Europe's energy crisis is forcing companies to switch strategies or close down:
In June, a vast new vertical farm opened on the outskirts of the English town Bedford. At a swanky opening event, members of the UK Parliament heard that the gleaming facility would one day produce 20 million plants annually. It was the latest opening for Infarm, a European vertical farming company that had raised over $600 million in venture capital funding, promising a future where vegetables are grown in high-tech warehouses stacked with LED lights rather than in open fields or greenhouses.
But now the future of the Bedford farm looks less than gleaming. On November 29, Infarm's founders emailed its workforce to announce they were laying off "around 500 employees"—more than half of the workforce. The email detailed the firm's plans to downsize its operations in the UK, France, and the Netherlands, and concentrate on countries where it had stronger links to retailers and a higher chance of eventually turning a profit. In September, Infarm had already laid off 50 employees, citing a need to reduce operating costs and focus on profitability.
Just six months ago, the vibe from Europe's biggest vertical farm company was unrelentingly optimistic, so what changed? According to Cindy van Rijswick, a strategist at the Dutch research firm RaboResearch, several pressures that have always existed for vertical farms have really come to a head in 2022. For starters, the industry is extremely vulnerable to increases in electricity prices. Powering all of those plant-growing LEDs uses a lot of electricity, and between December 2020 and July 2022 consumer energy prices in the EU went up by nearly 58 percent. Eighteen months ago, European vertical farms might have spent around 25 percent of their operational costs on electricity, but that might have gone up to around 40 percent, estimates van Rijswick.
At the same time, investors are starting to tighten their belts and look for faster routes to profitability. Vertical farms are expensive to build compared with conventional outdoor farms. AppHarvest—a US-based firm that builds high-tech greenhouses—has struggled to find enough cash to fund its ongoing operations despite going public in 2021. In its latest quarterly report the company said there is "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue into the future.
[...] Consumers in the West might have seen vertical farming displays in restaurants and high-end grocery stores, but the technology really hasn't transformed agriculture in the way that its early proponents promised. For a long time the industry has touted itself as a more sustainable way to grow vegetables, but all the energy needed to light up those LED bulbs means that vegetables grown on vertical farms can end up having higher CO2 emissions than those grown in open fields and trucked hundreds of miles to their final destination. In a world where all electricity is generated by renewables, those emissions would be much lower, but that's not the world we're living in right now. However, vertical farms use a lot less water and pesticides than open fields, which is another reason why water-stressed regions are so interested in the technology."I hoped that the impact of vertical farming could—and would—be bigger than it currently is," Pieterse says.
Europe's energy crisis has exposed some of the flaws in vertical farming that were just waiting to come to the surface. "I think in the coming year more realism will really kick in," says Van Rijswick. Energy prices in Europe will eventually go down again, but 2022 has demonstrated that such an energy-intensive industry will always be vulnerable to fluctuations in electricity prices unless farms can find a way to generate their own power. This is another reason why Gulf states—which tend to have more stable electricity prices thanks to huge reserves of oil and gas—are starting to look more attractive to vertical farm producers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Revek on Tuesday January 03, @04:49PM (26 children)
With a different approach they could use available sunlight along with the led bulbs. The idea that it has to be all one or the other is to me a serious lack of vision for those involved in this enterprise.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Tuesday January 03, @05:04PM (1 child)
If they use sunlight then it would be a greenhouse and not a hi-tech give-me-lots-of-money it's-the-future-of-farming vertical farm.
:-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by higuita on Tuesday January 03, @05:44PM
Bingo!
Slam a LED in it and it is high tech!!
Slam a RGB LED and it will be gaming high tech!!
If this is in a place with sun, use sunlight, if it isn't, only deploy this in places where you have cheap renewable energy, everything else is plain stupid and is set to fail sooner or later
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday January 03, @05:06PM (8 children)
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 03, @05:43PM (6 children)
Mirrors?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday January 03, @08:06PM
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday January 04, @12:18AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 04, @07:48AM (2 children)
Is there a law that a vertical farm may not use mirrors, or what?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday January 04, @07:24PM
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 04, @08:02PM
In order to have a vertical farm, you still need roughly the same amount of light, one row isn't do bad, but each row would require a doing of the height to get the same amount of light. The whole idea was dumb from the start as there isn't a lack of land to use, it's the light and water that are the typical limiting factors.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 04, @05:41PM
Doesn't work, generally. The problem is the density of sunlight.
