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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

> the Fed can't print farmland

The Fed can't print any kind of land, why such specificity?

In a sense we can print land--that just means building vertically. Building a 10 story building is essentially adding 9 layers of land.

But that land won't have farmable topsoil.

But what about vertical farming? It should continue to get more efficient.

You'd have to make it more efficient by either

(a) adding IP (gengineering crops to grow more efficiently

(b) driving down the cost of inputs (light/water/nutrients)

I'm curious how much more cost efficient vertical farming can really get.

Something's missing, there, as far as properly reproducing conditions, but I haven't figured it out yet.

It needs more than efficiency. It's a great way to produce flavor and nutrient-dense food, but is almost unusable for calorie-dense food. That has to change before it's more than an interesting idea.

You are losing out on free energy from the sun. You'll have to generate it yourself.

Historically, the cheapest way to "grow" farmland has been to make marginal land more productive.

And of methods for doing that, irrigation is the most effective. This speaks directly to Liebig's Law of the Minimum, which states that whatever factor is most critical in limiting plant productivity is the one whose adjustment will have the greatest impact on productivity. For plants, water is a cheap addition, it's frequently the critical missing factor in increasing land productivity, and will literally take you from 0 to 100% alone.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum)

By this reasoning, "vertical farming" is taking land as the limiting factor and literally requires building more land, substrate, water, sunlight, and nutrients in order to increase areal productivity. This is close to a maximally expensive expansion option. To date, vertical farming has been utilised only on very high-value crops, or those for which freshness is at an absolute premium. (Fresh crops can be moved across and between continents in days or hours, though quite often a 14-day transport with refrigeration retains freshness.)

For bulk cereal staples, overall land area remains the principle limiting factor, with sunlight, water, topsoil, fertiliser, and pest control as principle inputs. Weather is another key factor, with freezing, damaging storms (hail, winds), and heat as major concerns.

Meat grown in labs and hydroponics come to mind.

> In a sense we can print land--that just means building vertically. Building a 10 story building is essentially adding 9 layers of land.

That's a bit of a stretch, no?

The cost of the Fed printing money is effectively zero, there are substantial costs associated with building and maintaining such structures.

There are very rapidly diminishing returns to that. As soon as you add just one more floor, you lose a lot of space to stairs. Then you need a stronger foundation, pipes have to push water up farther so those systems need to be reinforced and the walls need to be stronger. Add a third floor and the costs go up a lot more. Once you are into the really big buildings, say skyscrapers, it's not unusual that 40% of the area is taken up by elevators, HVAC systems, supporting infrastructure.

Looking at industry data, e.g. https://ccorpinsights.com/costs-per-square-foot/ we can see that construction costs per livable square foot go from $300 for single story to $600 for midrise to $800 for highrise.

I don't want to be a rancher and farms pay an income. Real estate has gone up ~20% in some markets and may be overvalued. This felt like a good price with inflation considerations.

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