Pressures that have always existed for vertical farms have come to a head
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
This basically made me regard vertical farming as... not fundamentally important to the future of food.
High energy prices right now are mostly the result of the Ukraine war. It's painful now, but it is accelerating the conversion from fossil fuels. At least if this doesn't expand into a larger war.
There is no reason to think that, after the war is over, the sanctions will be lifted. I mean, why would they be lifted? Europe is not going to return to Russia the assets that were frozen/seized or start wanting to trade with Russia -- or vice versa -- moreover there are already new pipelines and trade agreements made within Eurasia that exclude Europe as a market for energy.
This is a permanent change ushering in a new cold war and a new multipolar world, where it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for commodities to cross bloc boundaries. Russia's commodities are going to be flowing east and south, Saudi Arabia's will be flowing mostly to China, while North American commodities will be staying mostly in North America.
After permanently and irreparably rupturing the previous trade relationships, Europe is going to have to become more energy independent, and I think they realize now that the previous energy dependence they had was a strategic weakness for them. They will need to learn to do with less energy at least until they ramp up domestically produced replacements such as nuclear or renewables + storage.
https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/european-community-...
EU sanctions against others may also cease after a regime change. US lifted sanctions against Vietnam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Vietnam_relation...
They would correctly view that as lack of an energy policy. Europe requires an energy policy for the world that exists, not the world it wishes would exist.
We have not been able to change the regime in Syria, Iran or Cuba despite decades trying. Not sure why you think China or Russia is going to be a more realistic target. FYI, the successor to Putin is Medvedev, who is much more of an anti-western hardliner. If Europe is pinning its hopes for the future on regime change in Russia, then the people of Europe deserve much more competent leadership.
It's like the prospect of some things are so terrible as to be unthinkable and when something is unthinkable, you don't come up with a plan to deal with it. Instead, you shout down anyone who brings up the unmentionable thing. For Europe, the list of unthinkable things keeps growing:
* What if they can't deploy enough energy storage at scale to make their renewable push actually work? Unthinkable!
* What if there is no regime change in Russia, and the present situation just continues for a few decades. Unthinkable!
* What will they do with millions of Ukrainian refugees that refuse to or are unable to return home? And the many millions more that will be flooding in soon? Unthinkable!
So this deer in the headlights inability to face reality is the leadership problem. And the sad thing is that Europe does have options. There is coal in Poland, Natural gas in Germany, Nuclear in France, Wind in Italy. They can scale up production of domestic sources and deal with the stark reality that they need to become much more energy independent OR they can spend $200 billion subsidizing the purchase of imported natural gas for consumers, just hoping that things "go back to normal after the war".
That's not true. The sanctions against Cuba remain in place because a small but significant number of Cuban exiles care very much and they happen to be mostly concentrated in a swing state
I'm not sure how we could move Cuban-Americans somewhere else unless you are suggesting forced relocations to other parts of the U.S.
Levis wants to sell them jeans. Apple wants to sell them phones. GM wants to sell them truck. Raytheon wants to sell them radar systems. There's just so much money to be made when a formerly isolated market become unlocked that I think you could win back Florida and more with all the donations from the big corporations that would stand to benefit from normalized relations with Cuba.
I think the only reason nothing happens is because there's no one sector that really stands to benefit and can make a concentrated lobbying effort whereas the people that don't want it are a unified ethnic group which for the purposes of high level political analysis can roughly be seen as a voting block.
Ditto all this for Iran, but move all the decimals to the right once or twice.
(11.3M people, per capita GDP $9,500 or so.)
US Presidential politics has been on a knife edge for the past 2+ decades, with multiple popular-vote-minority presidents elected (or appointed, according to some, notably Bush-Gore 2000).
There are a handful of swing states, with Ohio and Florida topping the list via Google Ngram Viewer. The term "swing state of " starts appearing notably around 1995, and has been persistent since the 2000 election.
<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=swing+state+of...>
(Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New , Illinois, and Virginia make the top six over that period. "New" seems likely to be "New York", though it could be the combined effect of "New York" and "New Jersey".)