There's only so much solar energy to be had per square meter, so the only way you can "mirror in" enough sunlight for a vertical farm, is if your "mirror farm" covers approximately the same area that a traditional farm of the same capacity would. In which case you're almost certainly better off building a *massively* cheaper traditional farm. Even covering the whole area in high-quality greenhouse(s) is going to be a lot cheaper than covering it in sun-tracking mirrors AND building the vertical greenhouse.
About the only place it *might* make sense is in extremely rocky mountainous terrain, where a "mirror farm" is at least possible (though considerably more expensive to build than on flat ground), while a traditional farm is not.
There's some caveats - e.g. depending on your crops sunlight might not be the limiting factor on growth in a traditional farm, and you might be able to shrink the "mirror farm" down to as little as half the size of an equivalent traditional farm - analogous to an agrisolar setup with solar panels blocking 50% of the day's sunlight. But that's still going to be massively more expensive than a traditional farm (and much less profitable than an agrisolar farm)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03, @06:51PM
You do it at high latitudes...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @05:23PM (12 children)
I'm shocked that vertical farming got this far before hitting the cost of energy wall. I mean, it's kinda obvious: solar power isn't free, and it's only about 30% efficient (less with real-world factors like transmission losses, etc.), so if you're getting your sunlight from solar to LED conversion, even with spectral tuning you're fighting an uphill battle there.
Maybe it still works economically in (nuclear powered) France?
The big boon I see is delivering fresh produce to the Parisian cafes without so much time and distance between farm and table, combined with the tighter control over pests - although as vertical farms approach open-air farms in terms of overall efficiency, I bet the pest problems in vertical farms will start to multiply...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Informative) by SomeRandomGeek on Tuesday January 03, @06:11PM (11 children)
Vertical farming has nothing to do with solar power. The premise of vertical farming is to create a completely controlled environment for optimum plant growth. Light 24 hours a day, optimal temperatures year round, no pests, optimal watering and fertilizing, etc. This results in very high yields, with each floor producing something like 20x as much produce as a similarly sized plot of land. It is, of course, hideously expensive under the best of circumstances. The primary benefit is that the farm can be adjacent to the distribution center, reducing transportation costs and allowing fresh produce to get to the store the same day it is picked, year round.
Personally, I think the failure here is less about the growers failing to keep their costs under control and more about the marketers failing to convince people that they need superlatively fresh lettuce.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 03, @06:51PM
The premise is to reduce land usage. The "controlled environment" bit is a bonus/necessary evil.
It turns out the land usage of horizontal farming includes energy from the sun, and vertical farming would require a comparable amount of land usage in the form of solar panels. Of course, you could technically use said land for other purposes (e.g., parking lots. Not buildings, because you would be taking away the energy that would otherwise be available to it), or substitute the energy with generators.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday January 03, @07:32PM (2 children)
Vertical farming is a marketing meme that obfuscates the mountain of cost-analysis research papers dealing with hydroponics: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hydroponic+cost+analysis [google.com]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday January 04, @08:46PM (1 child)
Horizontal hydroponics is great, vertical only really makes sense on the outside of a building to reduce cooling costs.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday January 05, @12:51AM
What I've seen in the papers is that vertical hydroponics yields are definitely superior. The issue is simply cost: Right now they're being introduced in places that enacted subsidies for farming and energy due to geopolitics so the war throw off their business models. However, give it 15 more years of nitrogen depletion, soil erosion, urbanization and alternative energies pushes, and it will simply become the most cost-effective solution to grow many crops even without subsidies.
There's also a few papers on aquaponics bringing up examples of repurposed waste water and heat that necessitates a certain proximity between the factories, the farms AND urban homes that can be made cost-effective right now without any sorts of subsides...
Then there's robotics...
Anyhow, point is, the papers deal with the costs and they predict it being a thing so.... Yeah.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @08:56PM (4 children)
>This results in very high yields, with each floor producing something like 20x as much produce as a similarly sized plot of land.
>It is, of course, hideously expensive under the best of circumstances.
Yes... I believe many operations are currently getting their building space for near free, or greatly reduced expense compared to denovo construction. Even still, open dirt is generally far less than 5% the cost of improved land with enough structure to control an environment for growing crops.
I do believe solar is a relevant benchmark for the comparison, since the open air farms are basically 98+% solar powered.
