The technology has been around since the seventies when a whole wave of stories were published about how the future of farming would be in skyscrapers. I am reminded of pg's classic essay, suits are back.
Historically these greenhouses depended on being able to sell a higher quality product during winter months than produce imported from California, Florida and Mexico. The technology is better and now that more people are interested in organic there's an audience that will pay higher prices than the supermarket year around. But it is a small audience, these greenhouses will never feed large numbers of people.
So far it's always been a great idea, just not very sustainable.
I mean imagine building a home for every plant you eat. It'd be kind of crazy right? You'd need to provide many of the things a typical home has: shelter, electricity, plumbing, food supply, structures etc.
But this is really what is proposed in these types of farms. Instead of available soil, you build a large structure, pots, racks and tracks. Instead of rainwater and rainwater distribution systems (clouds) you build pipes and tubes and plumbing and install pumps to move it all around. And you provide the plants nutrients in this way. And then you build a large shelter to keep everything away from the elements that mostly grow the plants outside. And then you install artificial lighting and electricity systems to pump energy into the solar panels that we know as leaves, to generate food.
For the longest time this has been hugely expensive. And to feed 7 billion people with about 2-3 plants or whatever it is, worth each day (in cereal, greens, fruits and legumes etc), you need to build billions of little plant homes.
And that was just never very economical. Let's not forget that a hectare yields an average of about 5.000 kg of cereal. Wheat goes for about $200 per metric ton, so a hectare nets you about $1k.
Now that's 107k square footage. That's incredibly cheap. Now imagine you want to replace that with a hectare of factory or say the plant houses I described earlier. That's a huge capex investment in the tens of millions compared to the hectare of soil which is priced around $10-15k and can be leased for a few hundred. To compete on price you'd need very high production in cheap economies of scale to offset your fixed costs on building this huge greenhouse structure with infrastructure for every individual plant.
But that's also where the land is much cheaper. It's virtually impossible to run vertical farms on soil, so you need a soilless medium which isn't a problem, but it means you need plumbing to every plant. No biggie. But the same for light, you can't do a vertical farm on scale (i.e. rows and rows) and expect sunshine to reach the bottom plants who sit in the shade. So you need artificial lighting and heating, and that's very expensive compared to sunlight.
High value crops, sure it's fine. (e.g. see every indoor weed farm with artificial lighting etc). But as the future of agriculture (where staple foods worldwide are cheap cereals, legumes, corn etc), no way.
Unless you have very large advances in material science (cheap, sturdy materials to pump out large greenhouses cheaply and sustainably) and energy (cheap solar pv/thermal, wind, geothermal). And that's what we're seeing now. So it's definitely getting more appealing by the day and it's something I've been very interested in pursuing because I just adore the idea of automated farming on some levels (I love to hike in nature, but large corn fields aren't really nature to me and don't excite me more than the idea of an automated corn factory!), but I still don't see how the economics make sense.
And it's more than finance, it's touted as an environmental solution because these farms can be located near the point of consumption. But that's just one part of the story, and incredibly myopic if it's the only part of the story that's considered. For example the problem in community supported agriculture I see is that people will drive a car individually, once a week, to a small location that doesn't get economies of scale, to pick up a tiny amount of food. Because they're under the impression it's more environmentally friendly than a large shipping container moving their beans across the ocean. When in reality their food miles is a bit like saying it's environmentally more friendly drive 2 miles to a store, than to cycle 5 miles to a store for your groceries because 'it's less food miles that way'. Susta...
I think the biggest problem with land-based farms is that there is only so much land available for it, and that land is also highly valued for other properties (such as residential and commercial ventures).
I don't think it's unreasonable to see us get to a point where the only room we have to grow our crops is upwards (or on another planet, but that's even further out on the timeline).
> I think the biggest problem with land-based farms is that there is only so much land available for it, and that land is also highly valued for other properties (such as residential and commercial ventures).
I don't think you really understand the distribution of land use and urbanization in the world if you think construction of houses and shops are a substantial limiting factor in its agriculture. Your remedial assignment is to drive from Denver to Chicago.
As for growing plants on another planet... and shipping them back to Earth... if you've got that sort of an energy budget to waste shipping food around why aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or some nonsense like that?
