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PLATINUMSILVER700 t1_ivxzrcw wrote

Vertical indoor greenhouse vegetable growing will remove giant diesel machines from being a cost in food prices.

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Hyjynx75 t1_ivy0bf5 wrote

This. Definitely. Had a conversation a few years ago with a guy who developed some pretty cool automation tech for this application. Sold the company for a lot of money to a national grocery chain.

The benefits are huge. Less risk of crop damage from weather events, far less physical space required, no need for pesticides, no dependence on growing seasons, and the list goes on and on.

Your local grocery store could eventually have a bunch of sea cans outside operating vertical growing operations and delivering all the produce they sell. Never touched by human hands until you open the package.

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CriminalizeGolf t1_ivzo1tl wrote

Vertical farming might take off for greens and other low calorie vegetables over the next few decades but it is incredibly unrealistic to expect staple crops like grains, corn, legumes, etc to be mass produced with vertical farming any time soon.

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Lejeune_Dirichelet t1_iw69gkk wrote

That's in no small part due to the fact that our current species of crops were selected to be grown conventionally, where height doesn't matter but disease and weather resilience is very important; not optimized for the very different requirements of indoor farming. Once LEDs fall further in costs and dwarf species of staple crops come onto the market, then we will start seeing indoor farming of those too.

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CriminalizeGolf t1_iwa27qz wrote

Still doubtful. High calorie staple crops simply require far more light to grow than greens do. That's just physics.

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