this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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This is really only a useful technology for hydroponics, which is really only a useful technology in places that are short on arible land, but the realities of globalization means good luck beating the costs of importing from places that have more arible land than you.
Still neat, I would have liked to have seen an explanation for the change
Hydroponic/aeroponic is way more efficient than growing in dirt. You can stack it as high as you want and grow way more per acre. On top of that you have the reduced amount of fertilizer and water and the increase in growth rate.
There is a reason why the best weed is grown via hydroponic/aeroponic.
It depends on what you mean by efficient. Cost efficiency wise, normal land farming beats out hydroponics by a mile. And really, cost efficiency is one of the top things to consider 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.