Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent, and it's gonna be really hard when competing with the free rain, free sun, and insane automation available for field agriculture already. Even Plenty with SoftBank's extra 'nutrients' tops out at strawberries. See https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr... for some raw data on unit economics.

One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired, or https://farm.bot/ which encourages hardware hacking and food supply awareness.

I'm not trying to be snarky; I'd love to see something like this, but the comment you reply to is my conclusion as well. I used to be very excited about this stuff, but the only viable crops are leafy greens sold at a high price.

I own a business selling sensors for use in hydroponics. I started because I wanted to make an impact in food availability. I've abandoned that, and continue because hobbyists, and companies like this have a use.

The GP isn't saying this is happening, though. They're saying that selling rich people overpriced kale and strawberries can fund further research and innovation. Maybe the next step is corn. Maybe it's bankruptcy. But it has cash flow to invest in the research to see which one it is, in part from growing and selling the less impactful stuff now.

Something about vertical farms for staple foods just doesn't pass the smell test. One big aspect of farming is the conversion of solar energy to edible chemical energy. Assuming natural plants and some efficient way of using natural light, stacking farmland vertically just means less energy per acre. And barring some new kind of clean energy like fusion, using artificial light will just introduce conversion inefficiencies and expense, at best.

That’s the surprising result of "closed" greenhouses: standard solar panels convert to electricity that convert to LEDs at the right frequency that offer more yield. Plants only absorb very narrow bands of light. Then you have more gains because the plants don’t have to maintain temperature, fight pests, dig deep roots for water; day/night cycle can be optimised. It is leafy greens for now, but there’s no strong reason that other high-energy crops (like sugar cane, carrots, beetroot) wouldn’t work.

Source: Friends working at the Umeå university grow house.

I’d like to see the accounting for how much of the “100% renewable” energy is actual production and how much is an accounting practice that involves offsets somewhere. Maybe it is, plants don’t need lighting at night so you could use solar. But the efficiency of sun -> cell -> transmission -> LED -> plant is much less than sun -> plant, it’s not a winner there. Are they attached to the grid and push more electricity to it than they draw?

Balancing production costs vs the carbon chain of transport is good to look at. Our springtime apples come from Chile, New Zealand, and other far-flung places. How many joules of energy went into getting that kale to your Boston store from California vs from Worcester in January? If the energy to grow to harvest is less than the energy to transport, and people really really need that fresh-picked kale in January, it’s a niche win. I’m doubtful you can make much of a dent in New England’s produce needs using New England’s available renewable energy during wintertime. But gathering evidence is better than listening to my doubt.

Vertical orchards- I don’t see that happening. So my apples will still be imported from across the globe.

Sure, it's a secondary product, but could have large impacts.

That said, insects are way more efficient than mammals at converting plants into human-edible calories thanks in part to their lack of internal temperature control and growth rate.[0] If you had to choose an animal to use as a protein-constructor, crickets would be a great choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Insects

That just seems to me like a choice that very few humans are actually going to make.

No no, not you. All the poor people. They're the ones who will be fed "efficiently". You and I and most people on HN will retain our privilege to eat what we want.

My comment stands. You would be forced to eat crickets and I wouldn't (be forced to eat them). That's the whole idea with feeding people "efficiently". Piss-poor people who can't get a living wage are already fed the most unhealthy food because it's cheap and easy to mass-produce, whereas those who are well-off can eat whatever we want, whatever we think is healthy and nutritious, or just pleasant to eat. And all this talk of efficiency means is that more cheaply produced, low-quality food can keep being sold to those who need to watch their wallet more than they care to watch their waistline.

Yeah the more I think about it, it's probably just a cultural thing and not a "whole humanity" thing.

As it's been discussed here, in some cultures crickets are sold as a snack on streetcorners and people grow up eating them.

And I think the whole "piss-poor people" thing might just be eating unhealthy garbage because, just maybe, the cheap high-sugar high-carb stuff releases endorphins in most humans, and they are just trying to get a small reprieve in their desperate lives.

I haven't had the courage to try them myself yet.

It seems very HN to take the perspective of an aloof farmer-of-humans rather than that of an actual human.

I say novelty as they’re not generally available as food where I live.

Some people like eating things beyond just basic nutritional subsistence. It's why meat is so popular. We've also been eating it since time immemorial. The demand for meat isn't going away no matter how many cricket/insect ads you shove in people's faces. If anything, it just breeds resentment for sustainable food practices, because the rich and powerful will always still have access to meat products.

Making meat into a luxury product like the days of yore will not work. The monkey's out of the bottle on that one. We need to work with this fact, not around it.

That said I think lab grown meats look pretty promising.

They do, at least per animal welfare standards.

I think GPs point is that those aren’t the high-calorie, high value crops needed to make this a real revolution in food production.

Show me vertical vineyards, maize, grains, stone fruits, apples etc.

Except when you realize that the most highly valued added product (wine) relies on soil/region specific soil (terroir). No one buying table grapes, even at Whole Foods, is going to spend the kind of money to make something like that at scale. I've worked in a vineyard for a Summer in Croatia, it's how I got run my own Kitchen in Italy soon after as it crated a good 'marketing hook' for a chef, and I can go into why that skyscraper idea is impractical for anything fruit bearing but suffice it to say: it won't work unless you want a small, low yield plaything that can be outperformed from anything in most common grape growing regions even if hyper-local expenses are removed. Hell, even using them as a cover crop/ornament on a trellis in a backyard garden may yield better results.

Cash crops, as specified, are based on economies of scale for a reason and are actually very efficient when properly done and have 10,000+ years of refinement behind them--crop rotation, efficient irrigation, cover crops in the off season, livestock grazing for fertility and micro-organism replenishment. With the advent of more automation, and no till methods we are seeing increases in yield, despite global climate change. Water scarcity, irrigation and water table replenishment and growing organically is something I wished we placed a greater focus on and would do more good for us and our Ecosystem as a whole than anything else hindering cash crop modality if I'm honest.

