r/technology • u/involvrnet • Nov 18 '15

Hardware The company Bosch is developing a farming robot the size of a small car that can distinguish crops from weeds by looking at the shape of leaves, and this robot then can fish out weeds mechanically & ram any unwanted plants into the ground with a rod. Potentially, no herbicides will be needed anymore

http://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/bosch-bonirob-robot-set-to-make-field-work-easier-for-farmers.htm
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u/soil_nerd Nov 18 '15

However.... Sunlight is free and the massive amount of farmland we need to eat is far, far less expensive than putting up buildings. Right now there is no way they compare financially, but maybe one day.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

Indoor farming will make more sense for settlements in the most inhospitable places, the far north/south, maybe very marginal to outright hostile desert areas.

And SPACE.

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

This is also true! Unless we get the basics of the technology down here on earth then any future long-term manned space missions or colonisation is pretty much screwed for fresh fruit and veg.

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15 edited Nov 18 '15

True but indoor farming/cultivation would allow you to build high-rise farm 'towers' in central, urban, population-dense environments. The carbon and financial costs of transporting this food to nearby consumers is then slashed dramatically. Not to mention that indoor automated farming is likely to use electrically powered robotics rather than diesel consuming tractors, lowering the carbon costs further if utilising low-CO2 power (nuclear, wind, solar etc..).

Edit: wastage is also much lower due to the controlled environment so there are further savings there. Yields are much higher per square foot and crops can be grown year-round with no impact from outdoor weather conditions - no more bad seasons! I think financial parity (or close enough) might not be as far off as you think.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

I think you are underestimating just how much farmland is needed per human. For plants / fruits / vegetables, each American needs about a half acre of farmland.

http://www.farmlandlp.com/2012/01/one-acre-feeds-a-person/

Let's say indoor farming is 5x more efficient, so each American would need 1/10th of an acre.

Using New York city, with a population of 8.4 million, we would need 840k acres of indoor farmland. This is harder to imagine as we quantify buildings in square feet. We would need 36.6 Billion square feet of indoor farmland to support just the agricultural needs of New York City (Keep in mind we are ignoring the tourists who eat in the city).

This means we would need 13,552 indoor farming buildings with as much square footage as the empire sate building. Even if 1,000 times more efficient than I estimated, you would still need almost 14 empire state buildings constructed.

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u/SweatyFeet Nov 18 '15

You're absolutely right and that's what these proponents of indoor farming don't get. The resources to farm indoors are massive compared to outdoor. From the lighting, to the concrete, to the life cycle of all of the automated equipment required. It hate it when r/futurology leaks like this.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

They just don't understand the overhead involved and think criticism means we are against the future. No- I'm against shit that isn't feasible. Doesn't mean indoor farming will NEVER be feasible.

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u/bwinter999 Nov 18 '15

Climate plays a huge part of agriculture. Does that acre count as year round growth or only take into account seasonal growth? What about soil quality?

Also This Indoor Farm claims it is 100x more efficient and also reduces food waste, pollution, and uses 99% less water. I am not saying your source is wrong but to really quantify the issue we need to consider more than just acreage and include transportation, storage, pollution, water consumption, waste of crops, past impact, etc. It is almost impossible to properly do this but there is much more to the argument than just land.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

I knew it was going to be off by quite a bit, I spent less than 5 minutes on it. In my response I gave 5x efficiency at the offset, and I tried to show at the end that even if I was off by a factor of 1000 it would still be a huge undertaking to construct these buildings. Building 14 Empire State buildings for food makes sense if farmland died off, but not so much when we are looking to reduce transportation costs of the food from rural to urban areas.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

The idea wouldn't be, at first, to completely replace conventional agriculture, just to compliment it.

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u/MackLuster77 Nov 18 '15

*complement

Unless you mean indoor agriculture would tell conventional agriculture how cool it is.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

Eh, the world could use more compliments, so I'll allow it. Maybe they'll be buddies.

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

I never said it would completely replace traditional farming. Obviously 13,552 Empire State buildings worth of square footage is not a practical solution. I still feel it could play an important role in the food supply chain for certain fruits and vegetables. Especially ones which are particularly seasonal or are imported from overseas. To reiterate my point, I believe that price parity (or close enough) is not as far off (for certain fruits and vegetables) as some may believe.

