Grain farming goes indoors | Hacker News Reader

Grain farming goes indoors

modernfarmer.com

60 pointsblacksqr118 comments

One thing people seem to be ignoring is that this research is useful because it creates a controlled environment in which to explore the variable affecting crop yields, even if the stated application has very limited practical value. Also keep in mind that many technologies take a considerable amount of time to develop before they are of any value at scale.

Take something that I presume most people on this forum are intimately familiar with: computers. It is not too difficult to find people mocking historical figure for claiming the world only needed a handful of computers, yet those claims made sense in a historical context: early computation devices were mechanical, electromechanical, or tube based. They were huge, slow, and seen of little value outside of performing a calculations in very specific domains. Even science fiction authors of the era had a difficult time imagining them as anything but hulking machines that may have controlled everything, yet were only accessible to a few. Attitudes may have shifted when transistors entered the picture, and shifted even further when integrated circuits were developed, yet it wasn't until the mid-70's until people started imagining what we have today. Even so, they were a novelty to most people until the mid-90's. We are talking about half a century in going from something that we would recognize as a computer until they were adopted by society as a whole. And that is ignoring the fact that people have been trying to develop calculating machines for centuries.

Research is good, even if the vast majority of it ends up leading to dead-ends, simply because we don't have sufficient imagination to determine what will be useful in the future.

This is true - and I think what’s also being missed here is the potential to further this research for producing grain off-world. Growing crops in space or other planets will be a heavily optimized and controlled process so it’s good to explore these possibilities here on earth even if it doesn’t yet make commercial sense.

"with the first successfully grown indoor wheat."

I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY

Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.

As usual, actual numbers for water/land/pesticide use (5%/3%/0%), but the only mention of electricity use is the fraction of green power.

Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it.

We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green energy production, not enormous new energy sinks.

"Just use green power" isn't the get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card people think it is.

And don’t forget the energy and materials you need to build something where you can actually grow things indoors. Total waste of so many things here. We know that we can grow stuff in greenhouses. We know wheat is a cheap commodity too, where it is hard to gain a profit on. What are they trying to accomplish here?

Dunno. In some places agriculture is fried with climate change at the gates so trying things to regain control over culture conditions could worth it. Could be useful also for keeping isolated varieties non contaminated with genetically modified pollen. Just in case something go wrong with that.

Not to mention plants are peak "green energy". There is a very real irony to the indoor farming movement.

Not so fast.

If you replace outdoor crops with forests, they'll sequester much more CO2.

In principle you can replace many acres of outdoor crops with one acre of greenhouse crops: with electric illumination you can make plants grow during nighttime, and with controlled temperature you they can also grow during the winter.

Irrigation also needs much less water in a greenhouse (because plants lose a lot of water via transpiration, and in a humid environment they transpire less). Not to mention that you can recycle the water in a greenhouse.

Irrigation is a big component of the energy expenditure of crops, but not the only one. All other components will decrease. Fertilizer, pesticides, tilling: you just don't need huge tractors to go miles and miles to the fields. You can have much smaller machines doing the job on the spot.

I'm not saying greenhouses are the solution to all the world's problems, but they shouldn't just be discarded outright.

That may be the principle but it's obviously flawed inasmuch as every square inch of cultivation needs its square inch of sunlight equivalent to grow. So now you're stuck with the energy cost of cramming (the sun) x (your stack depth) into your grow facility. You can certainly save on other inputs like water, but you lose the only free input available to agriculture, namely sunlight.

This would not be the case if you where growing the wheat in a tropical climate where wheat would not normally grow.

For example think of Sudan. Most of the current supplies need to be shipped by ship and then expensively transported inland.

But Sudan has lots of sunlight.

Modern logistics systems are so efficient transportation costs are a rounding error for bulk commodities. How's the energy grid looking in Sudan these days?

There is very little logistics in Sudan. The roads are often unpaved. The cost of road hauling the wheat will probably double the cost.

But on the other hand there is lots of sunlight for solar.

So the proposal is to construct and maintain complex infrastructure in a place where simple road construction and maintenance are problematic?

Plants don't use the whole light spectrum, at most they use 45% of the natural light. Solar panels can take advantage of the whole spectrum. Then, the indoor lighting will just shine the light that the plants can actually use (all growing lamps advertise that, see [1] for example).

Plants also don't use the light while they are just sprouting. Plants don't use light after you harvest them. And most importantly, plants don't use light where they are not.

If you have vast areas of desert, you can mount lots of solar panels. Lots of places are somewhat between pure Dunes-type desert and Ukrainian-type super fertile chernozem. In a semi-desert place, you might be better off just installing solar panels and building indoor farms. Think of places like Arizona, or Nevada, or, why not, Sudan.

