Future farm: a sunless, rainless room indoors

[Black Blade]

Future farm: a sunless, rainless room indoors

AP/Peter Dejong

Yellow peppers are seen under Light-Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, at PlantLab in Den Bosch, Netherlands. More photos »

Snippit:

DEN BOSCH, Netherlands – Farming is moving indoors, where the sun never shines, where rainfall is irrelevant and where the climate is always right.

The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.

Advocates say this, or something like it, may be an answer to the world's food problems.

"In order to keep a planet that's worth living on, we have to change our methods," says Gertjan Meeuws, of PlantLab, a private research company.

The world already is having trouble feeding itself. Half the people on Earth live in cities, and nearly half of those — about 3 billion — are hungry or malnourished. Food prices, currently soaring, are buffeted by droughts, floods and the cost of energy required to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport it.

Continued: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_netherlands_sunless_farming


Black Blade: I don't see why not other than it being more work and energy intensive (managed lighting). The pot growers have been using hydroponic methods for decades. Oddly enough this is in the Netherlands - where they have "smoke shops" selling various strains of herbal delights.

[withers.45]

Black Blade: I don't see why not other than it being more work and energy intensive (managed lighting). The pot growers have been using hydroponic methods for decades. Oddly enough this is in the Netherlands - where they have "smoke shops" selling various strains of herbal delights.

Maybe they figured it was more efficient to grow their own munchies as well

[Coils]

Maybe they figured it was more efficient to grow their own munchies as well

LOL That's a good one

[railbuggy]

I have three 400 watters in storage in the basement.The new LEDs are the way to go.Prices are high at this time but will come down in a few years.Tomatos
keep going up every year.

[TRX]

Advocates say this, or something like it, may be an answer to the world's food problems.

Doubtful. The starving hordes are starving because

A) they've bred until their country can't support its population

B) they're at the technological level where poking holes with a stick and fertilizing with human waste are considered valid methods of farming.

Before you can hang a grow lamp, you need a whole industrial infrastructure from the light to the power station to its fuel supply. And that takes money, and an effective government, with diplomatic and military ancillaries, to acquire and maintain that fuel supply.

Yeah, you can grow stuff indoors under electric light - orchid and rose growers have been going it since the late 1800s... but not in the kind of countries that can't feed themselves to start with.

edit: the government part is no joke. The Soviet Union was a nuclear power and landed probes on the Moon and Venus... and they lost tens of thousands to famine during that time. Gross mismanagement of resources forced them to buy food from the ideological enemies.

[withers.45]

I agree. Even in a developed nation where electricity, running water, and the proper supplies are readily available, its still not going to be economical to do this and the amount of space needed to even feed your own family year round is going to be rather large due to grow time and the need to have plants in various stages of growth to support year round harvesting (think small warehouse). There's still nothing like sunlight and wide open spaces on Gods green earth (or whats left of it) for growing food. Also I always thought artificially grown food lacked the taste of earth grown.