Vertical farms

>no insects
>no poison
>no drought
Is this a big meme?

Other urls found in this thread:

nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/
reuters.com/article/us-new-jersey-nuclear-subisidies/n-j-nuclear-power-subsidy-bill-could-cost-320-million-per-year-idUSKBN1E92Z0
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/scana-to-cease-construction-of-two-reactors-in-south-carolina
independentmail.com/story/news/2017/09/29/scana-execs-accused-misleading-investors-v-c-summer-nuclear-plant-project/714671001/
www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20171227_19/
nytimes.com/2017/06/13/climate/nuclear-power-retirements-us-climate-goals.html
youtube.com/watch?v=MNVLW5EzTDA
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

>huge climate controlled facility
>creating all that artificial sunlight
Shit's expensive.

enjoy paying $100 for some kale

You can control the photoperiod/temp and switch between veg/fruit cycles whenever you want, control everything that goes into the plant, hook all the irrigation/hydroponic equipment up to a computer to control nutrient delivery through negative feedback mechanisms in different ways depending on your growing medium, fine tune every little thing, and use LED's up close to reduce cost (better than HPS or Sodium Halide because you can control the spectrum and there isn't as much heat).

It's not a meme.

its doable with GMOs
could have a much smaller carbon footprint

GMOs don't produce more food or anything else valuable for that matter. GMO shills are paid Monsanto faggots and need executed in the purge that's coming soon.

This. The japs farm quite a lot of stuff this way, most of which basically anyone else would take for granted. Entire farmland is dedicated to rice so a strawberry costs $10

Why would you want to build them vertically again? This is as retarded as solar roadways, looks like something /r/futurology would come up with.

>small footprint. reduce arable land needed to grow food. allow more land to revert to wilderness.preserve biodiversity.
>build it in or next to major metro areas. reduce carbon foot print involved in transportation.
>countries with fuck all for arable land and increase domestic food production.

because you either don't have enough horizontal space, or the vertical space is cheaper than the transport costs from somewhere with enough horizontal space
i mean it's not such a hard concept

Nope.
nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/

It's more expensive and less environmentally friendly than regular farming because you have to burn coal to produce electricity at a ~50% conversion efficiency, then transmit the power to the farm at a ~90% transmission efficiency then finally shine lights on the plants at another ~90% efficiency. So you you could burn coal and throw away 60% of the coal's energy to grow your food, or you could just put your plants outside like a sane person.

Vertical farms are the future, and will be where most food is grown eventually
it's still expensive as all bloody fuck on energy though, and would require nuclear power to do in any large scale capacity

>coal is the only power source in existence
you're being retarded on purpose

Where does the soil come from?

Okay, what are you alternatives?

Natural gas
>still burning fossil fuels in place of natural sunlight
Solar
>just like regular farming except now you need ten times as much land because now you're throwing away 90% of the sunlight

Fucking popsci...

>vertical space is cheaper than the transport costs from somewhere with enough horizontal space
Which is basically never.

Plants absorption of sunlight loses that efficiency when you consider the space between plants where the sun is being wasted. A panel on the roof may loses efficiency in conversion, but at least it will utilize the full surface area, and the artificial sunlight is more concentrated where it's needed. It's a complicated comparison to make.

One of the alternatives is an organised effort to lower birthrates until the global population drops to a level where we don't have to employ increasingly desperate measures just to produce the most basic necessities for everyone. But no, we cannot do that, because of ideology.

Nuclear

9399304
>shitposting this fucking hard
No (You) for you

see: I'm sure if they had more nuclear power plants and subsidies it wouldn't matter.

>Jam a bunch of solar panels on top.
>Transfer to vertical farm.

Memes for days senpai.

Only whites and the educated breed less, the ideology is flawed.

In an extremely controlled environment gmos would have little advantage and no company has an interest in making crops that specialize in vertical farms.

Most gmos are used for cash crops or biofuel

By area, 40% of the US is farmland. So that's about 1.5 million square miles. Average solar irradiance at CONUS lattitudes is 300 W/m^2. Assuming a pitiful 25% area efficiency of farmland usage, which is much lower than reality, we would need 292 terawatts of new generating capacity. Current US production is 1.06 terwatts.

