Across the country, more indoor farms are launching or expanding even as others founder. This summer marked the groundbreaking of a huge vertical farming operation in Virginia by the California-based company Plenty Unlimited.
First, it’s not 5x; it’s five orders of magnitude, so that’s 100,000x.
But more importantly, cereal crops are actually not that productive in terms of calorie per unit area of land use. Wheat, for example, produces some 6.4 million calories per acre, which is way less than potatoes (17.8).
Also, no plants require huge variations in their energy input per area than other plants, because they all roughly need what the sun provides. Some plants have different growing seasons, and some can tolerate lower light conditions, but we’re talking about factors of like 1 or 2 here, not 100,000.
The reason grains support civilizations is that they scale as an agricultural practice, and they give you a very convenient resulting food. They’re easy to farm because they’re literally grass, plus their grains can be dried, stored, and transported easily, and they happen to make a reasonably nutritious staple for a diet. Their main labor input is the initial seeding, the harvest, and then the processing (threshing, milling, etc.), all of which scale much better than say picking tomatoes, blueberries, or apples by hand out in the field; this was true back in the day, and is even more true now with modern mechanized harvesting. We still pick tomatoes by hand, but our grains are almost grown autonomously at this point.
oh was it only using sunlight energy? I had assumed it was using totaly energy. Like to harvest and such. That is actually though a problem that it was not for comparison as well as with the indoor farming one of the big things is low shipping and less loss from it. Yeah I don’t know why it did not go with your comment as I am using the replies in the comments. Think its just one of those federation hiccup type of things. To reply to the thread I would have to be scrolled all the way up or down
I think you meant to reply to me here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/4074486
First, it’s not 5x; it’s five orders of magnitude, so that’s 100,000x.
But more importantly, cereal crops are actually not that productive in terms of calorie per unit area of land use. Wheat, for example, produces some 6.4 million calories per acre, which is way less than potatoes (17.8).
Also, no plants require huge variations in their energy input per area than other plants, because they all roughly need what the sun provides. Some plants have different growing seasons, and some can tolerate lower light conditions, but we’re talking about factors of like 1 or 2 here, not 100,000.
The reason grains support civilizations is that they scale as an agricultural practice, and they give you a very convenient resulting food. They’re easy to farm because they’re literally grass, plus their grains can be dried, stored, and transported easily, and they happen to make a reasonably nutritious staple for a diet. Their main labor input is the initial seeding, the harvest, and then the processing (threshing, milling, etc.), all of which scale much better than say picking tomatoes, blueberries, or apples by hand out in the field; this was true back in the day, and is even more true now with modern mechanized harvesting. We still pick tomatoes by hand, but our grains are almost grown autonomously at this point.
oh was it only using sunlight energy? I had assumed it was using totaly energy. Like to harvest and such. That is actually though a problem that it was not for comparison as well as with the indoor farming one of the big things is low shipping and less loss from it. Yeah I don’t know why it did not go with your comment as I am using the replies in the comments. Think its just one of those federation hiccup type of things. To reply to the thread I would have to be scrolled all the way up or down
lol no worries. If you want a more detailed breakdown, check out this thread: https://lemmy.ml/comment/4075176