>more about the marketers failing to convince people that they need superlatively fresh lettuce.
We ate at some hotel restaurant about 10 years ago that had their lettuce growing on the wall, literally came out and trimmed it when making the salads. It makes a difference in flavor/freshness. I believe the "show lettuce" was given water during dining hours and light when customers weren't present, but it was primarily grown outside and the boxes were rotated in as needed. Anyway, that sold my wife on hydroponics, we have two towers and ... they're a bitch to maintain. If it was a full time job, I could see maintaining 200 towers as that job. For us, it's remembering to check and adjust the pH every few days, watching for infestations, and disassembling, cleaning and reassembling each tower every 6-12 months depending on what's growing in it.
Also, for myself, I never really put much value on lettuce period. We're trying our second crop of strawberries in the tower now... fussy doesn't start to describe them, and again, if we were growing 5000 plants as a full time operation that might be reasonable, but growing 25 takes a lot of attention and little lapses can screw up the crop.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 04, @05:51PM (3 children)
Towers? Are you talking aeroponics (roots suspended in air with water slowly dripping over them) rather than hydroponics (where roots stay immersed in water)?
Okay.... in verifying I spelled it correctly I've discovered that aeroponics is technically a subset of hydroponics, since you're still using water to deliver nutrients.
Given the vast difference in setups it seems to me that conflating the two is counterproductive, but from the ads it looks like the marketing-drones don't care and will happily sell the (apparently) same setup under both names.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 04, @06:24PM (2 children)
They call it hydroponics, the roots grow into trays that are intermittently flooded with (controlled pH, nutrient enriched) water. The indoor setup runs the pumps 5 minutes on, 15 minutes off - outdoor if 5/5. Presumably, the roots are getting the oxygen they need due to the lack of continuous immersion, but also not drying out because the root chambers are 99% enclosed (small gaps around the plant stems) and should stay near 100% humidity (no wild fungal outbreaks yet, but it sure seems like a possibility...)
I have seen a bit of "behind the scenes" operational footage of a few commercial "vertical farming" operations, mostly ones that operate inside shipping containers, and they do similar intermittent watering but add the LED lighting inside the box.
What I'd really like to do (because it would be fun / interesting more than practical) is aquaponics where the nutrients in the water are provided from a fish farm, Tilapia and similar... Commercially sold Tilapia are disgusting, I believe mostly because of the conditions they are raised in (water so thick with "nutrients" that light does not penetrate...) In aquaponics setups you can run the (100% recycled) water crystal clear and still have great nutrient transfer from fishfood, through the fish, to the plants.
Anyway, we get fresh lettuce once in awhile, if our labor is free I think the lettuce is costing about $20 per head so far, might come down to 10 if we get good at it and don't break the plastic bits too often, but it's an entertaining hobby.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 04, @07:12PM (1 child)
Interesting, somehow I hadn't heard of that technique before.
I've seen interesting looking DIY aeroponics setups where an air pump is used to near-constantly dribble enriched water over the roots, which are enclosed in opaque suspended containers (usually made from beverage bottles suspended in a window).
Yeah, aquaponics seems really cool, but the (very) few people I've known who have tried it at a home scale have been underwhelmed. Not to discourage you, just... maybe keep your expectations low going in if you want to enjoy it? Given the productivity of larger farms it may just take a few years to get it properly "dialed in" if you don't have an experienced consultant on hand. (Or, hmm... considering the personalities involved, it might just take actually following the instructions to begin with instead of "improving" things up front...)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 04, @09:18PM
Yeah, I would be happy with a pretty fish pond and healthy plants to look at, any ability to eat the fish or plants would be a bonus.
Don't have the time or space to build something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAZvJcA0tqw&t=160s [youtube.com] at least not the space indoors, but something more along those lines than the PVC pipes and blue plastic barrels approach...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday January 04, @02:33AM (1 child)
Light plants 24 hours a day? That's not right.
https://www.hightechgardening.com/leaving-grow-lights-on-24-hours/ [hightechgardening.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 04, @06:00PM
There's probably a lot of variation of optimal lighting by species. E.g. the popular "Mother-in-law's tongue" or "snake plant" is one example among many of plants that actually absorbs and stores CO2 at night rather than while it's photosynthesizing, so it would probably be miserable in 24-hour light, while others might not mind at all.