I sincerely wish people were forced to have to farm as part of their formal education, and continued gardening as their is so much deadly ignorance in regards to where our food comes from and the maladies it creates as a result of being so far from it: obesity and heart disease kills more in the West than anything else.

With that said, I see this as very good data for Mars colonization and food production; but for terrestrial purposes its absurd for anything but Hype/Marketing an expensive and impractical bridge with fanciful ideas of 'closing the gap between food deserts' when urban farming is the real answer in the US (see: Detroit). This model only semi-worked when they were aligned to expensive fine dining restaurants, now that those have been systemically destroyed and may never come back, I don't see it having much if any potential as I've eaten greenhouse stuff that aren't herbs or salad from Holland and its awful!

We could honestly make more headway in solving hunger, food scarcity if they just allotted community gardens in vacant land not in use and mandated fruit bearing trees be used instead of ornamental ones in urban landscaping and reinstated gleaning as a form Community Supported Agriculture.

Bok, dobro dan:

Umag professionally, and then the countryside in Zagreb to help a friend and her village harvest later that year and begin the wine and olive oil pressing.

It took a whole village of maybe 25 rotating of various ages people to do both orchards and it was rather small, maybe 2 heactres each? But we were casual and stopped to eat and dink, chat and nap.

Whereas the one in Umag was back breaking slave labour as it was way larger ~20 hectares broken up into various fields depending on cultivar, as they mainly focused on white wine based grapes we sold by the bottle at the nearby campsite and at bio markets/stores, they had some other fruit for rakija. But it was me and an another guy who were the only apprentices in a staff of 4 plus the 3 owners who mainly focused on sales and very light field work in the mornings so me and the other guy each worked 13-16 hour days back then 6 days a week and a lot of that was just pruning leaves and unripened grapes and adjusting the vineyards to the trellis which is what made that farm most of its money. I'm glad I made the pivot to Italy when I did as I preferred to work in gardens and develop a menu and then run the kitchen for an Agrotourism in Maranello! Those 16-18 hour days were much more better spent in my opinion.

One day in Croatia the other guy in Umag was out taking care of the tomato fields and I was actually spraying the copper and Organic/Bio fungicide mixture with the blower machine in the red field and making my way to the white when I saw the plume of a bomb go off that contained sulfide in a neighbors much larger field nearby, which typically was used for low-end wines that give you headaches or were used for gemišt, and I had to run like hell to avoid getting sprayed on as that stuff hurts when you inhale it. I actually left the blower behind until the sky air cleared.

> As you probably know, a lot of what a winemaker does is adaption of the vineyard to seasonal conditions by adjusting variety and quantity of spraying with (usually) fungicides, reducing the leaves and reducing the grapes (in order to increase overall sugar and quality).

I know the farm-hands (like me back then) do that, the winemaker is usually the owner who seldom does much of the labour in my experience besides occasionally walk the fields and prepare the barrels and bottles in my experience during harvest. And he usually has an apprentice(s) do much of that as they're usually much older.

> This variation would be something that would be reduced using greenhouse/indoor growing.

How so? The vines are permanent once planted and are dormant in the Fall-late Spring in most wine making regions, so that is money you're losing because you cannot grow other crops, moreover from my limited experience on those farms the roots underneath need to have be really established before you're able to get any reasonable yield as the first years/decade is always going to be so-so vintages as the soil and microbiology underneath creates the taste you're looking for and is altered with time--different types of compost, more sand-soil ratios etc... These are all losses if greenhouse spaces is built for that end alone instead of fast-growing, low input things like salads and herbs in the winter and early planted nightshades in the early Spring to capture the higher premium on being first to Market.

Again, I don't know how the lack of restaurants is going to alter all of this, to be honest.

It made me who I am today, and I'm very thankful; but I still have friends in Croatia and I understand the plight well, such that I do want to move back to Dalamatia but only on the basis that I have secured remote work as I refuse to ever work locally again. Croatia is lovely place to live provided you don't have to work there, or at least depend on it as you major source of income, that's for sure.

> Considering the region we are talking about, the thing that pops in my mind and falls in the super-high return category is the truffle. (and they are trying!)

It's funny, I ran a kitchen in Lovran overlooking the Adriatic before I worked in those farms/agrotourisms and used to buy black truffles at a discount since there were so many and most restaurants in the area were closed for the season by November especially if I didn't need them to be fresh to garnish/finish a dish: and were used soups, stocks, bases etc...

The thing about truffles is that it really depends on how well you can make them travel to get into the hands of chefs in as short of time as possible, but again after COVID the culinary Industry may never be the same. And I don't care who you are and what kitchen you came from but I can't think of a single professional chef/cook who would buy black truffles, let alone white, on a weekly/monthly basis for cooking at home so the lack of demand would vastly reduce the price even if it could be actively cultivated instead of foraged in the Forest as it is now.

Personally speaking, I'm not that big of a fan as the black ones always tasted like very good garlic to me, I never got to use white truffles as I missed the season and only made rissoto from the rice they use to carry them in which was good but not worth the price, in my opinion.

And truffle oil is an abomination.

I'm ignorant about this. I want to learn more.

I've read that increasing CO2 %, increasing temperature, and increasing water availability will improve plant yields. Is this true?

I also understood that one of the positive feedbacks for the climate response is the increased amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, water vapour being a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. I'm confused about how we can have more water vapour in the atmosphere and yet less water availability, presumably because less rain - these things appear to be conflicting.

I understand that the change in climate will change the established weather patterns that we're used to now, and create drought in areas that are currently wet. I don't understand why we can't adapt to this and move our farms to where the water is.

In short: I keep hearing this, that global climate change will reduce our ability to grow plants, and I don't understand why this is true or how the science for it works. Can anyone shed some light on it, please?

