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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

These article talk about 'veggies' - but nearly all these vertical farms seem to be growing fairly low calorie/nutrient rich vegetables: leafy greens, herbs and some fruits etc.

There's no root vegetables, grains which make up the cornerstone of our diets.

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Grains and root vegetables are generally far easier to store and transport and keep from rotting than leafy greens, herbs, etc.

I'm most interested in tech like this as a tool for minimizing food waste. Your lettuce won't wilt and rot while it is sitting on the shelf if it is still alive.

Keep in mind that lettuce must be collected at a specific time to be good. If you wait too much, it gets spoiled.

In fact, it probably lasts for longer in a fridge than in fertile ground with sunlight.

You can also harvest the leaves and eating always fresh cut lettuce leaves one at a time, for several weeks

The energy use of the LEDs for a live lettuce plant and a fridge is about the same (or even lower), so you could keep it fresh for a few weeks more in a small indoors farm I'd say.

I wonder if you could grow lettuce within a refrigerator and drop temperature as a means of preventing bolting and to extend lifetime. Could both be better than sum of either individually?

You mean turn the refrigerator into a growth box? While still being able to use the cooling function? That sounds like an interesting idea.

Not sure how live lettuce reacts to low temperature, it might go into faster growth and would actually start rotting sooner.

Many plants do that in sudden weather changes.

Grains are staples because they provide a lot of calories.

More calories means more photosynthesis, so more incident light. The marginal energy cost would thus be a lot higher. The cost for lettuce, however, is probably dominated by refrigeration/shipping/logistics. So, from a fundamental cost standpoint (unless you have very low cost energy), that's likely going to be a while.

It's more simple than that even, grains are simply more portable and last longer. Those two properties are the major reasons they are the staples of our diets. There's little sense in growing and processing them on site at food distribution centers. Growing and storing them within a reasonable distance of food distribution facilities is sufficient for sustainable reliance on grains.

I believe rice can be stored safely for years given the right conditions. There are no sustainable conditions under which leafy greens can be stored for as long as rice.

Exactly this. A lettuce grown in California that's shipped to NYC is going to be incredibly low in 'benefits'. IMO vertical farms do have a role in the future and that is to swap out lettuce/leafy greens/herbs grown on a traditional farm to something more calorie efficient, local leafy greens grown in cities and towns.

> but nearly all these vertical farms seem to be growing fairly low calorie/nutrient rich vegetables

Yup. Any article about this type of thing needs to include calorie math. How many calories can you grow per installation / sqft / acre / etc.

Leafy greens are the best for these in their current iteration, they can be grown in fairly shallow dirt or even none using aeroponics and grow pretty quickly so operators can get regular harvests.

Looking at it from a value proposition standpoint, it could provide the base for an ultra-fresh salad bar if you have the space for a shipping container and presumably an electrician.

how can i architect my own vertical garden that "covers the ground" of the diet I am used to?

I grew up having to grow pretty much everything we ate (by necessity as you couldn’t buy anything in stores). And whatever we didn’t grow ourselves we helped relatives or neighbors with and shared in harvest.

I personally don’t understand the appeal of going back to that. I’m so glad I can just buy whatever I want at the grocery store these days and don’t need to spend all my free time on harvesting calories.

Reminds me of my reaction to that one Robert Heinlein quote about how "Specialization is for insects." Sounds romantic but also exhausting, unnecessarily so.

Robert Heinlein's life and career was made possible by those incredibly focused 'insects'. It's a nice platitude, but in its strong form, it seems quite myopic, and more than a tad out-of-touch.

Where was this?

It could be many places but one such place was Eastern Europe about 30 years ago.

Step one is to quit your day job.

Step two is to put in ~12 hours a day, 7 days a week of work into homesteading.

Step three is to dip on your savings to buy farming equipment, consumable inputs, and groceries for the remaining half of your food that you won't be able to grow yourself.

If you'd like to try before you buy, my parents' homestead up in Canada could always use another pair of hands. Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. You'll have to share the room with ~15-30 baby chicks, though. You'll quickly get used to the smell.

I understand that this won't give you a vertical garden, but unlike a vertical garden, it will go most of the way to meeting your daily caloric and nutritional needs.

It will never cover your whole diet, but it is a good way of growing some of it yourself. And that's not as time intensive as the other commenter says. If you use soil, have the lights on a timer and use auto-irrigation, it's pretty much hands free. A few weekends to set up, then months of marveling at how plant life works heh.

I think it's really hard to grow most of your food with little effort, but you can go start with FarmBot

See here for yield estimates https://farm.bot/pages/yield With 18m^2 you can only get 175 calories/day which should be less than 10% of your diet.

That depends on your diet and place.

Once vertical farming can tackle rice, wheat, corn, and potatoes, then I will be more excited about it.

I'd be quite the opposite, honestly. Cropland area in the US covers 367 million acres in the US [0]. Even assuming that vertical farming is 10x more land efficient, the amount of resources (steel, power, plastics, etc.) needed to convert 36 million acres of land into vertical farms would have a staggering ecological impact.

Just covering that area with a 22 gauge corrugated steel roof, without any supporting structure, would be about 1.35 billion tons of steel [1], or about 75% of the entire world's steel production for a year.

There are definitely products that would make sense to grow in vertical farms (eg. high value crops like tomatoes or bell peppers, which are already grown in hothouses in certain areas of the country), but staple crops tend to preserve for a long time, and wouldn't see as much of a benefit from vertical farming.

[0] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/tech...

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=36000000+acres+*+(9.28...

Yeah, tbf I'm not seeing this as viable for industrial level production. But it does seem like a good fit for individual farms, even in a personal backyard.

Honestly, it seems like a good weekend project to get going

It is! It's also a great way to learn how plant life works, it's more complicated than people think haha

We just need to get the price of energy down https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131

Vertical 'farming' would be revolutionary if we would accept its dark and real hidden nature. Food production is not the real goal here.

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