I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming.
You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients built in.
Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?
- Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop
- Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs
- Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually almost always the case, to my knowledge
- 365 days a year of efficient production
- Good for the environment to save so much in transport
- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.
To be honest, the only con I see is that this perfectly automated gardens produce much less tasty food because they are given the exact amount of water and minerals needed to generate the product, but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor
Correlation ≠ causation.
I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest.
Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses.
This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops. The longer the process, the more time the produce has to collect and store the relevant substances. Artificial ripening only takes a day or two compared to weeks for naturally grown food.
Varieties have long been selected to optimize industrial constraints, production, distribution ... Ripe often means colorful, perfumed, tasty, sweet ... and fragile.
Some tomatoes won’t ever get good. They just don’t produce the compounds necessary, have thick skin, etc.
However growing a decent variety in a vertical farming style would produce better tasting fruits.
Collecting ripe fruits with machines is however difficult.
I'm not so sure. Some biohackers have found that changing the colors in the light changes the photosynthetic reactions and thus the flavors. For instance, some colors makes the lettuce more bitter.
Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.
This is also demonstrably false in the wine industry. Soil has a direct impact on the outcome of your grapes, e.g. fields that have water runoff from mountainous/rocky areas produce wine that tastes more of minerals.
Im curious if there have been any blind studies that show this. I think a lot of what is conventional wisdom when it comes to taste in the wine industry is often not reproducible in the lab: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...
Its tough to taste a $10 wine and a $100 wine blind and say "oh this one is much better than this other one". But it's easy to taste a wine and say "this is earthy" or "this is fruity" or "this is peppery". Earthier wines tend to be from grapes that are in more mineral present soil. Have you been wine tasting in a major region before? It's actually a fantastic experience. There's so much complexity in wine flavor.
OK, but that's a varietal difference, which is one of the factors that the poster identified as being important - no? Unless your parents are actually growing San Marzano tomatoes.
Yes, it's a varietal difference. Obviously there's some personal preference here, but California grown San Marzano-style tomatoes (not true San Marzanos as that's a protected designation of origin) can be just as good. Canned tomatoes also just taste better in some applications, like pizza, so they're always going to be better than GP poster's parents' home-grown fresh tomatoes.
> - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop
yes, but you are spending money and carbon on re-creating sunlight.
> Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs
Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria.
> - Good for the environment to save so much in transport
None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit.
> - Independence from other countries
Actually this is the only real selling point. Theoretically you _could_ grow crops that are difficult to cultivate in your climate.
> - 250x less water
Yes, but I am sceptical. It should use less water than an open field, but the same as a greenhouse. if it truely is 250 less water then great. But I suspect thats clever comparison. There are ofcourse low cost ways to save water, like multch, or constricting water supplies and frequency just after germination.
Look, the problem I have is that a lot of these systems are basically hype machines. They are invented by tech bros who've just discovered that nature exsists. But instead of looking at the vast reams of research they head straight for the vertical/hydro/LED segment.
What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world
Up until that point, your just pissing dollars into the wind and wasting everyone's time inveting solutions to problems that are not actual problems.
> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil.
Growing up on a farm in Germany, this is just what I would call decent farming and this is not rocket science. The knowledge how to do this is there and imho it does not involve some "tech disruption". Agriculture, at least in Germany, is highly mechanized/technized and in the end it does not matter if you look at conventional/"industrial" or ecological/bio-farming.
You need to take care of nutrients, humus creation, ... . This involves "artificial" fertilizer, regularly taking soil samples, to check what nutrients are there, crop rotation, etc... Sure you can just "raid" the soil and move on after ten years, but good luck finding new area in Germany to farm on ;-) And this is more or less independent of scale of farming.
I grew up going to a museum that had a historical farm every weekend (17th-early 19th century) Spreading liquid cow poop on the field wasn't an option because they didn't have the machinery. So they needed to do animal/crop rotation to keep the costs down (ie not pay for animal food.)
When I wasn't there I was on my parent's allotment. Next to the allotment was a standard arable field. For various reasons It stopped being used and was left to nature.
Two things struck me: 1) it was about 80cm lower than the allotments
2) nothing grew on it. The strip of land that served as a border had to be mown _every week_ to keep it from exploding.
I don't know how different Germany is, but here in the Netherlands, it's hard to find farmers who understand what good soil and the meaning of an ecosystem is. They are, apart from a few, industrialists operating a biotech factory for which they've learned the 'recipe' for growing and selling particular crops or livestock.
>it's hard to find farmers who understand what good soil and the meaning of an ecosystem is.
I am not sure if you are referring to specific types of crops, but Netherlands has consistently been the best in Europe if not the best in the world at agriculture. Using nothing but precisely good soil, science and ecosystem. Outpacing yield make in both Canada and even US with GMO. It also has one of the best Bio/Food Tech startup scene.
And they have been doing it for years , before it get reported on by mainstream media [1]. The only thing that is lacking, comparatively speaking is the management, marketing and sales. Where the US companies tends to excel.
I think its more analogous to inspecting the biomedia to see what bacteria are growing there. As you know its important not to wash them with tap water, but you never really know whats growning there, unless it goes wrong and your nitrites spike.
You can buy sponges that have nitrate/nitrite removers in them, but they run out, and have to be replaced. Its far better to grow the bacteria to do that for you.
However its like starting a new tank from scratch, it takes at least a month before you can put even 1/4 the fish in. Its much the same with fields.
They are problems though, we haven't used all of the globes arable land but that doesn't mean we are able to or even should. Consider that much of the remaining arable land is forests we really need to keep. Not all of that is suitable to the types of crops we want to grow, and not all of it is available to the countries currently requiring more food.
Arable land is a resource not available to everyone as well, and we shouldn't assume we can just take it from those who have it. The global economy is more complicated than that.
And lastly, climate change is set to shake things up significantly. Record droughts already cause huge economic damage nearly every year, and it is only just beginning. We are going to need more control and stability over our food sources.
Absolutely there is room for development of more traditional farming but I think it would be naive to imagine that it would all just work out fine in a global market utopia. It is worth developing this technology.
> Absolutely there is room for development of more traditional farming
I'm not talking about traditional farming. I'm talking about using "low tech" solutions but monitoring them scientifically.
For example, flooding in the UK is becoming a bigger problem, partly because of more rain, partly because people are allowed to live on flood plains. However a significant change is the way farming has modified land drainage. The soil contains less humus (spongey black/brown stuff, not hummus :)) which means it's much more like sand and doesn't absorb water.
This water runs off, taking the fertiliser, and soil with it. This clogs up and kills rivers, and because there is no capacity to hold water in the land, it all disgorges into streams and rivers at once, causing floods.
Improving soil health costs money, more money than fertiliser in the short term. There are no real incentives to change this. Everyone knows that soil health is degrading, but there isn't agreement on how to proceed.
> Record droughts already cause huge economic damage nearly every year
Farming has a massive impact on droughts. it also has a massive impact on heat absorption. hence my statement on mixed tree/arable.
Its less productive, but moderates water loss and heat gain. It also is a boon to wildlife. it can be made almost as productive if there is some form of intense labour. Assuming that we can mechanise it effectively we can remove the barriers to adoption.
Tax externalities. The concept isn't that foreign. Basically the same as pollution fines, but instead of on a case-by-case basis, with long investigations and usually with involving the courts, just use that IT thing you mention and have people pay according to how badly they mismanage their land.