[1] https://bioslighting.com/grow-light-spectrum-led-plants/grow...

Or we could maybe just keep growing things in places where they actually grow? Crazy, right?

The big deal here is the yield; the field outside my window yields 6 tonnes/hectare/year on a good year. The article mentions 117 tonnes/hectare and I assume it's on a yearly basis.

I can't imagine the production being more energy efficient than a regular field, but it sure saves space. I can imagine places like Singapore would benefit greatly since it could produce food locally.

Eliminating those huge tractors injects a huge amount of inefficiency into your harvest operation.

How? Electrical equipment moving on rails seems more efficient than driving diesel tractors around on tires on dirt.

Really? On what grounds? A modern combine can harvest 30 acres of wheat in an hour, and can be trivially reconfigured to handle a variety of bulk grains. Your task is now to match or better that without resorting to a monstrous pool of starvation-wage labor and without raising the price of grain to the level of a luxury good.

As I understand it, the stacked greenhouse is automated, so no labor, starvation-wage or otherwise.

Modern combines sit idle when the harvesting period ends. So about 90% of the year. With indoor farming, you are not constrained by the seasons. You can rotate your crops, so you harvest some in January, some others in February, etc. Whatever machines you need for harvesting, spraying, tilling, etc, you can arrange to use each 100% of the time.

I personally think grains will not be economical indoors this decade, or maybe even next, but in some not very distant future, the majority of the agricultural products will be produced indoors, just like chickens are now. Of course, when that time will come, indoor farming will be perceived as bad, horrendous, anti-nature, etc, just like people perceive the industrialized chicken farms now.

Neat thing about idle equipment, it doesn't consume any inputs, so not real sure where you think you're going with that one. And yes, you aren't constrained by seasons. You're constrained by grid electricity rates, market prices for agricultural products, available labor pool, and the supply of dumb money naive enough to capitalize infrastructure projects that are balanced on that house of cards.

Same, I have a green house. I have high tunnels and low tunnels too. They allow my family to grow nearly 100% of our plant needs year round. But I don't grow my grains in a tunnel or a house. I don't grow my pasture in one either. Green houses are a tool and there is a place for every tool. New tools get used for lots of things they aren't good for.

outdoor farming already uses green power - a giant fusion reactor in space, if you would believe it.

It also uses a lot of non-green power to plant, spray, harvest, and transport.

you have to plant, spray, harvest, and transport even the indoor stuff.

You don't need to spray because you control the environment, you don't need to transport as far, and planting and harvesting won't use fossil fuels (unless that's your only source of electricity).

Harvesting won't use what? Are you proposing we, as a species, revert to harvesting the equivalent of a few hundred million acres of cultivated land by hand?

It's indoors, probably on many narrowly spaced floors, so you're hardly going to use a combine harvester! There would be some much smaller electrically-powered robotic system.

So now we're proposing to replace an insanely efficient harvesting system that has been refined and perfected over the course of the last century with what? Rasberry Pi's and some off the shelf stepper motors? Best of luck with your endeavor.

you have to spray because

1) you still have to use actual soil and thats full of bugs and organisms already

2) if you aren't fertilizing you won't get anywhere near the yield farmers do and you won't be competitive on cost.

Harvesting will still require the use of whatever harvesting technology there is. If we can't competitively build grain harvesters with electricity outdoors its unlikely that you'll be able to do the same indoors. You'll notice no pictures or description of how they harvest - they aren't doing it by hand and they don't say its by electricity, and even if it is do you think the sun provides more energy for free over the life of the crop vs the one time its harvested?.

This doesn't seem very interesting as it stands now.

This article doesn't say, but vertical farms almost always grow hydroponically, using sterilized inert media (like coir) or inherently sterile inert media (like rockwool). The water and fertilizer are delivered together by drip irrigation. Some farms may instead use no medium at all, like in NFT or DWC. With precise control over the plant nutrition, this can achieve higher yields per square foot than soil, making optimal use of the expensive indoor space. (I think grains are particularly unsuitable crops though, per my other comments here.)

In theory it's possible to run completely free of insects, with cleanroom-like precautions, and I think some facilities do. I think it's more common to live with some level of insect pests though, since it's so hard to avoid introductions and so destructive when they occur--with no natural predators, they can multiply far faster than in nature. That implies some level of pesticides, deliberately introduced predatory insects (which are particularly effective indoors, since they can't fly away), etc.

you're still fertilizing then, its just in the liquid you're using. I suppose that helps against nitrogen runoff which is bad for water bodies so thats a plus.

That means we would have to build our own fusion reactor on Earth or on Mars. Sure, it would be worth it on Mars since you don't have any other choice but on Earth? Anyone who thinks that is arguing in bad faith.

