2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI and Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm (intelligentliving.co) 267
schwit1 quotes Intelligent Living: Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company's chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.
Plenty's climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.
Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren't grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.
Plenty's climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.
Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren't grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.
Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've seen some interesting experiments to change lighting profiles to generate different flavor profiles. An AI might be able to improve on that, although I don't know if the data collection/iteration is sufficiently quick to feed modern AI
Re:Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're also going hard and heavy on the "two acres of vertical farm vs. 720 acres of conventional farm", but nothing in the blurb or in TFA does it say how high the plant rigging is. It's the same sort of lying-by-omission as saying that your beehive will produce a gallon of honey over a summer in an area of four square feet, while ignoring the fact that the hive has 32 four-square-foot racks of honeycomb.
You're acting like you've found a gotcha, but this is not an "aha" moment. This is a "who the fuck cares" moment. They aren't claiming to reduce farming volume, they are claiming to reduce farming area. And since farming area is what's decreasing, and also what's in short supply in urban areas, that's what's actually relevant.
Vertical farming lets us take spaces which are already tall, namely unused warehouses (which are unused because cities have expanded to encompass them) and use them for food production in a way that not only results in fresher produce being located where people want to consume it, but also reduces farming emissions — both in transport and in production. California is the only state which even slightly tries to control emissions of farm equipment, and even we don't do a good job of it.
Re: Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:2)
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Re:Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Tiny parasitic wasps [bbc.com] have been a big win, and BT is another, along with a mix of beneficial microbes and mychorrhizea, that can limit pests and root conditions.
Primary goal is to keep pests out, make people walk through areas that use forced air to remove clingers-on, then use glue traps to detect any infestation before it gets out of hand, I have seen whitefiles take over and require a complete removal of plant material and scrub before starting over
Re:Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:4, Interesting)
BT will become useless soon enough.
It's just another monoculture, we are porting our way of hyper-accelerating resistance formation from medicine to agriculture. It's not enough to have monocultures of crops and pesticides, now we are creating monocultures of internal resistance mechanisms across different crops.
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The current mix I use (Orca) has about 20 different cultures in it. either they are working to avoid monoculture issues, or just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticls ;)
BT-wise (and this goes for any pesticide use in controlled environments), I work to exclude pets before using BT, soap, oils, etc... because it helps to ensure that any pests that show up are naive to the treatments I am using
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Hope you're right. There's a growing body of of evidence that the toxins produced by Bt harm our microbiomes, with whom we are symbiotic. They may not kill humans directly, but the microbiome is way more important than most people realize, and anything that hurts that will ultimately hurt us as well.
Same goes (many times over) for glyphosate (Roundup). And likely other herbicides, fungicides and other pesticides. And likely, IMO, many other things that "couldn't possibly harm us," and yet do. Mainstrea
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The fertilizers can stay in a closed loop, or if it needs to be discarded, it would be in a controlled way.
There are many variations of indoor farms, some even looping in fish tanks so that the "fertilizer" is generated naturally. Others can run only on water with no soil, or even with soil it is completely controlled. Overall for non-root veggies this works well. (I have a small setup at home).
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imo it is very hard to balance healthy fish and plants in a system where adjusting to suit the plants can easily kill the fish and fish waste can burn plants pretty quickly.
I was watching a very interesting video where they were using a product called veg+bloom as single-use-to-drain product, with no recycling.
It does not require r/o water (must filter out chlorine) and even has an industrial in-line capsule that they just run the water through, out to the plants (in 6" rockwool with aerator caps), then jus
Re:Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost all the hot houses have strong annual program to air it out and let the winter frost kill the pathogens. But Iceland has been growing fresh vegetables in geothermally heated hot houses. Hot house conservatories also have existed in large numbers for several decades. So the mitigation measures are known. But I dont think it is 100% pesticide free.
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Just fill it with ozone between crop cycles, that should kill everything pretty quickly. Just need to be careful with using plastics (and humans).
