Vegetables get freakish in the land of the midnight sun (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Vegetables get freakish in the land of the midnight sun (2014)

npr.org

73 pointsEndXA41 comments

When did Alaska become the land of the midnight sun?

I think it must be something more to it than only the sun. I have lived north of the arctic circle in the land of the midnight sun (Norway) most of my life, potatoes and carrots grown here are not bigger than what is grown in the south where the growing season is much longer.

Cambridge dictionary: Land of the Midnight Sun

the part of Europe inside the Arctic Circle where the sun is in the sky very late at night in the summer.

---

Collins: Land of the Midnight Sun

in American English, noun.

1. any of those countries containing land within the Arctic Circle where there is a midnight sun in midsummer, esp. Norway, Sweden, or Finland

2. Lapland

in British English, noun.

1. any land north of the Arctic Circle, which has continuous daylight throughout the short summer, esp N parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland

2. an informal name for Lapland

According to Wikipedia it’s a nickname for Alaska but also can refer to any region above the Arctic circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Midnight_Sun

The Rise and Fall of Scottish Tomatoes - https://food.list.co.uk/article/17305-the-rise-and-fall-of-s...

‘At the farmers’ markets, people are always delighted to get Scottish-grown stuff. But in the supermarkets, people always buy with an eye on the price. The fact is, heating those greenhouses is always going to put us at a cost disadvantage.

‘Now if something was to happen to road transport, more attention to food miles perhaps, it could change things. Or if southern Europe was to have more water shortages … But that’s looking decades ahead. If there’s ever going to be a Scottish tomato revival, I doubt I’ll be here to see it.’

2009 article, likely he is here to see it.

Growing veggies in heated greenhouses is madness in the current climate crisis, transporting them even long distances is vastly more energy efficient because freight is quite efficient per kg.

That depends on your heat source. If it’s carbon neutral then shipping is still worse.

Even then the heating fuel/electricity could be used to heat houses and displace fossil fuels there. There are rare exceptions like the mentioned iceland situation.

Except in Iceland, they do a decent job with their geothermally heated greenhouses. They're very proud of the tomatoes.

Which brings up the thought - what about the efficiency of solar powered greenhouses? As solar cells are more efficient at catching the sunlight than plants - might boost the overall efficiency of growing things without negative environment impact.

Is that even theoretically possible? Unless you find a way to grow plants directly from electrical power, you'll need to rely on a light source and the (purportedly) less efficient photo receptors of the plants in the end. I guess you could modify the broad spectrum of light emitted by the sun into a more narrow spectrum that plants are most efficient at.

I guess you could modify the broad spectrum of light emitted by the sun into a more narrow spectrum that plants are most efficient at.

Turn the green into red and blue?

Well, yes, effectively. By turning all the incoming light (including red, green and blue, and the non-visible spectrum, given a solar cell that's sensitive to it) into electricity and using that electricity to power a grow light. I'm not saying that it's a feasible way to get more energy flux into the plants this way; I think it's unlikely. But that's theoretically a way to do it.

If on the other hand you emit light on the same spectrum as you receive it, then it's impossible to generate more flux, even in theory.

A normal greenhouse is passive solar powered.

Modern solar panels and high efficiency GHP, are getting upto a point where it's comparable to the heat you get from direct sunlight. So I don't think it's far off that we see green houses heated purely by solar energy, with the added benefit of being energy sink during low demand (night) and energy source during demand (day).

Geothermal heating is possible in most places even without volcanos or hot springs that Iceland has. The temperature of soil just 0.5m under the surface is almost constant over the year, and soil due to huge thermal mass can act as an excellent free heat reservoir during the winter. All you need is a sufficiently large area of land to burrow your heat exchanger pipes, and a simple ventilation system (that can easily be solar powered).

In addition to long daylight periods during the growing season, you're also using soil that hasn't been farmed continuously for hundreds of years like in the mainland US, or even thousands of years like pretty much everywhere else on earth.

You don’t need native soil. Compost, manure, and off season ground cover crops that are mulched into native soil do just fine. Where I live in the South there’s lots of red clay but if you provide amendments you will do fine. Your county dump will probably provide compost for free. California provides food for a massive portion of the county but without us providing water it would be too arid for most corps.

I didn't say anything about "native" soil, just that it's land that hasn't been used agriculturally. Yeah, we can put compost, manure, nitrogen, etc in the soil, but you can't artificially recreate the microbiome and micro-nutrient mixture that nature creates over eons.

I think modern farmers don't really have much of a problem re-introducing depleted nutrients into the soil. Modern fertilizers, composting, and amending soil are pretty well understood farming and gardening techniques.

The fact that every year, literally thousands of tons of nutrients in the form of salmon from the ocean makes its way upstream, where it just deposits itself and stays there probably helps a lot. All the local plants are benefiting from this annual nutrient bomb.

