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Comment by LMYahooTFY | Hacker News Reader

Are there some links to elaborate on this topic you could/would share?

Vertical farming certainly seems like an awesome idea with obvious benefits, but there are clearly plausible obstacles and drawbacks that I don't know enough about agriculture to deem valid or not.

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I saw this a while back when I went into a big research hole on this topic: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/02/indoor-urban-farms-... .

LEDs have certainly gotten more efficient and cheaper since that lecture, but I think the general argument is still the same. The sun is pretty damn powerful.

Sorry, I don't have time to dig much out. The tldr is that we tend to overestimate the inputs like water and fertilizers and underestimate the massive amount of energy added by the sun.

Solar energy is getting so inexpensive and more TWhr installations will come online in the next century, it’s still possible we can use that energy.

I’m thinking more on the 100 year timeline.

Yes but plants have built in solar panels, you need to have solar energy that is much more efficient than plants and also very, very cheap

But then you will need the space freed from agriculture for the solar energy production, instead of forests? In the end, isn't a field of corn a massive solar energy plant?

But not nearly as much land would be required, if Nebraska was covered with solar panels, that would be enough for the world:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200+W%2Fm%5E2+*+area+o...

A real improvement would be to reduce the amount of grain we need to produce. Cutting down on beef consumption would have a huge impact.

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