Re:Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be a mistake to assume that there are no pests in an indoor farm. Spider mites and aphids are plagues in indoor cannabis grow ops.
Re:Less pesticides and fertilizer too? (Score:5, Funny)
I hear there's plenty of roaches too.
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I hear there's plenty of roaches too.
Well done sir! I'm glad I wasn't taking a drink when I read that - it would have been a truly messy spit-take.
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Organic fertilizer is generally a bit of a scam any way. Almost all commercial organic farms use fossil fertilizer by detour.
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9... [doi.org]
In the end there's only one semi-renewable source of non fossil fertilizer ... human manure. As long as we eat from a farm and shit in the ocean, then no amount of wishful thinking will make organic farming without fossil fertilizer possible.
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I'd love this if it could be made to work. I see two main problems though, particularly in places like inner city Cleveland which I'm a 5 minute walk from now.
First, energy. We don't get a lot of sun here, and nothing I know of really beats an actual, traditional farm in terms of harvesting energy from what sun we get. You won't get more energy out of any process than you put in, since, even here in the 'hood, we still have to obey the Second Law. So I think this may work better in a place where energy,
Wasn't that a surprise? (Score:3)
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If you're going to sell lettuce, it might as well be expensive lettuce!
Stack em, don't flip em. (Score:2, Insightful)
Efficiency not Translating to Cost Reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Efficiency not Translating to Cost Reduction (Score:2)
Well I mean it's possible that down the road this technology might be able to reduce the production costs to something on par or cheaper than traditional methods. It's POSSIBLE, not a sure thing by any means. Let's see how it turns out.
Re: Efficiency not Translating to Cost Reduction (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Efficiency not Translating to Cost Reduction (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds good on paper, but you're still paying 15x the price of 2D-grown lettuce
We've seen how this works before. A state will start subsidizing the creation of these vertical farms until the consumer cost of the food coming out of them is the same as a traditional farm. This will happen quickly because those subsidies will be funded by a new tax that only affects traditional farms. After enough vertical farms are built, the government will set a mandate all traditional farms be phased out within X years (because traditional farms are suddenly bad/unethical/immoral/whatever). Once that deadline approaches, the vertical farm subsidies will be dropped and the food costs will still be many times that which was coming out of the traditional farms. The variety of crops grown will be reduced substantially because it is found out that many do not perform well in vertical farms but are suddenly too expensive/illegal to grow traditionally.
If you dare question whether any of this even makes sense, or are just not entirely lockstep with this plan, they will attempt to publicly sham you with whatever "-ist" word is the cause du jour. They will call it, "progress."
Re:Efficiency not Translating to Cost Reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the climate and environmental impact of 2D-grown lettuce is not included in the price but it is in the 3D-farm-price. We're giving away our planet for free to farmers, loggers and oil behemoths and get cheap food in return. Let's hope 2D-grown lettuce one day becomes as expensive as it should be.
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
Ever been down to see Greygarden? I heard the whole place is run by robots. Now isn't that something?
society's most impoverished" get more impoverished (Score:5, Insightful)
"society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem." How? By putting at least some of them out of work, and letting them eat the technocrat's food scraps?
Great for the new Mars Colony... (Score:2)
Thats the way to grow food on Mars too. They should see if Elon wants to buy them.
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I'd be really ok with Elon moving to Mars. Or even better, Uranus, a place where his asshattery would go completely unnoticed. I understand that there is no covid pandemic on Uranus, and no pesky unions.
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What is this fascination that conservatives have with human feces in California? Do they taste better than what they get at home, or what?
Greenhouses? (Score:2)
Aren't these almost as productive, with just as low water/pesticide/fertilizer use? And don't they cost much less and use far far less electricity?
Of course, you don't get a "tech multiple" with your IPO on a greenhouse farming company.
Does anyone do the math? (Score:5, Interesting)
Grow kale indoors... fine.
Now let’s grow soybeans? Say an acre of land is $10k and has free light and water and you get 60 bushels an acre of bean yield.
What’s a building water and power for light cost? Warehouse is 20$ a square foot by 43500 for an acre, $870k.
Now assume you can stack soybeans which grow 3’ or so 3 times in your warehouse. Assume you can get three crops a year. ( maybe a bit low, but soybeans are long season). Assume you get more yield, say 80 bushels.
So 240x3 gets us 720 bushel an acre yield or more than 10 times.
Unfortunately warehouse costs are 87 times higher and you have to pay for water and light.
Do city folk have no concept on how food is made?
This is probably about automation (Score:2)
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So you've assumed you can't build the vertical farm higher than one story, and that transportation from a dirt farm is free.
Do country folk have no idea how food is made?
Must be a B.S. in BS (Re:Does anyone do the math?) (Score:4, Informative)
Do city folk have no concept on how food is made?
No. These are the same people that think we can produce electricity from "agricultural waste". What "agricultural waste"? You mean like corn stalks? They must think farmers harvest corn and soybeans and then have to haul away all the stalks to a landfill or something. There's no "agricultural waste". The people that believe that there's all kinds of "agricultural waste" to burn for fuel will at least clam to have a bachelor of science degree from some university. You ask if these people do the math. They don't. I suspect that they couldn't if they tried.
I'm no farmer but I've talked to some during my life. I learned something a while back, there is no crop that is grown to produce straw. By that I mean straw is not a kind of crop or plant. There is no "straw plant" like there is a corn plant, soybean plant, or wheat plant. Straw is the stuff left over from harvesting corn, soybeans, or wheat. Well, straw is only straw if it is taken from the field to make straw hats or baskets. If it's left in the field then I think that they call it "humus". The stalks and leaves from a cereal crop like corn and wheat is mostly left in the field to control erosion, keep nutrients in the soil for the next crop, and other benefits. Some of this straw will be used to make overpriced hats and baskets for city people to hang on walls and put on shelves to get a "country look" for their overpriced city dwellings.
I say we ask these university educated morons where we will get the electricity for these vertical farms. If they answer "solar power" then I'm going to have to do all I can to not instinctively punch them in the face. Solar power? To keep the lights on in a vertical farm? I thought you said you went to school.
Do people do the math on where the calcium in milk comes from? The calcium comes from the cow, the cow that produced the milk. Where does the cow get the calcium? From the plants it eats. Where does the plant get the calcium? From the dirt. Okay, one more question, what happens to the dirt if there are plants grown in the same dirt year after year? The answer is that it runs out of calcium. Farmers pay people a lot of money to mine calcium, normally as an oxide, to then haul it to their fields and spread it out for the crops.
These vertical farms will need a lot of electricity, a lot of water, and a lot of dirt. There will be claims that these vertical farms don't need dirt. They will need dirt. Special kinds of dirt, but still dirt dug up out of the ground. Dirt with calcium in it, and iron, magnesium, selenium, zinc, manganese, molybdenum, and so on. I didn't learn this from some university educated moron. I learned this from geniuses that grow our food, some of which had not even graduated from high school. They did the math on this, they had to or they would have gone out of business.
Solar power is a waste of area that we could use to grow something. And before anyone asks, I do mean to include your roof. If you are going to spend the money on solar panels for your roof to save on electricity, twice over apparently because the solar panels lower heating to the home from the sun and therefore lower air conditioning demand, then you are likely another university educated moron
This world needs fewer university educated morons and more high school educated geniuses. These morons are going to starve us all with their plans to feed the world.
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Warehouse costs can vary _incredibly_ dramatically.
My company bought a 75,000 square foot warehouse a few years back. It's ~20 years old, partially electrified, no heating/cooling (2,000 sq ft heated/cooled office area) and we paid a bit over $1 million. Roughly $14/sq foot to buy. New construction costs even more.