And again, Cuban politics and policy is absolutely pivotal in Florida.
Also russian controlled gas storage in Germany decided to keep fill levels in storage artificially low. This had direct impact on price and also not part of the sanctions, tho still part of the wider war of russian aggression.
It looks to them like a price-driven transition and if you are a market forces kind of person, the investments in renewables are already following the market pricing structure.
1. https://energyandcleanair.org/eu-co2-emissions-reach-a-30-ye...
Investing $600M right now though.. seems a bit excessive, unless they somehow figured there's a completely unserved multi billion dollar luxury demand.
Verticality (including regular shelves on a single floor) is good for density (may be cheaper to build), but has energy density issues for some crops.
https://www.mapsofworld.com/thematic-maps/arable-land-map.ht...
It's the same nonsensical reasoning behind putting solar panels in places where they don't make sense. I remember france putting money in a solar panel road that was both ridiculously overpriced and ridiculously ineffective for reasons completely predictable. Of course places where solar panels made sense were in essence still barely utilised. Someone just made a lot of money off of the invented scarcity.
1) People who wanna grow mind altering plants and fungi.
2) People who are worried about destabilized food supply chains and would rather have $10 lettuce than no lettuce.
Both groups have priorities that come before riding the razor's edge of economic efficiency.
Local foods are, as I understand it, supposed to be some combination of more eco-friendly and supporting local farmers.
Growing a potato in your kitchen cupboard using hydroponics and PV+LED is very local, but you'd have to grow a lot of them before you saved more on transport and processing emissions than created by the equipment; and you certainly aren't helping local farmers by doing it yourself.
Why do you support local farmers? Like on a deep level? Deeper than "well they're my neighbors" Why do you support your neighbor over some guy in Nebraska? Probably because his culture an interests align with yours whereas the same is not necessarily true about the guy thousands of miles away and all the parties between you and him. You'd rather be slightly less dependent on the long supply chain than the short one.
I'd also like to know what these magical nontransportable crops you have in mind are.
Oddly enough, precisely the opposite circumstance describes most farming.
Greeks and Romans ate pretty literal salads, and I'm pretty sure people historically knew what natural plants were edible and ate them some of the time.
Being able to be self-reliant meant being resilient and so being able to evolve more.
Of course it's a failure because we are decades behind the needed level of tech and cheap energy to makes such approach feasible and probably they will never scale anyway. But for many aspects they are tempting for many people. Robotic industries like them, service industries like them, some long-term sociopolitical planners like them and so on.
Comparison of five cheap methods to grow potatoes hydroponically:
The usual figure I see is that food wastage is about 30--40%.[1] That figure's been remarkably stable over most of the past 100 years, though when the wastage happens has shifted dramatically toward the end-consumption phase, that is after a tremendous amount of additional energy has been applied in the form of transportation, processing, and cold-storage. It's much better to toss unusable food in its raw state on the farm rather than as leftovers from your fridge (harvested, transported, refrigerated or processed, merchandised, bought, driven home, cooked, refrigerated again).
There's some wastage of imperfect fruit and vegetables, yes, though you'd be amazed at how much of that actually is incorporated into processed foods (dishes, smoothies, beverages, etc.) or used in animal feed earlier in the supply-chain.
________________________________
Notes:
1. E.g., US FDA: "In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply." <https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste>. An arbitrarily-selected 1977 citation of the 1974 growing year suggests about 30% food wastage at the time as well ("the combined [food] loss ... could have fed an estimated 49 million people"): <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Food_Waste_an_Opportuni...> Food Waste - an Opportunity to Improve Resource Use Department of Agriculture : Report to the Congress, US GAO (1977). I've seen similar figures in works on resource utilization / limits dating to the 1950s.
Slack is highly underrated.
This also turns out to be a serious problem in advocating for efficiency vs. growth.
Efficiency maximises at 0% wastage. Growth is (in theory, though very rarely in practice) open-ended. At least in the short term, growth compounds, whilst efficiency tends to asymptotically approach some minimum.
