/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11725102
There were many plans developed for decentralized and architectural farming, including tiered and vertical farming. developed in the 1950's. It peaked in the 70's. We are in the mediocre hell we are solely because the power structure wanted to herd us like cattle. That's why none of this has been done yet.

It's not enough to transition to a new paradigm, we need to also destroy the existing controllers. They're already working on depopulating right now.

>>11725102
Probably not skyscrapers but in huge industrial warehouses on the edges of cities.

>>11725168
fuck off back to pol faggot

>>11725102
It’s viable and several countries have done it on small scale.. would need some funding and some big companies to plant these babies all across skyscrapers in various cities and sell food made on rooftops or gardens. And the people who own these buildings can get a small cut of that.

The problem is vertical farming is irrigation and maintaining the crops properly because city life and limited space may not promote crop growth as well as a big ass 10 acre farmland per say.. ofcourse if the vertical farms were limited to particular crops and rest taken from large farms something could be done

Nah, bro
You see, plants rely on photosynthesis

In vertical farming, you provide light that the plants need via electricity which makes it highly inefficient by definition alone.
It is only viable if you are in a city, a space station, or in an inhospitable cold wasteland.

Otherwise horizontal farming would remain the cheapest though as the sunlight is completely free.

I'll throw you a bone, though, OP
Vertical farming may be efficient if you planted crops that don't need much sunlight like fungi and algea.

Then again, you need to control temperature so I guess it's still not cheaper than the classic farms.

>>11725102
Worth it if you're growing weed, otherwise terrible idea

>>11725102
No, it's far cheaper to grow industrial amount of crops on a farm rather then maintain a hydroponics system

>>11725214
You could always let light in through a roof/window or use reflective light pipes toward the lower levels

>>11725214
what about fiber cables.
You don't need electricity for those.

>>11725373
>You could always let light in through a roof/window
Dude, it's vertical farming. Only the top ones get sunlight

>>11725386
Don't know what that does but thermodynamics tell me that no. You cannot make a plant grow without offering the same energy that the sun provides one way or another.
Providing it through artificial means would always be more expensive that just letting it soak under the sky

>>11725373
>light in through a roof/window or use reflective light pipes toward the lower levels
Dude...are planning to use mirrors to redirect sunlight to each and every plant like a puzzle game?

Too bad sun moves everyday and changes trajectory every season

>>11725431
Fiber optic cables just transport sunlight.
The sunlight from the fiber cables would be roughly the same as the sunlight outside.

>>11725467
>just transport sunlight.
Oooooh, I am calling BS right here
Solar PV has an efficiency of 10-15%
You won't convince me like that

>>11725431
Basically, a plant needs only heat and ultraviolet. You can cancel every other waves out. (crystals can transform one light source into an other wave length with a very tiny amount of energy loss.), and isolate the Food-Hub. So you can basically drive whit very less energy vast quantity of plants.You can design the building in a way that you have close to zero heat loss, even with an triple isolated glass roof. If you force the light of the sun into this crystals and transform it into uv i guess you dont even need to add any additional energy, maybe for the water pumps but thats all.

>>11725102
Probably unviable for anything but drugs. The energy costs are too high and there is no way to change that.

>>11725478
Not an engineer but sorry bro.
Common sense in thermodynamics is enough to convince me that you can never have a 100% efficiecy
Even if you can
What is the payback time for the plants you plan to grow?

The sheer engineering and complex materials that you speak tells me that not even a hundred years of growing pot would make it break even

>>11725102
Is it possible? Yes, is it profitable? Not usually, the advantage is the small amount of space, and especially water used, the drawback is the electricity needed for temperates, light, circulation etc. I believe Japan is currently the leading producer of hydroponic farms, they grow lettuce mostly.

>>11725491
I am anyway for terraform the Sahara to an gigantic field and build a super city around the globe. But you climate faggots, environment activist and outdoors-man are against all good ideas.
What you gain? Massive space for no additional energy costs.The crystals work with an efficiency of 20% but now there is around 600% more light in other wave length as uv. =120%+uv=220% if you lead the light directly above the plants you get like 660%. The isolation of the building can in theory provide 4-6 harvest. Lets go with 4 =2640% Amount of space saved.

>>11725533
What. Explain the calculations, this is nonsense. Where would 660%come from? That is not possible.

>>11725533
Bro, I am more of a businessman
There's just too many cost just to raise crops that it's only justifiable for Space exploration

P.S
If you want to terraform Sahara,no need.
It turns green every 5000 years
Too long?
There's a Saharan Basin that can be connected to the Medditereanean Sea to deliver water to the desert

Watch the vid "Nuke the Sahara green"

>>11725544
Just imagine one salt head to an other, how much space is between each who dont need to be lightens? You dont need to provide dirt with uv radiation. (i just estimate that i dont know it exactly.)

>>11725547
>"Nuke the Sahara green"

Business? Find the mineral deposits in a line thought Sahara. Do some opencast mines. If you are done connect theme.

>>11725214
Truew you need to provide light artificially. However, you also pay well less on water since nearly all the water you pay for is used by the plants. And you don't have to pay gas the various vehicles used by regular farmers to plow and harvest. Plus, for the same ground surface you can plant many more vegetables.

>>11725471
>Solar PV has an efficiency of 10-15%
Okay... what is the efficiency of a fiber optic cable?
Also what amount of solar efficiency do plants really need?

>>11725587
Yeah, if there are mineral deposits on the line
The plan to nuke the Saharan basin to create a tunnel that would fill it with Mediterreanean sea was made because they do not have enough funds for a channel like the Panama.

They still rejected it though because it is too dangerous

>>11725600
Just ignore him anon.

Vertical farming has high initial capital costs but you can produce far more crops per given area of land and unit of water using it and can control for pests and diseases more easily.

>>11725102
Lmao just use the outside world. You don’t need a big building you don’t need a bunch of trays. You don’t need to supply light. You don’t need to supply all the water. If you really thought this was better why not just put plants in trays outside.

>>11725547
>>11725659
Wouldn't the basin fill up with salt very soon?
>>11725548
That couldn't possibly compensate for the energy costs, if I deciphered your gibberish correctly.
>>11725597
Greenhouses have all the same advantages, with much lower costs.

>>11725676
Only time you use vertical farming is in megacities where the cost of transportation makes fresh food unlikely to arrive.

Otherwise, the cost of land at the province is literal dirt cheap. Control of post and diseases are done mostly via natural ways like combining rice paddies with fish ponds. And no need for some expensive buildings with high energy consumption

>>11725708
>Wouldn't the basin fill up with salt very soon?
Yes but that salt would also be filtered by the sand as it moves forward into the horizon.

>>11725533
The hell was all that gibberish

>I am anyway for terraform the Sahara to an gigantic field
listen:
You. Cannot. Just. Terraform. without considering all the massive manpower and investments that must be done

You want to create farms on the Sahara?
First: consider how to get all the equipment and manpower there. You need to build roads
Second: what about the labor? They need living quarters, food, water, medicine, and so on.
Third: what about the electricity, the water, the pesticides and fertilizers?

And the greatest question: How can you make a profit out of it so that you can keep it going?

Reality break is so painful, isn't it?

>>11725102
So we take fields, cover them with concrete and put solar panels on it to power different fields covered in concrete to grow plants at?

>>11725745
Have you actually seen a solar plant ? You don't cover a field in concrete, you just stab the ground with metal poles to make sure the panels stay in place.

>>11725745
The point of vertical farms is to create farms under the city.

>>11725745
yes because you can stack concrete fields ontop of each other

>>11725533
terraforming the sahara will ruin the planet idiot, it will massively change rain patterns and probably ruin as much farmland outside of the sahara as it creates in it. I don't think ruining the planet to create farmlands for tuaregs and niggers is worth it. I hope you're larping, if not, i genuinely hope you and everyone you work with die.

>>11725856
Ruin the planet is too strong of a word, dude. Nature always changes. The Sahara goes into cycles of green and desert.

Whether the neighboring countries can adapt is up for debate.

>>11725102
We could use all these empty office towers.

>>11725861
It's not just the neighboring countries. The sahara is MASSIVE and the amount of water that would be needed to create the trees and plants needs to come from somewhere. Think the amazon, congo, indonesia. The rainfall there would be far to little to sustain the rainforests there, and then you're not even talking about how dry Europe is currently. If the sahara is terraformed, the current climate change will look like a fucking joke.

>>11725471
this is outdated info

>>11725745
actually you put panels on the rooftop or in a desert

>>11725870
Solar panels =/= solar cells
Solar cells are tested at the lab

>>11725102
actually the idea is to use an empty mall or warehouse or put it directly in the store so they can pick it for you

>>11725878
a solar panel is just many solar cells on a panel

>>11725869
Ehh, I won't really try to make those claims without a climatologist. Climate is too complex.
Mountains, wind patterns, seasons, earth's rotation, earth's equinox, and so on has to be considered.

If we terraform the Sahara, I'm guessing that the Amazon would slowly die and turn into a Savanna because the Sahara keeps it fertilized. Don't know what a grassland Sahara would do to European rainfall though. That's a matter for the meteorologists

>>11725870
Now do one with cost-efficiency that includes storage

>>11725102
That's so cruel. They have no room to move. I only eat free range lettuce.

