Major steps towards better, sustainable and affordable food production free of environmental challenges have been taken, with the "world's first farm to grow indoor, vertically farmed berries at scale" opening in Richmond, VA. It's backed by an international team of scientists that see this new…
I really do want to like the idea of vertical farms, and hydroponics in general as there are lots of benefits versus wild growing, but whenever I see some article claiming sustainability or a reduction in climate impact, it's total bullshit.
All of these systems require massive amounts of nutrients to keep the plants alive and producing, and that essentially means all kinds of mining. The byproducts of these facilities are also toxic, and there is no regulation about how they have to manage that...yet. Essentially they are just taking the farm runoff problem and moving it from rural areas where it's already bad, and transplanting it to denser urban areas.
If they could find better ways to streamline the acquisition of the fertilizer components needed for these facilities, and also the treatment or or disposal of the byproduct, these would be a much better idea.
Could be, but isn't, which is where some regulations probably need to come in. I'm familiar with the systems Plenty uses, and it's all automated.
Prime > start > feed > dump once dead
I've not seen another of these large scale startups doing anything different as of yet, which does make sense cost-wise. Any crop you grow won't ever use an exact amount of nutrients at cycle end with a completely neutral byproduct, and trying to reuse what is left would require a lot of expensive lab efforts which they don't care to invest in.
Example: say you start with a 9N-12P-34K solution, and after a month it degrades to 0-0-12. You can't just refill the nutrients with that same mixture you started with, or you'll damage or risk killing the crop with too much Potassium. You'd need to analyze the loop nutrients to know what level you're at for each nutrient, and adjust to get the mixture right to recharge properly. Currently all these systems just dump and recharge because it's cheap (for now) and easy, but these high concentrations of the various components just end up saturating an area the same as farm runoff. Even if you filter, that filtered medium needs to go somewhere.
There are fancier methods of nutrient filtration extraction and recapture just starting to become more feasible, and we should be looking at making sure these are being used for these large operations.
I don't see how vertical farming can make sense. There is only so much sunlight striking the ground and you just changed the angle and so shaded something else.
Let's assume the energy for lighting comes from solar. Panels are only 20% effective. Now your vertical farm needs 5x the space of a basic farm, and you still have to pay for power instead of using free sunlight.
There is some video on YouTube from a salt lake city university professor who works for nasa on growing plants in space about this topic.
Sure, but where does the energy for that light come from? If the answer is burning things (this is the most likely answer today!) then you are making the world worse. Renewable answers all go back to the sun so why not use the sun directly and avoid all the inefficiencies from turning the sun into electric and then back into light? Which leaves nuclear - which is dieing because of expense.