Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how indoor farming could be competitive with traditional farming for any kind of non-specialty, high value crop. You're competing with:

- Free energy from the sun

- Free water from the sky

- Basically free land in comparison because it needs barely any improvements

- Free substrate

You win out on:

- Less fertiliser, herbicide pesticide

- No seasonal variation in temperature/rainfall etc

- Closer to market

But at a very high startup cost and a high cost to maintain. Running it on racks with grow lights using solar? You're capturing the light, turning it into electricity, and using it to make more light. It's counterintuitive. I think it makes more sense to use technological advances to improve traditional farming. A lot of farmers are adopting new technologies, and I think that you'd get way more milage with cattle-herding drones, autonomous robotic fruit pickers or new fertilisers.

maybe if you could reduce/eliminate labor costs. So indoor robotic farm, setup close to consumers (to reduce transport).

No weeds, no pesticides, very efficient yields in terms of fertilizer etc. year round growth.

With the advantage of a indoor environment being easier for robotics.

it won’t be competitive with farming in other countries, where everything costs less (labor, land, equipment, etc)

But if America and other first world countries think it’s important grow food at home this is a way of making it more competitive.

America grows an enormous amount of food and exports it all over the world. We don't need indoor farming to be competitive. Indoor farming will only ever be practical for expensive and highly perishable crops that can't be transported very far.

America is perhaps the largest global producer and exporter of food. USA doesn't need it.

Frankly indoor farming is a very Dutch fad imo that would work well for countries with the Dutch economic conditions and stability. I could see it becoming more relevant for countries in the Middle East (who have already begun inviting Dutch farmers in droves to study them), Singapore, and possibly even some African and LatAm countries like Ethiopia, Costa Rica, etc.

Making a robot that can work outdoors seems a lot easier than making a farm that can be worked indoors.

Even if you need to do some prepwork like levelling paths for a robot to traverse, that's still cheap compared to a building.

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