Depends on the crop/cultivar and where and when it is being grown, but I distinctly recall 2019's Peach bumper crop in Colorado as I made a peach salad on my station that sold like crazy which was used as a sauteed fruit with our pork chop entree!, too and we still had more come in than we could use And this was sold alongside a melon and heirloom tomato salad that also sold well, but was always constantly running out sooner into service because of the immense surplus of peaches we had that year [0]. Looking deeper into that later in the Fall after we looked over the (record breaking) numbers I looked back at the reasons why which included the weather in the Western Slope: no snap frosts, very little hail and warmer/balmier albeit wetter weather in the Summer in Colorado.

This was true for almost all stone-fruit that year, too. Whereas the heirloom tomatoes were limited in the early Summer hit a snag because they kept bursting due to the extra rain or had to be grown in lower elevation counties in Boulder, Weld, Ft Collins and in the Southern Counties. This would get better, as one who has farmed/gardened would predict, in the later Summer to Fall despite the rain as more plants were planted and were maturing to uptake the water.

> I understand that the change in climate will change the established weather patterns that we're used to now, and create drought in areas that are currently wet. I don't understand why we can't adapt to this and move our farms to where the water is.

This is my biggest concern (one that I understand well) as our prediction models and the Ag supply chains and distribution models we've created and been reliant on and how fragile they are under simple variable changes as proven by COVID this year. We could, should and WILL HAVE TO adapt but the issue is that we have such a centralized food system that its so monolithic with massive labour shortages and is hard to correct that without a local system to meet the demand (which is the case for most city dwellers) is exactly how Society breaks down.

> I keep hearing this, that global climate change will reduce our ability to grow plants, and I don't understand why this is true or how the science for it works. Can anyone shed some light on it, please?

Its way more complex than that, and is really impossible to give a complete answer as countless books are written on specific topics that range from: water depletion due to lack of rain and drought, soil erosion, bee/pollinator collapse etc... I can help if you narrow down what specific aspect you're asking, but essentially what you're describing is the fear of ecological collapse as much of Man's intervention and actions have led to immense consequences we never took into account.

I also think that the Sun's activity is playing a bigger part in weather, specifically the role cloud formation has on rising temperature as a result of cosmic ray ejection, that we do not speak about enough.

https://coloradosun.com/2019/05/29/western-slope-peaches-bum...

> is really impossible to give a complete answer as countless books are written on specific topics

And it seems the story keeps getting worse.

My latest terror is the analysis showing how warming is drying plant life due to "vapor pressure deficit". While this article is about forest fires, I can't help but wonder what's happening to fruit trees, perennials, vines, etc.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/09/most-imp...

Enthusiastic agreement.

Maybe even get credits (and maybe even some cash) working in the school cafeteria.

My father had a veggie garden. Including heirloom seeds from the family's farming past. My siblings and I had a completely different relationship to food, compared to my school mates.

I'm glad you do, given your background, because while I'm a massive proponent of UBI it still doesn't solve a critical issue in the Human Condition: Purpose and the lack thereof.

I learned so much during my apprenticeship and I was honored to be taken in by some the most renown artisans in their fields that spanned: pecorino cheese makers, aceto and lambrusco brewers in Italy to a multi-genrational legacy Emnentaler cheese maker that allowed me apprentice for a day and even let me use the stick his great grandfather used in the Bernese Alps 100s of years ago to make a very rural and basic cheese.

This helped me not only further appreciate their artisan craftmanship, but it also gave greater insight that I would use in my career(s) later on in 3 separate Industries and allowed me to get opportunities to work under Michelin star chefs and get offers to work in Jame Beard award restaurants as a cook that simply cannot be gained in culinary school, which I completely bypassed to my complete benefit.

I think having community based works program alongside UBI would help solve local food insecurity and could be a critical part in solving so many more ecological issues, especially for disenfranchised and disillusioned younger millennials and Gen Z kids who we have to admit have really limited options in the traditional labour market with ever diminishing returns to be had rom their mandated 'formal education.' At least a program like that could pay for itself in the long with the work experience they gain as it could give them insight to prepare them to take on massive issues like carbon sequestration, soil erroison and water reclamation and basic survival skills for Mars colonization that will be CRITICAL in their lifetime and those to come and may be give them motivation to take their UBI with their neighbors/family and create a seed-round for a startup like Boyan Slat did to pull the plastic out of the Pacific Ocean.

I know that would help a lot of the kids who follow and are motivated by Greta Thunberg's activism and help give the younger crowds from Extinction Rebellion (all amazing movements) a productive outlet to let them utilize their anxiety to desirable ends. Because I know I felt that anxiety about our Environment since the 2008 financial crisis but didn't have any options due to student debt until I could afford to quit my Industry altogether and undertook a series of massive risks to pay it back that propelled me to flee to the other side of the World and put all of my skill-set to the test.

I now know in hindsight that I couldn't have done even a fraction of the amazing things I've done in Life if it weren't for those years of apprenticeship and how lucky I was that it even worked at all. My only wish is that the youth have a more structured path to that end as they will need it.

And to be honest after accumulating these skills I'd really like to be able pass this knowledge on to help instruct these kids to help them solve these very dire Environmental situations and if I can give them a craft in the process as I can no longer do it myself anymore I'd be glad to do so at no cost--but I wouldn't say no to reducing my tax liability.

One of the most rewarding things about going from an ignorant apprentice making a ton of mistakes along the way and learning a skill or craft well enough to then have apprentices of your own is this sort of legacy transfer of knowledge that I think is what parenthood must feel like when you see your child be able to undertake a project or task by themselves for the first time.

I've only had 3 but it was pretty cool experience that I think could scale with limited resources if the right incentives allowed to tap into the collective will and desire of the youth as I think it's Human Capital issue more than it is a lack of resources.

