How would a considerably advanced civilization do agriculture?

Question

In my canon, a scientifically advanced civilization exists, defined primarily by their arcology habitats that can house millions of people in a single colossal building. These arcologies are necessarily self-sufficient, though all arcologies are part of a broader, star-system-spanning trade, migration and communications network.

With regards to their technology, they have grasp of FTL travel, gene editing, advanced cybernetic augmentation, and the ability to harness considerable fractions of the energy output of an entire star. Nigh-utopic living conditions have been achieved via the application of technologies you'd imagine such a civilization would additionally have access to.

My question is how they would do agriculture (growing methods, technologies they'd use, crops they might grow), within the following constraints;

• Ideally, all food is grown within the arcology complexes, which are large enough to house millions of people.
• Culturally, they do not use animals for meat, and instead grow animal proteins in lab conditions.
• Resources such as water, soil and sunlight are easily accessible to the point of being effectively unlimited.
• Growing of food is done by combination human and automated workforces.
• The ideal conditions for any prospective crop can easily be created via fine atmospheric control technologies.
• There is little to zero qualms about the usage of gene-edited plant stock.
• The pool of available foodstuff to grow is identical to ours

Answer 1

• Synthetic factories
  They do not eat meat, and they can do great things with genetics, so why grow synthetic meat and not synthetic mushroom with any desired taste and texture? The difference would be that the genetic blueprint in these foods has nothing to do with animals, it is either plant-based (give or take the taxonomic status of fungus) or fully synthetic.

• Long halls of hydroponics
  These go hand in glove with the arcologies. Computers control lights, nutrients, water, harvesting, etc.

• Real food because it is real
  In addition, there could be people who insist that factory food is too boring, too predictable. They insist that coffee grown on a real tropical island, whiskey aged in a real wooden cask, apples from the own orchard are different. Some of this will be a luxury, but many people have a pot of basil in their kitchen.

Answer 2

Likely with hydroponics.

With effective unlimited resources, gigantic farms become possible, and with future tech, can likely be automated on a very large scale. Possibly with the only human intervention needed being an overseeing one, looking out for things needing maintenance or adjustments.

Why would we use Hydroponics instead then? Because if we are going to be fully gene editing plants anyway, just splice them on some kind of aquatic plant, and have them grow underwater. There are a few reasons why you could choose it over land based farming.

These example reasons are for plants grown on a long artificial (outdoor) hydroponics river:

Easier to maintain a steady temperature.
Water has a good heat capacity. It can store a lot of heat, and is easier to maintain at a steady temperature than the air would be around ground based crops at these very large scales. It would kind of 'insulate' the crops from the air. The insulation would ensure that extreme shifts in temperature and weather crop failure would be lessened.

If we place the 'growing river' near large buildings we can use the river as heat-sink and thermal mass for them. If we place a shallow roof-pond on top of the building (covering most of the roof) we can use it for passive cooling during summer, and heat transfer from building, to the crop river, simply by making the water flow towards the river, along a sloped side, using gravity. During winter, it would recapture heat from the building, ensuring that there is less heat wasted, and the system also functions as a rain gutter for gray water.

We could also use geothermic heating for the crop river.

Easier to maintain nutrient cycles.
Soil depletion is a thing. If we remove soil from the equation, we can't have it deplete. Jokes aside, keeping a constant level of the needed minerals in water is again easier than having it need to be added to the soil every year orso. We can simply directly add the nutrients to the water, and they will mostly spread themselves. If we go with slow-steadily flowing water, we can get away with adding nutrients upstream, and measure nutrient values downstream.

Giant fruit/vegetables
One of the best things about growing underwater would be that plants won't collapse under their own weight. As long as the buoyancy of the fruits/vegetables is near that of the water, the pull down/up on the rest of the plant won't be much. This means that a plant can get away with a lot bigger fruit, without needing to grow on the ground, taking up extra horizontal space, or needing sturdy branches.

Steady Produce
Because of the controlled temperature year round, and enough sunlight, we can also grow things in batches. Saving both storage space, and allowing for fresher produce year 'round. I imagine the plants being grown attached to floating baskets, which slowly drift downriver. Batches could be separated by some floating separation rope. Separate them by a week, and you can have many batches of produce in different stages of growth on the river. Creating a new ripe batch each week.