> Your remedial assignment is to drive from Denver to Chicago.
And yours is to drive from Boston to Miami. Or London to Glasgow. Or Osaka to Tokyo.
Cherry picking a route through the breadbasket of America as an example of typical land distribution between urban and agricultural doesn't make for a convincing argument.
> why aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or some nonsense like that?
Because any such location would be more valuable as a spot to pack more humans. Proximity (particularly when you start working on a planetary scale) to urban centers is worth a lot of money.
> And yours is to drive from Boston to Miami. Or London to Glasgow. Or Osaka to Tokyo.
I haven't driven from Boston to Miami in one trip, but I've traversed that entire corridor. My grandparents once owned a few acres on a private lake near Eastford, CT. Lots of cool old dairy-farms, apple orchards, berry-picking, bird-watching, wildlife, et cetera. Most of I95 south of Alexandria is rather boring -- hours and hours of trees -- if you're starting by DC it's a little more fun to divert along US 301, passing through horse territory and then rolling through Fort AP Hill. More travel time, but on the northern part of the route you're more likely to pass the occasional roadside produce stands.
The southernmost bits are the ones I'm less familiar with, though those are possibly the most interesting as in Florida in particular there are places where urban development threatens the most sensitive ecosystems... but the Everglades were never known for agriculture. Agriculture does moreover threaten ecosystems across the midwest (one recent example: monarch butterflies have been suffering massive population drops in the past few years because Roundup-Ready crops have led to widespread herbicide application that kills the weeds that they'd use for food).
There's definitely a bit of competition between agriculture and say forests, urban areas and sustainable energy projects. But urban areas probably are the smallest of them all. We've seen some deforestation, and we've also seen agriculture under pressure from biofuels. The biofuels idea is mostly bankrupt (at least in terms of crops, algae etc have potential), and deforestation is in part illegal and unnecessary, not due to a dire lack of agricultural land.
Our rate of human population concentration is very high, about 95% of humans are concentrated on about 10% of surface area worldwide. Meanwhile we only use 11% of land for agriculture, while about 36% of our land is suitable for farming. (which could be improved to some extent, e.g. there are various ways to take back deserts on small scales, and on large scales too if technology improves enough). And in fact, urbanisation is only growing. We've never had as much concentration of people, and as many people living in cities as today.
So I don't think agricultural land is under that much threat. In fact we could probably pretty easily cut back agricultural land by 50% while increasing to a population of 9 billion if we changed our diets and our use of farmland. For example some rough numbers from 2013:
> roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol, (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
Small edits by me. Now imagine what that means when you figure that corn is the nr 1 crop in the US, and a tiny fraction goes to actually feeding people. As for animals, the studies vary between chickens requiring as little as 2 kilos of plant food and cows as high as 10 kilos, to produce 1 kilo of meat. Whatever the exact accurate number is, it's a fact that making food from animals is inefficient. You put more food in than you get out, sometimes by an order of magnitude, for a different taste experience for a minute or so per day.
And that's just corn, it's not alone. More than half of grain is used for livestock, too.
Now obviously land is finite, if you want to live here with 50 billion people, sure. You need to go up. But the demographic projections to 2100 are to cap out at around 10 billion, and then slowly decrease again as the world moves to an average birthrate we see in OECD countries (1.7, while about 2.1 is necessary to sustain a population level). These kinds of population levels can be sustained on flat land, vertical isn't necessary.
Doesn't mean that vertical can't happen. If vertical is better, who cares if it is necessary, it'll be replaced anyway. But the challenge of vertical farming is currently sustainability (large infrastructure costs are necessary to make it possible to get conditions you see on flat land for 'free' (sun, clouds and soil taking care of light, water, food, distribution, containers, germination etc) in a vertical space. And if you can't solve that problem of sustainability, it doesn't matter if there's not enough flat land anyway because we'd be doomed.
"If every neighborhood had its own vertical farm, how many fewer semis would be choking up the metro area?"
In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants.
We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads.
Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.
In your considerations, what did you have planned to do if you did end up buying a farmstead? Pick up farming or livestock, or just live on the countryside with a big ranch available without animals but otherwise live and work like you do now presumably in a city, or a combination?
