
Roquette Science: How computerized arugula farms take over the world (2018) - zeristor
http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/07/this-is-roquette-science/
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threeisoneis
Why not grow hydroponically with the Kratky method instead? It's basically the
Ronco Rotisserie of hydroponics - just set it and forget it.

This is a fairly good intro video to the method:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqtXLiSCsQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqtXLiSCsQE)

I only spent ~£30 on all of the supplies to set up my system and have grown
lettuce, rocket, spinach, tomatillos, and peppers in my apartment. It's
fantastic and simple and will allow me to have a supply of fresh green food
after Brexit.

If you’re interested in hoby hydroponics, it’s a great way to start.

Here's a link to the original Kratky paper on the method:

[https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/hawaii/downloads/Three_Non-
circ...](https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/hawaii/downloads/Three_Non-
circulating_Hydroponic_Methods_for_Growing_lettuce.pdf)

~~~
Diederich
Cool! Can you roughly estimate how much electrical power it takes to grow some
of these from seed to edible item? Thanks!

~~~
jillesvangurp
Depends on the lights you use and how efficiently you are using them. I use a
simple kitchen light led system mounted under the kitchen cabinet to grow some
herbs. 450 lumen, nothing fancy, just ordinary white kitchen leds. The system
is rated at 14 W. So that's 0.014 kwh. It's on for about two thirds of a day.
So, a month of running this would cost me about 7 kwh/month. Depending where
you live that's about a 1-2$ in electricity cost per month. Low enough that I
did not actually look up my KWH price so can't tell you down to the cent. But
cheap enough and I like having fresh herbs around.

I've been running this over a month now. It's mainly a proof of concept before
I invest in some proper led grow lights next winter. Works great so far, my
basil plants are doing fine and will move to the balcony when the temperatures
rise a bit. There's enough room to have two or three small plants below the
lights. Two healthy basil plants translate into an enormous amount of pesto if
you treat them well. I must have harvested several kilos last year by the end
of the summer. That's starting with two anemic supermarket plants.

This improvised kratky system probably uses a bit more. I would say it's
probably 10x or worse. I've seen some fluorescent systems similar to what the
lady in the video uses starting at 140W. But you can get bigger lights. LEDs
are probably more efficient for the same amount of lumen.

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frankus
Indoor farming looks pretty promising, but we shouldn't be building indoor
farms in the middle of dense cities.

If you live in a high-cost city, the best thing to grow in your backyard from
an environmental standpoint is probably an ADU (backyard cottage for someone
to live in), and the best thing to grow in your spare bedroom is probably a
roommate. Displacing walking-distance housing to do farming is a huge loser
from a climate perspective.

Of course there is more to life than emitting as little CO2 as possible, but
to the extent that urban farming has environmental benefits, it is in
exploiting niches caused by shitty land use decisions in the past and present.

(By way of illustration, the average car commuting 20 miles each way every
weekday for a year emits 4.6 metric tons of CO2, so according to the article
you could grow and transport something like four and a half tons of greens for
the same carbon footprint. Maybe I'm weird but that's a lot more than I go
through in a year.)

~~~
jillesvangurp
Depends, people seem to appreciate being surrounded by green stuff for
esthetic reasons. And there also positive side effects on air quality. You can
actually improve air quality in a lot of buildings simply by doing some
indoor/vertical farming. IMHO it would improve most offices I've been in. Also
more green outdoors, would probably be not a bad idea in many cities. I was
debating this with a friend some time ago while looking at the blank wall of
an apartment across his street. Unused vertical space blasted by the sun most
of the day. It gets hot indoor because of that. A layer of green would
definitely help. Add water and nutrients and you have a farm waiting to
happen. Also, it might look pretty and provide some space for birds and other
critters.

The point being here is that this is not a zero sum game; there are many
benefits to growing stuff other than producing food.

A lot of the vegetables grown in Dutch greenhouses mentioned in the article
are actually exported; though other countries are starting to do the same now.

This area here is the most well known and largest greenhouse area in the
Netherlands (and probably world wide). It's comparatively tiny (about 100
square KM).
[https://www.google.com/maps/@51.986133,4.233423,25389m/data=...](https://www.google.com/maps/@51.986133,4.233423,25389m/data=!3m1!1e3)
[https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA21986](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA21986)

The reason greenhouses are used there is because they produce way more per
square meter than traditional farms can. That and access to cheap gas decades
ago caused a boom in greenhouses to happen. Currently many of these
greenhouses are switching from gas to clean energy. Over the last 4-5 decades,
local farmers have optimized their production and they now run very
efficiently.

The Netherlands is (by far) the largest exporter of tomatoes world wide. Most
of those are grown in these and similar facilities as well as many other crops
(i.e. this is not dedicated to just tomatoes). It's a vastly more efficient
way to use land. The point here is that it doesn't take much space to feed a
city.

~~~
frankus
Yes, to be fair, there probably are some exploitable niches unrelated to
crappy land use (which I should point out is much more common in the parts of
the US that co-evolved with the automobile).

For example, fresh herbs cost a fortune in grocery stores here, and are
festooned with single-use plastic packaging, and come in far larger quantities
than one can reasonably use before they go bad. So it makes tons of sense to
have a little herb garden in your house or yard, especially if you can grow
things that are adapted to your local climate (e.g. my rosemary bush is taller
than I am).

But I think the optimal scale inside of expensive cities is probably closer to
"houseplants that you can eat" rather than an urban farm.

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jackyinger
For the love of dirt just go outside and plant some vegetables. With half the
loving care that you put into your tech you can have a beautiful productive
garden.

My mother is an amazing gardener because she pays careful attention to her
crops and applies reasoning and careful experimentation to grow her knowledge.

