this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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I mean very high energy use is and has been known to be one of the primary costs to indoor and vertical farming from the outset. The other being most plants require far, far more manual labor to produce.
Outside of their current use to provide crops that otherwise couldn’t be grown in a region, the primary argument i’ve heard for such methods is we want the dense land use to rewild some areas, and don’t mind heavy construction, higher energy consumption, and drastic increase in manual labor needed to do so.
There is also the fact that they consume a lot less water. In regions where solar and wind energy are a surplus but fresh water is scarce, indoor farming makes more sense.
Except the energy, carbon, and labor costs massively outweigh the costs of growing food out in the open where there is plentiful and reliable water and just putting it on a train or ship. That also cuts down on the amount of people who need to do labor and therefore live in areas where water is scarce.
I’m not saying that greenhouses are useless of course, just that I would expect them to be found more in water rich areas that just lack the growing season for the relevant crops and don’t think they can ever be a good solution to growing major crops like wheat, corn, rice, etc…
Oh yeah at this time vertical farming is not suitable for staple crops. However because fruits/veggies lose a majority of their nutritional content when being transported growing them indoors closer to population centers makes more sense. Also would like to mention that the energy and carbon cost to an indoor farm are currently high right now however lots of work is being done to reduce those costs. Not saying it will ever be 0 but we can get closer. Like 3D printing hydroponic towers using recovered and repurposed plastic, integrating them into aquaculture systems to do aquaponics to provide a protein and high quality fertilizer source, placing them in skyscrapers with open walls to take better advantage of natural sunlight, etc. The current strategy of using climate control systems and LED lights is not the way forward IMO but hell it’s a start in a field of agriculture that hasn’t been touched in decades.