> There are no real incentives to change this.
Well, yeah, it's not surprising. UK is not really looking far ahead nowadays.
> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world.
Isn't this exactly what vertical farms solve in a single move? The automated part is extremely hard to do in a field, wind, rain, UV and sheer sq footage all work against you. We pretty much nailed automated warehouses at this point, vertical farms are just a re-implmentation of that technology for agriculture.
Humanity has spent close to 10 millenia at this point improving and optimising agriculture. I think it fair to say that we've made all of the major breakthroughs for farming in a field at this point, and if we want to see a step change in food production efficiency and reliability (which we need if we intend to feed 8-12 billion mouths) then we need to start looking beyond traditional farms.
We know there won't be enough arable land in the world to feed everyone in world 50-100 years from now using any currently known techniques, and climate change is only making that worse by reducing the amount of arable land available. Being able to build high efficiently (both in terms of land and energy) farming systems is incredibly important.
Being able to move to a system where almost all of the energy input is electricity opens up a whole world of new possibilities. Allowing us to build farms almost anywhere without regard for the local climate, and with our electricity production becoming increasingly carbon neutral it'll allow these farms to have little to no environmental impact on the world.
One your other points:
> Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria.
True but we know how to build controlled environments inside of factories. Just look at microprocessor fabrication. This is a completely solved problem already.
> None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit.
Modern building insulation is basically magic. Once you get it hot the first time, the energy to keep it hot is negligible. Additionally you can site these farms near natural geothermal sources etc, you don't need to put them in perfect climates. Same applies for electricity, put them near hydro, wind or even solar farms. Pick a place where the input resources are easily and readily accessible.
KaiserPro had good rebuttals to some of your points[1] so I won't repeat those, but here are some more:
> - 250x less water
Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0.
> transport
Bulk transport is incredibly efficient. IIRC, many food products spend more carbon on transport from the grocery store to home than they do getting to the grocery store. I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton.
> Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0.
Funny thing about rain, it comes from these things called "clouds", not the internet variety, but the type that blocks the sun.
Places with the perfect amount of both sunlight, rainfall, humidity and temperature all year round is extremely rare (you may also be familiar with the concept of seasons). Places with year round sun don't tend to have much rain (looking at you California), places with year round rain don't tend to get sun. There are of course exceptions to this, rainforests come to mind, but to farm there you need to remove the forest, which reduces the amount of rainfall (less water is evaporating from trees and foliage) plus all the other issues that come with deforestation.
Additionally farming has negative impact on the local water cycle, farmed land significantly increases surface runoff, contaminating local water sources with fertiliser and suspended dirt.
All in all, even using water falling from the sky isn't "free" from an environmental perspective. We should be focusing on making more food with less environmental impact worldwide, not returning to the Victorian approach of digging up and mechanising land, environmental impact be damned.
Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0.
A few days ago there was a post here about water now being traded as a commodity.
In many parts of the world, the water supply is far from guaranteed and must be shared with the local environment, population and other farmers. Using 1/250 of the water otherwise supplied by rain is pretty compelling.
And that's without the arguments about reducing the need for pesticides and fertilisers.
No, most crops are watered with dams and irrigation systems. It means changing the natural patterns for river areas, destroying ecologies, concentrating water to water-needy crops, destroying soil. Some plants do not store water, but vaporize it fast and it also can affect other plants and animals.
Somehow the water used by [almond and whatnot] farmers is a problem in CA.
Rain is great, and Earth's water cycle is closed, but plants evaporate water but you won't get it back as rain immediately.
Plus if you install irrigation you are taking water away from somewhere that would likely not evaporate that fast. (Eg from a river.) And if you also happen to have drainage, (eg if you converted a wetland area), then you suddenly discharge too much water from that region, and you won't get it back as rain.
I came here to dispute this, but when I looked it up, it appears to be true, at least in the US, where irrigated farms produce only 39% of farm products (in $). That being said, its still a nontrivial percentage, and irrigation for agriculture accounts for 80% of the nations water consumption.
Sure, but with the already significant climate changes yields are affected. Some regions turn toward irrigation, and it'll eventually run out, and it already affects non-agriculture water usage in many regions. (In India. But China's megacities also consume more water than what the natural replacement rate of the regional water table.)
I'm not saying everyone has to go all in on vertical farming, but there's value in food safety.
> Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain"
Do you mean 'most of the volume' or 'most of the crop types'? In case of the first I wonder where that's based on? Perhaps you even have a source?
I assume you mean 'rain' in the most direct sense, as water that falls down directly on/near the plants (as opposed to draining from a basin of water that 'used to be rain', which perhaps is true for many H2O molecules).
And would you say we have enough farmland that can be irrigated by rain (with some degree of consistency also in face of climate change) to feed the every growing population?
> I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton.
> The research showed that for each tonne of NZ lamb produced and imported, 688kg of CO2 is emitted. When compared to the 2849.1kg of CO2 emitted in UK production, the most sustainable lamb would appear to be that from NZ.
1. How many of these points can be achieved, and to what relative quality, with greenhouses?
2. Given sunlight is ~1 gigawatt per square kilometre, and given the light level plants need, to the extent that this allows winter production of:
(a) staple crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes: this will need implementation of all the improvements to the global power grid that eco-optimists like me call for and which eco-pessimists claim will never be sufficient, and because the energy has to come from elsewhere in winter they will be lacking exactly the same sort of independence they have now with food imports. (I don’t count this as “not independent” because if I did then no city would be, no apartment would be, no non-farmer would be).
(b) high-value non-staple foods such as lettuce, kale, peppers: it doesn’t provide enough calories for food-independence.
While absolutely you could put a small unit the size of a shipping crate in every village and have the local shops stock it’s lettuce output on their shelves, I see this as a fantastic solution to e.g. greening the Sahara [0] and terraforming the Moon/Mars, but mainly only a cash-crop thing in industrialised nations on Earth.
I would generally agree, but I see solving the problems caused by "cash crops" as very good and not unlike solar and wind solving the problems of extremes first.
If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great.
I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the tropical fruits that are being air-mailed and then largely discarded.
Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food.
I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
I would generally agree, but I don't see solving the problems caused by "cash crops" as very good and not unlike solar and wind solving the problems of extremes first.
If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great.
I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the trozical fruits that are being airmailed and then largely discarded.
Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food.
I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
I would generally agree, but I see solving the problems caused by "cash crops" as very good and not unlike solar and wind solving the problems of extremes first.
If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great.
I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the trozical fruits that are being airmailed and then largely discarded.
Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food.
I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
Average cost of a cheap warehouse in US (this is being generous as the cost is likely far higher for a vertical farm) $20 square ft [1]
Thus, Land/building cost standard farming method: $3160 per acre[2]
Land/building cost of equivalent vertical farm: $871200 per acre
Which is 275x higher. Once again, using warehouse costs is being generous to vertical farms. It's likely more than $20/sq f to commission a vertical farm.
What ever land use benefits of vertical farming are at the very least partially offset by the fact it requires a building, which has it own set of ecological impacts.
It's very hard for me to imagine any amount of bullet points to make up for 275x+ increased land/build cost. But if there was a market, it's probably in high end organic stuff for well-to-do people, rather than the a case of then technological wizardry feeding the masses.