So in other words we would need about 300 times our current electricity production. Check my math, but I doubt you'll be able to make this feasible. You are fucking retarded if you think this is a good idea.

>GMOs don't produce more food or anything else valuable
False. Indeed, one of the main parts of doing anything in agriculture above the bare basics is to increase yield.

It works. There are restaurants in Japan and China that grow their own stuff with it.

>huge climate controlled facility
It's not a server room that creating a huge amount of heat to sink nor are they that sensitive to temperature changes.

>creating all that artificial sunlight
You don't need artificial sunlight, red and blue led light is enough. And varying the proportions of red to blue can make grow taller or with larger leaves without having to pay Monsanto a fucking dime.

>more nuclear power plants
Brainlets plz get out. Nuclear power plants are expensive as fuck and are being cancelled from the cost or causing price hikes to keep them running.

>reuters.com/article/us-new-jersey-nuclear-subisidies/n-j-nuclear-power-subsidy-bill-could-cost-320-million-per-year-idUSKBN1E92Z0
>bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/scana-to-cease-construction-of-two-reactors-in-south-carolina
>independentmail.com/story/news/2017/09/29/scana-execs-accused-misleading-investors-v-c-summer-nuclear-plant-project/714671001/
>www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20171227_19/
>nytimes.com/2017/06/13/climate/nuclear-power-retirements-us-climate-goals.html

They are a failed experiment. Stop blindly supporting them to appear science savvy.

Tidal, hydroelectric, nuclear, ocean thermal, etc.
Plant absorption efficiency is meaningless because the energy input to the system is outside of human control and is essentially free.

>no insects
No pollination either.
>no poison
Same as organic.
>no drought
Yeah, magical water spring.

It is a big meme from big companies, just like GMOs.

There is a pretty effective way of mining uranium from seawater. Enrich that shit in a centrifuge, set up a colony on some mineral rich asteroid or some shit, boil some water with that enriched uranium, grow food for your peeps on that asteroid with LED's and use the minerals in the asteroid to create some awesome nutes for your planties, mine the gold or platinum or whatever and sell it for profit (minus the shit you need for your colony) and BAM -- you've more than broken even and have a pretty good business model going!

montsanto is not the only people who make GMOs, what's more is they only ever GMOs for crops that grow outside
pretty sure it was only like wheat or some shit
GMOs are the future

>GMOs are a meme
>GMOs are the future
The only logical conclusion I could reach from reading this thread is that "the future" is a meme.

why do you need it? Hydroponics should be fine

nah, wrong way around
memes are the future

mirrors?

a = b
b = c
a = ?

Serious question: where can I get good info on this kind of stuff and growing food and plants ? I'm Veeky Forums but I've know nothing about plants and biology. What's a good info source for this kind of stuff?

memes are the future =/= the future is a meme

A botany book
botany = taking care of plants
plant biology = studying plants

...

Cheers. That's a distinction I didn't know before. Do you know any good botany books?

>>>/reddit/

>>>>/reddit/
???
I've just linked you to the Outdoors board
in fact let's get even more precise

nope but it can't be hard to find some
check the sticky
just read a few different ones and if they say the same thing you can bet the info is reliable

Oh okay. People link to that board as if to say "get out" from my experience. Thanks. Appreciate the thread. Didn't even know they did that kind of stuff. I just thought they spoke about hiking.

youtube.com/watch?v=MNVLW5EzTDA

LED lights are more efficient at growing than the fucking sun? REALLY????

Why would these need a lot of power? Couldn't they just be designed like greenhouses for temp and humidity and use lightpipes to transfer natural sunlight to the plants?

you need LED lights of two different colors, red and blue. You can focus them so you only light the plants. And you can keep the growth cycle regulated

vertical farms get less total sunlight than horizontal farms with similar growing capacity so no matter how they distribute the light the building recieves they're going to need electric lights to get good yields.

You try this at home? This sounds like high level theorizing that leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. Also, the power conversion loss is another factor. Perhaps the plants grow more, but is the growth enough to offset the cost of transporting energy from powerplants to farm?

Ah, well it seems like the power consumption should be compared to the power consumption of a farm of similar yield. What's the cost of gas and maintenance for farm equipment per year?

