Vertical Farming vs Plebe Dirty Farming

>practical
>psychology
Your feels aren't practical.
The fact that I can produce more nutrition in my backyard than your beef farm or lab IS practical.
Sure, lab meat is fine and more efficient than farming.
Entomophagy is EVEN MORE efficient and less space consuming than lab meat.

See: And actually look at the picture in People already eat bugs.
So, checkmate.

Ant egg tacos are popular in Mexico.
Also, see this picture.

Cool dude, go eat your backyard bug farms. Actual rich people who fund things like this will enjoy no-dirt ponic farmed produce and in vitro steaks.

wow, you proved me wrong! Great post.

why aren't you selling ant egg tacos and taking over the world market in food?

The development on cultured meat is still farm form being viable.

Man I really like beef and it sucks that it requires much more from the environment.

For some reason I wish I had my own farm. grass fed animal meats are supposedly better than grain fed animal meats.

What if we fed animals more bugs instead?

Also I heard that some farmer had the idea of feeding cows seaweed instead of grains.
I bet feeding cows grass rather than grains causes them to produce less methane.

That's great, the bourgeois and wannabe aristocrats have always fucked the world over, no surprise there.

A professional chef:
>lmgtfy.com/?q=David George Gordon
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eat-A-Bug_Cookbook

Yes. You see.

1. Ants/insects exist now. We aren't waiting for technology or developments.
2. Cultured meat isn't available now.

Hence in 20 years when cultured meat is available and ants are still available, it's more probably that cultured meat becomes popular

wanna know why?

Because we have had time for ants to become popular foods, but no time for cultured meat. Hence any non braindead human would predict cultured meat has a better chance.

An infograph for your thoughts.

Holy fuck, the supposition in this is hilarious.
Guess what we also used to enjoy, mead.
I very rarely see mead now.
Mead used to be ubiquitous.
Oh, shit, does that mean fashions and tastes in food change?!
user, say bye bye to your 'argument'.

man keep it up with these low iq arguments, it's entertaining.

I've BTFO you each time.
Why don't we try another one?
In the Medieval Period in Europe they used to eat:
>Hedgehog
>Porpoise
>Chicken soup with alcohol
>Swan
>Lampreys
>Cockentrice
And so on.
Now, many of these are NEVER eaten in the modern era or rarely eaten, for some.
However many of these used to be extremely common.
Mhm, why did the diet change... c-could i-it be... fashions and tastes in food change?!
BTFO, again!

You are basically arguing nonsense. No one cares about insects and the thread is hardly about them.

Not an argument.

Option A. Eat fucking bugs.

Option B. Exterminate every non-white on earth, eat steak.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

There is zero evidence people are going to stop having steaks or cheeseburgers in favor of cricket sandwiches anytime soon. The demand for beef, chicken, etc is only rising.

I think it's safe to say most people will not convert to eating bugs even if they are as amazing as these images say.

Follow your morals, user!
Option A is the only option!

I'm sure you'll enjoy your beef and chicken when the land is barren and unable to support them.

There is no evidence the land will be barren anytime soon. This is just some basic retard hippie script

They're a non-meme superfood and people are missing out on their nutritional benefits because of Western snobbery and ignorance.

>There is zero evidence people are going to stop having steaks or cheeseburgers in favor of cricket sandwiches anytime soon. The demand for beef, chicken, etc is only rising.
There is zero evidence people are going to stop having hedgehog or porpoise in favor of brown bread sandwiches anytime soon. The demand for swan, cockentrice, etc is only rising.

>chicken 2.5 lb of feed to produce 1 lb protein
>bugs 2 lb of feed to produce 1 lb protein

Water's not scarce. Chicken's got a lot of other nutrition to it than just protein. The beef figure is assuming all-grain-fed factory farmed, when actually you can raise cattle entirely on grass. Traditionally, pork was raised on scraps and food waste.

If we're pressed for food, we'll return to the traditional, efficient roles of beef and pork from before the constant grain/legume surpluses, and eat chicken as the low-end option.

