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Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%
(www.earth.com)
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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.
This is so false it's not even funny. Hydro is way more efficient and aero even more so.
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.
If that was the case, why isn't every industrial farm doing it?
In part because traditional farms scale better than aeroponics or hydroponics. In part because farms don't pay for the environmental damage they cause. Because of these two points, there is little incentive to industrialize aeroponics or hydroponics.
What is true right now is that traditional farms use more water, fertilizer, and space, cause more environmental damage, but require less labor. And the labor problem can be mitigated with robotics, if we're willing to invest in that.
The Venn diagram of farmers and early adopters is harry potter’s glasses
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
Poor lad thinks farming IRL is like his Stardew Valley save
Farmers are quick to jump on an opportunity to refine their current processes in ways that reduce their inputs and increase their yields, especially when it only costs them a few grand in capital investment (drones for surveying and spot treatment) or is hilariously over-subsidized by the government (bioethanol). Wholesale change from the literal ground up, not so much, and perhaps understandably so -- farmers have massive, often generational investment in infrastructure and equipment for farming in specific ways and with specific crops, operate on narrow margins, and don't have much available liquidity to change things up on a whim. For that reason, major innovations in agriculture don't usually come from farmers; instead they usually come from university research.
There is definitely a back and forth between academics and industry in the agriculture field! The technological adoption spectrum was actually defined when looking at farmers.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called "innovators", followed by "early adopters". Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "Laggards" or "phobics." For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service. The demographic and psychological (or "psychographic") profiles of each adoption group were originally specified by agricultural researchers in 1956: innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders, less prosperous early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbors late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educatedThe model has subsequently been adapted for many areas of technology adoption in the late 20th century, for example in the spread of policy innovations among U.S. states.^article^ ^|^ ^about^
Which is why “rurality” is a synonym for modernity, and why “rural electricity/telephone/internet access” reminds you of a high tech data center. Ok.
The farmers where I live were 100% the first to get fiber to the home, by nearly half a decade.
Cool anecdote.
Anecdotes are what data is built on.
data is not the plural of anecdote
Or you could save $62,000/year by letting the mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria do their job.
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.
Only if you want to use incredible amounts of electricity and occupy a lot of building space. Ignoring those things it may be more efficient but not when you look at the whole picture.
It doesn't actually take that much juice these days. On top of being able to use solar and wind generated power we also have leds that barely use any electricity to run.
Aside from the initial investment for the setup, the ongoing energy and resources needed for hydro and aero are most definitely going to be less than dirt farming especially when you factor in being able to grow year round. And don't forget the reduced amount of fertilizer and water usage. The water isn't lost to the ground with only a small amount of it being used by the plants.
Basically this is like ev versus ice. When you don't factor in everything, one looks better than the other but with all things considered, ev is way better than ice.
You can grow year round with low-tunnels (conduit and greenhouse plastic).
There's these peaky things called "seasons" where the amount of sunlight fluctuates, sometimes dramatically based on latitude
The best weed is grown in no-till soil, hence why living soil weed sells for more money.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. Aeroponics were what you wanted, especially 20+ years ago.
Hydroponics, when combined with indoor, vertical farming, is the reason that the Netherlands are one of Europe largest exporters of food. Even though they're one of the countries with the least amount of farmland.
Efficiency doesn't matter when we have huge amounts of low-cost arible soil. We don't need to make the most of every square meter when it's cheaper and easier to just put seeds in soil. This is the problem.
Hydroponics are cool technology that is in every way "better" but useless.
Again, false. Getting the equivalent of 5+ acres out of the physical space of 1 and leaving the plants to do their thing is better in every way imaginable. I'm not sure you understand just how much more efficient hydro and aero are. The use of lights instead of the sun let's you grow year round and shorten the night so plants grow faster and fruit sooner.
Farming the way most industrial farms do things is one of the worst things we have done to the environment in our entire existence. Only outdone by the destruction of rainforests, extracting and burning petroleum from the ground, etc
So, everywhere within the next 60 years?
:-(
Also quite useful for places short on water, or daylight, or clement weather, or low-value ecosystems, or where transportation is unfeasible due to accessibility, environmental conditions, market access.
Also quite good to alleviate food deserts, securing strategic supply chains, and supporting urbanisation for greenification, food supply, lowering transport and food security (with growing food also having positive mental and psychosocial effects).