[Simon_ORourke]

> Hydroponics already works.

I read something on wired last year on why urban vertical farming never really took off, and one of the reasons was, if I remember, that these kind of environments increase the likelihood of plant disease and the density makes it difficult to arrest any spread.

So, I'm not too sure that hydroponics at scale is completely solved.

[lupusreal]

The big reason is growing food in wide open fields is almost always more economical. Urban farming is mostly advocated for by people who spend too much time in urban areas and don't have a solid grasp on the scale of the rest of the world.

[Melting_Harps]

> The big reason is growing food in wide open fields is almost always more economical. Urban farming is mostly advocated for by people who spend too much time in urban areas and don't have a solid grasp on the scale of the rest of the world.

While I agree on your conclusion, your reasoning is not entirely correct; urban farming is a byproduct, at east in MI, of a broken food chain wherein people left in the wake of financial disaster (2008) were left to fend for themselves and had to 'return to the land' while still being forced to stay close-by in order to just survive. Detroit was a food desert, the local, state and Federal government did nothing and corporate interests di-vested mainly from any real healthy options or grocery stores, what was left was what plagues the modern American diet (highly processed junk) and when the people of Detroit realized the help was never coming they took it upon themselves to create what has become the largest urban farming operation in the US.

Again, your conclusion may be correct, these people could not leave Detroit mainly for ecnomic reasons and were therefore 'Urbanites,' but rest assure this was not a hobby-farm approach they took, but rather the sullen and resentful resignation that they must feed themselves: what has since occurred has been amazing to watch, many chefs and artists returned back to Detroit and have made it an impact in self-organization and food security circles.

If I had more time I'd also make an argument for why the economies of scale tend to favor open field farming, but isn't that much better due to the vast needs of Govt. subsidies and the ever diminishing returns on investment when it comes to farming, conventional or organic, or in my case when I farmed: biodynamic.

You need only look to US/European farmers following the path of their Indian counterparts in mass suicides due to the unrelenting pressures and high debt loads in order to feed the masses.

Personally speaking, I think a huge missed opportunity was lost when many of the disillusioned in both West/East took to lying flat or quiet quitting etc... what should have been done was incentivize these people with low no interest loans and give them swaths of land to find purpose in regenerative Agriculture in order to remediate the soils and help offset climate control. Instead they just got chopped up in the meat grinder that is the depressing work force where they wallow in depression and suicidal ideation benefiting no one and making society more precarious day by day by making them gravitate towards extremism.

[Iulioh]

It's a price problem, not a technical one

[AngryData]

More directly it is energy/electricity, which is the reason the cost is high.

You need atleast 35 watts per square foot of high quality grow LEDs to grow most crops outside of leafy greens. That is about 1.5 million watts per acre for 12-16 hours per day, which makes it pretty obvious why it isn't economical. And even if we could meet the theoretical efficiency limit of LED lighting technology, it would still take atleast half of that amount of electricity.

[Cthulhu_]

That's the big one. With hydroponics, you need to control every factor, if one grows stuff in nature, you get a lot of it for free.

[RecycledEle]

> It's a price problem, not a technical one.

How do you define "technical problem" if you ignore the cost of the inputs to your system?

[Iulioh]

We can do it but it's an inefficient technology not because we haven't tried but because other methods are too good.

The sun is free, growing lamps aren't.

Hard to beat free energy.

[mandmandam]

Um. Doesn't technological innovation often make things cheaper?

Is this a distinction without a difference, or am I missing something?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

It's a hard ask to make space in high-rises in cities cheaper than farmland.

[mandmandam]

It is, yeah for sure. No argument there.

I do wonder though... How much cheaper is it really? What if the externalized costs were factored in?

Currently all manner of costs are put onto the environment rather than the producer or consumer: Soil erosion, soil degradation, fertilizer and pesticide runoff, biodiversity losses, greenhouse gas emissions, etc... All of which are huge issues, which we can't keep ignoring like we are.

And even after ignoring all that), most of 'the West' still needs to heavily subsidize farmers to make them competitive with imported crops.

[Iulioh]

Uhm.

"cheaper than before" usually yes.

But we are talking about different production methods, maybe hydroponics could never be cheaper than growing stuff in dirt because the production method can be optimized only so much.

An "advanced" (different) production methods is not inherently cheaper than a "traditional" method.

[versteegen]

Hydroponics usually isn't competing on cost, it's competing on other axes, such as having a greater amount of control. Just the same as greenhouses vs growing in the open. Farming is mostly about dealing with or preventing everything that could go wrong.