Indoor agriculture has many advantages, but it also needs cheap land, and cheap energy. That usually means a balance between close to major urban centers, but far enough away to have a lot of room (including solar). Greenhouses, even tall ones, with multiple stories is the path to go. Solar and owning land means complete cost certainty for energy.
Advantages include low water, pesticide, fungicide, long growing season, high yields, and resilience to climate. It is global south and high north that need the resilience, and who have the most threatened agriculture states.
I never understood the economics of those Agtech.
The margins on vegetables are shit.
Consumers won’t care that each of your potatoes had it’s own email addresse, a twitter account and was monitored by an AI.
Farmers are not just redneck assholes who needed some MIT grad to tell them how to increase yield, there’s already a huge agro industry and research and we’ve reached a point where the yield of carrots and others is pretty much already maximised. Assuming they are genius and get a 1% yield improvement that would be enormous.
A farm hand cost $25k a year, and engineer cost $150k and you haven’t priced in the tech and the building…
So you basically get a business where the cost of operation is about 20 time higher (and that’s conservative) than a guy with a plot of land and a tractor for sensibly the same yield (if not worse) and zero product differentiation in the market.
Well, I guess they just figured out the economics…
Perfect example of why worrying about the economic logistics in the face of climate collapse is complete fucking bullshit
Oh give us a couple of decades to screw up the environment enough we can’t grow outside.
Our climate is changing and we need research like this to ensure that we can still grow food productively in regions where weather is causing crops to fail.
First, we actually don’t really need that research, indoor growing is a very well known activities that is already performed in many places. There are large indoor farms in northern Europe (cold), in the middle east (hot). Greenhouse, tunnels, aren’t exactly new.
Second, it’s not what those companies were doing, they were trying to create farming factories that are fully automated, their goals was to remove humans, not to find ways to fight climate change.
Turns out land is still cheap and sunlight still generally free.
Even if it is true now, it is changing and very rapidly.
Cheap land? Where? Areas around me are crazy expensive, and that’s without buildings or utilities.
I was curious how cheap land was here in Washington. There is a posting of 570 acres for $815k in Riverside or if you want only 20 acres, there is land in Tonasket for $60k. Not really many people in either of those towns (not even sure Riverside qualifies as a town).
Agricultural land specifically. Growing stuff in the city is just not a great idea from a land use perspective.
Agricultural land isn’t cheap either which is why most farms are owned by massive corporations these days. They’ve bought up most of the good growing land.
most farms are owned by massive corporations these days.
Utter nonsense.
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-family-farms
By your link, 90% of farms produce 21% of producs. So yeah, most farms are owned by corpos, if we apply the meaning correctly
You aren’t reading that correctly.
“Small family maps” correspond to almost 90% in the “number of farms” graph and 21% in “value of production” graph, how else can anyone read it?
Those numbers can be quite skewed considering their definition of a “farm” is one that generates as little as $1000 in revenue per year, so anyone with a few chickens in their suburban backyard that sells eggs to their coworkers would fall under this definition. They even outline that 80% of these small family farmers have full-time jobs outside of farming. They also claim giant companies are “family owned” simply because a few family members control a majority stake. One could call Walmart or News Corp “family owned businesses” using this same definition and claim Walmart is a tiny portion of the retail space because there are 500k individuals selling keychains on Etsy versus their single company.
Farmland? Or near-residential plots?
The idea is to remove weather as a risk for farming. It’s remarkably hard making reliable predictions for yields with climate change on the horizon.
Yes that’s the idea, but perhaps it’s not actually a good idea.
I think the plummeting market price per pound of cannabis in Colorado is an interesting case. It has become so cheap that the cost of goods for indoor grown cannabis is higher than the market price. The outdoor growers are the only ones with a favorable balance of costs and product price for the long run.
Anyone want to buy some used lights?
It’s been the same in Oregon for years. The only reason why this crop was ever expensive and grown primarily indoors is that it was illegal and now with enough distance from illegality and enough competition, the price plummets. Your state may start implementing license and growing restrictions to counteract this as they’ve done here because the state loves their tax revenue and wouldn’t want to jeopardize this cash cow.
I have yet to see outdoor bud that’s the same density nugs as indoor.
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