>>11725899
do you got lights in your farm at night? so why would you need light 24/7 for your urban farm?

>>11725102
It's hard to beat the cost of throwing seeds in dirt and wait.

To become viable energy would need to become pretty much next to free (think fusion) or the price of land to become so high due to residential pressure (which won't happen before at least centuries).

Few reasons it still has a future:
- for countries with too few arable land wanting to be food independent (think China)
- for mass production of "prenium" organic foods
- in the case of a doom disease ravaging crops (think the blight in Interstellar)

>>11725913
it is used to grow food in Antarctica
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPS5V-NW3Bw

>>11725913
Also space colonies

+ more reliable
+ more produced per square meter
- much more expensive
- needs more workers?

>>11725936
The hell you mean more reliable?
What could be more reliable than dirt on the ground?

>>11725923
As a science experiment.
Still way cheaper and easier to get delivered your food from an argentinian cargo.

>>11725940
There are often droughts, floods or freeze ruining crops. By definition conditions are stable indoor.
I don't think you would need necessarily more workers though as it would not be crazy hard to automate.
The workers would need to be much more technical though to maintain the infrastructure.

>>11725944
At the moment yes but R&D could bring that price down.

>>11725957
None of those are "often"
Droughts and floods are now controlled with advancements in irrigations and water systems.
If fact, those are so rare that there are now more overweight people than underweight ones.

Vertical farming is not fixing something that isn't broken. It is a solution waiting for a problem

>>11725944
Self sufficiency must always be prioritized for long explorations and remote bases.
It took just 30 years for Venezuela to turn from a promissing capitalist country into a failed state

>>11725102
You're a vertical farm murray

>>11725940
more reliable since you won't experience a famine if it doesn't rain or if some insect hordes decide to invade your crops or for some other shit. you wouldn't even need pesticides.
the archaic principles of farming have been the same for the last 10 000 years, human put seed, human do rain dance, human pray to ra so god doesn't nuke you with some natural disaster, human take food.

>>11725982
Ah yes, instead you now have to deal with massive electric bills instead that you would always pay whether there's an emergency or not.

NEWSFLASH:
Farming is a business. Vertical farms costs a ton of money to operate and thus would have to sell their goods at a higher price at the same quality as the common one.

It's a monetary loss no matter how you look at it because we do not live in a vault.

>>11725968
>Droughts and floods are now controlled with advancements in irrigations and water systems
Farmers in the west (so not some africans) regularly go bankrupt over droughts. Floods are arguably rarer and mostly the result of poor land management but still happen.

>If fact, those are so rare that there are now more overweight people than underweight ones.
That's a different discussion altogether.

>>11726000
Droughts are not regular, duffus.
And guess what?
If there's a drought, your vertical farms would also suffer as there's less water to use which would make the hydroplants increase the electric bill.

>>11725999
that's literally what i said here >>11725936
if it was more cost efficient than traditional farming it would have been already done but that doesn't mean that it's better in every other aspect.
greenhouses do cost a bit more but when they are the most cost efficient option they are still used

>>11725999
>>11726025
Current farming is at a loss anyway with the amount of subsidies needed to survive. Its time we put R&D into alternative farming methods.

>>11726034
It would be easy enough to do. Just put up tariffs on foreign food imports, puts up the incentive for actual innovation.

>>11726034
Yeah, try to preach against what economist and farmers study all their life. What could go wrong?

>>11726044
And then what?
Deal with the massive starvation of the poor people who would riot over it and cause great damages? Shut it

>>11726034
>Current farming is at a loss anyway with the amount of subsidies needed to survive

So instead of paying the farmer with higher food prices, we pay them through our taxes, to secure the food production at a steady rate. A viable method, as prior to 19th century, mass starvation and hunger were very common, and would be still, if all agriculture was a free market.

as for vertical farming - not neccesary and ultimately not very efficient, as building and production maintenance are going to total up to more than the value of the produce in span of decades that you need to run it efficiently, while traditional farming, with wise soil management, needs less capital overheads and maintenance than food skyscrapers.

I wish technophiles would just fuck off with their endless attempt to industrialize everything. It's a fucking fetish that doesn't even pay off well long term.

Can you grow staple calorie crops yet?

I only ever see hydroponic and vertical setups being used to grow leafy vegetables, herbs, and rarely small fruit like tomato.

We need something like potato, wheat, corn, yams etc if you're going to supply the calorie needs of a reasonable population.

>>11725471
Minimum 20% and rising

>>11726136
I wan't talking about solar cells, I was talking about fiber optic cable.

>>11726135
I'm going for the 3 sister plants like Corn+Pumpkin+Beans all in one plant. Also shit like Pomato are cool as hell.

Multiple plants in one plot of land.

>>11726140
>Solar PV has an efficiency of 10-15%
???

>>11725102
It's really unnecessary for the most part. Space is not our problem, soil quality is. Once it becomes economic we will simply transition to aquaponic systems for a large amount of our crops (and in the process also solve the overfishing crisis). Many of the doomsday fears are entirely unfounded.

I guess aquaponics can be organized in urban environments too, looking all sci-fi. But I think this is an unnecessary investment and there are doubts about the nutritional quality of crops grown in hydroponic systems anyhow. Your average farmer can do aquaponics on his current land just as well, mkaing use of the available soil, after all it is what the ancient Egypt already did.

>>11726145
>I'm going for the 3 sister plants like Corn+Pumpkin+Beans all in one plant. Also shit like Pomato are cool as hell.
>Multiple plants in one plot of land

On a hydroponic/vertical setup?

>>11726161
Do we ""really"" have to go into aquaponics when soil has proven its mettle since our first farm?

Our farms are not broken. Introducing new methods are not going to take over what nature has already proven effective. Those new techniques are only going to be used for to take care of specific problems and that's about it.

Aquaponics for example are just asking for different types of problems like mold and insect infestations.

Please shut up.
Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

>>11726175
You can do it on any farm, mate.
I doubt you can plant corn and pumpkin on any other setup than standard soil though

>>11725102
We should grow crops on top of the wings of planes. Plenty of unused surfaces and planes fly above clouds so they get more sunlight.
It's a win-win.

>>11726178
Entire civilizations have perished because their soil has degraded. Aquaponics is just a way to make sure this does not happen, it's not magic and also not new, it has been utilized throughout human history to do just that. I brought up ancient Egypt to give a famous example of it (using the Nile river to flood the fields and ensure high soil quality, leading to a continuous source of agricultural prosperity). Basically I'm calling you a retard.

>>11726183
Oh shut up.
Farms no longer suffer soil degradation because of fertilizers. Nile flooding is not aquaponic, it's river residue

Aquaponics are what? fertilizers on fancy steel and glass boxes.
Literally just use a planter box stuffed with fertilizers if you want convenience.

Oh but it's not techno savvy enough for you, innit?

Listen.

I currently run my own vertical aeroponic farm. The numbers don’t lie, me and my friend are current turning a fuckload of profit. We havent scaled to the size of the Sahara whiicj is fucking retarded.

- Two shipping containers is equivelent to about two acres of farmable land.
-It uses 90% less water.
-Grows 30% faster, when you can controll the enviroment and water nutrients.
-No dirt = no insects, which doesnt force you to use fucking pesticides.

In 2050 we are gonna be about 10billion people on this pupper. We aren’t running out of space, but we are running out of food.
Animal agriciculture takes about 79% of all farmable land today, but produces only 19% of the calories, also 70% of the reason for all rainforest deforestation.
This is one of our options for the future, Vertical is the way.

>>11726192
No mention of disadvantages like high cost, high energy, and high maintenance?

>>11726181
Yeah thats why I'm asking, I'm really skeptical of vertical farming outside of niche high profit crops like drugs or some expensive herbs.

If it's possible to grow a reasonable yield of staple crops in a vertical/hydroponic setup why does it seem like no one is doing it?

>>11726196
almost fully automated, cost is but a slight margin of profit

>>11726190
>Nile flooding is not aquaponic, it's river residue
>Aquaponics are what? fertilizers on fancy steel and glass boxes.
You might want to look into what constitutes aquaponics. I'm trying to communicate here that it is not modern and fancy, and you seem to be under the false belief it is. Aquaponics is nothing but soil fertilization making use of aquacultures (e.g. rivers).

>Farms no longer suffer soil degradation because of fertilizers
The industrial use of fertilizers leads to a significant loss in organic matter. This is what people talk about when they talk of the decline in soil quality. We are only postponing the inevitable and you are very clearly uninformed.

By the way, we already utilize aquaponics to grow rice, one of the most important staple of civilization, especially historically Eastern civilization. Hundreds of millions of people subsist on this. Yes, really. And yes, this is aquaponics, even thought it does not include fancy tubes and plastic containers in your backyard. Aquaponics is a principle, not an aesthetic.

>Oh but it's not techno savvy enough for you, innit?
Is this projection? I've been trying to tell you over my last posts that aquaponics is not sci-fi. It is traditional, it works and we only need to adopt it on a larger scale than we already do.