You're ignoring the fact that vertical farms have layers. In this article, they are growing 14 layers, so to match the output of one acre of farmland requires 1/14 of an acre of building, if all else is the same. Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not. Other factors such as precise control of climate, nutrients, and pests will also increase the output of vertical farms.
I think in the end, you are right - vertical farms will be more expensive. But its going to be nothing like 275x as expensive.
> You're ignoring the fact that vertical farms have layers. In this article, they are growing 14 layers, so to match the output of one acre of farmland requires 1/14 of an acre of building, if all else is the same.
I also used 20 per sq foot which is an gross underestimation for actual cost per square foot of a vertical farm to compensate for this. I wouldn't be surprised if each "layer" itself has a per square foot cost that is a significant fraction of the equivalent cost of a farmland sq foot.
> Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not.
Vegetables are grown in California 7-8 months a year. So there is room here for an advantage to vertical farms, but is it really a significant advantage? Most CA growers own or lease land in AZ and CA and flip flop between the two as the season dictates, so there is there no real advantage here in terms of availability and as I already outlined the cost is far below a vertical farm so if you can't give vertical farm a price or available advantage what advantage do they have?
And to answer my own previous question, for all the "shop local" trends out there, transportation costs are minimal, which is why you can buy produce from even another country at cut-rate prices, so these are probably not a big factor. I would guess the most significant promise of vertical is probably less inputs. Inputs traditionally cost more than land in farming (I actually do know about this as I work for an AG company and have been in the precision Ag industry for 10 years). However, inputs don't cost (200x/150x/100x/50x/whatever number you want to go with for vertical farm land cost multiplier) more than land cost. I guess the argument can be made that I just put everything in cost terms and not in some sort of ecological benefit terms but that is just the world we live in, solar didn't blow up because people started to care, it blew up because it became economically viable.
I co-founded a home vertical farm company a few years ago (not in operation any more).
Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons:
1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste.
2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor.
The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark.
The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.
It takes around 3 to 5 days to ship anything anywhere in the US. If you buy food once a week, the increased shipping speed of local hardly registers.
Most of the time is taken by other things, not shipping. So the negatives of local (higher energy usage, less efficient use of resources) are not really worth it.
Local means growing food either in a greenhouse or in a place not ideally suited for it. It also means smaller less efficient operations.
It’s also good for the environment when land can be left to become wild instead of being actively farmed. The environment in the U.K. was greatly damaged during the Second World War when a lot of land that wouldn’t normally be farmed was farmed intensively, and that intensive farming continued after the war, greatly decreasing the land that was available to wildlife. Birds like nightingales which used to be reasonably known in the countryside now have vastly contracted populations in the U.K.
I'm an Elon fanboi but please let's start with desertified populated regions first so we have time to build a Mars colony without having to deal with civil wars
Both objectives can be worked on at the same time. I don't really like that argument. We could say "let's end hunger first then focus on computer games, or beer, or vacations, etc". Ending world hunger is way more important than those things but you can't expect we stop doing them to focus on something that is already being addressed but is very complex.
Yep, irrigation is location dependent as annual rainfall varies a lot. New Orleans, Louisiana gets 62 inches of rain per year where Las Vegas gets 4. In many areas water conservation is mostly pointless.
Indoor farming needs to irritate 100% of their needs so they can actually need more irrigation than farms in other areas.
Peak phosphorus is one of the peak i'm less worried about in my lifetime or my children's lifetime. Morocco reserves are probably underestimated, as are Algerian reserves. As long as Morocco stay stable and is help by its economic partners during hard times (France and Spain mostly), it wont' be an issue.
Yeah, I’m not worried much about it either... it would be a benefit to reduce phosphorus mining in general due to its environmental impact, but even that can probably be addressed in other ways.
I don’t know the geography well enough to know if this is a problem, but I thought half of the area claimed by the Moroccan government wants independence and has a long-running low-energy struggle going on to achieve that end?
The real cost (building, etc.) will results in a way more carbon intensive production as anything else. If you consider that Denmark electricity is 66 to 75% oil/gas/coal produced, the real environmental impact of this farm will be disastrous.
The 250x less water is compared to open field production without water drop control, it will be at the same level of water consumption than all the greenhouses you see, they will not be better. This argument is as such not a good one.
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.
Is this a real thing? Interesting! I wonder if, much like food additives, we could figure out what particular nutrients would be required to impart a specific flavor to produce.
AFAIK the compounds that make up the flavor are mostly known.
The problem is more that if you optimize plant growth for weight per time (because weight is what you are payed for) and leave flavor out of the equation, you'll end up with fruit that has a lot of weight with little flavor. If you switch to a growth regimen that gives the plants a bit more time, you will generally get a better flavor, even under hydroponic settings.
Given that you can sense a lot of compounds that make up a fruit non-destructively, I'm pretty optimistic that you could optimize for flavor too in a robotic/vertical farming setting.
It would be interesting to ask someone to taste-test hydroponic tomatoes vs soil tomatoes. My guess is no one can tell the difference, and in fact hydroponic probably tastes better. So yes, genetics only define a potential in a pedantic definition but those genes only need light, CO2, nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace metals to affect life.
As for the wine argument, I really can't tell the difference between two buck chuck and a $250 bottle of wine and I'd venture a guess that neither can most people (ok, maybe two buck chuck is a little too low on the quality pole). As for molecular content, I'm sure the grapes that go into a choice pinot noir would sustain life just as efficiently as the red grapes in my grocery store.
Differences in appreciation of food is multi factorial of course. One can produce crap or greatness given the same material, and another could appreciate it or not given personal preference and culture.
Regarding wine, I guess culture plays an important role.
Differences between wine grapes grains and table grape grains, is mostly selection and cultural practices. Table grape is grown for volume and freshness, wine grape is grown to be concentrated in sugar and other compounds, with lower yields, higher maturity, etc.
Both use lots of pesticides nowadays unfortunately.
As for their capability of sustaining life, I don’t know. Grape was used for fasting and purging traditionally :)
On top of that: this style of farming is additive to other uses of the same land area, not exclusive. Having a traditional 100-acre farm demands a loss of 100 acres of land in opportunity cost. Vertical farming allows to use the same land for residential or commercial development, or it allows for 100 acres of food production in only 10 acres of land.
This is a big one, and we should aim for rewilding in the reclaimed space. Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of habitat loss and thus biodiversity loss.
I wish we could properly account for this negative externality. To me the ideal state for every inch of land is it being a wildlife refuge. To that end I'd love to see a tax that gets charged for using land for anything else. I think it would drive a lot of improvements like vertical farming
As a counter example, raising grass-fed cattle on native prairie in Montana is much more "natural" than a wildlife refuge. The natural state of that land was maintained by massive wandering herds of bison. The massive bison herds and their apex predators generally don't exist any more, so a wildlife refuge can be far less "natural" than grazing land.
all these mechanical parts will cause pollution both in their production and their disposal.
365 days of production will also require some heavy fertilization cycles, so more chemicals to be produced and disposed.
I don't see that talked much and might very well come ahead with the efficiency of scale in having all these thing stacked instead of dispersed over a large tract of land, but these thing are an important aspect and hopefully what will come out of this deployment is some hard data about the impact they have.
I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language. Most of the time it's used, it doesn't mean anything at all.
What is actually used? Fertiliser, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'.
Do they need to be disposed of? Not really, plants use them up. If you are disposing of them, you are disposing of your money, because you paid for them.