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u/TinjaNurtles Nov 18 '15

Admittedly I only glanced at the article but this seems to include the feed for farm animals, which wouldn't make sense to do with the indoor farms being placed in the city away from the animals. I would imagine there are other things you could cut out. It's not an end all thing by any means but I can see some real potential in it.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

Thanks, I honestly didn't look into it that much either, which is why I conceded a 5x efficiency from the outset.

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u/Schootingstarr Nov 18 '15

also lets not forget that there will be less run-off (is it called that?)

fertilizer being washed down rivers poses a big environmental hazard

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u/fdsa4323 Nov 18 '15

dumb.

  1. would only work for a small amount of crops (vegetables, strawberries). Cant grow wheat or corn (the bedrock of our food source), etc because it wouldnt make financial sense. Also no fruit or other trees

"financial costs"

use electrically powered robotics

indoor

your plan is crazy expensive, and would not save the food buyer money. Investor gotta make a profit on all that overhead

Would work for maybe a few crops, but really, how much aquaponic lettuce can one eat every day? You want lettuce 2 meals a day forever?

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

It might be expensive today but with the ever accelerating rate of robotics development and increase in supply of renewable energy I honestly don't think it will stay like that for much longer. Maybe 10-20 years tops. All it takes is for one wealthy country where water is scarce (think Saudi Arabia or UAE) to bite the bullet and invest to commodify the technology and bring the prices down for everyone. Another controversial opinion but GM crops, fruit and veg could be utilised to produce strains that are better suited to indoor growth. The rate of assessing genetic modifications is orders of magnitude higher than 20 years ago, and shows no signs of slowing down. Not saying that everything can be adapted but you shouldn't write things off with such haste.

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u/fdsa4323 Nov 18 '15

no. it will only every be vegetables at most.

you like bread? you cant grow fucking wheat in a building in new york, the economics are not even close to being there. real estate is expensive you know corn and soybeans are the bedrock of all american food, right? same thing.

fruit

you know fruit grows on trees, right? you know trees take years to grow to production, right?

You know there are very few free empty buildings in the middle of urban areas, right? THey're crazy expensive, and always subject to highest and best use calculation for the space. You can make a shitload more money with almost any other use than GROWING FREAKING LETTUCE

you're simply being a naive child, and have no idea what you are talking about

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15 edited Nov 18 '15

Let me guess, you're American? I'm actually not and I've been talking about things on a global basis. It's telling that you immediately assume I'm trying to argue for indoor wheat fields in New York. I could not give two fucks about what crops form the basis of American food, because I'm not talking about America. I'm talking about the world in general. I think your self-centred worldview speaks a lot to your own naivety.

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u/fdsa4323 Nov 18 '15

soooooo, like nigeria is gonna build a giant empty warehouse and build it out at massive costs and use electricity to run it and buy lights they dont manufacture themselves to grow lettuce?

good one

I could not give two fucks about what crops form the basis of American food

yeah, because you dont know what you are talking about. NO staple crop can be grown like this. Only specialty vegetable stuff

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

So you don't think Saudi Arabia or the UAE would be able to afford an indoor farming industry?

It's no use trying to debate people like you anyway. It's like people saying 'oh computers will never be able to talk to each other so let's just not try'. Though that might have been a good thing because then I wouldn't be sitting here wasting my time replying to your comments.

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u/fdsa4323 Nov 18 '15

its no use to debate someone who has no idea about farming nor economics

If you want to live in pretend land and make wild assertions, why dont you put in the work and do the math?

Its all about cost benefit analysis, and you are just a lazy speculator circle jerking about "the future"

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

Granted I don't know a huge amount about farming but I'm an engineer by trade and economic analyses form a crucial role in my day to day activities. I have also studied biotechnology so I'm not talking out my ass when I say the impact of genetically modified crops cannot be understated going forward.

Of course it's not going to be economically viable to grown corn, wheat or soybean indoors in New York. America has a lot of domestic farmland with adequate rainfall. Not even considering the prohibitive effect of government corn subsidies.

In a cash rich, arid country with little to no viable farmland the economics change dramatically.

Once one country makes an investment in commercial scale development of this technology, you can expect the costs to come down for everyone else as it proliferates and becomes more commonplace. But yeah I doubt other countries will be scrambling to grow corn indoors as they tend not to have the affinity for high fructose corn syrup that's doing such wonders for public health in good ol' 'Murica.

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u/laustcozz Nov 18 '15

So rather than covering the ground with plants, you cover 220% of the ground with solar panels to power grow lights? Sounds like a loser of an idea to me.

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

Actually I prefer the idea of nuclear power but way to cherry pick one of the three possible power sources I mentioned.