As an example, if we use solar to generate the electricity to power the indoor farm, the panels will take up roughly 20-40% of the sun's energy, depending on the panel.

So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land.

The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?

This seems like a good point: just building greenhouses, providing full control of water usage and easy mechanical access, delivers all the value without the inefficient trip through solar panels and LEDs.

On the other hand, wind power would not use up cropland, and the solar panels could be on non-crop land, or water. Stacked grow trays might be more efficient to operate on.

The new Frankenstein rice that does CD4 photosynthesis, and also makes carotenes, seems like a good choice to grow in them. Maybe it can be persuaded to make protein, in the bargain.

It's more complicated than that, since the wavelength distribution matters--we can effectively transform green photons that the plant would have reflected into red or blue photons that it will absorb. (The plant still benefits from some green light, but less than in sunlight.) We can also supply each plant with its exact optimal PPFD and DLI. For example, lettuce may be grown under shade cloth, deliberately wasting much of the incident sunlight, because the extra light won't make it grow faster and will make it taste bitter. In a vertical farm, we can just set the LED current and spacing wherever we want.

I've heard that 1 m^2 of modern solar panels will support >1 m^2 of a low-light crop (like lettuce, unlike grain) under modern LEDs. I haven't done the math myself, and this obviously varies with climate. I think vertical farms (growing entirely by artificial light) are still uneconomic vs. greenhouses almost everywhere, per my other comment here. Supplemental artificial light in a greenhouse is of course highly economic in many climates, and Dutch growers have been using it for decades.

The cost to heat or cool a vertical farm should be lower than for a greenhouse with equivalent growing area, since it's got lower surface-area-to-volume ratio and doesn't need to be transparent. That may be important for stuff like high-end strawberries, where tight control of the day-night temperature swing enables higher sugar content. I again wouldn't expect a useful benefit for grains, though.

Food is localized. I'm in Korea now. There's very little arable land here, and vegetables are expensive. It could easily turn into a case of there simply not being available to everyone, simply because there's just not enough. However if the price rises enough to justify the cost of growing it locally in vertical farms, this secures access to greens to everyone. My in-laws are trying to do this at home and even just for their own needs: vegetables are becoming so expensive that it's more affordable to grow them on their balcony. Vertical farming is something they want to do to allow them to improve and maintain their diet at an sustainable cost (that of electricity). And energy is more efficient to import than greens, since it's fungible.

Vertical factory farms make a ton of sense here.

The objections are to vertical farms for grain, not vertical farms in general. Leafy greens are ideal candidates for indoor growing by artificial light, since they need relatively little light and are quickly perishable. The savings in transportation and waste may thus offset the costs of electricity, lights, and other capital equipment. I think even those economics are usually marginal now, and such vertical farms are usually profitable only if they can sell their produce at a premium due to real or perceived better quality (outside unusual locations like the far North). But there's still room for improvement in LED efficiency, automation, etc., so maybe it will cross over.

The economics for grain are much worse--the plants need much more light, and the product is easily dried, stored, and transported. The processing is also highly automated already. Here's an article with some (dismal) numbers:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117

Also, early grain breeding trials (before field testing) at least since Borlaug. Walk past any university greenhouse in the Midwest and peek inside

I hope they meant "first indoor wheat grown and sold commercially at competitive prices" or something, because yah certainly research and plant breeding have been done indoors (at least partially) for decades.

The assumption is that those field outdoors will work in the future. That is were your price point linear graph is wrong.

We wrote a short paper estimating and analyzing this sort of thing, and the numbers don't add up:

https://raghavan.usc.edu/papers/smartfarm-limits21.pdf

Maybe there's something different in this specific technique, but they need to publish detailed numbers before it's believable.

The way vertical farming works is that you use some sort of plant that has a massive surface to volume ratio and then just spread out the growing light on as big an area as possible. This strategy will get you very expensive "leafy greens" and inexpensive cannabis and no grains at all because the "growing lights are more efficient than natural sunlight" calculation no longer works because grains actually grow better if they are exposed to intense (sun)light which is expensive to produce in a vertical farm.

(from my own memory and it also happens to be a lazy summary of the paper)

I just can't see how this can replace conventional farming at scale. Currently, outdoor farming uses 4.62 billion acres [1]. The article says indoor farming has 25x the yield per acre. So that would be 177 million acres. Today, there are only about 44 million acres of total buildings in the world [2]. So to replace conventional farming, we'd need to build 4x as many buildings as currently exist; what's the environmental impact of _that_?

