China builds world's first 20-story robotic vertical farm
China builds world's first 20-story robotic vertical farm
The new vertical farming technology may save precious land space in future agriculture.
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I'm always suspicious of these tech farms because it costs a lot of electricity to run those LEDs to produce the amount of energy needed for food.
In America, these would just be used to make more corn that would be used to create biofuels that would be used to run the generators that would be used to run the LEDs. The whole goddamn thing would run at a loss, but a lot of people would make a lot of money in the meantime.
Oops got mad at capitalism again haha.
Anyway...
It does seem like they're doing it the right way. Producing foods that they can't normally produce year-round or producing foods that They can't produce much of normally.
They also talked about using it for starter plants which is a good idea. And I'm sure experiments are much better in a consistent environment like that.
Woop woop!
I'm surprised fiberoptics isn't used more for this stuff. This sort of stuff seems like an obvious thing to do https://www.energysage.com/solar/solar-accessories/solar-fiber-optic-lighting-overview/
From what I've seen, the electric cost is actually only a small component, the building, specialized hardware, maintenance and labour make up the majority of the bill for most vertical farming operations.
Further, it's a matter of how much energy density you need within a given volume compared to the available roof surface. Most plants don't need full sun, but you might only be able to supply 2-4 times the roof area as internal grow area (when accounting for efficiency losses and the needs of the plants). You would need to provide the majority of the grow area with LED lights anyway. So it might not be worth the resources/labour costs. Though it might be a good supplemental supply of photons.
The only real use case I can see for vertical farming is providing fresh produce nearer to urban centres, or if there is an acute shortage of land, otherwise passive greenhouses (with supplemental lighting and heating if needed) are generally a better use of resources. Specialized produce is another use case, but it seems that we need a lot more research to make it a viable option at scale.A question of where the energy comes from is also important, solar panels in a desert/on roof tops is good, but if they replace a farm field it's pointless. Wind, nuclear, hydro are good options.
I'm definitely curious to see how the field grows within the context of China and socialism more broadly. Many of the constraints in current implementations are only important when the only consideration is profit.
Edit: read the article, they have some really interesting use cases in their facility beyond what I could imagine.
It's good point about the amount of sunlight available via the roof being limited. The main value I see comes from having a controlled environment. I guess it doesn't really need to be vertical, but the key part is that you can regulate temperature, humidity, and so on. And yeah, I think this sort of stuff becomes much more interesting when the profit motive isn't the primary goal. I imagine China is investing into this as a way to ensure stable food supply for the people as the primary goal.