That was long, but I'm sure you're one of the few that would probably fully appreciate that sentiment and need given what you've written about your past.

Also, thanks for all your replies in this thread, about farming and otherwise. Some great posts!

Agree on all counts. I think about apprenticeship, coaching, mentoring all the time. Most of my own efforts to date have failed. Doing better would be nice.

Please continue posting on HN. I treat it as batting practice. Writing stuff out helps me refine my thinking. And the moderation (u/dang) keeps me civil.

A lot of it is definitely blatant Marketing, but having been in the culinary Industry and tasted countless wines from various regions their is definitely a reason why that phrase to describe a certain experience has persisted. Certain Pinot Noirs from various regions taste, smell and feel unique in your mouth and accentuate a dish differently than others.

And I'm not a wine snob by any means; I usually just drink whatever is Organic or preferably Biodynamic or leave it the the sommelier if I know them and is really just matching the right amount of tannins (or lack thereof) that matches the dish I'm eating or making, and I saw the leap that you're describing in California happen in my lifetime.

Back then as a kid I saw wine as that horrible tasting stuff from a box we were forced to drink at church/school in the US, in direct contrast with my Summers in Southern Europe where I had small glass at dinner which was remarkably smoother but something I personally didn't enjoy at all and told it was because American/Californian junk was inherently inferior. Only to turn the tables around in about a decade or so and created World class products from Sonoma and Napa that commanded a premium in Europe.

Which was also a phenomenon with olive oil by the way.

Personal anecdote: I can enjoy a $35 bottle of wine from Rioja just as much as a $200 bottle from Bordeaux depending on what I'm eating and I think food plays the bigger role in if I enjoy a wine or not than the wine itself. Also my Ag focuses just as much of not more on soil microbiology than the type of cultivar that is grown with remarkably different results, so the same should apply to grapes.

Some aspects are explainable, e.g. limestone-rich soil increases the acidity of grapes, which can impart notes of citrus on the wine. But what about notes of chocolate, or berries, or stone fruit? In some cases, this is totally because the winemaker actually conditions with those things, but in plenty of cases, this is actually imparted by the growing conditions.

For what it's worth, the impression I get is that Americans place a lot of stock in the varietal of grape, e.g. Pinot noir or Chardonnay, whereas the French place a lot more emphasis in the region, e.g. Bordeaux or Burgundy. Both impart different qualities (e.g. it's going to be a lot easier to find notes of pepper in a Tempranillo than in a Chardonnay).

Not going to get into terroir other than to say that to reduce it solely to the soil type is the wrong way to look at it. It’s more of a holistic view of the entire growing microclimate, including soil, topography, water table, general climate conditions, etc.

I’m a sommelier and own a wine shop, for what it’s worth.

We're agreed on that front. My comment about limestone was to present one scientific aspect of terroir as _I_ understand it (which is to say, as a casual wine drinker recalling something I'd heard from a winemaker some years back).

That's a fair point about a lot of varietals being very heavily coupled to places of origin, and that's especially true for the big names that we've been discussing. But a white wine from the Alsace region (for instance!) could be a Gewurztraminer, or a Riesling, or something else entirely. (That said, I wouldn't expect an Alsatian white to be an Italian varietal...)

(https://winefolly.com/deep-dive/alsace-wine-region/ suggests a pretty even split between 4 different main varietals, with a tail.)

Well said.

But on the other hand, vertical farming could possibly increase yields for traditional greenhouse owners, and cheap lettuce and tomatoes are definitely not a bad thing.

And still, this industrial style of grwing food is what enables our high living standard. if we now could just figure out how not have too much food in Europe and not enough in other places...

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/margaret-whitley/food-prices-c...

You can build head with a windmill, but moving water (gpm) requires horsepower.

Also: LEDs are very efficient vs other types of lighting.

Sure, but how much energy compared to also running grow lights?

Where I suspect this kind of growing technique would work is probably the spices aisle of the grocery store, and they have always been pretty high margin.

Right now there's a flood of capital available, so it's very hard to tell a priori which ideas have legs and which are just mirages that look good in a slide deck. This could be amazing. But it could be another Juicero or WeWork, where the unit economics just don't make any sense.

For comparison the best selling new car was Toyota Corolla for 80 000 zł.

But the real bestselling cars are for over a decade the same - 5-10 year old VW Passat Combi from western Europe for 10-50 000 zł.

For 200 000 zł you can have a single-room flat in a big city and rent it out for considerable passive income. 2 such flats and you can live out of that (not very luxuriously but still).

That's why Tesla is considered a luxury car here. Most people drive cars worth less than 10% of a new Model 3.

It's also important to note that a lot of car purchasers buy used cars, because the low end of the new market is too expensive for them.

And really the appropriate comparison versus food is the transport sector, not cars alone. Cars are, as I said, the rich end of the market. In many places, cars are less popular than motorcycles, scooters, and bikes. I don't see any reason to think Tesla has an advantage going downmarket there. Indeed, as a luxury brand, there are significant brand barriers to them going lower in the car market, let alone down to scooters.

Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California.

It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.

[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1052831

Potatoes, Carrots, Corn, Mushrooms... All grow fine in buckets. All grow fine hydroponically.

I'm not sure I see an obviously barrier preventing all of these from being vertically farmed.

Paper https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131

Appendix https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/200265511...

Actually, they do: subsidies distort the hell of out the price discovery mechanisms in Markets. At no point in time can a farmer sell a 1lb(~1/2Kg) of tomatoes at the hieght of season for for $1 or less, much less in the off-season. And yet they do because of the distortions in correctly pricing the inputs, transport and labour as a result of wanting to remain on the crop insurance and subsidy program.

