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RE: How Much Land does it take To provide enough food
A fun exercise in “what if” thinking as long as you toss out the Laws of Thermodynamics.
A fun exercise in “what if” thinking as long as you toss out the Laws of Thermodynamics.
damn....all those people who are using aquaponics are breaking the law.
who knew.
No they’re not. Say you can grow one lettuce with one square foot of sunlight. Put solar cells in that one square foot, use the electricity to power LEDS, and you get less light energy due to inefficiencies (those pesky Laws). Your process will actually grow less lettuce not more.
Here’s another perspective... https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/vertical-farms-arent-going-to-solve-our-food-problems.html
actually it will grow more.
because the 'one square foot' is TALL...as tall as you want it to be.
the lettuce is stacked...one on top of the other.
The Solar cells are on the outside.
the LED are calibrated to provide the exact TYPE of light that best suits the vegatable in question.
PLUS
the growing season is 24/7/365.
it's happening.
you must have missed that part when you watched the video.
The energy to power the LEDS is generated from an area bigger than than the original one square foot of solar or is generated from fossil fuels or nuclear. The Laws are still in effect.
As Bucky Fuller suggested, the smallest perpetual motion machine is the Universe. Some of these food growing schemes are 21 Century versions of perpetual motion machines.
I’m all for feeding everyone. The inputs need to be sustainably sourced and the non-edible outputs need to be reused and not turned into pollution. Food should be produced locally and in a decentralize manner.
I just don’t see some of these vertical schemes as being much more than clever marketing to people who don’t understand basic physics.
I’ll continue to grow my food horizontally, using natural sunlight, harvested rain water, and compost. The only infrastructure I need is a bit of open land and a few hand tools.
Dependence on another energy intensive system to produce industrial food does not empower people to live free of the possibility of catastrophic failure of such a system.
The title of the post is
How Much Land does it take To provide enough food
For one person to live
The smaller the 'footprint' the higher the tech required.
Some people have more of a 'bit of land' than other do. For those who don't there are technical options.
How much land depends on what you are eating. Here’s an alternative... http://growbiointensive.org/grow_main.html