If you make the river O or U form, you can easily move the water from the lowest point back to the highest one. Doing so ensure that produce collecting and (re)planting could be done in the same location. The river could be a -longer curving back and forth snake shape- for produce that take more time, or a very large O so that many buildings can use the river as heat-sink, and a city wide dump for grey water. (with an overflow somewhere).

Could we use aquaponics instead of hydroponics?
We can take the used water from the hydroponics, and feed it into a few small ponds. Fish would produce 'food' for the plants. The plants would then ensure the water was clean again for the fish. Some filters might be necessary.

I imagine the ponds as a side channel to an large O loop, keeping the fish separate, but having a part of the water flow from-, and back to-, the artificial river. The ponds could serve multiple functions such as a nice pond in a park. Even if the people don't eat the fish, watching them might still be a enjoyable pastime. Filters can ensure that fish and food are kept apart.

These ponds can also nicely work to store water overflow caused by periods of rain, as to refill our river during more dry periods.

Answer 3

Fungi food patties

Fungi are very space and energy efficient to grow. We can already make edible meat patties of them, and a hyper advanced society could make them with lots of flavours and textures.

Edible insects

Insects are likewise very energy efficient to grow and they can flavour them easily to tastes. They would have large insect growing areas to produce lots of cheap food.

Vertical farming

With limited space, vertical farming is the most efficient way to produce large amounts of food. With gene engineering a much wider variety of plants can be produced.

Cultured meat as an expensive alternative

Cloning meat is notably more expensive than just growing it. They would have labs to grow meat for special meals. If the archeology was very wealthy, they would be able to produce lots of meat. If they were packed heavily and had more issues with production, it would be a rare treat.

Answer 4

To get an idea of how such advanced agriculture would look like, imagine a sea in which all living things are whales feeding on smaller whales.

The land inside an arcology, the growing labs, the nutrient inputs, the agricultural robots, the atmosphere control, the research to know which genes to edit - all of these things are expensive. But without them, your yields would drop to the point of making less intensive agricultural practices uneconomical. (Yes you could grow proverbial 'five-dollar organic onions' in your own back yard as a hobby, but you would not be able to support yourself financially in this way when onions sell for less than one dollar in a shop.) This forces the producers to spent a lot of money upfront to get all the required equipment, and then to grow as much produce as their equipment can allow, so that its capital cost is spread over as many units of produce as possible. The smaller producers would tend to be priced out due to their unit costs being higher and/or not having access to enough capital to improve their productivity, and will be bought up by the remaining bigger players. Meanwhile new producers will not be able to afford the upfront investment just to enter a market with such tight (and constantly reducing) profit margins. These are perfect conditions for creating an agricultural oligopoly, or perhaps even an outright monopoly.

...which is basically what we have today, but even more so.

Answer 5

It seems to me that the technology set you've described would essentially allow for growing single-cell (e.g. bacteria) cultures in whatever format or structure desired, with whatever protein, fat, carbohydrate, fibre and flavour profiles anyone could possibly dream up, including anything that exists "naturally". The automated systems could quickly and easily edit genes and coax single-celled-organism cultures into small- or large-scale variegated produce.

Thus, the tools exist, and are as commonplace in your society as microwaves are in ours. This would allow just about anyone to produce whatever they can dream up, taking "home cooking" to a whole new level. But of course, not everyone has the aptitude for this -- most people just want to be able to buy prepared foodstuffs, for which further preparation may or may not be necessary (e.g. some people want to buy durum semolina and make their own pasta, and make their marinara from fresh tomatoes, and some people just want to stick something frozen into the microwave for 3 minutes, but none of these people want to grown their food in a field, grind the wheat, etc.).

Of course, large-scale production is likely still more effective than everyone having their own food-growers in their kitchen. So, while everyone is using the same technology, different people or companies will each have a difference focus. Some people will be "artists", coming up with new foodstuffs to work with. Some people will be "chefs", coming up with new recipes. Some people will copyright their work, and gain royalties from their endeavours, and some will "open source" what they build, making it available to all. (Yes, that's right, building food and writing code will have similar processes -- there likely will even be source control, versioning, and automated testing for all of this food-coding.)

