Turning Photons Into Food
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in vertical farming debates as a rigorous look at when indoor crops are economically viable.
What it is
Dr. Bruce Bugbee walks through the calculations for crop yield potential when light is the limiting factor, from photosynthetic quantum yield through respiration efficiency and harvest index, using the Energy Cascade Model.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2020 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec cagenut · 2020-06 · on “What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture”
This has the infuriatingly common fatal logical flaw of wrapping "farming" in one giant layer of abstraction and comparing indoor vs outdoor at the broadest scale. Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. "Farming" has always meant thousands of different things, and for some of those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is not an assertion, we all know there's a very robust one right now. Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like debating cars vs bicyc
Recommends halbritt · 2020-01 · on “For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity”
You could grow salad in the cupboard. Lettuce is one of the few crops that would be economical to grow under indoor lighting. I believe that info comes from here: [this video] If you think LEDs have gotten epic, check out his research. They're just getting to be more efficient than HPS.
Recommends cagenut · 2020-08 · on “Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms”
> Now lets get the yield potentials for everything else under the sun so we can start optimizing better. [this video] That presentation is by one of the same scientists referenced in the linked paper, Dr. Bruce Bugbee, the one who grew wheat on the ISS. He has a whole youtube channel that goes into more detail than you can imagine: [LINK]
Recommends SomewhatLikely · 2021-02 · on “Vertical farming does not save space”
For anyone who wants to get into the technical details on efficiency of growing crops under lighting, here's an informative talk from Bruce Bugsbee of Apogee Instruments: [this video] He shows that wheat, which was the example used in the article, would cost 100x more growing under lighting, but for greens and microgreens the lighting costs are only a few percent of the market value of the crop so those are very viable as indoor crops.