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Sweet, there is only approximately 300 million acres of cropland in the United States alone.

Sun == free, rain == free

How does indoor ag plan on scaling up for anything other than super high margin vegetables and spices when their competitor (outdoor ag) has no cost associated with sun or rain? Not even to mention soil.

edit: I like indoor/vertical ag a lot (when applied correctly) When people try to propose producing things that have no chance of succeeding in our current Kardashev scale, it makes me think they are arguing in bad faith or with a fundamental lack of understanding of the problems faced in food production.

By providing predictability/consistency/efficiency. Yes you end up paying for things that are otherwise free, but those free versions are at the mercy of nature and nature isn't exactly getting more predictable/consistent. You can also create highly efficient watering systems where evaporation is nearly nonexistent and nutrients are easily distributed meaning you're making way better use of that water. And let's be honest - if you're working with 10" of rain per year you're not just relying on the free rain anyway. California's central valley is also a prime candidate for this sort of thing as they're pumping water out of the ground so fast it's sinking and the underground aquifers are getting destroyed meaning the groundwater can't replenish and they're unable to capture as much snowmelt. That's in addition to importing water from other regions that are on the brink of not being able to sustain those exports. Water's already expensive and about to get more expensive.

And that's not even taking into consideration the higher density you can get indoors vs outdoors - the amount of land that is cleared for ag around the globe is staggering. Getting an order of magnitude more output from the same amount of land, but having to pay for water and light, is likely to make business sense and be better overall for the environment.

Do the actual economics work out right this second? Maybe not. Will they in the not so distant future? I'd bet on it.

I'd say that future is far more distant than you're willing to entertain.

California's central valley is a primer candidate not so much because of geographic concerns, but economic ones. Almost everything grown in the Valley is high margin. Those indoor ag systems need to get their water from somewhere so if if aquifiers and fresh waters supplies are dwindling, that will affect indoor ag too.

Growing stuff indoors, at any scale has proven harder than people thought. My experiences have mostly revolved around pests being more present in indoor setups (thrips, white flies) and you end up spraying more pesticides indoors than you would outdoors. Indoor systems are susceptible to the same climate variability as outdoor systems. A storm knocks out power for an extended period will kill an indoor crop too, or the storm itself may destroy the building.

I'm pro indoor ag. It needs more investment, but it needs the right investment, not this pie-in-the-sky mindset that we shouldn't grow anything outdoors and indoor ag will save us all.

I actually agree with you. It's purely a math problem. Where can predictable yield be profitable (including loss calculations) and where can it not.

Vertical as it is today is an excellent nursery solution to feed growable plants into float ponds with little to no loss. As an independent production method, vertical isn't mathematically sustainable.

40% of fresh food is lost before it makes it to the end user (USDA data). The loss comes from a combo of unpredictable weather, timing issues where market prices dip below production costs at harvest time, and supply chain issues.

So it's a complicated math problem but it's important to consider in the suite of food security tools we look to.

Absent regen, we're likely to decimate soils over generations. If we flip totally to regen, we won't have enough land.

So a host of solutions is required.

Fair comments.

I'm mulling whether we have enough land (at 100% regen practices). I almost think we do.

From a system-level, we're over saturated because of ethanol and other things that realistically could disappear and society would be better off. Just need to recalibrate our acres a bit

I don't know the number but I suspect some material % of corn production could go away if we stopped subsidizing that industry for insane things like making gasoline for electoral reasons. :-)

I think a material % would go away if we stopped feeding it to cows as well, a la regenerative ag.

make all the corn fields back into grasslands that they were and the cows will help rebuild the soil.

Should we be worried about how many more ruminants this would require, and their impact on the climate? I just saw some estimates of 90 million acres used to grow corn in the U.S., and a cow calf pair needs 1.5-2 acres to feed itself. I know we probably wouldn't maximize cows to the area for the type of growing we're talking about, but that's 45 million cows (with calfs) at the low end if we were, and I'm seeing reports we currently have ~95 million head of cattle in the U.S.

Those are all napkin numbers, or poorly sourced, and worst case, but I would love to see some good numbers on what it means to the climate to have a lot more ruminants in the farming process. (If much of current beef cattle production was moved to be dispersed along these lands, that seems like it might be a good idea for all involved though).

I think these numbers are from the more traditional way of farming.

At least one practitioner of regenerative agriculture, Gabe Brown, uses super dense grazing and frequent movement of the cattle to actually restore his soil health.

http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

If this sort of stuff interest you, I highly suggest his book, Dirt To Soil. It’s a light read with a lot of great information on regen ag.

its about 33% of acres of corn that go to ethanol.....this should go away even before electric cars MAKE them go away

Sure, sun and rain are free, but the costs for outdoor farming are huge too. Irrigation, pesticides, fencing, harvesting equipment, anti-weed chemicals. Then your yields are super volatile -- weather can be bad, you can just get unlucky, you can have weeds/bugs/mice eating into your yields. Then you need to get your crops all the way from Montana to big markets hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Indoor farming sure does require an input of energy and a high up-front cost, but you can get extremely high yields reliably, and you can dramatically reduce transportation and chemical costs, plus reduced water costs often.

