How does the math work out on indoor farms?<p>This particular article gets into numbers around water, but also mentions growing fruit such as strawberries which are 92% water. But they claim they can grow 350x per acre what outdoor can do and with 1% the water...<p>grown indoor or outside... the water in a pound of strawberries is a constant...<p>currently in CA, an acre of strawberries yields ~60,000 lbs of strawberries per year... 350x that is... 21,000,000 lbs of strawberries per ace...<p>so per acre, it would require a min of 231,377 gallons just for the fruit alone<p>currently it takes about 12 gallons of water in CA to yield 1lbs of strawberries, but that's the entire plant, fruit and all... 1 acre uses 720,000 gallons per year...<p>...to get 21m lbs of strawberries, you need 252m gallons of water<p>1% of that is 2.5m gallons<p>2.5m gallons weighs 20,850,000 lbs<p>21m lbs of strawberries is really just 19,320,000 lbs of water<p>so 92% of the water consumed in total goes to fruit...<p>which means they have strawberry plants that require virtually no water<p>and then you have the inputs... if it costs $40/lb right now... a test acre of strawberries alone... would cost $840,000,000 at their current rate...<p>and then their best case scenario mentioned would be $1 per pound so... $21m/acre<p>it currently costs $23,000 per acre in CA to grow 60,000 lbs....<p>so 350x that... and you're still at $8m an acre<p>so in their best case scenario... their inputs are still 2.6x today's current costs... startup costs are billions... and water numbers are off...<p>it would be interesting to see what they're telling investors and what is actually possible given that inputs like water are a constant no matter how a fruit is grown on a per pound basis