Comment on Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%
bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 year agoIt depends on what you mean by efficient. Cost efficiency wise, normal land farming beats out hydroponics by a mile. And really, cost efficiency is virtually the only thing that matters when it comes to farming on a massive scale.
That depends on yield per year and for certain crops it’s incredibly high compared to arable, especially with clever engineering that uses waste heat productively.
We’re certainly going to see an increase in city farms for various things over the coming decades, automation just makes it too easy and there are so many good options to explore
Or you could just skip all that and plant seeds in soil, with a larger farm outside of the city
Modern agriculture is hugely damaging to the ecosystem, provides a very low quality produce, is very inefficient, and there’s plenty of better things for the land to be used for.
I get that a lot of people want to live in an idealised version of the past but the past is someone’s future, things change and grow and evolve which is a great thing. People are going to grow daily produce locally because it’s more efficient and better than daily transporting food long distances - getting traffic off the road should be a key part of our future plans, localising production is a great idea. Growing lettuce six hours drive away is silly when it loses most it’s quality in six hours even when chilled, why run a truck every day when for less power than just the transport you could grow them locally, especially if you’re getting better produce without any damage to the environment.
Year round, pest free, high quality fresh produce locally is going to be a standard thing in every city and grumbling about how life used to be different isn’t going to change that.
It is, but we have a society based around profit making not a good ecosystem with high quality products. You’ll need to fix the former before the latter will actually be taken up.
rdyoung@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is so false it’s not even funny. Hydro is way more efficient and aero even more so.
The highlights because I don’t have time for a lecture.
With farming indoors you can control the day/night cycle which not only increases the growth rate it also let’s you manipulate fruiting and flowering.
Hydro and aero use a fraction of the water dirt farming does. More water is being taken up by the plants and none of it is being lost to the environment. On top of that evaporation is controlled so less is lost that way.
As mentioned above the growth rate is increased not only by the light cycle but also by being able to more strictly control and fine tune the amount of fertilizer and you use way less of it. Just like the water, fertilizer isn’t lost to the environment.
Seems like some of you need to learn more about this stuff. There is a growing number of vertical farms popping up all over the world. Hopefully one day soon we will be buying lettuce, carrots, etc that were grown if not in the same building but on the same block.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If that was the case, why isn’t every industrial farm doing it?
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The Venn diagram of farmers and early adopters is harry potter’s glasses
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Have you seen all the crazy stuff get up to? Geospatial analysis of fields, drones for spot fertilizing, the acres covering water systems, turning waste crops into ethanol, etc