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High-tech farmers sow seeds of revolution in Dubai desert:
An ultra-modern vertical farm in the middle of the desert stands as a testament to Dubai's determination to spark a "green revolution" to overcome its dependence on food imports.
Al-Badia market garden farm produces an array of vegetable crops in multi-storey format, carefully controlling light and irrigation as well as recycling 90 percent of the water it uses.
"It's a green revolution in the middle of the desert," the farm's director Basel Jammal [says].
[...] That was not an issue decades ago when the area was sparsely inhabited by Bedouins.
But the wealth generated by oil discoveries since the 1970s sent expatriates flocking to the UAE.
Dubai now has more than 3.3 million inhabitants of 200 nationalities, relies largely on expensive desalinated water, and its food needs have grown and diversified.
Will hydroponics be cheaper than importing food?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday August 20 2020, @01:06PM (1 child)
> And you can obtain it in vertical farms, right? Negligible footprint.
The GP was talking about yield per acre. If you have a tower, then that casts a shadow over land nearby, so you can't put another tower there, or solar panels, or whatever (not forgetting plants need light to grow). The averaged yield per acre is probably rather lower than flat fields. Once UAE runs out of desert, it makes sense to start going flat.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 21 2020, @02:45AM
My point: there isn't a single metric to say "hydroponics is a better solution no matter the conditions".
And I said that yield-per-acre is a bad metric to compare the traditional agriculture vs hydroponic, because of course hydroponics is going to win (for crops that can be grown in hydroponics), that's a no-brainer platitude that tells nothing.
Another metric that has to do with affordability: energy expenditure per unit of food.
Which of course it's going to favor traditional agriculture: most of the plant energy come from the free exposure to the sunlight.
Which of the two is better? Depends on the conditions that you have and the crop you need to grow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford