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Comment by terramars | Hacker News Reader

I like how this whole yield paper and model is based on the results of a 3'x3' trial area...

"With artificial lighting increasing the intensity and duration of light beyond what can be captured from the sun in a field, the short indoor growth cycle produced mean grain yields of 14 ± 0.8 t/ha per harvest at 11% grain moisture based on a 1-m2 edge-protected experimental area"

How tf can you say your yields are going to extrapolate from that tiny space to a hectare scale facility? It's ridiculous. We have a huge problem achieving lab-theoretical yields on working farms, outside of the super optimized and most destructive conventional agriculture methods. They didn't even do a full greenhouse trial. Come on guys, you can say it's promising but to say you can get 1000+t/ha out of a vertical farm because of this is fantasy.

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Agronomics baffles me, so I'll admit to not having read the paper. But for those of us just reading the comments, can someone expound on the complaint? If the yields only work in tiny spaces, why can't the hectare scale facility be divided up into tiny spaces? These are indoor farms, can't they just replicate the lab conditions?

I can understand the argument "it isn't economic", but the process to make something economic is do it once -> do it many times -> do it many times cheaply, so the paper could be part of the process that ends with mass vertical farming at absurd yields.

I think what you're asking is, couldn't a Beowulf Cluster of wheat be as efficient as a Mainframe of wheat? And I think that it could be, but there's so many "ifs" involved there it's crazy to speculate at the moment. We might get flying cars before we get massively parallelized vertical underground farms.

No need to speculate, just need to try :) Everyone just needs to share their results and let the risk takers and builders do what they do best. If they fail, in this scenario, the only thing wasted are time and money, and the only thing gained is knowledge.

But this is the other way around; if I wanted to draw a computing analogy it would be arguing that if I wanted to provide massive cloud storage then the physical volume density of information (bytes/m3, a funny but practical measure to talk about) can't approach the density of 1Tb consumer grade hardware.

And that would be true, but it could still be a good target within an order of magnitude, because it could be set up as a very big RAID array. There would losses due to cooling and power and space between the drives and whatnot, but to a first approximation (Facility Volume / 1Tb density * 50% fudge factor) will be pretty reasonable; especially if someone really tried to engineer clever heating solutions.

So the paper gets (checks) ~1,300t/ha lab conditions. Why, in theory, can't they just replicate the lab environment as many times as fits in a big facility? I can see practical impediments like cost, I can't see theoretical ones if it is decided that This Must Be Done. I'd expect reasonable yields of 650 t/ha. That improves on 17 t/ha farming practice [0]. Point is that sort of calculation is totally routine when looking at academic results and I don't see what the problem is using a 3'x3' lab environment then extrapolating with a fudge factor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat#Yields

Legit sounds like the person you are replying to is having a personal, visceral reaction to the results of this experiment compared to the results of (themselves or) others.

As a complete outsider, I say scale it out rather than complain! I eat chapati every day, so I am biased towards wanting success to occur.

It is always possible that endeavors will fail.

"Those who say something is impossible should get out of the way of those who are doing it"

I agree it sounds more like a superficial dismissal. Supposedly the exact thing HN is not about.

HN is a land of contradiction and overreaction :)

When scaling this up, I would be concerned about climate control, disease management, infrastructure limitations and labor / distribution details.

Light, nutrient and water distribution can be replicated, but making sure things scale properly and you don't get cascading failures is key.

Is it possible to somehow isolate the growing units in a way that's both economical, compatible with a degree of automation and also limits cascading failures like disease?

It might be. But that's the whole point of the objection - we suspect that naive scaling is unlikely to scale in the expected manner. There might be ways to mitigate that scaling losses, but it's disappointing that there's no investigation (or mention) of scaling losses in the paper.

It takes seven photons of the right energy band to make one photosynthesis reaction. This is a hard constraint that can not be eliminated by upscaling. Yield is hard coupled to light energy input. Agricullture is only feasible because we receive a huge amount of photons from the sun for free.

Vertical farming is a pipe dream.

Yet they apparently achieved this in a lab. You didn’t explain why it can’t be scaled.

GP is just restating the last sentence of the "Significance" section of the paper in harsher words:

"However, given the high energy costs for artificial lighting and capital costs, it is unlikely to be economically competitive with current market prices."

There is a limited amount of sunlight hitting an area. That means to scale crop yields by going vertical, you need artificial light.

At the moment energy is not harvested in a (sustainably) scalable manner, so vertical farming is infeasible except to boost local production in rich countries.

Saying it's a "pipe dream" is a bit too harsh imo, I think as energy demand ramps up, and oil keeps going down eventually we will be forced to produce unlimited amounts of cheap energy through nuclear power plants, but that's just my vision for the future..

1. I’m not convinced this has to be artificial light as fiber optics might be able to pipe in plenty of sunlight.

2. I’ve heard the real efficiency is tailoring light from high efficiency leds per plant.

I think it is a pipe dream until we master nuclear fusion. The issue is energy vs. land area.

Well perhaps with bio engineering we can improve the efficiency of wheat several times over. Optimizing it for an indoor environment free of pests and consistent in nutrients. Ultimately we just want the wheat berries how many protons are spent on the other portions of the plant.

If we do that it would nice to have some experience ready to go on the Industrial farming side.

Also it takes protons to haul the wheat to market, to harvest it, til the soil and plant it. Not to mention all the externalized costs of large scale outdoor agriculture.

Also on mars and the moon beckon, having a closed loop there would likely dwarf anything we can grow on a field here because of the energy costs of moving tons of food into space.

As someone who works with farmers, I completely and totally agree.

This is like saying that you can grow X goldfishes in your tiny little aquarium and therefore it should be possible to grow X * FACTOR in a lake which is FACTOR size bigger.

Naive question from someone not the least involved in fish farming: why would this assumption fail? Sounds reasonable. Works with humans, too, btw. See skyscrapers.

The vast majority of the energy in the food chain of a body of water comes from the sun so the bigger it becomes, the more volume of water there is relative to the surface area exposed to the sun. You can try to multiple the number of fish by the number of aquariums that would fit into a lake but the vast majority of those fish would starve competing for the limited amount of energy coming hitting the surface.

Thanks for pointing that out. Moving away from skyscrapers you could still successfully scale in 2 dimensions? Which I assume is what fish farming is primarily about, right? Depth brings more limitations like pressure, behavior of gases etc.

A open lake is not a controlled environment - unlike a person's house. You cannot change out the water in a lake, it is exposed to all sort of weather and climatic conditions, fauna and flora etc.

The same applies to open farming vs growing something indoors.

Now coming to this example about vertical farming - at much larger scale you will not get the sort of yield/sq.ft you get at a much smaller scale - even in indoor farming.

I'd like to see the yields in practice. This is necessary information if we look to grow crops in environments like Mars or Luna.

The light reaching the most centred wheat would barely be reduced in a 1mx1m vertical farm. Scale this to 100mx100m and it would be nearly dark without artificial light in the centre.

Isn't one of the primary benefits of indoor growing the influence you have over all of the growing conditions?

Ostensibly you would be able to do all sorts of shenanigans with light tubes for natural light and LEDs for artificial lighting regardless of the size of the facility.

> without artificial light in the centre.

The whole point of this paper is about having high intensity artificial lighting on the crop. So-- I'm not sure what your comment means.

Yes. Surely a better measure than 'per hectare' is for instance, 'per dollar'. Until we run out of hectares, space isn't not the limit on annual crop. Where space would definitely limit 'indoor' total yields.

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