If you want conditioned space--and as I understand it, LED grow light operations on this scale require cooling, and you of course need heating to stop from freezing, etc., and build costs go up dr
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Varies a lot by location also. It is not necessarily true that inner cities have the cheapest costs. They often seem to on the surface, but once you factor in things like costs to remediate lead, asbestos, and other contamination, the costs of security, high taxes, payoffs to keep city services working reliably, constant repairs to hundred year old foundations and roofs, frequent power outages, and countless other items of similar nature, many business find it way cheaper and less hassle to do business el
greens only (Score:5, Informative)
And very little energy content, when you get right down to it. I think that actual fruits and grains are going to be MUCH harder because of the enormous amount of energy and biomass required. Slower growing as well.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud this sort of thing. Strategies like this should be implemented where economical, and they should be researched to push them further. But I'll be honestly surprised if my flour, cornmeal, apples or raisins EVER come from an indoor-environment.
If we ever wind up in space like in the science-fiction novels, we might get our greens from autofarming, but I'm pretty sure that most of our carbs and protein will be synthesized in a vat. Either by genetically modified microbes or just straight-forward chemistry.
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Naturally vining plants such as berries and tomatoes would seem to be a natural for this type of operation. (Actually a tomato is a berry.) Since berries ripen at different times rotating them past a picker repeatedly would make sense, so that each can be picked at its prime. Personally I would pay a hefty premium for actual ripe tomatoes rather than the nasty green things the supermarket have to carry because of the transportation time.
Pro tip: if you grow tomatoes put your surplus in the freezer rather
Show me the money (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the square inches per potato that counts, but the dollars per potato.
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Exactery. Wake me up when this food is in the supermarket, at prices competitive with traditionally farmed food.
Re: Show me the money (Score:2)
It is already in Albertsons.
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The sugar and starch are the food. They're called macro-nutrients, because you need a lot more of them than the micro-nutrients.
People have such weird ideas about food.
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No it isn't. Unless you're a Ferengi.
It's the micro-nutrients per potato.
What good is a massive bag of water and starch if you can't digest it without getting sick or live off of it at all?
(Hint: Vertical farms are notoriously bad at this. Even worse than the discount store water vegetables that taste of nothing. The damn things don't even get a soil biome anymore! Even though that is a key part of every plant. Like an external digestive system.)
And it's the resource usage per micro-nutrients.
But here, vert
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> Exponential growth of the human population is the problem we need to fix, ASAP!
Don't worry about this one. Education fixes it. The best models have humanity peaking at 11 Billion in the next few decades and then falling below present levels by 2200.
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Well said.
Other than sub-Saharan Africa, most of the globe is already basically flat on population growth. Large swathes of Europe (and Japan) are shrinking.
I'm pretty much a diehard libertarian-capitalist type, but I can't see our current political-economic systems surviving periods of extended _global_ population decline. Europe and America have totally relied on artificial, aggregate economic growth from immigration to cover up many other issues.
We've seen it in many cities in America today certainly man
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> It's not the square inches per potato that counts, but the dollars per potato.
Right. Note that land cost is part of the equation that determines the dollars per potato on the supply side. Nutrition will affect the demand side of those dollars too.
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I calculate it using chips per potato.
Producing more stock value than food (Score:2)
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They might be growing the idea food crop, but it's far from the ideal crop.
That would probably be marijuana, opium poppies, or maybe coffee or coca, except that they're a PITA. If you've got some objection to drugs, go with seasonal flowers/plants. Poinsettias, roses, etc.
Do some calculations for me, Slashdot (Score:3)
How much of the earth would you have to cover in solar panels in order to do a solar-powered version of this for the entire production of humanity's food?
I'm assuming that with solar panel inefficiencies, transmission line inefficiencies, and LED inefficiencies, you'd need to cover much more land with solar panels for this than you would if you just planted the plants in the ground, but I haven't done the math on it. Would you end up with the earth so covered in solar panels that hardly any wild plants would have room to grow?