>>11726192

What crops are you growing?

>>11726196
he grows weed

>>11725102
It's far more viable to create pyramids or fuck it and use photobiorreactors.

>>11726192
You're pretty limited in the crops you can grow though and I have my doubts about the nutritional quality of your foods. Aeroponics is bugmen onions tier.

why would you make a state-of-the-art indoor farm just to grow lettuce, it has no nutrition or calories

Yes, strictly speaking it's less energy efficient.

However, due to the volume and distance-to-market, as well as controlled environment (guaranteed crops) it can come out a net positive

>>11726192
>10billion people
So you plan on feeding blacks and chinks then? Don't we have enough environmental problems?

>we are running out of food
No we don't, the amount of food waste generated and the enormous reductions in food shortages globally mean it's all a logistics problem, not production one.

Indoor farming is already a profitable business.
It's common in some parts of Europe. You see this in many stores.
https://agfundernews.com/infarm-joins-vertical-farming-pantheon-with-titanic-100m-series-b.html

>>11725102
For greens and herbs? totally. Actually, it'd be fantastic as a way to break the retarded system that is the California CV agriculture hub. For the unbelievable quantities of grain that the US produces to feed the entire world? No way in hell

>>11726693
lol @ those nerds stacking apples in a perfect pyramid

>>11726207
Yeah but you can basically make it so that you only have to go to the grocery store for grains and meat, all veggies can be grown at home with a little bit of planning. As for the nutrition, is fertilizer-intensive farming in depleted soils really that different from growing in a soilless medium? Depleted farm soils that need to be artificially fertilized basically ARE a soilless medium, there's really not that much different.

>>11726720
Triangles are the strongest shape, Anon.

>>11726201
Aquaponics that uses the rivers are not comparable to aquaponics that uses aquariums, mate

They are technically the same process of fertilization however, one is land locked the other uses a huge amount of electricity to keep the fishes alive, needs a lot of money to set up, and are only limited to a few set of high-priced crops otherwise the profit would be less than the expenses.
Combining fishes and rice in one paddie is a great idea but those need a nearby body of water. You won't be growing rice in an aquarium-type because rice need hectares of land to make a profitable yeild.

And no, fertilizers come from animal farms
Synthethic fertilizers are not as often used because they can actually harm the environment in the long run.

>>11726722
You're acting like fertilizers are a bad thing when most of it are literally just dried cow manure.
Your aquaponics need electricity - That's a huge issue compared to ordinary farms that allows you to just wait till it grows

>>11727035
>Aquaponics that uses the rivers are not comparable to aquaponics that uses aquariums, mate
>They are technically the same process of fertilization however

>>11727056
Yes?

>>11727048
They do need electricity but the overall resource consumption is significantly different in other ways. For instance, pesticide use and water consumption go way down, by as much as 99% in some cases depending on the method. I'm not saying fertilizers are a bad thing, I was responding to >>11726207 saying that the nutritional value was lower. My point is that fertilizer-driven conventional farming methods in depleted soils isn't really that much different than growing in a soilless medium using more or less the same artificial fertilizers. Therefore, a hydroponic spinach leaf isn't really that much different than a spinach leaf grown in depleted CV soil using heavy fertilizer spray.

>>11727073
You need electricity to keep oxygen in the fish tank
You need the clean the tank every 2-4 weeks or the mold would accumulate, consume oxygen and nutrient, and destroy your aquatic fields
You may even need water conditioner to keep bacterias in the water at a healthy level
Aquarium Heater and Fish filter, may even be necessary

Yeah..
I'll stick with "just throw it on the soil" method

>>11727035
>>11727048
Manure can only recycle, it adds no nutrients whatsoever, it can only add back what was taken away in the animal feed.

>>11727099
80% of crop yeilds are sent to the animal farms because they do not look good.
Your point?

>>11727091
You're talking about aquaponics. I'm talking about hydroponics or aeroponics. Learn what the hell is even under discussion here. Aquaponics is a meme anyways because it relies on inputs of fish food grown with the exact same fertilizers.

>>11727108
Oh fuck off
ALL your meme methods are not as popular as the dirt method for a good reason.

>>11727110
The dirt method is just as fake and gay as the hydroponic method. Might as well just cut out the middleman and let forests or something reclaim some of the totally depleted soils most food is grown on.

>>11727118
Fuck off, hippie.
Civilization came from farms
Farms need money
They use dirt because your fancy methods are not profitable

>>11727105
My poit is as stated. Manure creates no extra nutrients, it only recycles. The results are as best as if the 80 wasn't grown and everyone went vegan. If you want to add nutrients, you need real fertilizer.

>>11727128
The population of the world would have never been able to rise above 3 billion without the invention of the Haber process and nitrate fertilizers from petroleum. Since when are farms profitable? They rely entirely on massive government subsidies and 3rd world slave labor, they're a totally artificial construction from top to bottom. Might as well be made out of PVC.

>>11727137
And there's nothing wrong with that?
Returning the nitrogen in the soil is the point of fertilizers.
If it's too much, it becomes an acidic poison.

Organic fertilizers are the real fertilizers. Synthetic ones are bad in the long run.

>>11727145
Just shut up, mate.
USA is the biggest exporter of agricultural products in the world.

>>11727091
Once an aquaponics is set up it is low maintenance. The reason it is not widespread is because we already have ecosystems in place. Aquaponics would only become necessary if those ecosystems go to shit, and even in that case we might just remodel them.

>>11727160
No shit, and we use all three of those things I mentioned (turd world slaves, massive government subsidy, and huge amounts of artificial fertilizer sprayed onto depleted soil) to do it. What was even your point here?

>>11727165
Just shut up.
We won't export it if it's not profitable.

>>11727160
Mineral fertilizers are bad if they are incomplete, since you asd a few nutrients and the rest gets depleted. Organic fertilizers never give you back what you lost in the sold produce, they only recycle and limit the losses. You need to put back whatever you removed, or the soil gets depleted.

>>11727179
>>11727160#
Mineral fertilizers are bad if they are incomplete, since you add a few nutrients and the rest gets depleted. Organic fertilizers never give you back what you lost in the sold produce, they only recycle and limit the losses. You need to put back whatever you removed, or the soil gets depleted.

>>11727173
?????
Is this nigger serious?

>>11725964
No amount of R&D will be able to make build skyscrapers cheeper then throughing seeds at dirt.

>>11726073
>not neccesary
It is necessary, this virus has shown us that countries need to be sustainable on their own with things like medicine and food. The job market is changing and the newer generations are moving into a mega city structure. That poses logistical, land and environmental issues that need to be addressed. We all know of the environmental issues we are facing and one of the solutions is reforestation. If we can replace even a few factory farms with a vertical model we would make a significant impact. Logistically having farms in the city limits would make a difference. Land is the biggest issue, farms take up so much land and many countries do not have enough land to sustainably farm

>>11727186
I mean, it's not impossible to just use both methods to supplement their drawbacks

>>11727191
It's not really necessary to build skyscrapers, you can just do it in greenhouses or abandoned retail spaces (of which there are about to be many).

>>11727191
Do you have any idea how expensive normal farming is?

>>11727207
Surely not more expensive than other methods
It's throwing seeds on dirt

>>11727202
You never learn, do you?
Businessmen aren't switching because the profit is just smaller than standard ones.
Only way for meme methods to be accepted is for the traditional to be impossible

Funny isn't it?
Only way to win is to have no competition

>>11727220
>Wow such enlightenment
Dumbass

>>11727216
Its much more complicated than that and who knows until the tech is researched. Space agencies and governments have an interest to research this method.

>>11727216
It's throwing seeds on dirt, then draining the entire CA aquifer to irrigate it, then spraying it with unbelievable amounts of pesticides and fungicides because even a tiny loss will result in the razor thin margin being obliterated. Just "seeds on dirt" hasn't been a viable method of farming since the mid-20th century.

>>11725471
I could be wrong, but AFAIU, fiber optic cables have efficiencies of more than 95%. solar PV cells have NOTHING to do with fiber optics...

If we started vertically farming then rural right wing retards would go extinct because nobody would need them anymore.
Somehow liberals want to keep rural right wing retards relevant so they subsidize farms.

>>11726135
>I only ever see hydroponic and vertical setups being used to grow leafy vegetables, herbs, and rarely small fruit like tomato.
https://www.youtube.com/user/mhpgardener/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid

>>11726192
>I currently run my own vertical aeroponic farm
teach me please
I want to run my own aeroponic farm

>>11727532
>thinking the only reason to be rural is farming
Retard

>>11727580
This looks dope but I think he meant staple grain crops, not fruits and veg. Those are excellent but they're not going to feed people en masse like grain would.

>>11726196
The only reason conventional farming is considered "low maintenace" by your standards is because of fucktons of pesticides and fungicides lmao

>>11727608
he specifically named tomatoes and the guy in that channel does lots of tomatoes (and other stuff)

>>11727625
>fucktons of pesticides and fungicides
?
You mean like wasps, spiders, and baking soda?

