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.
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.