I'd had this realisation years ago in various efficiency drives (energy, water usage, etc.). The region that started in a more efficient and lower-usage state often faced a greater challenge than one which was profligate, as the latter would (usually) have an easier time cutting usage.
That's not always the case --- a region might become wholly dependent on profligate wastage, say, in the form of air conditioning or heating, in ways that are difficult to substitute for or curtail, especially given infrastructure which makes limiting such activities difficult. But as a general rule, having more fat to cut should actually increase options, all else equal.
The problem isn't the medium used to grow the calories per se, it's the overall cost per calorie which is mostly energy either in the form of fertilizer (which everyone pays, vertical or not) and in the form of photosynthetic input (which most non-vertical farms receive for free at the cost of reliability). The cost of scaling vertically (literally) is significantly more expensive in operating costs than scaling horizontally is in capital costs as long as the latter receives free energy in the form of sunlight.
For example, green houses which are half way between bare fields and vertical farms in capital cost are economically competitive all over the world because they get free sunlight and extra trapped heat.
But it's wrapped up in the 10x price increase in non-self sourced power and European politics. For the right market, and product it's fine. That market disappeared when discretionary spending shrank in the heartland markets and they made a decision to minimise capex without hedging their power cost inputs. (Or came to the end of the hedge)
So it's a pivot to markets either with cheaper power or with other cost issues in fresh green leafy veg and micro herbs. Ones with less or expensive water, who are also making a pivot to green energy (hint: as they say.. Arabian peninsula) come to mind.
Vertical farms aren't the only industrial sector to come unstuck on assumptions about power input cost. Lots of German industry assumes cheap gas.
There are efforts to shift to hydrogen electrically extracted ("electrolysed") from water, with the electric power obtained from renewables, but it is very early days. If your electrolysers and ammonia synthesis equipment are not too expensive, you can operate just when sun is out or wind blows, and not need to rely on stored or imported energy, or back-up generation. But high capital cost may favor 24/7 operation even at times when power costs more.
The world today produces ammonia in the millions of tons annually, but will produce many times as much when ammonia becomes a favored liquid fuel. It will be synthesized using solar in the tropics, and wind where that is reliable, and exported for backup generation. Nobody will need to store more energy than a week or two's worth, because when you expect to run low you order in.
How will hydroponic farmers adapt? Where will they economically obtain the necessary nutrient solution additives? Are there practical techniques to extract these nutrients from traditional sources, like urine or manure? The aspiring Mars colonist or hydroponic homesteader will need to figure this out, or return to traditional "regenerative" farming practices which compost biological waste and return all used-up nutrients and their constituent elements to the soil.
And for someone like a Moon or Mars colonist, even regenerative farming isn't simple. Composting relies on bacteria to convert waste products like nitrogen-containing urea, whose nitrogen isn't bioavailable to plants, back into useful and bioavailable forms like ammonium. Keeping cultures of bacteria alive and healthy indefinitely will be essential to a colony's continued survival. Are there practical chemical processes to replace the function of these microbes, e.g. to convert urea to ammonia without urease enzymes? I don't know. Maybe someone with more knowledge can comment on this.
I hope this problem can be solved. Hydroponics has many benefits, from dramatically lowered water consumption vs. soil-based agriculture, to higher yields driven by precisely-managed nutrient ratios. Spacefaring farmers will appreciate the weight saved by leaving all that excess water and soil on Earth. It'd be a shame to abandon this technology simply because we couldn't pivot away from fossil fertilizers.
Electric power to run the LEDs, if obtained from renewables, is protected from cost shocks, but such power might be more profitably sold at such times than used to drive LEDs and sell the produce.
Bold statement, I'd be impressed if it holds up by mid-century.
SpaceX cans are woefully inadequate even to maintain a Mars outpost.
The usual term is "outpost", or for a larger operation, "base".
There are no undersea outposts, even. Construction crews sometimes encamp for a few weeks for big hazard pay. There are two (count 'em!) low-orbital outposts that get literally all supplies except sunshine from the ground.
