LED agriculture is taking off. Combined with aquaponics it is quite an exciting prospect. Is this the future of agriculture. Underground farms using cheap LEDs to feed the world? No worries about rain, frost, wind damage to crops. If farms ar sufficiently deep even heating costs will be low. Is this the future?
You would still have to worry about fertilizer, water, and electricity usage. So I’ll have to go with “no.”
Sounds plausible. In any event I see a great dystopian sci-fi story in the making.
Putting anything underground is fantastically expensive. Same for on high rises. These notions of vertical farms or underground farms or miles and miles of greenhouses is pure fantasy. It’s just too expensive considering the value of agricultural products. I can’t even fathom what the cost of food would need to be to support such endeavors. 10x? 20x? 100x? It’s not necessarily the operating costs that are so unreasonable (though sufficiently bright lights, even super efficient LEDs, would still require quite a lot of power to cover any meaningful area, and also where do you get the water from if not rain?), it’s the capital costs. Excavation, roofing, lighting arrays, wiring, pumps and tanks, ventilation, this is all big money, and it’s not like we’re really hurting for farm land anyway.
I use a few LED fixtures in my basement light garden (ornamental and vegetable seedling growing) and they make a nice supplement for fluorescent lights.
I can’t imagine large-scale underground LED farms being successful, unless people are willing to buy $5 tomatoes.
Rather than underground, farming could be moved indoors. Here, for instance, is an article about entrepreneurs who are building grow spaces in shipping containers, so that even a restaurant in Alaska can serve fresh greens. Another article about “vertical farming” in small spaces near Manhattan. Many of these efforts use hydroponics…
“Send 'em to the farm.”
Where they have cornfields. (Duhn duhn duhnnnn…)
OP, artificially-illuminated closed-environment intensive agriculture (i.e., commercial scale) will take off when economic forces make it more profitable than conventional surface agriculture, where under optimum conditions critical inputs are free (sunlight, rain, pre-existing soil) and externalities can be safely disregarded (privatize profit, socialize cost).
There are places that already have massive, man-made caverns (like limestone quarries near Carthage, MO). I’m sure there are more of these pre-existing caverns that could be used. You still need to get power, water, etc to them…
I looked into wintering my pontoon boat in a re-purposed mine. It was pricier than I thought it would be.
To answer your question, no, this is not the future of agriculture; underground farms using “cheap” LEDs may have interesting micro-niche applications (e.g. growing pot in your basement), but they will not feed the world.
we use over 15 million square kilometers of land to grow crops. agricultural land is cheap, and sunlight is free.
Comparatively speaking, underground space is not at all cheap, and neither is the electricity required to power your proposed LED grow lights, even if those LEDs are designed just to produce the wavelengths that plants need for growth and phototropism (typically red and blue). If you want to replace even a small portion of the earth’s arable land with caverns, and replace sunlight with LEDs, you’re gonna break the bank, and you’ll also need to increase the world’s electricity production by multiples.
I’m going to half disagree with the naysayers here. Underground doesn’t make sense, this is true.
However - modular farming, done in stacked modules that might be shipping container sized or bigger, has serious advantages not mentioned above.
You control the temperature and humidity and CO2 levels inside. You also control the exact layout - there’s no weeds, and you can sterilize the modules so no bugs can get in. No need for pesticides, and you can use very fragile genetically engineered crops that would not survive windy conditions or insects but grow very fast, happy with 24/7 light coverage.
You could integrate rails and such so that all the crop tending, planting, and harvesting is purely robotic - robots have an easier time in a controlled environment. Machine vision won’t be as confused easily if the only plants allowed are the ones you are growing, and if the backgrounds are known and simple, and there aren’t any extraneous factors like weeds or debris or anything.
Some of the efficiency loss you can compensate for by using LEDs that are tuned towards the actual useful portion of sunlight to plants. Nevertheless, this is a huge issue - penciling it in, if you put solar panels over the same area the plants were in, you lose 80% of the energy converting light to electricity, then about 80% converting electricity to light, and then with the tiny amount of energy remaining (4%) you have available as light for the plants.
Now, if you use the world record most efficient LEDs, which are 300 lumens per watt, and the world record most efficiency solar panels, which are 46%, it’s a bit better. You also can re-tune those LEDs for the plant absorption spectrum. Let’s say you gain another 50% from retuning, so you get effectively 450 lumens per watt, or 450/637. So 32% efficiency. Better, but it still sounds like it might need more land for the solar panels than the current portion covered in crops…
Another issue is that the world record more efficient solar cells use rare materials that aren’t available in large quantities.
