You Were Stupid. Will You Still Be Stupid in 2020?

[The Grand Nudger]

Deep water culture under artificial light is many, many times more productive than sun and soil. The lights are the only expensive part. The heat too, I suppose, if you're not rotating warm and cold water species and cultivars. Not prohibitively so, all modern commercial operations already run at a profit under artificial heat and light. To get an idea of the difference, indoor production uses a quarter of the space to produce a head of lettuce, and can do so in 34 days rather than 54 - all year round. Integrated systems have no additional fertility cost and the main source of water loss is evapotranspiration (which is often trapped in condensers, chillers, and exchangers.......then returned to the system for climate control).

There are some really impressive systems already up and running. The problem is subsistence level ag. Unless we want to surrender food production to retired hedge fund managers, we have to make the systems less expensive. UVI wrote the book on this. They managed to put together a small 1/5acre system that covered it;s operating costs and hit it;s roi @ the 4 years mark while providing for 45kUSD in labor per year split between one full time manager and one part time seasonal assistant. Cost about 80k to build it (and that;s because they were researchers stuck on an island, not procurement pros here in mainland usa with a badass sales staff, lol).

That system loses about 5 gallons a day from discharge, and produces 5.6klbs of fish and @12klbs of green veggies and fresh herbs. It was built for tilapia, lettuce and basil and fed to favor the fish with minimal planting space to scrub the effluent. Fed to favor the veg...you can utilize roughly 1kg of 32% protein feed for every 50m2 of rafts. 1kg of feed supports about 700lb of fish in the late growout. Breeders can get even more raft space out of a given mass of fish because fry and juveniles froduce more ammonia by bodyweight than adults.