Eating bugs isn't an efficiency improvement at all.

>What is space?

>Western snobbery and ignorance
Look around the world. How's that non-Western humility and wisdom working out for the rest of humanity?

I mean, aside from apparently all wanting to move to Western countries, and mostly being dependent on the West for food aid.

>Western snobbery and ignorance
Eating bugs is just gross.

>Looks at China.
>Looks at Japan.
>Looks at Korea.
>Looks at Russia (which ISN'T Western)
Pretty good, user, pretty good.

>Eating bugs is just gross.
Thailand doesn't seem to think so.

>Thailand doesn't seem to think so.
Good for them, then.

Mexico doesn't seem to think so too.

Vertical hydroponic farming is certainly possible and doable.

What I'm more interested in is "synthetic" meat.
Imagine using stem cells to just grow mass quantities of prime grade steak and lowering the price to that of hamburger.

Good for them too, then. You can tell us all about their projects in insect food.

Aside from being a place where only idiots would try to raise bugs for food? If you want to produce protein with maximum efficiency in energy and space, you skip past bugs and go to cells. The easy thing is to use fungi or bacteria (which is already in the early stages of industrial application for livestock feed), the tricky thing is to culture muscle tissue so the product is indistinguishable from a steak or lobster tail (which is making good progress and will probably be ready for us when we need it).

Japan has succeeded by imitating the West as well as they could. Korea's trying the same thing and not doing as well. If you think China and Russia are examples to follow, I suggest you pay more attention.

Or, better yet, the even more efficient and ecologically conscious approach of entomophagy?

India doesn't seem to think so either!
Whoa, in fact, there are A LOT of countries... who aren't Western who seem to think so!
Maybe it is:
>Western snobbery and ignorance

Thailand and Mexico: two filthy, disgusting countries with loser cultures. Great examples, chum.

Fantastic, a third filthy, disgusting country with a loser culture.

The bug-eaters sure seem like the winning team. But we can't have a game without two sides, so I'll leave you with them and play on Team Doesn't Eat Bugs.

>entomophagy

Massive stigma in the West that will be difficult to overcome. I live in Tennessee and we get massive cicada plagues every 15 or 18 years or so, and there are some people who catch and fry the cicadas. That is the only instance of unironic insect eating I've seen in America, though.

If that's what you want to call it, then sure. But I really don't think the countries you are rallying behind are going to be funding your large scale entomophagy projects. Feel free to change my mind.

>Aside from being a place where only idiots would try to raise bugs for food?
I mean land.
>If you want to produce protein with maximum efficiency in energy and space, you skip past bugs and go to cells.
I'm almost certain an insect farm would take up less space than a meat lab.

>If you think China and Russia are examples to follow, I suggest you pay more attention.
>X countries are losers.
International Science Ranking:
Source:
>scimagojr.com
By citations:
>6: China
>14: India
>23: Russia
>33: Mexico
>40: Thailand
Out of 239 countries listed.
GDP:
Source:
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
>2: China
>7: India
>12: Russia
>15: Mexico
>26: Thailand
Out of 190-211 countries listed.
Human Development Index:
Source:
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
>15: Hong Kong
>49: Russia
>77: Mexico
>87: Thailand
>131: India
Out of 188 countries listed.
>1-51 is 'very high human development'.
>52-105 is 'high human development'.
>107-147 is 'medium human development'.
Shows what you know.

Interesting.
What do they taste like?

I edited it because the order of the countries was bugging me.

>sell them

I'm not the same guy, but I have a question.
At what point is bug protein different from regular protein?
Let's say I wanted to sell some sort of protein powder. Let's say bugs are the cheapest option.
Couldn't I harvest the bugs, and then reduce them to small enough individual components that what I'm selling isn't actually classified as bug meat?

Anyone feel free to answer.

>non-meme superfood

Fuckoff back to whole foods.

Not an argument.

