[dovvdkc]

“Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.”

Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics.

The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.

In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting factor is sunlight.

EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel

2. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes in the US are large and tasteless because they’ve been bread to be easily picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It’s not obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity and w/out crushing)

3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack when transitioning to “green” alternatives.

[saalweachter]

As an aside, while we're still a ways off from battery-electric farm vehicles (cost/weight of batteries is still just too high to meet the same parameters as diesel tractors, even with very generous assumptions the last time I ran the numbers), I still like the idea of electric farm equipment hardwired to the grid and dragging giant electric cords behind them like really boring EVAs.

(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge "tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current technology.)