See

Do you not understand why plants are green?

except you wouldn't be building these things to grow crops like corn or wheat that are space inefficient

I also understand plants have other pigments for the absorption of sunlight, and a simple leaf is as an extraordinary complex system of which we do not know the full mechanisms of, let alone the plant as a whole. While blue and red may be what's needed to produce sugars the other colors may be needed to provide all manor of external signals necessary for a plants functioning. Further again, the matter of cost has not been properly addressed.

The US has 315 million acres of harvested cropland as of 2012, for a total area of 1.275*10^12 square meters of farming. At 300 watts per square meter, you need to replicate 383.28 terawatts of sunlight.

If you wanted to be smart about it, you'd use light-pipes and not bother trying to duplicate the sun over a large area of the planet.

Better still is just using LEDs and using blue and red light exclusively. Only a tiny amount of solar energy is actually used for plant growth.

Pic related. It's not very pleasant to the eye, but who cares? It's not for people.

>383.28 terawatts of sunlight
So 400 times the current energy output of the US. Do you not see the problem here? Even if you used "solar pipes" you would still have to run them over even more land area than regular crops in order to collect enough sunlight because of efficiency losses, defeating the purpose. This is a solar-freakin-roadways tier idea.

That's why you don't actually use sunlight, but a much smaller amount of energy from blue and red LEDs. This isn't "solar roadways," it's a strawman that ignores common sense optimization.

no it's not, it's probably the only way overpopulation can be dealt with

Pessimistically, only 2% of the sun's spectral output is of interest for plant growth and reproduction.

The amount of energy needed to replace farms in the US therefor drops from 383.28 terawatts to 7.67. It's still an incredible amount of energy, but it's approaching the realm of plausibility.

So no one has addressed the fact that these vert. farms are a closed system.
Anyone who has tried growing weed or shrooms in a closed system knows that as soon as a mold spore or a mite makes its way into that system, the entire crops is essentially fucked.

So im sure vert farming sounds like a good idea but in the long term we will be fucking up our food supply by making our crops less resilient to the "outside" influences.
This seems like a red herring and an excuse for big companies to continue polluting. So while the cities are making their own food in glass towers. We continue fucking up our land until we have no other recourse to only farm indoors. And our crops will be the equivalent of some blue blooded albino thats too inbred to survive anywhere else other than a plastic bubble.
Its good tech, but maybe we should work on protecting the utility of our arable land instead of ceeding it to the big polluters.

I'm more interested in the value of hydroponics to produce food where it otherwise wouldn't be possible to produce, like the Moon.

Lrn2meme fgt pls

>is presented with calculations that show it's impossible
>responds with "no it's not"
What did he mean by this?

>a simple leaf is as an extraordinary complex system of which we do not know the full mechanisms of
No, we know. We've figured out how plants react to different wavelengths and what wavelengths to monitor in regards to their health too.

The main hindrance to these systems likely has been the lighting. LED lights only became efficient to produce rather recently and don't produce as much waste heat as conventional bulbs.

>overpopulation
Only an issue in places where the local population can't even figure out how to do conventional farming.

This user gets it.

Also 'tismos fail to realize nobody's going to grow fucking wheat and corn in those, which is the majority, making it drop to 1-2 TW, which is doable in the long run.

>it is completely impossible to introduce pollinating insects into an area and not harmful ones
hydro/aeroponics don't suffer drought because of what they are, if they can't get enough water, than the tray is fucked and needs repairs, You can add a sensor or two to detect that as it happens

>number is big so it's impossible to reach that number
we have many means of generating that amount of energy if we need to, Expensive but possible
We also do not need to change out ALL crops all at once everywhere, Just the things that would benefit from it most of all, working outward to others when the energy is made available

You really need to learn how to problem
solve, it's an important trait even children have

Crops and livestock have been genetically modified to be bigger than they are in the wild, hence giving "more food". See tomatoes, blueberries, oranges, cows.

each board has a diverse number of generals that sometimes don't obviously fit on that board yet belong most to it---for example, watch (as in 'timepiece') threads on /g/ and Veeky Forums.