But the real deal-breaker is energy. Outdoor farming gets energy naturally from sunlight. Indoor farming is powered by LED lights. LEDs could be more efficient than sunlight by only emitting the frequencies that are most useful for plants; but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre. So let's estimate it's exactly as bright as sunlight. To light 177 million acres exactly as bright as sunlight, you'd need somewhere around 3,000,000 terawatt-hours per year. For comparison, global electricity consumption is around 25,000 terawatt-hours per year [3]. So to replace conventional farming, this would need about 100x as much electricity as the current global electrical grid can supply!

So until we get fusion power, I doubt this is practical.

[1] https://www.producer.com/news/worlds-farmland-total-bigger-e...

[2] https://guidehouseinsights.com/news-and-views/the-global-bui...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption

But what if you _couldn't_ farm outdoors, because your outdoor farm is now a dust bowl, or a desert, or a recently inundated coastal plain, submerged by sea water?

Financial practicality is not a concern if this is the only way a region has to make food.

If any of those things happened our food needs would likely be diminished anyway

No more steak, that's for sure.

Have you tried "long pig"?

Congratulations, you have just indirectly solved global warming via a massive reduction in the global population.

You mean the Mad Max universe or Mars?

I kind of mean in places like Saudi Arabia, Saharan Africa, or Phoenix in 20 years or so.

"but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre."

https://i.imgur.com/FFKWNy8.jpg

I've been doing this for almost a full decade, so can say with quite a lot of certainty that you can safely put your suspicions to rest. We even have tech to grow various crop types to harvest stage without needing light at all.

Could you explain the picture?

The picture is me over a decade ago, doing microscopic analysis of live plant tissues growing under targeted-spectrum LED lighting in a vertically-stacked hydroponics building, and proving the viability of the very technology being discussed in the thread article.

This isn't even new tech. We've been using it since the 90s. The LEDs are new, everything else is exactly the same as it was back then. Maybe better nutrient profiles.

On the other side of the picture, behind the camera, was a grass-growing system that didn't require light for the grass to grow at all. We were doing artificial photosynthesis over there.

What's REALLY the big thing here is the NFT hydroponics technique being utilized.

https://i.imgur.com/uRkKe.jpg

Even several decades ago, you got great yields on regular land using far less water. Not even multiple stacked systems.

Now that we have good LED tech, stacked grow systems indoors makes a lot of sense. 1/8 of an acre to produce what 1 acre does, using much less in the way of resources. Water? Hugely reduced depending on the hydroponics system. Yields? Comparable or greater in a reduced footprint. Energy usage? Think about all that fuel those tractors you no longer need are burning to till soil, harvest crops, and do general field work on top.

Everything slowly combines to become an economically and ecologically-sound system.

Not so fast, you just skated right past capital requirements for build out, maintenance costs, and the sun. There was an article posted in here not two weeks ago detailing how the entire stacked grow startup industry is imploding due to increases in energy costs and I'm quite certain you haven't figured out how to grow tomatoes in pitch blackness.

I don't understand "artificial photosynthesis". Glucose in the water?

Elsewhere you write "electrocatalysis-based artificial photosynthesis". Wires clipped to the roots?

Solar Foods, in Finland, has a strain of Xanthobacter agilis that eats hydrogen, nitrogen, and CO2, and produces tasty protein (70% by dried weight) and carotenes. Their plan is to electrolyse water for the hydrogen, using renewable power.

Sorry, but I'm still quite skeptical; I'm going to need you to make a specific case, not just ask me to trust you because you're in the vertical farming industry.

> so can say with quite a lot of certainty that you can safely put your suspicions to rest

I took a closer look at https://www.infarm.com/vision, and it seems that the way they achieved 25x the yield per acre was by stacking multiple layers. So each layer needs its own set of LEDs. How bright is each layer of LEDs, compared to sunlight? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency, only about 45% of sunlight is in the part of the spectrum that plants can use; so if you grow crops with purple LEDs, you could use only 45% as much energy as sunlight. But if you're getting 25x the yield-per-acre by having 3 layers, then you're using 3*45%=135% as much energy-per-acre as sunlight.

I admit I'm not an expert, and these numbers are very rough estimates. Feel free to point me to a source that gives more specific numbers for yield-per-acre of an energy-intensive crop; number of layers used; and electricity usage per layer per acre.

> We even have tech to grow various crop types to harvest stage without needing light at all.

It's physically impossible to produce food without an energy source. So if you're not using light as the energy source, then what are you using? And if you look further upstream, where is the energy ultimately coming from?

> Energy usage? Think about all that fuel those tractors you no longer need are burning to till soil, harvest crops, and do general field work on top.

According to https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Agricultural_energy_..., the total energy use of the agricultural sector worldwide is roughly 2,000 to 3,000 terawatt-hours per year. That includes fossil fuels too, not just electricity. So the energy used to run a tractor is tiny compared to the amount of sunlight falling on the field.

