Can We Build Indoor 'Vertical Farms' Near The World's Major Cities? (vox.com) 255
Vox reports on the hot new "vertical farming" startup Plenty:
The company's goal is to build an indoor farm outside of every city in the world of more than 1 million residents -- around 500 in all. It claims it can build a farm in 30 days and pay investors back in three to five years (versus 20 to 40 for traditional farms). With scale, it says, it can get costs down to competitive with traditional produce (for a presumably more desirable product that could command a price premium)... It has enormous expansion plans and a bank account full of fresh investor funding, but most excitingly, it is building a 100,000 square foot vertical-farming warehouse in Kent, Washington, just outside of Seattle... It recently got a huge round of funding ($200 million in July, the largest ag-tech investment in history), including some through Jeff Bezos's investment firm, so it has the capital to scale...; heck, it even lured away the director of battery technology at Tesla, Kurt Kelty, to be executive of operations and development...
The plants receive no sunlight, just light from hanging LED lamps. There are thousands of infrared cameras and sensors covering everything, taking fine measurements of temperature, moisture, and plant growth; the data is used by agronomists and artificial intelligence nerds to fine-tune the system... There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn't have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs... Relative to conventional agriculture, Plenty says that it can get as much as 350 times the produce out of a given acre of land, using 1 percent as much water.
Though it may use less water and power, to be competitive with traditional farms companies like Plenty will also have to be "even better at reducing the need for human planters and harvesters," the article warns.
"In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible."
The plants receive no sunlight, just light from hanging LED lamps. There are thousands of infrared cameras and sensors covering everything, taking fine measurements of temperature, moisture, and plant growth; the data is used by agronomists and artificial intelligence nerds to fine-tune the system... There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn't have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs... Relative to conventional agriculture, Plenty says that it can get as much as 350 times the produce out of a given acre of land, using 1 percent as much water.
Though it may use less water and power, to be competitive with traditional farms companies like Plenty will also have to be "even better at reducing the need for human planters and harvesters," the article warns.
"In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible."
Epcot (Score:2)
Epcot in the 80s (Score:2)
Just saw some cool vertical plant growth at Epcot center that looked pretty cool, not sure how well it would work at scale but certainly worth investigating.
They've had some version of those at Epcot for 35 years. I visited Epcot in the 80s and saw demos of hydroponics and automated gardening. Never amounted to much outside of some cool science demos because it cost WAY more than traditional farming.
That said, the state of the art has progressed a LOT since then so maybe they can finally figure out how to make it economically competitive.
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One part in particular made me laugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, MANY parts of this made me chuckle... but one line made it pretty obvious the people behind this do not have a lot of actual experience with growing things...
”There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn't have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs...”
Yeah, good luck with the assumption there aren’t lots of pests which will find their way into your nice high-tech greenhouse and happily establish residence. There are ways to control them - there are even organic ways to control them - but it involves a fair bit of money and/or work.
Re: One part in particular made me laugh (Score:2)
The huge greenhouses in Canada have very few pests in comparison to traditional farms. Their pesticide and water usage is very little too.
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They have fewer pests than outdoor agriculture. They don’t have so few to the point they don’t need detailed plans for monitoring and dealing with problems when found.
The entirety of these guys’ thoughts regarding pests seems to be “we’ll buy a bag of ladybugs, it doesn’t even need to be part of the budget”.
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I would guess any indoor vertical farm would be segmented in a way that reduced pest spread and would also allow a given "room" or whatever to be sterilized if pests or something became a problem. Seal it off and fumigate if necessary.
You'd probably do it on a semi-regular basis anyway as a preventative, at least steam cleaning or something.
A solution in desperate search for a problem (Score:5, Informative)
The one question I'd have is 'why'. What's the benefit? So you can grow stuff closer to large concentrations of consumers? What for? So you save in transport? Ok. Valid point. Do you conserve more energy by not transporting it than you expend by artificial lighting, watering and whatever else you get for "free" from nature, and building of those "farms"? I dare say no.