The whole point of these greenhouse or vertial systems is that they are closed off, so you don't have runoff like you do in the open field, and you don't need pesticides because pests don't get in.
There are 99 problems with this 'tech bro' solution, but chemicals is not one of them.
I dunno, DHMO is pretty scary, but not as scary as the naturally occurring pesticide 1,3,7-Trimethylxanthine [0], which has become the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug despite side effects of anxiety, nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations.
> I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language
and I wish people would read the full sentences before entering a debate, because it was completely clear this wasn't about the specific fertilizers usage in situ, but pollutant released during production ( one of many examples https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.h... you can find, about every precursor can and is leaked in the environment ) and after usage (even assuming it's closed off, which it isn't, you need to scrub waste and put it somewhere or reprocess it at some cost)
is it so bad to be curious about these cost in hyper intensive production, especially since they aren't available in this press release?
>- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.
This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad
> This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of.
Quite the contrary: at least in Norway politicians have been busily pushing your side of the story for decades and only stopped pushing it earlier this year.
> It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad
If you said this last year many would have agreed.
This spring showed that even Norway - as rich and well connected as we are - cannot get hold of a simple thing like face masks if there is an emergency.
In Norway, food self-sufficiency has been a political issue ever since the Napoleonic wars and the British naval blockade on Denmark-Norway 200 years ago, to the point that the importance of self-sufficiency were taught from early in primary schools at least until the 1980's.
It grew in political importance as the national-romanticism movement grew, and then blew up massively in political importance after World War II demonstrated just how little it took to disrupt external supplies.
One might reasonably argue it's the reason Norway isn't in the EU - Norwegian agriculture and fishery policy is based very strongly on a view on self-sufficiency that includes high subsidies not originally for the sake of farmers, but for the sake of national security. It's also behind a lot of the push for retaining rural settlements.
It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.
Yeah, I didn't mean to sound like I was contradicting you. Just more background. This used to be a big deal, until people started forgetting about it, and now people are suddenly remembering it again.
But in a situation like the current pandemic with borders being closed this would provide a good alternative to buying from other countries. Another global pandemic might be even more damaging and might infect plants rather than humans.
Also -> distributed cultivation. You don’t have a single point of failure.
> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?
Do we really need a repeat of the supply chains breaking down again to answer this question? African farmers were dismayed when their bumper crops were rotting in their fields because they couldn't export the crops or even sell the excess locally [0].
Livestock farmers also saw this as well [1].
It's hard to imagine that people haven't learned the value of having a robust local food supply chain, which is the one thing that I had hoped we had learned after the shortages and panic buying created during the 1st wave of COVID.
I agree that vertical farming has limitations, but it could be a useful adjunct to meet demand the typical soil based farming cannot deliver. Moreover, much like Holland's greenhouse farming the chances are most of it will be exported in exchange for other goods. Also, remember Denmark has a limited growing season that could in theory help them plan for larger scale operations, which they can partner with for Mars colonization as things develop in both sectors.
> I imagine it would work quite nicely in Iceland, with abundant energy and little (any?) arable land. It’s arguably better than mining Bitcoin with that energy.
Why not both? The excess heat from the mining could be used to have heated greenhouse/nurseries while still utilizing the excess heat and energy. This was working rather well in Canada [2].
> It's hard to imagine that people haven't learned the value of having a robust local food supply chain, which is the one thing that I had hoped we had learned after the shortages and panic buying created during the 1st wave of COVID.
This seems like a worst case scenario, and it still seems like an overblown issue. I would say its usually much easier to just import produce if your country is not good at it. Use large ships and regulate them to be more energy efficient then they are now.
It seems like we need solutions to panic buying
---
Bitcoin in general doesn't seem very useful, making use of the captured heat is cool and better then wasting it but wouldn't it be easier just to not mine bitcoun
This and 'it's much easier to do X'
is exactly the lax approach that gives us crisis after crisis when we are caught with our pants down and people die.
"regulate them to be more energy efficient then they are now."
Laws of physics do not obey congress, they will pollute unless we make them nuclear.
>This seems like a worst case scenario, and it still seems like an overblown issue.
These are not overblown to people like military and civilian planners, who's jobs are setting up things during the good times so their country gets through the worst times like a global catastrophe or a world war. Having food security for years is essential for that. A pandemic like Covid-19 can severe supply chains for months. Their jobs is imagining what a Nipa virus pandemic or a world war could do.
FWIW I have no particular opinion other that "huh interesting" about vertical farms and no idea about their role food security planning.
Capturing bitcoin mining heat does not make it less energy intensive. If a bitcoin is worth X dollars it will always take X dollars worth of energy to produce a bitcoin. This is true even if you increase the efficiency of the miner.
Nope. Greenhouses use very low grade heat, so they can be run on 'waste heat' from pretty much anything, including server farms. The light they need is a different issue...
I imagine it would work quite nicely in Iceland, with abundant energy and little (any?) arable land. It’s arguably better than mining Bitcoin with that energy.
You can also significantly decrease water use, which matters in places like the Middle East that may want to reduce their dependence on food imports, and that already use desalinization to get water.
Singapore doesn’t have a lot of space but could also want to decrease its dependence on imports.
You can eliminate the risk of crop failures from drought / pests / freezes, and grow crops year round with lots of light, so yields can be quite high.
Local produce can be sold at a premium to high-class consumers, similar to the organic food industry.
And thinking farther out, this is an enabling technology for space colonization, so there’s a lot of growth potential in this technology.
Ground is a super expensive component of farming in Western Europe.
Investing in Africa adds transportation costs and with perishables a lot of tariffs and restrictions will apply that are much easier to solve on shorter distances.
Finally, there are non-economic reasons such as independence for food production, water efficiency, energy efficiency (including transportation) and quality control.
Personally I think that food should be grown as close to the point of consumption as feasible, if that's Africa for Europe then so be it but if it can be done closer then that's better.
Water consumtion is like the most frequently gamed statistics ever. People will count all the water that falls on the field of grass and call it 'water consumtion for raising cattle'.
Without a proper breakdown into blue water, grey water and green water this number is not even worth discussing.
Counterintuitively, I have previously been told that you can actually grow more than one square meter of plants with one square meter of solar panels. The reason for this is that LED lighting can be designed to produce exactly the frequencies plants actually absorb, and distributed optimally through the day. Current solar technology isn't sufficient to make that cheaper than regular farming for staple crops, but I can certainly imagine it getting there for anything that's grown in a greenhouse today.
Regular solar panels are about 6x more efficient than the photosynthesis of all plants except sugar cane. LEDs reduce some of this headroom by not being 100% efficient, but if the system needs some heat anyways that isn't an issue.
Looking at the stats, your question is very valid. We can drastically increase food production by marginally decreasing land dedicated for livestock and/or utilizing unused habitable land.
Those stats also do not indicate how much the agricultural land is being used to grow animal feed. In fact if a crop is grown but inadequate quality for selling for humans, it is sold at a massive discount as animal feed. Reducing the variability in crop yields, as vertical farming should do, should make the 2.3% more efficient.
We need to be careful about how we reduce livestocks globally. Naively interfering in the market such that the price of meat goes up could be disastrous as Brazilian farmers could accelerate the slashing of rain forests to make way for more profitable livestock farming.