One thing to consider is that in an aeroponics setup, which is one of the most popular setups for artificial growing environments, there is no soil, and thus no symbiotic soil bacteria, and any energy and resources the plant puts into feeding them is completely wasted effort anyway.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03, @05:47PM
Took a couple of very good building HVAC and Solar Energy courses back in the '70s (first US "energy crisis" days). Then helped design and build a passive solar house that was designed by the course TA. So these comments are based on that, I don't know much about how the vertical farms are run.
+ Are the vertical farms in re-purposed industrial buildings? If so, then sunlight will be hard to get to the interior of the (multi-story) building. If the building doesn't already have a clear roof (and lots of windows), this may be an expensive retrofit. If it does have a clear roof (skylights), that is often a source of leaks & maintenance expense.
+ Windows (glass and/or plastic) are generally poor thermal insulators, so in cold climates using direct sun in the daytime will also come with a big heating bill over cold nights. For example, to get the equivalent of about an inch (2.5 cm) of rigid foam insulation might take 4 layers of expensive e-coated glass and/or plastic. To meet modern residential insulation standards takes several inches of foam... Green houses in colder climates often have large heaters to keep the plants from freezing (I've seen propane, since the green houses are usually away from urban/suburban natural gas plumbing).
+ If you have a lot of glass area on a building in the summer and no way to cool (massive fans or expensive air conditioning), overheating could easily be enough to kill the plants.
All these things are well understood and straightforward to calculate/analyze. Is it possible that the vertical farm investors didn't run different scenarios with variable costs of energy?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 04, @06:12PM
>With a different approach they could use available sunlight along with the led bulbs
Two words: Solar density.
Lets say you want "sunlight level" lighting on a short 5-floor vertical farm. That means you're going to need to provide 5x as much internal lighting as is hitting the building as sunlight. 10x if you're using 24-hour lighting.
That means your maximum theoretical cost savings on energy is about 10-20%. And that number will continue to fall as your vertical farm becomes more vertical - e.g. a 10-floor farm will save at most 5-10% energy.
Really, the most efficient design would probably just be building a greenhouse on the top floor, and maybe a glass south wall if you're north of the tropics and there's no similarly tall structures south of you.
But it gets even worse - some of these vertical farms are claiming 20x the yield per floor as a similarly sized farm. If that translates (as it likely does) to something like 20x the lighting per floor to power all that growth, then you've just reduced your energy savings by a factor of 20. All that extra work to cut your energy bill by less than 1%.
You could bring in more sunlight by surrounding your vertical farm with "mirror farms"... but then you're consuming just as much land area as with a traditional farm, so what's the point?
(Score: 2, Troll) by XivLacuna on Tuesday January 03, @05:12PM (1 child)
People will accept almost anything so long as they feel something is being done about a supposed problem. People looking to make money will always take advantage of this and we'll be worse off than before.
My opinion on the matter is that the media fuels this for advertisement revenue and politicians go along with it for legal bribes known as campaign donations and cushy jobs in newly created industries if they retire from politics.
Corn ethanol in the United States causing food prices to increase while using more fuel to harvest said corn, process it into ethanol, than it saved in pure gasoline.
Nuclear fear preventing safer reactor designs from being implemented which caused current reactors with their design flaws to have their end-of-life dates extended far beyond what they were designed for, allowing Fukushima to happen.
Switching off nuclear to Russian natural gas in Europe years before the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Was it worth the internet upcummies? Probably. Most people have the memory span of a goldfish and will buy up whatever new greenwashing scam so people might as well get their upcummies.
The major problem with vertical farming is that any place that'll benefit from the fresh food will have a higher land cost, labor cost, energy cost, etc. You can't get organic certification for any produce grown in vertical farms which is a major downside since the people willing to pay the higher prices love the word organic.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @05:32PM
>Corn ethanol in the United States causing food prices to increase while using more fuel to harvest said corn, process it into ethanol, than it saved in pure gasoline.
Yes, but food is subsidized in the U.S., gasoline is taxed, so who doesn't like free money from the government?
>You can't get organic certification for any produce grown in vertical farms which is a major downside since the people willing to pay the higher prices love the word organic.