That's until they manage to stack vertically six layers of planted wheat, then you have 156x the yield per acre. You don't need to move all farming indoors either to create a big impact, if some countries manage to move indoors only 20% of the farming for instance, that's already a huge change by any possible measure, be it environmental, economic or geopolitical.

And also your remark about the energy cost doesn't seem correct, if that were true any kind of indoors agriculture would be too expensive to be possible.

But if you stack six layers, each layer needs its own set of LEDs, or else the lower layers wouldn't get any light; so the energy usage per unit of wheat is the same.

(In fact, if you look at the photos and video on https://www.infarm.com/vision, it seems like they're already doing multiple layers, each layer with its own set of LEDs; so the energy-usage-per-acre is probably already significantly more than direct sunlight.)

> And also your remark about the energy cost doesn't seem correct, if that were true any kind of indoors agriculture would be too expensive to be possible.

My understanding is that commercially-viable indoor agriculture works by focusing on expensive foods that are not very energy-dense, like fresh leafy greens. According https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0706-x, the cost of electricity to grow fresh leafy greens indoors is 1% of what they can be sold for. But to grow tomatoes, the cost of electricity is 18% of the selling price; and to grow grains, the cost of electricity is 10,000% of the selling price!

Ok so let's run with this a bit. The US uses on average 90 million acres of land annually for grain production. If we stack 10 deep we'd need a 8-10 story structure the size of Vermont.

Fusion will not help.

I had the same thoughts initially. It's interesting to think about with the way the climate is heading. The people that are working on this are likely also working on breeding plants that are more suited to growing indoors. Useful genes would be dwarfing genes or genes that speed up the growth cycle. What breeders would be looking for is completely different than what's been selected for throughout history. Most grains are also annuals but there is work being done on breeding perennial grains.

Do you know why strawberries from California are available at the supermarket all year round? It's because farmers and breeders found a gene that made strawberries daylight neutral, meaning they didn't have to go through a "winter" season to produce fruit again. Plants will keep bearing fruit all year round.

This is just a proof of concept. A first attempt. Assume increased yields over time through engineering improvements, maybe some genetic engineering, etc. You end up with a more favorable situation.

Also with vertical farming, you have to think in terms of vertical and time dimensions. You have no more seasons and you get to harvest throughout the year. And you can stack vertically. So, it can be pretty efficient in terms of land usage depending on how high you stack.

As for energy and light needs. Yes, it would need lots of energy but nowhere near what you think. Your back of the envelope math is talking about acres which isn't that useful of a metric for your energy needs. This is the fallacy in your argument. It's not about the light emitted but about the light delivered to the plant. Which depends mainly on the distance to the plant of the light source.

You can actually grow herbs with a kitchen light LED. I've done so. They sure aren't anywhere near as bright as the sun or particularly efficient. But it works. You just have to put them pretty close to the plant to minimize the light losses. That's the whole point of a vertical farm: minimize the losses by maximizing the light usage. Lots of low energy LEDs centimeters away from the plant are much more efficient than big light sources a meter or so away. And what happens to the light that "misses" the plant? Very simple it either gets absorbed by something and turned into heat or reflected by something back to the plant. And of course you'll find lots of reflective surfaces in vertical farms for that reason. Ultimately a lot of it gets transformed into heat. Some of that is useful. Plants grow faster at higher temperatures. And some of that is a cooling problem. Which takes more energy.

Vertical farming feasibility is mainly going to be a function of price and availability of energy. And as energy is the most costly component, yields measured in tonnes per mwh are a more sensible way to think about the feasibility than tonnes per acre. Acres are not that useful as a metric for measuring energy usage. They are useful for traditional farms mainly because land is expensive and you can't stack your crops on it. But it's a useless notion for measuring vertical farm production. How do you even measure acres in a 3 dimensional environment?

So the real feasibility just depends on cost per mwh. As that comes down, a lot of things become feasible. Including vertical farming all sorts of things. It's a cost curve. Right now energy is to costly and yields are to low. There's a point where those curves cross and things become feasible.

> As for energy and light needs. Yes, it would need lots of energy but nowhere near what you think. Your back of the envelope math is talking about acres which isn't that useful of a metric for your energy needs.

It's true that acres were an awkward way to do the calculation. Let's redo the calculation in megawatt-hours.

- According to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0706-x, grain crops yield about 0.24 grams of dry weight per mol of photons. (This assumes 100% of the photons are delivered to the plant, e.g. the LED is shining directly on the leaf with nothing lost.)

- One mol of photons embodies about 0.1kWh of energy. (That's for red photons; higher-frequency photons would require more energy. And note this is a physical limit, where we're assuming the LEDs are already 100% efficient.)