Why grow plants at all? They have to spend all that time and energy growing root systems and leaves and other such wasteful things. The real future is in cell culturing.
>take potato cells, place in nutrient vat, convert energy and nutrients directly into edible starches at maximum efficiency
>take orange cells, place in nutrient vat, convert energy and nutrients directly into jam at maximum efficiency
>take tomato cells, place in nutrient vat, convert energy and nutrients directly into chutney at maximum efficiency
>texture with mycoprotein, vat-grown at maximum efficiency
Hopefully we weren't born too early to experience the true future that is vat cuisine

Baby steps
We don't even have Spy Kids microwaves yet

Yeah man, or even just take the enzymes in the relevant metabolic pathways and feed it raw materials

no insects
>shitload of chamistry
theres always some fuking bugs

...

>theres always some fuking bugs
Ideally you would be cloning new plants (not growing them from seed), and keeping them in isolated batches so that if you did wind up with some kind of infestation you could easily identify and spot-treat the affected batches before it spreads.
Also I dont think anyone in this thread is accounting for the energy savings on the decreased logistics that vertical farming would lead to. You don't need to crate and store tomatoes to ship them across the country to new york, they would just be grown in the suburbs and carted a few miles to the end user.
Or hell, just make the first floor a storefront.

>being this incorrect about nuclear

that's fine, there's a huge amount of misinformation floating around because people are okay telling lies an making things up about what scares them in order to ensure it is never implemented.

Read up on fifth generation nuclear reactors. The ones that would breed fissile fuels from materials hundreds of times more common than U-235, and thousands of times easier to process (zero isotopic enrichment required). The ones that by design physically cannot be made to melt down, even in a total systems blackout while running at full power. The ones that have negligible fuel production costs since they don't use solid fuel rods, instead the dissolve fertile material into a working fluid, which varies depending on the design.

Maybe you've heard of LFTR. It's a fifth generation nuclear reactor design that uses molten salt as a working fluid, solid graphite as a moderator, and breeds either thorium or uranium 238 into uranium 233 or plutonium, respectively. In either fuel cycle your only input is fertile fuel isotope, and your only outputs are fission products and decay products. Since these aren't bound up in a ceramic fuel rod structure they're separated from the molten fuel salt as they're produced, meaning zero reactor down time is required to clean or add to the fuel salt. The relatively small amounts of radioactive waste are easily stored, although many of those isotopes are actually potentially very useful for medicine and other scientific fields of study. We can't extract them today because fuel rod processing is extremely expensive, but in a molten salt reactor they just drop out on their own almost free of charge.

I admit it sounds too good to be true, but just research the science behind it and you'll see why nuclear is our best option going forward.

>Nuclear power plants are expensive as fuck

Did your IQ drop or did you stop reading and not notice the "subsidies" part? FYI, all power generation of every kind is very heavily subsidized. You pay very high costs for all electricity generation because you are making up for that low power bull via your taxes part of which gets turned into subsidies for power companies to fight over. Coal, nuclear, solar, hydro, wind, everything is heavily subsidized.

Guys, guys . . .

Why don't we build large, transparent dome farms in the middle of the desert, bring in some water from off site or deep underground, and farm plants in an environment that gets full sunlight almost every day and never experiences a meaningful winter?

Better yet rather than domes we should just build rows and rows of arched tunnels side by side to cover lots of area with minimal engineering effort and wasted volume.

We'd lay a shallow foundation, build the canopy structure, install a vapor barrier, bring in desert sand from outside and mix it with some organic mulch to get started, add enough water that the humidity stays moderately high and condenses on surfaces at night, and seal it up to prevent water losses. Plant a bunch of stuff inside, bring in beehives and other pollinating insects, introduce earthworms and isopods and millipedes and some predatory insects to keep things balanced, and now we're essentially para-terraforming the dry desert of the southwest United States.

Don't need to power artificial lighting. Don't need to use light pipes or mirrors. We'd have all the advantages of knowing exactly what's growing and living in the farm without the logistical problems of vertical farming, plus it's not like anyone's actually using the desert for anything else anyway. It'd even beat the shit out of irrigation farming, not only using way less water per kilogram of produce, but also producing more int he same time period as the plants always have water instead of being watered periodically and then dried out by the Sun.