>>11728921
no

>>11725178
>pol
he's 100% right

so no. you fuck off

>>11725102
Vertical fagging = POS

>>11725102
No because it takes energy to make your own light

>>11725386
I think this could work, so long as you are only redirecting the sunlight. But when you start dealing with insertion loss this idea may start going down the tubes.

I remember in DisneyWorld they were big in promoting hydroponics as being a less soil-exaustive type of farming. But I don't see how vertical farming is an improvment over land farming. Ultimately you want to increase the cross sectional area and time you plan is in the sun. With that you might as well build a Dyson sphere, but the trick then there is how to circulate the water.

>>11725471
hahaha fucking retard

>>11729033
they're doing it in the Netherlands and getting a much larger crop per acre value.

>>11729069
No shit, retard.
You stacked up multiple plots
The profit margin is the only thing important

>>11725484

>The energy costs are too high and there is no way to change that.

Cheaper energy (nuclear).

Also special LEDs that output only the specific wavelength a plant needs.

>>11729087
You want to establish a nuclear plant just to plant crops?

>>11729084
>You stacked up multiple plots
except they didn't its only one level retard.

>>11729087
You would soon run out of nuclear fuel, and you'd have hard time dealing with the waste heat. The energy needs are that extreme.
Anyway, the elements can have more profound uses in the future, it seems like a terrible waste to just burn them for fuel.

>>11729087
>Cheaper energy (nuclear).
Are people seriously forgetting that the Sun is a nuclear power station?

Hiding from the sun and using nuclear energy for crops is like buying a threadmill because jogging is too mainstream

>>11725178
fuck off brainlet

>>11727532
indoor farming is mainly for herbs, fruit and vegetable, you can still grow corn in the middle of nowhere

>>11725168
/pol/ and /x/ are that way ----------------->

>>11726047
I didn't say stop all food coming in silly. I said put up tariffs.
>poor people will starve
no, they won't

>>11729213
hes right though

>>11729408
That makes the food more expensive.
Countries import because they cannot produce it on their own or at least not in a cheap and sustainable one. You make the cheap exports expensive and boom
Starvation and riots.

>>11729136
You wouldn't necessarily have to power LEDs all the time. You could use a fiberoptic light collector for when the suns up, LED's for when its not, protect the crops from unfavourable conditions, lower the use of pesticides and herbicides needed on land...

>>11729420
Yeah you dont have to rocket up the tariffs. You can do it slowly and monitor the situation. Isn't importing food a really dumb idea - if something stupid happens in another country your food dries up.

Its better to try to support your own population, even if it is a bit more expensive, because it protects you from collapses in supply chains - which would cause way more rioting and starvation than what I am suggesting.

>>11729422
We discussed this
Shut the fuck up

Farming is simple, cheap, and easy.
Your shit is not.
We are not going to use your shit if it's not profitable.

We do not live in a nuclear wasteland and it is foolish to waste good cheap arable land just because you wanted to.

>>11729428
Yeah, preach.
Preach to the people who manage the country after ruthless study over economics and politics.
The single main reason why some countries lack produce is because of the profit and economy
Local farms in a poor land are bound to sell their products at a high price to make even.
On the other hand, exports from agricultural countries are cheap and even if you put high tarriffs, the local farms still cannot compete due to difference in quality, quantity, and profitability.
Make it too high and they just stop coming for you.
Farms are not owned by the government - they are private business and therefore cannot operate on a loss

The world is not equally distributed. It's a matter of making the best of what you have AND using trade and market to make up for what you don't have.

>>11725102
Fat fucking chance. It requires a lot more than just a fucking field of dirt. In addition, rather than plants harnessing their own solar power we now have to provide external power for lighting and even moving water up vertically. Also, you know what you never see with vertical farms? Wheat. You don't grow wheat and staple crops with vertical farming. There is an interesting tech out there that could be much better than vertical farms, solarfoods. You can use solar panels to split hydrogen to feed bacteria to make proteins, lipids, and carbs, sugars, the basic components of food staples. Even with cracking water to hydrogen the process is still more efficient than photosynthesis. There is the potential to be an order of magnitude or more efficient than photosynthesis with this method. Most plants are less than 1% efficient while you can readily obtain solar panels 15-20% efficient. The other nice thing is almost everything coming out of the process is edible rather than resulting in inedible cellulose like most plants are made of.

Absolutely fucking not. Apart from the resources required to build and maintain anything more than a science project hydroponic/aquaponic set up, the crop produced is deficient in nutrients. Maybe it doesn't matter for lettuce, but good luck covering the costs involved with sales of lettuce.

t. urban farmer

>>11729465
>Solar Foods Ltd. manufactures Solein, single cell protein. As well as having a high-protein content (50%), the flour-like ingredient contains 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbohydrates. It is reported to look and taste like wheat flour. The product's initial launch is set to be in 2021.[1][2][3]

>Solein is made by extracting carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and combining it with water, nutrients and vitamins. Electricity is needed for the process, but solar energy from Fortum (its partner) is used. A natural fermentation process then occurs which is similar to the one produced by yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

>It's been claimed the product could have a revolutionary impact on food production. [4] [5] The company predicts its products may become more cost efficient than the currently cheapest source of protein (soya from South America) by about 2025. It's been stated that the land efficiency for Solar Foods methods is about 20,000 times greater than for conventional farming.[4]

>Michael Le Page for the New Scientist took a more sceptical view, noting that the x20,000 improvement only applies to the factories themselves. If land use for Solar panels is taken into account, then land efficiency only improves by about x10. Despite his doubts over how beneficial the technology will be overall, Le Page stated that "the potential rewards are so immense that we should be pouring vast sums of money into finding out

That's all the info in wikipedia. Literally nothing else
By all accounts, that's most DEFINITELY a scam.
The hell kind of method reaps 20,000% increase in crop yeild? Onions Green?

>>11729490
>Onions Green
Damn autofilter
*onions green

*onions green
*s-ylent green
s*ylent green
Would these work?

>>11729490
Read the last paragraph. The factories take up 1/20,000th of the space of a wheat farm and with the solar panels included they take up 1/10th the space. The figure was picked to create hype. Follow the citations if you want to know more about how they're measuring efficiency.

Also 20,000x is 2,000,000%

>>11729490
actually it's more of a research project in finland. It's not completely out there, there have been a number of studies on using solar produced hydrogen to feed bacteria to make biofuels much more efficiently than you would otherwise:
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=programs/electrofuels
One of the problems with this approach was that the bacteria made too much protein rather than burnable lipids. The protein was basically wasted and a drain on fertilizer resources. However, if you want to produce protein this is a good thing. Growing microorganisms like algae rather than plants also realizes improvements over traditional crops, although there are a number of problems with algae. Still the possibility of making food more efficiently than photosynthesis is pretty compelling.

>>11729535
I went down this new-approach-to-food rabbit hole years ago. The tech is unreal and will no doubt be useful for space travel, but I eventually realised that the food produced is essentially garbage. You can survive on this shit at a push, but I'd like to see the generational effects and I'd bet it would lead to the same kind of collapse we are seeing in bee colonies.

>>11729451
I didn't say it was cheap. It has the potential to be cheap.

I just layed out a way it could be done. Like Japan did with its car industry - protect it from outside competition for a couple of decades. ok the japanese had to put up with crappy cars for 2 decades, but afterwards they had car manufacturing companies that could rival the US industries. It was a more costly decision at the time but payed back dividends because then japan had rubber, electronics, metal processing,and systems industries it didn't have before

Why not try the same with farming. Ok it might suck for 2 decades, but you'll open new industries in hydroponics, plant management, lighting/heating/cooling systems that it would end up being a benefit in the long run both economically and socially (employability)

>>11729451
I never said get rid of farming. I didn't say farming was bad. But if you have the capability to grow foreign foods instead of importing them, that is a good thing

>>11725178
moron, go back to your containment board.
>>>/pol/

>>11729553
Cars. Are. Not. Food.
You allow 2 decades of bad food and boom. Millions dead by starvation.

JUST.
Just shut the fuck up.
You're useless.

>>11729556
>i didn't say
>i never said
Just be quiet.
Everything you suggested is absolutely moronic and not viable for real world logistics.

And yet you still continue posting without learning a thing.

>>11729578
You do not have to kill millions by starvation to improve your food output/ sustainability/ independence.

>nothing can ever change
yeah ok, i guess farming has just peaked this is how it will be forever.

>>11729578
you're funny, you know that, right.

>>11729578
>Cars. Are. Not. Food.

It's amazing that people do not grasp this basic concept. Food is and always will be a black box, because we have no idea what a healthy diet actually is. Sure we can define macro/micro nutrients, but each of us has different requirements. We are 3 generations into an experiment regarding commodified nutrition and look at the results. Maybe declining birth rates, rising physical/mental illness and the general state of war isn't caused by this and maybe eating garbage produces garbage, either way I would not feed my kid food that is produced by and in a machine.

>>11729583

Yes farming did peak in the early 20th century. Everything after that was a huge mistake.

>>11729583
How do you intend for expensive local farms to take over the local market?
By blocking cheap exports and letting the poor people die of course!

Dumbass.