I've been really interested in the idea of moving out of the city for some time but I don't know many people who've done so. They usually just moved to a smaller city (i.e. a village) without any real farmland, but a decent backyard. (something pretty rare here in Amsterdam).
Professionally I can essentially work anywhere with a high speed connection, and my wife is in healthcare and can work anywhere near even a somewhat built up area. We would like to do low-intensity farming, have some chickens (primarily for eggs), ideally have some woodlands, and so on. My wife really wants to try keeping bees, and the honey products from that.
I'd love to have enough land to have a small nanny-suite house, a bunkie off in the woods somewhere, etc. With connectivity (which is starting to appear in even really rural areas via wireless options), I really have to imagine that more of an exodus out of urban areas will happen by the people who want the more remote living and had only moved to urban areas out of proximity needs.
He's not a super techie, he has a few websites and it's not always super professionally structured, but check it out. He's basically a dude who got into farming later in life, first did an apprenticeship, and then started his own community supported agriculture (CSA) business.
His initial focus was chickens which you mentioned wanting to do. It's looks like it's pretty easy for him. He orders chicks online, they have enough food in their bellies to survive the trip in the mail (sounds crazy but apparently it's a normal thing). He has a heat lamp and a basic food/water installation. He designed his own pens for the older chicken for which he has a blueprint online for free, they're actually very neat. And then he has to do the butchering which is the worst part, but he has about 60 customers for his CSA who paid him upfront for the season (I think about 20 weeks), and he delivers one whole chicken to them per week, so about 50 per week, and he actually has a very high chicken price at about $25 or so. Anyway so all these people basically paid him in advance, so he starts with $30k and can make the investments he needs to. (seller discretionary cashflow is about $8k per year).
I can easily see how producing 1 chicken per week for your family, plus eggs, is a piece of cake. He's now also moving into other things, eggs, crops, hogs and vineyards and his own brewery. You can see some of his financial plans for 2015 here: http://www.farmmarketingsolutions.com/about/income-reports/2...
The cool thing is he's trying to be 100% transparent. Very interesting insight into small-scale farming. Providing for yourself is pretty easy, not trivial but very very doable. Providing for a CSA also looks like a very decent business, it's hard work but you can compete because people pay a premium for this stuff. On a larger scale I'm skeptical, selling wholesale really sucks and it just doesn't seem to be worth it unless you automate it (which seems only economical when you get economies of scale, i.e. a large scale) largely, or go big on certification and find a bio/eco/sustainability/local niche that wholesalers are seeing increased demand for themselves, too. Anyway I know that's not really your goal here but I thought I'd share the link :) All the best
That is a fantastic blog, thank you very much. I love reading stuff like that.
I have the luxury, of sorts, that the farm doesn't really need to support anyone financially (the primary income still coming from `traditional' sources), and ultimately just having a selection of foods available for my own immediate and extended family would be awesome. I've done the home vegetable garden thing for years, and would really like to take it to the next level. One of the next things about a lot of crops is that minimal effort often gets you 70% to the best outcome, so while a dedicated farmer carefully tends everything to fully optimize, I find the bounty and selection of just a variety of lazily planted tomato plants incredible.
There's a TON of productivity gains available using current land. India produces 5x less food per acre than the U.S. We can feed 9 billion using less farmland than we do now if all farms were as productive as the best US tech can provide. plus agriculture tech is progressing very quickly, another doubling of yields is expected in the next decade!
The vast majority of crop land in the US is not used to produce food for humans directly, but rather for animals. (I don't have a source, but at as an agronomist and someone who grew up in agriculture, and someone who has paid careful attention when traveling I can say this is almost certainly the case or close enough to the case to be relevant for the below point...).
The key to growing more high value food (protein and fat as opposed to low nutrient density fiber, vitamins and water foodstuff like this system provides) is to remove animals from the equation. This is the terrible inefficiency in modern agriculture and solving it would result in tremendous gains.
I'm very excited about things like tank grown nutrient yeasts. There was an article a few weeks ago about a type that has been engineered to produce milk for instance. This type of thing is the future I believe and has great potential. A few off season indoor vegetables are great too. As condiments.
Corn is the largest crop in the US. 84 million acres of it were grown in 2011 (try fitting that in a hydro system in an old factory).
