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"Born in Silicon Valley and worked only by robots"
A "farm" (Iron Ox) has been established using hydroponics and robots that can sense & control the indoor environment, do the planting and harvesting of greens & tomatoes automatically according to the programming.
Advantages: indoors, controlled environment, so production is not based on capricious, natural seasons-- harvest can be continuous all year and farms can be placed anywhere in the country, close to local markets. That avoids long transport & storage problems, and can potentially replace CA Central /valley as our major source of these products where sustainability due to salinization of soil is becoming a problem.
Another advantage (and disadvantage?) of robotic ag is that it alleviates some of the labor problems facing the industry. Currently wages & rewards tend to be low and fewer young people want to go or stay in ag work.
Disadvantages include its reliance on hi tech, the unnatural growing conditions (?why is it the TreeHuggers who oppose GMO, chemicals and such always seem to embrace these hi tech solutions like indoor hydroponics?) ...and remember that "greens" like lettuce have almost zero nutritional value. The staples of a good diet include wheat, oats, beans, peas & potatoes and corn & soy for animal feed for meat. These things don't lend themselves well to indoor, artificial growing.
I guess it could be a good experiment to work on now in the hopes that they'll have perfected the techniques for producing essential nutrients and oxygen indoors for the depletists of the future when the time comes that nothing can live or grow outdoors any more. I envision thousands of miles of sterile, robotically controlled indoor algae farms under artificial lights all enclosed within giant domes.
Corn & soy production has replaced natural grassland in large areas, but the biomass is actually greater in the "man-made grassland." Industrially produced N fertilizer puts much more N into the biomass than natural sources. Deserts have been made to bloom with industrial ag techniques around the world. As co2 rises, it encourages even more growth of photosynthetic plants-- "air fertilization" is well documented. Inorganic minerals are abundant & easy to disperse. Industrial tree farming has given us more forested area in NA than in pre-Columbian times. Reverse osmosis production of fresh water from sea water is a viable process if the TreeHuggers would give it a rest...And if the planet is really warming, then biodiversity will increase.
People have reacted to the problems we were headed for when we thought natural resources were inexhaustible. We don't clear cut any more, and now restore open pit mining and landfill operations to acceptable environmental condition, don't dump industrial waste directly into the rivers, and are scrubbing our furnace emissions to avoid acid rain etc. etc.
The first part, factory crop farming, is already here and off to a good start. It just hasn’t spread far yet. That first step, of highly controlled, vertical warehouse farming is what makes the biggest impact on productivity and the environment. The robots will just further reduce labor cost.
All these techniques and tools are here and in use now. However, they will expand first and fastest producing "luxury" foods like lettuce, not staples like grains.
As for why food fussies embrace hydroponics and not GMO... water is water. Nutrients are nutrients. UV light is UV light. It may be packaged and delivered to the plants, but it's not fundamentally different from a dirt-farm garden.
The first part, factory crop farming, is already here and off to a good start. It just hasn’t spread far yet. That first step, of highly controlled, vertical warehouse farming is what makes the biggest impact on productivity and the environment. The robots will just further reduce labor cost.
“At 25,000 square feet, the farm can yield up to 10,000 heads of lettuce a day. That's 100 times more per square foot than traditional methods.”
...”Since the plants grow twice as fast with 40 percent less power, 80 percent less food waste and 99 percent less water usage than outdoor fields...”
Most growth phenomena start slow, then reach a point where growth explodes before finally leveling off at a maximum. The Logistic Curve.
I like the idea of saving land area by going vertical. If factory farming becomes the norm, maybe cropland can be returned to biodiverse natural prairie.
Cropland uses natural sunlight. I wonder what the energy cost (both economic & environmental) of artificial lighting will be?
This could be the final nail in the coffin of the near sacred status of the family farm. Well, I guess there's few of us still mourning the loss of the whale bone corset factories at this point in history.
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