Answer 6

sustainable mixed farming using robots.

we have either embraced sustainable farming by that point or massive wars caused by food shortages have reduced the human population drastically.

What is sustainable its not organic nor is it modern factor monocropping. its integrated mixed farming, diffrent crops grown at the same time using robotics. multiple crops to untilive space as effiecently as possible while ensuring the most sustainable use of the land. today integrated farming costs too much because mixing crops inflates harvest cost becasue you can't just use a single purpose machine. organic and monocropping both lead to huge wastages, monocroppping through the need for constant fretilizer to offset depletion and soil wastage through tilling, organic through crop loss and having to overengineer sites to match poorly suited crops. Both damage the local enviroment through depletion of soil, and you can't mine fertilizer forever. The rocks themselves are a nonrenewable resource.

In the future you want to keep using the same farmland forever, which means using it well. This also lets you keep farmland as small as possibly a must for arcologies, space has to be a limiting factor. You do this by using GMO crops to match conditions, mixing multiple crops and rotating them to prevent soil depletion and loss. You can also use animals for pest control and to recycle crop waste and possibly get animal products as a bonus, we use animals for a lot more than just meat. It is literally the most sustainable farming technique. We don't use it much now becasue it is expensive in terms of labor, you can't build a sinlge purpose machine to harvest/ plant/ or care for mixed crops efficently. But you could do it with future technology, with robotic farmers, intelligent multifunction machines that can do what each crop needs at the same time.

This gives you the variety humans demand in their diet with as few undesirable sideeffects as possible. As a bonus it means a larger variety of individual crops as well, many many varieties of apple or rice works just as well or even better than a single and thus problomatic variety. It also had the bonus of making your crops desease resistant.

Answer 7

The idea that they would need to use (what we see as) "hi-tech" solutions is naive:

In fact all food would be created in a pastoral, picaresque manner.

Indeed, this is happening as we speak ...

In 1900, here on planet Earth, all foods (that is: meats, grains, vegetables) were created in a manner which was

• (extremely) small scale

• by-hand

• (what would now be called) organic

By 2000, there had been a stunning change to (let's call it) "modern" food production

• (staggeringly) large scale operations

• using tractors, battery type systems (for battery hens, battery pigs etc)

• and only possible using (staggering) amounts of fertilizers and chemicals

But literally as we speak ..., every human who is rich enough demands only

• (extremely) small scale

• by-hand

• (what would now be called) organic

food production. The humorous way to put it is

Your sci-fi future belongs to Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall :)

Literally in the world we live in today, as we speak, if everyone was rich enough, every single food stuff would be produced in the "pastoral, picaresque" manner -

• (extremely) small scale

• by-hand

• (what would now be called) organic

"they have grasp of FTL travel" (!) .. "the ability to harness considerable fractions of the energy of a star" (!)

Given these incredible considerations, space ("space" in the sense of "oh we need another 20 million acres, spin that up for me would you?) is irrelevant. They could absolutely trivially build (random example) large flat squares at (whatever situation they prefer) in the solar system.

And time is irrelevant - they could (trivially) truck the produce (in mere hours - fresh everything!) back to the planetary cities.

At this level of technology it would be completely trivial to have robots that would do all the exactly-as-if-by-human-hand chores of running a pig farm where you can only keep 5 or 15 pigs, nurturing them on a by-hand basis. (These type of robots would be the totally "simple" type we can just-about build today - nothing to do with needing intelligence or AI.)

or in fact since people in such a society would have nothing to do, it's quite likely that very many people, as a plain vocation, hobby, would in fact do bucolic "Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall -style" farming.

A literal real-world example of that ...

The bloke Jeremy Clarkson, who is I believe the highest paid TV celebrity in Britain and who is wealthy (order of $100m USD wealth) in fact bought and runs exactly a bucolic farm, producing a handful of pigs, etc, each year - there's even a TV show about it!