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Urban indoor cultivation techniques Indoor hydroponics Microgreens Container gardening Aeroponics Mushroom cultivation Aquaponics Vertical farming Terrariums Window farming Sprouting Herb gardens Tea gardens Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS)

>>67425 I'm thinking of imitating this guy's setup in my basement over the coming weeks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWebs3ID6Hw If the thread doesn't die I'll post progress here. I already have the shelves and the lighting.

It's a fun solar punk idea but it will never be economically viable. Modern industrial agriculture is absurdly efficient and shipping is so cheap that traditional agriculture will always out-compete you. Unless you have free energy but if you have free energy so will your competitors. That said, there are some niches where it can work and in fact already works. Champignon farming has been an indoor, automated vertical farming business for decades at this point. Vertical farms within very large cities are already a thing as well. Restaurants are willing to pay a premium for fresh greens, herbs and so on all year round so it's a viable business.

maybe this could be used for cannabis farming?

I absolutely love when online bugmen who've never even met someone who's grown a year's crop in their life proclaim they've reinvented the whole of the agricultural process. /s Pro tip: It's almost always safe to assume nowadays that if any of this were meaningfully true it'd already be implemented. The majority of farms by product are large industrial conglomerates that couldn't care less what methods they use as long as they get more cashflow. Their attached lab of agricultural scientists have already tried "vertical farming", and if it produced more value for anything other than grey market leed wegal operations inside large cities they'd be using it. (Gaining access to the more abundant labor of the cities would be a huge boon, so it should be very telling that vertical farming can't overcome ground farming even with this advantage.) Not to say that indoor farming is entirely without merit, or that there's nothing about it to discuss. You can't ground farm without buying a plot of land and finding somewhere to live nearby, so until one is ready to drop that level of startup capital indoor systems are a necessary substitute. Low-volume systems like mushroom and herb cultivation are great ways to save a little money by reducing reliance on supply chain fluctuations without just going without. But part of building any technological system right is knowing which parts are viable designs that scale well and which are dirty hacks used out of necessity. "Solarpunk", if it even truly exists, is pretty much just neural cancer as a formalized belief system, because it explicitly rejects doing this for the sake of other priorities. You're not going to save the world by burning money, unless your definition of saving the world is spreading the uber model to as many economic sectors as possible.

I mean there are niches where its sensible. A lot of greenhouse/nurseries use verticality, and obviously if you're confined by area but have cheap labour (or expensive products) you have a different cost/benefit analysis than if you're like, trying to grow the most potatoes or corn for the least effort (and have a tractor and a few hundred acres or more).

>>67539 >it should be very telling that vertical farming can't overcome ground farming even with this advantage I'm not convinced of this. To me it seems like it could easily be the case that economically viable arrangements of indoor farming are possible, but not without first overcoming barriers like hostile zoning priorities and lack of existing tech/process, and therefore current market participants aren't incentivized to practice it. Kind of like how solar was much less viable years ago and has only become more viable now because of artificial bootstrapping enabling people to put in the work making it better. I have experience growing crops (including corn and potatoes) in a family garden, and the lack of a controlled environment is by far the biggest difficulty and risk. Frosts, insects, weeds, wildlife, too little or too much rain or sun, soil composition, soil being full of rocks, these are the things that make the process so labor intensive, prone to failure, and for most crops not at all worth it. Nature works hard to fuarrrk your soykaf up. Industrial agriculture solves these problems with blunt force solutions. Farms are located where the growing seasons are long, and huge volumes of water are liberally sprayed from mobile pipes along with chemicals to kill insects and weeds. A lot of fuel is used. We are facing down problems that may necessitate higher costs going forward for these techniques. For instance the insect population is collapsing, for which pesticides are likely at fault, and to avert ecological disaster that negative externality may have to be priced in. Ditto for fuel use. Aquifers are being used up, and invested parties are beginning to squabble over rights to diminishing river water. Basically, it's likely that style of farming is about to get more expensive, or we impose the true expense on humanity as a whole rather than the farms. It already isn't using real prices, there are massive government subsidies distorting the market (another potential explanation why outdoor farms still haven't faced serious market competition). Considering that system failure here means we all starve to death, it seems a worthy investment to encourage experimentation into more efficient, less damaging solutions to growing food despite nature being uncooperative. The technology of "walls and a roof" to me seems like a promising place to look since we've already done so much with it elsewhere and it directly addresses the biggest core issues.

We already store humans in skyscrapers and commieblocks, why not livestock animals?

>>67547 If one is acceptable, then both are acceptable. Neither are acceptable.

>>67539 >>67542 these posts are quality i don't know anything about agriculture, but the economics of it has always been of some interest to me in the us at least it's primarily a function of government subsidy, which breaks a lot of the actually desirable properties of capitalism i.e. corporations have a tendency to disproportionately benefit from government policy and the industry becomes stagnant with innovation not being incentivized Cf. Cadillac Desert also related: von thunen model, related to the economic niches in which various farming techniques are viable based on geographic distance while i was searching for images i came across research diagrams for vertical farming, which were mildly interesting definitely seems still-nascent as a technology

I'd prefer permaculture but I understand not everyone has access to a backyard and many countries have limited access to land. The problem with vertical and indoor farming deals with rare earth minerals needed to keep the electricity for the solar lamps since I know a lot of people are still wary to the idea of adding nuclear power plants even if they were underground. >>67539 Those buildings are eyesores. Burn them.

>>67547 The real take away from this image is that Chinese real estate market is in a completely shambolic state and has nothing to do with vertical farming.

I've been both an indoor hydroponic farmer and a field grower. The guy I used to work for who did the hydro got fed up with it and went completely field organic after a few years. Like others here have said, there's certainly a niche for indoor and climate controlled growing. It can allow you to have a wider harvest window and lower pest pressure. But trying to grow things like fruit trees, wheat, or sweet corn to scale in an indoor setting is asinine. It's possible but not viable. Farmland continues to be readily available. As we move into the future you'll continue to see indoor farming as a supplement to the food supply, but it's not going to replace conventional farming.

>>67539 >if any of this were meaningfully true it'd already be implemented. There are various reasons why farming conglomerates wouldn't go for this. One of them could be: real estate conglomerates have a stranglehold on most urban areas, driving the cost of the buildings up absurdly high. Land is still cheaper in the boonies and conglomerates already own it, plus they have already bribed all the local cops into ignoring the fact they import wageslave labor.