Re: A solution in desperate search for a problem (Score:2)
A plant only converts about 2% of sunlight that hits it. Solar can do 15%. That means one solar panel can "feed" 7 layers of plants using only the spectrum they absorb.
A lot of water is lost through evaporation; this can be recollected in a semi-closed environment. You also won't have fertilizer loss from run off.
You won't have as many natural disasters that nature gives you for free either.
So I would think those factors would play toward the controlled environment. The only real problems I see is the po
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So you have plants that converts about 100% of the artificial light that hits it?
Advantages vs disadvantages (Score:4, Insightful)
The one question I'd have is 'why'. What's the benefit?
Potentially several:
1) Crop losses due to weather no longer a concern.
2) Reduced exposure to pests and pathogens
3) Less transport costs to get product to market (esp for big cities)
4) Increase crop yields due to optimized conditions
5) Less horizontal footprint required so cost of land cheaper
6) Complete control over conditions (light, water, nutrients, soil (if any) etc.
7) Less need for chemicals and fertilizers
8) Less pollution from runoff of chemicals and fertilizers as they can be controlled on site
9) Can be located anywhere
Disadvantages:
1) Buildings are expensive
2) All water, light, and nutrients have to be artificially provided which costs $
3) The equipment isn't being produced at sufficient scale to get full economies of scale. (again $)
4) Competing traditional farms aren't required to control their pollution and runoff (again $)
5) Competing traditional farms have less up front capital costs because they're already in operation
So basically the only disadvantage to farming indoors is cost. Unfortunately that's by far the most important consideration. They're basically gambling that the increased yields and reduced transport costs will offset the expensive of the building and controlling the conditions. Unclear if it will be possible to make it competitive but it's arguably a worthwhile gamble.
Re: Advantages vs disadvantages (Score:4, Interesting)
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According to the following study, fruit, vegetables and fish(!) can be produced at EUR 3.50 to 4.00 per kg in vertical farms, which is surprisingly cheap:
http://large.stanford.edu/cour... [stanford.edu]
I'm pretty sure that the big staple crops (wheat, rIce, etc.) aren't going to be farmed in vertical farms, but I can see the Wholefoods kind of stuff being farmed there.
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Unclear if it will be possible to make it competitive but it's arguably a worthwhile gamble.
I don't see why it needs to be a gamble. You can find out how much everything costs and do some basic math. If your best case cost of an indoor farm is 10x more than a traditional farm, then you might have some problems.
It always impresses me how these people can soak up so much investor funding.
Lies, damn lies and business plans (Score:2)
I don't see why it needs to be a gamble.
Really? You think nothing could go wrong? Nothing unexpected could crop up or costs couldn't be different than you expect?
You can find out how much everything costs and do some basic math.
You cannot find out in advance how much everything will cost. I've never seen a business plan where that actually happened and I've seen a LOT of business plans. The only thing you can be certain of is that a lot of your assumptions about costs and revenues will be wrong. Probably by a lot. You just hope you are wrong in the direction that works out well for you. Here is a short
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You cannot find out in advance how much everything will cost... Here is a short and incomplete list of things you won't know in advance:
You can make a reasonable estimate for most of them. And if you did, you'd know it's not going to work unless your end product is cocaine.
1) Cost of real estate
Have you ever heard of Zillow? City land prices are 10x rural prices so right off the bat your crops are going to be 10x more expensive.
2) Cost of capital equipment
What equipment can't you get a price for? Pipes? Nozzles? LEDs? Go to Home Depot and whatever price there is going to be your worst case.
3) Cost of labor
Go to a restaurant near your future farm, ask the cooks how much they make. You'll be paying a simila
It's all about economics (Score:3)
So for these vertical farms to work the cost of their product has to be roughly equal to or less than the cost of farming in an open field + transport + crop loss. Bear in mind that open field farming has minimal electricity costs and at least some of the irrigation comes from rain. It's basically the cost of transmuting diesel fuel into food crops. It takes a lot of space but the upside is that cost per unit area tends to be rather low.
