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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Food shortages are caused by natural disasters and political problems such as wars, not by lack of places to grow crops. We have plenty of farmland and farmers. If your vertical farm is caught in the middle of a war or flood then it won't be able to operate.

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I'd like to see crop prices listed by expenditures. Something like this:

For every $10 of wheat produced it costs -

$X for gas for production $X for transportation and packaging $X for human labor $X for machinery $X to buy the land etc.

I'm guessing that land ownership is a tiny minority of this - and if you are building towers that are 50x more expensive than an empty field it would make the process more expensive and less energy efficient if you factor in upfront costs. Making land more efficient is great but I don't think it is the limiting factor for supplying ample food for everyone in the country or the world.

It depends on how efficient you can make things in terms of harvesting (with the vertical frames), energy, and lack of pests.

I think you’re missing my favorite point: we can return land to the environment and potentially reduce the entire effects of pesticides.

Even if it were less efficient, that would be worth something.

How can you return the land to the environment when you still consume the same amount of energy (or more because LEDs arent 100% efficient)? During farming most of the energy comes from the sun. Vertical farms consume more land the denser they are. All that freed up land has to be filled with solar panels or wind turbines. Considering that plants are basically collecting solar energy for free that's a huge step backwards.

I suppose it's like I said: it depends on how you get that energy. Geothermal, nuclear are options, as are coastal wind farms (minimal environmental impact once up). Solar, Yes, I hear you.

Isn’t the idea here that every city would have a vertical farm close to it, decentralizing the production of food? And if for various economic reasons food does tend to be grown in clustered vertical farms, I imagine the know how to do so would be widely disseminated and cities in particular would keep aside dormant vertical farms as a measure of food security, to quickly scale up in harder times.

I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in the Midwest. Food production has been the foundation of every successful civilization, this technology would potentially allow us to grow food without wrecking Earths environment.

Have you ever even been to a farms in the Midwest? They are not centralized. They are distributed over a large part of the country.

California and several other states are also net food exporters.

Net by value, weight, calories, nutrition ..?

Farming enough grapes (as my late Uncle did in California), say, to balance trade doesn't mean you could farm enough food in general.

Pretty much everybody already farms locally. Go outside any city, virtually any city, and it's farmland. Montreal is surrounded by farmland, despite its absurdly short growing season with five months of -20C weather. You have orchards in New York. Food system disruptions are due to the local distribution system, as in war or natural disaster, or due to literally everybody's failing all at the same time, as in a pandemic.

>cities in particular would keep aside dormant vertical farms as a measure of food security, to quickly scale up in harder times. //

Both USA and UK recently stopped funding pandemic preparations.

Keeping spare capacity on hand when the money could go to private profits instead .. not with our current political systems.

If we can forcibly spread the benefits of technological progress, and require long-term planning in the political processes then we (humanity) can probably do this sort of thing.

"I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in California."

I fixed it for you. States like Indiana import 90% of their calories. Midwest farming is all about massive row crops, not human food.

https://www.crcworks.org/infood.pdf

Yet Indiana does not even feed itself, let alone feed the world. The state imports an estimated 90% of its food. More than $14.5 billion is spent by Hoosier consumers each year buying food sourced outside of the state.

Vertical farms are more vulnerable than regular farms since they are entirely dependent on electricity.

When you consider that many countries import energy through natural gas from Russia vertical farms could be shut down during a war all at once and force the affected country to surrender immediately.

I think we're currently using more farmland than we should. Giving back land to natural ecosystems is a good thing.

You can build vertical farms underground or at high ASL to avoid these issues.

Until your substation gets shelled or bombed.

Underground spaces don't get flooded? Soldiers aren't able to walk up hills?

I could think of a few designs that would fight the flooding problem actually

There are ways to design underground spaces to avoid flooding, yes.

Basically, you put them on a hill :) Now you have an underground farm at high ASL. Problem fixed.

I thought the food issue was global distribution and wastage (by which I mean edible food that is not eaten but instead thrown away) - we have enough but it's in the wing places and lots of it is wasted.

Mind you Western Capitalism loves consumer wastage as it leads to higher sales, wastage is designed in.

Vertical farms and current political systems just means more wastage will be encouraged and more obesity generated with less expense at the front end.

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