Why must everything be absolute? You can have urban farming and rural farming. Urban farming would obviously have to happen gradually, so start with easier stuff. It's not "impossible". The point is that it will reduce pressure from rural areas which are going to be stressed significantly in the coming decades.
Urban farming is in early days so ideas are still be attempted that may not make sense for the long term. That may change.
There are many things we do in our worldwide agriculture system precisely because they make economic sense. That doesn't mean they are a good idea. We are going to pay the price for that lack of judgement. I am excited to see anything that bucks that trend.
Large cities would not exist without agriculture. Agriculture is a technology. I understand why it's not popular to talk about this stuff. We're pretty much stuck with all of it, I get it.
I think the main thoughts/focus areas are:
1.) Remove the pricing power on the primary drivers of inflation (urban land, oil&gas, electricity, non-staple food crops, education, unnecessary luxury novelties) so that people are not indebt
2.) When everything in life is automated/delivered via Amazon drone, people especially those living in a rural areas and/or those not technically inclined for remote SW work) a low cost, sustainable reason to get going in the morning. To me, urban farming fits the bill. If done right, after a small startup cost/environmental impact, the long term steady state inputs and outputs are biodegradable. If you are busy with your tomatoes then you are less likely to channel your energy to less productive pursuits (mindless consumerism, illegal activities, discontentment)
3.) Always on fiber optic video conferencing in public spaces in rural townsquares so that there's less fear of missing out on urban/suburban life.
I could see a more distributed food production, avoiding the production madness on natural soil. So country side could be countryside again, farmers could get a healthier life style while cities get cost less food with less pesticides too. I also wonder if this would be interesting on a per-house basis.
The argument doesn't quite work imo because farmers are actively working against the normal ecosystem - we don't want the normal plants to grow there, we want our desired crops. With enough production for us to feed the world and to give farmers a living wage.
I still think it's doable (but not if we also want to feed many times our mass in lifestock), but it's not easy.
To add a slight positive to urban farming - where I live used to be the agricultural heart of the region. It was settled partly because of this and the volcanic soil is very good. Move 100-150 years forward and urban sprawl has completely swallowed the good soil and we mainly farm further out on worse land.
The same can be said of other places I'd have thought?
I am not saying it is not technically possible, but that it might not make financial sense long term. Nor I am saying that we should do without any automation (agriculture, by the way is already highly mechanized), I consider that there might be a sweet spot beyond which further development is not worth the hassle.
Yeah I completely agree it's harder than a short post by a software engineer on HN :grin: ...
But you're right that it's amazing how many variables add to the optimal solution.
I think part of what's hard is that it's a process that includes time as a variable. Who wants to hold onto land for 10 years while it prepares for productivity?
I think in time we'll see a combo of a need for industrial scale soilless vertical farming to feed a huge population, and a return to extremely sustainable solutions for the aristocrats that can afford the fanciest "farmers market" food.
Try tilling 40 acres with a horse. Imagine getting sick, or giving birth.
We lived without cities, but with a vastly lower population and quality of life. Things like knowledge work and financialization are what made possible great ventures such as energy distribution, transportation, mechanized farming, medicines, and so forth. I'm not sure agriculture would even sustain the existing rural population without the infrastructure of a complex modern economy.
Considering how abusive the human relationship is with the land and the animals, why don't we have an agricultural revolution and creates 10s of millions of jobs for farmers? Modern human imagination is so constrained to think that this is impossible. But really it's just political and as easy to do as it is to automate millions of jobs away.
Ok, this is very cool, but it looks like as of now it requires orders of magnitude more manual labor than existing agriculture. This means increase of produce price to about the same extent. Unless a huge paradigm shift will happen (which takes decades without a major disaster), I don't see this as feasible any time soon.
As I understand it we don't even have to change farming to achieve that. We have abundant food for the current population size. It's distribution and the global economic system that make it extremely unequally available.
One issue is that arable land isn't, along with other resources, evenly distributed over the plant, nor do the people have equal access to technology maximise production output.
This is why we need trade, which is arguably better than one form or another of centralised government controlled redistribution.
So the issue isn't, and probably never will be, limits to resources, but limits to human resourcefulness - of which there are none.
Farmland isn't going to be developed for the same reason it's not currently being developed, it's either zoned so development is difficult, or too far from the city to be interesting for development.
Also, unless we figure out how to replace all crops with vertical efficient farms, demand for agriculture is going to remain. It will just shift to different crops which can't be farmed this way.
The obvious limitation is that conventional agriculture can't scale endlessly. This isn't controversial, even among conventional farmers. It's a known issue that the 'next green revolution' is needed to feed the ever expanding billions of people on the planet. Conventional agriculture, while a modern miracle in many ways, is just inefficient – in space, resources, etc.
One also can't just hand-wave over the negative externalities of modern farming. Pesticides, soil-carbon loss, and the energy requirements are completely unsustainable.
It is true that there's an enormous difference between a 'food forest' and a natural one. A lot of the research suggests that to adequately address climate change, we can't simply convert farmland to food-forests and call it a day. We actually need to return a significant portion of land back into natural forests.
Anything seems possible when you don't know what you're talking about. There is no spare agricultural capacity to be had anywhere on this planet and the required inputs are both not something we can replace and dwindling.
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