4 ms·

Cases like these build support for indoor farming if externalized costs of black swan events and pesticides are incorporated into the cost calculation. Outdoor

Cases like these build support for indoor farming if externalized costs of black swan events and pesticides are incorporated into the cost calculation. Outdoors wins always from a power efficiency standpoint, but disease can flip the balance.

kreyenborgi 2y ago
> The most practical strategy, for now, is to plant olive varieties that are naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa to prevent future outbreaks and minimize potential losses. It seems rather to be yet another argument for polycropping and taking care of genetic variety and adapting to local conditions, instead of trying even harder to hammer nature into a grid.
- giantg2 2y ago
  I agree. Biodiversity in agriculture is severely lacking. The good news is that we have heritage seeds. However, we don't have the capacity to ramp that stock up quickly. The main issue is that farmers will choose the best seeds for the current conditions/risks. This leads to a consensus winning variety. There's no benefit to the farmer to plant "inferior" seeds for an event that has yet to happen.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    A "biodiversity subsidy" sounds like a kind of agricultural-assistance I could get behind, although the devil is always in the details. One concern that comes to mind: If a certain variation is more-susceptible to a particular disease or pest, and becomes a beachhead or reservoir--fun mixed metaphors there--for infection.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      Yeah, this would probably be best served by some biosecurity program at the USDA or a handful of universities.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  Reading more, there appear to be just two cultivars naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa. Spain already grows hundreds of cultivars of olive trees, though only three are used for the bulk of the olive oil. So replacing those with resistant ones would reduce diversity.
  - kreyenborgi 2y ago
    A different monoculture is not the solution to the problem of a monoculture. Replacing all of them with the resistant ones would reduce biodiversity (perhaps the resistant ones are susceptible to other diseases, perhaps the nonresistant ones will at some point be resistant to a new disease). See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture The main problem with polyculture being that it assumes local farmers are smart and cunning individuals who find (perhaps unorthodox) solutions in constrained, complex and realistic environments because their livelihoods depend on it (or because they got an interesting idea and couldn't let it go), and who know more about their challenges than random hn commenters like me, instead of being mindless drones that can be replaced/interchanged at will by central overlords with complete control over the panopticon food factory.
culi 2y ago
Disease is not a problem if we stop practicing monocultures. The added labor costs associated with polyculture still end up being less than the added energy costs of indoor farming
- adalacelove 2y ago
  From TFA: While the focus has been on olives, the bacterium’s ability to infect such a broad spectrum of plants makes it an agricultural nightmare, particularly in regions where multiple crops are grown in close proximity.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. This issue is very common. Another example is the Cavendish banana. I believe the article advocates for planting resistant varieties.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      >They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. I know that not everyone is a horticulturalist. Allow me to explain why this is dumb. It is true that for a crop like tomatoes, you might just grow any old mongrel seed, and that the tomatoes will still produce... even if yields are off 30% or 40%. Monocropping in that case is about increasing yields, not making the impossible possible. This is simply not true with most orchard tree crops (or grapes, or about half the sorts of food crops you've enjoyed all your life). An apple, for instance isn't just a monocrop of closely related sibling plants... each Fuji or Pink Lady apple you've eaten is a genetic clone of any other of that type. They are literally cloned through grafting (and sometimes rooted cuttings). If we want to get really technical, each tree is technically a chimera, with only the crown being Pink Lady, the low trunk and roots will be something like M.111 (another variety that you don't eat it's fruit). Hell, sometimes there's even a third type in the middle of the two called an "interstock". What would happen if you didn't clone apple varieties? You wouldn't eat apples anymore. Every apple tree would produce its own kind of fruit, some might be just as good as Fuji or Yellow Delicious or any of the others you're familiar with. But there'd only ever be one tree of that. Apples do not grow true to seed. Some would be little golf-ball-sized crab apples. Others would be completely tasteless. Or dry and pithy. Or nasty-looking things that always split while growing. Maybe farmers would still grow them as feed for hogs (but productivity is also a genetic trait, and you've just struck a death-blow against having a large number of highly productive trees). Maybe they'd be grown