If the world wants to feed 10 billion people in 2050, it’ll need to find a better way to grow food.
Today, about half the world’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture, yet even that amount can’t provide everyone with the sort of diet enjoyed by people in developed countries. If everyone wanted to eat like Americans, we’d need to farm about 140% of the world’s habitable land.
That’s obviously not possible. The other option is to radically boost the amount of food that each acre of land can produce. While agriculture has made impressive strides over the last several decades, tripling production seems like a stretch. One solution is to skip the soil and grow crops hydroponically in greenhouses.
Hydroponic agriculture has a lot of potential — …