Have patience, read up, and dig in. You can grow things yourself too.

Perhaps I’m becoming a Luddite...

~~~
PyroLagus
If you have a house with space for a garden and the time to dedicate
gardening, sure. You can grow some things in an apartment even, but not much.
Taking the labor, time, and space requirements out of food production is a
huge deal, especially today. If computerized farming means fresher and cheaper
vegetables in the city, why shouldn't we use that?

~~~
steve918
Power efficiency for one.

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eyko
There's a table in the article about the Net carbon emissions of indoor vs
outdoor farming, claiming a total of 1.1 for outdoor vs 1.0 for indoor.

~~~
philipkglass
I wouldn't trust that table.

1) I redid the calculations using the numbers shown in the table. With more
decimal places, it's 1.054 for outdoor and 1.036 for indoor. The _actual_
penalty for outdoor growing, using their own input numbers, is more like 1.7%
than 10%. Presenting the results rounded to 1 decimal place is misleading.

2) The only reason indoor comes out ahead _at all_ is that they gave indoor
lettuce a 0.18 kg credit for sequestered CO2 and gave the outdoor lettuce no
credit. Plants absorb CO2 while growing regardless of whether they are indoor
or outdoor. In the case of lettuce, there is no long term sequestration
anyway; the plant matter is soon converted back to CO2 when it's metabolized
by humans or microbes. Setting both indoor and outdoor sequestration credits
to 0, indoor has a CO2 footprint of 1.253, significantly larger than outdoor's
1.054.

The original source for the table is cited as a blog article from the
Breakthrough Institute titled "Don't Count Out Vertical Farms." I tried going
back to the original source to see if the numbers were misrepresented here, or
if they had more justification in the original, but the Breakthrough Institute
appears to have removed the article from their site. Existing links to it 404
now.

~~~
mikeyouse
Looks like they changed the link along the way:

[https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food/vertical-farms-
raise...](https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food/vertical-farms-raise-yields-
but-what-about-emissions)

~~~
philipkglass
Thanks. It appears that the sequestration credit for vertical farming presumes
that agricultural land formerly used for lettuce will be converted to a
forest. That's questionable but not crazy.

It gets worse when you look at the footnotes. They assume that the electricity
going to the vertical farm is produced at the Swedish average carbon intensity
per kWh. Sweden is _far_ below the OECD average for electrical energy carbon
intensity:

[http://www.compareyourcountry.org/climate-
policies?cr=oecd&l...](http://www.compareyourcountry.org/climate-
policies?cr=oecd&lg=en&page=2)

Only Switzerland, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway have low enough electrical
carbon intensities for vertical farming to have a smaller carbon footprint,
even conceding the re-forestation assumption.

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dandare
How about the CO2 footprint of the building, ventilation systems, lamps,
cameras, sensors, electronics etc?

~~~
jillesvangurp
Not 0 of course but you can amortize a lot of that over a lot of time and
weigh it against e.g. transportation cost, the cost of intensively farmed soil
not capturing any carbon because it is over fertilized, compacted, and sprayed
with poison, the cost of producing fertilizer, poison, and fuel needed for
operating the machines, etc. There are two sides to this coin.

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Angostura
Interesting - there was a ready-made pun there, and they mangled it in the
headline. In the UK it's just called rocket, not roquette
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruca_sativa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruca_sativa)

~~~
maw
I independently came up with the same pun just last week! I'm disappointed to
learn that I wasn't the first after all.

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kstenerud
This is a good start. Like any nascent operation, there is plenty of room for
efficiency improvements.

What would be really cool to see is an offshoot of this tech for greenhouses,
or rooms with piped in sunlight, or leveraging geothermal energy, etc. Micro
machines for apartments... So many possibilities!

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drallison
Worth reading if only for the nice play on the words _arugula_ and _roquette_
in the title. If you are not amused, you should read your seed catalog.

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vkou
Most of the responses here are missing an important point.

Yes, you can grow leafy greens semi-profitably in urban environments, or in
your garage.

How many calories do those leafy greens contain? Calories are what keep eight
billion people alive. You may be able to grow salad garnish in your office,
but good luck growing the 2,200 calories/day that the average adult needs.

There's no transition from this, to actually useful agriculture, just like how
there's no transition from throwing a Frisbee, to putting a satellite in
orbit.

~~~
ggm
_to actually useful agriculture_

Sorry.. are you saying the 'eat leafy green vegetables' thing is wrong? I
understand your underlying concern is the lack of calories, but we don't eat
purely for calorific content: vegetables have vitamins and fibre without which
we get unhealthy.

Your 'useful' is what worries me. Please don't eat a diet absent any greens
except on doctors advice.

~~~
vkou
If you eat nothing but empty carbs, you will die.

However, growing calories is hard. It's really hard. It's just about
impossible to, outside of a real, outdoor, field.

And we need to do it, to keep people fed. It's the hard part of feeding
people. Urban farming of a small number of high-vitamin, low calorie crops
doesn't solve a problem that anyone is likely to have.

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maxmcorp
"Why vertical farming wont save the world" \- Nuff said!

[https://youtu.be/ISAKc9gpGjw](https://youtu.be/ISAKc9gpGjw)

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hjk05
These systems all feel like the worst parts of failed industrial automation
projects. They take something that is extremely simple (growing lettuce) and
claim to make it “easy” by attaching robotic watering systems and lighting
systems that “work automatically” which then ends up being a very
timeconsuming hobby project to keep alive.

Gardening isn’t all that hard in the first place. Put seeds in the ground,
water occasionally. If you buy a sprinkler you’ll have a more reliable system
than 90% of these arduino based 3d printers hacked into “growing systems”. Of
cause for all the startups the focus is on the “IOT crowdsourced disruption”
not about actual end user value.

