The plant respires into the air. That moisture is recoverable. The air gets humid, you condense the excess, and use the resulting liquid water for further irrigation.
The farm is just a black box where food comes out on one end. Everything else is recycled. It needs energy, water, air, and some trace elements as input. That’s all.
I’d say biking is easy.
We are just trying to refute your statement that " Food production shouldn’t require more water than the mass of the final product".
If you can’t see that from the example of a leafy vegetable, surely you can accept the notion that more water is used by the plant to produce a seed than is in that final product. And if the only part of the plant which humans can eat is the seed (indeed that vegetative body is of negligible calorific value to monogastrics) then 1000s of times more water is required to produce a seed than is in the mass of the seed.
“The farm is just a black box where food comes out on one end.”
And because of recycling, and imported water, the whole bloody hydrological cycle more water is used in the production of the final product than is in the mass of the final product. For every final food product.
I think you’re arguing a strawman or something. I was speaking exclusively of indoor farming, not farming as it exists today, which is incredibly wasteful. The entire point is to capture all the losses (of water, fertilizer, etc.) that currently just gets dumped into the environment.
Again, this technology exists today. It’s not fully perfected, so it doesn’t achieve the entire potential benefit, but it is much better than normal outdoor farming. And the price needs to come down, but ultimately we may not have much choice.
As a side benefit, it is much more dense than normal farming, so we’d no longer have to dedicate an insane 40% of the US landmass to farming. Because it’s so compact, farms can be much closer to cities, reducing transportation costs, reducing waste, and increasing quality.
Why pick on this issue? If the fundamental question is “why don’t good people do more”, it costs a few thousand dollars to save a life in the developing world. Most of us could subsist on far less. Why don’t we all give away 90% of our wealth to save untold lives?
You’re not wrong about eating meat, but I think your approach to the issue from the perspective of “how could well-meaning people not be doing this” could be applied to any number of things, some of which seem more fundamental to me.
Yes, this.
This is, and can only ever be, technically possible with one foodstuff … water.
It should only take 1kg of water to produce 1 kg of water.
You put any living organism into the equation then the very process of life requires additional water be it outside, inside or in a petri dish.
You seem to have a mystical view of life, but it’s just a chemical process. The input water may be split into hydrogen and oxygen, temporarily repurposed into sugars or other materials, but ultimately it all winds up as water again.
I do a lot of things that I KNOW are bad for me. Like eating things with lots of processed sugar. That’s just human nature.
IANA economist, but I think this is largely about what economists call “externalities”. Pricing out direct inputs versus direct outputs does not capture all the negative externalities of industrial agriculture (the toxic runoff, the excess antibiotic use, the pollution of local waterways, the loss of wildlife habitat corridors, the community impacts, etc.) or all the positive externalities of sustainable agriculture (the habitat restoration, the improved soil and livestock health, the reduction in toxic pesticides and antibiotics, the increased biodiversity, etc.). Leaving all those factors out skews the comparison.
(Note that this is not to claim that industrial agriculture has no benefits or sustainable agriculture has no disadvantages. Just that the net benefit/harm ratio is not correctly represented by merely answering the question “How much of what resources were applied directly to this particular chicken to get it from egg to market?”
So it turns out I didn’t miss that part, it isn’t here. Yet surely there’s some reason we can’t just eat less meat isn’t there? It couldn’t be that simple could it? Instead of everyone becoming vegetarians we just eat less meat? Nah, there must be some reason why we can’t eat more vegetables and less meat. Even if we ate 10% of the meat we do now it might not help because there might not be any more vegetarians than we have now.
Indoor farming is great at conserving water but it requires a LOT of power to run all the bits and pieces. If the electricity is generated by green sources that’s fine, but if it comes from petroleum/coal/other fossil fuel then you’re back to destroying the planet.
Thank you. Much more clearly said.
Agreed. Most of my suggestions about how stuff “should” work depend on abundant green energy.
However, I don’t think this is an unreasonable assumption. Renewables dominated new energy installations in the US in 2021 with >75% of the total, depending on how you count it. Zero new coal, and even natural gas seems on its way out. I don’t see much sign of this stopping; renewables keep getting cheaper while fossil plants keep getting more expensive.
Indoor farms have an advantage that will be important for renewables: they’re compatible with load shedding. If there’s a day of particularly high residential demand, or the renewables aren’t producing as much due to some weather event, you can just dim the lights on the farm. The plants will take a little longer to grow but they won’t die. They have to survive through ordinary cloudy days, after all. Better to lose a percent or two of farm productivity than have blackouts where people lose their heating or A/C. The farm benefits by getting super cheap energy the rest of the time.
We’ll want energy storage as well, but these kind of smart grid features give you many of the same benefits for cheaper.
I guess composting the crop waste to produce fertilizer is out of the question.
Personally, both biking and going meatless are easy.
There is much to be said for vegetarianism.
I am at a loss to know why vegetarians cannot be content simply to say it, without taking the argument over a cliff.
And some of the externalities of my meat production are beneficial. The pastures are lightly managed, and increase the local biodiversity, as they are home to a wide variety of local plants and insects. The employees, including those who slaughter the animals, are paid a decent wage and have decent working conditions. Neither of those are true of the mass-produced vegetables i buy in the supermarket.
It’s because bacon tastes good; pork chops taste good.
Everybody is a little inconsistent with their values.
Glad it was caught.
