Technology We should make a National Water Reclamation System

[Sailor.X]

I have been thinking about this for quite some time. As you know a lot of places in the US and around the world for that matter are having extreme water issues



The current way of doing things can't last and many places are hitting a hard wall. So I got to thinking. We have massive flooding in some parts of the US and Massive Snowfall in others. What if we place a series of Infrastructure and company based systems and groups in place to collect the Flood water and massive snow buildup. Transfer it to locations to be purified. And then sent to places in the US that needs it. A National Water system that takes water that is not used at all and puts it to use where it is needed. What are you thoughts on the matter?

 

[PsihoKekec]

That would have to an infrastructural project on downright epic scale.

What if we place a series of Infrastructure and company based systems and groups

I don't know what you meant with this, it sounds gobbledygook to me, but the first step would have to be a series of massive catchment dams in tributary streams of the rivers that have occasional floods and you will have to hit a lot of people with eminent domain, because this requires not just the land for dams, but also the land that will be flooded in the catchment time.
Then you need pipelines to to pump the water from catchment areas across the mountains to artesian aquifers which would be filled as water storage.

Thirty years ago it could be doable, today when the west is struggling with maintaining basic infrastructure it's pipe dream.

 

[Sailor.X]

That would have to an infrastructural project on downright epic scale.



I don't know what you meant with this, it sounds gobbledygook to me, but the first step would have to be a series of massive catchment dams in tributary streams of the rivers that have occasional floods and you will have to hit a lot of people with eminent domain, because this requires not just the land for dams, but also the land that will be flooded in the catchment time.
Then you need pipelines to to pump the water from catchment areas across the mountains to artesian aquifers which would be filled as water storage.

Thirty years ago it could be doable, today when the west is struggling with maintaining basic infrastructure it's pipe dream.

I mean't get both Private industry and State/ Federal governments involved in making these projects happen. And the US is not the Great we use to be. We are still great at mega projects. But most lay people seem to have forgotten that fact. The problem is not technical expertise. It is politicians not wanting to spend money on it.

 

[Marduk]

I have been thinking about this for quite some time. As you know a lot of places in the US and around the world for that matter are having extreme water issues



The current way of doing things can't last and many places are hitting a hard wall. So I got to thinking. We have massive flooding in some parts of the US and Massive Snowfall in others. What if we place a series of Infrastructure and company based systems and groups in place to collect the Flood water and massive snow buildup. Transfer it to locations to be purified. And then sent to places in the US that needs it. A National Water system that takes water that is not used at all and puts it to use where it is needed. What are you thoughts on the matter?

Flood water sucks, no one wants to deal with that, it would not be worth the price anyone will pay for the water. Snow buildup, excess river flow, and so on, that is conventional "water infrastructure", and yeah, it is what would be most likely used to solve any such problems - but then again, it has to be paid for too.

The problem is organizational and financial - it's one thing if some large water users like farms in dry places argue like hell to get more water allocated when it's free or cheap, but once you build that infrastructure and tell them to pay water bills reflecting its cost, suddenly they aren't so interested.

And that's without even getting into legal and regulatory roadblocks such massive infrastructure projects normally have even if money was arranged. Do you have any idea how many habitats of rare bugs and birds would be getting disturbed?

 

[Bear Ribs]

I have been thinking about this for quite some time. As you know a lot of places in the US and around the world for that matter are having extreme water issues



The current way of doing things can't last and many places are hitting a hard wall. So I got to thinking. We have massive flooding in some parts of the US and Massive Snowfall in others. What if we place a series of Infrastructure and company based systems and groups in place to collect the Flood water and massive snow buildup. Transfer it to locations to be purified. And then sent to places in the US that needs it. A National Water system that takes water that is not used at all and puts it to use where it is needed. What are you thoughts on the matter?

This would actually dick over the environment pretty badly. That snowmelt and flooding are needed to keep things like Wetlands functional.

Mismanagement of water in the USA is joined at the hip with abusive regulation and the wealthy taking advantage of turning natural resources into their personal resources, at the expense of everybody else.