to make alcohol (more applejack or cider than apfelwein I'd think). But apples as a desert fruit would be gone. And it's like this for many, many crops. Hell, even something like wheat... you can complain about monocropping, but these new varieties that they use actually resist diseases better (not to mention prevented who knows how many famines through increased yield). This is the argument of someone who whines about GMO crops and shops at Whole foods, a certain political type whose preferred policies seem designed to just make food more expensive and scarce. >Another example is the Cavendish banana. There are plenty of banana cultivars... few of them of the sort that people in the developed world enjoy. It's the same problem as all of the other. But for Cavendish (and a tiny handful of other varieties), you'd have no bananas at all.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Wonder if you could robot automate indoor gardening or beekeeping. As someone who strongly dislikes bees, but loves honey and its products I find myself wondering how to automate beekeeping so I can not interact with bees.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  They once built a robot bee that could waggle-dance inside the hive. The bees eventually started listening to it. You could put on an Oculus, and go dance-talk to them remotely. There are like 5 words in their grammar with which to communicate one idea... where to find the nectar. But the truth of the matter is they need someone to babysit and check up on them once in awhile. Make sure they're free of mites, that the colony isn't going to be unbalanced (that they might need a new queen, if something went wrong, or there's not enough brood in the comb). Wear a beekeeping suit. No reason to dislike them, they appreciate flowers, make candy, and twerk-to-talk. Seems like they're the good guys.
- Carrok 2y ago
  Indoor gardening is very much highly automated already.
- yyuugg 2y ago
  Have you spent any times with bees? Beekeeping really changed my opinions on bees. They are quite industrious and very gentle.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
This will sound like bullshit... but I have three indoor olives at the moment. Two were ordered as rooted cuttings a couple months back, under grow lights and getting a decent amount of new growth. A third was on the clearance rack at Lowes, it's a big bigger. But, before they get 3ft or so, they're going to have to go outside. They're already too big for my not-unimpressive grow lights. Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Trim them into bonsai.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
    - Maciek416 2y ago
      I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
jnmandal 2y ago
No offense but that is bunk. To grow thousands of olive trees indoors would be nearly impossible. Perennial crops like this need huge amounts of soil for their root systems, and to replace the amount of olives with indoor plantation would require a massive square footage of greenhouses. Not to mention that diseases like this can just as easily transmit indoors. Look into the American chestnut blight if you don't believe me. There almost no way to grow a tree isolated from the blight. The only viable solution in cases like these is a genetic one. In this case, we can actually top the olive and graft a disease resistant variety onto the rootstock. In some cases you may have to actually develop an entirely new tree from scratch and replant. That is why continuous research into plant genetics and breeding is so extremely important for the continuation of human society.
petergs 2y ago
Indoor farming is far from immune to disease. Infected inputs (seed, substrate) are just one route to contamination. See for example: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-leaf-eating-pathogen-failed-acquisition https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-...
pezezin 2y ago
I am from Spain. We have 340 million olive trees on 28 000 km2 of farm land. Please tell me how we are going to do it indoors. Example of an olive grove in the province of Jaén, that alone produces 20% of the olive oil in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#/media/File:Panor%C3%A1mica_olivar_Ja%C3%A9n01.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#...
- lioeters 2y ago
  That panoramic view of the olive garden is magnificent. I didn't know olive trees are being cultivated on such huge plots of land, covering fields and hills as far as the eyes can see. Trees seem unsuitable for indoor farming, since they need tons of soil and sunlight. Also taking years to grow and mature. Indoor farming in general seem unsuitable for Spain, where there is an abundance of land and sun. Searching on this topic I learned that green houses are popular in some regions like Almería for growing fruits and vegetables. I guess green houses are something between indoor and outdoor farming. > Spain is currently the world’s third largest tomato exporter, and up to 60% of those tomatoes come from the province of Almería. > The region has around 30,000 hectares of land under cultivation, the majority of which is under plastic. It is also the most rapidly desertifying region in the country.
  - KSteffensen 2y ago
    To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    Something interesting about the greenhouses of Almería is that they are one of the few human constructions easily visible from space.

