Yes!!! An intensely farmed flat acre can provide for two people. Going vertical, well, the sky’s the limit. And we haven’t even broached fungus yet!
There also need to be large underground resevoirs with blind fish. Not to eat, but fertilizer. The insect farms become fish food, the fish become fish meal. That fertilizers the crops.
Nice that it coincides with the release of “Fallout Shelter”. I wonder what stat on SPECIAL you need to run this underground grow facility.
Compared to what? Sunlight?
Compared to sunlight and shipping produce from agricultural regions outside of London, especially when the crops may be out of season and have to be shipped from afar.
Sorry, this isn’t the world’s first. Japan’s been doing this for at least a decade:
http://web-japan.org/trends/lifestyle/lif050317.html
Shipping is a rounding error on the price and energy cost. Japan ships in rice from California because the cost to ship is so low. Bulk shipping really isn’t an issue. I would bet that you find the vast majority of shipping cost and energy comes when trying to get the produce the last few miles.
You are almost certainly far better off building horizontal and flat some place cheap, than vertical or underground. The only reason why these guys what they are doing is because the space underground was already there. Even then, I am deeply skeptical. Ignore for a moment the infrastructure cost, what is the actual cost in labor, consumable supplies, and energy? Added in the infrastructure cost of going underground or vertical, and how long does it take to repay the investment? How much time does it take if you factor in the cost of the land?
I keep seeing this sort of stuff, but never any real figures. Frankly, I don’t think it makes sense. Even if this was a panacea and truly cheaper, you are vastly better off building it on shitty terrain you can’t use, and building horizontal. Space isn’t a problem in most parts of the world; it is arable land and land in the city that are the issue. This just trades one valuable piece of real estate (arable land) for a vastly more valuable piece of real estate (city).
Depending on how well their underground agro-bunker is sealed, they might be able to keep that problem to a minimum by doing a nitrogen flush of the environment during a fallow period(on an as-needed basis, obviously it’d impact productivity per hour so you wouldn’t want to do it more often than needed).
None of the risks of more selective toxins; but unless the parasite problem is with anaerobic or non-obligate aerobic organisms, nitrogen will be abundantly lethal in a closed environment like that, while being unlikely to harm plants, leave soil residues, and so on.
In that vein, it would add cost(so might only be relevant for very cost insensitive applications like hypothetical space-agriculture); but do we know how plants would do in a de-oxygenated nitrogen/CO2 atmosphere? For a variety of applications, we already have ‘Nitrogen Generators’(which don’t actually generate Nitrogen, since the atmosphere obliges; but scrub the oxygen and sometimes the trace gasses, depending on how fancy you get); so even with those scurrilous plants photosynthesizing away, it wouldn’t be terribly impractical to maintain a lethal-to-aerobic-pests N2/CO2 atmosphere, with some water vapor. You could shut down the scrubbing a short time before harvest, so humans could work without risk or bulky gear; but when working with a relatively small, sealed, volume, you have options…
Depending on whether you are the Overseer or the labor, this would probably be a matter of either Science, Repair, or Survival; so INT, END, or a combination.
Spider mites. So evil!
I knew that’s where Mitt was headed with that whole 47% thing! 
I’m having a hard time finding recent references to this project, which did make headlines in the mid-00’s. A large part of it was flashy demonstration: rice was one of their crops.
I’m with you on the numbers–I’d like to see them link to studies that (ostensibly) support their work. In terms of pest-control, the best we get is:
The farm says its advanced systems mean crops can be grown year-round in a perfect, pesticide-free environment because there is no risk of pests or disease.That sentence is the perfect zero-calorie meal!
Exactly right. Time will tell whether it can make money, but it seems unlikely. In capitalism, lack of understanding of physics and biology is nature’s way of redistributing wealth.
i agree that building this in a cave under a city is silly, but vertical agriculture has been going on for decades. want to feed a family of four on an acre? go vertical!
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=760
Apparently plants need some oxygen. But my bet is that they can survive for a while without any, for longer time than insects (especially in presence of light when they make so much of a surplus they have to fart it out). So lower the oxygen level below the threshold of the insect survival, keep it there for long enough, and voila, pesticide cycle done.
Such cycling may also work on getting rid of some of both aerobic and anaerobic bacteria. Cyclically starve ones and poison the other ones.
but this is an easy one–90% of the oxygen used by plants is in their roots. so every four days shoot down a super oxygenated hydroponic mix for ten minutes, and blanks the greenhouse with nitrogen and co2. preferably very early in the morning.
–edit–
crap it likely won’t work.
What a novelty. I bought my first punnet of strawberries of the year today and reconfirmed that any artificially grown fruit and veg is not a patch on freshly picked produce. I only have a small garden and can’t grow a lot of veg, but anything I do grow is a lot tastier than anything that isn’t grown to it’s full term in sunshine. Stick to a trusted green grocers and don’t waste your money on this stuff (unless you’ve got no taste).
If this is the future it won’t be much of one if they only grow a bit of salad. I’d have thought potatoes and lambs quarters would have been more nutritional produce if they wanted to make it more than a gimmick.
…you… You do understand it has little to nothing to do with the anecdata you just mentioned, right? It’s all about structural integrity, waste, and varietal, right?
Come on over to the gardening thread, and lets talk shop!!
Shipping is a rounding error on the price and energy cost. Japan ships in rice from California because the cost to ship is so low. Bulk shipping really isn’t an issue.
The last sentence is the important one there. Bulk shipping a dried dense product isn’t really an issue. Long distance sea-shipping really doesn’t use much energy at all. Of course literally shipping fresh "pea shoots, several varieties of radish, mustard, coriander, red amaranth, celery, parsley and rocket" is relatively uncommon, as these products all have short shelf lives.
So your assertion that:
I would bet that you find the vast majority of shipping cost and energy comes when trying to get the produce the last few miles.
is actually talking about pretty much the whole shipping side of the equation with the produce they’re growing.
This just trades one valuable piece of real estate (arable land) for a vastly more valuable piece of real estate (city).
Clearly in this case it doesn’t. The bunker has been there since WWII. It’s been used for precisely nothing* since. Until now. London may be somewhat unique in the size of the bomb bunkers that lie underneath its surface, but it certainly isn’t the only city with sizeable underground spaces currently unused.
*on second thought, I think perhaps it had been used for archive storage for a while…
For agricultural produce with short shelf life, there’s airfreight. It’s quite common.
Celery grower says that air freighting produce to Asia is a growing business
book: Air Transport of Perishable Products
For agricultural produce with short shelf life, there’s airfreight.
Yes, which comes with massive energy & CO2 costs. So in that case the “majority of shipping cost and energy comes when trying to get the produce the last few miles.” argument falls over.
Look I’m not saying this farm stacks up on an environmental/energy level. Clearly there are energy costs associated with having the thing underground, but if it’s only supplying the London restaurant market, it probably does have some advantages. If it performs as well as they claim, quality will be consistent year round, meaning suppliers from afar wouldn’t be required when products were out of season in the UK. The space was vacant beforehand, and I’d argue its a better use than nothing.
Does this make the equation stack up? I’ve no idea, haven’t done the maths and its way beyond my pay-grade as a semi-anonymous BB commentator; but it does save on transport and in some cases it would be quite considerably.