- So that works out to 0.0024 metric tonnes dry weight of grain per MWh. Global grain production is about 2,700 million metric tonnes per year (per https://www.statista.com/statistics/263977/world-grain-produ...)

- So we'd need 1,125,000 TWh/yr of energy to grow the world's supply of grain through indoor farming, or 45x the world's current electricity production. And this calculation is just for grains; to grow all the non-grain crops too, you'd need even more energy. So I stand by my original estimate.

What about genetic engineering? Looking at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0706-x, the "0.24 grams of dry weight per mol of photons" calculation is taking into account that e.g. grain plants are not as efficient as some other plants at absorbing light, and not all of the grain plant is edible. The most efficient plants (leafy greens) produce 1.33 grams of dry weight per mol of photons. So if we could genetically engineer a grain plant that absorbed as much light as the most efficient plants, and didn't have an inedible stalk, then we'd need 203,000 TWh/yr of electricity to grow the world's supply of grain, which is "only" 8x the world's current electricity production.

And at that point, we've squeezed out all the obvious sources of inefficiency; to do better, you'd need to fundamentally change plant biology, or just do photosynthesis directly in a vat, or something.

For general interest;

Let's call Western Australia a small cog in feeding the world demand for grain.

* WA produces on average 13 million tonnes of grains (cereals, oilseeds and pulses) each year. Grain exports generate more than $4 billion (five year average) for the WA economy each year

* The state's grain production area, known as the 'wheatbelt', covers seven million hectares across the south-west corner of the state.

* 7 million hectares ~ 17.3 million acres

Assuming a factor 30 (greater than the 26 stated in the article) increase in production ...

It would take 233,000 hectares (576,600 acres) powered, piped, under a roof, with artifical light to achieve the equivilant production.

[1] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains

[2] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/west...

etc.

To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers.

You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine.

You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.

It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...

That's a truly insane local climate changing amount of ad-hoc greenhouses, although it appears the bulk crop is leafy greens and organic growers market produce.

Grains are different beast again, you want millions of tonnes cheaply with efficient bulk acerage harvesting etc.

Thanks for the link, if I hadn't seen it I might not have believed it.

Those are a long shot from the level of climate control the vertical farming crowd is talking about though. On a spectrum between untouched nature and isolated artificial growing environment the Almeria installations aren't that far from the best-prepared open sky setups.

You are assuming a single-story building growing only one level of crops per floor. It should be feasible to have 2-3 crops for each floor, which cuts down the required space. For example, the Tesla gigafactory has 229 acres of floor space, and it is high enough for two floors with 2 levels of crops per floor, so 629 would have to be built. The factories could be built in desert areas. Also, the world would be very interesting if 17.4 million acres of land were returned to nature.

He assumes 30 layers of plants... Reread his comment.

I guess I could see some use cases in places that can't farm grain but still want some farmed locally for strategic or protectionist reasons. But on a pure cost basis I don't see how this will ever be competitive with growing grain under open skies in suitable locations, and then shipping it where you need it. At least not on earth.

Am I missing something with this whole square foot fetish? I get that vertical farms can be great in cities for reducing shipping issues. But how many cubic feet are used is more interesting to me. Sure, it costs money for land. It also costs money to build vertical infrastructure. It seems that only in urban areas are the costs for land so prohibitive as to make the infrastructure costs look reasonable.

All the city farming tech stuff requires some kinda cyberpunk megalopolis scenario to be remotely practical. Or maybe a nuclear post-apocalypse. It's cool or whatever, but most of the world has quite a lot of arable land.

Nice pun. But crop cultures are substantialy 2D things. You cannot economically grow them in multiple layers (like you can mushrooms). You need to put enough solar energy onto that surface, so it cannot be excessively vertical.

Grain storage and transportation have been perfected through literally millennia. Grain can be stored for years and there is no premium to collect for fresh, just collected grain (unlike vegetables, for instance).

Grains can be stored for years but it isn't economical to store more than one year's harvest for farmers.

They use their grain bins to smooth out the demand over a year.

This really doesn't seem cost-effective. Yeah on the one hand you're getting an increase in your output but on the other, you're getting a massive increase in costs. Traditional farming is dirt simple - you put the seeds in the dirt and the plant grows, then you harvest the plant (plus irrigation, plus fertilisation, plus pesticide use, etc). The cost, once you have the land, is the cost of the seed you're using (plus labour, plus machinery, plus water rights, plus everything else).

With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow.

"With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow. "

With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for the setup.

LEDs are way more efficient when using properly-targeted wavelengths for the crop - way more efficient than the sun.

