I’ve often thought about the fact that most food into places like Barrow, Alaska is flown in, and wondered whether it would be practical to set up local infrastructure like this to grow food locally (with “practical” meaning “the CapEx of doing so would be repaid in logistical OpEx saved over a small number of years.”)
Forget about Point Barrow. I live in Upstate NY, one of the best Apple growing regions in the world. I’m eating an Apple grown in Chile while local orchards collapse.
Food has more to do with capital and commerce than anything else. The inefficiencies of consolidated global scale distribution require squeezing every penny on the production side.
It's not a requirement, it's a choice, and one with catastrophic downside risk.
Refusing protectionist trade policy became popular among the people who make these decisions, a trend which accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We're in the middle of a crisis which brought to stark light the lack of resilience created by this relentless focus on efficiency and productivity at any cost.
But this is policy, not immutable law. Markets do predictable things in the absence of trade protection, subsidy, and state investment, true; but they do predictable things in the presence of them also.
I’m not talking trade policy. It makes sense to get summer crops from South America in winter/spring! It ridiculous to get months old apples from there. The US regulatory and monetary system facilitates big players.
Today you have buyer cartels purchasing in bulk and fixing prices. They demand quantities and pricing that shut the market to most players.
I can’t buy lettuce in NY at retail because the supply chain from Arizona and California is fubar. Farmers in NY will be harvesting lettuce from high tunnels soon, but they don’t have access to markets and can’t scale.
The apple is not months old, but more likely a year old. They are kept in cold storage for extended periods of time.
The truth is that it makes horrible sense to ship crops to the US from anywhere outside of the US.
US agriculture policy is broken fundamentally. It is corn, soy, wheat. It is what is used as the feed stock for industrial food production. Basically, all the pseudo-food that lines your grocery store shelves. In the US, your tax dollars are used to subsidize the production of this "food" so that it is artificially cheap.
food security in times of disaster or emergency are other good reasons for investing in local food supply. Also, diversification of the economy. But ya, it needs to make some economic sense too.
I would love to see the math of geothermal greenhouses powered by renewables versus the carbon footprint of air freight of food. As renewables drive down the cost of electricity, the economics continually shift towards local production versus import.
Outside of Alberta, most of Canada's electrical generation is very low carbon (nuclear and hydro) per electricitymap.org.
ya, but I think a lot of commercial greenhouses are heated by natural gas because of lower cost. A quick google found some really interesting stuff regarding alternative (geothermal, biomass) heating specifically designed for greenhouses: https://www.greenhousecanada.com/topic/structures-equipment/...
Current state, yes! But something we need to get away from (unless methane from bioreactors or landfills is used, in which case burning it is the best form of disposal).
I feel like with the advance of renewable energy sources and the lowering prices on things like solar panels, it might become quite plausible for places like Barrow to start growing their food with these methods, utilising zero fossil fuels (or close to zero.) I've seen videos of people with pretty sprawling underground "bunkers" set up for growing fruits and vegetables. They require tons of energy, of course, but if done on a governmental scale, I'm sure it can be pulled off. Both to provide more varied food options and to achieve self-sustenance as well as give an option for a worst case scenario where deliveries are impossible.
The government investigated that back during WWII. Unfortunately, the north slope is one of the foggiest, darkest places on earth. Additionally, the soil is thin and permafrost runs nearly right up to the surface. The local environment provides literally nothing to work with, so it was considered uneconomical.