Indoors all the light, water, and nutrients, and crop handling have to be artificially provided, all of which costs more money than an open field under normal circumstances. Buildings + HVAC + lighting + irrigation = expensive. BUT indoors you can control the environment completely and optimize so presumably there is the opportunity for a gain in crop yields as well as reduced losses of crops due to pests, weather, etc. Plus you can farm indoors all year with minimal worry about location AND you can be closer to your destination market. You also can grow crops on multiple vertical levels so the amount of land needed is less which somewhat offsets the cost of the building.
It's not clear to me whether indoor farming can be done economically but it seems worth trying. I tend to believe there will be at least some use cases where it makes sense. It will have to get some significant scale to be economically competitive so someone will have to take a big financial risk to try to make it work. But if they succeed the benefits could be huge.
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So what? (Score:2)
What about just using sunlight? Too crazy?
What about it? A) it isn't available in a lot of places reliably or for much of the year. B) The availability of the sun can't be optimized further than it already has been. C) Sunlight is not even close to the only variable in play. Weather, pests, pollution, fertilizer, seasons, climate, etc all matter and indoor farming can take a LOT of those variables out of play.
You only get so much solar flux per unit of area anyway.
Again, so what? There is more than enough available. We have VAST areas devoted to growing crops not to mention plenty of non-arable la
Supermarket kiosks (Score:2)
Single point of failure (Score:2)
While vertical crops could potentially produce vast amounts of food with lower environmental impact given sufficiently low energy costs, it seems a bit dangerous to have such a condensed supply chain.
If something were to happen to the mega tower feeding Manhattan resulting in a lost crop, what would people do?
Losing a crops happens all the time, but because there are so many farms, it doesn't really have any impact on the food supply. If you shut down all the farms and have a few towers, losing a tower to
Not so different than today (Score:3)
If something were to happen to the mega tower feeding Manhattan resulting in a lost crop, what would people do?
A) It wouldn't be a single tower. It would necessarily be a bunch of buildings, probably more resembling warehouses than towers.
B) It wouldn't be any different than a farm failing now due to a weather event or crop failure. You simply pay more and get the product from elsewhere just like today.
C) The operational costs of large towers would likely be prohibitive.
Seattle a strange choice, and no mention of a DC? (Score:2)
I don't understand (Score:4, Funny)
Re: I don't understand (Score:2)
Try The Opposite (Score:2)
"In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible."
After the city jobs are automated, people will move back to the country on subsistence farms since it'll be the only thing left for them to do -- completely withdrawing from the greater economy and building their own from nothing. Knowledge and technology will still help with this, like mentioned in TFA. However, it won't be able to compete with larger megacorp factory-farms that employ the same tech.
Hmmm, that sounds wrong (Score:2)
> 100,000 square foot
That's just over 2 acres.
It takes 3 to 5 acres to feed a family.
So they are going to do what, make it 1 million stores high?
This is a joke, right?
Think it through (Score:3)
That's just over 2 acres.
You're still thinking in 2 dimensions.
It takes 3 to 5 acres to feed a family.
It's not really that simple. Your assuming traditional agriculture with traditional crop yields, traditional crop spacing, etc. Those all change when you farm indoors and control all the variables. You can get more crops out of the same space indoors AND you can do it more times per year. And your estimates are too high. It's more like 1.5-2 acres [boston.com] to feed a family of 4. There would be no point to indoor farming if they couldn't get better yield out of the same foo
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Someone else here posted a similar comment:
"With a 100% corn diet, you'd need ~1,000 WTCs worth of floor space to grown enough calories for Manhattan."
This is not traditional farming, so those kinds of calculations need to be amended.
Also -
Think of nutrition like a machine. Corn (or any grain or vegetable oil) is carbon and is the fuel to run the body machine. Mineral, vitamins, and other chemicals are the maintenance tools that keep the machine in order and running. Growing carbon energy crops is cheap
The guiding philosophy for 21C business (Score:2)
In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible.
Sadly, people are the worst possible investment,
Any business that can remove them from its model will have an overwhelming advantage over "traditional" enterprises. But then, what do you do with all the people? The ones you rely on to buy your products. Consumerism without consumers is a meaningless failure.