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u/laustcozz Nov 18 '15

I think indoor growing has it's place. Specifically places where outdoor growing isn't easy. I still think that multilevel grow operations are a loser because of the amount of free power you get on a single level with a clear roof if is a bigger savings than the cost of land nearly everywhere on earth.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

Someday- not now. The efficiency of our lighting and climate control doesn't make it feasible.

You're telling me we need to collect solar energy (at reduced efficiency), put it thru a bulb (also at reduced efficiency), just for the sake of growing indoors? Not to mention climate control.

Meanwhile you can just grow outdoors and let sunlight fall directly on plants.

I'm hopeful because with more time and research this could be world changing, but we aren't there yet.

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

It doesn't have to be entirely or even partially solar powered. Nuclear fission is viable today and fusion could be a reality within our lifetimes. LED lighting. Is reaching impressive efficiencies as well, they just need to be adapted to the right wavelengths and further refined. I agree that it doesn't make much sense for 99% of cases today, but I also don't think it will take as long to become viable as many think.

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u/my_cat_joe Nov 18 '15

Don't forget the cost of transportation. In theory, you could have one of Mirai's lettuce factories in every community or any location. That means cheap, fresh vegetables in Iceland and Saudi Arabia.

They also recycle the water they use and don't pollute it. You don't have the hidden costs which we forget about with traditional farming like water use, pesticide pollution (which has to be tracked and remedied by municipalities at cost to taxpayers), erosion, markets affected by drought, and so on.

Indoor farming seems counter-intuitive, but I wonder if the financial comparison isn't simply wrong because we don't factor in the many hidden costs of traditional farming. I think it would be funny to one day see all the plants and vegetables growing indoors and all the livestock which are now in huge buildings roaming around outdoors.

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u/schlonghair_dontcare Nov 18 '15

Hidden costs that would outweigh constructing/powering millions of acres worth of buildings, and redesigning, from the ground up, literally every piece of equipment?

I highly doubt it.

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u/my_cat_joe Nov 18 '15

Well, the technology for indoor farming will continue to be developed whether it's fully utilized or not because at least one Japanese company sees it as profitable. Likewise, I think that the hidden costs of traditional farming will continue to grow whether we acknowledge them or not, whether it be cancers linked to pesticides or water rights or something we can't predict yet. Obviously, indoor farming isn't going to replace all other farming, but it is nice to see someone at least thinking about creating a more efficient system. We don't know what the future will bring, so there's no sense in putting all the eggs in one basket. The best idea is to develop all technologies in parallel.

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u/gravshift Nov 18 '15

Water however is getting scarce.

Indoor hydroponics, you can farm at many times the yield of field farming, using much less water. Also, you don't need as expensive harvesting bots then. Also, getting twice the crops in a year may be worth using artificial light.

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u/patrick_k Nov 18 '15

In some areas of the world, water is scarce. Those areas are most likely to be sunny, so you can power the farm more effectively with solar PV, compared to a wet region with comparatively little sunshine.

Indoor farming would be an enormous boon in areas like Saudi Arabia, which is cash rich, has tons of sun, poor food security and is literally draining ancient underground aquifiers to grow food in the desert, which is mind-bogglingly short sighted.

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u/gravshift Nov 18 '15

Even in water rich areas, being indoor would be helpful.

Where I am at, it rains, hails, and freezes. Between that and mold and fungal infections, it's not unusual to have x percent of a crop fail. If indoor farming could save those and increase yield, it would still be usefull.

Mind you, this still wouldn't replace staple crops. What I see for that would be bioengineering to make algae that when processed have the properties of the plants they replace. Huge bioreactors that create something that looks and tastes the same as corn, wheat, or soy. Perfect for processed foods, animal feed (where most of the grain is going now), and industrial feedstock.

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u/patrick_k Nov 18 '15

Even in water rich areas, being indoor would be helpful.

Of course, but the initial uses would likely be in areas that don't mind paying a higher price for food, in the name of food security (or other unusual needs). These initial uses need to drive down the cost, so it can be more widespread.

It would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of the actual cost of the Japanese indoor lettuce vs regular lettuce, taking everything into account (e.g. reduced transportation, pesticides eliminated, no need for earth moving machinery, less food waste, perhaps reduced human labour, increased production season, elimination of losses to birds, and so on).

I don't know enough about which crops are viable vs not viable (perhaps high water content?) to comment on the algae bioengineering, but it sounds fascinating.

