If you’re talking about deserts, for a lot of the earth’s hot deserts, the giant difference would be to bring in water. You can either avoid the desert areas of excess alkalinity, or rinse it away. For agricultural production, the main needs are sun for the power source; water; and soil for nutrients and for holding the roots down.
Desert soils don’t have the tropical problem of having the minerals and organic matter leached out by endless warm rains. (Wet tropics are “lush” but tend to produce sugars and starches, with only minimal protein in plants.)
Note what happened in Southern California (the Imperial Valley) when the taxpayers brought in water.
So howza about putting a giant nuclear power plant on the south side of the Mediterranean, and pumping a few Nile Rivers-ful of water into the Sahara. You might want to bulldoze any sand dunes out over barren rocky areas also, and bring in organics and minerals as required for those areas.
It would take a lot of canals and pumps, and say railroads to bring in the initial resources and take out the produce. Use big-time mechanized farming methods, rather than guys with bad teeth hunched over a hoe.
Seems like industrial-level costs, near-industrial-level production. Interesting to calculate if it would pay the costs.
The most efficient way to farm the ocean is hard to guage. Probably simply building floating hydroponic farms would be the most efficient. Vascular plants tend to dominate the planet because they can get tall, providing more mass/unit area. Since we are being restricted to sunlight for our energy source algae will present a problem because they can effectively only grow as a shallow mat, in real terms only a few cell layers thick. It’s doubtful if even under ideal circumstances this can ever compete with plants that can grow up into the light and pump their own water.
Farming the deserts will probably always remain the preserve of grazing. Most deserts, or more accurately arid and semi-arid regions, produce reasonable annual flush of mostly perrenial grasses but little ability to produce grains. Grazing remains the best mechanism for harvesting this resource.
If we have finite energy we are right back where we started. The energy costs of agriculture are far more than just those associated with powering the grow tubes. There are energy costs associated with producing fertiliser, desalinating and pumping water, producing pesticides, transportation and so forth. Because of this the question becomes highly complex. In reality it would be most efficient to ignore the drier and less fertile areas and leave them to whatever agriculture is currently being practiced there. The potential of the more productive areas could then be maximised by judicious. With the huge energy costs of desalination hydroponics would only be more efficient in those areas with large fresh water supplies, at least open to seasonal harvesting, meaning that it would only be efficient on a very limited scale if energy costs are a concern.
Basically the best answer to your question is going to be very close to simply looking at the agriculture practised in an area tody. There will be some oddities like intensive grazing animal production, high value cropping and subsidised (non) production, but by and large current agricultural practices aim to maximise production. Areas that are grazed today are probably most efficiently utilised by grazing, areas given to maize are most efficiently utilised by maize and so forth.
Most deserts are tropical of course, so I guess you meant the tropical rainforest problem. But the comparison doesn’t hold up. Most deserts soils do tend to be infertile because of leaching. The Australian desert soils are particularly notable for this problem, but the same is true of deserts in Asia, Africa and North Am. While deserts don’t get much rain, they do tend to get large amounts cof seasonal rain. This wet season surplus combines with the lack of binding plant materials to produce a very rapid infiltration and flow through, which is characterised by heavy leaching. The problem is compounded because the lack of steady water and glaciation results in very slow soil production rates. As a result the nutrients are leached out faster than they are replaced.
The opposite generally tends to be true. The rapid nutrient turnover in tropical rainforest and seasonally wet forests lends itself to very high protein plant biomass. Because the cycling is so fast plants can afford to produce short lived vegetative parts loaded with nutrients that maximise both growth and energy capture. If the leaves are lost the nutrient loss it is only temporary and rapidly recouped when the leaves decay. In addition the constant warm temperatures and water availability make replacement fairly cheap.
In contrast the plant of temperate regions and dry forests and savannas can not afford to lose biomass. A lost leaf will lie on the ground, possibly for years, before the nutrients are returned through decay. Any plant losing a leaf has lost those nutrients for several reproductive cycles. With dry seasons, winters in which growth is impossible and so forth it is vital that any biomass accumulated is retained to the maximum degree. If a leaf is lost today and growth is not possible next week the plant has lost a very precious resource in addition to the nutrients: time. The problem is exacerbated in dry regions by the constant threat of fire. Plant parts lying on the ground are consumed and the nutrients lost as smoke or washed away as ash, leading to a permanent depletion of the nutrient resources of that plant. The solution adopted by most dry tropical species is to make leaves with low nutrient levels and loaded with fibre and toxins so that herbivory loss is minimised. As a result protein levels tend to be very low.