That one's easy: Certified Controlled Environment produce labels. Can be co-certified non-GMO, minimal-pesticides, and stamped with point of harvest so you can see that your bibb lettuce only traveled 12 miles from farm to table. Should only cost 1/3 what the "Certified Organic" marketing campaign cost and yield equal or more market preference, especially with the near-zero pesticide pledges. If there is a pest outbreak on the floor, then use whatever pesticides are necessary and remove the minimal-pesticides label, most shoppers will never notice.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 03, @07:08PM (8 children)
Get woke, go broke. Some of the Greenies and the woke crowd's intentions are laudible - but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
What about an alternative idea? Encourage citizens to grow food in whatever space is available! You get some almost-free food, you get some exercise, and you get closer to nature. Not to mention that youngsters in those citizen's households get to learn where food comes from. AOC's exclamation that "Food comes from dirt!" was just so embarrassing. We need to prevent future generations growing up so dumb.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03, @07:20PM
> grow food in whatever space is available
It's war I say, WAR, to prevent climate change (etc, etc, etc)! If enough people get riled up to defend the USA against something or other, perhaps it will be possible to bring back Victory Gardens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 03, @08:54PM (1 child)
It has very little to do with wokeness or lack thereof, and an awful lot to do with investors with zero knowledge of the subject matter in question getting to decide what happens with millions of dollars.
That's also how you get nutty ideas like "solar roadways" and tunnels in Las Vegas.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 04, @09:24PM
>investors with zero knowledge of the subject matter in question getting to decide what happens with millions of dollars.
dot com was just a recent example. Guys with so much money and all they can think of to do with it is try to make more money seem to love long odds high potential returns investments. They do minimal research to ensure they don't look too foolish if it's an utter scam, but all in all, they're throwing the dice to see what happens, and they'd be happy if they were required to throw 3d6 and have a total loss for anything other than a 6-6-6 result (1/216 chance), as long as that 6-6-6 paid off better than 500:1 on their risked capital.
Millions of dollars? Just means they're willing to put a few thousands into their BS sniff tests, and maybe a few hundreds of thousands into co-management of the enterprise to keep an eye on their money and ensure that nobody else is getting rich off of it.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @09:02PM (4 children)
>Encourage citizens to grow food in whatever space is available!
Australia has done some studies on this... it seems that the space available to the average citizen for growing food tends to be unacceptably contaminated with lead and other fun byproducts of "modern life" since the penal colony was founded.
>You get some almost-free food
Or, you calculate the cost of inputs and find out that even if your hundreds of hours of labor are free you are still paying more for this locally grown lead contaminated stuff than you would for similar produce from the supermarket, even at today's inflated prices.
>you get some exercise,
Farming is much closer to hard, back breaking labor than "exercise."
>and you get closer to nature.
Skin cancer, insect bites, soil under the nails and in open scratches... yep, all natural.
>youngsters in those citizen's households get to learn where food comes from.
Funny, back when I was growing up we'd drive by pastures, fields and groves, stop in at the Farmers' markets direct on the growing plots and that's where 8 year old me thought food came from. Have I been wrong all these years?
>We need to prevent future generations growing up so dumb.
For sure.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 04, @12:03AM (3 children)
I feel that I really need to address that. I grew up on farms. Yes, you're right, real farming is back breaking labor, at least for part of the year, depending on what kind of farming you're about.
Gardening cannot be confused with farming. Square foot gardeners manage to grow quite a lot of food in little tiny plots. They know how to make the best use of space, one single square foot at a time. There is almost no real labor involved, and most of the labor takes place when building the raised beds, and putting soil into them.
My gardening is more traditional, spread out over almost 1/2 acre now that I've expanded. Although I've gone to a modified "no till" regimen, there will always be a little tilling, either by hand, or by machine. The individual gardener decides how much or which crops to plant, as much or as little as he likes. The individual gardener can, and likely does, decide just how hard he wishes to work on any given day. There is no "backbreaking" involved, as near as I can tell. Potatoes used to be a lot of work, but with my modified no till, it's a lot less work. I'm doing things backward from what I used to do - I use the tiller with it's hiller/furrower attachment to dig an 8" trench. Fill the trench 12/ full of compost and/or compostable material, like leaves. Put your seed potatoes on top of those leaves, then finish filling your trench with leaves, or maybe sawdust, then finally rake just enough soil back over the trench to prevent your compostables blowing away. It's January, and my potatoes are already planted - they'll marinate in that compost until they decide it's warm enough to peek outside. I spread that work out over two days, and only worked as hard as I felt like working. No back breaking involved. I may do another row in a week or two, haven't decided yet.
