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Joe Biden pledges $1.7 billion to end hunger across U.S.
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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This is definitely one of the ways forward. Many, many, many, many moons ago I attempted to run a blog about growing fresh produce in an urban environment. You can't feed a family on what will fit in a window box or on an apt porch but you can have tomatoes for a salad or on a burger, lettuce for that salad that is actually good for you and more.
If we are talking feeding the most people at once from a central location, hydro and aeroponics is what is needed, combined with leds of varying colors and you can cut the growth time down by 50% or more, that means 90 day tomatoes in 45 or so with aeroponics and 60ish with hydro iirc.
I'm a proponent of multiple avenues. Do the vertical farming and focus on community gardens where kids especially can get their hands dirty and learn something about the planet we live on.
The big problem with advanced (indoor) farming practices is that it defeats the purpose of what makes farming so very cheap...
The sun is providing the power for free. Running lighting for plants will take electricity we aren't currently collecting from the sun and now adds a cost. Water, soil, and light are all basic ingredients you can get by going for a walk in particularly arable climates. But become controlled variables that need to be heavily paid for in advanced techniques.
It's not scalable to large scale farming and not using the sun is a huge error in trying to make things more sustainable. Not until mass adopted solar arrays or some kind of passthrough system for light.
All of this is wrong. It sounds like you don't know how much more efficient hydro and aero is with leds that can be programmed to trick the plants into thinking it's whatever season you want. Not to mention being able to grow tomatoes in Canada in the winter.
Indoor, vertical farming with aero/hydro is many many times more efficient. The 2 plants I have real numbers for (because they are similar) tomatoes and weed will grow up to twice as fast without manipulating the day/night cycle.
As for energy use. Solar is fucking dirt cheap and even without solar, it's extremely cheap to run the lights and other systems.
Seriously my dude/dudette. Do yourself a favor and look into this. I highly doubt that everyone who is investing in this and using it now is wrong and you are the only one who knows better. There is a reason why the best weed is always hydro or aero especially when you can grow it anywhere.
You might be surprised to find out just how much produce already comes from indoor farms. It's the going vertical with it or turning an entire floor of a building into a farm that is what is needed to feed our growing population. You can only spread out so far horizontally, vertically let's you go as high as you can build.
Oh and you might want to look into just how damaging regular farming is for the environment. With hydro/aero you use way less fertilizer than growing in dirt along with a fraction of a fraction of the water.
There's an inherent geometric problem with using solar for vertical farms. They use the volume of the space, which increases by a cube factor. Solar, however, increases according to surface area, which is a square factor.
You thus quickly hit a limit where you can no longer power the lights for your vertical farm by solar panels you stick on the roof. You have to have either a field of solar panels elsewhere--which might have been used to grow food the old fashioned way--or you have to use something that scales differently. Wind also scales by surface area, so not that. Geothermal or nuclear are maybes.
Possibility one way around this is tweaking the spectrum of lights that plants use. Taking full spectrum sun lighting, converting it to electricity, and then using LEDs to create full spectrum lighting isn't going to work. However, plants primarily use only a narrow space of blue and red light as part of photosynthesis. This isn't the full story, either, as plants do use the rest of the spectrum as signals for other biological processes.
Now, do they need the rest of that spectrum all the time and at full power? Depends on the plant. It's complicated, and we may end up customizing lighting for every crop.
Even then, the square-cube problem will put limits on how big vertical farming facilities can get while being powered by solar and/or wind.
Thank you. I had someone explain this to me before in this kind of directly data driven way but I studied astrophysics and macro-xenobiology so I am not the person to be explaining it back out.
But yeah all that.
It makes me wonder if you could build a vertical farm like a big greenhouse made of glass though and direct light from the sun through the building using reflectors without overheating and cooking the plants but, with green energy production you really get to a point where it's the fields for growing crops previously are now covered in mined advanced electronics that need replacing and the farming structure itself which isn't as scalable as just adding a field to your crop rotation.
This isn't the problem you two think it is. No one is talking about feeding an entire city from one skyscraper. But, you could feed an entire block from one or two levels of a skyscraper.
I'm now going to block you two twits because I don't have to time for this shit right now. Going out tonight to see Gladys Knight and I have to respond to someone helping me grow my business.