There is an exception to this rule in the dry tropical/subtropical legumes. The Acacias, Mimosas, Albizias etc. these all tend to have high protein levels, but this is because they can fix atmospheric nitrogen and so are less constrained by nutrient cycling and environemental conditions.
I don’t see why the highest technology imaginable should not be considered, as a thought experiment; you will need some sort of very high tech to live in the asteroid habitats imagined by so many dreamers like me.
You need plentiful water (lots of that in the solar system;)
Energy (ditto)
Carbon, oxygen, trace elements (ditto- although not always in juxtaposition)
genetically engineered plants- assume the efficiency of rice or algae, producing all amino acids and vitamins - probably need some animal genes in there too- soy/beef splice? chickenwheat?
efficient soil composition- an artificial medium called gardenpaste has been proposed, actively supplying all nutrients to the roots of the GM plants.
Yes- there is nothing impossible about the idea of efficient food production-
you could even do it on Earth, much more easily than in orbit-
import too much energy into the Earth system and you might cause global warming despite the reduction in C02 such an intensive cultivation regime would produce.
Please stop using the terms “tofu” and “TVP” (Texturized Vegetable Protein) interchangeably. They are two entirely different things. Tofu is a condensed bean curd similar to a vegetarian form of cheese. TVP is sawdust digested by yeast cultures that is tarted up with spices and other ingredients. Tofu is relatively cheap to produce (~$1-2 per pound) while TVP is a much more complicated product with an incredibly lower demand.
The Mediterranean already has serious salinity problems. Compounding this is probably not a good thing. You might want to try putting the plant somewhere on the Atlantic and piping the water through Morocco etc.
Short answer is no. As has already been noted, we already have an oversupply of food on this planet. Prices are decreasing fairly rapidly as a result. Any project with a need for serious long term investments is not going to be a money spinner even without factoring in the environmental costs.
Ummmm, you left out the hyper-expensive desalination part. This is why scientists are trying to engineer edible plants (besides kelp) that can be irrigated with sea water.
Flooding the Sahara with salt water would guarantee that it could never be used for decades or centuries in the future.
Absolutely; simplest is best; gardenpaste may never be a real item, but it is supposed to be an artificial soil complete with composting processes, defences against pests and dehydration, and a monitoring/control system;
conceived as a way of exploiting marginal land or the soils of an alien planet, it would no doubt be too expensive to use in a situation where hydroponics would suffice.
Well, that certainly leads to the next question: How did people, way back when, get started eating soy in the first place? I’d think that eating soybeans in their natural state would predate the invention of tofu, yes?
99% correct, and a good post. One quible- the “feed grain” cattle are fattened on is a specially grown grain that is very high yiled but not very tasty. Feed corn will yeild several times as much corn as sweet corn.
Eating soybeans in their natural state predates only one thing, death, and only by short periods. The damn things are poisonous. Like many other legumes they contain inhibitors that make it impossible to digest or absorb food. Eating soy in its natural state will lead to death from malnutrition no matter how much other food you have.
It’s hard to say how far back people started eating soy. Within recorded histoy it ha sonly been eaten during famine conditions, or in tiny amounts as part of condiments. The only way it can be eaten is after it has been fermented for several months to destroy some of the poisons. The technique of leaving toxic or indigestible food to ferment in clay pots has very ancient origins in Asia, and analogous practices are practiced by cultures worldwide. It may well be part of the original human toolkit. If that’s the case then people may have been eating soy out of desparation for the 100 thousand years or so.
I thought cooking (heating) makes them safe to eat. Tofu is made from boiled soy beans, not fermented beans. Roasted soy beans are widely eaten in Japan.
Normal cooking does not make soybeans safe to eat. Cooking for etended periods can make them somewhat less toxic, but it would still not pass US health guidleines. Eating even slow cooked soybeans would result in severe problems if you insisted on doing so for more than a few months, and even less if you did not adhere to the standard Asian practice of eating the soy with mineral rich meat products.