>yeah ok, i guess farming has just peaked this is how it will be forever.
Precisely!
Dirt and sunlight has proven itself as the best method at cultivation. Cry me a river

>>11729534
>>11729535
Oh, so it's basically like growing bacteria for food?
I wouldn't mind eating that so long as it's cheap and safe

But LMAO
Here's a personal experience:
I once suggested in a forum site that eating insects are much more efficient and environmentally healthy than common animal farms. Guess what?
I got downvoted to hell and they hurled insults at me at every possible angle and no amount of scientific article managed to convince them.
>mfw I was at the epicenter of that shitstorm

On one side, it was a hilarious experience. On another, man. The progress we could have achieved if only people can be more logical.

>>11729614
>food that is produced by and in a machine.
That's debatable at this era.
Factory animals are technically flesh raised in iron cubes at this point
And then there's GMOs

I really wish insect diet is much more common in the west. 80% of the world eats insects yet westerners view it with sheer vileness like, by their own words "degrading and humilating"

Seriously. They got that emotional over a new diet
Westerners can be so funny sometimes

>>11729639
It makes eating bugs and onions obsolete. Now you wouldn't necessarily eat it directly. It could serve as a feedstock for cultured meat or even for feeding yeast to make whey and proteins for making cheese.

About the power inefficiency problem, Isn't there a huge deficit between day and night electricity output? Couldn't one use that difference to power uv lights instead of having malls climated and lit during the night?

>tariffs this
>tariffs that
Have absolutely none of you reddit-tier mongoloids heard of a fucking subsidy?

>>11727580
>>11727608
Yeah I worded that badly, I meant can you grow staple calorie crops.

>>11729634
It really isn't the best method of cultivation. If you're talking sheer quantity maybe.

But soil quality has been declining for decades. Pumping soil full of nitrates/ phosphates/ pesticides is radically different to small scale crop rotation done before the industrial revolution, which was sustainable. A less destructive method will have to be found eventually.

>block cheap export
I didn't say that. You could raise a small tariff, or subsidize a local business until they produce a product that is more affordable. I never said rush in and ban exports. I suggested a slow method for increasing innovation/ efficiency in the agricultural sector.

>>11729649
>Factory animals are technically flesh raised in iron cubes at this point
And then there's GMOs

Exactly and it's not limited to cattle, vegetables are produced in much the same way and pumped full of industrial byproducts to look like the real thing, but they are bereft of secondary metabolites. I wouldn't eat insects for the same reason I wouldn't eat dog, cultural aversion. But I would rather eat an insect that lived a natural life than beef that had never been out of its cage.

>>11729694
That method already exists. Permaculture/silvopasture/biodynamic. Look into it.

>>11729696
Also the standardisation in farming processes has led to a huge decrease in plant and livestock biodiversity. 1000s of species of plant adapted to growing in their local environment gone.

>>11729700
Thanks.

>>11729702
That's the danger of GMO. Seed is bred to survive in a specific set of conditions that are not sustainable, which leads to farms getting bigger and eventually belonging to some megacorp. The biodiversity loss is killing us.

>>11729707


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51mYOnQ4RFs

https://www.youtube.com/user/BionutrientFoodAssoc/videos

>>11725886
solar panels get covered in dust, operate at variable ambient temperatures, degrade with time and probably won't get sunlight inciding directly most of the time, since motorizing solar panels is more expensive.

>>11729712
Oh yeah and its horrible how low resolution the debate around it is
>YOUR ANTI SCIENCE
>YOUR TRYN TO KILL OUR CROPS
>ITS THE FUTURE
>YOUR PLAYING GOD...

>>11729729
Yeah man. There's huge money behind the push and then there's the I FUCKIMG LUV SCIENCE AND STUFF useful idiots who have never touched a seed in their life. Everything after WW2 in agriculture was a mistake.

>>11729756
I grew up in lincolnshire and remember farmers tearing down trees and headrows in 2012 when they changed the laws around here allowing farmers to merge fields into much larger ones. They literally plow up to the road side now, see hedge hogs/ foxs/ deers/badgers far less.

The soil's like clay now anyway, and the amount of topsoil that gets blown off in winter because they don't plant crops to fix the soil is despicable.

>>11729770
They never stopped to think that this wildlife existed for a reason and played a role in the ecosystem. And oh fuck, the soil died! How could this be? Better carpet bomb the field with chemicals, that'll do the trick. It's insanity.

>>11728993
>>11729160
>>11729558
samefag poltard kek.. back to pol pablo

>>11725431
>Dude, it's vertical farming. Only the top ones get sunlight
Just use mirrors.
>>11725442
>Too bad sun moves everyday and changes trajectory every season
There's a mirror array that can take sun from any angle and redirect it into a set place. Look it up.

>>11729788
It is insane but i also feel sorry for the farmers. They only do this because they operate on such tight profit margins, they have families to feed etc etc

>>11729961
Agreed. The farmers are victims in this. They've been educated to operate in a system that sees them rolling the dice every year with everything they own to maybe come out 2% ahead. So they buy more land and try to make it 2% of something larger, which then requires more machinary, which kills the soil, which requires more synthetic inputs, rinse, repeat... Until they go bust and are swallowed up. One thing driving this is supermarkets. A guy who produces X tonnes of X commodity has very few outlets and his only hope is to double down in the face of pressure to reduce prices for Walmart. A guy who produces X amount of ABCDEFG commodity could sell his own produce at a market or farm shop. He sells less, but can then produce less because all the profit is his and he makes more whilst trimming costs. It's easier said than done, especially for farmers who only know the old system, but the upside in terms of sustainability for them, the land and the wildlife is enormous. Vertical farming and all the other contraptions proposed are a sign of mental illness, imo.

>>11729961
>>11730002
Unless theu use futures contracts, boycott chains that pay them too little and vote communists, they are not victims.

>>11729797
yikes, sweetie. you're in denial, hon. now get back to pol :)

>>11730058
Yeah voting for communists always works out well...

maybe we combine farming and solar power

>>11725102
Not realistically, plants need light to grow. Sun light is the cheapest light to grow plants with, so it is very hard to make it cost effective despite having the tech right now. There are some rare specialized exceptions where people will pay for it, but nothing near large enough to replace our current system. And while in theory it could be more efficient, in practice it is basically impossible even with crazy things like 90% transfer rates.

Now green houses and roof top gardens, are useful and could replace part of the system with some useful gains.

>>11725102
>>11725102
The biggest drawbacks of vertical farming are sunlight, nutrient transportation and harvesting.
All these problems come from the fact that plants don't move, making huge structures that can move and rotate crops seems like the perfect approach instead of investing on pipes, pumping systems and special equipment for harvesting.
The only limiting factor would be the available sunlight of a given region and the energy to operate these structures. Methanol seems to me like the perfect fuel for these structures, since it can be produced through the fermentation of plant matter waste and the exhaust CO2 used to acidify the water inside multiple aeroponic chambers.
I think 10 meter is the ideal height since most prefabricated warehouses are built like this, the use of a light scattering polymer as walls and roofs is important as well.
The location and shape of these giant greenhouses is critical, since blocking the sun of a tower with another tower defeats its purpose.
I've been thinking a lot about this, and came to the conclusion that I need a simulation software to find the perfect greenhouse shape, tower shape, structure movement, light scattering properties and get a production estimate before buying the materials to build a 1:2 prototype.

>>11730138
Dude, light pumps are seriously fucking easy and it is absolutely not new technology even.

>>11730147
The biggest drawback to vertical farming is the fact it produces food that has a nutritional content similar to cardboard. You need soil, water, sunlight and biology in and on the soil. If you are losing soil every year, you are doing it wrong. If you have to bring water in, you are doing it wrong. If you don't have enough sunlight, you are doing it wrong. If you need fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide and fungicide, you are doing it wrong.

When you do it wrong, you produce garbage. When people eat garbage, they produce garbage children.

>>11730184
You can put soil in a vertical farm, its not hard - just like a greenhouse.

>>11730201
You certainly can and it even looks like soil, but it's not soil, it's dirt. There is a difference and the difference reveals itself in the taste and nutritional content of whatever is grown in that dirt.

>>11730201
Why not just build greenhouses then? a square meter of farmland is orders of magnitude cheaper than a square meter of a high-rise building

>>11730184
>>11730184
dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Organic farming is unsustainable, you require a lot more energy to produce a healthy soil biology than the energy required to make artificial fertilizers. Crop production is a closed system, you can't get more energy out than what you put in.Take your hippy magic bullshit out of this discussion.
There are multiple scientific methods used to know the specific nutrient requirements of a plant and non of them are happy bacteria and beneficial fungus, plants absorb nutrients, all of which can be synthesized, they don't absorb life force or mana points from their surroundings. Get real for once man.

>>11725102
no, and nobody wants to live in giant indoor cities either you might as well just be hitler

>>11730213
Vertical greenhouse -> greater yield

>>11730209
You can buy/ transport high quality soil. We can experiment to see how best to maintain high quality soil in such an environment.

just look at if the netherlands is doing it and if so how, I read they've been leading the farming/food/agriculture bizz for a while now.

>>11730219
Correct organic farms are unsustainable. Thankfully, I never once mentioned organic farming, life force or mana points though.

