Ikea debuts an indoor farm that grows greens three times faster than a garden | Hacker News Reader

Ikea debuts an indoor farm that grows greens three times faster than a garden

businessinsider.com

53 pointsimwally8 comments

There are tons of exciting things happening in this space.

Check out the OpenAg Movement out of the MiT Media Lab, Caleb Harper's TED talk on youtube.

Also go to www.openagriculturesupply.com for all the Kits, Parts and supplies you need to build your own "Food Computer".

Here in sunny Florida, there are plenty of examples of efficient, indoor gardens. We call them grow houses. With supplemental CO2, mylar sheeting, and constant heat, they massively out-produce a normal garden.

But they're still not economically viable for any legal produce. Sun, dirt, and water are still too cheap in the Eastern USA.

With medical marijuana here, and full legalization on the horizon, I wonder how soon grow houses will be an obscure bit of history.

A few years ago I heard an episode of "you bet your garden" where the host got a question about the best lights and setup for growing tomatoes indoors. The host kept asking the guy why he would ever do such a thing as the tomatoes would cost much more than you would pay at the store for them and the caller didn't really have a good answer. The funny thing is, tomatoes require basically the same care and conditions as marijuana and I heavily suspect that was the true motivation of that question.

Reminds me of this company in Japan called Mirai that specializes in this type of advance agriculture.

http://miraigroup.jp/en/

There must exist some kind of adage out there that acts as a couterpart to Betteridge's Law [1] which states:

Any headline that celebrates an achievement in greater speed will invariably omit the correspondingly greater cost.

If not, you can name it "Andrew's Law" in my honor.

Hydroponics works. It works fast. But that's because it's using more resources in the form of heat and light than the average passive garden. Thermodynamically novel, this is not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

In Shoreditch. That's all I needed to know.

Sounds exactly like what Plenty is doing.

This looks like a personal greens garden. Isn't Plenty doing a large scale farm?

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