Tofu is not made from boiled soy beans. Unfermented tofu is made from curdled soy milk. The milk itself is produced by boiling the beans for a long perod, then simmering the beans for a long period, then filtering off some of the more toxic substances. The milk itself is then curdled and the substances that do not coagulate, including several toxins, are again filtered off. The coagulated mess is then drained of most water and left to dry (and incidentaly ferment in traditional methods). After draining the solid mass is then rinsed for several hours, or traditionally several days, in running water to remove still more toxins. What you have left is tofu. It is not made from boiled soy beans except in the same way that dynamite is made from peanuts.
There are also a range of fermented tofu products.
I have never heard of roasted soybeans being eaten in Japan or anywhere else in the world, but I am not terribly familiar with Japanese cuisine. I haven’t been able to find any refernce to such online either. I suspect that you will find that the ‘roasted sobeans’ have been fermented or pre-cooked.
I meant “boiled” as opposed to fermented, i.e. no yeast or bacterial action involved.
The “roasted” soybeans are apparently cooked for a long time, but I don’t think there is any filtering or fermentation involved. Also, I’m pretty sure the bunches of edamame sold in local supermarkets are fresh and hasn’t gone through any industrial detoxication processes. They look pretty fresh and unaltered to me. All the references I could find on the web (not many, I admit) say the toxins in soybeans are broken down by cooking.
“To retains the freshness and natural flavor, it is parboiled and quick frozen. In the east asia…”
Hmm. you shouldn’t trust a website that makes that number of spelling/grammatical mistakes in one paragraph.
Edamame are a specific strain of iGlycine max. They are only soybeans in the same way that chihuahuas are wolves. They have lower toxin levels than soybeans, and are also harvested unripe before toxin levels are at maximum.
Websites on this topic tend to be either run by the fanatically pro or qanti soy camps. I’m amazed that you couldn’t find anything suggetsing that the toxins aren’t broken down by cooking.
However for slightly more reliable information:
Soybean proteins are widely used in human foods in a variety of forms, including infant formulas, flour, protein concentrates, protein isolates, soy sauces, textured soy fibers, and tofu. The presence of inhibitors of digestive enzymes in soy proteins impairs the nutritional quality and possibly the safety of soybeans and other legumes. Processing, based on the use of heat or fractionation of protein isolates, does not completely inactivate or remove these inhibitors, so that residual amounts of inhibitors are consumed by animals and humans…The results indicate that even low inhibitor isolates contain significant amounts of specific inhibitors. "
Brandon, DL et al 1991 Adv Exp Med Biol “ELISA analysis of soybean trypsin inhibitors in processed foods”
By heating soymilk at 100 degrees C, TI activity decreased to 11% at 10 min and 5% at 20 min. After heating soymilk in a water-bath for 15 min at 75 and 100 degrees C, TI activity decreased to 35 and 12%, respectively. The TI activity of tofu was proportional to the remaining whey. The effects of chemicals used for the coagulation of soy protein and foam-removal on TI activity were little. The results suggest that soybean products retain 2.5-12.5% TI activity of the whole soybean and that humans are consuming some active TI in their daily lives.
Miyagi, Y et al 1997, J Nutr Sci 1997 “Trypsin inhibitor activity in commercial soybean products in Japan.”
Most commercially heated meals retain up to 20% of the Bowman-Birk (BBI) inhibitor of chymotrypsin and trypsin and the Kunitz inhibitor of trypsin (KTI). To enhance the value of soybeans in human nutrition and health, a better understanding is needed of the factors that impact the nutrition and health-promoting aspects of soy proteins.
Friedman M., et al 2001 Nutritional and health benefits of soy proteins. J Agric Food Chem
Edamame are Glycine max, as you say. They are soybeans in the same way that puppies are dogs. To say that the immature, non-toxic seeds are somehow fundamentally different than the mature, (possibly) toxic seeds of the exact same plant strikes me as disingenious in the extreme.
Yes, there may be a distinction between the vegetable-type cultivars [note plural] and the grain-type cultivars, but they are still the same plant. The only reason that the edamame cultivars are preferred is because they taste better:
Here’s a soybean cultivar that’s used for both edamame and tofu:
This article suggests that it may be difficult to differentiate between the two different types of soybean.
