8 ms·

The Vertical Farm

90 points by karmel 10y ago

philipkglass 10y ago
Most of America’s baby greens are grown in irrigated fields in the Salinas Valley, in California. During the winter months, some production moves to similar fields in Arizona or goes even farther south, into Mexico. If you look at the shelves of baby greens in a store, you may find plastic clamshells holding five ounces of greens for $3.99 (organicgirl, from Salinas), or for $3.29 (Earthbound Farm, from near Salinas), or for $2.99 (Fresh Attitude, from Quebec and Florida). Harwood’s magic number of eight dollars a pound would be on the cheap side today. Four dollars for five ounces comes to about thirteen dollars a pound. AeroFarms supplies greens to the dining rooms at the Times, Goldman Sachs, and several other corporate accounts in New York. At the moment, the greens can be purchased retail only at two ShopRite supermarkets, one on Springfield Avenue in Newark and the other on Broad Street in Bloomfield. The AeroFarms clamshell package (clear plastic, No. 1 recyclable) appears to be the same size as its competition’s but it holds slightly less—4.5 ounces instead of five. It is priced at the highest end, at $3.99. The company plans to have its greens on the shelves soon at Whole Foods stores and Kings, also in the local area. Greens that come from California ride in trucks for days. The driving time from AeroFarms’ farm to the Newark ShopRite is about eleven minutes. All of this makes sense. People will pay a premium for fresh produce and herbs, particularly if growing them close to consumption means that you can optimize for deliciousness rather than for transport-durability and long shelf life. I expect vertical farming to work well in this niche. But the rest of it -- feeding all of New York City using just the space available in NYC, "Feeding the World in the 21st Century", "what might come of it when we’re nine billion humans on a baking, thirsting globe?" -- that's nonsense. For staple crops that provide most of the calories in a vegetarian diet, there is no net economic or environmental benefit to vertical farming. And there are good reasons to suspect that there will never be such benefits even as the technology evolves. It's the vertical stacking of greenhouses that doesn't make sense outside of a high-priced freshness niche, and that's because of the requirement for artificial lighting. Artificial lighting is a very expensive way to drive photosynthesis compared to natural sunlight, and remains more expensive even with optimistic assumptions about future LED efficiency and falling costs for clean electricity. The energy requirements to grow e.g. soybeans in a vertical farm inside the NYC city limits wipe out all the environmental benefits of "locavorism," compared to just transporting them from the Midwest like usual. And New York has one of the cleaner electricity mixes in the US. It's worse if you use a fossil-heavy mix to power the lights. I could see large scale use of greenhouses in the future, particularly things like this: http://www.sundropfarms.com/ http://www.sundropfarms.com/ Greenhouses and perhaps soil-free growing may be great ways to produce food in places that face extreme weather or lack soil or natural precipitation. But one level construction only, illuminated by natural sunlight. You can ship a ton of dried beans or wheat across oceans for significantly less energy than it takes to grow the same calories locally via artificial illumination.
- the8472 10y ago
  > Artificial lighting is a very expensive way to drive photosynthesis compared to natural sunlight, and remains more expensive even with optimistic assumptions about future LED efficiency and falling costs for clean electricity. What if we are talking theoretical limits instead of what is practical today? Couldn't capturing the full spectrum of sunlight (e.g. through multi-junction cells) and then emitting an optimized spectrum for plants to absorb boost efficiency? Photosynthesis efficiency is also affected by temperature. So at least in hot climates having the plants indoors while capturing the sunlight outside could yield increased efficiency when compared to fields exposed to direct sunlight.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    You can have the plants indoors and protected from temperature extremes in a single story greenhouse with natural illumination. Theoretically, an infinite-junction solar cell can achieve up to 68.7% efficiency under non-concentrated sunlight. The best demonstrated so far is about half of that: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517121811.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517121811.h... Efficiency under concentrated illumination is higher but concentrating designs require direct illumination and have their performance fall off a cliff under even partially cloudy conditions. Spectral tuning of the light sources can make illumination more photosynthetically efficient, and so can evening out the illumination intensity. If you could get lights and multi-junction solar cells that operated at the theoretical limit it might be more efficient than natural sunlight growing, but that's a tall order to achieve in practice. To achieve a net environmental benefit not only does it have to be more efficient than single-story natural illuminated structures, it has to be enough more efficient to pay back the environmental costs of manufacturing the extra equipment required up-front in the vertical case.
    - the8472 10y ago
      I was particularly thinking about applications in arid climates. Where just spraying water on plants or cooling large greenhouses has inefficiencies on its own. Or is cooling horizontal greenhouses easy enough, even in deserts?
jlebrech 10y ago
maybe one of those farms could directly replace the produce aisle of the supermarket. the benefit is that unsold produce would just get bigger.
Animats 10y ago
"The willingness of a certain kind of customer to pay a lot for salad justifies the investment." It's a hipster thing. The greens thing may not scale. With salad greens, most of what you grow is salable product. With most vegetables, you grow a lot of plant that gets discarded. There have been companies doing vertical farming in Japan for a few years, but they're mostly lettuce factories. There's one operation in Japan growing strawberries, but "they are currently selling their medium size strawberries at around $5 per berry, not per package. They only sell through their own channels or at high-end department stores in Tokyo, and they admit that their product is not for people to purchase at supermarkets for daily consumption, but a luxury product for gifts." There's talk of vertical farming for tomatoes, but nobody seems to be doing this profitably on a significant scale.
- jsilence 10y ago
  Tomato production in greenhouses is already vertical if you consider that the plants are grown up to 6m (20ft) high. The plant length at the end of the growing period is roundabout 15m-20m (50-65ft), since the plants are treated in a way that keeps one main branch growing at the top while pruning everything below harvest line. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/19/c4/53/19c4539e7860d1288ecbdeaddedd5347.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/19/c4/53/19c4...
- new299 10y ago
  This probably makes sense in Japan more than anywhere else. There's an active market for small numbers of near perfect fruit attractively packaged and sold for use as gifts. $5 is still on the high-side. But a pack of perhaps 8 fruit for 30USD is pretty normal. You'd actually find that in a lot of supermarkets in Tokyo and beyond, not just very high end places.
