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Comment by epochwolf | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool. I wonder if something like this could be used to supply food for space travelers.

I wouldn't doubt it; and I'd bet it would also work for apartment buildings. This is incredible -- where do the plants even get the energy to grow 347 cherry tomatoes in a year?

This would be a heck of a lot better for the environment, too, than the mess we've currently made of agriculture -- huge quantities of fertilizer producing algae-laden dead zones in the Caribbean. A flexible government not beholden to farm lobbies would subsidize this immediately.

Grow sugarcane in it, and we'd even have energy independence from Saudi Arabia! :)

You can grow a tremendous amount of food in a relatively small space. Square foot gardening is a good example of this (http://www.squarefootgardening.com/). The trick is in crop selection - if you grow things that do well near each other you end up with fantastic yields. The common example is the "3 sisters" method of growing - melons + corn + beans, for example. The melons provide a shade canopy at the soil level, the corn grows tall so it gets enough sun and the beans use the corn stalks as a trellis.

Of course, this isn't a method that scales up at all; machines can't be used in harvesting since you have mixed crops everywhere. Arguably they wouldn't be so necessary for community gardens though.

melons -> squash, at least for the traditional meaning.

Ah, you're absolutely right - that should say squash, not melons.

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