This is seen the World over in various ways too, in the EU farmers are paid to let their fields go fallow and orchids entirely neglected for seasons; it's one of the biggest reason why Farming as a profession has an average age of 60+ World wide as any younger person not born into the Lifestyle or from a Legacy Farming family will quickly see how impractical it is to operate with this system in what amounts to near subsistence levels of poverty. As an outsider going into the Industry for culinary and ecological activist reasons it's incredibly daunting when you realize that in 100 years we created a system in which less than ~2% of the World's population feeds the ~98% and how fragile this system is and how much of a miracle it hasn't blown up in our faces long ago.

It's maintained by fanciful economic machinations and make-believe accounting created by Nation-states to essentially keep a slave labour class in place and avoid peasant revolts due to mass hunger to the detriment of everyone--and that often breaks down, see EU dairy farmer protests in 2012/13/20, and the widespread Indian suicides in the early 2000s and now the farmer revolts happening in New Dehli. Not to mention the amount of subsidies there are for multinationals to sell processed junk into the Market and sold to children school programs at an inflated prices that have resulted in lots of disease and have actually made the average population shorter: a possible inference and consequence of undernourishment due to consuming nutrient deficient food.

The Tesla model, while only slightly relevant due to State and Federal subsidies for EVs, is not painting as good as a picture as an analogy for the reasons you think if you have an understanding of either or both Industries: I happen to have worked in both.

But suffice it to say that up until recently (Federal subsidy of $7500 expired in 2019) in the US where most Tesla deliveries take place--specifically CA-- and where most of the fruit in the US is grown in (Central Valley) it is safe to say that EXACTLY both of those things happened to a certain degree.

I think it is different for others regions, were soil is less well suited and getting the necessary scale is difficult.

Actually it isn't, and you are only focusing on the Federal Tax credit whereas I purposely mentioned California's EV program in my statement (but didn't elaborate for brevity's sake) that deducts the sticker price for the end consumer in various ways [0] with State/Local Government based subsidies that make Tesla's product (and other EVs for that matter) more accessible to the end consumer.

In the end I think its one of the few examples of a good use of taxes, unlike the Ag based subsidy model; but to deny it isn't a direct benefit to Tesla is to deny reality as most EV and Hybrid deliveries take place in California by a significant margin and thus proves my actual claim that you see these practices in Ag as well.

https://electrek.co/2020/11/17/california-adds-1500-incentiv...

1. Aquaculture works 2. It's successful with only a handful of species 3. It can't replace marine caught wildlife 4. Flavor-wise it is frequently inferior.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't grow salmon, tipalia, shripm or oysters, we just shouldn't make a claim or claims that aren't reasonable (i.e. aquaculture can feed the world or aquaculture will revolutionize modern food production).

Vertical farming is great for greens, microgreens, strawberries, herbs and that's about it.

You respond with a qualitative argument that you can grow a business and/or industry and maje better technologies if you have profit.

The issue isn't that the technology isn't good enough, it's that there isn't as many nutrients (as in soil) in a city or apartment to grow highly nutritional food. You'd have to truck in bags of soil to do this, which isn't nearly as efficient as leaving the soil where it is and growing it there.

Meanwhile Tesla has a waiting list for virtually every one of their vehicles and is the only one selling them.

I'm rather bearish on Tesla for various reasons. I also believe current stock prices for Tesla and Amazon are mainly driven by general uncertainty and too much liquid cash with nowhere to go.

That being said, vertical farming doesn't realy solve any problems, food nd water are distribution and not availability problems. None of which are solved by vertical farming. Obviously that doesn't prevent people from raising a shit load of VC money. If anything, the wetern world is producing too much food, incl. meat, in hyper industrialized farms already.

For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.

1. Not all dirt is equal. Land being able to grow some kind of plant matter does not mean that the land is suitable for growing plants humans will eat.

2. The plants animals eat are easy to process mechanically at huge scale. The plants humans eat, not so much.

It's far from a solved problem. Meat is the historical solution.

I don't agree. Ground that can grow animal food pretty much always can grow a human food. I know of no exception (particularly for high production foods).

About the only exception I can think of is undeveloped grazing land in the mountains. However, that's such a small percentage of the food that goes into feeding livestock that it's hardly worth mentioning. Most of our meats don't come from animals living on mountain ranges, that's too expensive. It takes ~2 acres to pasture a single cow if you don't actively farm that pasture. On the flip side, that same 2 acres if farmed can easily feed about ~2 cows.

In other words, you cut your land requirements in half if you don't pasture your cows.

> The plants animals eat are easy to process mechanically at huge scale. The plants humans eat, not so much.

Humans do require a bit more processing of their foods than animals do, but not much and not enough to introduce any sort of scaling problem. Certainly not more costly than meat processing. Most meat processing requires manual interaction which is super expensive. On the flip side, plant based processing is pretty much completely automated. About the only part that isn't 100% automated is transport (and usually harvesting, though that's changing fast). As with everything, manual processes are the most expensive part of anything because humans cost a lot of money.

Meat is a solution to the energy density problem. Meats are high in protein and energy which makes for a good winter food for farmers (so long as you can keep it cold, it will last a long time).

It's also an ecological mess. Cows aren't native to North American mountain ranges and are tremendously destructive. Also, native predators get hunted to protect the non-native cattle which causes an even bigger environmental mess.

> On the flip side, that same 2 acres if farmed can easily feed about ~2 cows.

Yes? But it's a terrible practice. The cows end up piled atop each other in big barns waste deep in their own shit. Then they end up draining the barns into massive shit ponds which have to be filtered with large RO systems. The densely packed cattle are in such poor health they are over-medicated to prevent disease and that medication ends up in the food chain.

Pasture raised beef is just much better. I'd just as soon we limited how much total beef was raised and did it in pastures rather than corn-fed barn raised beef. Its more humane and while it's not been proven, the large amounts of antibiotics in barn raised beef is almost certain to have effects on humans who eat that beef.

But that said, small time farmers are getting priced out by factory farms. Unfortunately, the dollar is king when it comes to meat production.