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Don't forget that with artificial lights you can tune the spectra for the plant you are growing, e.g. put much less energy in green, and none in infrared. Also, if you grow the food near the people you reduce the transportation costs of the final product.
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Plus you can deliver actual ripe product. Most people have never actually eaten a ripe tomato.
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How much of the earth would you have to cover in solar panels in order to do a solar-powered version of this for the entire production of humanity's food?
5.4 times the amount of crop land:
https://youtu.be/ISAKc9gpGjw?t... [youtu.be]
Efficiency lessons and Mad Cow CJD (Score:2)
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You mean aside from the metric fuckton (offical SI unit, I swear! ;) of radioactive cesium ejected by the coal power plants powering those lamps? :D
I seriously hope they don't farm with plastics that use cancerous softeners.
But usually, with such projects, I'm happy if they even use actual real soil at all.
(Which is like the digestive system of the plant. With an entire biome specifically adapted to that plant, working in symbiosis with it. So no, putting roots in water is not the same.)
Ridiculouly short-sighted. (Score:2)
Aside from the almost complete lack of micro-nutrients in the crops from such farms usually produce,
this obviously only works because it steals the light from neighbors whose land now is worse growing crops, or because they waste massive loads of energy on artificial lighting.
Anyone with half a brain can see, that this won't work anymore when the farms are arranged like New York skyscrapers, where barely any light reaches you anymore unless you build even higher, and when energy is supposed to come from roo
What problem is this trying to solve? (Score:3)
Is space really one of the primary issues with modern farming? This approach requires orders of magnitude more energy and cost than traditional farming, and doesn't work for most crops. And using solar power doesn't make it any more green: every watt of solar power used to counteract the wasteful vertical farming is a watt that could have been spent replacing coal.
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A good bit of the formerly prosperous countryside in northeast Ohio (within say an hour of Cleveland, Akron, Canton, or Youngstown) appears to have been abandoned, or, at any rate, definitely not being used for farming, in spite of being really good farmland. Almost all of it was cornfields as recently as 15-20 years ago.
I can't generalize to other areas but I can certainly say that around here, the availability of land for farming doesn't seem to be an issue. Of course, our cities are about half abandone
And the nutrients come from where, exactly? (Score:2)
So, I understand one very important thing about normal outdoor in-ground farming. I'm not eating the potato. I'm eating the nutrients in the potato.
Those nutrients came from the soil. From the insects that died, the worms that excreted, the minerals that flooded down from the mountain or up from the bedrock.
Big or small, fast or slow, the potato doesn't matter. It's what's inside the potato that counts.
So, if you're growing a potato indoors, in a desert, hanging from the ceiling, please tell me: what am
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The macronutrients come from the same place as they do in a dirt farm: mostly the air. Those are the protein, sugar and whatever more complex things the plant makes out of sugar.
Micronutrients, plus some bits and bobs needed for the sugars and protein, are added in the fertilizer. This is also the same on a dirt farm, although the exact process may be different. One of the problems with the dirt farm is that a lot of the fertilizer you spread on it washes or blows away, while you can make very efficient use
Corn (Score:2)
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Corn can grow there if genetically modified to be really short plants, or the stem only cultured (with normal size cob).
Other Costs (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Next up (Score:5, Insightful)
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If I use a couple extra trailing off... or semi colons to make my writing better reflect the little pauses nuances of spoken language I get hit by Slashdot's ascii art filter. But the flag above sails right through.
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Next up: Vertically farmed cows and pigs.
And after using them for testing, next will be farmed people [wp.com].
Re: Next up (Score:2)
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So build vertically in the sea.
That's called a fish farm. (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Aquaponics: Fish are sometimes reared alongside these sorts of indoor vegetable operations, where marine poo becomes your fertilizer. Baby fish may be moved to traditional farms once they become too big for an indoor tank.