As I said to another commenter, there's a difference between artificially enriching the soil and virgin land that's never been farmed.

NPR seems to use Reddit post/commemts for lots of it's stories. Yesterday some redditor posted about Alaska's large (and sweet) vegetables and not 10 hours later NPR published an article on the topic. I notice NPR using reddit for story leads at least a few times a week.

that npr story is from 2014.

You're reversing cause and effect. Someone saw the reddit story and decided to post this NPR story here from 2014.

> The extra sunlight also makes the produce sweeter. "People often try our carrots here, and they think we've put sugar on them," Brown says.

That's interesting. The few people I know that live in Alaska or who have purchased local produce have said the opposite. That the strawberries were very large and very bland.

I assume some things get sweeter and some are more bland depending on if they burn their own sugar to grow?

Larger strawberry varieties do tend to be bland in my experience. Also carrots are root storage while strawberries are more temporary, so maybe they get prioritzed differently in plants that adapt to really long dark stretches.

Tomato fruit sugar content apparently inversely correlates with the sugar content of the fruit.[0] That is, larger tomatoes tend to have less sugar in them as a percentage of the whole. I'm not sure if this applies to strawberries, but it's worth considering/looking into.

[0] https://doi.org/10.21273/JASHS.129.6.0839

See also "In England, rhubarb is grown by candlelight" as discussed here[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19746707

This reply was pretty fascinating: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19754114

Probably greenhouse grown strawberries, which imho are bland due to the medium they're grown in. But some varieties of strawberries do seem to need fairly high heat.

But having been raised in central Alberta, which is fairly far north (lattitude 53), I tend to agree with this about flavour and northern climates. Higher lattitudes seem to produce more intense or nuanced berry flavours. One thing I've heard mentioned is that cool nights are important for berry flavour development; here in Ontario in the high humid summer heat (great lakes basin) it doesn't really cool down much at night.

Things like carrot flavours are likely explained more by the mineral composition of the soils, which haven't been farmed as much and are younger soils.

In my country the potatoes which grow on hills taste wayyy better than the ones produced on flatland.

Same here in India.

Our weekly mandis ( local vegetable markets ), have two kinds of potatoes, - Pahadi meaning from Hilly areas, and Desi meaning from the plains/flatlands.

Here's a good article mentioning history and cuisine of how they are used here.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/how-t...

How is that? Is it the "terroir" or the weather or the different variety?

here where I live too. Maybe flatland is too tough, muddy.

My guess would be drainage. Plants don't like usually like wet feet. Potatoes are more tolerant of this than others but that doesn't make it ideal.

could be air drainage.

On hillsides the cold air will flow downhill, but not linger.

On flatland cold air will "pool" and the temperature will drop.

(could also be water too)

In the competitive giant pumpkin world, all the largest entries come from northern regions, due to the increase number daylight hours in the summer.

Couldn’t indoor farming also accomplish this?

Growing under artificial lighting is extremely challenging. A lot of study goes into selecting the right kind of lights with a spectrum that closely matches natural light. (An ordinary light bulb won't cut it.)

Once the proper lights are found, energy consumption and cooling are so significant that it's not really economical to grow food indoors.

If you want to understand this more, I suggest looking up how to grow pot indoors. (It's really interesting to read, even if you never plan on doing it.) A significant amount of pot is grown indoors because it's easier to keep hidden than growing outdoors. (And, the stores that cater to indoor vegetable gardens really just cater to people growing pot in their closet or basement.)

(BTW, people growing lots of pot indoors are easy to find due to electricity consumption and strange heat signatures from their homes. Some people get caught after large blizzards because the snow on their roof melts unusually fast.)

No idea about pot specifically, but it's not totally impossible for vegetables.

Canada is a net exporter of tomatoes, many of which are grown in massive greenhouses in the middle of nowhere (e.g., https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/16/473526920/ho...) As the article says, it costs a bit more to grow, but the yield and quality make up for it.

In Australia a major tomato producer built their new greenhouse facility in the high-altitude (1km) New England region because it's cheaper to heat the greenhouses in the cold winter months than to cool them in the hot summer months in low-altitude high-temperature areas. It might be with global warming the economics of Canadian tomatoes get even better.

The regions of Canada where we grow tomatoes are not particularly cold. The greenhouse heartland here is in the southernmost part of Canada near Lake Erie and sits at the same lattitude (42) as northern California / southern Oregon, or central Italy.

Yes, it's cold in the winter because it's a continental climate, but the summers tend to be very hot and humid (mid 30C not uncommon and perceptually higher due to the high humidity.) Obviously not in Australia's heat ranges, but warmer than you'd find in most of Europe.

Many of these greenhouses are switching to growing cannabis now, with legalization.

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