Crop production is not a closed system in the slightest. Systems that attempt to close themselves off eventually collapse into dust or bankrupt the owner. Systems that don't, produce for 1000s of years.

Yes, you can know a plant's specific nutrient requirement in the abstract, but you cannot know what it needs right now and you cannot possibly know or deliver what 1,000,000 individual plants need right now. Only the plant can know that and the plant has its own mechanism for acquiring that. As soon as we interfere with that, disease and pests descend, which we combat with synthetics, which then neccessitates other synthetics, creating a vicious circle of increased costs and decreased quality.

This is why a soil test can show you have enough of X nutrient present, yet your plant is displaying deficiencies of X nutrient and why blight seems to magically avoid certain farms, leaving boffins scratching their tiny eggheads.

>>11730257
Luckily vertical farming produces high quality products without pests or pesticides since they exist in a monitored environment.

>>11730257
>Crop production is not a closed system in the slightest.
besides sun, water and atmosphere what other energy input does the environment give to farmers?

>>11730223
That soil loses its quality as soon as you disturb it. By the time you've loaded it onto the truck, the very thing that defines its quality has died. "High quality" soil has 20 tonnes of worm castings per acre added to it a year by magic. It has an organic content of at least 5% which increases year on year by magic. It does not have a layer of compaction preventing the water table from irrigating it by magic. It is full of bacteria, fungus, insects and rodents all doing their own thing, to say nothing of all the mammals and birds dropping shit on it.


>>11730271
No, they don't. But I'll carry you a round or 2. Define quality. For me, I define quality in terms of secondary metabolites, which also correspond to taste.

>>11730276
Mainly nutrients in the form a plant can consume at the exact time a plant needs it. Fertilizer and synthetic nutrient solutions limit a plant's growth and ability to consume what it needs when it needs it. Wildlife and synergistic interactions between plants, wildlife and the environment are non-negotiable. If you can do that in a greenhouse or a skyscraper, you should let everyone know and you'll be crowned the king of crops. What you'll actually do though is short circuit the plant's metabolism.

>>11727108
You need to get nutrients to the plants somehow, the benefit of introducing them at the fish level is that you can harvest both fish meat and plants.

To avoid pesticides you can just as easily grow duckweed as supplemental feed for your fish population, and use scraps and cut offs from your produce harvests to farm black soldier fly larvae to feed your fish as well.

>>11730318
and how you'll feed duckweed?

>>11730318
I fell in love with aquaponics 7 years ago and built a system for pennies. It is a great tool for learning and production of specialized crops, but it doesn't scale. If your pumps dies, you are fucked. If your water gets contaminated, you are fucked. Spring a leak, you are fucked. Fail to maintain the correct ratio between plants and fish, you are fucked. Everyone should have an aquaponics system in their kitchen, but they are a full time job.

>>11730320
http://www.fao.org/ag/aga/agap/frg/lrrd/lrrd7/1/3.htm

You can grow it both on top of the existing fish tanks, or you can use the filtered out solids from your water management systems.

>>11730331
I also made a small scale test aquaponics setup in my basement to test various air quality controlling plants that nasa was talking about for possible use in helping regulate air quality on space stations.

I found them to be pretty robust, Having a secondary pump set up to be used if something goes wrong with the first, using two/three times the amount of water needed for the tanks, separating out the grow beds from one another. Yeah, things can fail but with built in redundancies I feel those risks were manageable.

I even toured some small scale commercial setups, Trifecta Ecosystems in CT, to see if there was any difference in system design and to see what troubles they had at larger scale. It seems currently that the way it is kept viable right now is growing high priced meme microgreens to local restaurants moreso than growing large volumes of staple crops which sort of turned me off, I'd like to see someone using it in combination with vertical growing to get higher yields to compete with shipped in produce.

>>11730350
My man. Props for actually doing it and having a fucking clue. The air quality tests blew my mind. I can't recall if it was a NASA test, but they locked a guy in a sealed greenhouse to see if the plants could maintain the atmosphere and see how it affected him. It was a success, iirc.

The risks are manageable, but they have to be managed 24/7. Extra pumps are easy to maintain, but storing 3x your water requirements is unfeasible past a certain point. As you know, scale changes the equation and as you rightly pointed out, those who have scaled only use it for leafy greens. Of course there is a market for that, but ponics of any kind cannot fulfill all our needs and I'd love to see a nutritional comparison of the crop between ponics and soil.

>>11725168
Based Frog

>>11725883
That's awesome, now we just have to wait 20 to 30 years until supermarkets catch on...

>>11725471
Based retard

>>11725431

>what is architecture

You don't even need to get particularly creative with the angular design of the farm building, you just have to use the word 'diagonal' farming

>complaining about farms suffering soil degradation
Have you pseuds heard of Crop Rotation?
Have you even heard of symbiotic relationship that plants have with the microbes and fungi in their root?
Tilling?
Planting tress next to each plot?
Relationship with ladybugs, bats, moths, and other critters?

Arable soil is a valuable and worth its weight in gold due to the sheer amount of ecosystem that happens underground. It was never just fertilizers.
Growing in Water and Air is a dumb meme

Another thing worth of note is the fact that 90% of agricultural products are grains like rice, oats, barley, corn, and wheat.
Done as such because they has a high yeild, highly resistant, very nutritious, and has huge profit margin

If your farming method cannot produce those, then your method is not going to change anything

>>11731647
All of those have basically negative profit margins and without subsidies no one would farm them

>>11732068
My neighborhood grows rice.
Say that again.
I dare you

>>11732106
Unless you live in 3rd world he can only make a profit with subsidies. Well that or he makes some meme "ultra organic local gmo-free rice" but that is subsidized by retards. You can go ask him about his profit margins

>>11732116
Tell me more.
Tell me more of how we do not make money out of our plantation.

>>11732127
I mean I'm not sure what kind of response you are looking for?
Take your meds I guess

>>11732145
YOU take your meds.
You clearly have no idea of what you are talking about.

Industries with negative profit margins?
No one would farm staple food eaten by the entire world without subsidies?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>>11732151
Not that anon, but why do you respond like this?
Western agriculture industries often don't make a profit without subsidies.
It's way cheaper to buy food from third world countries than to produce it locally.

>>11732360
Stop talking out of your ass
>https://www.uaex.edu/farm-ranch/crops-commercial-horticulture/rice/2018%20Rice%20Farming%20for%20Profit.pdf

>While the rice production in the US accounts for about 2% of world production, its exports account for about 10% of all exports. The export is mostly of high-quality rice of the long and combined medium/short-grain varieties of rice. The type of rice exported is rough or unmilled rice, parboiled rice, brown rice, and fully milled rice.
10% of the world's rice.
And you're telling me it does not make a profit without subsidies?

There are western countries that have farms older than the USA itself.

Who the fuck are you to say that we do not make money out of our farms?

Looks like this guy does not even know what or why subsidies are being handed out
It was just an assistance. Nothing more
It was established because if there are too much products on the market, the product would sell less and the farmer would make less money.
If the farmer made less money, then he would be inclined to sell some of his land. The US produces far too much food than they could eat. The subsidies are there to ensure that the farmer, no matter how cheap the food gets, would still continue producing crops.

And that's all it does.
If you remove subsidies, the farm industry would decrease as farmers compete ferociously for who gets to sell their products first at every harvest season. The food gets cheaper the more were harvested and the first one receives the highest income.

Other than that, nothing else would change

It is laughable how some retard would think that the entire agricultural sector depends on subsidies. Farmers, sure. Agriculture, no.

>>11725168
IQ >160 detected
brainlets seething itt

>>11725102
how the fuck would you be able to fit a tractor in there

>>11732515
Mildly annoying post.
Well done.

>>11725168
>They're already working on depopulating right now.
this is a bad thing?

>>11725102
Has anyone thought about the amount of liquid fertilizer waste that these things are going to produce? What are we supposed to do with all that? Dump it in the sewers?

>>11732556
And whos going to pick your produce?

>>11732436
except your forgetting that America issued out huge loans for the combines to gobble up all the competing industry during the turn of the century in order to establish an illegal government subsidized monopoly then overproduced so much food it put 90% of rural america out of business, combines which still exist today and rely on those subsidies to destroy their competitors.

>>11732566
the only farmers who get 'subsidies' are the ones that sold out to the combines and get paid not to grow anything.

>>11732436
Its funny cause your just dead fucking wrong, but you're so sure of yourself. This is why no one trusts the alt-right to do anything but spew mountains of bullshit.

>>11725214
>You can’t build a tower with windows
It’s a good thing we have your massive brain on the case

>>11732566
thats the 19th century, younglings.

>>11732589
or 20th, if you want to be pedantic.

>>11732552
Too complicated to bother discussing on 4chan. Depopulation is a component of a broader process, not the aim of the process itself.

>>11732558
Robots. Literally. Otherwise you could have a structure where people just pick it whenever. Like, there's your lunch. Imagine fruit trees growing in atriums on various floors. Many (most?) buildings pump water to a tank on the upper floor, so you can utilize this gravity propagation to irrigate multiple sectors, etc.