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Though with aquaponics, it is more an upside capital 'T' floating on water, The base for ground growing plants and the vertical for tall or clinging plants. A long above ground channel, that you feed water in one end and remove out the other to generate current, you add new floating growth platforms with seedling at one end and remove old ones to be refreshed at the other end, repeatedly planting and cropping along the route. All undercover, better quality crops and you heard the fish from one end to the ot
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More seriously, I'd imagine vertical fish farms could go on the list too.
A local guy did that some years ago. It's not too difficult. Pump water in from the top, exhaust it out the bottom. The fish eventually get used to swimming vertically. I was told there were some ethics issues at the time.
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Re: Next up (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news grass grew. Which is far more topical than yet another case of TDS
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Record low black unemployment, peace in the middle east, a booming economy until a pandemic which affected every continent on earth and every nation struck ... yeah, not starting any new wars, an unmitigated disaster for sure.
Why do you hate blacks so much? Are you really ok with foreign wars?
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We already have vertically farmed people. Not for eating, more for filling out nightclubs.
Re:Next up (Score:5, Funny)
Build it high enough, and it can have cloud storage too.
Vertically farmed chickens already (Score:2)
Rather disappointing FP. Were you feeling rushed? Or is is supposed to be a joke? In any case, I concur with the lack of mod points.
In small world news, a local politician was just destroyed because of bribes he took to support vertical chicken cages. Don't think there were any robots involved, however. The recently revealed bribes were to insure the cages were not made larger or provided with perches that would have been more comfortable for the chickens. He claims to have resigned for his health, but the
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Next up: Vertically farmed cows and pigs.
This is already done for chickens [ytimg.com].
Re: Also, no pesticides (Score:2)
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Pedantic correction: that was an appeal to stoners. There was a claim they are authorities in this area, but it is not proven.
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Kale is super food.
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Simply vertical is not superior. It's a gimmick. (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is just that - vertical.
As for the robots... All the "robots" do is rotation of the plant-beds from vertical to horizontal. For planting and picking purposes.
They have to grow the plants horizontally first, on account of gravity, which guides the water flow as well as the roots.
Then the robots lift the beds and hang them vertically for plants to grow a bit more.
And that's the end of robots' input.
I'm not sure where does their "AI" fit in according to their presentation - it shows nothing even remotely AI about it.
What it DOES show... is a bunch of lettuces and cabbages (like kale) grown vertically and picked very young to be eaten as salads.
I.e. As "food" for people who like to pretend that they are eating.
So no... this (should it actually work) will not replace "rice, wheat, and corn" nor any other kind of actual caloric or nutritional food.
As for it working... They actually show in the very presentation that it DOESN'T WORK.
They are picking those (actually very easily grown) leafy vegetables which were clearly chosen for their very strong leaves - before those leaves are fully grown.
They are picking the plants early.
Cause they can't keep them from breaking off of the vertical plant-bed, when fully grown.
Cause they are not fuckin vines.
And you know what is actually nutritional, already grows vertically like a vine AND could actually use some robots in the process, mostly for picking and cleaning?
Beans and peas.
They are not growing those.
Instead they pretend to use robots to pretend to grow vertical salads.
This really smells like just another Theranos scam.
At one point they also pretended to be using robots as a major component of the process.
Only difference being they were using a Cartesian robot arm as a gimmick while Plenty uses an articulated robotic arm.
Which IS a superior gimmick, but it is still a gimmick.
Grains are already solved (Score:3)
Growing grains at scale is solved. You use land, you store them for a year and they are fine, you transport them. We'll leave grain alone because there's no profit in it. Focus on the lettuces which grow quickly, transport poorly, don't last, and have consistent demand. Then move into herbs. I imagine most veggies and then fruits will go vertical before grain. Corn/wheat planting on land is incredibly effective.