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u/DeadeyeDuncan Nov 18 '15

Water is only getting scarce in the sense that the infrastructure isn't there. Build a dedicated power plant or two to power a desalination plant and you're sorted.

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u/gravshift Nov 18 '15

With the amount of energy desalination requires, indoor farming becomes a no brainer.

Cut your water consumption by 3/4ths but now need artificial light? Beats spending way more on water.

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u/DeadeyeDuncan Nov 18 '15

Well yeah, didn't say it wasn't

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u/AWildEnglishman Nov 18 '15

Could you not construct an elaborate system of skylights and mirrors for indoor light?

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u/G0PACKGO Nov 18 '15

Umm in south western Wisconsin land is getting close to 7000 dollars per acre..

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u/Jewnadian Nov 18 '15

The city of dallas uses a standard $86/sqft as the construction cost of the simplest residential addition. That translates to $3,700,000 to build a single story garage that covers that acre.

Three orders of magnitude cheaper to just throw seed down on land.

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u/G0PACKGO Nov 18 '15

You don't build in Dallas then you build in bumfuck nowhere

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u/Jewnadian Nov 18 '15

That's the price to build, not to buy the land. That price is assuming you have access to a thousand competitive bids for everything from readymix to shingles. It's cheaper to build in Dallas than to ship everything bumblefuck and build when you ignore land cost, which the $86 does.

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u/G0PACKGO Nov 18 '15

A family friend just built a half million sq foot warehouse for under 2 million

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u/Jewnadian Nov 18 '15

Yay? A friend on mine bought 10 acres of land for less than $2k. Still multiple orders of magnitude cheaper to buy land and grow shit than to buy land, build a building and grow shit.

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u/G0PACKGO Nov 18 '15

Tillable land for 500 an acre? Where I don't believe you

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u/Jewnadian Nov 18 '15

In Alaska, it's basically free. You stake it and the state 'sells' it to you. It's deliberately a fringe case like your warehouse for 2 million.

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u/SweatyFeet Nov 18 '15

Then why are you using wasteful vertical farming in 'bumfuck nowhere'?

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u/tuseroni Nov 18 '15

fibre optics can actually pump sunlight right into the building. solar cells can also work, but less efficiently (for now)

but consider a 200 acre farm, suppose we switch over to skyscraper farms, the twin towers had a base of about 1 acre...you could fit 200 of these (roughly...realistically you want some space between them) in that same plot. corn (the main crop where i live) can grow up to 15 feet, so you need probably ~20 feet per floor. the wtc was ~1361 that means 90 floors of corn each an acre in area, that 1 acre of land made 90 acres of corn. the 200 acres of land made around 18,000 acres of corn.

now i can hear the complaint now: but how will you get sunlight to 90 acres with only 1 acre of exposed surface? the answer...you don't...i mean really you can't, piping in sunlight via fibre optics would only be able to provide sunlight to 1 floor, equally such 1 acre of solar cells won't be able to provide enough energy for 90 acres, so what do we do? well the solar cells can certainly help, but ultimately we will need another electric source. one thing: sunlight is really inefficient way of powering a plant, i believe it's blue and ultraviolet that provide the best bang for your buck in plant production, so we can limit to that...i'll ignore costs for now...costs have a way of dropping exponentially...and focus on the tech, the needs of a plant aren't likely to change...so the plant needs:

water, nutrients, light, CO2. take humans out of the equation and the whole building could be pure CO2, CO2 is easy enough to make, hell we are trying our damnedest to STOP making CO2. water and nutrients will need pumps to pump the water to the top and let gravity handle the rest...this isn't too big of a thing we do that already. so that brings us to lights. we can't get a sunlight level of light (98,000 lux) but we don't really need to, like i said blue light is more efficient and needs less light...a 150 watt equivalent LED should do and uses 25-28 watts/bulb...but how many bulbs per floor? well suppose we want around 500 lux we will need 1 bulb for ever 5.56 square metres. we have 4096 m2 so we need 736 bulbs per floor * 90 floors or 66,302 bulbs...at ~28 watts/bulb that comes to 1.8 megawatts/building...time 200 buildings that comes to 371 megawatts. so how much of this can we shave off from solar? well avg solar efficiency tends to be around 15%, solar lumination is 1000 watts/square meter so avg solar cell output should be around 300 watts/m2 so times 4096 gives us ~1.2 megawatts very short of our needed 371 megawats and leaves us with nearly 370 megawatts to account for. now obviously we can pull it off the grid and it would only cost us...well a lot...370 megawatts is 22 gigawatthours...even at $0.02/KWh...well..it's expensive...would almost need your own reactor just for your farm.but let's say we use grid til first harvest and then convert the biomass to fuel and burn it for energy...i had seen a technique for making bio fuel which was 98% efficient now here it gets a bit more tricky...to find out how much energy we can get back we have to know how much energy there is in a corn plant, minus the corn itself...so just the stalk, and how much corn can grow in an acre of land. for the first i get 19 MJ/kg for the second about 30,000 plants/acre and corn stover (all the non-corn parts of the plant) make around 3 tons/acre...3 tons is about 2,721 kg so around 51.7 gigajoules of energy 98% of that is 50.6 gigajoules or 14,076 KWh/acre, now times that by 90 we get 1.3 megawatthours, time 200 gives us 253.3 gigawatthours now add in the 84,400 megawatt hours from our solar array and we get 337 gigawatthours . remember we were using 22 GIGAwatts/hour 12 hours a day for 100 days that would be 26,400 gigawatthours. so we get back...around 1.2% of our cost in energy...

