this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Initial upfront costs are heavy but you would be saving all of the transport and logistics costs for the lifetime of the facility. Aeroponics are also a lot less resource intense than growing in the dirt.
Not in energy requirements when the sun is free and electricity and lightbulbs are not.
Transporting food halfway across the world ain't free either.
Absolutely. Doesn't change my point. Just brings up a different one.
It does change your point because you need to look at the total energy cost, not just a single part.
Transport costs are enormous. The land you’re talking about using could be used to generate even more power with renewables.
We can not replace ground cover of plants with nothing but solar panels. The moisture difference alone would cause huge ecological issues nothing to say on the reduced plant matter.
Plus plants use sunlight to grow everything. That energy cost is way more massive than you think. It takes a fusion reactor in space to power it.
Trying to get the same effect from solar powering Leads will be far less efficient and take an area larger than the traditional farm to generate the power for a vertical farm and be less effective. Plus you would also need to run vertical water pumps which are difficult with the weight of water, air flow, and still need fertilizer and nutrients which would mostly be chemical synthetics for making sure it's in the right concentrations.
Transportation costs are absolutely huge and more local transportation would be better but don't mistake it for being much more efficient because of a single point that can be reduced.
Farming is a huge endeavor that works mostly cause it is free energy and resources that as we need to provide more becomes already worse. Trying to control that entire chain is extremely difficult and costly and should only be done as necessary.
It's far easier to work on flat land that sprawls than vertical and the density would not even be in the favor of the vertical grow tower.
I am looking at total costs. It's just not nearly a catch all solution because it's far more intensive than people generally at a glance expect. And I'm for adopting it in specific situations and add more vertical grow to farm operations but it does not fix food to grow everything indoors.
Has anyone broken down the difference in energy between artificially creating growing conditions in the middle of cities compared to just transporting the food from where it grows easily? Trains and ships which transport most food are incredibly energy efficient per ton transported
Trains can transport one ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of fuel and ships can transport one ton of goods 600 miles on one gallon of fuel. If a urban farm can produce one ton of food it needs to consume less than a few gallons of fuel's worth of energy in lighting and other city-specific infrastructure in order to come out ahead of growing food where it grows best