Couple these farms to data centers. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, not a joke, but an idea in integrated efficiency. Build data farms next to or underneath these vertical food farms. The data centers already have a robust energy infrastructure, and the farms have biomass infrastructure, and together they have synergies.
Assume that the farm is built with a conventional greenhouse outer structure to capture daytime light, and that it uses the LED's as described in the article for nighttime or interior use.
Then, together, they could operate this way:
1 - In colder weather, heat runoff from the data center will keep the greenhouse heated. This means no heating costs for the farm, and it can operate year round with one major expense eliminated.
2 - In warmer weather where the farm could operate as ordinary greenhouses do, the excess heat from the data center could be used to accelerate non-human food or non-food farming, such as algae or bacteria for food, drug production, and biomass fuel.
3 - Depending on how much sunlight is allocated to the food farming, any biomass thus produced could in turn be used as fuel for running the data center.
4 - If the incoming sunlight could be filtered, everything between 500-700 nm could be diverted to silicon solar cells which have a peak absorption in that range, which is also the range that chlorophyll has no absorption. All captured light could be used where it is most efficient, allowing each "bucket of sunlight" to do double duty with relatively high efficiency, the green-yellow light supplying the data farm, the higher and lower energies supplying the food farm.
Efficiencies and economies would vary with time of year, latitude of each synergistic facility, and so on. So, operations and costs might not be so perfectly automated, but it could work. Right now, we are generating massive amounts of spent heat every time Facebook steals your data, you buy dog food on Amazon, or somebody mines bitcoin. That excess heat should be seen as an already captured natural resource that can be reused.
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I do believe they were talking about pure LED farms. No windows. No light conduits. Easier to just cover the building with solar cells and produce just the frequencies of light you need specialized for each plant.
EditorDavid (Score:2)
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Just because you use ellipses to make a tweet sound like William Shatner doesn't mean that's the purpose of the ellipses in a quote.
It's called editing a quote for the purpose of summarizing. Near as I can tell, he did it exactly right. He used direct quotes from the article, snipping out sections that weren't necessary, to create a concise summary from the article's own words. He even cited the source paragraphs by way of a url link to the original article. Maybe he could have edited the quote different
Maybe for Marijuana ? (Score:2)
Getting to be a huge cash crop now.
This would keep the crops protected.
One thing a life in tech has taught me: (Score:2)
The word "can" in "can we X?" is ambiguous.
"Can" might mean, (1) "Is it physically or logically possible?"
Or "can" might mean, (2) "Is it feasible to do?"
Or "can" might mean, (3) "Will we make money trying to do this?"
The thing is as you go down the list it gets harder and harder to say "yes", both in overcoming the possible objections and in the work you have to do to get to certainty. I am quite certain that a farm along these line could be built. I wouldn't be surprised if, given sufficient money, it
Expensive Real Estate (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I farm. For real. Not iFarm gaming but rather I farm as in I do the real thing growing plants and animals which I deliver to customers year round.
I bought land in the cheapest area that was reasonably close to my markets.
I get free energy from the sun which shines down on us.
I get free fertilizer from the air.
I get free water from the sky and don't even have to use pumps.
I get free growth medium.
Now let's examine the proposed vertical city farms where they're going to use:
Expensive real estate p
It's all about water (Score:2)
People really have no idea about how big a business farming really is and how dependent it is on clean cheap water and sunshine. These people are talking about hydroponics. With the LED's they can grow any plant they want, any time of the year. As far as number of workers; they can ship whole plants to factories to be processed if really needed. But I have seen the trend in grocery stores where with compact plants they sell them with the root ball still intact.
Further since they are so compact and use less
Investment scam? (Score:2)
Straight away this proposal looks like it was designed to attract Silicon Valley VCs. What they're proposing to do is create automated farms with very little labour, more than likely at less than a 10:1 ratio. That's the sweet spot for startups: Disrupt an existing business model by reducing the number of workers needed by at least 90% then you can disrupt the market by having lower labour costs, i.e. put tens of thousands of people out of work.