- louhike 10y ago
  First, "hispter thing" doesn't mean a thing. And for the profitability, it may improve through time, so this kind of farms should be not discarded. Electric cars are mostly a luxury for now, but it will clearly comme to mass market soon. For a lot of products, it is neccessary to sell it as a luxury first to be able to improve the process enough to make it available to all.
wonko1 10y ago
Reminds me of Toshiba, and their project to repurpose semiconductor facilities to grow vegetables: http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba_starts_vegetable_production_at_its_Clean_Room_Farm_in_Yokosuka/102062 http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba...
GrumpyNl 10y ago
You still think that salades are grown on, as we call it in Holland, full ground? This is how its done now, 5 layers on top of each other and no more dirty ground. http://www.food-nutrition.nl/artikelen/groenteteelt-op-een-hoger-plan/ http://www.food-nutrition.nl/artikelen/groenteteelt-op-een-h...
simopaa 10y ago
I think that the most important potential with vertical farming is not the smaller area requirement, but the tremendous water saving that can be achieved. For example in areas like the Middle-East, agricultural irrigation takes a huge and increasing toll on the water resources [1]. This along with the large rivers of the world (where the irrigation water usually comes from) being constantly more polluted may well increase tensions in these arid regions. If by vertical farming techniques the need for water can be reduced as dramatically as the article states ("Aeroponic farming uses about seventy per cent less water than hydroponic farming, which grows plants in water; hydroponic farming uses seventy per cent less water than regular farming"), this by itself seems like a worthy effort for certain regions on the planet. [1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/Y1860E/y1860e05.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/Y1860E/y1860e05.htm
- gjem97 10y ago
  Right, but then we're really talking about aeroponic farming, not vertical farming.
  - SamBam 10y ago
    But the vast majority of vertical farms are aeroponic farms, are they not? It's way more efficient to do aeroponic if you are vertical farming, and it's way more efficient to do vertical if you are aeroponic farming. The two work together.
- thinkcontext 10y ago
  The water issue is independent of whether the farm is vertical or not. There are plenty of hydroponic farms that are in a traditional horizontal orientation, I presume aeroponics can be setup this way as well. So, I do think the smaller area is the main advantage, though I'm not convinced it is a compelling enough reason given the increased energy, land and capital costs. I agree that water should be treated as more valuable and scarce than it currently is. You mentioned the Middle East, I saw this concept for a "seawater greenhouse" recently in Qatar and was intrigued http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/11/desert-farming-experiment-yields-first-results http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/11/desert-farming-experi... In the US, I'm curious about the scalability of these water saving technologies. Could they replace a significant percentage of vegetable production of drought stricken California? As I understand it now, hydroponics is used primarily for winter production, even that competes with Colorado River dependent Arizona.
kfk 10y ago
The combo is high yield, fast growth, good price and dense areas (as in, you can serve your market on a bike). I did not yet run the numbers, but I think it can be profitable. Take rucola, which grows very fast, if you can make 0.5kg per square meter every 2 weeks, then it's eur ~1.25 (1kg = ~5 euros) per square meter per week. With 10,000 m2, it's eur 12.5k per week. 10,000 m2 is a 100x100m square - not much, you can probably rent that much worth of loan in residential areas and pay in vegetables (1 box per week, etc.). I think this is pretty doable. Go to market is pretty much done. Good story for being local, etc. Probably even tastier product if you know how to play with a greenhouse.
m-i-l 10y ago
Very interesting. A couple of thoughts: 1. How about automating harvesting? The article suggests that there is a fairly sizeable unskilled workforce, potentially involved in harvesting, packing etc. I think I read elsewhere that the costs involved in this are relatively low and that there might be little cost benefit in automating. However, an automated solution could potentially have other benefits, e.g. opportunity for a "pick on demand fresh for me at the time I schedule" option, e.g. via an app (assuming automated inventory etc.). Going one step further, if you had automated planting, pruning etc. you might even be able to create "black boxes" which would in effect be fresh produce vending machines. 2. Does this scale to larger perennial plants, e.g. fruit trees? If vertical farming is only viable for salad greens (where you harvest pretty much the entire plant and then start again), not just from a cost perspective (value per kilo of produce, frequency of harvests, space occupied by plants, etc.) but also from a practical perspective (e.g. does aeroponics even work for trees - a quick read of wikipedia is inconclusive) then it isn't going to make the world a better place.
- tom_mellior 10y ago
  > However, an automated solution could potentially have other benefits, e.g. opportunity for a "pick on demand fresh for me at the time I schedule" option, e.g. via an app (assuming automated inventory etc.). If the pick-up times are at reasonable times (not 3 a.m.), they would already have people on site. The system could tell them to pick X amount of plant Y. So "on demand" doesn't necessarily mean "no humans involved". > Going one step further, if you had automated planting, pruning etc. you might even be able to create "black boxes" which would in effect be fresh produce vending machines. From the article and the company's website it seems that the growing cloths must be washed from time to time, possibly after each harvest. I guess you wouldn't want to build a washing machine into the system, but it might be done... > Does this scale to larger perennial plants, e.g. fruit trees? Even if this system doesn't do that, growing trees indoors might be interesting from the perspectives of controlling temperature, wind, and especially water runoff/evaporation. > salad [...] isn't going to make the world a better place You might say the same thing about fruit trees. The key crops would probably be legumes and rice.
mxuribe 10y ago
This is a great story. I - for one - hope that this technology and method of growing (provided it stays nice and healthy) succeeds. As a side benefit, if other competitors rise up and begin populating old, large metros (that were titans of jobs and industries decades ago), like Detroit, etc...well, that's another great benefit! Imagine all the jobs created, and not for getting more people to click things on the web. Also, I hear all the time that we need more farmers (to keep up with increased need for food growth), and yet others stating that we need more technologists/engineers (to solve some vexing human problems)...This farming technology appears to be a confluence of a need for a merged type of worker: the techno-farmer! Crazy, eh? But, I think, very cool.

