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.

Salads are economic to produce because they have no calories.

Calories = Light (energy) + Fertiliser.

Efficiency of an LED is like 40%, and Photosynthesis efficiency is like 2%.

In other words calories are expensive and ineffieicent to produce through artificial lighting, no amount of 'startuping' will change that.

Also nothing here is new, we've had greenhouses, artificial lighting, hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics and even vertical farms like 50 years.

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

> no amount of 'startuping' will change that.

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 didn't claim they were."

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.

6) reduce waste, stop feeding meat instead of people

Sorry, yes I should have put these two points in.

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.

Northern Europeans and many steppe peoples exist largely because livestock can be raised on terrain that's not suitable for animal farming.

Factory farming uses almost no land. The animals never leave the building or their cage.

I don't quite get the point you are making. Can you rephrase it?

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.

Thanks for clarifying.

Letting cattle and sheep and goats forage in terrain unsuited for agriculture is fine.

I still think we should stop feeding that 1/3rd of our grain to cattle.

> 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 ?

It's a political kind of payment: the shape of farming in the "first world" is determined by what gets subsidised.

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.

6) Eat less meat.

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.