Turning Photons Into Food

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

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.

> 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

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.