I guess the only real barrier would be construction costs, but if you're considering vertical farming on any significant scale you're looking at high construction costs anyway.

>(((overpopulation)))

some plants don't respond well to more light, they're evolved to live in lower light conditions
and how about temperature? it might be too hot for them out there, and regulating the temperature is gonna take a lot of energy
Finally engineering that actually seems pretty difficult, if the water escapes it'll evaporate really quickly
And it does take awhile for this kind of ecosystem that you want for organic farming to take root

The idea is to use fast growing, even tropical plants. Obviously it wouldn't make sense to use these long greenhouses to grow corn, you want to focus on cash crops.

The light intensity can be reduced by partially covering the greenhouses with white strips of material or a partially reflective layer, whatever's cheaper.

The temperature can be regulated by reflecting sunlight away again by using a reflective layer or white partial coverings, or by setting the foundation of the greenhouses several feet down into the desert soil; the relatively cool ground underneath would prevent the temperature from becoming too extreme. No active cooling via electricity would be needed.

Engineering a vapor barrier is difficult? We're talking about transparent plastic sheets melted together at the seams in sections forming a very long tube. We could very slightly pressurize the interiors of the greenhouses in order to locate leaks if they were suspected to have formed. Alternatively we could just accept some evaporation losses and replenish the water supply, which we'd have to do anyway since we're shipping plant produce away from this farm. All the vapor barrier really needs to do is maintain a pocket of moist air around the plants at all times.

It takes less time than you may think. Really we'd just need to bring over a few hundred worm cocoons to start a colony, which would immediately begin eating the decaying organic matter in the soil we'd already put there previously. Planting clover as a nitrogen fixer and source of organic matter for the worms to continue to eat is as easy as scattering handfuls of seeds. Each greenhouse tube could have a bee colony, which would pollinate crops and feed primarily off of the nectar produced by the clover. All this would probably only take a couple years to really set up, remember the growing season would be year round. Those organisms are just there to automatically keep the soil from degrading over time anyway.

but then what're are the advantages of doing this out in the desert? Cheap land?
I'm just saying every biosphere attempt we've done has failed pretty badly

>he solves his problems by creating more problems other people need to solve
That way of thinking is why we can't have nice things.

It's not a biosphere, it's an open cycle. The only reason it's enclosed is to reduce the water usage. Water, organic waste, fertilizers, etc would all be brought in and used, while farm produce would be shipped out.

The advantage of doing it in the desert is the cheap, empty land with plenty of sunlight available. This is an alternative to vertical farming, requiring no electric power or light piping, for those nations with desert land currently going unused. Obviously you wouldn't do this if your land was already useful for farming, it is a means of transforming otherwise useless land area into valuable farmland close to population centers in arid climates. Australia could benefit greatly using this method of farming, for example, since the vast majority of the continent is some of the most arid desert on Earth.

And where do you get your water from?
If there's a drought, everybody's concerned.

> orange jam
yeah, thanks, fuck off with this shit

Fungus is a HUGE issue with hydroponics.

>you'll see why nuclear is our best option going forward.
except for the whole part where we don't have materials certified for use in molten salt reactors

nuclear powered desalination plants making ocean water into fresh water

>we don't have materials certified for use in molten salt reactors

Except they developed those materials in the 50's during the MSR Experiment at Oak Ridge National Labs.

Also even if some critical and insurmountable technological barrier was between us and viable molten salt reactors, molten salts aren't the only option. Several breeder reactors operated with liquid metal rather than liquid salt for many years. These would remain perfectly viable today if we wanted to build them. There are many designs for high efficiency nuclear power plants that, mainly for political reasons, aren't being built, in favor of more pressurized water reactors, which aren't being built fast enough in America to replace the ones being shut down.

Theyd also dump hectilitres of waste runoff full of ferts into water systems daily

Love dem algal blooms

Molten salts are easier to work with even

Okay, point is we already figured them both out more than 50 years ago.

lol no
They can easily recycle that shit because it's all controlled
fields just runoff with no control
even organic farms have run off in the form of manure
Also how are you going to fertilize organic farms without livestock?
Checkmate vegans

subsidies are unamerican

That's a problem that affects everything, not just vertical farms, so it can't be held against them