Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

Re:Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding ver... by ch4s3 on Friday April 28, 2023 @01:02PM (#35744044)

Those systems never seem to produce very many calories per acre. They're interesting as biology labs, and would probably be fine for subsistence agriculture for a small number of humans. However, we're trying to feed 8 billion people and we need the raw calorie to arable land ratio to work.

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Re:Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding ver... by tfourb on Friday April 28, 2023 @01:10PM (#35744163)

Actually we are trying to feed 8 billion people, 21 billion chicken, 1.4 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, etc: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/livestock-counts

The systems I have highlighted have demonstrated commercial-grade calorie surpluses over decades. Kindly da a tiny bit of research before simply claiming the opposite.

Regenerative agriculture has also demonstrated that it can bring degraded and marginal land back into production and it uses less irrigation etc. by design, so it would be possible to expand arable land.

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Re:Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding ver... by ch4s3 on Friday April 28, 2023 @01:47PM (#35744669)

This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think. You’re still talking about significant inputs of land and human labor for lower calorie outputs.

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