According to the National Corn Growers Association, 80% of corn in the US is consumed by animals.. poultry, cattle, hogs, fish etc.
Soybeans are the second largest crop with ~74 million acres grown in 2011. Although not as dramatic as corn, animals eat a significant share of soybeans as well. Over 30 million tons of soybean meal is used as livestock feed annually (very roughly 1/3 of soybean production according to my quick and dirty calculations).
The third largest crop is hay at ~56 million acres. This is exclusively used for animal feed.
These three crops together are many times the acreage of all other crops combined.
Manifestly, the big savings in water, fuel, fertilizer etc would be to remove the dependence on animals in the diet.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadWhen they get alternatives to grains, pulses, meats and milk then real advancement in food production will being made.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Historically these greenhouses depended on being able to sell a higher quality product during winter months than produce imported from California, Florida and Mexico. The technology is better and now that more people are interested in organic there's an audience that will pay higher prices than the supermarket year around. But it is a small audience, these greenhouses will never feed large numbers of people.
I mean imagine building a home for every plant you eat. It'd be kind of crazy right? You'd need to provide many of the things a typical home has: shelter, electricity, plumbing, food supply, structures etc.
But this is really what is proposed in these types of farms. Instead of available soil, you build a large structure, pots, racks and tracks. Instead of rainwater and rainwater distribution systems (clouds) you build pipes and tubes and plumbing and install pumps to move it all around. And you provide the plants nutrients in this way. And then you build a large shelter to keep everything away from the elements that mostly grow the plants outside. And then you install artificial lighting and electricity systems to pump energy into the solar panels that we know as leaves, to generate food.
For the longest time this has been hugely expensive. And to feed 7 billion people with about 2-3 plants or whatever it is, worth each day (in cereal, greens, fruits and legumes etc), you need to build billions of little plant homes.
And that was just never very economical. Let's not forget that a hectare yields an average of about 5.000 kg of cereal. Wheat goes for about $200 per metric ton, so a hectare nets you about $1k.
Now that's 107k square footage. That's incredibly cheap. Now imagine you want to replace that with a hectare of factory or say the plant houses I described earlier. That's a huge capex investment in the tens of millions compared to the hectare of soil which is priced around $10-15k and can be leased for a few hundred. To compete on price you'd need very high production in cheap economies of scale to offset your fixed costs on building this huge greenhouse structure with infrastructure for every individual plant.
But that's also where the land is much cheaper. It's virtually impossible to run vertical farms on soil, so you need a soilless medium which isn't a problem, but it means you need plumbing to every plant. No biggie. But the same for light, you can't do a vertical farm on scale (i.e. rows and rows) and expect sunshine to reach the bottom plants who sit in the shade. So you need artificial lighting and heating, and that's very expensive compared to sunlight.
High value crops, sure it's fine. (e.g. see every indoor weed farm with artificial lighting etc). But as the future of agriculture (where staple foods worldwide are cheap cereals, legumes, corn etc), no way.
Unless you have very large advances in material science (cheap, sturdy materials to pump out large greenhouses cheaply and sustainably) and energy (cheap solar pv/thermal, wind, geothermal). And that's what we're seeing now. So it's definitely getting more appealing by the day and it's something I've been very interested in pursuing because I just adore the idea of automated farming on some levels (I love to hike in nature, but large corn fields aren't really nature to me and don't excite me more than the idea of an automated corn factory!), but I still don't see how the economics make sense.
And it's more than finance, it's touted as an environmental solution because these farms can be located near the point of consumption. But that's just one part of the story, and incredibly myopic if it's the only part of the story that's considered. For example the problem in community supported agriculture I see is that people will drive a car individually, once a week, to a small location that doesn't get economies of scale, to pick up a tiny amount of food. Because they're under the impression it's more environmentally friendly than a large shipping container moving their beans across the ocean. When in reality their food miles is a bit like saying it's environmentally more friendly drive 2 miles to a store, than to cycle 5 miles to a store for your groceries because 'it's less food miles that way'. Susta...
I don't think it's unreasonable to see us get to a point where the only room we have to grow our crops is upwards (or on another planet, but that's even further out on the timeline).
I don't think you really understand the distribution of land use and urbanization in the world if you think construction of houses and shops are a substantial limiting factor in its agriculture. Your remedial assignment is to drive from Denver to Chicago.