Much of the livestock land is steep or rocky. The same obstacles to drawing a plough across it present to building buildings on it. Unless you're prepared to invest a lot of energy flattening it.
In Denmark 62% of all land is used for agriculture. That's not only the habitable but all of Denmark's area. Any area that is able to produce is already in use.
I don't know if I would call Taastrup prime real estate :D
I'm also sceptical if it will be sustainable. After all, someone needs to produce the solar panels, metals building construction etc.
On the other hand taking water from Afrika might not be the best idea.
The answer is very simple: Food is what is called strategic interest for a given country.
Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food.
E.g It is said that "Arab's spring" was about "people wanting freedom". It was really about food being ultra expensive in the north of Africa and speculators hoarding most of the rice and cereal in the world so they could benefit from the situation.
We have seen recently what happens when countries ignore strategic interests. US companies that made face mask and ventilators like 3M sent manufacturing overseas to places like China. When the Covid emergency broke, China did this:
1. China has higher priority to any other country.
2. If your country criticizes China(and the communist party CCP) in any way, you must censor them or there is no face mask for the people in your country. No censorship, no masks.
3. If necessary, China will nationalize factories.
4. The surplus will be sold to the highest bidder. China will send already paid cargo for higher bidders.
5. You praise China, even when the virus came from it. You demand no investigation.
That was self inflicted damage done by the West ignoring strategy 101.
You can not let other countries control your basic food supplies or anything strategic. Europe can not send most of their food by sea because the US has the biggest navy in the world. So if you do something they don't like, they just can block your supply chain and make food prices skyrocket and change governments so they become puppy States.
In fact, one of the secrets of US' success was that it could expand from the East Coast to the West by land with no European interference.
> Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food.
That doesn't mean your country has to grow it.
A much better solution for individual food security is food stamps.
If your country has problems with a temporary lack of food one of the easiest things to do is to import more and if nesacery subsidize it. Famines tend to come from broken economic and political systems like imperial UK in Ireland and communist USSR, they both refused to import more food during a famine and in fact exported a lot food
Only so long as you CAN import it. Which means you need to ask from where - which gets into a large number of political issues. You may be forced to overlook something evil (slave labor), or even contribute to evil (pay bribes to someone who is turning around and using those bribes to fund an army that is planning to attack you).
Just because the world is currently politically stable for those reading this does not mean that will continue.
Same, but at the same time, it's preparing for a future where the borders and international shipping may be impossible, where overpopulation means we can no longer use land for farming, and where farmland becomes unusable or at least unpredictable due to climate change. Plus something about colonizing space. It's far future and dystopian, but not improbable.
Anyway, it's not the most efficient way to grow food; I live in a country where they have tons of greenhouses. Also pretty energy intensive, but yields are great and predictable, meaning that despite being one of the smallest countries of the world, we're the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Basically we do a lot with what we have. Which is also (for me) a bit unexpected given that most of the areas I've lived in and driven through is grass for cattle.
Anyone that have lived in China or India knows how much people those places have.
There is already a tremendous pressure from the food those countries demand on the world. Chinese fishing fleet just obliterates anywhere they go, and they are destroying the Amazon forest in Brazil and Argentina with soya(proteins for pigs) plantations and equatorial jungles for Palm Oil.
Anything is inefficient at first, including agriculture itself. Wheat and corn grains were super small at first. At first, solar panels did cost hundreds of times more than what it does today.
Technology will improve and the future will be better.
>Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?
I think you are not fully grasping the logistics of your plan. Most of Africa is pretty much landlocked, meaning shipping needs to happen by road (that do not exist today). This alone makes your plan more expensive than vertical farms.
Logistics in the food industry is a very complicated mess, with timelines so tight that we need to hack the riping process by picking fruits early and have them ripe on route, which negatively affects the quality of the produce (and with that the price that the average consumer is willing to pay).
Transport of perishables costs way more than growing them in the first place; so doing it locally is cheaper, less polluting and much fresher. Saying you could do it remotely is about as convincing as making ice in your house as opposed to shipping it from a cold winter halfway around the world.
> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?
Perhaps because the Danes rather be self-sufficient with respect to food, than depend on the development and continued cooperation of a country in Africa?
I personally have a deep love for the idea of mechanizing agriculture in a fully sustainable way to the point you could drop a few pods anywhere and provide healthy, nutritious and free food for any population, for free, forever. What a gift for our children that would be.
It takes time to make the economics favorable by incrementally improving the technology. Once indoor vertical farming does become favorable, it will have huge benefits over outsourcing food production to Africa or elsewhere.
National security for one; it times of war no one can starve your population into submission by cutting off shipments of food into your country. Your crops are also more resilient to pestilence and disease if grown in a controlled indoor environment.
All this makes it a worthwhile line of exploration, no?
I think this kind of thing is really only economical for niche products like micro greens and fancy lettuce with high markups. It can be grown under perfect conditions, then transported and used the same day it's harvested.
So, pretty cool from a technical and culinary perspective, but it's never going to produce staple crops economically. It seems kind of silly to portray it as being particularly eco-friendly or as addressing concerns like food security.
Another argument is that produce has to be packed unripe in a truck to come all the way to copenhagen from spain without spoiling, which results in a usually bland product.
My question is, we know they expect to be profitable by a set date, but what will their prices be per pound? Does part of their plan include asking for a premium ?
Renewable energy will certainly spread to the shipping industry and that alone will increase the number of markets served. The key is opening these markets so farmers in Africa have more destinations for their goods as the pandemic has shown what happens when your existing market slows greatly.
> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?
That's where some of Europe's fruit and veg comes from now, more every year. However, in the long run I would question how sustainable a trade that effectively amounts to transferring water from Africa to Europe is, especially as African domestic markets grow.
I know a guy who made a fool of himself for becoming an enthusiast, starting a company promoting vertical farming, only to find out the Economics don't work.
On a similar note I recommend engineers get Engineering jobs, not business jobs. The money is tempting, but you will never learn about specifications and quality metrics otherwise. (Note I'm not including programmers as engineers)
Just farming in sunny places is also expensive and complicated. It's also vulnerable to drought, flooding, frost damage, pests, blockades, tailbacks at ports etc.
I'm lucky enough to live in one of the most food secure countries in the world, but not everyone is in the same position. There's value in having a food source near big population centres.
I don’t think LED lights are the ultimate solution. They could use light pipes during the day when it’s sunny to route sunlight from outside and distribute it inside possible using fiber optics.
Consider the ratio of growth area to exposed surface area. 14x in this case. It's a vertical farm to maximise this ratio.
Light pipes may be slightly more efficient than PV in energy conversion during daylight hours, but they do not scale horizontally as the farm scales vertically.
For this project in Denmark, the energy comes from abundant wind, not weak and intermittent sun.
I think you should take into account that plants can differ enormously. Small plants that don't grow in tight grids get some fancy 14x multiplier but once you actually try to grow a space efficient plant like wheat it just doesn't work out. The crop is already maximizing exposure to the sun to an incredible degree. Vertical farming can't increase this "efficiency" other than by adding more layers which will always involve uneconomical artificial lighting.
Growing easy plants... is easy. Not every plant is easy to grow in a vertical farm.
Personally, I like light pipe tecnology. But I still don't get it. If wheat is already maxised for land/light and cannot be improved then what could be the theoretical advantage to indoor growing of wheat partially under light pipes?