The word colony in the sense of space exploration and other extreme habitats means permanent occupation and exploitation of the resources there.
>4. Sabatier reactor
>Inside this machine, a blast of roughly 750°F heat breaks the bonds inside CO₂, forcing it into its constituent elements. The carbon and oxygen combine with hydrogen from the station’s oxygen generating system to make H₂O and methane (CH₄), the latter of which vents into space.
Even if this pessimistic prediction comes true, the same nutrient-recycling solution could support human life in resource-poor regions on Earth, such as Antarctica or Detroit!
The bigger question is how the liar benefits from the lie. Pumping stock value is the usual guess: (Tesla stock is only now starting to correct, and that largely because of the Twitter debacle.) The fusion-energy startup business runs this way.
This was honestly the first I've heard about concerns regarding phosphate and potassium supplies. After some quick googling, possible projections are 2030 for peak phosphate, 2057 for peak potassium:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus (TIL a large majority of the world's phosphorus reserves are in Morocco)
* Peak Potash study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorganite
>Milorganite is a brand of biosolids fertilizer produced by treating sewage sludge by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. The term is a portmanteau of the term Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen. The sewer system of the District collects municipal wastewater from the Milwaukee metropolitan area. After settling, wastewater is treated with microbes to break down organic matter at the Jones Island sewage treatment plant (also called "Water Reclamation Facility") in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
>The byproduct sewage sludge is produced. This is heat-dried with hot air in the range of 900–1,200 °F (482–649 °C), which heats the sewage sludge to at least 176 °F (80 °C) to kill pathogens. The material is then pelletized and marketed throughout the United States under the name Milorganite. The result is recycling of the nitrogen and phosphorus from the waste-stream as fertilizer.
>The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District's Jones Island Plant had the largest wastewater treatment capacity of any in the world when constructed in 1925. It was the first plant in the United States to succeed in using the activated sludge treatment process to produce fertilizer.
Potassium is excreted by humans mainly in urine, which is easy to recover. But NPK fertilizer is just one piece of the puzzle. AFAIK, plants require 17 essential micro- and macro-nutrients to grow [0]. I'm just a lay gardener, not a chemist nor research scientist, so I'm not sure how to approach recovering calcium, magnesium, sulfur, or metals like zinc and molybdenum for nutrient solution manufacture. That's the nice thing about composting for soil-based gardening; so long as the right microbes are there to make it bioavailable, all the elements you need are in the used-up biomatter. If it was eaten and not exhaled, sweated out, nor incorporated into the body, it'll be there in the waste stream.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/There-are-17-essential-p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
To farm plants without soil, they must be supplied with a water-based nutrient solution. The solution contains a precise mixture of all chemical substances a particular plant needs to grow. Yield efficiencies can be realized by carefully tailoring this mixture to each plant. The problem is where to source the ingredients once extracting them from mineral deposits turns uneconomical.
Compost- and manure-amended soil theoretically has everything plants need, but that's not very useful for soil-free farming. The precise ratio of nutrients in a given patch of soil is also outside of the farmer's control. Perhaps the individual nutrients can be leached, distilled, or otherwise chemically separated from compost and biological waste products to enable their reuse in finely-mixed solutions? I don't know. Maybe someone with more knowledge can answer.
They don't disappear from the planet when consumed.
This doesn’t need to stop at the hydroponics system. There are plenty of opportunities to create better nutrient loops in our food production system.
We have been working on this for nearly five years. We currently participate in a project which has two dozen companies participating in closing this nutrient loops and create better and more efficient food production.
One question about this video— at 1:46 the speaker says, "fish provide all the nutrients [for] our vegetables, which means we don't have to add anything artificial." Is this accurate? My impression was that aquaponics mitigates, but does not completely eliminate, the need for industrial fertilizers/nutrient solution additives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGmJETrqzN4&t=1m46s
Another question— with aquaponics, how do you incorporate food waste into the circularity? Do you feed it to the fish, extract nutrients via an external physical/chemical process, or just dump it in the water and let it decompose? I've heard the latter approach described as "fermented plant juice", and its apparent simplicity is certainly appealing:
We see that a very large portion can be done with circular biological systems. We have been working to incorporate food waste via insects. We take allowed food waste and feed insect larvae. There are several teams in Sweden working on this together, with some government support.