I just patented that, sorry.

already done, look up cricket flour

But they were dumb enough to call it "cricket" flour...

That infographic is poorly made

Im all for bugs, nothing wrong, but usimg facebook-tier pics no way to promote them

Why is this veggie farming thread getting bombarded with pro-entomophagy? The two are completely unrelated. Don't you realize you need to feed those insects? Where do you think the food for them comes from?

Insects don't really taste all that good. You really have to grow up eating them to enjoy them. I prefer to feed them to my chickens as part of a permaculture system where the chickens clean the crops free of insects, and fertilize the fields & orchards, all without me doing a damn thing. I get veggies, fruit, meat, and eggs.

There are papers on plants uptaking plastic leached chemicals. It is the only reason I don't do aquaponics. That and the fish also take in the same thing. I've worked in several hydroponics greenhouses. I personally utilize vertical gardening indoors in the winter. Though, I use soil-based techniques. I have 40sq feet of growing space per 4x8 shelving unit. Electric for the LEDs/fans cost about $40 per shelving unit per month. I only do this for "starts" that are set out in spring for normal gardening, but it saves me several hundred dollars a year. When I get a greenhouse up, I won't need to use the LEDs and I'll be able to grow year round crops instead of just starts.

Vertical farming is a good thing, but I think the further you remove something from a complete ecosystem the less value it has.

I like how most of these infographics' ratios and amounts are all different from each other.

>op asks some honest, interesting questions about a sustainable method of growing food
>two posts later: EAT BUGS, GUYS
>and it gets worse from there
disgraceful

Ah yes, Russia, China, Thailand, Mexico, India, shining bastions of civilization.

All of those countries are ass, and your HDI list shows that.

hippe libshits are holding back humanity an amazing amount

You'll need those vertical farms in order to make the food to feed the insects.

this

bugshills need to fuckoff.

>i.4cdn.org/sci/1501044360744.png
feed for crickets: 2lbs
feed for cattle: 10 lbs
>i.4cdn.org/sci/1501044879918.jpg
feed for crickets: 1lb
feed for cattle: 12lbs

>Why is this veggie farming thread getting bombarded with pro-entomophagy?

Bug sliding.

>Where do you think the food for them comes from?

I actually don't know. Other bugs?

>Vertical farming is a good thing, but I think the further you remove something from a complete ecosystem the less value it has.

Explain.

Wow, a vertical farming thread and all you faggots can talk about is eating bugs.

Vertical farms are not the solution. Instead of getting free energy from the sun, you are switching toward paying for energy to run LEDs. Terrible for the environment. The only slight "advantage" is fresher produce for very densely populated cities. And not all types of produce, only certain crops like basil and other herbs. Nothing you can live off of.

So no, vertical farms are not a tool against climate change. It will always be more efficient and take up less space to power farms directly from the sun instead of taking up 8 times the land for solar farms.

Just become a fucking vegetarian if you want to help the Earth.

>15: Hong Kong
Hong Kong is a British colony, you chimp. They may have returned it to China recently, but everything they built was under British rule, and they're still in the period when China agreed not to change any major laws or policies within Hong Kong.

So no, Hong Kong is not representative of China, which is still about half people living in mud, with the other half working long-distance McJobs for the West.

>GDP
Being a big country with a high population is not an argument that it's sophisticated. At least look at per-capita GDP.

So yeah: China, India, Russia, Mexico, and Thailand remain loser cultures we rightly look down on as inferior. Bug-eating comes from poverty. Poverty in the modern era comes from ineptitude.

Traditional agriculture takes up A LOT of land, as well as fucking up local water tables with fertilizer runoff. Hydroponics requires very little square footage since grow units can be stacked and uses 90% less water due to no runoff. As well, with proper disposal, no fertilizer will contaminate local bodies of water causing massive algal blooms which fuck up the ecosystem.

Vertical Farms are unique from traditional farms. They are not simply a "Is it cheaper" choice.

In a controlled system you have much more ability to control every variable. Whereas traditional farming utilizes a much larger and open system.