Let's take an example from everybody's favorite punching bag, California. Now it's well known, California has some serious water issues, it's got too many people and it's mostly desert, needing a huge influx of water from several other states just to stay hydrated. It's bad enough that California needs to use draconian measures like forbidding people from watering their lawns... poor and middle-class people of course, the wealthy and their golf courses get along just fine.

California is also the second-largest producer of rice, with almost half a million acres of rice planted, much of it for export to China. Rice fields look like this:

Keen eyes might spot some water in that picture. Actually they flood those fields to around 6 inches deep. I wonder how many people could afford lawns if that wasn't going on? What's even worse, Rice isn't actually profitable. Literally, China pays less than it costs to grow the rice. Government subsidies, OTOH, amount to significantly more per pound than the actual selling price of the rice, almost all the money those rice fields make are actually from collecting a wide range of programs to grow the rice at a loss and ship most of it to China.

What Price Rice? California Farmers Harvest $480 Million in Subsidies

Sacramento Bee | September 24, 2001 | BY: Paul Schnitt, Bee Staff Writer For more than 50 years, the Spanglers have farmed rice in Sutter County, brothers working side by side, growing old and yielding to sons. But there has never been a time when their silent partners have been so vital: the...

www.iatp.org

So needless to say, a heck of a lot of problems would be solved by not growing rice in the middle of a desert. And they do, 95% of the rice is grown in the Sacramento Valley, ie. the most drought-stricken part of the state.

https://rice.ucanr.edu/About_California_Rice/

So basically a metric ton of California's water woes could be solved by removing the massive financial bennies the state and federal government hand out that only really subsidize China. Multiply by fifty other states and ten thousand crops and you have the issues with water in the country.

 

[Sailor.X]

This would actually dick over the environment pretty badly. That snowmelt and flooding are needed to keep things like Wetlands functional.

Mismanagement of water in the USA is joined at the hip with abusive regulation and the wealthy taking advantage of turning natural resources into their personal resources, at the expense of everybody else.

Let's take an example from everybody's favorite punching bag, California. Now it's well known, California has some serious water issues, it's got too many people and it's mostly desert, needing a huge influx of water from several other states just to stay hydrated. It's bad enough that California needs to use draconian measures like forbidding people from watering their lawns... poor and middle-class people of course, the wealthy and their golf courses get along just fine.

California is also the second-largest producer of rice, with almost half a million acres of rice planted, much of it for export to China. Rice fields look like this:

Keen eyes might spot some water in that picture. Actually they flood those fields to around 6 inches deep. I wonder how many people could afford lawns if that wasn't going on? What's even worse, Rice isn't actually profitable. Literally, China pays less than it costs to grow the rice. Government subsidies, OTOH, amount to significantly more per pound than the actual selling price of the rice, almost all the money those rice fields make are actually from collecting a wide range of programs to grow the rice at a loss and ship most of it to China.

What Price Rice? California Farmers Harvest $480 Million in Subsidies

Sacramento Bee | September 24, 2001 | BY: Paul Schnitt, Bee Staff Writer For more than 50 years, the Spanglers have farmed rice in Sutter County, brothers working side by side, growing old and yielding to sons. But there has never been a time when their silent partners have been so vital: the...

www.iatp.org

So needless to say, a heck of a lot of problems would be solved by not growing rice in the middle of a desert. And they do, 95% of the rice is grown in the Sacramento Valley, ie. the most drought-stricken part of the state.

https://rice.ucanr.edu/About_California_Rice/

So basically a metric ton of California's water woes could be solved by removing the massive financial bennies the state and federal government hand out that only really subsidize China. Multiply by fifty other states and ten thousand crops and you have the issues with water in the country.

But said blooding also causes a few billion dollars worth of damage and costs lives when it happens. If I have to choose between people starving and a wetland drying up in an area. The Wetland looses everyday and all day. A lot of people around the world depend on the food the US produces.

 

[Bacle]

The problem is, that groundwater is not something that is easily or quickly rechargable; most aquifers recharge on the timescale of centuries.

