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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space.

It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser.

We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place!

Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.

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“Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.”

Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics.

The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.

In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting factor is sunlight.

EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel

2. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes in the US are large and tasteless because they’ve been bread to be easily picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It’s not obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity and w/out crushing)

3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack when transitioning to “green” alternatives.

As an aside, while we're still a ways off from battery-electric farm vehicles (cost/weight of batteries is still just too high to meet the same parameters as diesel tractors, even with very generous assumptions the last time I ran the numbers), I still like the idea of electric farm equipment hardwired to the grid and dragging giant electric cords behind them like really boring EVAs.

(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge "tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current technology.)

Fruit trees already exist and are up to 20 feet tall and especially citrus trees produce significantly more calories per acre than grains.

Vertical farming is unsustainable because then you will have to cover 10x the land in solar panels or use fossil fuels.

If you don't expose your plants to the sun, you're going to need a lot of energy to power their illumination. I'm not sure solar panels-> tuned led illumination is any more efficient than direct exposure, nor could it be any cheaper (and because solar irradiation on Earth is finite of course the amount of food you can grow is also finite). Then there's the profit per m^2 of agriculture isn't that high -- how much does a structure cost? I'd say at least $400/m^2. If your profit is <$10/m^2, you'd need decades to recoup costs (not a viable investment currently) -- that's only for the structure discounting all the other necessary additional infrastructure, lightning, irrigation, etc. Unless we switch to radically different/more efficient food growing than plants (say direct cell cultivation, or direct nutrient synthesis), then the current approach is probably the best (still with room for some automation and significant genetic improvements on crops, I'd say).

I think direct nutrient synthesis probably has potential, but it will take a very long time to understand nutrition and synthesis of organic mollecules -- not an expert by any means, but I'd be surprised if it took less than several decades to develop the necessary tech/science. Even then the gains in efficiency will probably not be that large -- plants/life in general have been optimizing synthesis for billions of years, they're already quite efficient. What we would gain is minimizing to its limit parts of the plant we don't consume, and concentrate on the essentials/optimal nutrients.

Because sunlight ?

I do feel the same about the mechanical side of farming. I'm sure there's room for different tools and structure.

This is already a thing I think - Vertical farming its called - here's some links https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin.... Though its mainly in land constrained places like Singapore or places that are frozen much of the year, or deserts. There is a solar powered tomato green house in Australia I'm aware of https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-... last I heard they were talking about copying it and making them around the world it was going so well

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