Those costs are known, and outside of California and Nebraska, almost no crops are irrigated.

As far as transporting crops to markets? That's actually a success story. Rail hauls most of the crops from Montana to the PNW (if exporting to China). Rail is dirt cheap and efficient, as any true HN reader will know. :)

For context, the "almost no crops" that are irrigated comprises about fifty-five million acres, a little over 7% of cropland & pastures. Removing pastures from this data is difficult, but since we're only looking at three hundred million acres primary cropland in the US, we can confidently approximate between a tenth and a sixth of primary crops are irrigated.

1 - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...

Do you know if things like sprinklers count as irrigation? I grew up spending a lot of time in Delaware which is tons of farmland, and I remember seeing lots of weird watering devices and sprinklers.

Yes, they absolutely do.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/june/understanding...

I believe around 50% of that 55M acres are hay/forage/pasture. Nebraska and Colorado are easily top players. I underestimated the delta. Point remains there isn’t a ton a irrigated production for commodity crops (corn/soy/wheat/cotton)

If you've ever tried hydroponic, you quickly realize that soil is amazing technology. Indoor ag is yet another utopian fantasy.

Plenty of people are proving that wrong, with certain crops.

I visited with some friends a couple of years ago who had leased a paddock to a pair of humans who used it to build a hydroponic green house.

They produced leafy greens for the local restaurant market and in the first part year had more cash flow than the whole farm around them.

They were working very hard but were poised to make a lot of money.

They were using the sun for energy input - I fail to see how indoor agriculture under lights can be profitable except for the most valuable of crops

It seems like vertical and hydroponics are great for leafy green cash crops and spices, but don't work well to produce cereals, soy, or pulses, which are materially where all of the calories come from.

Vertical is the future.

Imagine all the kick in the mid 2000s for "vertical living walls" as all the rage in large scale office complexes.

Imagine that if instead they put vertical gardens in every high-rise and the farming of the veggies was a part of the HOA and the veggies were just included in the cost of the living in the home - and you could opt-out and give the veggies to the homeless/shelters/churches/etc...

Now imagine if the US was like Singapore, where the setbacks in dense urban environs is massive enough to manage handling a ton of eatable growth between all buildings.

There are three things that should be required for every single building going up (aside from structural sound-ness)

1. Parking underground for 3 levels

2. Vertical EATABLE gardens

3. A network of 'non=potable' water supplies (water you can get from a grey-water system run through the entire building to feed the plants in the vertical gardens.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_water

Bad old farming: put plants in sun

Good new farming: put solar panels in sun, connect lightbulbs to solar panels, put plants under lights.

(Although it's not totally as daft as I make it sound, because it's theoretically possible to do frequency conversion in a way that makes all the energy of sunlight available to plants instead of everything but green.)

That equation doesn’t balance out.

The physical limit to frequency conversion efficiency, whatever it is, is much higher than the efficiency of today's cost-effective solar panels plus cost-effective purple LEDs. So it may happen some day.

City boy here with no knowledge of farming.

When you say "indoor" are you describing large greenhouses? Or growing crops using artificial light?

I'm generally referring to float pond greenhouses though some variants are emerging that use artificial light in a vertical setting for the germination stage where loss rates are high and you can get extremely high density. The types of density you can't get in the overfunded vertical pipe dreams in VC.

So that when you hit the float pond for a 12-16 grow cycle, there's marginal loss.

Interested in links or books on this if you know any good ones. Don't you still have to use soil?

Probably hydroponics? Soil is adds more variables and can be a home to pests/microbes.

Hydro grown plants are often more susceptible to pests and problems because they lack the natural fortifications provided by soil. Large scale living soil can still be done indoors though.

What criteria (crop type, geography, etc) are required for the benefits you outline of indoor ag to outweigh the energy cost of artificial lighting?

> What criteria (crop type, geography, etc) are required for the benefits you outline of indoor ag to outweigh the energy cost of artificial lighting?

Massive amounts of government regulation that inflates the price.

I.e. just weed so far.

It's mostly high margin vegetables and spices. Look up gotham greens for a successul and properly done indoor ag startup.

Generally tomatoes and maybe peppers have enough margin and volume to be justify indoor settings.

Things like nuts are a no-go or any sort of wheat/cotton/maize/soybean operation (even specialty applications like edamame have severe uphill battles to profitability)

You are 100% right on the grains.

I hope you realize that high yields are the problem, not the solution.

Well, with low yields, financial viability is the problem. It's already difficult to make a living farming, unless maybe you're in an area with lots of rain or where you can mine groundwater.

>>*What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. a*

WTF - I hope ZERO of this happens... Don't attempt to think that youre smarter than ~5BILLION years of earths bio/eco balance until we were weaponized by fungi...

We dont need "higher yields" -- we need more efficient consumption and distribution...

Predictable yields at controllable times are how you get efficient consumption and distribution.