- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Breakthrough: “Electronic soil” boosts crop growth by over 50%::This research introduces an innovative approach to soilless cultivation, or hydroponics, by integrating electronic soil, or eSoil.
That depends on yield per year and for certain crops it’s incredibly high compared to arable, especially with clever engineering that uses waste heat productively.
We’re certainly going to see an increase in city farms for various things over the coming decades, automation just makes it too easy and there are so many good options to explore
Or you could just skip all that and plant seeds in soil, with a larger farm outside of the city
Modern agriculture is hugely damaging to the ecosystem, provides a very low quality produce, is very inefficient, and there’s plenty of better things for the land to be used for.
I get that a lot of people want to live in an idealised version of the past but the past is someone’s future, things change and grow and evolve which is a great thing. People are going to grow daily produce locally because it’s more efficient and better than daily transporting food long distances - getting traffic off the road should be a key part of our future plans, localising production is a great idea. Growing lettuce six hours drive away is silly when it loses most it’s quality in six hours even when chilled, why run a truck every day when for less power than just the transport you could grow them locally, especially if you’re getting better produce without any damage to the environment.
Year round, pest free, high quality fresh produce locally is going to be a standard thing in every city and grumbling about how life used to be different isn’t going to change that.
It is, but we have a society based around profit making not a good ecosystem with high quality products. You’ll need to fix the former before the latter will actually be taken up.