4 ms·

There might be a "food related start-up" bubble but I don't think there is actually a "food" bubble. If anything, its the reverse. More mouths to feed. Less wat

by jqm 12y ago

There might be a "food related start-up" bubble but I don't think there is actually a "food" bubble. If anything, its the reverse. More mouths to feed. Less water and land and pristine ocean to do it with. Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies.

trhway 12y ago
>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies. those containers with blue&red LEDs (pioneered by marijuana growers) is pretty much the solution (or at least preview of a very large part of the solution) as it allows to not waste water and energy and multiplies square footage by using several layers of shelves. Due to such efficiency, it also allows to grow food where normal open-air agriculture wouldn't be very feasible. Non-mobile versions, more like warehouse scale than container, can be built-in into cities (even underground like parking) or suburban areas.
- seiferteric 12y ago
  I am extremely skeptical that this type of agriculture will ever make up significant portion of food produced. Pick a random spot in the middle of the US on google maps and zoom in, it will most likely be agricultural fields. USDA says ~51% or 2.3 BILLION acres of land is used just in the US for Ag. Much of that relies on "free" resources like rain and sun shine to be economical. The cost of creating the infrastructure to replace even a tiny fraction of this land would be huge. Plus now you want to replace sunshine with artificial light? Where does this energy some from? Maybe there is some application for this in cities for fresh produce, but I don't see it for staple crops. The only reason it works for marijuana growers is due to the extremely high price they can sell their "crop" for.
  - klibertp 12y ago
    There are countries where land is more scarce than in the US where area efficiency is more important than water/light efficiency.
    - seiferteric 12y ago
      Yes and a lot of those countries import a lot of food from elsewhere because they cannot produce enough (or would be more expensive to do so). Japan for instance only produces ~39% of its own food on a calorie basis.
- collyw 12y ago
  We could grow biofuels this way and power LED's. Does anyone see a problem with this approach?
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    No just a lot of turtles stacked on top of each other :) Technically it might be possible to capture more of the solar energy falling on the surface and convert it to light with the exact wavelengths used by plants photosystem 1 & 2, but I suspect it would be hard to make this work.
lsc 12y ago
>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies. It might be the most important challenge, but it's certainly one of the challenges we seem to be rising to. People have been predicting mass starvation with population growth forever; From the seventeen hundreds to the seventies, Malthus has been a huge influence on the hippies, and he's been wrong for most of that time, too. Our ability to grow food is growing faster than the population; apparently arable land isn't the limit people thought it was. At this point in history, famine is generally a political problem, not a resources problem.
- sukilot 12y ago
  Starving people don't care why they don't have access to agriculture.
  - lsc 12y ago
    Baby steps, man. I'm just saying that we have solved the "produce enough food for everyone" problem, and that's pretty great, even if we have other problems that have to do with hunger that we still haven't fixed. Certainly, our ability to produce cheap food is vastly reducing the number of starving people out there, and that's good, even if there are still problems to solve in that arena.
- ceras 12y ago
  We can produce enough now, but at a cost to future production. We're increasingly cutting down forests, draining non-renewable water supplies, and reducing the quality of arable land. In other words, at the current usage levels places like California will not be arable forever.
  - lsc 12y ago
    Eh, perhaps sometimes? I think we are vastly more conscious of this sort of thing than we were, say, in the '20s and the '30s, and that consciousness is going to help us screw up less. Which isn't to say we aren't screwing up some things now; I'm just saying that we're getting better at this sort of thing, in the two steps forward, one step back kind of way that humans as a whole seem to get better at things.

by jqm 12y ago

trhway 12y ago

>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies. those containers with blue&red LEDs (pioneered by marijuana growers) is pretty much the solution (or at least preview of a very large part of the solution) as it allows to not waste water and energy and multiplies square footage by using several layers of shelves. Due to such efficiency, it also allows to grow food where normal open-air agriculture wouldn't be very feasible. Non-mobile versions, more like warehouse scale than container, can be built-in into cities (even underground like parking) or suburban areas.

seiferteric 12y ago
I am extremely skeptical that this type of agriculture will ever make up significant portion of food produced. Pick a random spot in the middle of the US on google maps and zoom in, it will most likely be agricultural fields. USDA says ~51% or 2.3 BILLION acres of land is used just in the US for Ag. Much of that relies on "free" resources like rain and sun shine to be economical. The cost of creating the infrastructure to replace even a tiny fraction of this land would be huge. Plus now you want to replace sunshine with artificial light? Where does this energy some from? Maybe there is some application for this in cities for fresh produce, but I don't see it for staple crops. The only reason it works for marijuana growers is due to the extremely high price they can sell their "crop" for.
- klibertp 12y ago
  There are countries where land is more scarce than in the US where area efficiency is more important than water/light efficiency.
  - seiferteric 12y ago
    Yes and a lot of those countries import a lot of food from elsewhere because they cannot produce enough (or would be more expensive to do so). Japan for instance only produces ~39% of its own food on a calorie basis.
collyw 12y ago
We could grow biofuels this way and power LED's. Does anyone see a problem with this approach?
- danieltillett 12y ago
  No just a lot of turtles stacked on top of each other :) Technically it might be possible to capture more of the solar energy falling on the surface and convert it to light with the exact wavelengths used by plants photosystem 1 & 2, but I suspect it would be hard to make this work.

lsc 12y ago

>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies. It might be the most important challenge, but it's certainly one of the challenges we seem to be rising to. People have been predicting mass starvation with population growth forever; From the seventeen hundreds to the seventies, Malthus has been a huge influence on the hippies, and he's been wrong for most of that time, too. Our ability to grow food is growing faster than the population; apparently arable land isn't the limit people thought it was. At this point in history, famine is generally a political problem, not a resources problem.

sukilot 12y ago
Starving people don't care why they don't have access to agriculture.
- lsc 12y ago
  Baby steps, man. I'm just saying that we have solved the "produce enough food for everyone" problem, and that's pretty great, even if we have other problems that have to do with hunger that we still haven't fixed. Certainly, our ability to produce cheap food is vastly reducing the number of starving people out there, and that's good, even if there are still problems to solve in that arena.
ceras 12y ago
We can produce enough now, but at a cost to future production. We're increasingly cutting down forests, draining non-renewable water supplies, and reducing the quality of arable land. In other words, at the current usage levels places like California will not be arable forever.
- lsc 12y ago
  Eh, perhaps sometimes? I think we are vastly more conscious of this sort of thing than we were, say, in the '20s and the '30s, and that consciousness is going to help us screw up less. Which isn't to say we aren't screwing up some things now; I'm just saying that we're getting better at this sort of thing, in the two steps forward, one step back kind of way that humans as a whole seem to get better at things.