And surface water rights are a very, very contentious issue already, based on lots of players.

We need to be smarter with our industrial water usage and regulations, and not think it's a choice of 'we can have wetlands, or people can die of thirst/starve'; that is absolutely a false dichotomy and destroying wetlands is one of the easiest ways to fuck over the entire local biosphere, on an increasing scale with how much wetlands is taken out.

We need smarter farming methods, less water wasting crops in bad areas (looking at Cali's rice fields and flood irrigation in general), need to start getting people into urban and vertical farming to increase food supply without destroying more wild areas for crop cultivation, and we need to start being realistic about certains cities outsized impacts on the issue (SoCal, Vegas, Phoenix).

The Colorado River Compact alone needs to be reworked, because it was made in an unusually wet peroid during the 1800's, and the allocations built into are not actually representative of the normal water amounts in the Colorado River Basin.

 

[Bear Ribs]

But said blooding also causes a few billion dollars worth of damage and costs lives when it happens. If I have to choose between people starving and a wetland drying up in an area. The Wetland looses everyday and all day. A lot of people around the world depend on the food the US produces.

People keep building on floodplains, because the US government keeps subsidizing that behavior.

Building In A Flood Zone: 11 Things (2023) You Must Know

Are you looking to build in a flood zone? Want to know if it is possible? We have everything you need to know in our latest blog post.

gokcecapital.com

Note that most of that money goes to houses built on riverfronts, lakes, and beachfronts. In other words, it's being used to subsidize the super-rich's homes. It's also worth noting that people building in floodplains then increases the total area of the floodplain, causing flooding in areas that aren't floodplain. As usual, the rich offload their problems onto everybody else.

Building in the Floodplain

www.a2gov.org

As far as food vs. wetlands... guess where Rice would actually grow really well without monstrous government subsidies? Where it regularly floods. Yeah, without government subsidies we could grow the same amount of rice (and other intensive crops) by using the floodplains and wetlands to grow crops that like those conditions, like rice, instead of paying people to build houses where it floods and to grow rice in a major drought zone.

That's beyond that you can say "Wetlands lose" but the loss of biodiversity is a loss for everybody, not only are those animals, plants, and terrain vital for keeping the rest of the planet going, there tends to be immense amounts of medical research, biotechnology, and other scientific discoveries those wild lands provide us.

 

[Sailor.X]

People keep building on floodplains, because the US government keeps subsidizing that behavior.

Building In A Flood Zone: 11 Things (2023) You Must Know

Are you looking to build in a flood zone? Want to know if it is possible? We have everything you need to know in our latest blog post.

gokcecapital.com

Note that most of that money goes to houses built on riverfronts, lakes, and beachfronts. In other words, it's being used to subsidize the super-rich's homes. It's also worth noting that people building in floodplains then increases the total area of the floodplain, causing flooding in areas that aren't floodplain. As usual, the rich offload their problems onto everybody else.

Building in the Floodplain

www.a2gov.org

As far as food vs. wetlands... guess where Rice would actually grow really well without monstrous government subsidies? Where it regularly floods. Yeah, without government subsidies we could grow the same amount of rice (and other intensive crops) by using the floodplains and wetlands to grow crops that like those conditions, like rice, instead of paying people to build houses where it floods and to grow rice in a major drought zone.

That's beyond that you can say "Wetlands lose" but the loss of biodiversity is a loss for everybody, not only are those animals, plants, and terrain vital for keeping the rest of the planet going, there tends to be immense amounts of medical research, biotechnology, and other scientific discoveries those wild lands provide us.

Most of the world is not eating Rice. Most of the World is eating Corn and Wheat. And those lands are the ones I am the most concerned for. Not California Rice Farming.

 

[Marduk]

We need smarter farming methods, less water wasting crops in bad areas (looking at Cali's rice fields and flood irrigation in general), need to start getting people into urban and vertical farming to increase food supply without destroying more wild areas for crop cultivation, and we need to start being realistic about certains cities outsized impacts on the issue (SoCal, Vegas, Phoenix).

