It's a price problem, not a technical one
More directly it is energy/electricity, which is the reason the cost is high.
You need atleast 35 watts per square foot of high quality grow LEDs to grow most crops outside of leafy greens. That is about 1.5 million watts per acre for 12-16 hours per day, which makes it pretty obvious why it isn't economical. And even if we could meet the theoretical efficiency limit of LED lighting technology, it would still take atleast half of that amount of electricity.
That's the big one. With hydroponics, you need to control every factor, if one grows stuff in nature, you get a lot of it for free.
> It's a price problem, not a technical one.
How do you define "technical problem" if you ignore the cost of the inputs to your system?
We can do it but it's an inefficient technology not because we haven't tried but because other methods are too good.
The sun is free, growing lamps aren't.
Hard to beat free energy.
Um. Doesn't technological innovation often make things cheaper?
Is this a distinction without a difference, or am I missing something?
It's a hard ask to make space in high-rises in cities cheaper than farmland.
It is, yeah for sure. No argument there.
I do wonder though... How much cheaper is it really? What if the externalized costs were factored in?
Currently all manner of costs are put onto the environment rather than the producer or consumer: Soil erosion, soil degradation, fertilizer and pesticide runoff, biodiversity losses, greenhouse gas emissions, etc... All of which are huge issues, which we can't keep ignoring like we are.
And even after ignoring all that), most of 'the West' still needs to heavily subsidize farmers to make them competitive with imported crops.
Uhm.
"cheaper than before" usually yes.
But we are talking about different production methods, maybe hydroponics could never be cheaper than growing stuff in dirt because the production method can be optimized only so much.
An "advanced" (different) production methods is not inherently cheaper than a "traditional" method.
Hydroponics usually isn't competing on cost, it's competing on other axes, such as having a greater amount of control. Just the same as greenhouses vs growing in the open. Farming is mostly about dealing with or preventing everything that could go wrong.