Could Indoor Vertical Farms Feed Livestock?
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Solar panels lead to lots of tech trash, e-waste which destroys the environment. Not to mention the buildings themselves and all the electronics required to keep such a farm running.
This kind of over-engineering will simply never work without a fundamental re-understanding of how our world works. It's just such a waste of resources. The "Mercedes" model. Make a really nice car for the first 50k miles, then sell it for $5,000 because each successive year of maintenance costs more than the car is worth.
This is not possible due to nature's complexity. Until we will be able to use nanomachines to analyize individual proteins and cells we won't know how the body works on a global scale so you will end up with incorrectly guessing how much micro/macro nutrients the meat will have.
Over time artifical meat will be a disaster as far as nutrients go, saying that you can "grow good meat that can compare to natural meat and has all the required nutrients as natural meat" is arrogant and shortsighted, but I don't expect anything more from modern scientists.
indeed. then we will do the rational thing and learn to live without an excess of animal protein. it is simply not necessary to consume so much in excess as we do right now.
The livestock (cows, chickens, pigs, goats, etc.) eat the roots, greens and the remainder of the seed. Each type of livestock requires a different amount of fiber, so the length at which the seed is sprouted differs; chickens only get sprouted a few days, just long enough that the enzymes in the seeds break down the starches and make them more bio-available. While cows will have something that looks closer to grass.
But I'd like to know which study you are talking about?
We are in a scam industry thread (vertical farms) jumping the shark to talk about fodder for animals. Which I assume is all about the overton window.
So not sure if this is the right place to talk about said study.
I do throw whole wheat grains into my chicken run's deep litter every time I put a new layer of chips or hay down. I personally do this more to encourage the hens to scratch for sprouts and fermented seeds. IMHO this scratching has value as it keeps the birds active in cold months and keeps the bedding compaction down which makes spring cleanout easier but I also believe it provides some benificial nutrients.
Silage tarps over hay, especially hay that didn't get cut before heading out due to wet weather, results in sprouted fodder of sorts and that definitely increases the nutritional value of seedy hay.
> I'm not utilizing and lights
This is how it's implemented in large scale systems.
My beef is how they rip off struggling farmers.
Huh. In my country, "struggling farmers" are people who own several million dollars worth of land and typically several million more in plant.
To my knowledge corn is more sugar per other nutrients
Another problem is that this cheap land with free water and sun is often a long way from the people who will eat the food. That means transportation and that also means you're still paying something even if the land, water and sun are free.
Another interesting feature is the way that solar cells can capture the energy from a broad spectrum of the sunlight and then the LEDs can be tuned to the narrow spectrum that the plants absorb. Even with losses to resistance and conversion, you could end up ahead eventually.
Transportation is solved, in bulk, with trains and trucks. It costs pennies a ton. Also not a real objection. Not at scale, which is hopefully what we're talking about.
The local argument is a good one, but certainly not for the OP topic. It's useful for just-in-time locally-grown specialty crops. Just not livestock feed.
It comes in powders that you can just mix to your water.
[0]less transportation and other misc.