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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

I think I like the farmbot.io idea a little bit better as it seems far more practical. After all I'm not looking to grow all my food but mainly the dirty dozen vegetables/fruits (as well as seasonal ones I like).

One of the main reasons I want to grow food though is some vegetables are not carried by my local grocery stores (I have to go to a farmer market or expensive grocery store). For example many grocery stores do not sell Japanese yams, Yuca, various peppers, or plantains (I suppose plantains would be difficult to grow).

I also would like to do it all inside as well (because I live in New England and have more inside space than outside and various other reasons). Basically a refrigerator size farming appliance that you plugin with plumbing and electricity.

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Unless they put the farmbot on wheels, you're talking about too small of a square footage to generate any interesting yields. You'll spend WAY more time maintaining the bot than you would just planting and mulching.

The farmbot development is important, but won't be commercially viable with the current fixed rail system.

Well that is what I'm wondering. One of the big issues is real estate. I wonder if it would be more viable instead of just going 2D to make a more 3D system (ie stack plants ala hydroponics).

Obviously the sun is way more efficient and preferred but if you live in an area where the sun isn't exactly available that much of the year it might be worth it for some automated easy to use large indoor like closet system or cabinet particularly in more urban areas.

As much as it's fun to think about, food doesn't need to be grown in urban areas with expensive real estate.

Green houses and hydroponics are great, but they can just as well be done on cheap land.

The biggest difficulty in food production isn't land, water, and sunlight - its management at scale.

This is why the vast majority of everyone's calories comes from large tractor managed commodity crops.

As a metaphor, the easy part of IT is ordering the servers, switches, etc. The setup takes some labor, but the real difficulty is the ongoing management.

> food doesn't need to be grown in urban areas with expensive real estate.

It doesn't need to. But there's an increasing push towards looking for ways to cut the environmental effects of farming, and there transport is part of the challenge. There's also an increasing push for cutting time to market, despite traditional farms being further and further away from most consumers.

Hydroponics in urban areas is likely to converge on the mass market from two directions: Environmentalists looking for options that cut land use and transport, and up-market foodies willing to pay extra for products that are "straight from the farm two doors down" in the middle of a city.

Whether it eventually will get cost effective enough to supplant normal farms is another matter.

I so sympathize with this view. I used to hold it.

After experimenting with the hydroponics, vertical growing, etc. I've come to realize the best way to cut the environmental effects of farming is to make traditional boring broad acre farming restorative and regenerative. Moving farms into cities simply won't produce enough calories profitably enough to make any meaningful positive environmental impact.

Amazingly enough, there are a large number of well-educated farmers out there that are moving to no-till, alley cropping, key line design for water retention, and perennial crops.

One of the best voices for this new generation of farmers is Mark Shepard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnoeb1x-XVA

yet

Maybe it never will, but we won't know without trying.

> I've come to realize the best way to cut the environmental effects of farming is to make traditional boring broad acre farming restorative and regenerative.

But none of that can fully counter the massive land use, nor does it address the increasing effects of transport necessary to handle increasingly urban populations and increasing expectations of short delivery times.

What if you put the FarmBot plotter on wheels or rails and let it move up and down rows of boxes?

I haven't looked a ton at its performance characteristics but I would imagine it spends a lot of time sitting idle with the current plot they're maintaining.

But a similar bot that could maintain 4'x8' boxes and then roll on to the next one could be interesting. Or even one that could manage continuous line of plots of a given width, e.g. 4' wide

You should be able to grow all those indoors. I had a friend who grew bananas and lemons in containers in a Minnesota climate; he moved the plants indoors when it got too cold.

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