And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage, without any light whatsoever. Look up H2OFarm on BBC Countryfile, if the video of that company still exists on the BBC site.

> … way more efficient than the sun.

How many kilowatts hours of generated power do you have to put into the sun to get a certain output of photons?

None you say? Interesting…

This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Just use the land to produce something more valuable than grain and trade that for the grain you need.

If you get down to the actual physics of it all, plants waste so much actual sunlight. It's actually more efficient to harvest the sunlight, store it, and convert back into photons using efficient targeted-wavelength LEDs to just put the amount of light that will get used where it needs to go, and use the remaining power for other things like pumps or atmospheric conditioning.

Nuclear incandescence efficiency - 93 lux/wH - approximately 14% overall efficiency at 6500K.

LED efficiency - narrow-band wavelengths make measuring lux at any wavelength other than green useless, so we stick to overall conversion efficiency, which ranges from ~35% in the red to ~80% in the blue, then we get to phosphor-converted white LEDs using a blue base, which can be compared again to the nuclear incandescence above, and these reach over 200 lux/wH at 6500K, and that was with Cree MK-R LEDs a decade ago.

Then you get into photosynthetic efficiency, which is absolutely dismal in the low single-digit percentage range.

I'll leave the extra math to you. Suffice to say, it's more efficient with decade-old tech to store the sunlight and convert as needed.

> And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage,

Please expand on this if you would. The seeds would not necessarily need light to germinate but certainly you would not be able to grow beyond the energy contained in the seed which had to come from somewhere.

It's a form of artificial photosynthesis - electrocatalysis-based artificial photosynthesis.

We don't need sunlight, or light at all. We can mimic its effects and induce the biological mechanisms to work. For a fodder grass, you only need a few weeks from germination to harvest.

You aren't violating basic physics and thermodynamics being what they are please explain simply where the additional energy comes from?

"electrocatalysis-based artificial photosynthesis"

https://engr.udel.edu/news/2022/06/artificial-photosynthesis...

This should help out some.

The extra energy comes from the electro. Electricity into acetate, then used as 'plant food'. As a substitute for the glucose perhaps?

Radical!

This reads like marketing bullshit. "4 times more efficient than photosynthesis" is gibberish when the sun costs nothing and your process requires electricity. Yeast, algae, and fungus? And maybe lettuce (which has roughly the nutritional content of a glass of ice water with a couple gnats in it)? That's it?

I don't understand what problem this is meant to actually since. We have no shortage of land or water in most of the world. Aside from some tiny cases like nuclear bunkers or space colonies this remains a pet project.

Water is actually scarce and getting more scarce every year, particularly in agricultural areas.

There are article about this pretty much every year now.

How would this venture bypass the water issue? Because, I think this venture will also require similar quantity of water.

The same way every hydroponic system saves water. Recirculation.

Traditional soil growing literally pours the water on the ground, where most of it evaporates, and what doesn’t sinks into the soil and becomes unrecoverable on any reasonable timescale.

Depends how deep your well is. Sometimes around here, the water table is closer to the ground than your basement floor is…

It’s not the depth. It’s the rate of draw vs replenish.

We can drop water requirements up to 99% for some crops versus traditional land farming using hydroponics. You get a sealed environment where water doesn't just get lost.

From the article: "In addition to the mobility of indoor farms, vertical farming has the capacity to grow food with 95% less water and 97% less land, according to the USDA"

It's really not.

The patterns of rainfall are changing. But that's just a matter of needing better infrastructure or moving crops around to follow it.

It's also important to note it's a renewable resource: when you use 1l of water, you don't "use" it forever, 99% of it just goes back into the water cycle.

"Place X will be out of water by 2025" is great clickbait but it's totally untrue.

Pretty cool.

Maybe one day someone will invent a way of growing food where the supply of sunlight and water is fully automated and at near zero cost, and a way to reduce the building costs.

I'm from Argentina. Our incomes comes basically from agriculture and livestock, we export almost all (we produce food for 10 times our population, estimated)

Anyway I'm very sure that in some years the country incomes will plummet, because the technification. We are not doing anything against the fact that climate change, wars and technology are driving us to a point that every country can grow their own meat or grain on their own land.

Now farming this indoor is expensive, but in few years importing will be higher, and the technology to produce that indoor, on your own land will be cheap.

Now, we are having a really bad bad drought that cut our income expectation by 40%, soy beans prices will be really high this year, other things like wheat, corn, etc maybe will be not affected because our market is Latin America (prices will be for them). Cattle is dying becaue ethe lack of water, but anyway we are so stupid country that we don't have the number of livestock we had decades ago.

So, now could sound stupid, not in the future, and definitely not if you can think about permanent bases on Mars for example.