The modules you would mass produce in China or in robotic factories in the USA. This would lower the cost enormously.
There’s little or no water loss. Any water that evaporates is still inside the modules, and you can recondense it with air conditioning. You could, instead of introducing air from the outside, supply more CO2 by injecting more. You could get the CO2 from power plants - remember carbon capture technology? Lots of cheaply available CO2 from that.
Sure, but that’s more along the lines of growing specialty produce for limited consumption, not growing staple foods.
Think about it this way- NO other source of light is going to be cheaper than the sun. And relative to nearly every other artificial source of light, the sun is fantastically bright. If you’ve ever done old-school (i.e. not automatic point and shoot) photography, you’re well aware of this.
What I could see possibly happening with lower cost artificial lighting is lower cost greenhouse production of crops that aren’t feasible in some locations due to low temps, etc… Like say… growing winter greens in Alaska.
Or possibly the ability to grow certain things in specific controlled conditions in a cost-effective way. I keep thinking that whoever could come up with artificial growing conditions that are inexpensive enough could knock it out of the park in the wine business- they could literally grow their grapes in optimal conditions every single time, or mimic certain awesome vintages, etc…
Yes, but it’s not the only cost. You need land. It needs to be land with adequate rainfall, or you need a ton of water. You need crops able to survive the wind and insects - that means the plant needs to waste energy creating lots of non edible components like the tough stems and other sections.
You have a severe problem that since it’s outdoors, you cannot control the spread of various diseases. Indoors, in sealed modules, you can absolutely prevent any bacteria or fungi from spreading. This means that a disease can evolve to kill all your crops, and you won’t be able to prevent it from spreading like wildfire unless you have many different kinds of crop.
During parts of the year - is it half the year? - sunlight falls on the ground but you can’t use it because it’s not the growing season. Whole areas of the Earth are drenched in sunlight but you can’t use them for crops because there is not enough water, it’s all rocky desert.
And of course, there’s the threat of climate change. For various reasons, some political, some tragedy of the commons (even if we can solve all the politics, every nation has an incentive to pollute and “cheat” any agreements) - it seems inevitable. That would warm up polar regions and turn equatorial regions to uninhabitable desert.
It could reduce the total farmland on Earth, since the land/ocean ratio is not the same at all latitudes, and/or the newly created farmland might belong to nations who don’t fully use it or who charge exorbitant prices for food grown on it. It would be really useful to not depend on the outside environment at all - just order a big stack of farm in a box modules, stack them up, and connect in a big array of solar panels for power.
Oh, I just thought of another advantage.
These farms in a box are an example of power demand you can throttle. You could turn off half the LEDs, or 1/4 the LEDs, and the crops inside are going to slow their growth rate but it’s not linear, and they won’t die unless you leave the plants in the dark for days.
So in a grid that has a lot of renewable energy, during times when there is excess energy, you run the farm in a box lamps at full brightness, day or night. When there is less energy you cut back.
Nonetheless, agriculture is first and foremost a business. Until this significant re-alignment of its operating model is reliably more profitable than plain ol’ large-scale dirt farming, it’ll never be more than a trivial niche.
Correct. This actually is an example of the “free market taking care of it” if climate change or overpopulation means there isn’t enough farmland to keep everyone fed, however. In such a world, food prices would rise, and it would become profitable to grow the food in these container farms.
Certain people have argued that in such a world, there would just be mass death instead, but given certain assumptions, the market would respond and handle this problem.
In addition, the container farms might someday be cheaper than large scale dirt farming. Sort of how solar might someday be cheaper than coal. (well, ok, some numbers say that someday is today)
Since this requires speculation, let’s move it to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Where is the electricity coming from? Since you only need light for half of the day every day, it may be a good match for solar power. But it seems absurd to use solar panels to power underground farms. Just replace some of the solar panel installations with greenhouses and eliminate the cost and inefficiency of the solar panels and LEDs. Greenhouses have many of the same advantages as underground farms.
Historically, starvation is a market response. It also appears to be, to some extent, a current one.
Don’t count on the Invisible Hand feeding people if starving them is more profitable.
Well, if the worst case scenarios about climate change came true, it would come from the predicted vast equatorial deserts. But yes, a greenhouse is a good point…