Is it possible to scale vertical farming?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90783102/these-smart-farms-are-100-times-more-productive-than-traditional-agriculture
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming (subscriber only)
Short version: scales well for fruits, veggies, high-value crops. Doesn't not scale well for wheat. In other words, it works better for the fruited plain than for the amber waves of grain.
Up until the 1960's truck farming was big around here with produce going to Chicago. You can still see the ruins of the huts the migrant workers lived in out in the country. It is/was a hard way to live and grow crops.
Today there is a big hydroponic plant about 2 miles away. They grow nothing but fancy perfect lettuce for fancy hip restaurants in Chicago. I don't know how many people they employ but it's got to be better than hand picking in the hot fields like the old days.
What are the energy inputs for such setups?
Will they survive as we use up our fossil fuel resources?
> energy
Probably high energy use. Although I'm guessing, less energy use than flying fresh produce in from Chile on cargo planes in the winter. And the summer alternative has been to truck in produce half way across the continent form California.
Water.
I assume they use a fair amount. Right here in the Chicago metroplex, we have the water to spare from the Great Lakes. Whereas, the Imperial Valley in California is running out of surface water for irrigation and has about used up their aquifer.
Runoff pollution
These vertical farm operations are not spraying chemical fertilizers all over fields nor are they spraying pesticides and weed killers the way traditional truck farms do. Plus there is a whole carbon chain behind all three of those products.
That said, you can really only grow high value crops like strawberries, fancy lettuce and such in these plants for now.
Quote from: buckworks on August 31, 2022, 05:22:20 AM
What are the energy inputs for such setups?
Will they survive as we use up our fossil fuel resources?
That article is behind a paywall, but the Nat Geo article about modern indoor ag in the Netherlands shows it as hugely more efficient in the use of energy and above all water and pesticides. A lot of the energy cost of farming goes into pesticides, herbicides, driving tractors around and pumping water. These setups reduce all those by huge amounts.
As mentioned, though, it is not efficient for things like wheat that just require a lot of land, so the embodied energy in the structures ends up costing way too much.