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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

For general interest;

Let's call Western Australia a small cog in feeding the world demand for grain.

* WA produces on average 13 million tonnes of grains (cereals, oilseeds and pulses) each year. Grain exports generate more than $4 billion (five year average) for the WA economy each year

* The state's grain production area, known as the 'wheatbelt', covers seven million hectares across the south-west corner of the state.

* 7 million hectares ~ 17.3 million acres

Assuming a factor 30 (greater than the 26 stated in the article) increase in production ...

It would take 233,000 hectares (576,600 acres) powered, piped, under a roof, with artifical light to achieve the equivilant production.

[1] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/crops/grains

[2] https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains-research-development/west...

etc.

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To put a big number into perspective for how ridiculous indoor cereal grain farming is... 576,000 acres is ~900 square MILES (3x the size of NYC) - or almost ~2400 square kilometers.

You'd need a structure bigger than Florida to replace all cereal grains with indoor farming. It's just absolutely absurd to imagine.

You'd need to get probably a 1000x increase in production for it to make sense to move indoors.

It only sounds ridiculous until you see photos of the greenhouses in Almeria

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alm...

That's a truly insane local climate changing amount of ad-hoc greenhouses, although it appears the bulk crop is leafy greens and organic growers market produce.

Grains are different beast again, you want millions of tonnes cheaply with efficient bulk acerage harvesting etc.

Thanks for the link, if I hadn't seen it I might not have believed it.

Those are a long shot from the level of climate control the vertical farming crowd is talking about though. On a spectrum between untouched nature and isolated artificial growing environment the Almeria installations aren't that far from the best-prepared open sky setups.

You are assuming a single-story building growing only one level of crops per floor. It should be feasible to have 2-3 crops for each floor, which cuts down the required space. For example, the Tesla gigafactory has 229 acres of floor space, and it is high enough for two floors with 2 levels of crops per floor, so 629 would have to be built. The factories could be built in desert areas. Also, the world would be very interesting if 17.4 million acres of land were returned to nature.

He assumes 30 layers of plants... Reread his comment.

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