Open-sourced food production – the future of urban diets? | Hacker News Reader

Open-sourced food production – the future of urban diets?

theguardian.com

37 pointsbenologist17 comments

What is the point of the article? Shamelessly promoting Cleb Harper?

Seriously, there's not a single real argument or piece of data in the article, just a bunch of complaints about "first world problems".

- How does growing food locally in sub-optimal scale in urban environments stack against high-efficiency farms?

- Cities' water systems are strained and wasteful due to old infrastructure, and require that water is brought from hundreds of miles away, while some agricultural areas face similar issues, how does this compares with the average agricultural area?

- Why would someone try to grow anything in San Francisco using tap water?

“Everyone wants transparency in food. Anyone right now that’s building opacity in the offering to consumers is going to die.”

AFAIK, starving people are more worried with finding the next meal, not with the terroir of the wheat in the bread. Sounds too much like many SV startups: solving first world problems first.

"including boxes that create controlled environments to grow specific types of food"

So, instead of growing crops where they grow best, and efficiently shipping them around the country (freight accounts for 6% of the total food chain emissions), we'll use energy to create boxes that maintain controlled temperature, humidity and luminosity so we can grow our favorite crops just next door? That sounds totally inefficient for me (but I'd love to see data on that).

It sounds especially inefficient when you consider the bad example brought up in the article--apples. There is a reason apples are mass-produced--lots of land and the right climate conditions. You can't grow too many apples in urban areas. I love real apples, but I grew up in an exurban area across the street from an apple orchard.

You won't taste apples that good through mass production, but you will be able to get apples year around. Those are the trade offs.

Apples are great in an urban environment -- they're a nice looking tree that gives a spectacular flower show in the spring.

But I don't know what relation apples have to the OP, though. A controlled growing environment is generally associated with small vulnerable vegetable crops like lettuce, not huge hardy apple trees.

considering how polluted urban areas are, and how good are apples in retaining pollution in them (no sources at hand now, sorry), I would not touch those unless situation got serious.

BTW, you are smoking the exactly same air as tree.

One of the biggest problems with this idea of producing lots of food in urban areas in that urban land is very expensive and transportation will only become more efficient over time. So why are we obsessing on reducing transportation distance? Trains are incredibly efficient and trucks will only improve, especially with increased automation.

Transportation costs will fall, but urban land values will continue to increase. Just look at the housing situation in the San Francisco metro area. It's more efficient to use urban areas for people and grow crops where they grow well.

I feel as though the article is using "open-sourced" more as a buzzword than as a phrase to convey actual meaning.

The only concern most gardeners have related to patents or copyrights is in their seed acquisition. Those who care at all use heirloom seeds and save portions from their previous crop, whereas those who don't just buy seed packets.

Now, if we're talking minimal-effort gardening robots, with open hardware and freely modifiable firmware, that's a different story, but the fine article didn't mention anything more in that vein than a vague reference to optimized tomato boxes.

What would be a more truthful headline? Summary of a Conference Talk on the Future of Gardening by Caleb Harper of MIT.

I am conflicted on this. On one hand, there's a large push for locally produced food, to save on distribution and transport. But on the other hand....surely it's better for the environment if we produce most of our food on huge mega farms which are highly efficient?

Mega farms typically have lower distribution & transport costs too. Hundreds of miles in a semi-trailer uses less gas per pound than 50 miles in a pick-up.

It's all background noise compared to the gas used to go from the grocery store to your home, though. If you drive further to get to the farmer's market to get local food...

In this case you aren't using any gas to get your food. That doesn't automatically make it less carbon-intensive, though. Producing the equipment, driving to get required inputs, it all adds up.

Yeah, different values lead to different conclusions.

If married to proper waste management, a chicken factory -- with chickens packed into tiny little boxes, egg production per calorie maximized, chickens discarded the moment their egg production drops, bred to mature as rapidly as possible -- is probably to most environmentally friendly way to produce eggs. You minimize land and energy use and human labor as well (humans have environmental costs, after all).

On the other hand, if you care about animals more than the environment, it's probably the worst possible way to raise chickens for egg production. Instead you want to maximize chicken happiness, you probably want small flocks free-ranging in a safe pasture-land, with chickens allowed to live out their dotage after the egg production has waned. This, of course, will require far more land and other inputs. You'll even have higher transportation costs, since you'll need to accumulate eggs over a larger area.

So would you rather have a chicken factory, a hundred acres of corn, and a thousand acres of wilderness, or 1100 acres of happy chicken pastures?

Which use large amounts of pesticide and waste if the crops don't look pretty they are scraped.

And in the UK allotments are a growing trend and of course popular with Guardian readers.

In the Uk there a duty for local government to provide land for alotments

Well yes, of course, but my point is that on mega farms you can use gigantic tractors which process a lot more crops than your tiny tractor or even what you can collect by hand. Just like transporting 50 people is a lot more efficient by bus, instead of having 50 cars. And mega farms don't have to use so much pesticide, and mega farms don't have to throw away ugly crops - this happens due to a stupid system around how we sell vegetables, nothing to do with farm efficiency.

Unfortunately mega farms have issues with getting rid of pesticides and fertilizers. To ensure the soil has enough nutrients for a desired crop, other crops often have to be planted as well, no? Mega farms really only do monocultures well right now AFAIK, and that's a problem.

The fertilizers are actually the solution to (most of) the monoculture problem. Other problems remains, such as erosion, biodiversity, etc. but not efficiency.

The increased use of fertilizer tends to lead to the forced increase of pesticide use IIRC (Source is in my library at home atm, sorry). It also leads to a decrease in nutrient value from the food as well due to the increased pesticide use.

From a pure efficiency note, pesticide and fertilizer use is the best solution in the short term. But I'm curious what the long term repercussions will be for both human and environmental health.

In the long term, we're all dead :)

But I agree with your point. Sadly, long term is too long to have enough information to make decisions ex ante.

And on your pesticide and nutrient value claims, I'd love to see data on that, sounds pretty dubious to be honest.

Sorry for being off-topic but I need to write this down:

The first thing I had in mind after reading the topic "Open-sourced food production" was "Soylent Green is people!".

Puh, good thing that's off my mind now.

Best, Steviee

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