Turning Photons Into Food
Turning Photons Into Food on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2020–2021.
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.
What HN commenters said
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
cagenutJun 2020Strongly recommends
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 bicycles as if we have to pick one. If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very well spent: ▶ this video
in “What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture” · View on HN
SomewhatLikelyFeb 2021Recommends
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.
in “Vertical farming does not save space” · View on HN
cagenutAug 2020Recommends
> 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]
in “Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms” · View on HN
halbrittJan 2020Recommends
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.
in “For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity” · View on HN