Unless you are doing it on Mars and Elon Musk pays for it, pointless waste of money only idiots would shell out for. If growing food in cities was cost effective, China would be doing it since ages.

Stopping doing stupid shit that makes no sense in either financial or food supply goal is a better idea. Like growing corn to turn into a little of overly expensive fuel additive.

 

[Bacle]

Unless you are doing it on Mars and Elon Musk pays for it, pointless waste of money only idiots would shell out for.

No, vertical farming has a lot of potential to make food production far more cost-effective in marginal areas, and allow greater amounts of food to be grown in the same acrage.

Old abandoned warehouses or vacant lots can be converted to growhouses or urban farms without too much fuss, and water-reclaimation systems on site can limit water use, while on site solar and/or wind can help off-set energy costs.

There are ways to reduce water usage without destroying wetlands or ecosystems, and without starving people, and a lot of them come down to using tech and methods we already have in new ways, or just not growing certain crops in certain areas.

 

[Marduk]

No, vertical farming has a lot of potential to make food production far more cost-effective in marginal areas, and allow greater amounts of food to be grown in the same acrage.

Yes, it is a way to squeeze a lot of food growing in a small acreage. Great for Lunar and Martian colonies, it's not like they can just plow a field outside. On Earth though, no one wants to pay space prices for food. Because the biolab level hardware needed to make this shit work costs real money.

Old abandoned warehouses or vacant lots can be converted to growhouses or urban farms without too much fuss, and water-reclaimation systems on site can limit water use, while on site solar and/or wind can help off-set energy costs.

There are ways to reduce water usage without destroying wetlands or ecosystems, and without starving people, and a lot of them come down to using tech and methods we already have in new ways, or just not growing certain crops in certain areas.

>converted
Yes, you can set up a lab in an abandoned warehouse. The lab equipment costs far more than the warehouse though.
And that's without even getting into power use, the only crop people do that with on large scale often is weed, and usually the illegal kind, because it can be sold expensively enough to justify that.

 

[Bacle]

Yes, it is a way to squeeze a lot of food growing in a small acreage. Great for Lunar and Martian colonies, it's not like they can just plow a field outside. On Earth though, no one wants to pay space prices for food. Because the biolab level hardware needed to make this shit work costs real money.


>converted
Yes, you can set up a lab in an abandoned warehouse. The lab equipment costs far more than the warehouse though.
And that's without even getting into power use, the only crop people do that with on large scale often is weed, and usually the illegal kind, because it can be sold expensively enough to justify that.

No, legal weed use the converted warehouse method for growing as well, and get's pretty good results.

And with the way solar and wind are subsidized, getting renewables set up on the top of the warehouse is hardly a big hassle; use a reverse-osmosis machine and you can do water purification and recapture pretty well.

Light-pipes are also used to reduce energy cost, though in some 24/7 full tilt grows they short circuit the natural life-cycle on the plant through light-timing manipulation.

 

[Bear Ribs]

No, legal weed use the converted warehouse method for growing as well, and get's pretty good results.

And with the way solar and wind are subsidized, getting renewables set up on the top of the warehouse is hardly a big hassle; use a reverse-osmosis machine and you can do water purification and recapture pretty well.

Light-pipes are also used to reduce energy cost, though in some 24/7 full tilt grows they short circuit the natural life-cycle on the plant through light-timing manipulation.

You cannot put enough solar panels on a building's roof to power its interior with grow lights (obviously an acre of sunlight is enough to grow an acre of plants, multiply this by several levels and it's clearly going to fail, add in inefficiency losses and it's going to fail harder, add in the skyscraper next door shading your solar panels for several key hours a day and it's going to failed harder... er... harderest), and wind turbines in a city are completely awful. The surrounding buildings generate a ton of turbulence that tends to destroy the turbine, plus they're noisy and annoy the neighbors and sometimes explode. There's a reason wind farms are usually deep out in the boonies.

One thing worth noting as a major waster is ethanol. The US eats a surprisingly tiny percentage of its grain, and turns several times more than it eats into fuel.

