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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Robot labor isn’t free. You pay in capital costs, energy costs to run them, and ongoing maintenance costs if you use them a lot. Environmentally, these costs might be more or less than the chemicals they replace, but it isn’t am obvious comparison.

Changing farming methods along with automation might work better, like vertical farming techniques.

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Non-subsistence farming is basically all cap ex at this point. Farmers have Ag Ec degrees and think about cap ex first. With the price of energy on a secular decline, imagine a world with ubiquitous renewables. The robots can go to a charge point and recharge themselves.

Vertical farming is complete bullshit for most plants. I don't know why people keep talking about it.

Plant growth is (for most plants) limited by available energy, which comes in the form of sunlight. Sunlight is extremely bright compared to artificial light sources and extremely cheap, i.e. free. Replacing it makes no economic sense in most situations.

If we talk about producing a lot of calories to feed the starving, even most reservations go out of the window, because staple crops are staples because they are very efficient at turning sunlight into chemical energy and they need all the sunlight they can get.

It's weird, vertical farming has gotten so much hype but really only makes sense for luxury products like microgreens, and still only makes sense if you specifically want to grow them in an expensive, dense city. Even things like mature lettuces, tomatoes, and strawberries have been tried extensively and simply don't make economic sense to grow indoors in stacks the vast majority of cases.

I assumed vertical farming was exciting for space reasons, and maybe very little else other than someone wanting (for whatever reason) to grow things in the middle of a dense urban center.

Sorry, but in every example of vertical farming I've seen, there's nothing that actually works. Nearly all of the farms and companies I've visited and been exposed to use a lot more water and energy (in all forms) compared to a conventional farm. The only appeal I see are for places with limited agricultural land space such as Singapore or the Netherlands, or arid regions such as the Middle East or Central Asia. Even then, it's much cheaper for most of these places to simply import from abroad.

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