"With this method you get the land, then you spend a fortune building a place to house your hydroponic setup, then getting the solution ready, then adding lighting, etc. Also, if you're using solar to power your lamps you're basically capturing sunlight, converting it to electricity, then using that to make fake sunlight for your crops to grow. "
With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for the setup.
LEDs are way more efficient when using properly-targeted wavelengths for the crop - way more efficient than the sun.
And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage, without any light whatsoever. Look up H2OFarm on BBC Countryfile, if the video of that company still exists on the BBC site.
> And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage,
Please expand on this if you would. The seeds would not necessarily need light to germinate but certainly you would not be able to grow beyond the energy contained in the seed which had to come from somewhere.
It's a form of artificial photosynthesis - electrocatalysis-based artificial photosynthesis.
We don't need sunlight, or light at all. We can mimic its effects and induce the biological mechanisms to work. For a fodder grass, you only need a few weeks from germination to harvest.
This reads like marketing bullshit. "4 times more efficient than photosynthesis" is gibberish when the sun costs nothing and your process requires electricity. Yeast, algae, and fungus? And maybe lettuce (which has roughly the nutritional content of a glass of ice water with a couple gnats in it)? That's it?
How many kilowatts hours of generated power do you have to put into the sun to get a certain output of photons?
None you say? Interesting…
This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Just use the land to produce something more valuable than grain and trade that for the grain you need.
If you get down to the actual physics of it all, plants waste so much actual sunlight. It's actually more efficient to harvest the sunlight, store it, and convert back into photons using efficient targeted-wavelength LEDs to just put the amount of light that will get used where it needs to go, and use the remaining power for other things like pumps or atmospheric conditioning.
Nuclear incandescence efficiency - 93 lux/wH - approximately 14% overall efficiency at 6500K.
LED efficiency - narrow-band wavelengths make measuring lux at any wavelength other than green useless, so we stick to overall conversion efficiency, which ranges from ~35% in the red to ~80% in the blue, then we get to phosphor-converted white LEDs using a blue base, which can be compared again to the nuclear incandescence above, and these reach over 200 lux/wH at 6500K, and that was with Cree MK-R LEDs a decade ago.
Then you get into photosynthetic efficiency, which is absolutely dismal in the low single-digit percentage range.
I'll leave the extra math to you. Suffice to say, it's more efficient with decade-old tech to store the sunlight and convert as needed.
With the right crops, the turnaround time goes between 2-5 years for the setup.
LEDs are way more efficient when using properly-targeted wavelengths for the crop - way more efficient than the sun.
And there are also various crop types, like fodder grasses, which you can bring to full harvest stage, without any light whatsoever. Look up H2OFarm on BBC Countryfile, if the video of that company still exists on the BBC site.