Area/energy-wise the best it can ever grow indoors is surely no better than on the roof.
It's a luxury product and I'm pretty sure their market is restaurants. Since freshly harvested just tastes better, now good restaurant must source produce locally so are limited by seasons.
This opens the possibility of "farm" to plate under a few hours for what is out of season.
This is just the start, but as other commenters have pointed out in this thread this is not just about the nutrition you get from Lettuce and Kale in comparison to other farm products. It is about the reduction of the need for farmland, transport, packaging, water and the use of chemicals. All parts of the problematic stress we put on nature and the environment. The use of greens in human food consumtion is enormous, regardless of the nutrition value they have compared to meat. If we can reduce the "environmental footprint" this consumtion have, it is a win, and not a waste of resources. On the contrary, I would argue.
And as I start off with; this is just the beginning of an interesting development. The road to a more sustainable future is paved with innovation and technology. It's amazing how far vertical farming has come already, in my view.
Food is absolutely the most important, foundational aspect of any nation. It is so fundamental, that countries will rather create stockpiles and let it rot rather than risk running even the remote chance that they will run out of food. When you run out of food... everything breaks down, quite literally. It is thus in every nations interest to be as self-sufficient in their food production as possible.
This is a very welcome development. Currently, only countries blessed with large sizes and specifically large arable lands are even capable of being self sufficient in their food production. This kind of hyper localized food production might just be the answer for nations of the future that don't want their population or geo-political influence to be limited by their size.
Additionally, climate change has the possibility of severely disrupting both the production and supply chains for food. Being able to grow food anywhere, without worrying about soil fertility, is incredible.
Plants use two (they're probably fine with just one) specific wavelenghts of light, so if you're solar power is broadband you can be saving energy this way.
For places like, say, UAE it could be national security issue (you are 9 meals away from a revolution). It's a great back up in case of natural disasters.
Food sovereignty is a thing - an open air farm in Africa has geopolitical and weather risks. Not to mention the shipping carbon footprint and freshness issues.
and how are you gonna ship fertilizers and ship out highly time sensitive produce from africa where theres no political stability and no roads,no qualified manpower and no law infrastructure?
also ,do you think it makes much sense flying cabbage to Holland from africa?
> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?
Maybe due to things like increased CO2 contributions, poor quality control, and decreased food security?
Anyway, Taastrup is not prime real estate in Copenhagen. It's one of the poorer Copenhagen suburbs.
"If greenhouse gas emissions are not significantly reduced, part of the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region risks becoming uninhabitable before the year 2100."
I agree with you for the most part, but also do disagree. It's complicated. Like water consumption is absolutely far more efficient 10 to 100 times less water used per plant depending on the setup between outdoor to indoor hydroponics. The climate control factor is also a big plus. Sudden heat waves or cold snaps are not as big of a concern with indoor farming. Some places, protection from hail is a huge factor. Even just smoothing out the edges of harsh weather is a huge benefit. These are the tried, true, real world benefits that are both proven and economically efficient already in some small scale vertical farms along with large scale traditional farming plus with hydroponic farming. This doesn't even mention the year round, local supply of certain foods.
However, the electricity issue is the obvious problem along with the artificial light itself. The lights themselves to properly grow plants are not cheap and I saw a study that on an industrial scale, they're also not that reliable (lots of replacements). I have my doubts about the long term nutritional factor of using artificial light. We are evolutionary developed for plants that process the sun for their different forms of photosynthesis. I'd trust plants raised on the light of a fusion reactor more (tongue in cheek, chill). I did read something where researchers are trying to breed certain crops to respond better to artificial light, but I don't know at what stage they're at with it.
Wind energy is still not 100% reliable for obvious reasons and there's only a ~20% efficiency of solar right now on the commercial market (unless something has happened I don't know about). If you're aware of the conversation of energy, I doubt I need to really go into more of that. However, it's a good extra step forward for further market investment in renewables with essentially an extra market to purchase said products (still a win-win).
Without being a party pooper, I still see vertical farming as having potential. All crops? Probably not, to be honest and serious. 25% at least of produce that's available in your average market? Absolutely. We're just not there yet to achieve that, but you have to start someone to work out the "at-scale" and commercial viability issues. This is all good steps forward as long as you see it as such. If you think it more than that, then you're going to get disappointed and miss the lessons that can be learned.
Beating that dead horse, there are plenty of problems that need to be addressed. Plantagon comes to mind as to their failures, but that was a bit more money related due to not realizing the infrastructure requirements (plus, from the articles I read, I smell a bit of... corruption? con-artist? bullshit?). Respecting the problems at hand and trying to fix them is far better than just going, "We need to change everything to vertical farming now! You're a piece of shit if you think otherwise!" Which is kind of where a lot of these conversations and articles go. None of which is beneficial for anyone.
You're idea of investing in Africa is generally the tried and true commercial agricultural method of expanding food supplies. Nothing wrong with it, as long as you don't go Belgium's King Leopold II about it. But I'm not 100% against diversifying food supplies at some sacrifice to efficiency both short and long range in time and distance. I think the pandemic shows how important it is to never have "one source" of anything. The logistics dangers never show up in the good times, but they can make the bad times really bad. I like the vertical farm idea due to the decentralized concept.
There's pros and cons to the vertical farming movement. I don't believe we're at a point where a major portion of the food supply can come from it. I really think a decent portion (20%-30%) can come from it within the end of the 2020s with better economic efficiency than traditional farming. Beyond that, no one can really predict it without their personal biases playing a factor. Once we can shut up the fanboys and wannabe environmentalists who have bullshit degrees in nothing actually useful from spouting stupidity and diverting investments to con-artists, real progress can be made and some benefits can be seen relatively quickly. I want to double down on that statement, the over hype and fanboys do nothing good for any technology. Their rhetoric diverts investments from those who make real progress in a field to con-artist ponzi scheming assholes. The more emotionally charged something is, the more this happens.
Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else.
all They grow are great salad crops. Thats about it. If you're going holistic, you can farm fish at the same time. But that introduces a load of complications.
Look, if you want to make the world a better place you need to:
1) come up with a simple system that can create good quality soil (think Terra preta, but different blends for different regions of the world)
2) make a multch that is cheap, safe and sustainable, so normal farmers can reduce water loss
3) create a cheap fast robot that can remove weeds
4) same again but for pests.
5) make a system of payments that allows both mixed crops (ie fruit/lumber/nuts) as well as livestock and arable.
Out of all of them 5 is the hardest. Its also the one that will have the biggest impact on climate (mixed land holds the most water, regulates heat and captures the most carbon, it also can have the lowest yield.)
Vertical farms start with salads ('crunchy water') because they are easy crops to start such a process with. Once established and verified they will for sure move away from just leafy greens. The typical plan for a startup in this domain runs in the decades, not just a few years, and they're pretty capital intensive compared to software start-ups. Think of the salad producing vertical farm as you would of an MVP for a SaaS company and it makes more sense.
While your premise is probably right, note that the 2% efficiency of photosynthesis is for sun light. Growth lamps such used here will certainly emit at wave length optimized to the absorption spectra of the crop.
Yes, we could use some numbers here.
I.e., how much energy would it take to grow one kg of potatoes in artificial lighting. Compared to how much it takes to transport it by ship from Morocco to Copenhagen. Or by an electrical train from Spain.
