I know you just copied the youtube title, but the title is obnoxiously pretentious.
600G of strawberries retails for £4.50 (Tesco). If this whole setup cost only a million pounds, a producer would have to grow 133,333,332G worth of strawberries to pay it off, and this assumes nothing breaks (ever) and that there is some way to harvest that many strawberries without paying labor, packaging, licensing, and other costs. I feel like this was a cool tech demo but that’s about it
Not saying I disagree, but out of curiosity I looked up the yield of a conventional strawberry field, which is apparently 15-25 tons per hectare, or 11-18% of your threshold.
I agree that this would likely never be economically viable for strawberries, as I imagine it’d cost way more than £1M for a “hectares worth” of this setup.
More importantly, I don’t consider strawberries vital to our food security, unlike Dyson
I think the price will come down now that they have a proof of concept.
You know, the more I think about this, the more I bristle at Dyson claiming this will solve Britain’s food security problem.
Firstly, this kind of system seems limited to small cash crops rather than staple foods. (Good luck growing wheat on these.)
More importantly, Dyson has personally done far more to harm British food security than this gadget could offset. He was an ardent Brexiteer, which resulted in substantial barriers to importing food from our closest neighbors. (He also then immediately started relocating his business to Singapore in a stunning show of confidence in post-Brexit Britain)
These people don’t want to save the world. They just want to look like heroes
