This basically made me regard vertical farming as... not fundamentally important to the future of food.
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.
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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.
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.
Oddly enough, precisely the opposite circumstance describes most farming.
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.
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.
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.
I'd also like to know what these magical nontransportable crops you have in mind are.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Investing $600M right now though.. seems a bit excessive, unless they somehow figured there's a completely unserved multi billion dollar luxury demand.