Making corn into ethanol needs a lot of water beyond what the corn took to grow in the first place, so much so that it's actually highly wasteful to even try.

They do it anyway because, you guessed it, there are massive freakin' government subsidies for ethanol.

Study shows tax payers subsidizing ethanol at $4.18 per gallon

A new study by University of Missouri Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (PDF) reveals that the current corn ethanol tax credit is effectively costing tax payers $4.18 per gallon and is driving up grain prices. The study estimates that...

www.nrdc.org

 

[Marduk]

No, legal weed use the converted warehouse method for growing as well, and get's pretty good results.

Still works... as weed is something that sells for few dollars per gram.
Staple crops sell for a dollar or less per kilogram, usually much less.

And with the way solar and wind are subsidized, getting renewables set up on the top of the warehouse is hardly a big hassle; use a reverse-osmosis machine and you can do water purification and recapture pretty well.

Exploiting green money grifts that shouldn't exist can help, but even then, marginal.

Light-pipes are also used to reduce energy cost, though in some 24/7 full tilt grows they short circuit the natural life-cycle on the plant through light-timing manipulation.

And cost money...
Long story short, hi tech agricultultural techniques that make sense for ultra expensive plants like drugs, medicines and some spices (or even normal food for hipsters willing to pay few hundred percent premium for food if you call it organic), are economically unthinkable for the cheap stuff that people eat by kilograms.

 

[Bacle]

You cannot put enough solar panels on a building's roof to power its interior with grow lights (obviously an acre of sunlight is enough to grow an acre of plants, multiply this by several levels and it's clearly going to fail, add in inefficiency losses and it's going to fail harder, add in the skyscraper next door shading your solar panels for several key hours a day and it's going to failed harder... er... harderest), and wind turbines in a city are completely awful. The surrounding buildings generate a ton of turbulence that tends to destroy the turbine, plus they're noisy and annoy the neighbors and sometimes explode. There's a reason wind farms are usually deep out in the boonies.

One thing worth noting as a major waster is ethanol. The US eats a surprisingly tiny percentage of its grain, and turns several times more than it eats into fuel.

Making corn into ethanol needs a lot of water beyond what the corn took to grow in the first place, so much so that it's actually highly wasteful to even try.

They do it anyway because, you guessed it, there are massive freakin' government subsidies for ethanol.

Study shows tax payers subsidizing ethanol at $4.18 per gallon

A new study by University of Missouri Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (PDF) reveals that the current corn ethanol tax credit is effectively costing tax payers $4.18 per gallon and is driving up grain prices. The study estimates that...

www.nrdc.org

The panels were never meant to power the whole grow the whole time like some off-grid set up, they were for tax breaks and back-up power. Call it a green grift, call it a tax break, but it works and businesses use it to help off-set energy costs.

Though you are absolutely right the ethanol shit, or at least corn based ethanol, is pretty wasteful water wise. You get more alcohol per pound of base plant water weigh/matter with sugar cane or sugar beat, or even just winter wheat in cold climates.

Or just stop trying to wean ourselves of oil/petro-chems, and instead focusing on doing that stuff as cleanly and environmentally aware ways that minimize habitat disturbance/destruction or economic hardships/hazards to the locals around the wells/refineries/pipelines.

I'm still betting on fusion, even if maybe not widespread in my life-time.

Still works... as weed is something that sells for few dollars per gram.
Staple crops sell for a dollar or less per kilogram.


Exploiting green money grifts that shouldn't exist can help, but even then, marginal.


And cost money...
Long story short, hi tech agricultultural techniques that make sense for ultra expensive plants like drugs, medicines and some spices (or even normal food for hipsters willing to pay few hundred percent premium for food if you call it organic), are economically unthinkable for the cheap stuff that people eat by kilograms.

At this point, yes, in most cases in the developed world, that is true.

This tech is more to help the developing world be more self-sufficient, and utilize the rather abundant sun and wind in the tropics, where a lot of the poorer nations are.

