Lots of indoor farms are shutting down as their businesses struggle. So why are more being built?
Lots of indoor farms are shutting down as their businesses struggle. So why are more being built?
If they existed to feed people, not to maximize profits, there'd be no issue. But like so much else that has emerged in the last 15 years, they came to be because money was free and the people with it were taking bets on "disrupting" technologies. Now that money has a cost again, investors are unwilling to wait on the tech to mature, or on the existing markets to crumble.
Finding a way to use less agricultural land is great, but I find the mere visual of these farms quite dystopian.
I think they look the opposite. They don't just reduce land usage, but also the amount of water, pesticides, fertilisers, carbon / transportation, and waste (longer shelf life due to less transportation time); plus they're less susceptible to the local climate variability, which will become increasingly necessary at we blow past 1.5c and agricultural yields deteriorate.
They'll be huge once they mature and are 100% powered by renewables.
It is dystopian. There are far more effective uses of the buildings and resources these techno-utopians are squandering.
also the nutrient profile of these plants is probably even worse than regular industrial farming
I think that highly depends on the soil and environmental conditions they are given. It’s kind of a blanket generalization to just assume they must be worse, as if farmers didn’t account for farming, no?
Doubtful. Industrial agriculture is applying the same nutrients, but to the dirt. A large portion doesn't make it to the roots, and instead gets swept up and runs off into the water system.
Versus hydroponics, where the nutrients are added directly to the water which is applied directly to the roots and cycles back through the system repeatedly.
If the soil grows plants can be grown without fertilizer, you might have a point. But we have historically low topsoil, and most of it is less good quality. To continue with traditional/industrial agriculture, we need to start implementing regenerative practices, and that would take decades of active management across the entire sector to make a big enough impact.
With climate change they'll be a necessity
Yes, heating, lighting and cooling a building should reduce GHG.
installing solar plants in arid regions should compensate for the energy needs of those vertical farms, no ? also climate controlled farms should save on water consumption since water evaporation is minimized. also a vertical farm with a studied location is probably beneficial from a business standpoint: the weather is more predictable inside a vertical farm instead the one of an open field. climate change and unpredicted weather is what made agriculture energy-hungry.
Not really. Cereal crops are very different from any other crop. The efficiency of it is the reason it basically was the start of farming and civilization. 5x compared to other crops would not surprise me at all.
I think you meant to reply to me here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/4074486
First, it's not 5x; it's five orders of magnitude, so that's 100,000x.
But more importantly, cereal crops are actually not that productive in terms of calorie per unit area of land use. Wheat, for example, produces some 6.4 million calories per acre, which is way less than potatoes (17.8).
Also, no plants require huge variations in their energy input per area than other plants, because they all roughly need what the sun provides. Some plants have different growing seasons, and some can tolerate lower light conditions, but we're talking about factors of like 1 or 2 here, not 100,000.
The reason grains support civilizations is that they scale as an agricultural practice, and they give you a very convenient resulting food. They're easy to farm because they're literally grass, plus their grains can be dried, stored, and transported easily, and they happen to make a reasonably nutritious staple for a diet. Their main labor input is the initial seeding, the harvest, and then the processing (threshing, milling, etc.), all of which scale much better than say picking tomatoes, blueberries, or apples by hand out in the field; this was true back in the day, and is even more true now with modern mechanized harvesting. We still pick tomatoes by hand, but our grains are almost grown autonomously at this point.
oh was it only using sunlight energy? I had assumed it was using totaly energy. Like to harvest and such. That is actually though a problem that it was not for comparison as well as with the indoor farming one of the big things is low shipping and less loss from it. Yeah I don't know why it did not go with your comment as I am using the replies in the comments. Think its just one of those federation hiccup type of things. To reply to the thread I would have to be scrolled all the way up or down
This is the best summary I could come up with:
CLEBURNE, Texas (AP) — Inside a bright greenhouse about an hour outside Dallas, workers in hairnets and gloves place plugs of lettuce and other greens into small plastic containers — hundreds of thousands of them — that stack up to the ceiling.
The company operates two greenhouses and has broken ground on two more at its Cleburne campus, where the indoor facilities are meant to shelter their portion of the food supply from climate change while using less water and land.
The industry churn doesn’t bother Jacob Portillo, a grower with Eden Green who directs a plant health team and monitors irrigation, nutrients and other factors related to crop needs.
He pointed to the organic farmstand-oriented Elmwood Stock Farm outside Lexington, Kentucky, which can grow tomatoes and greens the whole year using tools like high tunnels, also known as hoop houses — greenhouse-like arches that shelter crops while still being partially open to the outdoors.
Indoor farming companies counter this by emphasizing high hygiene; for example, Eden Green touts “laboratory conditions” on its website and says workers closely monitor their greenhouses to immediately catch any pests.
Evan Lucas, an associate professor of construction management at Northern Michigan University who teaches students about proper infrastructure design for indoor farms, said he’s not concerned about the shakeout underway.
The original article contains 1,099 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This isn’t a very good summary.