kreyenborgi 2y ago

> The most practical strategy, for now, is to plant olive varieties that are naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa to prevent future outbreaks and minimize potential losses. It seems rather to be yet another argument for polycropping and taking care of genetic variety and adapting to local conditions, instead of trying even harder to hammer nature into a grid.

giantg2 2y ago
I agree. Biodiversity in agriculture is severely lacking. The good news is that we have heritage seeds. However, we don't have the capacity to ramp that stock up quickly. The main issue is that farmers will choose the best seeds for the current conditions/risks. This leads to a consensus winning variety. There's no benefit to the farmer to plant "inferior" seeds for an event that has yet to happen.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  A "biodiversity subsidy" sounds like a kind of agricultural-assistance I could get behind, although the devil is always in the details. One concern that comes to mind: If a certain variation is more-susceptible to a particular disease or pest, and becomes a beachhead or reservoir--fun mixed metaphors there--for infection.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Yeah, this would probably be best served by some biosecurity program at the USDA or a handful of universities.
Aloisius 2y ago
Reading more, there appear to be just two cultivars naturally resistant to Xylella fastidiosa. Spain already grows hundreds of cultivars of olive trees, though only three are used for the bulk of the olive oil. So replacing those with resistant ones would reduce diversity.
- kreyenborgi 2y ago
  A different monoculture is not the solution to the problem of a monoculture. Replacing all of them with the resistant ones would reduce biodiversity (perhaps the resistant ones are susceptible to other diseases, perhaps the nonresistant ones will at some point be resistant to a new disease). See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture The main problem with polyculture being that it assumes local farmers are smart and cunning individuals who find (perhaps unorthodox) solutions in constrained, complex and realistic environments because their livelihoods depend on it (or because they got an interesting idea and couldn't let it go), and who know more about their challenges than random hn commenters like me, instead of being mindless drones that can be replaced/interchanged at will by central overlords with complete control over the panopticon food factory.

culi 2y ago

Disease is not a problem if we stop practicing monocultures. The added labor costs associated with polyculture still end up being less than the added energy costs of indoor farming

adalacelove 2y ago
From TFA: While the focus has been on olives, the bacterium’s ability to infect such a broad spectrum of plants makes it an agricultural nightmare, particularly in regions where multiple crops are grown in close proximity.
- giantg2 2y ago
  They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. This issue is very common. Another example is the Cavendish banana. I believe the article advocates for planting resistant varieties.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    >They aren't talking about polyculture as proximity to other types of crops. They are talking about the limited genetic diversity in within a specific type of crop. I know that not everyone is a horticulturalist. Allow me to explain why this is dumb. It is true that for a crop like tomatoes, you might just grow any old mongrel seed, and that the tomatoes will still produce... even if yields are off 30% or 40%. Monocropping in that case is about increasing yields, not making the impossible possible. This is simply not true with most orchard tree crops (or grapes, or about half the sorts of food crops you've enjoyed all your life). An apple, for instance isn't just a monocrop of closely related sibling plants... each Fuji or Pink Lady apple you've eaten is a genetic clone of any other of that type. They are literally cloned through grafting (and sometimes rooted cuttings). If we want to get really technical, each tree is technically a chimera, with only the crown being Pink Lady, the low trunk and roots will be something like M.111 (another variety that you don't eat it's fruit). Hell, sometimes there's even a third type in the middle of the two called an "interstock". What would happen if you didn't clone apple varieties? You wouldn't eat apples anymore. Every apple tree would produce its own kind of fruit, some might be just as good as Fuji or Yellow Delicious or any of the others you're familiar with. But there'd only ever be one tree of that. Apples do not grow true to seed. Some would be little golf-ball-sized crab apples. Others would be completely tasteless. Or dry and pithy. Or nasty-looking things that always split while growing. Maybe farmers would still grow them as feed for hogs (but productivity is also a genetic trait, and you've just struck a death-blow against having a large number of highly productive trees). Maybe they'd be grown to make alcohol (more applejack or cider than apfelwein I'd think). But apples as a desert fruit would be gone. And it's like this for many, many crops. Hell, even something like wheat... you can complain about monocropping, but these new varieties that they use actually resist diseases better (not to mention prevented who knows how many famines through increased yield). This is the argument of someone who whines about GMO crops and shops at Whole foods, a certain political type whose preferred policies seem designed to just make food more expensive and scarce. >Another example is the Cavendish banana. There are plenty of banana cultivars... few of them of the sort that people in the developed world enjoy. It's the same problem as all of the other. But for Cavendish (and a tiny handful of other varieties), you'd have no bananas at all.

