An idea that sprang to mind and please point me out at which points its unrealistic and why because I am talking completely out of my ass here. If we want to reduce mono culture but we still need to somehow figure out how to provide humanity. Could large scale vertical farms, in Green Houses reduce the footprint of monocultures? By being more productive year round? Or is that just technolgist delusions of mine?

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forlorn_mammoth an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I appreciate you being upfront about the depth of your knowledge.

Regenerative farming and/or permaculture offer ways to run industrial-scale agriculture without the monoculture. See i.e. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal...

Another innovation I see is the use of "crop tunnels" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytunnel) to greatly extend the growing season in colder climates (another poster mentioned "Ohio"), and/or better control evaporation.

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j4k0bfr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing that always baffles me with vertical farming is sunlight. Assuming most crops are pretty good at turning full spectrum sunlight into useful stuff, why shrink your solar energy per crop?

And assuming you get around this via grow lights, surely the energy and material cost goes up too much for high-volume crops to make economical sense.

	▲	ssl-3 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think it's hard to generalize whether vertical farms are good or bad; efficient or inefficient. It seems that whether it works or not relies very heavily on the locality. In my part of Ohio, we have lots of farmland -- and plenty of water that just falls out of the sky. We've got reasonably-long, generally-hot days during our growing season and we get some serious crop production done here while it lasts. The rest of the year? The days are short. It's dark and cold outside; frozen, even. We can't grow crops outside here in the winter. But vertical farms (eg, fancy greenhouses) can just keep going. With artificial light and/or supplemental heat, they're still producing even in the depths of winter. Thus, I can go to the grocery store near my house and buy a locally-grown tomato in February. It's expensive to get this done, but the alternatives include paying someone to drive it up here from thousands of miles away or just going without a tomato until after things have warmed up again and stayed that way for awhile.
	▲	b112 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This only makes sense in certain circumstances I think. For example, shipping tomatoes from 5000km away when it's winter in Canada. I recently did some research, and there are multiple local greenhouses around many large Canadian cities for just this reason. They are competitive in the winter, and sell to local supermarkets. The cost of the greenhouses vs shipping + loss. And there is a loss in nutrition, when you harvest green and it takes weeks to hit the table, vs something picked yesterday and picked when actually ripe. Of course, these are large warehouses, not typical greenouses. So I guess the answer is, it can make sense in certain circumstances. A warmer place where you can grow fruit outside year round, not so much.

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bell-cot 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Over the years, many firms have poured many $millions into vertical farms.

If you're growing extreme-value crops - marijuana, or maybe exotic salad greens for Michelin-starred restaurants - that can actually work.

Otherwise, you're trying to compete with millions of square miles of naturally sun-lit dirt, and extremely efficient modern agro-tech stacks. Bankruptcy awaits.

> just technologist delusions of mine?

I'd bet you've read several articles about techno-utopians setting up vertical farms, and their grand dreams. Which always hand-wave the "how can this massively expensive setup complete with dirt?" part.

Farming sun-lit dirt does not magically require monoculture, nor poor farming practices. The problems is monoculture's appeal to certain human cultures - especially profit-maximizing "big ag" capitalists - and the agricultural policies enacted by naive politicians.

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looping__lui 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m just saying: stop hating bees with made up arguments