The worst part is that there's no real way for a consumer to fix this problem. You can significantly reduce or eliminate your meat consumption and that won't affect factory farms. Remember, they are the cheap meat. So who gets the brunt of reduced consumption? Generally smaller operations as they end up priced out of the market.

The only 2 ways I know of to really hurt factory farmers is for either lab grown meat to be less expensive or for government regulations to outlaw the practice. If the quality of lab grown meat is high enough, however, you are going to see major issues with small time farmers being priced out of the cattle industry completely.

I just can't stand shit farming.

> The worst part is that there's no real way for a consumer to fix this problem.

About all you can do is buy local grass fed or go vegetarian. As you say, it's not a huge thing, but at least I'm not participating.

> Generally smaller operations as they end up priced out of the market.

I would love to see some legislative reform on the large scale use of antibiotics in meat raising. That wouldn't necessarily help smaller farmers, but it might push larger scale farms into somewhat less heinous practices.

Not necessarily with the productivity to justify the human effort, though, which is the important bit. You can let cattle graze low-yielding grassland with essentially no effort. You're not going to bother with the intense labour requirements of picking the scant vegetable crop you'd get off the same land. Not when you can easily ship vegetables from highly productive ground.

3. We massively overproduce grains in the average year because falling short one year is really, really bad.

Since we're going to have too much grain most years, we might as well feed the excess to livestock and turn it into meat. In bad years we can reduce the amount of livestock to keep the available grain constant.

The same goes for ethanol.

Efficiency is the often the enemy of security, and food security is very, very important.

[1] Source: I grow soybeans for the human market. To which I'll add that human grade soybeans themselves are less efficient to grow than animal grade soybeans. They command a pretty sizeable premium to reflect that added cost of production. It's not exactly as simple as shifting your diet to eating animal feed.

On the local level I think companies lobby against redistributing excess foods for free to keep prices high. Something's got to give, either food waste is drastically diminished or we redistribute all of it.

Why be a subsistence farmer or cash cropper when the local market is flooded with free food?

http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-1...

As the article points out, byproducts such as alcohol production waste are used in feedlot feed. This very much does not mean that a high percentage of feed is grazed grass.

If you have ever made the mistake of trying to eat feed corn, you know that the real world amount of human palatable food fed to cattle is about zero. But that does not matter.

The reason it does not matter is that the land, fuel, water, and capital equipment that goes into making feed for cattle is still entailed in feeding cattle, for about half the weight of each steer.

Tl;dr: the article is not apropos.

EDIT: I should clarify that I do not mean that feed amounts to half the weight of the steer. It takes 6kg of feed to add 1kg to the weight of a steer. Feedlot cows consume about three times in feed what they weigh on the way to slaughter.

its been this way for several decades.

As it stands today, as a nation, the United States supply of vegetables and many other products is totally dependent on the Colorado river. A variety of problems from climate change to terrorist or other attack could rapidly impact our ability to feed ourselves.

There's plenty that can be done in traditional agriculture.

That the rich and naturally irrigated soils of the midwest and northeast are basically only used for animal feed agriculture now is a real shame from an economic diversification and health POV but also from an environmental perspective. Giant swathes of topsoil are depleted every year, and fertilizer and pesticide runoff pollutes entire drainage basins of these regions.

Cash crop agriculture like this is highly capital intensive, so squeezes out smaller operators, and does very little to support the surrounding towns.

Apple orchards in particular up until the 70s often used lead arsenate pesticide sprays. Yes, you read that right; lead and arsenic. Sprayed onto plants. It accumulated in the soil and basically never leaves, and is a serious potential health hazard.

There has been insufficient discussion of this, overall, and it's basically "buyer beware" for land.

A better approach might be to produce hydrogen via photovoltaics and electrolysis, then use hydrogen metabolising bacteria to create more complex carbon hydrates and proteins from that.

The raw output of this might be edible in an emergency, but you would typically further refine it. Either you use fungi and end up with something similar to Quorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn , or you feed it to livestock (fish, chicken).

I think that this might be the base of the food chain for space settlements. On earth, traditional agriculture works just fine to produce an abundance of food, and I don't see more than aesthetic reasons to change it.

There was a previous discussion with some more details about what they're doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344636

Basically animal food that is made in a bioreactor from methane. Methane can be easily made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide via the sabatier reaction.

The PV efficiency on the other hand only gives you electrons and you need electrolysis and bacterial metabolism on top which have their own losses.

You are also going straight to complex proteins, whereas photosynthesis produces just basic hydrocarbons.

There are definitely barriers to entry associated with getting into vertical farming, but there are also advantages for the farmer.

While millions of people do eat hydroponically grown/growable produce, they do not survive on these kinds of crops. They rely on root vegetables and cereals for that, and those are currently impossible to grow in the way described in TFA.

Tobacco is a cash crop, not caloric dense. Cash crops are the profitable crop a farm might use to generate cash. Since all farms are now commercial this isn't a meaningful distinction but it was when most farms were substance.

Wheat and Corn are not traditional cash crops. They are stable cereals. Cereals will be the last crops to ever become viable in vertical farming. Which is fine, the technology can develop leveraging the high value low-calory crops.

From this perspective, garlic is an extraordinarily excellent cash crop: high yields, very low inputs, extremely low impact on soil nutrients.

By contrast, potatoes can generate more income for the farmer per unit area per year (mostly because of the caloric density), but they do wear down soils way more than an allium like garlic, and if you take that into account, the long term picture is not so rosy.

I've read that if you can get the timing right, the most profitable crop to grow in the USA are the flowers used at high school and college graduations. The window is very narrow, however, and if you miss it you earn basically nothing at all.

That's something I hadn't considered, the social aspects. Thanks!

The greatest value of urban farms might be in primary-school education.

It is true with integrated pest management and careful observation you can be a little more calculated and strategic in a closed environment. Until something comes in on your shoe, or blows in through a door left open...