Currently, no machine can pick crops like agricultural workers
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why build them outside cities if they are indoor and vertical?
Re:You can build them (Score:4, Informative)
I believe his question is trying to get across the idea "what not build them inside cities". The answer would be cost per square foot of land is still higher in cities.
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Also they don't decrease transportation, they increase it. Fertilizer and supplies have to be trucked in, and waste transported out. But most importantly, any space dedicated to "urban farms" means less space for other things, such as housing. Which is going to reduce transport more: Avoiding a truck of produce once every 3 months, or avoiding dozens of people commuting to and from the suburbs every weekday?
Families living in urban apartments have only half the environmental footprint of families living
Flawed thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
Also they don't decrease transportation, they increase it. Fertilizer and supplies have to be trucked in, and waste transported out.
That's no different than traditional farms. Traditional farms are basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and they require a lot of stuff to be transported a loooong way. Plus once you get a number of indoor farms located close together you can build a compact supply chain. You can process the fertilizer literally next door. Same with the waste. With traditional farming that is impossible because it is necessarily and irreducibly geographically dispersed.
. But most importantly, any space dedicated to "urban farms" means less space for other things, such as housing.
All it means is that we reorganize a bit. Dedicating some buildings to farming isn't going to cause some massive displacement.
Families living in urban apartments have only half the environmental footprint of families living in single family homes in the suburbs.
Even if true it's irrelevant. I'm not going to pick where I live for the environmental footprint and neither are you.
Pushing more people out of the urban cores to make room for farms is not helpful.
Who said they had to be pushed out of the core? All you need is for the farms to be close. You don't have to transform midtown Manhattan into farmland. Put the warehouses with the farms a few miles from city center in the suburbs.
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I believe his question is trying to get across the idea "what not build them inside cities". The answer would be cost per square foot of land is still higher in cities.
You build them on rooftops. The gigantic, non-load bearing roofs found on malls and the like notwithstanding, most roofs can bear crops if you grow them aeroponically. Then only the reservoirs weigh very much.
Re: You can build them (Score:3)
Re: You can build them (Score:2)
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Kent, WA, is far from Park Ave. no worries there, we are full of Aerospace manufacturing and supporting industries. I'd be more worried about the powder-coating shop across the street.
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> Presumably to cut down on transportation costs and to be able to harvest when the crop is closer to being ripe rather than harvesting weeks ahead and letting fruits and vegetables ripen during transpot.
There are already farms adjacent to cities. Farms have been adjacent to cities for pretty much the entire history of human civilization.
These days there are CSA farms just outside of cities and even new housing developments built around CSA farms.
Most food travels a long way (Score:3)
There are already farms adjacent to cities. Farms have been adjacent to cities for pretty much the entire history of human civilization.
There are but lets be honest, the VAST majority of the food is produced a long way away from the cities. Your average meal has traveled 1500 miles [cuesa.org] to get to your plate. The ONLY way you are going to reduce this substantially is to do some sort of indoor farming. Lots of crops cannot just grow anywhere and there is the problem of seasons too. Hard to grow leafy greens when it is snowing.
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> There are already farms adjacent to cities.
Yes, but those farms are generally limited to growing seasons and crop variety. Most of the year, fresh fruits and vegetables for cities like Chicago are shipped from somewhere south, like AZ, CA, or other countries.
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No. And no.
Caveat: if the population were ten times as high, it would be both useful and make sense.
Alternately, if we had a holyhelluvalot of nuclear power, it MIGHT make sense, since it would allow us to turn most of the planet back to wilderness. Solar won't do it, because it requires large amounts of land covered by panels, which implies wires, switching stations, repair roads, etc...
All crops are grown with solar power (Score:2)
Solar won't do it, because it requires large amounts of land covered by panels, which implies wires, switching stations, repair roads, etc...
"Solar won't do it"? You do realize nearly ALL crops we currently consume are grown exclusively with solar power, right? Claiming that we can't grow our crops using solar power (directly or indirectly) is just an idiotic claim.
