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Comment by russdill | Hacker News Reader

Alright, there are 37,716 grocery stores in the US and 321.4 million residents. That's about 8500 people per grocery store. According to this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...

The minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres. This comes out to a land area of a little more than 2 square miles per grocery store. Your average grocery store is 46,000 square feet. So if you did stacked farming on the area of the grocery store, you'd only need a about 1400 levels. Give 2 foot per stack, and your grocery store is only about a half mile high.

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> minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres

Why assume a vegetarian diet? And why assume that 100% of farming would be done at the grocery store?

Do you really need the vertical farm in the grocery store to grow the wheat to bake your bread or the silage to feed cattle?

The vast majority of farmland is dedicated to grains and animal feed, and that can remain.

But the vertical farm in the grocery store can take care of the fresh stuff, like herbs, lettuce and some veggies.

> Why assume a vegetarian diet?

It's the most efficient in terms of land use (also water, etc.). I think the person you are responding to is trying to make the best possible case for the approach, in order to be as fair as possible.

(And yes, it is not necessary to grow 100% of food in stores, as you point out, for this startup to have a viable business model; but it's still interesting to see how far it could go, that's what I took that comment to be doing.)

This is missing the point. Fresh herbs in particular are delicate and easily damaged, and degrade quickly.

It's like going to a seafood restaurant that has live lobsters, vs a seafood restaurant that uses already dead lobsters. Sure both are lobsters, but one is better than the other.

If a customer is really worried about it they will just grow their own herbs in their window. It is super easy to do so.

I don't disagree that something about the equation has to change. I think that "thing" is the 0.17 acres. According to this webpage[1], the productivity of a vertical farm is 11x greater than a horizontal farm.

But, that said, I don't think a complete replacement is necessary for this to be significantly beneficial even on a subset of grown plants.

[1] http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/

To replace the entire food chain, sure.

At that point let's just get some symbiotic bacteria under our skin that feeds us proteins, fats, and simple carbohydrates. That would solve lots of problems.

Sounds like you wanna start a biotech firm.

Oh, I wanna do all sorts of crazy stuff.

You and me both, man. I don't think starting a biotech ranks very high on the crazy scale though.

Really more farming than biotech (but basically the same thing). I want to build a franchise based on atomic gardening and finding profitable new mutants of plants, mushrooms, and micro organisms (flukes and flatworms) to the effect of synergy. There'll be papers and licencing and outreach, of course.

They are not trying to supplement 100% of a veg diet. Far more interesting would be to understand what the hurdle rate is for a given grocer (ie the sell-through per week per square foot of retail space that they require to keep an item in stock). If this device can produce good basil for 30% less than that hurdle rate, grocers will very likely be interested.

Nice, this at least attempts to define the upper-bound. 10% would be 80 meters high.

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