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Comment by kickout | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

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)

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.

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.

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