You could power the entire globe by covering an area roughly the size of Spain [landartgenerator.org]. Close to half of that could be supplied by "simply" (it's not simple) converting existing rooftops to solar. That is more than enough to power all agriculture around the globe. Even if we sacrificed n
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> "Solar won't do it"? You do realize nearly ALL crops we currently consume are grown exclusively with solar power, right? Claiming that we can't grow our crops using solar power (directly or indirectly) is just an idiotic claim.
Do you remember the Jarvik heart? That was nearly 40 years ago and people thought that kind of bionics would be commonplace by now. Just because something can be done by nature doesn't mean that we are any where near as good at replicating it with technology.
No excuse to give up (Score:2)
Do you remember the Jarvik heart? That was nearly 40 years ago and people thought that kind of bionics would be commonplace by now.
Yes I remember the Jarkik heart when it was in all the headlines. I'm old enough and I've actually seen a Jarvik 7 in person. People talked about it but there was not widespread belief that bionics would be routine. Like any technology advancement there was a lot of prognosticating and a media circus but we also saw what happened to Barney Clark [wired.com] (spoilers: he suffered a lot) so there wasn't a lot of optimism by the public.
Just because something can be done by nature doesn't mean that we are any where near as good at replicating it with technology.
True in some cases. In other cases we are actually quite good or even better. Jus
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"Solar won't do it"? You do realize nearly ALL crops we currently consume are grown exclusively with solar power, right?
That would be crops grown the conventional way, in fields. Covering those fields with solar panels to power a high-rise building full of the same crops under lights is an expensive way of going exactly nowhere.
The attraction of vertical farming is being able to grow crops in cities, pesticide free and saving transportation cost. It's a concentrated use that works best with the concentrated sources of power that you need to have cities in the first place.
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That would be crops grown the conventional way, in fields. Covering those fields with solar panels to power a high-rise building full of the same crops under lights is an expensive way of going exactly nowhere.
They actually do experiments like that in Japan. And many foods don't need/like full sun anyway, so a bit of shade is good for them, like Kiwi. Just google, there are plenty.
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Solar won't do it ...
Solar converts about 20% of incident sunlight to electric power. Cropland is less than 1% efficient.
If solar panels on cheap desert land collect the energy, and it is used to power LEDs at very specific wavelengths optimized for photosynthesis, in pest-free and weed-free indoor facilities with perfect nutrients, and enriched CO2, all using plants genetically modified for these conditions, ... it would likely still be uneconomical, but not obviously so.
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"t would likely still be uneconomical, but not obviously so."
But it can't be worse than traditional farming that gets tons of subsidies, protection for everything under the sun and still farmers kill themselves by the dozen because they can't make it.
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But it can't be worse than traditional farming that gets tons of subsidies
The subsidies go to staple crops like corn, sugar, and dairy. These are NOT what urban farms grow.
still farmers kill themselves by the dozen because they can't make it.
Farmers are doing well economically. The average farm family makes almost twice the median income, although not all that income comes from farming. Many farmers, or family members, have other jobs. Suicide is correlated with age, and many farmers are old. It is also correlated with gun ownership, and farmers are more likely to own guns.
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And how much is that in "average income"?
Median income has no meaning, especially if you don't tell us what the median is.
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And how much is that in "average income"?
Do you know how to use Google? No? The median income for full time farmers in 2018 is projected to be $119k. That is net income per household.
Median income has no meaning
Did you take math since 4th grade? Do you seriously not know what "median" means?
especially if you don't tell us what the median is.
Median income for American households is ~ $59k [wikipedia.org]. That is about half what the median full time farming household makes.
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Caveat: if the population were ten times as high, it would be both useful and make sense.
Alternately, if we had a holyhelluvalot of nuclear power, it MIGHT make sense
So once again, China will be the first to try these.
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Deaths per terawatt hour produced?
How in the holy name of fuck do you figure this?
Nuclear POWER has possibly the lowest death rates in the entirety of the power industry.
And NO, you cannot simply chalk up random cancer deaths to nuclear power.
And NO, you can't simply chalk up the use of atomic bombs to nuclear power.
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You're an idiot.