Particularly island nations with limited foot-prints, as you could do a food grow on a converted freighter instead of a warehouse, and move it where needed when need. Ocean-steading, I think the concept is called.

Like, Japan could really benefit from vertical farming, using old buildings and cheap nuclear power to make it work.

And that's the real kicker, is indoor grows become much, much more feasible if couple with not just renewables, but fission and in the future fusion power. Or places like Iceland, that already do indoor grows for a lot of shit with cheap geothermal, and have large greenhouses.

A purpose built vertical farm could even use see-through/mesh flooring to aid air flow and light dispersal, with the proper considerations for seasonal sun placement.

Vertical farming, at scale, is a very straightforward way to help places with limited growing seasons or footprint provide larger amounts of food locally, lessen need for direct import of food-stuffs.

 

[Marduk]

Though you are absolutely right the ethanol shit, or at least corn based ethanol, is pretty wasteful water wise. You get more alcohol per pound of base plant water weigh/matter with sugar cane or sugar beat, or even just winter wheat in cold climates.

Even best crops have bad EROEI and worse than bad economics without subsidies - plant waste processing into methane and such is the only sensible option here really, only because the waste has no real value otherwise and you get it from growing stuff for other uses anyway.

This tech is more to help the developing world be more self-sufficient, and utilize the rather abundant sun and wind in the tropics, where a lot of the poorer nations are.

Developing world especially cannot afford this shit even if it cared about it. In some specific locations solar can make sense as it is several times more cost effective there than in environmentalist northern Europe, but that's about it.

Particularly island nations with limited foot-prints, as you could do a food grow on a converted freighter instead of a warehouse, and move it where needed when need. Ocean-steading, I think the concept is called.

Those nations either have proportionally little population, or are better off importing their food while earning money from industry and services.
No country with a normal economy can afford space grade food production en masse.

Like, Japan could really benefit from vertical farming, using old buildings and cheap nuclear power to make it work.

It does use that... For premium fresh lettuce access. Not for the caloric stuff.

The Competitive Economics Of Vertical And Greenhouse Farming — AGRITECTURE

Greenhouse or vertical farm growing, or a combination of the two, can get farmers close to meeting the needs of today’s consumer.

www.agritecture.com

Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer with other vegetables and sides.

As i said, it's fine for very high value items where the controlled environment is a major help...
But for anything else, it's good only for hipster food, not for the proverbial masses.

And that's the real kicker, is indoor grows become much, much more feasible if couple with not just renewables, but fission and in the future fusion power. Or places like Iceland, that already do indoor grows for a lot of shit with cheap geothermal, and have large greenhouses.

Renewables, fission, fusion, unicorn farts.
Get the price per industrial megawatt-hour low enough by whatever means, and it will work. But then we will live in a very different economy in general, one a big step closer to post-scarcity.
It's hard to imagine the amount of changes "sufficiently cheap energy" could do to merely existing, modern technological processes, economy, industry etc.
Things that are economically pointless now would could become a great idea, while many energy saving measures would become economically pointless.

A purpose built vertical farm could even use see-through/mesh flooring to aid air flow and light dispersal, with the proper considerations for seasonal sun placement.

Vertical farming, at scale, is a very straightforward way to help places with limited growing seasons or footprint provide larger amounts of food locally, lessen need for direct import of food-stuffs.

Even for security purposes, bunkers full of food rations are better and cheaper - if you can't import food, good luck importing all the parts and supplies that make thousands of such farms work.

 

[Bacle]

Even best crops have bad EROEI and worse than bad economics without subsidies - plant waste processing into methane and such is the only sensible option here really, only because the waste has no real value otherwise and you get it from growing stuff for other uses anyway.

Developing world especially cannot afford this shit even if it cared about it. In some specific locations solar can make sense as it is several times more cost effective there than in environmentalist northern Europe, but that's about it.


Those nations either have proportionally little population, or are better off importing their food while earning money from industry and services.
No country with a normal economy can afford space grade food production en masse.

It does use that... For premium fresh lettuce access. Not for the caloric stuff.

