Can a nozzle provide the breakthrough indoor farming has been waiting for?

Horticulture Week ^ | May 3, 2018 | Gavin McEwan

[BenLurkin]

Interesting.

[Jeff Chandler]

Very cool.

[4Liberty]

bump!

[rawcatslyentist]

Problem 1 is the nutrients form salts, crystallize, and clog the jets.

2 Plant is dependent on electrical supply, if supply is interrupted they die very quickly!

[imardmd1]

Sounds like a great soilless idea. Overuse for potatoes exhausts soil and makes it useless for anything else but weeds, IMHO.

[miniTAX]

“Overuse for potatoes exhausts soil and makes it useless for anything else but weeds, IMHO.”

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NO.

[Fhios]

one of the obstacles with other vegetables is their time to grow. Short term vegetables turn over quicker such as boston lettuce, baby bok choy, baby spinach et al, will show more profit then say potatoes, corn, certain squashes, Melons.

After the leafy vegetables and spices comes tomatoes, some baby squash, baby Cucumber, green onions, strawberries.

Those all can be grown in soilless mediums fairly well if you are dedicated in keeping the PH right and the food supply consistent. But larger tomatoes, green peppers, small baby potatoes are best grown in hybrid of soil, and flood systems. The soil can be reconstituted after every harvest.

Big time money can start rolling in for the professions with Aquaponic systems that include growing Tilapia. Used water from the hydroponic or flood table flows through the system filtered some what then dumped into a large tanks similar to what you would see at fish hatcheries, with the water eventually being feed back into the system.

There are indoor and outdoor systems. With indoor systems you have to factor huge electricity costs for lighting (LEDs are still not quite there yet and cost a fortune as compared to a 1000W light source). Outdoor systems come with their own problem such as heating or cooling, nosey bodies and drawing the interest of EPA who would like to know what you do with your runoff.

I did two years of dabbling and I only know surface details. It was productive privately, but costly and time consuming to maintain. My equipment was a hodgepodge of repurposed low cost item and like the article mentions, cleaning spray heads became a pain, and testing PH and nutrients by hand and adjusting was time consuming.

If I was a young man again I would specialize in that type of farming and get a postgraduate degree in that field. Round up some investors and then build and run a 4 acre outdoor system with filtering ponds for Tilapia. It’s estimated that you can gross slightly over 100k per acre per growing cycle. That’s why you want to do two cycles a year.

[miniTAX]

“Problem 1 is the nutrients form salts, crystallize, and clog the jets.”

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If there is no calcium ions, this is not much of a problem. But the promises of the device are most probably overrated. Added the mention “climate change” and every sane bs detector should ring loudly.
- Claims that finer mists would give a boost to yields compared to much simpler, proven, more robust and cheap ultrasound mist generators are preposterous as long as there is no data to support it. Is the yield boost enough to make the system viable, nobody knows since there is no number, just claims. Aeroponic is well known for sometimes now for its high yields, still it has never supplanted hydroponics or soil planting, there must be some good reasons.
- Emphasizing the production of potatoes instead exclusively marketing high end and high margin products such as herbs or fresh vegetables is putting the ox before the cart, it’s silly and tells something about the inventors’ lack of basic common sense.
- The tunnel system is just window dressing. If it is needed in the marketing of the main invention (the mist generetor), it should raise big suspicions.

[steve8714]

Soylent Green is made of people!

[imardmd1]

Why not?

[Haiku Guy]

Indoor farming is a persistent fantasy of the Urban Left, who would like nothing more than to divorce themselves from the dirty, smelly, right-wing places that provide them with all their food.

[IncPen]

Just wait ‘til the plants-rights crowd hears about this and demands free-range agriculture...

[trebb]

Never a bit of progress that can’t be poo-pooed away by those who find fault with everything.....

[American in Israel]

Or, you could use dirt...

[Vaquero]

Problem 1- Quick switch out ‘print’ heads.

Problem 2- automatic or manual started generators.

[miniTAX]

“Never a bit of progress that can’t be poo-pooed away by those who find fault with everything.....”

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Funny claim, given that guys like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Andy Grove are notorious nitpickers and maniacs about fault finding. So I would rate your claim as at best “mostly false”, at worse “naive”.

[miniTAX]

continuous flow systems don’t clog easily by crystalization (see e.g. drip irrigation). On ultrasonic systems, where vibration energy swamps crystalization energy, the problem is probably non existent. IF this particular device is prone to clogging, but it’d be rather by particle size than by crystalization.

[BobL]

Neat stuff, probably works well with herb.

[from occupied ga]

Sounds like the perennial “100 MPG carburetor” designed to appeal to charter members of the Dunning Krieger club.