Production of electricity from wind turbines fluctuates a lot. So does the price. I wonder if there are plants that you can give light when it is windy at any time of the day and leave in the dark when when electricity is expensive.
There are some things that were not available 50 years ago. Better robots, better accumulators, flying drones, image recognition, AI able to make complex decisions. Those things might reduce need in humans and humans are not cheap.
A flat farm, everything else being equal, will take less humans. There's nothing about being indoors and vertical that is a magical advantage for mechanization. There's also a lot more mechanization necessary in dealing with vertical farms. All of a sudden you have to transport soil, fertilizer, and harverst vertically in addition to horizontally.
Already, wheat fields can be tilled and harvested by autonomous combines. Direct human labor is basically down to picking fruits and vegetables. Most of the time, it's going to be cheaper growing something outside, in the sun and dirt that's already there.
Thats true, but all of those things work just as well in a normal horizontal greenhosue that takes maximum advantage of the sun , or even in the open field
Well technically, if you could increase the photosynthesis efficiency then it might. There are projects that aspire to do just that. If the results are somewhat fragile and wouldn't survive in the wild then this could work in combination with greenhouses or vertical farms.
But yeah, that's quite speculative and until it happens I agree that the energy budget doesn't make much sense.
Other crops are not just scaled up versions of salads. Bulk foods (wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, cassava, rice) cannot be grown efficiently in such vertical farms, at any scale, with current technology. Having lots of multi-story greenhouses does not contribute to developing the sort of radical innovative tech that would be required for staple foods.
> Other crops are not just scaled up versions of salads.
I didn't claim they were.
But Salads are a good way to get a whole pile of principles figured out (contamination, environmental effects on the gear, basic robotics, deals with potential customers and so on).
> Bulk foods (wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, cassava, rice) cannot be grown efficiently in such vertical farms, at any scale, with current technology.
That's true, but that's also not where the next move would be. Bulk foods (more properly called staple foods) do just fine in regular soil where ever they are being grown, and do so reasonably efficiently.
But for cucumbers, tomatoes and a whole pile of other veggies vertical farming quite probably will work just fine and cost competitive with normal greenhouses.
A vertical farm does not compete with in soil agriculture in open air, it competes with greenhouses. Staple foods are an entirely different class of problem.
In IT terms: don't complain that the more efficient CPU factory doesn't make your memory faster, it isn't meant to do that.
I know you didn't, but (without wanting to put words into your mouth), the more abstract claim was that there is some sort of technology path from growing salads to growing other crops, which (I'm claiming) there isn't, or at least not to a significant degree. The things you mention are already solved, have been for many years; it has been a specialty and major export product of our country for decades (as you indubitably know).
"Bulk foods (more properly called staple foods)"
I didn't use that word on purpose. What I roughly wanted to say was "root crops, grains, tree crops, basically anything that isn't herbs or salads", but that wouldn't be accurate either (carrots are root crops but not a staple and can to some degree be grown in substrates). But probably it's a distinction without a difference, in this context. I think it's fair, for the sake of the discussion, to talk about "leafy greens" vs "non leafy greens", even though "but tomatoes" etc.
"Bulk foods do just fine in regular soil where ever they are being grown, and do so reasonably efficiently."
No they do not, at least under other circumstances than precisely the ones we want to get away from, with indiscriminate use of nitrates and pesticides. I happen to have a yield model for various crops in the EU here open on my other monitor, that I've been working with for several months now. Agriculture as we do it today in the western EU cannot be done efficiently without intensive farming methods. Without fertilizer, yields are a factor of 2 to 4 lower. That is an absolutely game changing difference.
"A vertical farm does not compete with in soil agriculture in open air, it competes with greenhouses."
Well I'm not sure any more what we're arguing here. The OP's point was "Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else." Which, to some degree, holds for greenhouses (depending on definitions). The food production problems we have is not that we don't have enough area for greenhouses, or that we can't grow enough leafy greens; greenhouses are so efficient that we're not constrained by land for the demand we have for food that can be grown in them. What we need is more space efficient production of high calorie foods, in ways that don't degrade the environment in the ways and to the extent current methods do. Neither vertical farms nor greenhouses (I mean, 'vertical farm' is just a marketing word for 'multi story greenhouse') will be of any use for that.
But maybe your point is something entirely different and relates to the OP in a different way, in which case our whole discussion is moot.
Vertical, robotic farms can compete favorably with greenhouses because of reduced labor costs, increased energy efficiency and better usage of available space. That's enough of a difference that it will disrupt under glass growing. If that's all it does it is already well worth the investment, if it does more than that that would be an amazing bonus (but I'm not counting on it for reasons that you've already touched on).
I disagree with that 'feeds some restaurants', regular consumers take in far more in terms of leafy greens, tomatoes, cucumbers and a raft of other vegetables besides than the restaurants do (in particular right now, but also under more normal conditions).
If anybody cracks the staple foods under glass problem with any degree of efficiency that would really be a game changer but this vertical farm option is already quite impressive from what I've seen. There are some interesting trials underway in NL by people that at least seem to know what they are doing.
Can you give me a reference? I am somewhat interested and my current information is that they are generally trying to work around the disadvantage of giving up scale compared to traditional farms.
I would not compare a vertical farm to a traditional farm but to a greenhouse and then the comparison is quite favorable. Effectively it is a more acreage efficient version of the greenhouse at a somewhat higher energy expense per kg of produce.
Waste is a big fucker, as is the over supply of meat.
However where I diverge is that I still think livestock have a strong role to play in established and subsistence agriculture. I mean this in the way that fish can be put in the loop for hydroponic, chickens to reduce pests, or pigs/sheep used to rotivate fields. Not in the way that we devote vast amounts of land to pasture. (although there are questions to answer about how to manage rich grasslands that are carbon sinks.)
Ain't this the truth. It's an incredibly inefficient way to feed the human race. And to boot, there's fewer starving livestock then there are starving humans.
You can't plow a mountain side and grow acres of corn or build a feedlot. But you can run cattle and sheep over it which are able to forage the grasses while climbing the terrain.
So mountainous people are able to obtain calories from animals in places otherwise unsuitable for more conventional farming methods.
No one is trying to force people to abandon their locally sourced food. The problem is with people in developed nations who live in cities. Also the point is you wouldn't need to expand the farmlands, quite the opposite.
> 5) make a system of payments that allows both mixed crops (ie fruit/lumber/nuts) as well as livestock and arable.
I don't understand that statement. Is that a tech/internet software payment solution ? Or do you mean that a farmer/breeder should be able to use his fields/pastures for either livestock and agriculture ?
Let us not make the best an enemy of the good. The overall benefits from vertical farming are good when implemented correctly. Sure it isn't a perfect solution that solves everything, but it is on the road to better solutions. And in my opinion a part of our future farming solutions.
Shit ton of land, water and other resources are used to grow grains just for the meat industry. If a portion of those resources are used to grow food for humans instead of animals, it would reduce a ton of waste and pollution.
Disclaimer: I've grown tomatoes, strawberries and weed indoors with artificial lighting.
As long as there is no shocking event like global drought or famine I do not think vertical farming or indoor farming will be a norm anytime soon as it takes massive, massive amount of energy/capital.
That being said, the moment we figure out using fusion energy, conventional farming will most probably vanish.
Also R&D on agriculture robots is a nice side perk, there is only so much to automate in agriculture & horticulture.
