Ultimately this is about removing the limitations of agriculture as it stands (1 acre/acre, 1kw/m2, 330ppm CO2) so that we can convert energy and chemicals into food in a scalable, reliable and repeatable way. This has obvious medium-term applications outside of our atmosphere and gravity well, but if we allow energy costs to come down by orders of magnitude by continuing to make advances in nuclear energy, it will inevitably lead to a system that's preferable in terms of land use, both in terms of former agricultural land that can be returned to forests and relatively small high-density power plants that will replace sprawling renewable infrastructure. I don't understand why people keep bringing up the idea of using high-rise buildings in an urban/near-urban environment; surely you'd want to do it in lights-out factories on the cheapest available land, and if energy is cheap enough to make vertical farming profitable, shipping costs would be negligible. A single 1km X 1km X 1km underground vertical farm could be sufficient to feed millions of people while leaving the land above it available for forests/grassland/tundra, or provide district heating to a sizeable population.
We already use half of all habitable land for agriculture.
"The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. It has transformed habitats and is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity: of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them"
Do we really want to keep eating into what wilderness remains?
Just because we "have" it doesn't mean we should convert it.
We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yeilds and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world.
> We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yeilds and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world.
If we want to release cropland back to the wild, then by far the cheapest way to do it is improve farming infrastructure and practice in low income countries, which is where yields lag so far behind the state of the art.
Social, or political - giving less technological countries advances shifts power.
And who in those countries gets the advances? A corporation or a community - if a community currently grow the own food inefficiently and you take the growing land, give it to a corporation and produce the same food efficiently then the people lose income, need to buy their food, and all financial benefits of the food sale get privatised. The value produced by that land is moved. We need to be careful not to spread the bad parts of efficient production.
>We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yields and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world.
I saw some mango farming videos in Africa and that's pretty much it. There are lots of inefficient farming practices and agriculture experts are teaching farmers how to improve their yields significantly without any fancy technology.
Crops in fields are subject to pests, infections and flooding; look at East Africa, South Asia and China at the moment for examples. It's a lot easier to achieve food security when your food production is industrialised and hermetically sealed in a relatively small area. Not depending on precipitation and being sheltered from hail/frost is also an advantage once you have sufficiently cheap energy that enables desalination on a mass scale. And while it isn't a pressing issue at the moment, it would certainly be preferable not to have to use half of the world's habitable area for agriculture (that tends to be heterogeneous so that it can be done efficiently at scale) with millions of acres used to grow grain with nitrate fertilisers and pesticides and to use it for stuff that's more biodiverse, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing instead.
The environments can be compartmentalised and sterilised between crops; if it's a sealed environment and the only inputs apart from the seeds are sterile (via UV treatment of water, for instance), there's far less risk of disease, and by carefully controlling the handling of the seeds (and ensuring that there's a reasonable degree of genetic diversity amongst them) that also reduces the risk of widespread crop failures. It's also far easier to monitor and continuously test crops in a controlled environment like that, and it wouldn't need to be just a few massive factories; there could be a large number of smaller ones that were geographically distributed.
I don't have any peer-reviewed papers to hand on this particular subject (they may not even exist yet), but I welcome your feedback on the reasoning that I gave as to why I think that this is, fundamentally, a solvable problem.
I absolutely believe you could be right. Would love you to be. I literally was looking for citations. I also know these problems are difficult and my own experiments were discouraging--which has absolutely no bearing on what's possible.
Much of US produce comes a few counties in California 100% dependent on the Colorado river — what are the risks with respect to climate change on reduced snowfall, etc in the Sierras? Midwest irrigation depends on aquifers that are being irreparably depleted.
On the east coast, the dominance of California produce and decline of dairy killed many forms of agriculture. The endless suburbia of New Jersey was once prime farmland, gone forever.
The fires raging in pristine rainforest, a lot of them purposefully started to clear the land, speak a different language. In more developed countries this has already happened centuries ago, there is very little old growth forest left. It has all been converted to farm land. This is not good for preserving biodiversity.
Even if we could only implement vertical farming at a similar level of productivity to traditional agriculture on a horizontal basis (although it seems from the paper that we could do a lot better than this), with a unit height on the order 1 metre/unit, we could still achieve productive densities hundreds if not thousands of times higher, given sufficient power and building technology.