A solar facility would still have to have a grid tie.
Especially if you're talking about powering the entire planet.
Then the main problems become off-peak production, line and conversion losses.
You can't simply hook an 8 gauge wire up to a powerplant in Arizona and run it to central China.
For solar facility to provide peak power for the entire globe at a specific time you have to build it in a semi-specific general location and build it of sufficient size (basically 2-3x (more actually if yo
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Chinese energy experts are estimating that by 2050 the percentage of China's energy requirements that are satisfied by coal-fired plants will have declined to 30-50% of total energy consumption and that the remaining 50-70% will be provided by a combination of oil, natural gas, and renewable energy sources, including hydropower, nuclear power, biomass, solar energy, wind energy, and other renewable energy sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Basically they're expecting to replace 4 Gwh mainly with nucle
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Food deserts (Score:2)
Wow, I knew the USA are a bit backyardly, but you have no supermarkets?
Nice troll jackass. Read about food deserts [wikipedia.org] and educate yourself. Every country [wikipedia.org] has them. Including whatever backwater you hail from.
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Food deserts exist because of lack of demand, not lack of supply. Even when produce is available, most poor people don't buy it. My trailer park dwelling redneck relatives refer to salad as "hippie food".
... and before someone brings up the bogus argument that "good food is unaffordable", I will point out that plenty of healthy food is cheap: Oatmeal, carrots, turnips, squash. I buy soybeans in 50 lb sacks, and make my own soymilk, tofu, and tempeh. That is WAY cheaper than hamburger. At dinner, they
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It's like a French bodega that wants to sell you cabbage for $3 per pound.
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Poor is relative.
In Europe no one is poor.
If you are "poor" you get welfare.
Grocery stores are everywhere ... there is no lack of good, fresh and "cheap enough" food.
Minimum wages has nothing to do with the topic.
If you want to find a "food desert" then it might be remote towns in Switzerland (or Austria). But those get supplied my "market trucks", moving supermarkets going from village to village and selling stuff for the exact same price as they do in the supermarkets in the big cities.
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Food deserts are located in lower-class residential neighborhoods of poor cities (and I link to Richmond, a 20 minute drive from SF without traffic) [yelp.com]. You can go miles without a store aside from corner stores, which have little/no fresh produce. Residents may not have a car, may have kids, and often work difficult jobs that keep them from having free time to make regular long trips to grocery store across town. Maybe you've taken a lot of vacations to some wonderful cities, but areas with food deserts are
Re: You can build them (Score:2)
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But will it be useful and does it make sense?
Indoor farms would require artificial light and production costs would be higher than for ordinary farming.
There's a number of possible advantages:
- Land is expensive, by increasing the density we can reduce land usage (maybe keeping more land wild).
- Transportation is polluting, being closer to cities can save a lot of transportation costs
- Harvesting is also polluting, you might be able to do that more efficiently
- Eliminating/reducing pests cuts down on nasty pesticides.
- People are even more expensive
You'd have to do a ton of number crunching to see if it works, but if it does it could lead to a new green re [wikipedia.org]
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There's a number of possible advantages: - Land is expensive, by increasing the density we can reduce land usage (maybe keeping more land wild).
Land is only expensive in a city. A house in San Francisco with a 3000 sqft. lot (0.07 acre) is $1.2 million, but a 20-acre plot in the not-so-distant Central Valley is $2 million. Even if you could build the multi-story indoor farm for free, it's still 10x more costly for the same amount of arable land. Now I'm not sure how such a farm will be taxed in SF, but I imagine the property tax on it will be much higher as well.
- Transportation is polluting, being closer to cities can save a lot of transportation costs
Not really. This replaces the problem of shipping food into the city with the problem o
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This replaces the problem of shipping food into the city with the problem of shipping fertilizers, laborers and water into the city.