(Took greenhouse mgmt courses before, though I've never worked in the horti industry)

This isn't like growing in a greenhouse where you use screens to keep out bugs.

I once toured a (large) malting works where the soak-tanks are bathed in UV all the time (except when humans need to enter the room) and harsh chemicals are employed constantly to limit fungal and bacterial growth. They are still unable to eradicate those pathogens and suffer constantly from infection problems.

Also hi , I've been curious for years what happened with your farming plans. I can guess you walked away from them!

I don't know anything about farming, but this is exactly what the first version of a true innovation usually looks like. First versions of everything, from iron weapons that bent on the battlefield, to computers that took a room, almost always were more expensive and worse than existing alternatives. These first version occupied weird niches, for example where existing alternatives were not available (as trade of tin and copper broke down after bronze age collapse) or were just toys for rich people (like first mobile phones and many, many other things).

But unlike existing alternatives, they only started their cycle of scaling and optimisations.

Altho with the exception of Middle East and possibly Singapore, other regions will be severely constrained wrt energy requirements, infrastructure.

It is kind of a minor tragedy that due to American poverty of imagination and a lack of culinary heritage, all our indoor vegetables are lettuce and all our vat grown meat resembles burgers. We can’t seem to progress beyond burger meat and lettuce even with cutting edge tech.

Perfect day makes dairy that doesn’t require cows. And what is their first product? Ice cream. It’s all very depressing. In 500 years, when we run out of natural resources and when our food comes from fermentation tanks, veggies from vertical farms and is 3D printed...we will all be eating burgers and salad and ice cream.

the only bad thing about singapore for me is the humidity. i struggle when i am outdoors in singapore. i cant handle it anymore. otherwise..my motto to other wannabe city states: be like singapore!

https://www.urbankisaan.com/ourgreens seems to be doing exactly that, too, in India.

I image that countries with very little agriculturally usable land are watching this closely. Reducing dependency on imported food is probably in every nation's interest.

"Reducing dependency on imported" anything seems to be an idea that often isn't a reality when it comes to paying for it.

But I'm skeptical. Even nations that 'should' care about local production often don't, even in the face of obvious consequences and disadvantages. It seems like more often than not the price / market still leans towards cheaper and other concerns are just concerns that aren't addressed.

The american midwest farming practices have really optimized to minimize the labor cost because space, light and water were in abundance. But if the space cost goes up from higher/re-internalized transport costs, and the cost of light goes down from miscellaneous power production schemes taking hold, the economics for vertical farming changes.

[*] and various nutrients/minerals in the vein of phosphates, nitrates and what have you.

They just aren't especially....legal at the current time.

Specifically, there's a number of states in the U.S. that allows people to legally grow marijuana / cannabis. I know it's still illegal at the Federal level, but that hasn't stopped people here in Washington state.

Plus, I was never the type of cool that knew a lot about drugs and alcohol. Computers, sure - I was definitely the type of cool that knew a lot about computers, but not so much the recreationally altered states.

Which has now come back to haunt me as I'm woefully ignorant of which crops might grow well in this sort of environment :)

I’m sure the USA will also unlock some new farming areas.

So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less.

(I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)

Nobody desalinates & floods fields, surely. (That's what you do if you live before the invention of water-pipe, or have a use-it-or-lose-it quota.) The Israelis are I think world leaders in growing stuff outdoors with minimal water, delivered directly to the roots. And indoors, they have greenhouses, just not the same design as in cold climates obviously.

You could probably recover some of the water from the exhaust air with a dehumidifier. I'm not sure if that would use less power than air-conditioning the whole structure, but at that point you're pretty much back to indoors farming anyway.

Water can be recuperated with an enthalpy wheel.

[0] https://tour-pronl.com/en/mice-tourism/tours-for-professiona...

Well, that would be quite something.. but the number is a typo. From Wikipedia:

> With a population of 17.4 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,800 square kilometres (16,100 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 square kilometres (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 12th most densely populated country in the world.

The total amount of greenhouse area is about 10,000 hectares (24710 acres).

May be true, but I take these top comments with a grain of salt.

Every new tech has its Hype Cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

There are real ecological services provided by a healthy land and natural agriculture that can't be provided by such food factories.

As @systemvoltage wrote, this is good for a heavily centralized system that's owned by big corporations looking for big profits but that's not a solution to the global environmental and soon to come (and it's already here for a lot of us) food/water crisis.

Also, unless we figure out how to replace all crops with vertical efficient farms, demand for agriculture is going to remain. It will just shift to different crops which can't be farmed this way.

Perfectly good arable land is not being misused for development projects that don't mean anything when you know for ex. that Japanese population is in decline and creating individual houses far from the center of the city is going totally against what should be done to counter potential food crisis and the real environmental crisis. Etc.

Sounds like an existing problem, not something which vertical farming is going to accelerate.

Not wasting food is. Not destroying biodiversity is. Not destroying ecological services is.

Exactly none of those problems are solved by salad factories.

> Exactly none of those problems are solved by salad factories.

Honestly, I'm not particularly invested, financially or emotionally, in salad factories, but if something reduces the footprint of arable land needed to do something that was going to be done anyway -- assuming it doesn't have some large externality, like using untenable quantities of energy or producing some toxic waste product -- isn't that a net good?

> Not destroying biodiversity is. Not destroying ecological services is.

I'm worried that we're approaching this from different ethical perspectives / arguing about different things here. I think I may be working from the perspective that avoiding famines and mass starvation is the primary goal of agricultural planning, and you're worried about the ecological health of the planet as a whole.

