Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Which indoor models work? They might be viable for boutique produce that is highly perishable. But the notion that this could ever work for bulk staple crops is just stupid.

Farmland isn't that expensive.

View on HN

A lot of the bell peppers and tomatoes for sale in Germany, especially in the winter, are grown in greenhouses in the Netherlands. They’re only somewhat more expensive than the ones grown outside in Spain at the peak of their harvests.

But wheat and potatoes? No, those are strictly outdoor things.

already mentioned, but the netherlands (pop 18m) is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world (after the US) — Driven largely by high-tech greenhouse operations.

Maybe not on a per-acre basis, but when you consider the acreage needed for commercial farming, it's untenable for the "family farmer." As a real estate agent, can I find you a generic alfalfa field that might kick off some vacation money? Sure - $11,000-15,000 an acre. Why is wine $500 / bottle? Because that farm ground is $70,000 / acre in some cases. You want to produce wheat, potatoes, canola, legumes? Now you are talking somewhere between hundred and tens-of-thousands of acres to actually be a player and make any money, so even at $15,000 / acre you are talking millions of dollars just to get in the game before you buy that $500K+ harvester, etc.

Australia has a number of large veggie producers that use glasshouses for growing and have been around and successful for many years. Look up Flavorite and Perfection Fresh for two examples.

Perfection seem to be using a lot of foil tunnels: https://www.perfection.com.au/our-farms/perfection-berries-r... Which makes sense, because they're cheap and easy to construct. But for some reason "indoor farming" startups don't seem very interested in taking the simplest solution that could possibly qualify as "indoors" and scaling it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com