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Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

How do you supply enough power to vertical farms without those same externalities? And then how green is it to build and run them? Considering all the equipment, infra and inputs. It is not like that stuff magically comes from thin air with vertical farming.

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Renewables, but then you might as well farm on farmland and haul to urban areas with electric trucks.

Vertical farms are another solution looking for a problem (unless you’re truly land constrained, like the Maldives)

I mean traditional farming and photosynthesis from the sun is the original form of renewable solar power we have had since the birth of civilization.

True! But you can do some fun acts like using heat pumps in certain climates (the Netherlands, for example) to extend growing seasons or create them (if they don’t exist) all year long.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

The biggest argument for vertical farms is that you'd be able to bring high-quality year around produce to more places. We do have most produce year around, but the quality of it varies wildly depending on the time of year. Most produce shipped from California and Mexico during growing off seasons is quite subpar.

But this is an argument for quality, of which people would have to be willing to pay a premium for. I could see high-end restaurants and others wiling to pay for this.

Greenhouses already extend the growing season. This would ideally be able to do that further.

Maybe we don't, but we should let market forces sort it out by doing our best to tax the externalities of power generation too.

Let me know when you sign up for a 5$/gallon carbon tax on gasoline.

That is something like $600 per ton of CO2. For that amount you can literally capture the CO2 from the air today.

Alas there is a backlog of a century of emissions to handle. You know, externalizing costs on other people?

At this point we'll need active carbon capture not for neutrality, which is its own political boondoggle, but for actual active mitigation of some of the damage.

Dont worry, nothing like this will come to pass. Pollute away.

Nuclear power. I don't think there's any other alternative if you really wanted to grow anything other than "green water" (i.e. leafs like lettuce) for large portions of the planet.

Many of the inputs are reduced; You use the natural gas to make energy for LEDs to decrease your time to market by increasing sun. By circulating the water you save 80% of it.

Simple. Generators run on vertically farmed biodiesel.

what if I told you that to be actually sustainable at current population levels long term, we'd need to surrender 70% or more of currently used pastureland and farmland?

Oh wait, we aren't going to stay at current population levels. Still at least have, what, another 4-5 billion people to crank out before we allegedly plateau?

Wind power doesn't take up a lot of space, especially offshore. Solar? There's this thing called a desert.

People, we are in the midst of a mass extinction. We NEED that land for biodiversity. Mass extinctions occurred over long periods of time that enabled evolutionary adapatation to some degree. We're doing ours over the span of a thousand years. Most mass extinctions at least get to "experiment" will all Earth's land surface to find new adapted animals. We've taken a huge portion of the world's biodiverse and fertile lands and industrialized them.

Otherwise, yeah, we'll have vertical farms... in space, because we won't be on earth.

I guess you think solutions to traditional farming, which is unsustainable, will come out of THIN AIR.

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