That is a common misconception. But! Field Corn is 100% edible by people. All varieties of corn are. We eat it as corn meal, corn syrup, corn flakes, etc.
It isn't quite a sweet as, well, sweet corn when boiled/roasted on the cob. But it's no problem at all as a food.
More likely Quorn style fungus fermented/grown in dark vats connected to nuclear reactors for power. Might be tricky to ramp up in time but eventually could actually lower the cost of food, if more boring food. Flavoured fungus burgers all the time, kids might actually like it...
Modern LED grow lights require minimum 35 watts per square foot to grow things beyond just lettuce, which is around 1.5 million watts per acre. Americans currently consume a bit over 2.5 acres of farmland produce per year, however you could get that down to 1 acre without much problem by cutting out some of the less land efficient crops likes fruit trees, especially when talking indoor grow.
So I would expect bare minimum energy requirements to be near 1.5-2 million watts per person for 12-16 hours a day for indoor food sustainability.
This is of course not accounting for fertilizer which has large energy requirements or anything more than the most simple and basic of climate control.
wow, if that is all true then vertical farming is even less relevant to this scenario than I thought. I'm not sure I'm qualified to check your figures and I suspect some of your assumptions are more pessimistic than mine, but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs. amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots).
(Just to preempt some likely replies from other people: I'm sure there is a big difference between "Americans consume" (including livestock grazing, which can't be magic-ed into anything else) and "You can get by on" (measured in hypothetical perfect-acres) - it would take esoteric casuistry to make these really comparable anyway. Nevertheless the gap is so large that AngryData's fundamental point is extremely robust: growlamp-ing everyone's basic needs is fantasy-land. I thought that, but didn't realise the case against it was as strong as I now suspect it might be)
> but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots).
Solar panels produce about 150 watts of energy per square meter since most solar panels operate at 15% efficiency this translates to 15 watts per square foot.
Which is 100 Watts solar energy per square foot, so 35 Watts certainly has the right order. (LEDs are not 100% efficient, sunlight is not 100% efficient with chlorophyll, some edible plants grow in shade).
And how soon would their building be turned into yet another polarizing issue, or their building farmed out to contracting companies who would make most of the money disappear?
A global response on the scale of Covid to build vertical farms would reduce the severity of the famine dramatically.
It would be expensive, but the alternative would be burning cities and food riots. I can hardly imagine the USA avoiding a civil war considering how divisive and hostile things already have gotten
You can get hydroponics going fairly quickly, the bottleneck would be the supplies and supply chain — materials to build the with