Commercial freezers are also frequently built with vacuum-insulated panels[1] which have very low thermal conductivity.
It's not crazy to build something very large, like a grain silo, to hold dried grain at a low temperature. That seems fairly plausible as a way to reliably "turn off" subsidies over time.
It sort of reminds me of the strategic oil reserve[2] in the US. Similar idea (boring holes in the earth cheaply via using water to etch into giant salt deposits)
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_insulated_panel
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
A bushel of corn is 56 pounds. Assuming a very high 1lb of corn per person per day only gives 2 * 365 * 330 million / 56 * 1.25 = 5.4 billion cubic feet.
Which still sounds insane except AT&T Stadium in Dallas is 0.1 billion cubic feet and cost only 1.3 billion to construct while including all sorts of stuff we don’t need. So roughly one building that size per state. Even if it was almost that expensive vs a more realistic 1/10th, the cost of corn + ethical subsides would hit that in roughly a decade and we would could then spend a 1 billion a year cooling the things while saving money.
PS: Having just one building would look cool but would be a massive single point of failure. Also, you can store dry corn for quite a while even in non cryogenic conditions.
It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other.
> Any data to back this up.
The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc.
The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.