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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

If startup-ey media is anything to go by, agg-tech has some weird ideas about what the problems are with aggriculture.

The water and land required for vegetables farming isn't a problem. We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms.

Most of the water & land is used for cereal farming.

Whatever you can grow in a mine or a skyscraper can be grown on a "small" farm near a city. Whatever water saving, pesticide minimizing, or other benefits you get have little to do with location.

There are plenty of led/hydroponic farms in normal farming places.

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>We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms.

Food crops in general absolutely, some like lettuce could actually benefit from being done indoors though as you could limit exposure to things like E. coli compared to traditionally grown lettuce.

Growing in a largely enclosed system also allows you to prevent runoff, use the least amount of water possible, control all environmental variables etc BUT unless we suddenly develop fusion today and magically start bringing hundreds of fusion plants online a year, using the sun is always going to be more efficient than grow lights.

Economically that’s true, but ignoring capital costs...

LED’s are up to 50% efficient. The best Solar is hitting 44% effecency. So, we can only keep ~22% of the energy from sunlight. However, plants are green because they only absorb a subset of sunlight. So, by designing LED’s that only emit the light best collected by plants you can get fairly close to 1:1 and theoretically you could see a net gain. Thus, 100 years from now things might flip. Further, we can stick solar panels many places we can’t effecently farm.

It’s still going to stay very niche, such as producing ultra high grade produce for high end restaurants.

We could potentially supplement the LEDs with fiber optics that deliver natural sunlight underground.

I think you're exactly right here

in the same vein, vertical farming stuff like this could become appealing if we can design solar panels that function in an opposite (complementary) spectrum vs. plants

The water is forward looking at least given aquifer depletion issues. Land itself is just silly to try to minimize for agriculture however - while you want more yield the strategy is cheap land for farming. Transportation costs (cheap in bulk but still a sizable component given how farmers' markets are cheaper), and freshness premiums might make it viable to centralize agriculture but certainly not land cost.

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