Comment by sapote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sapote | Hacker News Reader

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This is a terrible idea. Growing plants sustainably requires soil and sun. And good tasting produce requires both. Two minutes thought about it from a whole-systems perspective, and maybe a bit of common sense, would have told them that this was a terrible idea.

A few reasons to get things started:

* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.

* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.

* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.

* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.

At some point, vertical farming might make sense. But you'd put it in some cheap industrial land, not in a retail mall (unless it's purely a marketing thing - maybe herbs), because of efficiency of scale.

A lot of the issues can go away when you can run clean rooms, cheap real estate, and a specialised workforce (or robots?). If you put it in a retail space, will customers be able to wander in (dragging in bugs), or will it be a room in the back with dedicated technicians (kind of like a commercial kitchen). And since it's not made to order, why not centralise the business end like a lot of butchers do? Sure, some butchers might still do their own work in a retail space, but they have higher margins on their product.

It also heavily depends on the region. The US has a lot of space for farmland. Maybe look at regions with a lot less arable land. Japan springs to mind. But even then, why would you move the factories into shopping malls? If farmland is at a huge premium, it seems unlikely retail space will be cheap.

It's true. As much as we want to use technology to make our lives better, this isn't the way. There are much better ways to innovate that still involve real soil and sun.

> Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.

That is true, but look at the current reality when it comes to the produce sold in supermarkets. It seems like most people care about how it looks (hence the wax makeup) and how cheap it is. Our food has been commoditised to such a degree that it's more about brand perception and price, rather than taste.

This is why strawberries taste like fibrous nothing but look really great. Same for cherries. In fact, most fruits don't taste very good anymore. I recently found bought a bunch of 'Heirloom' oranges which actually tasted wonderful. Probably because they haven't been genetically engineered to look good and last a long time.

I mostly agree with what you're saying. Not sure whether vineyards are such a good example though. Isn't wine one of those things where even "experts" can't taste the good from the bad?

That being said, some vegetables need to be kept away from sunlight (flemish endives come to mind). This could probably work quite well for those.

> Isn't wine one of those things where even "experts" can't taste the good from the bad?

Experts can't really reliably tell the good from the mediocre, but bad wine is pretty obvious to anyone, and certainly has a lot to do with soil type and quality.

> Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them.

Weird, I heard the opposite on an informal tour I took of a local hydroponic farm. They guy could have been full of shit, but he said that one of the biggest benefits of growing indoors was that you didn't have to use pesticides.

Well in sterilized vertical farming concepts that is true. Pests are eliminated. Don't even need to supply oxygen the more automated the system is.

But this concept (as I understand it) has the plants growing where there are humans present so it is going to be a dirty environment and pests will undoubtedly be a problem that needs to be addressed in some fashion.

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