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Oh yeah, and corn and other grains. I just meant a large portion of land that feeds livestock is not suitable for farming, even more is not suitable for multi crop non-grain farming, so I think his estimates are way off.

That water is becoming far less cheap, at least here in California. We sucked so much out of our aquifers that the central valley is sinking! There's a limit to how much more we can irrigate.

It's probably commercial turf not grown from scratch. To enable commercial turf to survive harvesting , transporation and installation, immediately after seeding a field they roll out a 20' wide biodegradeable plastic mesh which becomes incorporated into the sod as the grass grows. I've actually had a bubble like this beside my house, but much bigger, caused by a glitch in the irrigation system.

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

@newtboy
There's also absolutely no measure of the aquifer itself, how it moves, mixes, flows, etc. The system is mostly unmapped.

Fortunately that's not entirely true. If you go check out the wiki article, it has a lot of links on a lot of mapping that has been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer#Hydrology_and_Geology
Most relevant to trying to analyze things, the graphic below is a mapping of the normal water flow within the aquifer based off of testing from about 1,500 different locations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floridan_aquifer#/media/File:Estimated_transmissivity_of_the_Floridan_aquifer_sytem.png

The Mosaic leak occurred somewhere inland from Tampa as close as I can find, if you can narrow that down it'd help. On the map that looks like good news though because that region shows upwards of 100,000 m^3 of water flow per day. So very good mixing for the quantity of leak being discussed if it falls there.

And you didn't address the orange problem.
That's because there isn't one. Radon doesn't work like lead or mercury, it's a gas and doesn't build up in irrigation or the food chain. It bleeds off very fast, irrigation systems bleed it almost instantly into the atmosphere. In animals and meat bags like us, the references I've found suggest the average time from consumption to release is about an hour so we don't hold onto Radon long. Again reason for optimism imo.

I think corn would be doable, but the advantages would be less efficient compared to short plants.

At some level of efficiency, there is a break even point (which can also take into consideration shipping costs and fossil fuel usage to major metro areas). I'm pretty convinced that vertical farming could be a significantly good / efficient idea for those plants that it is best suited for, but I do think there would be some early-adoption issues that would make it less practical for tall stuff like corn. At least until it has been done enough to work out the kinks and economy of scale kicks in.

So at least for the time being, I think we'll see it first be applied to leafy plants and tuber / root plants. But I could definitely be a biased opinion since my family revolves around conventional corn farming on irrigated fields...

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

Thinking further, the use of chemicals and fertilizers in orchards is more different than I'd first thought too.

If you take an apple orchard, every plant is priceless compared to a grain crop. Killing off insects, keeping exactly the right fertilizer amounts and irrigation are all absolutely required. In grain farming, pests like weeds or insects are measured and the cost/benefit is weighed to see if it's worth the cost of spraying. I'd imagine with a fruit crop, the benefit is almost always keeping your plants as healthy as humanly possible. With grains though guys will often estimate a 5% loss from whatever best is there and decide to leave well enough alone.

A bit of a side note, but the kinds of chemicals guys on the grain side use has changed a lot too. Plenty of chemicals used for killing insects when I was a kid where being replaced then. Farmers here universally remember a laundry list of different pesticides they remember as just nasty and downright scary stuff. The ones available today are far more selective, and for weeds round-up ready has allowed guys to abandon pretty much all other weed killers, and most of those were much more expensive and lingering than round-up.

OK, his studies beat my anecdotal bias.

...That being said, I will continue to eat breakfast cereal with milk pretty much every day (as I have since I was very very young), and be strongly tempted to attribute my own lack of having ever broken a bone to that.

The other anecdote I have in my favor is coming from a farm family that raised chickens. I grew up in a prairie grassland area (converted to irrigated farmland thanks to aquifer access), while my cousins lived a couple hours away in limestone hills ranchland. Both of our families raised free range chickens.

Our chickens produced very thin-shelled eggs, and displayed behavior to suggest they were calcium-deprived. For example, our chickens wouldn't cannibalize their own viable eggs, but if we threw empty shells to them they would fight to eat the shells. Same but to a lesser extent for leftover bones, etc. (I assume they fought less over these because bones are harder to near impossible to break down with a beak). On the other side of the table, we sometimes exchanged eggs with my cousins, and their chicken's eggs were always extremely thick-shelled and hard to crack open.

When I asked about that, my folks told me (and later my Biology teacher confirmed) that was because the sod/soil around my home and flora and fauna growing from it contained very little natural calcium. Chickens raised in our area would often be supplemented with commercial feed that contained extra calcium, but we let ours range for food and eat table scraps; almost never supplementing their food with any commercial stuff. But the limestone (aka calcium carbonate) around my cousin's house contained very high amounts of natural calcium, which was naturally infused into the plants / grains / insects that their chickens ate, giving them incredibly thick shells.

So, I guess that while calcium intake apparently doesn't have a very statistically significant impact on human bone growth, I think that it must have a much more significant role to play in egg thickness if you happen to be a chicken... At least if you compare extremes of low natural calcium diet versus extremely high natural calcium diet.

USED FOR WHAT THING?!

" in power stations, manufacturing plants, ice plants, flour mills, rock crushing plants, cotton gins, seed oil mills, textile mills, irrigation and drainage pumping stations, and many other locations."

I dont wanna fkn search through tens of rows on an external link to understand WHAT these things drove..

Agreed. Culture adapts more quickly than evolution.

Now the deserts are paved and irrigated, and little boxes made of ticky-tacky dot the hillside. All with AC and all just the same. Culture can adapt again.

>> ^dag:

I think it could be that STDs have evolved quicker than us. Therefore we use culture as a way to beat their faster microbial evolution. The same goes for dietary laws. There were probably pretty good reasons for not eating shellfish, if you lived in the desert without refrigeration. >> ^notarobot:
I've never understood the argument that a normal body part, found on pretty much every mammal species on earth, evolved over millions and millions of years is flawed.

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