So it's not simply "fresher", but also less contaminated, no dirt for certain food products, and other benefits like avoiding certain pollutants. It's easier to control a closed aquarium than the ocean floor or a random farm. Density of packing of grow space into such controlled areas becomes important.

Also photosynthesis in plants is not actually super efficient when compared to Photovoltaics. I'm not saying it's more efficient to rely on solar panels and LEDs, but that there are unique properties to each one that under certain circumstances can favor one over the other. It's not simply that trad farms are so unbelievably perfect that vertical farms have no positive tradeoffs and are a scam. Advances in technology which if you look at graphs of cost over time are happening, favor vertical farming.

>I actually don't know. Other bugs?

From traditional farming.

>Explain

Humans are part of nature. The further away from nature we get the more problems we tend to have.

Considering we are never going to run out of land, I don't think vertical farming is really worth it. It just seems like a waste.

Well, I'm not for vertical farming, but it is cool and the development of the technology is important for future things like space exploration/colonization/O'Neil cylinders type stuff. That's the only value I can see for it.

I mean, it is way cheaper to cover land with greenhouses and grow crops in areas where you normally couldn't than it would be to build a vertical farm.

why do you stack things during vertical farming

I mean don't plants we grow for food tend to grow upward?

Most have a terminal height they reach. For stuff like indeterminate cultivars of tomatoes a different system is used that allows the vine to be lowered and moved to one side as it grows. Eventually, the tomato vine is 50-75 feet long after 2-3 years of growth, but is never more than 8 feet tall. If you can give them enough light, you can stack them.

this.
fucking average ignorant consumer

But hedgehogs taste really good.

Anyway all the entries in your list belong to classes of animals that we still consume.

Swans? For real? The only thing keeping people from eating those is the law. I wonder if they taste like grease.

The immigrants in France are eating so many hedgehogs that farmers are trying to get them protected now. Evidently, the little critters eat a shit ton of insects that are harmful to crops.

What formula did you use for this determination?

>I mean, it is way cheaper to cover land with greenhouses and grow crops in areas where you normally couldn't than it would be to build a vertical farm.

I'm interested in the dt

you kinda have to tell someone the product or food is crickets

>In addition what do you think about the advancement of LED technology especially with application to growing plants. Such as unique rest/light timings for faster growth.

LEDs are great because they can be tuned to emit just the frequencies of light that chlorophyll is best at absorbing. Because of that, it's more efficient to grow plants under LEDs powered by say, 20% efficient solar panels than direct sunlight, because a lot of the energy in sunlight is in colors that chlorophyll can't use.

>tfw screwed anyway by FDA regs limiting the maximum allowed insect content

The tomato greenhouses in Spain are pretty cool.
>pic related: millions of acres of contiguous greenhouses

There was a time people refused to eat tomatoes (or was it potatoes) until some famousguy in Europe did some neat ass trick to get people interested in them.

I'm so hard right now looking at that image.

They could use the scientific name.

>What formula did you use for this determination?

I didn't. There's no lighting in most greenhouses, while in vertical farms all the floors except the top will need lighting, if the top is open to the sun (usually isn't.) The biggest flaw in this argument would be the turn around rate per plant for harvesting. Like the control of the light using faster day/night cycles and all that. In the end, you need to calculate it via energy/money spent per calorie harvested in x amount of time with the exact same cultivar of plant. I'm sure it could be googled, except maybe for the cultivar information.

The main problem with this is that gardening/farming is extremely variable in so many ways. One tiny change and you can get a wildly different result. Like how you germinate the seeds or how the plants are being stressed or not stressed from something as simple as a fan blowing.

It was potatoes. Pretty neat trick too.

youtube.com/watch?v=IBIpgnxtTpE

Love it.

>in vertical farms all the floors except the top will need lighting
There are also vertical farms with the plants on conveyor shelves, so they're rotated through the sunlight.