This is an incorrect analysis. Cities already have water and labor so that's not an issue as a general proposition. As for fertilizer and other supplies, if there is a sufficient number of indoor farms clustered together, the supply chain will develop nearby. You can literally park the fertilizer plant next door to the indoor farm in principle unless you are (foolishly) locating in the heart of downtown. Plus you can supply several farms with a lot less driving. Right now farms are irreducibly geograph
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Indoor farms would require artificial light
I can't find the link right now, but I've read about a company that claims they can end up producing net-positive energy by putting solar panels on the roof of their indoor farms and then inside only have light broadcasting at the spectrum peaks for absorption in photosynthesis. They can use the solar energy from the rest of the spectrum to power other equipment, and allegedly have some left over.
Re:You can build them (Score:4)
Actually, no you wouldn't need artificial lighting all the time. I don't remember what book I read it in but there was a plan to bring sunlight into building using a variation on fiber optics. Basically it would be a big ass light pipe coming from the ceiling. You would need artificial lighting at night.
An there is where indoor vertical farms start to make a shit load of sense. Think about it. A totally indoor system, you could control the light, the soil, water, and even the atmosphere of the plants. You can tailor each environment to one type of plant.
An more over food growing wouldn't be a seasonal affair. The outside environment would have no effect on growing. Well unless there was tornado or something.
Food would be far more healthy for you too. There wouldn't be a need for any kind of pest control since there are no pests. No need for any kind of genetic manipulation of any kind for pests or weather.
Wastes would be to a minimal too. Everything could be recycled, even the water. Water that wasn't used by the plants could be easily captured and reused. Farming would also take on a lower environmental foot print. Two or three fields or more, could take up the space of just one.
So hell yeah, It makes all kinds of sense.
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These would be low calorie foods such as peppers.
Nope. It could involve high calorie munchies after smoking the crop.
Re: You can build them (Score:5, Informative)
Most "urban farm" proposals that I have seen focus on growing "greens" such as arugula, endive, baby spinach, radicchio, broccoli sprouts, wheatgrass, etc. These are crops that sell at a very high premium for freshness. These crops grow very quickly, and are ready for harvest just a few weeks after planting. They also benefit biggly from growing in a pest-free environment, since insects can damage the appearance as well as triggering a bitter akaloid toxin response from the plant, and these crops sell at a premium if they are labeled as "pesticide free" and "locally grown".
Nobody is seriously considering growing feed corn or soybeans in cities.
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Re: You can build them (Score:4, Insightful)
Because we couldn't grow different things in different kinds of farms.
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That has nothing to do with what I am saying.
You can have farms inside cities that grow some things and farms like we have today to grow the rest.
Re: You can build them (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you eat about 15kg of tomatoes per day
Urban farms are unlikely to grow tomatoes either. Tomatoes need a lot of direct sunlight. They will not fruit well under LED light. They also benefit little from pest free environments, since tomato plants are already toxic to most insects. Unlike arugula and endive, the freshness of tomatoes is measured in days, not hours.
you are going to starve to death without corn, wheat or soybeans.
Urban farms are a supplement to traditional rural farms, not a replacement. They are inappropriate for calorie dense staples.
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Tomatoes last weeks.
Only the modern for transport optimized "tastes like nothing" might spoil faster.
We used to harvest them green and put them on a window shelf, they maturing there several weeks till being red and tasty.
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I just don't see the point of this. People can grow microgreens enough to feed their families in window sills...
People CAN do many things, but they don't want to. I grow most of my own fruit and vegetables, keep chickens in my backyard, have a beehive, and ferment my own yogurt. But I also realize that most people have no interest in doing any of those things.
I'd be more interested in yams or other calorie dense options like that.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Yams require a long growing season with lots and lots of direct sunlight. They grow long vines that require plenty of space. They can be transported easily and can be stored for months with no loss of taste or quality. Also they are cheap. I can't imagine a dumber crop to grow under lights in a city.
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> I'm sure you wouldn't mind citing your sources, right?
Have you ever tried to grow anything in your life? I suspect not.
A good, location appropriate crop can almost be treated like a weed. Water is free. Light is free. The real world examples of this kind of thing are restricted to expensive cash crops like pot and kale for good reason. They aren't economical for anything else.
Wake me when they are using this stuff to grow potatoes, onions, carrots, and cabbage.
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