Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 166 points – Discovery: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%
earth.com

Breakthrough: "Electronic soil" boosts crop growth by over 50%::This research introduces an innovative approach to soilless cultivation, or hydroponics, by integrating electronic soil, or eSoil.

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This is really only a useful technology for hydroponics, which is really only a useful technology in places that are short on arible land, but the realities of globalization means good luck beating the costs of importing from places that have more arible land than you.

Still neat, I would have liked to have seen an explanation for the change

Hydroponic/aeroponic is way more efficient than growing in dirt. You can stack it as high as you want and grow way more per acre. On top of that you have the reduced amount of fertilizer and water and the increase in growth rate.

There is a reason why the best weed is grown via hydroponic/aeroponic.

It depends on what you mean by efficient. Cost efficiency wise, normal land farming beats out hydroponics by a mile. And really, cost efficiency is one of the top things to consider when it comes to farming on a massive scale.

This is so false it's not even funny. Hydro is way more efficient and aero even more so.

With farming indoors you can control the day/night cycle which not only increases the growth rate it also let's you manipulate fruiting and flowering.

Hydro and aero use a fraction of the water dirt farming does. More water is being taken up by the plants and none of it is being lost to the environment. On top of that evaporation is controlled so less is lost that way.

As mentioned above the growth rate is increased not only by the light cycle but also by being able to more strictly control and fine tune the amount of fertilizer and you use way less of it. Just like the water, fertilizer isn't lost to the environment.

Seems like some of you need to learn more about this stuff. There is a growing number of vertical farms popping up all over the world. Hopefully one day soon we will be buying lettuce, carrots, etc that were grown if not in the same building but on the same block.

If that was the case, why isn't every industrial farm doing it?

In part because traditional farms scale better than aeroponics or hydroponics. In part because farms don't pay for the environmental damage they cause. Because of these two points, there is little incentive to industrialize aeroponics or hydroponics.

What is true right now is that traditional farms use more water, fertilizer, and space, cause more environmental damage, but require less labor. And the labor problem can be mitigated with robotics, if we're willing to invest in that.

The Venn diagram of farmers and early adopters is harry potter’s glasses

Have you seen all the crazy stuff get up to? Geospatial analysis of fields, drones for spot fertilizing, the acres covering water systems, turning waste crops into ethanol, etc

Farmers are quick to jump on an opportunity to refine their current processes in ways that reduce their inputs and increase their yields, especially when it only costs them a few grand in capital investment (drones for surveying and spot treatment) or is hilariously over-subsidized by the government (bioethanol). Wholesale change from the literal ground up, not so much, and perhaps understandably so -- farmers have massive, often generational investment in infrastructure and equipment for farming in specific ways and with specific crops, operate on narrow margins, and don't have much available liquidity to change things up on a whim. For that reason, major innovations in agriculture don't usually come from farmers; instead they usually come from university research.

There is definitely a back and forth between academics and industry in the agriculture field! The technological adoption spectrum was actually defined when looking at farmers.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called "innovators", followed by "early adopters". Next come the early majority and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "Laggards" or "phobics." For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service. The demographic and psychological (or "psychographic") profiles of each adoption group were originally specified by agricultural researchers in 1956: innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders, less prosperous early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbors late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educatedThe model has subsequently been adapted for many areas of technology adoption in the late 20th century, for example in the spread of policy innovations among U.S. states.

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Which is why “rurality” is a synonym for modernity, and why “rural electricity/telephone/internet access” reminds you of a high tech data center. Ok.

fertilizer

Or you could save $62,000/year by letting the mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria do their job.

That depends on yield per year and for certain crops it's incredibly high compared to arable, especially with clever engineering that uses waste heat productively.

We're certainly going to see an increase in city farms for various things over the coming decades, automation just makes it too easy and there are so many good options to explore

Only if you want to use incredible amounts of electricity and occupy a lot of building space. Ignoring those things it may be more efficient but not when you look at the whole picture.

It doesn't actually take that much juice these days. On top of being able to use solar and wind generated power we also have leds that barely use any electricity to run.

Aside from the initial investment for the setup, the ongoing energy and resources needed for hydro and aero are most definitely going to be less than dirt farming especially when you factor in being able to grow year round. And don't forget the reduced amount of fertilizer and water usage. The water isn't lost to the ground with only a small amount of it being used by the plants.

Basically this is like ev versus ice. When you don't factor in everything, one looks better than the other but with all things considered, ev is way better than ice.

being able to grow year round

You can grow year round with low-tunnels (conduit and greenhouse plastic).

There's these peaky things called "seasons" where the amount of sunlight fluctuates, sometimes dramatically based on latitude

Hydroponics, when combined with indoor, vertical farming, is the reason that the Netherlands are one of Europe largest exporters of food. Even though they're one of the countries with the least amount of farmland.

I grow using a technique known as "notill" where you guessed it, I never till the soil. Or replace it. It's organic, I even have helper bugs and worms. Inside. It's awesome.

It's really weird to me that you write just like Jesse talks on the No Till Growers youtube channel

Don't you have to till at least once?

I tried growing on ground that was matted deep with decades old dead vegetation. And even after raking the crap out of it and trying to dethatch it, I couldn't get anything to stick.

After giving it a good till and mixing in a decent bit of old herbivore manure, my plants took and grew wonderfully.

Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.

I've had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.

Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.

A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.

Barley seedlings, traditionally not grown in hydroponic systems, exhibited a 50% increase in growth over 15 days when their roots were stimulated electrically using eSoil.

I didn't know barley is such a masochist plant. I wonder if it's just barley being weird, or if other plants also like being (lightly) electrocuted.

Humanity could already be well fed without stuff like genetic manipulation and eSoil. We have all the agricultural methods to produce enough food for everyone. Fair distribution is the actual challenge, not production.