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

Wonder if you could robot automate indoor gardening or beekeeping. As someone who strongly dislikes bees, but loves honey and its products I find myself wondering how to automate beekeeping so I can not interact with bees.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
They once built a robot bee that could waggle-dance inside the hive. The bees eventually started listening to it. You could put on an Oculus, and go dance-talk to them remotely. There are like 5 words in their grammar with which to communicate one idea... where to find the nectar. But the truth of the matter is they need someone to babysit and check up on them once in awhile. Make sure they're free of mites, that the colony isn't going to be unbalanced (that they might need a new queen, if something went wrong, or there's not enough brood in the comb). Wear a beekeeping suit. No reason to dislike them, they appreciate flowers, make candy, and twerk-to-talk. Seems like they're the good guys.
Carrok 2y ago
Indoor gardening is very much highly automated already.
yyuugg 2y ago
Have you spent any times with bees? Beekeeping really changed my opinions on bees. They are quite industrious and very gentle.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

This will sound like bullshit... but I have three indoor olives at the moment. Two were ordered as rooted cuttings a couple months back, under grow lights and getting a decent amount of new growth. A third was on the clearance rack at Lowes, it's a big bigger. But, before they get 3ft or so, they're going to have to go outside. They're already too big for my not-unimpressive grow lights. Olive oil's already like $50 for a gallon can (and not much cheaper even if you eat the trash stuff). Were olive orchards inside, no one like you or me would ever get to enjoy them again.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Trim them into bonsai.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.
  - Maciek416 2y ago
    I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.

jnmandal 2y ago

No offense but that is bunk. To grow thousands of olive trees indoors would be nearly impossible. Perennial crops like this need huge amounts of soil for their root systems, and to replace the amount of olives with indoor plantation would require a massive square footage of greenhouses. Not to mention that diseases like this can just as easily transmit indoors. Look into the American chestnut blight if you don't believe me. There almost no way to grow a tree isolated from the blight. The only viable solution in cases like these is a genetic one. In this case, we can actually top the olive and graft a disease resistant variety onto the rootstock. In some cases you may have to actually develop an entirely new tree from scratch and replant. That is why continuous research into plant genetics and breeding is so extremely important for the continuation of human society.

petergs 2y ago

Indoor farming is far from immune to disease. Infected inputs (seed, substrate) are just one route to contamination. See for example: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-leaf-eating-pathogen-failed-acquisition https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/bowery-farming-collapse-...

pezezin 2y ago

I am from Spain. We have 340 million olive trees on 28 000 km2 of farm land. Please tell me how we are going to do it indoors. Example of an olive grove in the province of Jaén, that alone produces 20% of the olive oil in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#/media/File:Panor%C3%A1mica_olivar_Ja%C3%A9n01.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Ja%C3%A9n_(Spain)#...

lioeters 2y ago
That panoramic view of the olive garden is magnificent. I didn't know olive trees are being cultivated on such huge plots of land, covering fields and hills as far as the eyes can see. Trees seem unsuitable for indoor farming, since they need tons of soil and sunlight. Also taking years to grow and mature. Indoor farming in general seem unsuitable for Spain, where there is an abundance of land and sun. Searching on this topic I learned that green houses are popular in some regions like Almería for growing fruits and vegetables. I guess green houses are something between indoor and outdoor farming. > Spain is currently the world’s third largest tomato exporter, and up to 60% of those tomatoes come from the province of Almería. > The region has around 30,000 hectares of land under cultivation, the majority of which is under plastic. It is also the most rapidly desertifying region in the country.
- KSteffensen 2y ago
  To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.
- pezezin 2y ago
  Something interesting about the greenhouses of Almería is that they are one of the few human constructions easily visible from space.