The Sprung Greenhouse

[james_davis_nicoll]

People looking for fun ways to complicate thrilling tales of space settlement could do worse than to steal outright from this fascinating experiment I managed to overlook until just now.

Comments

[kedamono]

Yeah, it's never bit anyone in the butt before when you think you can corner the market on a product or resource due to the scarcity of said item, only to find out you're not the only one that saw the same trend. And, in this case, using brand new, untested technology without proper field testing to help with said resource extraction...

[(Anonymous)]

I would call scam at the word "biophotic".

I am not surprised that Newfoundlanders eat very few cucumbers. In Halifax vegetables and especially fruit were a little tattered,
and after I moved there my fruit consumption moved to near zero (soft grapefruit, mealy apples, bananas that went from green to brown with virtually no intermediate stage - ugh). By far the worst oranges I've seen until online ordering in the lockdown.


A student who moved to St Johns said the situation was worse there, and appalling in Goose Bay. Habits don't change overnight - if people have been avoiding product X because it is generally poor, they won't rush to buy even when a decent version is offered.

William Hyde

[maruad]

It also seems odd they would grow a product that had little local demand. I regularly eat hot house tomatoes and English from St Anne MB and some place in Alberta but the prairies have both the demand and the sunlight (even with shorter days).

There a passive year round greenhouses in ALberta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Pg3gY7wQ4

And it works for oranges in Nebraska as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_3_gsgsnk&t=2s

[scott_sanford]

Cucumbers struck me as a poor choice too. At some point someone should have asked, "What vegetables do Newfoundlanders want to eat?"

Tomatoes might be too obvious but they are also very easy to grow. Interestingly, I was told earlier today that nowhere in Canada makes ketchup, but it is all imported. Go figure.

[maruad]

Heinz used to make ketchup in Southern Ontario (Leamington iirc). When they shut it down, a number of people starting boycotting Heinz Ketchup. I suspect Heinz is still the top brand (French's ketchup really doesn't taste very good) but a lot of people have switched.

[elusis]

And they don't keep very well, nor do they have much in the way of vitamins.

[scott_sanford]

Both cucumbers and tomatoes seem awkward and inconvenient to ship or store compared to other products that might return more dollars per kilo or per cubic meter.

[roseembolism]

Not only did they do an inexpensive crop in a place not suited for them, if sounds like they didn't even try the battery annoying of marketing to convince people that they could enjoy local fresh vegetables.

[theresawright]

The path to business success lies through the wallet of a patron who doesn't understand the business you claim to be running.

A private sector patron would have been even better in this case. They wouldn't have had political rivals happily exploiting the situation to throw your patron out of office.

[(Anonymous)]

Or a non-ag university — remember the MIT grow box fiasco?!

[theresawright]

Was that the Epstein-funded "personal food computer"?

[(Anonymous)]

Yes! It was exposed by internal whistleblowers who were horrified at having to go to the market and buy produce to lie to donors at fancy dinners that it had come from the project, among other issues. Otherwise the fraud could have gone on for at least a few more university giving cycles….

[theresawright]

How terribly cruel of those whistleblowers to snatch funding from the mouths of those poor starving waifs at MIT Media Lab.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it was students and faculty on the project who blew the whistle on their own employers (aside from the whole “not working” thing, the system was released untreated fertilizer- filled wastewater into the Charles River iirc) so it was more of a “Mutiny on the Bounty”….

[bolindbergh]

I doubt that building a greenhouse on springs would make sense even in earthquake country.