If we are going to confuse gardening with farming, then it would be equally reasonable for me to claim to be a Linux sysadmin. I mean, I do keep my own systems running!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 04, @01:08AM (2 children)
Key words: raised beds. Or: how to make dirt cost $7 per square foot and require extra maintenance...
>There is no "backbreaking" involved, as near as I can tell.
When I rented the power tiller to clear 800 square feet of sod for a potato crop, it was easier than busting the sod by hand, but I was thoroughly exhausted before it was returned to the rental company. Attempting to grow various things in that plot over the years has mostly failed due to weed competition. I scaled back from 800sf to 200sf because keeping 800sf free of weeds was far too much work, and even 200 is a lot to keep up with.
Can you replant potatoes season after season? Here we have to rotate them out for a couple of seasons because the various things in the soil that eat potatoes become overwhelming after a season or two.
Whether you call it gardening or farming, growing even 25% of your own food gets to be a lot of labor.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 04, @01:49AM (1 child)
Been there, done that. You might check out a couple of videos. Cardboard seems to be working for me. In a test area, I spread cardboard out, then threw sawdust over the cardboard to keep it from blowing away. It worked great - I had to pull a few weeds that sneaked through the cracks. In the time that I would have spent weeding one row, I weeded the entire test area, because there were few weeds. Better yet, the soil beneath the cardboard stays moist, so the weeds you do find are easy to pull. All of my old garden area is now covered with cardboard and sawdust, and I've begun mulching some of the new area I'm clearing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LH6-w57Slw [youtube.com] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miur3m8a4jA [youtube.com]
I'll dive deeper into my hopes and plans for the garden, if you're interested. But, I will say that I can no longer put in a long day of back breaking labor. I will either work smarter, or I will have to give up.
No - but whatever I grow next year in this year's potato patch will benefit from all that wonderful organic material!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 04, @02:30AM
I got lucky one year, got the weeds well under control and planted a successful crop of giant sunflowers (successful = harvested more seed than I planted). That held up through the first season with cypress mulch, so I tried sunflowers again the next year and failed, flowers hardly grew at all and the weeds took over. Cleaned the weeds thoroughly and tried converting that to blueberry bushes, which grew for 2 years then died, I suspect our moles contributed to that one, so now it's a wildflower bed, bees love it, maybe we'll try a hive...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday January 03, @07:54PM (2 children)
You've got a perfectly good sun out there, and you're using lightbulbs to provide the light instead, because you're building the thing in a counterintuitive way. Nice.
Ah, so here's the tradeoff that made the thing economical. At least, until the European energy market shat itself inside out because of Ukraine.
Keeping innovating is a good thing, but it tends to generate things like this that just make me shake my head at the "duh" of it all.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @09:05PM
>perfectly good sun out there, and you're using lightbulbs to provide the light instead,
Well, nobody is employed providing sunlight to farms, it's a missed opportunity.
Plus, when Yellowstone finally makes its re-appearance and the northern hemisphere is shrouded under a stratospheric ash cloud for 5 years, who will be laughing then?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 04, @12:48PM
Keep in mind that turning sunlight into electricity at 30% efficiency into balanced LED plant light is actually more efficient than just sunlight. You probably get two or three times as much energy to the plants themselves. It's not just an energy problem. Don't forget the massive infrastructure and maintenance/plant care these things need.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Tuesday January 03, @08:08PM (4 children)
Well there's your problem right there.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @09:08PM (3 children)
Population keeps on growing, everybody's gotta eat, sooner or later supply vs demand means they'll pay whatever it costs for food, right?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 04, @12:10AM (2 children)
The thing is, few farmers ever make a real profit. Most farmers make a living. Some farmers don't even make a living, and eventually sell out, so that some other sucker can try his hand at farming. In a good year, a good farmer puts money in the bank. In a not-so-good year, even good farmers do little more than break even. In a bad year, even good farmers lose money.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 04, @01:11AM (1 child)
Monsanto makes excellent profit every year...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 04, @01:24AM
I think you mean 'Bayer makes excellent profit every year'? Remember, Monsanto was facing serious legal problems over Agent Orange and Roundup. Everyone saw fit to sell out to Bayer, I guess they are in a better position to fight those suits.
And, Monsanto never was in the business of farming. The only milking they ever did, was to milk farmers around the world for seed priced far over it's real value.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.