>>11732556
This would be recycled. It would go through a passive processing chain, ultimately into a pool or a reservoir shared by multiple buildings on the ground level, filled with fish (who poop), etc, and the nutrients would be circulated back up.

>>11732589
>>11732651
I hate this bullshit where n century is actually the (n-1) 00's, It's stupid, I don't like it, I'm tired of it, I want it gone.

>>11732658
>Robots. Literally.
Also, this really depends on what sort of "ecology" this is taking place in. Present day you already have a workforce in much the same way as you have enough people to wash the windows of massive skyscrapers weekly. Too much to be said. Honestly, I've been looking at the population control and eugenics thing long enough that I just don't even have anything to say about it,

Aquaponics is a good way to produce multiple products (plants and fish/arthropods in this case) in a small area. The biggest energy usage is light for the plants but a greenhouse/sunlight piping to not have to use energy
The fish provide nutrients to the plants so you don't need much in the way of fertilizer

Also just find native plants that produce food you like and plant them in your yards so you can produce your own food if you're worried about food security
Honey mesquite, prickly pears, hardy pecans and yucca grow everywhere here and they make delicious foods every year with little maintenance
>>>/out/1779278
unironically a good source for practical experience

>>11725219
Algae needs sun

the future of space looked so bright bros, we were finally making progress. then the corona virus slowed things down and now the chimpout is going to destroy vital businesses and stall things even further

>>11732918
I will say something even sadder. JWT will be delayed again, mark my words.

>>11732918
I will say something even sadder: JWT will be delayed again, mark my words.

>>11732944
enh, I've seen enough delays on it to not believe any dates already

It's amazing how the biggest shills for ponics are also people who have never grown a crop in their life and oh how angry they are when you burst their little bubble. Ponics have a limited use that is confined to domestic settings, urban areas with high price restaurants and Australia. Even then you cannot produce anything beyond leafy greens and fish. Yes people have grown strawberries and carrots, but the yield was poor and the nutritional value made the whole thing a waste of time. Fish do not excrete all of the nutrients required to produce a fruit and you cannot add anything to their water. Systems without fish are feeding their plants nutrients in a form that the plant can't benefit from and they are also doing it on a schedule that doesn't suit the plant. This is why ponics has not replaced soil in the 90 years since its inception, despite all the IFLS memes...

>>11733751 Continued
Plants have a symbiotic relationship with the environment and the wildlife that lives in that environment and every attempt to subvert this ends in collapse. When a healthy plant requires a specific mineral, it injects carbon into the soil through its roots. This stimulates the bacteria, fungus and microbes in the soil to reproduce and accumulate the specific mineral the plant has requested. Their life cycle is short and the plant is able to feed on their remains. This mechanism does a few things:

a: Sequesters carbon, increasing fertility year on year.
2: Create flood proof soil that does not erode, compact or repel water, again increasing fertility year on year.
D: Create an ecosystem requiring very little human input, which increases fertility year on year.
123374: Produce vigourous plants that have their own passive and active immunity to pests and disease.
Z: Produce food that can be classed as medicine, due to the increased levels of secondary metabolites.

Pic related is the state of the art. The key to understanding this is the chemicals listed at the bottom of the pyramid are "manufactured" by fungus & bacteria on demand and delivered in the nonoxidised form the plant prefers, at the exact time the plant needs it. Every other way of feeding a plant involves guesswork, labor and money. Conversely, when you spend money on fertilizer, you sterilize your soil and develop nutritionally deficient crops that are prone to disease and dependent on the grower for irrigation. This is the science behind what the permaculture hippies have known for decades. Take care of the soil and the soil takes care of you. INB4 organic strawmen. KYS and get a clue.

>>11733757
Conventional agriculture taps out at level 2 of the pyramid. If any of you have been paying attention lately, you will understand why the zinc ionophore Quercetin is a very important part of our diet. On that basis alone, eating fertilized tomatos grown in a skyscraper is fucking retarded, but have at it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17590007/

>>11730291
>Wildlife and synergistic interactions between plants, wildlife and the environment are non-negotiable. If you can do that in a greenhouse or a skyscraper

This should be doable in a skyscraper. A gut feeling is that some of the best tech for it is in aquarium tech, since what you're talking about is recreating an entire biome within a human constructed environment. That's essentially what aquariums (can) mimic. Not easy in the slightest, though.

It would require farmers with advanced scientific knowledge working with building engineers and investment capital. It would require quite the collaboration.

>>11732682
>Honestly, I've been looking at the population control and eugenics thing long enough that I just don't even have anything to say about it,

We removed so many selection pressures from the human species that we had to create new ones. It's another part of us trying to exert control over the fate of our species.

>>11730138
I am very familiar with light pumps as I have researched them before. We had some fairly impressive versions in the past before light-bulbs took over. (see Anidolic lighting)

However light pumps and such can only do so much. They can move and spread the light, but they don't make more of it. You can use them so you can grow plants deeper into a building, in which case you just added a lot of stuff to move the plant instead of just growing it closer to the window. So that doesn't really change much in that case.

Worse yet is when you spread the light so you can have more growing area, you also lower the energy each plant receivers, which directly effects how much the plants grow. So you get more planets with less yield which again doesn't change much except for adding more complications.

This is where people start suggesting plants that do well with less light, while this can help it doesn't change much in the way of food as those plants tend to be lower calorie foods, because there is less energy.

You can see how we keep hitting the conservation of energy issues. We can move things around, but it doesn't really change much. Adding artificial lighting make it so much worse, which puts pressure for better energy sources. Which leads to suspended nuclear fusion for direct lighting as an ideal model. ... and we have once again gone full circle as that is how the Sun and planets do it in nature.

Regardless of if you say it was billions of years of evolution, or God's divine work. It should be self evident how hard to make a better setup. This is what vertical farms fail at time and time again. We have already developed and in some cases abandoned effective ways to address our food production demands. Shoving it in a tall building, just means you need a tall building to add to you cost.

>>11730138
So make southern facing terraces. Use the inner parts of each terrace for plants that don't like a lot of direct sunlight. Use water features and bounce boards on flat surfaces to spread as much ambient light through the area as possible. Cover the rest of the building in solar collectors and make the hollow core of the structure several large gravity batteries that get winched up during the day, and slowly lower over night turning a flywheel to generate some power for artificial lighting and pumping water up to the top of the building over night.
Depending on how air tight you want to make each level you could also be really efficient with your water usage.

>>11733775
Can you cite more sources please?
Could industrial scale harvesting affect the microbioma of a fields, even using nobel machinery intended to preserve the soil?
How important is the use of clays, organic matter or any other particle smaller than 1mm to make a healthy microbioma? Could the soil be fed exclusively through water soluble nutrients?

>>11734254
It's doable for a mission in space, mainly because you need to and the cost can be written off as a consequence of discovery or recouped by mining. Also because the operators would be bonafide scientists, but here on Earth it is just uneccessary. We have more than enough land to do this on and trucking is cheap. The only reason to do it in a skyscraper is as some kind of showpiece/educational project. There are people who take over empty buildings in the cities and produce crops, but they tend to rely on courses and tours for their revenue. This guy in Milwaukee has a decent urban operation, but he also has 40 acres of land outside the city that is a key component of the operation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4

Aquaponics is certainly a great tool, but it is only suitable for salad crops, although it could be used to reduce our impact on sealife. It really depends what you want to grow in the skyscraper, but 90% of plants interact with and rely on fungus and bacteria to process nutrients and deoxidize them on demand. The on demand part is crucial, because a plant doesn't operate on a timer attached to a pump, it operates on its own time. You would need some form of media for that to exist in and water/air aint it. Again, I just don't see the need for it. There's plenty of under utilized farmland out there and even if we exhausted that supply, deserts can be regreened providing an added benefit over the cost of a skyscraper.

>>11734388
Sources for specifically? Here's general source for production focused on quality, they have a site too.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRApdrU3BA0Pzo6MNWTD2jg

And Dan Kittredge is a great introduction to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im42xjLEk3A

An article you might find interesting. The part about being able to pierce the soil easily. This is the sign of good soil, that is aerated, easy for roots to establish in and a sponge for water.

https://craftsmanship.net/drought-fighters/

Machinery is detrimental period and a system of huge farms with few people and lots of machines is just not sustainable. Maybe if we have machines that fly and never disturb the soil, but compacting the soil causes all kinds of issues that affect nutrient uptake, yield and nutrition. The answer right now is smaller farms, with more people involved and transfer the costs to labor over synthetics and machines. Of course it is cheaper to mechanize, but is food really cheaper if it eventually makes you sick? The composition of your soil is less important than it being covered up and not having a hard pan of compacted soil. You want as much organic matter as you can introduce to your soil. Seaweed if you can get it, rock powder if you need it. Never till the soil and don't waste energy removing residue. The whole idea is to not have to feed your soil eventually. On a new piece of land you would add inoculants and green manure after establishing swails and ponds to store water. From there it's simply a case keeping the soil covered and not compacting it, the microbioma looks after itself.

>>11725856
Nigga, forests are literal rain makers.