You know, if you feel the need to block people who are laying out arguments and being civil, then maybe you should rethink having Internet discussions altogether.
They ignore people providing data and argue their opinions are worth more than facts, call people rude names and take the chance to brag about themselves every chance they can take.
So they are the average American apparently and exactly the right level of self assured to be the desired group to sell anything too.
They really shouldn't be here but none of us are ever gonna get that through to them. They will be right whether or not the have to ignore everyone else to be so.
I'm American.
Thing is, I actually am interested in this stuff and am working on setting some of the ideas up in my own backyard. I just have some idea of the limitations and what problems are yet to be solved.
I know I know. We aren't all like that but seriously they are all over this comment section being like this. Literally just above is one where someone says after providing a research study for emphasis "you aren't entitled to assume a study is wrong just because of a gut feeling and this guy responded with:
And I just can't think of a more stereotypical, Self Assured American™ thing to say.
I'm just trying to be practical and know that nothing is perfect, and have read up on some of the limitations of this to think it's better than just ecologically friendly farming practices for widescape use.
I noticed that thread, too, and had a good pounding-my-head-against-the-wall session about it.
This reminds me, too, of a thread I had some years ago on Reddit that was also about hydroponic farming. The other guy also had the idea that hydroponics would change everything, and would also shake off all the corporate control of farming. As if large scale hydroponics wouldn't also become the new large scale corporate farms. Or that Monsanto would see the market shift and go "whoops, guess we're irrelevant now".
I bring this up because I've noticed a trend of hydroponics advocates. They see the problems with our farming system, which is fair, but drink deep of the hydroponic flavor-aid and don't understand the other problems of what they're talking about. This tends to overlap with techno-fetishism. Grow plants in dirt? Like we did when we first learned to make fire? Move over, because I've got something that will make it way better without knowing how the current system works.
Sorry to sorta necro this but I had a couple of his numbers floating in my head and I had to do the math.
He suggested that you could feed a city block with only 2 floors of a skyscraper which is already an insane ask but whatever.
But that means for a city like Philadelphia, you would need a total of around 16,000 buildings with 2 floors each dedicated to farming which widespreads your farmers. Or if you decide to dedicate each building to farming only you still need 322 skyscrapers each 100 floors high to feed the city.
Which means water pumps and infrastructure to support all that water for 322 buildings which is about the current number of high rises and skyscrapers in Philadelphia combined.
You need to convert your entire city to food production just to feed the city that is just existing to feed itself.
My God this really isn't the win they think it is. Technology will certainly save us but man I don't see it in the pie in the sky scifi answers but something boring like protein manipulation in yeast cultures.
Not surprised at all. Beyond that, I suspect even two floors is already too many to effectively power the thing with solar on the roof of the same building. Even converting solar to electricity to a narrow spectrum of light at 100% efficiency for the entire thing wouldn't get you there.
No I know all about how incredibly efficient hydroponics can be and even deeply loved reading a research paper on using just nutrient enriched water for roots systems without the need for soil. Super cool stuff.
But still doesn't take into account electricity use is way more power than just using the sun. There is a reason greenhouses are standard still in that they are cheap and only require basic maintenance but still let you harvest the sun as an energy source.
But scaling that to feed an entire country is basically impossible. Power use becomes outrageous and you get limited by size. You need a skyscraper to feed a city and nearly as much energy.
It works on small scale and can be much more efficient than local wild growing for small scale productions but that's about it.
The math for how much energy we take from the sun and how much of it is absorbed by plants is not negligible. And it will not work for all crops in our current energy needs to run it. Especially with our current production rate and system.
Sorry but it's the truth. It's just not there and won't be for a while.
You really need to argue don't you?
This problem you are stuck on isn't actually a problem. Why? Because of how much more efficient it is. No one is saying that one vertical farm will feed the entire country. We will still have local farms, home gardens, etc. This is the future of growing food both produce now and meat in the coming decades.
Yes, the solar panels only convert like 18% of the incoming light, but, again, $ for $ growing things with solar and aero/hydro is way way cheaper than dirt, relying on the sun, seasons, etc.
Seriously. Maybe stop focusing on what you think is wrong and work to improve things.
Vertical farming is the only way we will feed people in the coming decades.