Further reading here if you're interested:
1. https://www.dw.com/en/could-high-tech-netherlands-style-farm...
2. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
I agree though, there's not enough info out there about an integrated approach. Perhaps it's proprietary.
Economically speaking, for wide scale production, most people don't care about the flavor of their lettuce or spinach. Which I understand and don't have a qualm with. I just have a problem with people who have never held a shovel in their lives try to act they know everything about farming and make wide sweeping judgements (what's that fallacy about lack of knowledge and thinking you know it all?). When you grow it yourself in a good environment, you enjoy eating leafy greens alone because you can taste actual flavor.
What a lot of people outside of agriculture don't know is the movement to recreating the top soil back to a healthy state. Commercial farmland soil is borderline clay and sand, especially compared to well maintained soil. Chemical fertilizers only go so far. A wide variety of decomposing organic matter is needed in soil to help maintain it. Along with letting a field sit for a few years with a cover crop (or variety of cover crops to speed up the process) is needed. Adding in grazing livestock is even better.
Mostly, I know you all think farming and agricultural science are stupid, numbskull pursuits because you're all techies. The obvious and only way to save agriculture is to use silicon chips, plastic and metal to fix it all. But "dirt" agriculture is extremely in-depth and complex. Especially the last 2 decades worth of research has been insane due to the realization that our "tried and true" commercial farming operations are more unsustainable than our dependency on fossil fuels. I don't see an inherent problem with vertical farming. I have a problem with the hubris that over commercialization is the only method of fixing these problems, even though that's the reason we have the problems to begin with.
> they grow almost 70 kilograms (154 pounds) of tomatoes per square meter. That's at least 10 times the average yield from an open field in Spain or Morocco, but with eight times less water and practically no chemical pesticides.
A promising method with a yield like this shouldn't be abandoned just because the taste isn't as good. This is just something the market will force them to improve, if customers don't continue to buy them. Personally, I've never tasted a tomato that I would label as atrocious so I'm now intrigued to try them :)
Jokes aside, from a biology perspective why the aversion to GMO? From an ML perspective, what are you optimizing for - maximized growth rate?
In terms of optimization, here are some:
1. What is the optimal time for getting a lettuce plant until harvest without juicing it up with nitrates?
2. What parameters could double the functional components of my mint (think about essential oils) and basil plants just by proper timing in stress and nutrition. These are already questions that botany departments have worked on- I want to bring them out in commercial setting (and may be a bit better).
3. Does back-radiation i.e. reflected light from plant leaves help in measuring plant well-being?
4. What's the right grow medium
5. In general, I BELIEVE, that there is a sub-optimal application (as in wastage) of light (which is roughly 20-30% of indoor farm expense), sub-optimal production in terms of the harvest we get. An improvement in harvest timing by a day would still be a very big volume once you scale it to bigger grow area; more importantly, I believe plant experts are good (even though very rare and expensive), but a DeepFarmer might be able to do better (and this is my main bet), both in terms of scaling and expertise.
Aqua- and Hydroponics have been successfully used to grow food for a very long time now.
If you have any evidence of food grown this way lacking any nutrients, please provide it.
What's the point in such restriction? AFAIK, GMO was never proven harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops#Con...
I would argue that saying all GMO products are equal and the entire concept is safe is also not correct. To me, "GMOs are totally safe" sounds a lot like saying "chemicals are totally safe."
There are multiple techniques, many possible product categories, with many possible safety outcomes. The safety relies on regulation by U.S. agencies which are mostly compromised by regulatory capture in a market with trillion dollar IP potential.
It is not insane anti-science to question the deployment of GMO products into the food chain and ecosystem.
See also: https://xkcd.com/641/.
GMO products are as (un)safe as all other products. This label just has not meaning related to safety. You can create harmful products using GM or by x-ray irradiation (which doesn't count as GM) or by using fertilizers. The "non-GMO" label is simply misleading, it doesn't mean what people think it means.
> To me, "GMOs are totally safe" sounds a lot like saying "chemicals are totally safe."
So do you suggest to print on every product (food or not) "chemical-free"?
I personally believe that permaculture would actually be the best solution overall, but our modern economy's pace and expectations would always keep such methods at bay. But at the same time, for leafy produce, and herbs, I think proper vertical farming would not only make it more affordable but also sustainable too. For the math, the rough estimates are production per m^2 (2-4kg on ground vs 70-400kg indoor farm), 10% lettuce in solid won't see the dining table i.e. they'd die, here there's no loss, off-season non-perennial produce, no problem for a vertical farm, the expenses on operations change too. Overall, if done properly, a very high-tech vertical farm should be able to break even in 2-3 yrs, even assuming a sales at no premium (which is very easy given the high-quality) i.e. at the shipped food i.e. the status-quo. But once people get used to the high-quality, and wholesalers get to enjoy the short supply chain due to indoor farms, I think the remote once will face a fierce competition, at least for select crops.
Forget Dubai, it's natural that a city in the desert that relies on tourism way too much will keep itself open. Government even mandated schools to open (no one's sending their kids, except the really desperate parents), mandated malls to stay open and cancel temperature checks, mandated employers to open up offices. They just recently closed up and put in all restrictions once again (although not European levels).
I think a lot of countries will see shifts from major cities to cheaper cities (as long as they are safer and have basic services). The only reason people (like my parents) are still staying in Dubai is because it has gotten cheaper - rents are falling, home prices are falling, there is a visible glut, and it's a buyer's market right now.
I imagine COVID may possibly have an impact on our megacities trend (even though it had many dying signals already), but I don't believe it may push people into rural areas. Rural life isn't for everybody.
Computer vision is a big chunk here, and me being no expert, I'm trying to have the hardware setup right so I'd have to do little on the software side of data processing.
If you're doing on your own, and don't want to spend a lot, I'd just say that almost everything can be done with off the shelf boards and sensors.
Now this could be interesting...
Vertical indoor farms are getting a lot of attention in the recent times, but the issue is the lack of plant expertise. Even if you were to go through all the literature, you would never find a holistic study that takes into account all the optimal factors for specific plant growth. For example, for lettuce, the best you will get would be EC, Ph, Light Intensity, CO2 ppm over an average range. However, approaching it from a perspective of 'systems' design where all these things play a role (often in an interaction with all factors) is still missing. For example, what part of the artificial light spectrum + nutrition level + air composition would be most optimal is still missing.
I'm a computer scientist by training and I'm trying to solve this with ML. It's a really hard problem, but I'm doing it. I have a mini-farm setup in my appt where I collect the data, but hopefully I'm getting some more seed-money to build a 10m^2 farm to be able to demonstrate the optimization. My goal is to hit as high as 370 kilos of herbs per m^2 (or 2.5 cubic meter) per year from only a four layer farm.