- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.
- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.
- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
>Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
Are you aware of how much water it takes to produce the output of the Midwest or Central Valley? We'd be talking about the largest desalination project in human history by orders of magnitude.
As of 2013, Israel had a desalination capacity of 500 million cubic meters per year.
> As of 2015, the US used ~450 billion cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation
I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be 450 million cubic meters.
Your source says this:
"For 2015, total irrigation withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d"
So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound so outrageous. Israel is a small country.
Ah you're right, I read the wrong line in the wolfram alpha output. That does make it seem less crazy. It would still be a crazy project but not "entire GDP of the US" crazy.
Coastline distance is irrelevant, you could use a single mile of coastline to extract this much water. The issue is infrastructure and energy costs. Traditional irrigation is about 3 orders of magnitude cheaper than desalination.
All those rivers dumping into the ocean demonstrate how rarely it’s needed. Long term pumping water from the eastern US to the Midwest is vastly cheaper than the kind of massive and effectively pointless desalination effort required.
If your nos are correct and if desalination was done at the scale of Israel in US, it would mean it would be able to provide 10% of the irrigation needs via desalination.
This is off course not a big deal in USA and desalination and economics of certain agri crops if reassigned can lead to better outcomes. However i am sure India can do with the level of desalination Israel has (scaled up to its population size) as can other middle Eastern countries. If not today, then may be a decade or 2 in the future. This can enable habitation in many areas in land and water scarce countries.
You know if we are already going through the effort of transporting & stacking dirt vertically for these things we might as well go all the way and integrate them into the pylons of offshore wind turbines, which'll guarantee them a viable support structure, an infinite amount of available seawater & more than enough power to desalinate it locally. Heck, the harvest logistics means it'll give fishing boats something to do off-season too.
That might be possible, I don't know enough about it to say for sure. I could see us needing somewhat less just due to evaporation differences, but I'd think plants need basically the same amount of water to do what they do regardless. How do we get down to 5-10%?
I don't know how, but a different post claimed that indoor farming needs 97% less water. I imagine it has something to do with using a closed loop. (And the remaining percents are obviously due to imperfections, and the actual water content lost due to the removal of the produce from the loop.)
Most of these sound reasonable, but I've never bought into the "grow vertically" idea. It seems to ignore physics.
Sunlight is delivered as electromagnetic power (watts) proportional to surface area. Plants naturally grow on the surface of the earth, and therefore receive a small proportion of that power which they use to convert CO2 into sugars and eventually plant mass which we eat. Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much. And that's ignoring the added complexity and logistics (read: overhead) of maintaining a system that stacks plants on top of each other, which would surely obliterate whatever 2-digit% efficiency bonus you can eke out of stacking. The universe doesn't work like Minecraft.
Chemical and water use reduction seem to be a pretty good outcome, as well as being able to ignore seasonality.
I would like to see some numbers on farm equipment (in?)efficiency before throwing that out as a fact. Color me skeptical but it doesn't seem obvious at all that rebuilding a 10000-acre greenhouse every 20 years will necessarily produce less greenhouse emissions than running a few tractors. Or even that harvesting food in a greenhouse takes less energy than doing it with a tractor.
Every once in a while you see some high school science fair project where a kid has the brilliant idea of making 3D solar cells... maybe little pyramids or ridges instead if a flat plane, to capture light from all angles.
The kid gets patted on the head. Those who know better, immediately recognize there is no great increase in power obtained as the 'shadows' caused by the raises structure invariably decrease the efficiency down to that of a plane.
Anyway, vertical farming reminds me of this. You would defintyl need artifical lights.
Akyway, it's amusing watching amateur would-be tomatoe growers get excited about a technology that has been around as long as Cheech and Chong.
Using these systems for decorative purposes, on the other hand, is a cool idea. It's a fast and cheap way to make an 'instant' hedge. I have a 'wall' of pole beans planted in this manner which thrive and create a solid mass of greenery within a month of planting.
It's been a few years since I've followed vertical farming, but I have recalled an argument being made that an artificial light source can be made efficiently by using a single-wavelength, super-efficient LED with a specific color that stimulates photosynthesis.
On the other hand, I've also read (old, long-lost) sources that state that the energy cost per loaf of bread is about $10 for indoor farming, vs $5 for outdoor farming.
These specialized lights won't save vertical farming today, but I will keep following the progress. If nothing else brings value to vertical farming, the fact remains that local food independence is valuable; growing food in a dense apartment or a dense city will pay dividends in the event of large-scale famine or civil unrest.
“Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much“
That assumes all light comes from straight up. That isn’t even true if the sun is straight overhead, and definitely not true close to the poles.
I don’t know whether it’s profitable, but I would think the economics of vertical farming on Iceland (sun lower in the sky, greenhouse heating cheap, imports expensive) are different from those in Equatorial Guinea.
No, it assumes that power is delivered based on surface area with respect to the sun. Vertical/3d farming can't work more than ~2 plants deep, where "depth" is measured as the number of plants between a given plant and the sun. Sure, build it vertically on the north pole, but it's still gonna be essentially "flat". You can't magically get power deep into a 3D farm when there 20 other plants on every side that would get the light first.
I have never heard anyone suggesting that vertical farms enabled 3d planting. It simply removes the linear relationship between square foot of land and number of plants.
> Stacking a bunch of plants on top of each other cannot change that the lower plants must receive less power, and therefore cannot grow as much.
I thought the common idea (and implementation) of indoor vertical farming used artificial lighting at each level. Possibly only using light in the wavelengths actually used by the plant, not "wasting" power at other wavelengths like the sun does.
Also, indoor and especially vertical farming can save precious land. Maybe the US has enough land for farming, other countries certainly do not. Rain forests burned to make space for soy or palm oil are proof of that.
Rain forests are being burned down because these areas are poor and farming is the simplest way to make money starting from scratch. Multi-million dollar vertical farms don't help.
Forget even about money, sometimes if you cannot participate in the 'official' economy and have no prospects, you need bare minimum capacity to cultivate land and feed yourself and your family. This is what happens in developing countries.
Calory-dense foods are more economic to ship long distances though. From a 'power plant to plate' energy conversion viewpoint, leafy greens that don't ship well are probably the best things to grow in urban farms, assuming people will eat them anyway.
But consider my second point. If there is no caloric crop sustainability crisis in our future, then there is definitely no leafy green sustainability crisis looming on the horizon. The problems that vertical farming of kale solves are... Not very impactful ones. If all the kale in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of us wouldn't even notice.
That land is quickly abandoned. Rain forests are burnt because once you drain the soil of nutrients (takes less than 3 years) you can just move on to a different plot. Conventional farming reuses soil by adding fertilizer to artificially replace the missing nutrients.
If you look at satellite images of Indonesia, you'll see that much of it is now just palm oil. Most of that area was burned at least a decade ago. It would be nice if they'd abandon it, presumably a new rain forest could grow over the next century or so. But they continue to grow monocultures.
- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.
- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.
- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.