
Indoor farming: Good for cannabis, not so good for food - protomyth
https://gigaom.com/2015/12/29/indoor-farming-good-for-cannabis-not-so-good-for-food/
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weisser
The reason some vegetables (particularly tomatoes) taste fairly subpar in the
United States is because of the journey they make to reach your salad. If the
tomatoes are coming from across the country (or Mexico, or another nation)
they are actually picked prematurely so instead of ripening on the vine they
ripen during transit. If you've ever had a tomato that tastes "mealy" this is
the reason.

This mass transportation of food over long distances explains why you can get
an orange any time of the year in Boston but also why the quality can be so
poor - you're far away from the source.

After moving to San Francsico (from Boston with it's crazy winters) where
local produce is available pretty much year-round at the local food Coop, I've
noticed a pronounced different in the average quality and notably lower
prices.

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mcbrown
The advantage of vine-ripening is a myth, as I have discovered first-hand by
growing tomatoes in a home garden. For optimal flavor, tomatoes should be
picked when they have just a slight blush of color but are still almost
entirely green, and then finish ripening OFF the vine. When allowed to ripen
on the vine their texture and flavor suffer - they tend to taste and feel
almost rotten.

The reason mass-market tomatoes taste worse, and your California tomatoes
taste better, is because they are different varieties. The varieties that make
it to e.g. Boston in the winter are selected to be edible after a long
journey, not for flavor. The varieties that you get in San Francisco year-
round are grown closer to their ultimate destination and can be selected more
for flavor than for their ability to survive long journeys.

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weisser
Yes, I meant to emphasize the long journey being the main factor.

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mschuster91
Outdoor grown pot (for me) is way better than greenhouse or indoor grown pot.
Same for tomatoes - if you have the chance, grow your own. Outdoor tomatoes
are way way tastier than the mass produced industrial crap.

I think that we don't understand plants' needs at all... just let the plants
grow naturally.

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smoyer
I agree that mass-produced tomatoes seem to have been bred to also have no
flavor. I'm not going to blame this on greenhouses though - there's a local
family farm that produces tomatoes that are just as tasty as those from my
garden but are available for an extra 3-4 months of the year. (Note that I'm
in central Pennsylvania)

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sametmax
I'm really suspicious when americans are stating some vegetable/fruit is
"tasty". Everytime I go to the US, what strikes me is the very low quality of
the food products. Even in France, what I consider a shitty tomato taste
better than the regular ones in the US I tried.

It's not a misplaced patriotism, it's just that I fear a lot of americans
really don't know what food is supposed to taste like anymore. Which is very
scary.

The same thing is happening here in Europe, but at a much slower rate. Not
sure if it's reassuring though.

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jerf
It's not a new phenomenon; it's actually a very old one. Much of this US food
culture that you (IMHO rightfully) decry comes from our cultural heritage,
which, despite our post-WWII wealth, was _then_ a poor country. Go back a
hundred years in the US and what you'll find is a country mostly full of
farmers, who are mostly concerned about A: having any food _at all_ and B:
making sure they don't die from the parasites in the food, one way or another.

I was born in 1978, and I was still raised in a culture of blasting my meat
until all the pink is gone, and boiling my vegetables until all flavor was
gone. My influential-grandparents were both raised on a farm, which influenced
what my parents ate. (To this day, neither of my parents will even _consider
trying_ sushi, because it's raw fish. That's it. That ends the argument for
them. You Don't Eat Raw Meat. You don't even eat slightly pink meat.) While
this may have produced generations of people with low standards, it was
_caused_ by trying to make dubious food safe-to-eat. Even today, many of our
official government standards still source from this heritage, being rather
excessively conservative and recommending cooking meat as if it's still full
of parasites, just to be safe.

So, it's not that "Americans" don't know what food is "supposed" to taste like
anymore... many of us have _never_ known what food is "supposed" to taste
like, for many generations. This isn't a situation created by "Big Food", it's
a pre-existing situation that allowed Big Food to drop in, and offer Americans
food that tasted _better_ than what they were used to. That it turns out to
itself have been quite mediocre is a measure of just how bad what came before
it is!