I haven't seen the "fermented plant juice" before, but the principle is the same, let bacteria work on it.
Furthermore, I am thinking of places like Canada (where I live) that get very little sunlight in the winter, despite having incredible abundance of fresh water. We could grow a lot of vegetables in the winter and power the artificial lighting using wind, hydroelectricity, or nuclear. This would allow us to avoid importing so many vegetables from California or Mexico.
I realize PV panels are less than 100% efficient at solar to electric energy conversion. Wikipedia suggests 30% is a realistic figure for large-scale solar installations. Batteries also add losses, so let's assume LEDs only run while the sun shines. LEDs themselves add losses too, so our inefficiencies seem to be piling up... All the same, I'd love to see someone run the experiment of (yield per care of traditional farming) / (yield per acre of solar panels + vertical hydroponics).
As I understand the variation in green light and it’s intensity mucks up photosynthesis, now if photosynthesis could be tuned to use green light too that would be handy, it’s just that evolution has a head start of billions of years.
Of course though eukaryotic cells run on mitochondria, if energy could be sourced to the cell to replace the chloroplasts directly that could be one way around. But denaturing food like that could have unforeseen consequences.
There was a Tommorow’s World item about making food from petrochemicals, I’m still aghast.
You make that sound so bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein
Imagine the potential... ;->
So my solar panel that gets ~200W/m2 could feed 10x the area of plants than the sun directly?
Something does not add up here.
Edit: 10k/200 is 50 so I don’t see how you ended up with 10-15
What we need is an energy efficient way of producing food with minimal cost and which doesn't turn arable land into a vast monoculture. Alas, we need food more, and experimenting with food supply can be... disruptive...
> Management believes there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. [1]
If you rely on cheap energy, then yes. If you grow under the sun, vertical systems and hydro-/aeroponics still make a lot of sense, IMO.
Check what these guys are growing under the sun in grow towers:
I think this would be impossible to reproduce with traditional horizontal farming.
So when at some point in future we manage to get cheap renewable replacements to fossil fuels, all of this becomes very relevant.
Now the socio-political trend is extremely in the other direction: Disparage, shame, and ridicule any intent to improve the world and any interest or intent in innovation; that competition for survival, rather than improving our world, is the only purpose; that only corporations and wealthy people can accomplish anything; that only 'bosses' have worthwhile ideas; and fetishizing power, corruption, and 'post-truth', and exercising that for profit rather than merit.
We were right the first time - you can see all that was accomplished. Those truths haven't changed. But it's harder going when so many disparage them.
We have definitely hit some snags like the collapse of Google search results, drm, and several other major human hostile monetization strategies but the reality is that we can do a lot more a lot faster as an individual or with your own team than you could in very recent history.
As for touting international logistics as innovative, I guess we're ignoring the last couple thousand years of sea trading? The only innovations in this space are new shipbuilding techniques and the dismantling of international trade tarif regimes, neither of which involves the kinds of technology touted here.
As to claimed productivity gains, you can do more of what, exactly?
(Yes, there are many variations to traditional recipes and there often is not one official recipe, but I see that as something else from the many different recipes found online for the same thing)
Shipping not well preserving crops from other side of the world is weird. But that doesn't mean it has to come from across the road. From massive vertical building.
I strongly disagree. If you think it's incidental, you make yourself a victim. You can see the campaigns by people like Thiel to promote nationalism and the power of the wealthy, and by groups like the Federalist Society and the very large neo-reactionary movement (my term).
Framing the debate and the 'mood' is the most powerful thing you can do, and many smart people know that and work hard at it. You can look up the research by people like the Heritage think tank, who develops talking points that frame the debates, and that eventually you hear people you know unwittingly repeating. Also, if you read HN you are aware of the grassroots disinformation campaigns by governments. Social media gives them much more power.