sand. Either way lots of building materials. Its literally easier and cheaper to terraform the saraha than it is to do vertical farming there.
- imtringued 3y agoOr how about adding a transparent roof to the container systems...
- bastawhiz 3y agoVertical farming seems to be to be the hydrogen power of agriculture. It works in theory, but it currently really only works for fairly niche situations and the effort to break through to economies of scale is pretty intractable. Energy use is one reason; cost and profitablity is another. Compared to the alternative (making traditional agriculture better, improving electric vehicles), there's much less low hanging fruit.