The trend in the US is quite clearly upwards; I think perhaps if you aren't at
least 30 right now that might not be obvious, but believe me, it's getting
better, not worse. Yeah, you can still buy Doritos, which haven't hardly
changed in 30 years, but the produce sections! Holy shit the produce sections.
If you were presented with a produce section from 1985 you'd reach to clean
your glasses, if you have them. Absolutely night and day. And the other
selections too; I can't go back in time but I wonder if my mom could even have
bought _any_ sort of extra-virgin olive oil back then, to take just one
example, let alone have 10 different selections.

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marak830
I have always wondered about this, thank you for the good explanation.

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slfnflctd
This seems like a no brainer-- of course it's cheaper to use inputs from
freely available outdoor sources rather than metered and/or artificially
provided ones. Since these plants evolved in that setting, it works rather
well for them.

There are still many important reasons to pursue indoor farming. For one,
population dense areas have few other options, especially in a crisis. Perhaps
more importantly, space travel, colonizing other moons & planets, or even the
radiation-proof underground cities we may need right here on Earth would all
depend exclusively on such technology.

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kinofcain
Seems like a false dichotomy: why not augment a greenhouse with LED lights?

For some crops, like wine grapes, growers prefer to "dry farm" or use only
natural rainfall.

In dry years, however, most are forced to irrigate if nature hasn't provided
enough water.

If LED lighting prices (and generation costs) continue to decline, why not
"light irrigation" for cloudy climates or latitudes that don't get enough
light for a full growing season.

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Symmetry
The startup right next to us at Greentown Labs is devoted to letting people
grow herbs and such in their kitchens.

[https://grovelabs.io/](https://grovelabs.io/)

I've learned a lot about growing plants under LEDs talking to them. In the
long run space exploration will require us to do a lot of indoor plant
cultivation.

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lyschoening
Indoor farming is not good for wheat or corn, or really anything where the
majority of the plant isn't fragile and/or valuable. Even if we had a mini-
wheat without a stem it would be hard to compete with the outdoors. But it's
great for leafy vegetables.

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asuffield
Interesting. Why?

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dickbasedregex
Cheap space, lower nutrient requirements, less (depending on the crop) or more
conventional infrastructure, etc...

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kevindeasis
Well, I am just going to leave this article here:
[http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japan-automated-
facto...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japan-automated-factory-
lettuce/)

Indoor farming will be much more cheaper, efficient, and more environmentally
friendly.

Imagine how much transportation is required to deliver food from a farm to the
grocery to your table.

~~~
evgen
Indoor farming will not be cheaper, efficient, or environmentally friendly. It
will be more expensive because it has to supply all of its inputs while
outdoor farms get a _massive_ energy subsidy from the Sun. The amount of
energy required to deliver food from a farm to the grocery is NOTHING compared
to the energy we spend getting it from grocery to table; indoor farming will
change none of that. It is a delusional pipe-dream from people who do not
understand modern agriculture.

~~~
kevindeasis
Ok, this article claims the productivity:
[http://weburbanist.com/2015/01/11/worlds-largest-indoor-
farm...](http://weburbanist.com/2015/01/11/worlds-largest-indoor-farm-
is-100-times-more-productive/)

Let me find a research paper and see if it is really valid or not

So, I still don't find any reason why vertical farming, which is indoors is a
problem:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming)

What are your thoughts on this?

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crisnoble
The article mentions that the cost of growing wheat indoors would result in an
$18 loaf of bread, so there is a breakeven point. If the cost of
transportation and water continues to rise that breakeven point will get
closer. Saying that it will never work out reminds me of the early 1990s
report that the Army did finding that if we used a tiny portion of the Mojave
desert to grow Algae, the only inputs of which would be grey water from LA and
sun, we could provide enough bio-diesel to take care of all of the USAs
transportation needs. But they killed the project because it would only make
sense in a world where gas would cost more than $1.50, which would never come.

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thaumasiotes
This fails to explain the barrier to reviving that idea when the price of gas
rises.

