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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

That helps, but the losses in solar panels means it’s never going to be close to just putting the plants outside.

There is a perverse incentive in vertical farming. There is no logical reason to farm indoors while the land outdoors is still arable. This means any form of pollution that makes land less arable increases the relative profitability of vertical farming. Accelerated desertification is good for your business because then you can collect solar energy or wind energy there with little resistance.

My expectation is that if this technology was widely deployed in the Sahara, any afforestation attempts would be cut short because they step on the toes of the vertical farming guys.

I still don't get why vertical with all the support(probably concrete) needed versus just going with green houses. Maybe with semi-reflective surfaces.

Is all that much support needed? Maybe for crops grown on trees or something, but in videos I’ve seen about indoor farming [1], there hasn’t been much other than basic metal cages with containers spaced out.

[1]: https://youtu.be/gW-21CHDkIU

this looks like a good way for humanity get fuxked.

Not only will individuals loose the ability to farm, it will be locked up in companies. Who will likely make it illegal for others to do the same.

Beyond that we will likely loose access to all strains of plants that’s can grow well outside.

As a safe guard. Humanity needs a super farm that is isolated and trains and maintains the old ways.

There are so many problems with vertical farming, but doing it in the sahara is even more problemattic.

First you still need water, and its not like its a closed system, so you'll get significant losses.

Then you need to either think about heating and cooling (it gets really cold at night and super hot in the day) or build under the sand. Either way lots of building materials.

Its literally easier and cheaper to terraform the saraha than it is to do vertical farming there.

The way to do it would be to electrolyze CO into acetate, and feed that to the plants. That's actually more efficient already than to grow on a field.

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