I can't listen to your podcast right now, but solar panels are more efficient than photosynthesis, and you can produce the wavelength of light needed for plants by LEDs using a fraction of that power, so what makes you say that the solar farm that powers a vertical farm will always take up more space than the vertical farm saves?
You're right, I was generalising a bit in my above comment. The wavelength - focusing argument actually comes up in the podcast and we agree it might possibly offer a way out of the energy trap.
Someone claimed a while back most of these vertical farms would switch to growing weed once it became legal in the state(s) they have farms.
I’m not sure if any other crop beside weed would turn a significant profit. You might be able to get a government contract to grow some other controlled substance and turn a small profit.
The only other way it would work would be if it was a co-op owned by residents or subsidized by the local government.
The only pressure to grow weed inside is quality but premium flower is losing market share quickly. Every extracted product (vapes, edibles, drinks, topicals) is created from biomass which is best grown outdoors for the cheapest price.
There also isn't really that much weed needed as people think. Outdoors you can get roughly ~1,500lbs per acre of dried flower. In Colorado 2017, roughly 20,000lbs of cannabis was consumed per month. If you project based on population, the whole USA only needs about 7,000 acres harvested, annually. Maybe they'll be some loss so let's say 15,000 acres would safely cover it. In the USA, there's over 90,000,000 acres of corn grown a year. Cannabis is actually a very small market from the farming side and the indoor grows will very much be a niche market.
As for the general economics, vertical farming will never make sense until either the underlying economics of farming change (maybe from climate change) or energy becomes free.
Presumably the demand for weed is already being met (legally or not). Is there evidence that legalization prompts a large increase in demand? Just thinking about myself, I did not use weed when it was illegal, and legalization has not changed that.
Also see previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (2017) - (1) and (2).
As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens (mainly water but but not much other nutrients or carbon), but much harder for other plants.
See this video [3] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)".
A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead - correct link[4]).
What are some high-calorie/nutritional value plants that work well in vertical farming? Maybe if those were grown cheaply enough people would adapt their recipes to incorporate them.
After the success of vacuum trains, underground superhighways, solar roadways and rocket travel, I guess this is the next logical step? At least you have something to sink our money into, rinse and repeat. Maybe even involve some EU green & eco funds.
I've always been a fan of those projects but it's clear they've now mostly turned to greenporn.
For this specific project: nothing makes sense. The farm is operated by "Nordic Harvest", with claims that it can produce 200 tons of products in 2021 on a 7000 sqm footprint. The products would be fresh herbs and salads (the website only displays fresh herbs). So the total output of herbs on year 1 would be more than the equivalent surface of beetroot, one of the heaviest products. The site says the farm uses "no fertilizer" then comes to explain than they only use "natural fertilizer". The entire thing looks like a byproduct of the windmill industry, which is crumbling because of intermittent surplus of cheap electricity. All details on https://www.nordicharvest.com/
This reminds me of for urban farming in Paris a couple years ago, where I witnessed most "startup farms" from inception to failure: it's a perfect PR choreography. Some company builds a "farm" on its roof (with bee hives), advertises it as a totem of some vacant post-carbon strategy, collects fiscal incentives, then the farm never gets to see its 3rd year because it's so impossibly hard to even dream of reaching profitability or large-scale production. In Paris, the "largest farm in the world" is twice the size of this dutch "world largest" and actually operated by Unibail Westfield (and produces barely anything): https://www.urw.com/en/press-room/press-news/world-largest-u...
There are exceptions in urban farming (Lufa in Montreal, some sites in Singapore) but the PR pressure and laziness of journalist coverage is ruining it from the inside.
I wonder if this will eventually lead to even more efficiency (less people involved in per output). Vertical farms lend themselves much more to standardization than conventional ones imo (many small machines instead of few big ones). If all the often-failing parts could be built in a way that they can be replaced automatically I can imagine a giant farm being run by a single guy who's main task is receiving replacement parts and sometimes untangling messes the bots don't know how to manage.
The other big benefit of being independent from environmental factors might also come in handy in space or as a cheaper alternative to fighting climate change.
Totally agree with Barrin92; the dollars don't stack up.
Ballpark estimate here, I've tried this with several crops and its similar
Hard comparing field farming and tower-farming but here in NZ good level farmland is ~NZ$40000 Hectare Ha (2.47 acres), most farms >300 Ha. Equipment, fences and buildings are NZ$2M+, so that makes it nearly $47k Ha, round up to $50k Ha to be safer. So you could say their infrastructure cost is $10000/Ha.
But farms don't have to purchase light! Lighting costs for farming $0, for 100% artificial light NZ$1.90 per harvested Kg.
Current production costs for e.g. wheat $2500 Ha (seed, tillage, weed-control, harvest). Wheat NZ has world record of ~17t Ha, but all of this is a lot easier (cheaper) when you can move large machines freely. Wind is also an advantage in strengthening plant stems.
A farming tower needs greater strength than a residential building as there are live loads like harvesting equipment and a lot of 'soil' media and/or water if fully hydroponic. So I'll use costs for a concrete multilevel parking building which is going to be at least $2200 m² (plus lighting, HVAC and fitout - not in calc).
So, say your tower floorplate is 1000m², and taller than residential for extra HVAC and machine space. Assume you buy farmland at $45k Ha and build 10 floors (1000m²/floor), and prob. end with ~700m² growing space per floor, means you need another three floors to get you up to a 1 Ha growing area,
: so 13 1000m² floors at $2200m² = $28.6M / $50k = 570 times.
Plus lighting at $1.90 per kg of harvestable product - which for wheat at 17t/Ha would be $32000 per crop cycle.
For all the anti-vertical farmers out there with a highly USA-centric view, consider that the Netherlands (the world leader in indoor agriculture aka 2nd largest exporter of vegetables in the world [1]) is investing in vertical farming and research into it. "This won't work in the US therefore it won't work anywhere in the world" is a very limited view. New York, Japan, Singapore and other regions and countries have very good reasons to invest in it [2].
Not every country has the space or disregard for greenhouse gases.
Two reasons. Leafy greens are easy to grow hydroponically because they grow quickly. The problem with them is that they have nearly zero calories.
People invest money into growing them hydroponically because they don't keep, or transport well, which makes them incredibly expensive out-of-season. The high margins make it economical. Nobody's going to be growing rice hydroponically, for instance, because rice retails for 75 cents a pound.
Size is the main thing, plants like corn haven't had much in the way of vertical constraints so until we adapt new shorter breeds of them you can only grow so much per cubic meter and the economics doesn't work out compared to an open field. There's also the economics of how much goes into the non edible parts of the plant, this is much lower in leafy greens. Aside from that they just don't keep as well as more robust crops, so they have to be a lot fresher.
What happens to the soil (or growth medium) over time? Soil is a living system, pretty much an organism unto itself. You farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.
If they are able to produce a Rucola/Rocket, Baby Spinat or Lacusta salad cleaned and packaged for less than 200 kr/kg (27 euros), they will be making significant amount of money. (or anyone else who does it for that matter)
Not really. 91M acres of corn is grown in the US annually. I don't see that being put indoors. It would be best to grow high calorie and protein rich food in indoor farms. I could imagine cell cultured meat or insect farms really disrupt farming. From a cost standpoint, vertical plant farms will have enormous difficulty competing with any outdoor farms.
You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients built in.
Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?