I’m sure that’s nice when it happens, but that’s the exception, not the rule. Here’s a sustainable water use map:
All those red areas in the US? Those basically correspond to the most productive agricultural areas in the US. They’re either importing water or unsustainably using fossil aquifer water. It’s not just those farms in Arizona or New Mexico.
Unfortunately, farmers pay far too little for the water they use, leading to wasteful practices. The benefits of indoor farming would be far more apparent if conventional farms weren’t effectively subsidized.
Yeah. We moved most of the agriculture out to areas with lots of sun and with land contours that allowed for huge fields and huge machinery. We’re going to need to move some of it back to where the water is.
Better yet would be to put solar panels where the sun is, and indoor farms where the people are. That’ll reduce food waste, making them even more efficient, not to mention providing higher quality food year round. Costs need to come down, though.
Why not? Your dad did it for your family - how much time did he take? An hour? I’m betting that can be improved in an industrial setting. Let’s say they can get a family’s worth of pollination in 6 minutes. 3 people could get 240 family’s worth of pollination in one work day.
Not sure how indoor growing would reduce food waste. And I’ve eaten both hydroponic and field grown, and found the best quality usually in the field grown – though not, generally, in the versions bred to ship across the country without bruising. But the hydroponic stuff I’ve had has generally been pretty tasteless.
It’s the putting it near people that reduces waste, not the indoor part (the latter is just to make it dense enough to be practical). About 14% of food is lost between harvest and retail. Seems pretty clear that reducing the transport distances, and being able to time the harvest to consumption, should be able to reduce the amount of waste.
That is curious. There must be some mechanism at play, some component that is present in soil that isn’t being added to the hydroponic solution. Something for more research, I guess.
I believe this is akin to the concept of terroir in wine - the notion that the environmental conditions in which the grape grows (type of soil, climate, altitude, what neighboring plants are present, etc.) can impart a noticeable difference in the flavor profile of the end product.
While the concept of terroir in wine had been known and accepted for centuries, food scientists have also been studying its effects on other crops such as coffee and hops. That being said, with flavors being somewhat subjective, I am skeptical of how much benefit one can get from applying rigorous science to this field.
My dad did it for two to half a dozen tomato plants, the same for peppers. It wasn’t for the majority of our food. It’s tedious, fiddly stuff. It takes very little time to thread a needle, but no one is suggesting that anyone thread needles over and over for 8 hours at a stretch.
Interesting. My hydroponics didn’t seem to have that problem. We did, sometimes, have a problem with texture - indoor plants don’t get stimulated by the wind and thus may not develop as robust stems or other structures, which problem we solved by use of an oscillating fan.
I would suspect a lack of particular nutrients, or perhaps the cultivar being used.
Another possible issue is the lack of stress. As two examples, chard and kale are both known for getting sweeter/less bitter after a light frost or two. Low temperature stress affects their flavor due to adaptions made by the plant to the stressor. Some crops may benefit from timed/applied stress.
The “less food waste” comes in from avoiding damage from weather, animals, insects, and the harvest-to-retail chain @Dr.Strangelove mentioned. Also, because rows of plants can be staggered in their develop you can get a nice, steady, predictable daily/weekly/monthly harvest instead of having everything ripen at once, resulting in a glut, once a year. So you won’t have losses from having to store the vegetable long term.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that stuff too. I was only considering the post-harvest effects. The company sending me advertising says they use zero pesticides. Makes sense–it’s not like bugs are an inevitability of nature; they eat our food because we put our food right out in the open. Keep it in a building and there’s no need for them.
Huh, that’s pretty neat. I wonder if you could mechanically shake the plant, too. Mount the frame on some kind of bearing and have a motor give it a jostle every so often.
Mechanical oscillation should use less power than a fan, since it’s not wasting energy moving the air. On smooth bearings, with a spring for energy recovery, it should take very little power to give a long tray of plants a push to get them waving back and forth for a while. A cheap fan definitely sounds like a good solution on a small scale; I’m just wondering how to scale up the idea to a warehouse size. Not sure that individual fans are the right idea here.
You’d need a pretty big fan to rustle the plants in a building a half-mile on a side! Sure, you don’t need a fan for every individual plant, but you’d still need a lot of them. Fans wouldn’t work very well through multiple layers, either; the plants in front would block the ones in the rear.
Well, I’m sure there are plenty of good ideas here; shaking the grow box is just the first thing I thought of. Some of these places might end up having a bunch of robots to fertilize and harvest the plants. They could give them a shove, too.
You don’t need to have the fan ruffle the plants continuously - you could have the trays pass by just a few fans. Or the other way around - have fans that are on a track and ruffle the plants. Some of these places already have the trays on tracks that progress though the facility from seed to harvest.
I’m sure there is more than one solution to this problem.
If the trays are already moving around, you don’t need anything extra; just jerk the conveyor every so often. Or put a stick in the way so the plants get deflected as they pass by.
I did a bit more research and found this (again on the Plenty company selling goods near me):
Specifically, they say:
One of the primary initiatives is recycling water, by filtering surplus water that accumulates at the base of the plant towers and redistributing it [4]. In addition, a dehumidifier “captures the condensation produced from the cooling hardware, along with moisture released into the air by plants,” and this water is harvested and also redistributed [5]. Plenty claims that when compared to traditional farms, “its technology can yield as much as 350 times more produce in a given area as conventional farms, with 1 percent of the water.” [6]
That sounds pretty good. It means they’re only using a few times the minimum water use instead of hundreds to thousands of times. It’s basically negligible at that point–the daily food requirements per person only require a gallon or two of water, which is less than what people use for toilets alone.
Indoor farming can be very efficient… provided you have energy to put into the system. If you have lots of energy and little water I could see this being superior method of food production (think desert area - you could use solar power). If you have lots of water and little energy it might not be preferred.
The folks who say this sort of farming has a role and a niche probably have it right - it’s not going to replace traditional farming (at least not at this time), but it could supplement it.
This video shows a lettuce ‘factory’. It is in a horizontal greenhouse, but in an area with high land values, it’s not hard to imagine it as a vertical setup.