As for growing plants on another planet... and shipping them back to Earth... if you've got that sort of an energy budget to waste shipping food around why aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or some nonsense like that?
Yep. Or just look out the airplane window at all those little green circles and squares next time you fly across the country.
And yours is to drive from Boston to Miami. Or London to Glasgow. Or Osaka to Tokyo.
Cherry picking a route through the breadbasket of America as an example of typical land distribution between urban and agricultural doesn't make for a convincing argument.
> why aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or some nonsense like that?
Because any such location would be more valuable as a spot to pack more humans. Proximity (particularly when you start working on a planetary scale) to urban centers is worth a lot of money.
I haven't driven from Boston to Miami in one trip, but I've traversed that entire corridor. My grandparents once owned a few acres on a private lake near Eastford, CT. Lots of cool old dairy-farms, apple orchards, berry-picking, bird-watching, wildlife, et cetera. Most of I95 south of Alexandria is rather boring -- hours and hours of trees -- if you're starting by DC it's a little more fun to divert along US 301, passing through horse territory and then rolling through Fort AP Hill. More travel time, but on the northern part of the route you're more likely to pass the occasional roadside produce stands.
The southernmost bits are the ones I'm less familiar with, though those are possibly the most interesting as in Florida in particular there are places where urban development threatens the most sensitive ecosystems... but the Everglades were never known for agriculture. Agriculture does moreover threaten ecosystems across the midwest (one recent example: monarch butterflies have been suffering massive population drops in the past few years because Roundup-Ready crops have led to widespread herbicide application that kills the weeds that they'd use for food).
But agriculture itself is not under substantial pressure from urban land use at this time. Look, let's ask the US Department of Agriculture: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib-economic-informatio... (2002).
Urban land, 2.6% of the nation's land area. Crop land, 19.5%. Grassland pastures/ranges: 25.9%. -http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/249911/eib14fm_1_.pdf
"In 2002, urban land in the United States was less than 3 percent of total land area, but housed 79 percent of the U.S. population." - http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/250013/eib14g_1_.pdf
Space for physical people has always been a nonissue next to space for their agriculture and other people-supporting land uses.
Our rate of human population concentration is very high, about 95% of humans are concentrated on about 10% of surface area worldwide. Meanwhile we only use 11% of land for agriculture, while about 36% of our land is suitable for farming. (which could be improved to some extent, e.g. there are various ways to take back deserts on small scales, and on large scales too if technology improves enough). And in fact, urbanisation is only growing. We've never had as much concentration of people, and as many people living in cities as today.
So I don't think agricultural land is under that much threat. In fact we could probably pretty easily cut back agricultural land by 50% while increasing to a population of 9 billion if we changed our diets and our use of farmland. For example some rough numbers from 2013:
> roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol, (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
Small edits by me. Now imagine what that means when you figure that corn is the nr 1 crop in the US, and a tiny fraction goes to actually feeding people. As for animals, the studies vary between chickens requiring as little as 2 kilos of plant food and cows as high as 10 kilos, to produce 1 kilo of meat. Whatever the exact accurate number is, it's a fact that making food from animals is inefficient. You put more food in than you get out, sometimes by an order of magnitude, for a different taste experience for a minute or so per day.
And that's just corn, it's not alone. More than half of grain is used for livestock, too.
Now obviously land is finite, if you want to live here with 50 billion people, sure. You need to go up. But the demographic projections to 2100 are to cap out at around 10 billion, and then slowly decrease again as the world moves to an average birthrate we see in OECD countries (1.7, while about 2.1 is necessary to sustain a population level). These kinds of population levels can be sustained on flat land, vertical isn't necessary.
Doesn't mean that vertical can't happen. If vertical is better, who cares if it is necessary, it'll be replaced anyway. But the challenge of vertical farming is currently sustainability (large infrastructure costs are necessary to make it possible to get conditions you see on flat land for 'free' (sun, clouds and soil taking care of light, water, food, distribution, containers, germination etc) in a vertical space. And if you can't solve that problem of sustainability, it doesn't matter if there's not enough flat land anyway because we'd be doomed.
In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants.
We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads.
Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.