Yeah, I've seen one of those. It was actually intended as a art thing. I think if I were to use vertical farming, it'd be for mushrooms, with the very top as a normal greenhouse. Then you'd only need low level ambient light instead of sun-strength type of lighting.

I think vertical farming with LEDs makes sense for things like seedlings, while vertical farming with rotating shelves makes sense for low-energy crops like lettuce.

Obviously, vertical farming as we know it doesn't makes sense for high-energy crops like wheat, but there's another method we may see with genetically engineered crops: chemical energy feeding. For instance, we may see wheat that grows in the dark very quickly by taking up acetic acid or sugar through its roots.

Why use chemical energy feeding? Energy's cheap. CO2 and water are cheap. So the feedstocks may be significantly cheaper than conventionally-grown grain, and more storable as well. The yield will be absolutely reliable, entirely unaffected by weather or season, and there will be no need for pesticides or herbicides. Furthermore, the full variety of crops can be produced locally as needed, rather than seasonally on distant farms.

I like how some people in this thread pretend that every bit of food that a cow or sheep eats is food diverted from human consumption.

Plenty of small farmers keep a hundred sheep or a few dozen cattle as an extra cash crop, having them graze on land that's currently fallow, unsuitable for cropping, or has a cover crop growing on it.

Plenty of graziers keep livestock on land that's unsuitable for cropping for whatever reason, where they can graze livestock over areas where there is little fertility.

so i'm really unfamiliar with botany. I heard a rumor that the issue with vertical based farming was not only the obvious cost issues, but that the products grown have a lower nutritional level. Anyone with any knowledge in this know if this is true?

I love red meat (bit too much in fact), but honestly the stats on those crickets seem too good to pass on.
Can't wait for them to be actually available everywhere actually. With some salt I think you could eat them like potatoe chips. Meat flavored, protein-full potatoe chips

Changing the height you farm at isn't going to change jack shit.
If vertical farming had any issues pertaining to the product itself, the issue would lie with pretty much everything else. It would be an issue common to hydroponics, or the substrate, or of any number of actually impactful variables.

>order of the countries was bugging me
BUGGING ME, CARL!

>What does sci think about vertical farming technologies like: Aeroponics, Aquaponics, Hydroponics?

It is only economical on low value land. At which point you have to truck it into cities anyway so much of the environmental benefit is negated.

However you do physically exclude pests which means no pesticides are needed

>posting literal subhumans as an example
Disgusting.

Dammit, you're actually making me hungry.

Same goes for biofuel production too. Some people pretend that diverting food crops like corn for ethanol production reduces the amount of food available, because once it's been fermented to produce the fuel, the grains are used up and have no further nutritional value, right?

Wrong. Distillers grains, the leftovers from ethanol production, have about the same nutritional value as animal feed as the original corn did. And make no mistake, the majority of corn int he US is grown for animal feed, not human consumption. Only 1% of corn grown is sweet corn. The rest is field corn, used for feed and ethanol.

Like wise, the glycerine byproduct of making biodiesel can also be added to animal feed.
biofuelscoproducts.umn.edu/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
minnesotafarmguide.com/news/crop/ask-a-farmer-what-is-the-difference-between-sweet-corn/article_bd236186-093a-11e3-9c90-0019bb2963f4.html

>obsessing over the ONE nutrient that isn't a problem at all if you're not a dirt poor country
meanwhile the share of people eating the minimum amount of fiber is 3%
eat plants or cultured meat

How do youi want to feed the LEDs? Sun is better for now.

>>> Synthetic meat

What do you feed it? :D Aminoacids that you can eat directly? Isn't it pointless?

so does hydroponic grown food have a nutritional problem?

>products grown have a lower nutritional level

Not true, if using the same cultivars.

Why are people assuming the only way to cleanly power these farms would be solar? I imagine that a nuclear fission plant is perfectly suited for the task, they're also relatively clean and safe even without considering modern reactor designs. Plus it could also deliver power to other areas when the light periods are over for the day. I guess the main issue would be up front cost.