>>11734388
Modern agriculture is destroying the soul.
Just look at topsoil erosion in the great planes over the last 100 years. It's more than a little spooky to think about the long term implications, especially on top of the depletion of the water table.

>>11734388

This is a great lecture.

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

>>11725102
Over-engineering , materials better used somewhere else or not being manufactured and transported at all.
Plant in the ground. Keep the air and water clean.

>>11735013
We can fit more people on the vertical axis making the world better faster.

>>11735123
>That moment when it just won't give you a line block
Grr....

>>11735135
Then just throw it in the fermentation tank to recycle it's pixels to make room for something better fitting.

>>11735123
>that picture
hands free

>>11725102
They can produce higher quality thanks to climate control but for now at least they cost a whole lot than the sun to run.
As land value increases and energy prices drop there will be a point where it becomes economically viable for staple crops.

>>11735220
YES! And for protein we can farm insects fed with the discarded aeroponic corn in the basement of every living space pod hub.
In the future I want to be a light bulb designer.

>>11725102
what are "factory farms"?

>>11735369
I'm assuming he just means industrial agriculture. Massive monoculture farms operated by heavy equipment and automation that just grow metric fucktons of legally protected big agra gmo's.

>Iffy

>VISIBLE RAIN
Well thats it boys, whens the next window?

>>11725168
>move from farming natural land to skyscrapers
>call it '''decentralised'''

What did he mean by this?

>>11735845
I think it's obvious. It has to do with ownership and transport.

>>11735882
It's the furthest thing from obvious, this would be a textbook case of centralisation.

>>11735013
>Plant in the ground. Keep the air and water clean.
Ironic since large scale soil farming requires pesticides and herbicides that run the soil quality and even the ground water.

Skyscrapers are the least economical form of housing, we don't see factory skyscrapers either. Vertical farms belong in warehouses, not skyscrapers.

>>11732584
no matter how you arrange it, if you have more plants per square meter, each plant is getting less sunlight since theres only so much sunlight per square meter

unless you go so far up that you significantly delay the sunset, but I don't thing thats economical.

>>11735932
I feel like you're not actually thinking about it, and shouldn't be posting if you're too lazy to provide something substantial. So that's that.

>>11736414
Not him, but there is nothing centralized about owning/renting a piece of land and growing whatever on it.

>>11735972
Yes, too many well-fed people is an impossibility.
Oil is running out, digging for metals and rare eaths becomes unfeasible, and so on.
Burning the candle from both ends won't save us from the inevitable and on the way there I'd rather eat well and naturally produced food.
Soilent ain't a solution!

aeroponics > hydroponics

change my mind

>>11735972
>pesticides and herbicides
All have natural remedies, monoculture is shit for stability in the long run. Permaculture is the answer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSNc13cmknE

>>11736497
Consider spatial resource flow. Food in every building vs food grown and pooled at large distributors, then trucked into cities, brought in from ports, whatever.

The issue is cities themselves. Either you spread people out (not desirable to many people, and living in a rural area, to me either), or you stabilize population and grow food locally to offset resource waste in transit. What you want is security. You want power. You want control. You do not want to be controlled, you do not necessarily want to control others, but you most certainly want control of yourself, How do you facilitate this and safeguard against someone wanting to starve you? Increase food production in the cities. This is a matter of social stability and prosperity. The matter of efficiency is obvious.

Eh, everyone is such a dick these days, Look, like I said in my first post, viable designs were a plenty in the 50's to 70's. Imagine what could be done with modern materials and electronics. Use your imagination. For example the OP image pf so-called "vertical farming" under lights, is absurd. Yes, you can make a ton of money on sprouts, but you're not going to feed a population that way, and it's not decentralized.

>>11736654
>For example the OP image pf so-called "vertical farming" under lights, is absurd.
And to add onto this. The only way it can be viable is the use of LEDs. For this we need to restart our research program on the effects of color and visible light on plants and micro-organisms. A plant which is under little fungal, insect, bacterial, etc threat, won't make as much of a number of beneficial compounds. A bit of UV is important. Growth can be tuned by cycling colored light. Etc.

Lot of work to be done. My disposition is towards tiered farming and plant growth around the outside of buildings, but there's a lot to work with.

a cute space anouncer keeps telling me she loves me, what do?

>>11736654
No material nor electronics will get you over the fact you just need so much light you cannot ever do this in any useful way.

>>11736635
You tell me how permacultures can be sown and harvested on an industrial scale.

>>11739719

>>11739874
Robots.
>>11739967
And?

>>11740045
Comes down to the material of the windows. The traditional notion of floors would need to be reworked (hence "atriums"). Reflective or "metamaterials" could be used selectively.

>>11740102
There is nothing much you can change about windows, glass is glass and it already lets virtually all light in as it is, so any difference would be equally minimal.

>>11740400
You need some UV. Quartz would be superior in that regard.

>>11740457
Plants don't need UV light, it's harmful to them.

>>11740535
Plants often need some level of UV for adequate nutrient levels, and levels of beneficial phytonutrients.

Quickly googled.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19453388/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17230336/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0098847285900048
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2012/608954/
https://www.ledsmagazine.com/blogs/article/14038790/balance-taste-nutrition-and-crop-yield-with-uv-light-exposure

>>11736239
What are mirrors?

Any system of food production that does not have secondary metabolites as its goal is at best retarded and more likely malevolent. Any system of food production that does have secondary metabolites as its goal starts with soil and doing everything possible to bring that soil to life with bacteria, fungus and microbes. You cannot do this in a closed system.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite

>>11730062
>what is dynamic IP
poltard is mentally ill, now there’s a surprise

>>11730069
capitalists have destroyed families and homes in America so yeah

>>11744994
Yes they have learned well from the communists how to atomize society.

>>11725923
Here is a longer video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb60O-LDuL8
It's in German, though.

>>11726135
Yup, you can. And you get something like a factor 3 to 5 increase in yield too.
>>11725102
Probably not unless you have fusion. I've done the math because this has always interested me. If you're using potatoes and take the most optimistic numbers you get enough calories to feed about 50 million people per km^3 per day. A 200m tall skyscraper 20 meters wide will only provide enough potatoes to feed 4000 people. You'd need hundreds of food skyscrapers to sustain a large metropolis. And the energy requirements are enormous too, powering 500 of these (sustaining a million people) at 1% energy to edible calories efficiency you'd need a 10 gigawatt powerplant.

>>11745072
nobody would plant potatoes in a skyscraper, urban framing makes sense for herbs and fresh fruit but not for potatoes because they can be stored for months, you can still use hydroponics, but you better do this in a greenhouse build on cheap land

Yes, or just put it into round tubes

>>11734401
>Again, I just don't see the need for it.

I think there are several good reasons for it. First, it would be a great technology/knowledge set to demonstrate mastery of before we try to recreate it in a spaceship. Clearly, there are some additional challenges in space, but if we cannot overcome the challenge of maintaining a proper biome, microbes and all, in a controlled environment on Earth, we should question our ability to do it in space.

Second, I believe there is actually a lot of unused skyscraper space, and has been for a while. This is a great use for some of that space that will also help cities to becoming, at least partially, self-sustaining. I think there are numerous benefits to this, even cultural/perspective shifts. Anyone that's spent any time growing their own food knows the impact it has to watch and tend to your garden and then the satisfaction of eating what you've worked for. This would make cities a bit less of a burden, and probably help reduce some of their waste, and a host of other benefits.

Finally, to your point about under utilized farmland. I do think, as perhaps you or another poster mentioned, many farms are mismanaged and knowledge that some farmers possess dating back thousands of years is still magic to others. However, in general, I would hope to see more land put into a state other than farmland. We clearly currently have a problem with fertilizer runoff and other problems from mass industrial farming. If we could use our empty skyscrapers to create some space within agriculture to improve land use, it would be a positive.

>>11743397
how do mirrors get more than 1 km^s of sunlight in 1 km^s of plants?

>those /pol/tard hicks that have been seething this whole thread
lmao

>>11725168
This person is unironically intelligent.

>>11747360

Space missions requiring food production are going to need genetically modified humans anyway. I have no problem investigating how to maintain a proper biome in service of that, but first we need to define what an actual biome is and how it operates. I can say one thing with 100% confidence about that: Plastic pipes, mirrors and synthetic nutrients do not occur in any of the hundreds of million year old biomes we could learn from.

Urban agriculture already exists and the people who are successful at that don't need more space. The problem they have is the tiny market for the limited range they can produce and the fact that they cannot compete on price with conventional ag. The educational aspect of that sounds nice, but people simply don't give a fuck or else they would have their own kitchen garden and chickens. Conversely, allotments are very popular, so a simple solution to sustainabily in cities is to stop packing them so densely and integrating green spaces for communal gardens, which would have the added benefit of eliminating the concrete jungle mindset. The abundance of skyscrapers simply means we have no need to build any more. Racing into the sky and ignoring the problems on the ground is just a bad idea.

The fertilizer runoff problem has been solved and the solution is being adopted by larger companies on more land each year, but that will take a generation or 2 to become the the norm. Moving conventional ag indoors is just repeating the same mistake at a higher cost and expecting a different result.