I've been really interested in the idea of moving out of the city for some time but I don't know many people who've done so. They usually just moved to a smaller city (i.e. a village) without any real farmland, but a decent backyard. (something pretty rare here in Amsterdam).
Thanks
I'd love to have enough land to have a small nanny-suite house, a bunkie off in the woods somewhere, etc. With connectivity (which is starting to appear in even really rural areas via wireless options), I really have to imagine that more of an exodus out of urban areas will happen by the people who want the more remote living and had only moved to urban areas out of proximity needs.
Just the other day I was checking out the blog by http://foodcyclist.com/farm-blog/
He's not a super techie, he has a few websites and it's not always super professionally structured, but check it out. He's basically a dude who got into farming later in life, first did an apprenticeship, and then started his own community supported agriculture (CSA) business.
His initial focus was chickens which you mentioned wanting to do. It's looks like it's pretty easy for him. He orders chicks online, they have enough food in their bellies to survive the trip in the mail (sounds crazy but apparently it's a normal thing). He has a heat lamp and a basic food/water installation. He designed his own pens for the older chicken for which he has a blueprint online for free, they're actually very neat. And then he has to do the butchering which is the worst part, but he has about 60 customers for his CSA who paid him upfront for the season (I think about 20 weeks), and he delivers one whole chicken to them per week, so about 50 per week, and he actually has a very high chicken price at about $25 or so. Anyway so all these people basically paid him in advance, so he starts with $30k and can make the investments he needs to. (seller discretionary cashflow is about $8k per year).
I can easily see how producing 1 chicken per week for your family, plus eggs, is a piece of cake. He's now also moving into other things, eggs, crops, hogs and vineyards and his own brewery. You can see some of his financial plans for 2015 here: http://www.farmmarketingsolutions.com/about/income-reports/2...
The cool thing is he's trying to be 100% transparent. Very interesting insight into small-scale farming. Providing for yourself is pretty easy, not trivial but very very doable. Providing for a CSA also looks like a very decent business, it's hard work but you can compete because people pay a premium for this stuff. On a larger scale I'm skeptical, selling wholesale really sucks and it just doesn't seem to be worth it unless you automate it (which seems only economical when you get economies of scale, i.e. a large scale) largely, or go big on certification and find a bio/eco/sustainability/local niche that wholesalers are seeing increased demand for themselves, too. Anyway I know that's not really your goal here but I thought I'd share the link :) All the best
I have the luxury, of sorts, that the farm doesn't really need to support anyone financially (the primary income still coming from `traditional' sources), and ultimately just having a selection of foods available for my own immediate and extended family would be awesome. I've done the home vegetable garden thing for years, and would really like to take it to the next level. One of the next things about a lot of crops is that minimal effort often gets you 70% to the best outcome, so while a dedicated farmer carefully tends everything to fully optimize, I find the bounty and selection of just a variety of lazily planted tomato plants incredible.
The key to growing more high value food (protein and fat as opposed to low nutrient density fiber, vitamins and water foodstuff like this system provides) is to remove animals from the equation. This is the terrible inefficiency in modern agriculture and solving it would result in tremendous gains.
I'm very excited about things like tank grown nutrient yeasts. There was an article a few weeks ago about a type that has been engineered to produce milk for instance. This type of thing is the future I believe and has great potential. A few off season indoor vegetables are great too. As condiments.
http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html
Corn is the largest crop in the US. 84 million acres of it were grown in 2011 (try fitting that in a hydro system in an old factory). According to the National Corn Growers Association, 80% of corn in the US is consumed by animals.. poultry, cattle, hogs, fish etc.
Soybeans are the second largest crop with ~74 million acres grown in 2011. Although not as dramatic as corn, animals eat a significant share of soybeans as well. Over 30 million tons of soybean meal is used as livestock feed annually (very roughly 1/3 of soybean production according to my quick and dirty calculations).
The third largest crop is hay at ~56 million acres. This is exclusively used for animal feed.
These three crops together are many times the acreage of all other crops combined.
Manifestly, the big savings in water, fuel, fertilizer etc would be to remove the dependence on animals in the diet.
I won't argue the benefits of increasing meat and animal product consumption here, but there is evidence to support that as well.
[0]: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-li...
The problem is grain fed meet and milk from an efficiency standpoint.