The Competitive Economics Of Vertical And Greenhouse Farming — AGRITECTURE

Greenhouse or vertical farm growing, or a combination of the two, can get farmers close to meeting the needs of today’s consumer.

www.agritecture.com

As i said, it's fine for very high value items where the controlled environment is a major help...
But for anything else, it's good only for hipster food, not for the proverbial masses.


Renewables, fission, fusion, unicorn farts.
Get the price per industrial megawatt-hour low enough by whatever means, and it will work. But then we will live in a very different economy in general, one a big step closer to post-scarcity.

Even for security purposes, bunkers full of food rations are better and cheaper - if you can't import food, good luck importing all the parts and supplies that make thousands of such farms work.

On the methane extraction, I do agree that or composting is a better use for green waste than ethanol.

The developing world has a lot of the rare materials needed, just not the in-house production know-how for solar; wind and possibly tidal is far more indigeniously developable right now for many of them.

However, grants and aid money to those nations for solar panels, say ones made in the US instead of the CCP, would be a good way to build ties with friends and help them be more resilient against CCP coercion.

This is also why you don't do fully indoor grows, and use light pipes/skylights where possible, to mean you need less artifical light to keep the plants going. And the thing is, you could do it in a way that grows more than one plant type in the same room, and actually use multiple plants together to make it more cost effective and produce less waste, since the right crop mixes are self-reinforcing/mutually aiding.

Relying on mono-crop grows and farms is a big part of the waste water issue as well; a better, self-reinforcing crop mix would need both less water and less fertilizer to keep operational and profitable.

 

[Marduk]

On the methane extraction, I do agree that or composting is a better use for green waste than ethanol.

The developing world has a lot of the rare materials needed, just not the in-house production know-how for solar; wind and possibly tidal is far more indigeniously developable right now for many of them.

We're not in Starcraft, the raw materials usually are a small fraction of the price of incredibly high tech devices they are used for, which are made only in a handful of most developed countries, with even some major EU countries struggling to make their own in a competitive way.

However, grants and aid money to those nations for solar panels, say ones made in the US instead of the CCP, would be a good way to build ties with friends and help them be more resilient against CCP coercion.

That's just giving them money in form of more expensive solar panels, just why. If you have so much money to spare, use it to build nuclear power plants in USA, and by total accident get economies of scale good enough that others will be able to buy them much cheaper too.

This is also why you don't do fully indoor grows, and use light pipes/skylights where possible, to mean you need less artifical light to keep the plants going. And the thing is, you could do it in a way that grows more than one plant type in the same room, and actually use multiple plants together to make it more cost effective and produce less waste, since the right crop mixes are self-reinforcing/mutually aiding.

Relying on mono-crop grows and farms is a big part of the waste water issue as well; a better, self-reinforcing crop mix would need both less water and less fertilizer to keep operational and profitable.

That's great stuff for highly efficient space colonies where every kilogram of anything has to be delivered at a great cost. All these measures are definitely helping efficiency... but the work and tech needed for it often makes it less, not more profitable, which is why they don't even come close to the cost efficiency of the usual "dude on a big farm with a tractor" kind of farming.

 

[Bacle]

We're not in Starcraft, the raw materials usually are a small fraction of the price of incredibly high tech devices they are used for, which are made only in a handful of most developed countries, with even some major EU countries struggling to make their own in a competitive way.


That's just giving them money in form of more expensive solar panels, just why. If you have so much money to spare, use it to build nuclear power plants in USA, and by total accident get economies of scale good enough that others will be able to buy them much cheaper too.

That's great stuff for highly efficient space colonies where every kilogram of anything has to be delivered at a great cost. All these measures are definitely helping efficiency... but the work and tech needed for it often makes it less, not more profitable, which is why they don't even come close to the cost efficiency of the usual "dude on a big farm with a tractor" kind of farming.

Vertical farming is not meant to replace traditional farming, it's meant to supplement it.

I think you are working on the false idea I was pushing for all farming to become vertical/indoor farming, instead of showing why it is both reasonable and viable in an increasing number of places due tech and agriculture innovations.