I’m skeptical. The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it. Vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are mostly water and can be sold at tremendous markup. I don’t see anything here that changes that economic reality. Even if they were able to double wheat production to 4 crops a year, I don’t that’s enough to make it viable.

Most telling is this passage:

>It’s a tradeoff, says Frederick Smith, a regenerative food consultant. “You replace field-based risk with cost-based risk,” he says. “Having control of [variables such as water and temperature] eliminates a lot of potential risks, and that really appeals to investors who don’t understand farming as much and are looking to invest in something at scale.”

This makes it sound like that investors that understand they market and biology, are staying away, and instead meme investors are who they’re trying to attract.

That ain’t good.

"The problem with grains and hydroponics is that grains are just so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense to do it."

It makes a ton of economic and ecological sense if you actually break it down. Damn shame the article fails to do so. We knew it made sense a decade ago when I got brought into the field to improve upon the lighting aspects for several companies.

Those companies aren't exactly profitable today.

No dude. It does not make economic sense to grow cereal grains. This has been studied multiple times. It costs $20 to grow enough wheat for a single loaf of bread.

https://thehydroponicsplanet.com/can-cereals-be-grown-hydrop...

Hmm, nice thing from an experimental point of view, but I very much doubt there will be any practical use of this tech anytime soon unless one happens to have supply of free energy.

They say>grow food with 95% less water and 97% less land

What about energy, and other inputs(like fertiliser)? I bet just hauling food from wherever it grows well will be much cheaper than growing it indoors for a long time.

Unless... Someone finds a way to harness sun's energy in a much more efficient way than plants do it. I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1%. If we could capture this light with 25% efficiency (doable), then we illuminate plant with efficiency of 80% in some way by giving them only the right wavelengths so their conversion of said light into calories is (a lot)higher than 5% we may be onto something there. Until then... Not really.

> I read somewhere direct efficiency of most grain crops in sun energy conversion into calories is 1%

This is why I’m in favour of turning farmland into suburbs/exurbs. As you cover your roof in solar panels and plant a few trees, you’re collecting more energy than the farmland did before.

And if you’re like me, using most of the backyard as pretty high intensity agriculture and food scrap management (and if I could get away with it, some fertilizer I usually flush to the city for processing…).

The average flower garden has more biodiversity than any corn or wheat field.

I can see this being practical for a Mars colony, but only in other places if there is a large supply of low-cost energy and limited agricultural space, plus limitations on food imports. Perhaps Iceland, using geothermal energy would be a good place to try a large model installation?

Anyone know how many acres of solar panels you would need to power one acre of LEDs to grow the wheat?

My rough estimate would go like this

- 20% efficency of solarpanels

- 1000W/m² sun under good conditions (at the equator)

-> we get 200W/m² from solar panels

- 600 W/m² energy needed for the plants

- 60% efficency of the LEDs

(both from the paper linked in another comment)

600/0.6 = 1000 W elecricity needed per m²

1000/200=5

So for 1 acre LED farm, we need 5 acres solar panels, if I made no major misstake.

Add to that further losses from energy transformation and you see that solar panel powered, it makes even less sense.

If you want to grow grain indoors, because for example outside is a dessert, but sun, you just would use windows, (mainly to keep your water).

This project only makes sense in space or very remote areas with other good sources of energy.

Your desert idea tracks (many of the biggest greenhouses already are) but to keep the majority of the water, you would dehumidify it from the exhaust air. There are systems for this, I saw a couple in NW Mexico when I worked in greenhouse hydroponics in a past life

How much protection will they get from external weather? What about soil quality in the middle/long run?

If weather becomes unreliable or far more extreme, indoor farming may be a better bet than hoping than a flood, a drought or other extreme weather events don't happen before harvesting.

Pfffft. Indoor grow startups around the globe that focus on significantly higher roi products than simple grains are tanking on energy costs and investment in the space is headed for the exits. I mean I get hustling for dumb money buy is any money really this dense?

One wonders, given that most grain is milled into flour if precision fermentation might be a better solution to this particular problem of producing what is essentially just a mix of proteins and starches.

What would the fermentation feedstock be? Wheat?

It seems like a lot of effort to grow the entire plant when we just want the grain, or in fact mostly just flour.

I'm sure there will be a better way to make those with yeast, or cell culture.

Starch synthesis via enzymes inside bio reactors.

I suppose this will be handy if you were trying to grow wheat on the moon, or Mars.

Still find it weird that you would not allow in natural light?

It could be cheaper to build the way they did it. Greenhouses are really expensive, and they get hot in the summer so need sophisticated ventilation systems. Another part to why they did it that way is they might want to stack more layers of crops in the future.

Very surprised that makes any sort of sense on any level frankly

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