Grain farming goes indoors
I just can&#x27;t see how this can replace conventional farming at scale. Currently, outdoor farming uses 4.62 billion acres [1]. The article says indoor farming has 25x the yield per acre. So that would be 177 million acres. Today, there are only about 44 million acres of total buildings in the world [2]. So to replace conventional farming, we&#x27;d need to build 4x as many buildings as currently exist; what&#x27;s the environmental impact of _that_?<p>But the real deal-breaker is energy. Outdoor farming gets energy naturally from sunlight. Indoor farming is powered by LED lights. LEDs could be more efficient than sunlight by only emitting the frequencies that are most useful for plants; but on the other hand, I suspect that they might need to be brighter than sunlight to achieve 25x the yield per acre. So let&#x27;s estimate it&#x27;s exactly as bright as sunlight. To light 177 million acres exactly as bright as sunlight, you&#x27;d need somewhere around 3,000,000 terawatt-hours per year. For comparison, global electricity consumption is around 25,000 terawatt-hours per year [3]. So to replace conventional farming, this would need about 100x as much electricity as the current global electrical grid can supply!<p>So until we get fusion power, I doubt this is practical.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;worlds-farmland-total-bigger-expected&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.producer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;worlds-farmland-total-bigger-e...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guidehouseinsights.com&#x2F;news-and-views&#x2F;the-global-building-stock-is-expected-to-exceed-183-billion-square-meters-in-2026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guidehouseinsights.com&#x2F;news-and-views&#x2F;the-global-bui...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electric_energy_consumption" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electric_energy_consumption</a>