>>1735027Yeah, some more lines can be drawn on that to connect animals as food to humans. There's other additional things that can be put into the loop. It was unfinished.
>but is there really enough energy being captured No. That is never true even if you include the entire planet. You need to look at it more like a giant flywheel. Energy goes into it to spin it and there's a constant drag on it to get energy back out of it. You need to put more energy into it than you can get out of it or it will fail. A single small farm would be a we tiny flywheel while the entire planet would be a gargantuan flywheel. The farm's flywheel has more energy drains on it and since the flywheel is smaller it is more likely to run out faster and need outside energy.
>Is anything else being brought into the cycle? Sunlight, air, and water are always the big three. You simply can't go without continually adding them in some form. If you try to go without input of those, your farm's flywheel will run down and out of energy pretty quickly.
Using systems and methods that can allow you to reuse as much of the energy as possible will merely slow down the overall energy drain to the flywheel. Which is some of what that simplified flow chart shows. Here's some more, but even this is lacking and needs updated. The one on the far right was the original and the simplified one in the middle was made from it.
Basically, if you run a farm, you should be getting as many inputs to it as possible, but also trying to reuse those resources as many times as possible before they, "escape." Nothing should be thrown away. It should either be used up where it escapes into the air or is sold/traded for other resources.