The next couple of centuries are probably going to be ... grim for the planet as a whole, as far as the interplay between agriculture and the environment go, until we stop burning fossil fuels and the human population of the earth peaks and at least plateaus, if not declines. The best case scenario I can see on the table is that we are able to produce enough food -- with improvements in both agricultural technology, the composition of food produced, and in the distribution and storage of food -- using the same agricultural footprint, maybe being able to pull back from some of the more agriculturally marginal land and allow it to re-wild (the way New England has gone from being 75% cleared for pasturage to being mostly re-forested). Maybe a few small wildlife corridors, but no substantial decrease in the fraction of prime farmland being farmed.

The more likely and worse case is that climate change makes currently prime agricultural land ... not, and the "replacement" land to the north is substantially inferior to existing farmland (even if it has the same "growing season" of frost-free days because of warming, it will still receive less sunlight than the land in lower latitudes), so we end up using a lot more land to grow hopefully-enough food (worst case is we use a lot more land and still fall short, of course).

Most of the things that could really help here are really outside the scope of agricultural planning -- cutting CO2 emissions completely over the next decade would be great, reducing the human population would certainly ease ecological pressures, creating a perfectly efficient, fair and ethical global system of food distribution would reduce total production needs, but good luck with any of that.

> Growing food is not an issue. Not wasting food is.

So one issue to be careful with here is that the goal isn't just to grow enough food; it's to grow enough food that even in the worst-case scenario, with half the fields flooded, half in drought, and half blighted, the meager production is still sufficient to meet all needs.

Yes, we can move food from a region that is having a bountiful harvest to a region in drought, yes, we can save food from year to year. But we can also have globally bad years, where the decline in production isn't regional, and we can also have years of bad production, where droughts or floods or blights lower production for three-five-ten years at a time; centuries of cyclically good or bad production aren't unheard of in the historical record.

The only way to achieve an acceptable level of food security is to damn efficiency and massively overproduce in the average year.

A healthy chunk of the inefficiencies and waste in food production are leaning into that overproduction. Livestock can consume the extra grain calories in a good year, producing tasty, high-quality calories in return, and in a bad year, we can cull the herds of cattle and pigs, both realizing an immediate gain in calories from the livestock, and freeing up a portion of the food-stream that had previously been fed to the livestock to be redirected back to direct human consumption. Likewise with ethanol -- in a good year, you turn the extra corn into biofuel, in a bad year, the price of gas goes up and you redirect the corn to either livestock or directly to people.

You could eliminate these sorts of things, and cut back on crop production overall, and realize great gains in efficiency -- you could re-wild substantial amounts of prime cropland, even. But you'd be building a food production system that was much less secure, much more fragile -- in a bad year, there would be nothing left to cut, and it would be much easier to fall short enough for widespread famines.

An observation from the article also could be answered: what areal space is required to generate the power?

Neither of these are meant to be thunderclap proof-it-fails critique, they're just interesting.

In food miles, freshness and lack of need for water, fertiliser and pesticides its winning hands down for feeding its urban population surrounding it. Repurposed brownfield site, existing buildings would also reduce impact.

I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Supporting towns. Jobs are empowering, even crap ag. jobs but a reality here is that farming is overwhelmingly industrialised and jobs are either kept in the family or massively exploitative piece rate so this isn't a killer argument against either, but I do worry the rural area depopulation is a continuing trend.

That drive from Albany to Cooperstown is progressively more depressing first as small dairy was destroyed by deregulation and later as agricultural policy put everyone out of business unless you grow corn or flowers or farm tourism.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...

They didn't mention it because it's impractically high right now. As an experiment this is interesting but it's nowhere near cost effective yet.

Anyone ran the numbers on how long uranium would last running sun-less agriculture for a few billion people?

When fusion arrives in the next 40 years: "Lithium from sea water would last 60 million years, however, and a more complicated fusion process using only deuterium would have fuel for 150 billion years." [calculated at 1995 global power output]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Energy_source

One thing people don't get is we only need a tiny fraction of net positive output due to the insanely large amount of fuel available to us. 2-3% positive output is all we're talking about and it'll be able to economically replace most other energy sources (though it will take time to ramp up of course.)

Basically it's just a matter of time and continued advances in material sciences. Purity of materials and perfection of manufacturing are the primary barriers. Operational consistency a secondary one (and continued improvement in microcontroller tech and data analysis/AI/etc. will help here.)

One example, in focus fusion, the current progress has definitely been incremental but basically every step of the way the progress has been hindered by exactly the same problem: the materials and apparatus have to be nearly perfect to increase plasma duration sufficiently; to avoid contamination of the self-sustaining plasmoid. And indeed, the progress on that end has been continuous. Once it's proven it will be a matter of perfecting the manufacturing process and automations/etc. to ensure that degree of material quality and device engineering and voila we'll have cheap scalable power.

Based on what I've been watching for the last 15 years, I think within 40 years is quite reasonable. In fact, I think it would not be a surprised to see consistent 0.5% net positive or better in the next 5-10 years, whether it is focus fusion or tokamak or whatever.

TL;DR: Fusion is a 100% sound energy generation avenue that is simply waiting for its "welding" moment. By which I refer to the point where gas production became suddenly economically viable due to the invention of welding (which was motivated at least partly by the desire to improve gasoline production.)

Right now human civilization is running off something like 18TW of energy.

If you add in 2000 kilocalories per day for 7.8 billion people, you add another 750 GW; if you add in a factor of 10 for biological & technological inefficiencies on actually turning electricity into edible calories, you're up to 7.5TW.

As long as you don't throw another factor of 10 on top of that -- imagine growing all food indoors, and then feeding it to cows, before subsisting entirely on beef -- you're probably looking at an amount of energy comparable to that used by humans currently.

Obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to just switch over to indoor agriculture when there's free sunlight outside, but if we were to do so, the energy demands are probably on a scale comparable to what we're working with already.

So you're probably only halving or so the runway of available uranium.

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

Sure, this can be used used land not suitable for agriculture. I only see this really being helpful in cities that have old industrial buildings that are sitting vacant (reuse existing infrastructure and reduce transportation).