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Comment by ijoijiuiuni | Hacker News Reader

Vertical farming can do 10X, GMOs can do 10x, urban farming can cut out 90% of transportation costs, (not exactly what you mean but getting people to eat less meat would 100x our efficiencies) there is still room for improvement.

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Let’s see you sell your easy ten thousand percent increase in farming efficiency.

The reason it’s hard to sell hype to farmers is they live in the real world and they’re not impressed by idiots that are so wrong that stupid isn’t a big enough word to describe them.

Vertical farms have their own issues and it turns out that they are incredibly vulnerable to electricity prices.

It seems an obvious route to take but it isn’t all sunshine.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/vertical-farms-energy-crisis

It takes 9 acres of solar panels to light 1 acre of vertical farm crops.

Theoretically, you could cover all of Nevada (~70M acres) & Arizona (~73M acres) with solar panels.

That would only give you enough vertical farm space for ~16M acres, and apparently the US only has ~10M acres for farmland for fruits & vegetables.

Point being - this seems implausible - and I'm not sure how you work around that.

IIUC, it takes about 1 acre to produce ~.12MW solar (obviously differs based on where the panels are). The world installed 168GW of solar in 2021 - so that's 1.4M acres of solar.

It'd take 100 years of solar production to cover that much area with solar panels.

And for what?

Cattle uses 4.5x more land by itself. We use 3x as much space to grow most of our calories (grains and oils) - replacing that with vertical farms seems like something from an alien civilization that is way to far away to imagine.

Note that vertical farms have about 3-4x yield compared to an equal area of land. They also require significantly less pesticides, water, or fertilizers. Though currently they struggle with many types of vegetables.

3-4x yield for which crops exactly? They are only used for growing leafy greens and low volume high cost fruits such as strawberries. Do they produce 4x corn and soy? 4x potatoes?

The capital investment required to grow corn indoors would be enormous relative to the per bushel cost. I reckon the operational cost would even outweigh the revenue.

Average corn yields in Iowa were 205 bushels per acre in 2021. Let's say corn is $10 a bushel (trading around $7 on the spot market right now). So $2050 per acre for conventional ag.

Let's assume 4x yield for indoor production, so roughly 1000 bushels/acre. Or $10k per acre at $10.

I had trouble finding any good information on energy consumption in an indoor cropping system, but I'd bet lighting energy consumption would eat up the additional revenue from higher yields.

Edit: Please let me know if anyone has access to scientific literature/experience on indoor farming energy use, I'm genuinely interested to know

Perhaps you can collect light vertically as well? And deliver it to crops either via the conversion to electricity and back, or even by some sort of optical/waveguide/handwave thing?

There's only so much sunlight that reaches any point on the Earth throughout the day. You could build something really tall to collect more light from the sun at more angles, but that will cast a shadow and reduce what's available for other collectors. So you end up with a lot of collectors receiving little sunlight or fewer collectors spread far apart.

It is also unreasonable since there are better competitors like artificial starch synthesis where you can use bioreactors to produce starch directly from CO2 and electricity at 8 times the efficiency of corn. If you add artificial lighting then vertical farming is at least 16 times worse than artificial starch synthesis. The freed up land would allow us to then grow normal non nutrient dense food in its place instead which obsoletes the need for vertical farming.

Vertical farming can grow micro-greens pretty well but it will never produce 90% of our calories, even with optimistic assumptions. It would also be an environmental disaster.

Transportation is a teeny tiny fraction of the environmental cost of food as well.

I'm also not aware of any GMOs that are 10x better than their non-GMO counterpart although there are certainly improvements to be had here.

GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions. The savings come in other ways, such as no manual weeding with glyphosate resistance (or higher yields compared to letting the weeds rob NPK), or less insecticide use and spraying for BT corn. As a rough estimate, yields are about 6-10% lower for GMO seeds, but labor savings can be huge. GMO cotton cuts labor costs by 90%.

> GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions.

If, as is true of the most commom GM crops, the specific GMO trait at issue is a non-yield trait like, say, glyphosate resistance, sure, that’s what you would expect. (Though the yield is substantially higher in the intended conditions; real crops rarely grow in ideal conditions.)

Of course, there are crops modified for yield specifically, too.

It makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process? I am aware of accelerated mutations by irradiating seeds, though I think this is rare and I only know of red grapefruits that successfully used this technique.

> I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process?

Not sure that anything particularly CRISPR-like is involved (there are other transgenic techniques), but:

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-genetically-modi...

Thanks for the article and I read the paper. I know people have been working on it for ages, but it is nice to see some promising results.

One huge problem with the article is this line:

> The plants are also 16% to 18% more efficient at using nitrogen

The paper said no such thing. These plants take up more nitrogen and increase yield.

Even in a place like Canada where so much food is imported, transportation only adds up to about 12pc of the total energy cost.

I'm not aware of any vertical farm that is 10x as efficient as a regular farm.

It depends upon what you're defining efficiency as. In terms of yield per acre, there are estimates that yield per acre can increase by a lot more [1]. I haven't seen anything more efficient energy or cost wise (outside of a couple types of plants, really just microgreens).

[1] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002655117

Land is cheap. Efficiency in this context is units of product per dollar spent.

Or, perhaps, carbon emitted. Either way vertical farms are a huge loser for anything outside of niche products.

Yeah sure at 1.5 million watts per acre of grow surface in LED lighting. The average American eats 2.5 acres worth of food and produce per year, which is a 3.75 million watts of lighting for 12-16 hours a day per person.

Now sure that number can be improved, but it also isn't accounting for additional HVAC costs, and you are still looking at atleast 2 million watts per person.

Do tech people really believe in the vertical farming hype? Genuinely asking.

I ask myself this. Are the vertical farm fans really this ignorant? Or is it an act? But there are also people who will pop up and advocate for "personal rapid transit" (they are known as "pod people"), hyperloops, NFTs, and all types of other things that are impossible, nonsense, or pointless. Vertical farms are just the latest of these: a stupid idea with no future whatsoever, but with a vocal army of online boosters.

I think they are really this ignorant. The tech suburbanite ideas about farming are insane.

Vertical farming is just one of the cringy ideas. Farm underneath solar panels instead of putting the panels on one side of the farm, monocropping is pure evil and farmers are simply stupid for doing it. Grow cover crops so we have to dedicate 50% more land for agriculture.

Would you rather grow cover crops or have soil depletion?

Also cover crops don't result in a 50% increase in land usage.

Here is a video that might interest you:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

They don’t even eat the alfalfa sprouts they praise and they think chicken nuggets grow under Golden Arches.

Personal rapid transit as in e-bikes is doing great

The best greens I've had come from a vertical farm. Its too bad - I otherwise think its a wasteful, inefficient technology. I suspect the high quality didnt really have much to do with the vertical-ness of the farm though, and could likely be reproduced in a more traditional greenhouse (with some supplemental lighting during the shorter days).

Yes. But it requires nuclear power, ideally compact fusion reactors on site.

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