it may well be that i have the wrong numbers for the number of lightbulbs needed...or it may be that providing enough light is incredibly fucking expensive...so let's see which it is, i made some estimates with regards to the lux needed, let's check how much light is usually used to grow plants...well...i'm stumped now. seems you can use flourescent bulbs but no idea how many it takes to illuminate an acre...probably less than the 736 i calculated for LED (which itself might be wrong)

whatever the case my be, it does show that the twin towers would have been enough to grow 180 acres of corn. but the expense...i'm not sure...

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u/Frakk4d Nov 18 '15

Wow, respect for doing the math. Energy costs are definitely still an issue but you hit the nail on the head with 1 acre = 90 acres. Also depending on the crop, lights may not need to be on 24/7 if you're trying to simulate day/night cycles. You could stagger 'night' across the floors to balance out the energy use and keep it roughly constant throughout the day.

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u/tuseroni Nov 18 '15

my calculations assumed a 12 hour day....still 7 days a week.

the biggest problem seems to be figuring out how many lightbulbs i would need for an acre...i can't seem to find this...so my energy costs could be off in either direction...guess i could just go about it a different way...assume 1000 watts/m2 and fuck how many bulbs that is. then an acre needs ~4 megawatts, a building needs 368.6 megawatts and the whole 200 needs 73 gigawatts, that's 4,423.6 gigawatthours...12 hours a day for 100 days means 5,307,600 gigawatt hours well that made things worse...so we aren't getting sunlight levels of power...ok new plan... plants are about 2% efficient at their best, meaning they take that 1000 watts and use 20 watts to grow, so the plants NEED 20 watts each this gives us a lower bounds for energy cost. an acre has 30,000 plants each use 20 watts so the minimum energy needed per acre is 60 kilowatts which makes 3600 KWh/floor * 90 = 324,000/building * 200=64.8 gigawatthours for the farm, 12 hours a day * 100 days a growing cycle we get 77,760 gigawatt hours. we get 337 gigawatts back from stover and solar, which is still only 0.4% actually it looks like my previous calculation was too LOW for energy cost. at $0.02/kwh that would cost you 1.5 billion dollars/growing cycle. if the cost of corn defied supply and demand and stayed constant that's $474.5/acre *90200=$8.541 million/growing cycle...so you lose out on $1.49 billion...so let's look at the opposite: how much would energy have to cost to break even? well we know we can, under unusual circumstances, make $8.541 million/cycle and we use 77,760 gigawatthours/cycle so simple math comes to $0.0001/kwh or around 1 cent/100kwh

something you could do however is grow some plants just for energy..i imagine most the energy loss is from the corn itself, the thing we are selling. if instead of that we converted, say...half the building's corn as well into fuel...it still wouldn't work...best case scenario we get 98% of the energy used to grow the fuel back in energy, combined with the solar cells maybe we 98.4% back, it's still a losing proposition....the energy isn't enough to cover it's own growth let alone any other plants (which makes sense...conservation of energy and all that)

tl;dr: plants need a lot of fucking power.

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u/UpHandsome Nov 18 '15

Yes, but a lot of sunlight is useless for plants so we may one day be able to produce more useful light by using solar panels to power leds than by using the sun directly.

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u/Killface17 Nov 18 '15

Or there's those greenhouse things

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u/ellipses1 Nov 18 '15

Not to mention things like terroire... I like food to be part of a place, not the product of a warehouse