Turning Photons Into Food

In this video Dr. Bruce Bugbee shows the calculations necessary to determine crop yield potential when light is the only limiting factor. This is now widely used to predict yields in indoor agriculture and vertical farming. The approach starts from the efficiency of photosynthesis (measured as quantum yield), expands to include the efficiency of respiration (called carbon use efficiency) and includes photon capture efficiency and harvest index. The model is called the Energy Cascade Model. It has been used by NASA to model the size of a space farm in regenerative food production. It is also used by the USDA to calculate potential yield of agriculture on Earth.

A Team of Scientists Just Made Food From Electricity — and it Could be the Solution to World Hunger

https://futurism.com/a-team-of-scientists-just-made-food-from-electricity-and-it-could-be-the-solution-to-world-hunger/

Electricity to Food - Industrial farming indoors, improves yield 100-fold

This is what I call an Electricity to Food system.  Mostly self contained and isolated from the environment, you could grow food underground or in the desert and control water usage and air temperature.   But they never talk about powering the LED.

So if you use Solar, then it seems like a long way to put up solar cells only to turn it back to light to grow plants. 

That's why this is different then the solar elevated farms. 

I dread the thought of coal or oil to food using this technology. 

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If you thought the agricultural revolution was something that already happened, maybe you should think again: a scientist in the Miyagi Prefecture of east Japan recently converted an old semiconductor factory into the largest indoor farm on the planet illuminated by LEDs. Racking up 25,000 sq. ft. and 10,000 heads of lettuce per day (no, that is not a typo) even this early in the process, the superfarm could very well make outdoor agriculture a figment of history.

Point in case: Shimamura's indoor farm uses just one percent of the water consumed by outside crops. This is thanks to the advanced monitoring systems that are plentiful throughout the entire system. The farm is truly a science experiment at this point, not meant to get into the produce business, but rather the "changing the world" business. It may do just that -- plans are already being drafted to crop up more farms in food-starved areas of the world.

The innovative people at GE Reports have kept us well-apprised with a thorough article on the topic, and the topic surely warrants even more research. We may be witnessing a monumental discovery, as it occurs.

Source:  http://www.mekanikalblog.com/2014/07/s-shimamura-brings-industrial-farming.html

Inter-modal containers used to grow fresh produce.

Basically Electricity to food, independent of how harsh the outside environment is. 

This is nice, I have a friend in New York that talked to me about something like this. 

Ships are not really known as places to grow food on; rather, they’re adding to the food miles that your typical lettuce or tomato spends from where it grows to your table.

On Blueseed, things will be different. This past week, we’ve partnered with Freight Farms, an award-winning startup that makes it possible to grow plants 130 times more efficiently than on land, in terms of space, using only 10% of the conventional amount of water, and without pesticides or herbicides. This is done with soil-less vertical hydroponics in a repurposed shipping container with low energy needs using remote monitoring and control via a cloud-based mobile app.

The 1,000 entrepreneurs on Blueseed will be able to consume entirely local-grown lettuce, supplied by one Freight Farm unit, which requires only about one hour of human operator time per week. Units are self-contained and Freight Farm will be working with Blueseed to adapt them for maritime use.

Lettuce is just the beginning. Blueseed intends to use two Freight Farm units, the second one for vine plants (currently in development). The partnership with Freight Farms is an excellent showcase of local food growing, and is an important step in furthering the environmental sustainability of the Blueseed community.

See images and source at: http://blueseed.co/blog/how-to-grow-fresh-produce-on-a-cruise-ship-and-lots-of-it/