this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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I approve of the overall message but indoor farming is kind of insane in the present day. It uses incredible amounts of energy and our scarce building materials to do something we can do much more easily outside.
Long term it might be important but I don’t think it makes sense until we solve the current energy crisis.
Initial upfront costs are heavy but you would be saving all of the transport and logistics costs for the lifetime of the facility. Aeroponics are also a lot less resource intense than growing in the dirt.
Not in energy requirements when the sun is free and electricity and lightbulbs are not.
Transporting food halfway across the world ain't free either.
Absolutely. Doesn't change my point. Just brings up a different one.
It does change your point because you need to look at the total energy cost, not just a single part.
Transport costs are enormous. The land you’re talking about using could be used to generate even more power with renewables.
We can not replace ground cover of plants with nothing but solar panels. The moisture difference alone would cause huge ecological issues nothing to say on the reduced plant matter.
Plus plants use sunlight to grow everything. That energy cost is way more massive than you think. It takes a fusion reactor in space to power it.
Trying to get the same effect from solar powering Leads will be far less efficient and take an area larger than the traditional farm to generate the power for a vertical farm and be less effective. Plus you would also need to run vertical water pumps which are difficult with the weight of water, air flow, and still need fertilizer and nutrients which would mostly be chemical synthetics for making sure it's in the right concentrations.
Transportation costs are absolutely huge and more local transportation would be better but don't mistake it for being much more efficient because of a single point that can be reduced.
Farming is a huge endeavor that works mostly cause it is free energy and resources that as we need to provide more becomes already worse. Trying to control that entire chain is extremely difficult and costly and should only be done as necessary.
It's far easier to work on flat land that sprawls than vertical and the density would not even be in the favor of the vertical grow tower.
I am looking at total costs. It's just not nearly a catch all solution because it's far more intensive than people generally at a glance expect. And I'm for adopting it in specific situations and add more vertical grow to farm operations but it does not fix food to grow everything indoors.
Especially for some crops, like leafy greens. Having a semi-sterile environment can also mean pesticide-free crops. (Or at least, that's my understanding).
Way less water use and transport costs for a superior (fresher, pesticide-free) product.
It only makes sense for some crops, though. Ain't nobody growing watermelons or carrots in urban vertical farms.
Has anyone broken down the difference in energy between artificially creating growing conditions in the middle of cities compared to just transporting the food from where it grows easily? Trains and ships which transport most food are incredibly energy efficient per ton transported
Trains can transport one ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of fuel and ships can transport one ton of goods 600 miles on one gallon of fuel. If a urban farm can produce one ton of food it needs to consume less than a few gallons of fuel's worth of energy in lighting and other city-specific infrastructure in order to come out ahead of growing food where it grows best
I think it's outweighed by the possibilities of hydroponic farming to reduce overall land (and therefore fossil fuel) use for agriculture.
Do hydroponic plants have fewer nutrients compared to soil grown plants?
No worries for pesticides or water use, as well.
Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn't make any sense from a sustainability perspective.
But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city's thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.
By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.
https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409
https://www.dlsc.ca/
https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it's another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)
Oh I fully agree that greenhouses have a role to play in food production. But that’s not typically what’s meant by indoor farming. That’s a separate but related concept.
That said, you may be slightly overstating the benefits here. Greenhouses can actually be very vulnerable to pests and diseases due to the high humidity, year-round warmth, and lack of natural predators. In theory they’re isolated but in practice it’s very likely some organism you don’t want will sneak in somehow. Pollination can also be a challenge for crops that need that.
I think these challenges can be overcome but there’s a lot of work to be done on them still.