90 points by karmel 10y ago

Most of America’s baby greens are grown in irrigated fields in the Salinas Valley, in California. During the winter months, some production moves to similar fields in Arizona or goes even farther south, into Mexico. If you look at the shelves of baby greens in a store, you may find plastic clamshells holding five ounces of greens for $3.99 (organicgirl, from Salinas), or for $3.29 (Earthbound Farm, from near Salinas), or for $2.99 (Fresh Attitude, from Quebec and Florida). Harwood’s magic number of eight dollars a pound would be on the cheap side today. Four dollars for five ounces comes to about thirteen dollars a pound. AeroFarms supplies greens to the dining rooms at the Times, Goldman Sachs, and several other corporate accounts in New York. At the moment, the greens can be purchased retail only at two ShopRite supermarkets, one on Springfield Avenue in Newark and the other on Broad Street in Bloomfield. The AeroFarms clamshell package (clear plastic, No. 1 recyclable) appears to be the same size as its competition’s but it holds slightly less—4.5 ounces instead of five. It is priced at the highest end, at $3.99. The company plans to have its greens on the shelves soon at Whole Foods stores and Kings, also in the local area. Greens that come from California ride in trucks for days. The driving time from AeroFarms’ farm to the Newark ShopRite is about eleven minutes. All of this makes sense. People will pay a premium for fresh produce and herbs, particularly if growing them close to consumption means that you can optimize for deliciousness rather than for transport-durability and long shelf life. I expect vertical farming to work well in this niche. But the rest of it -- feeding all of New York City using just the space available in NYC, "Feeding the World in the 21st Century", "what might come of it when we’re nine billion humans on a baking, thirsting globe?" -- that's nonsense. For staple crops that provide most of the calories in a vegetarian diet, there is no net economic or environmental benefit to vertical farming. And there are good reasons to suspect that there will never be such benefits even as the technology evolves. It's the vertical stacking of greenhouses that doesn't make sense outside of a high-priced freshness niche, and that's because of the requirement for artificial lighting. Artificial lighting is a very expensive way to drive photosynthesis compared to natural sunlight, and remains more expensive even with optimistic assumptions about future LED efficiency and falling costs for clean electricity. The energy requirements to grow e.g. soybeans in a vertical farm inside the NYC city limits wipe out all the environmental benefits of "locavorism," compared to just transporting them from the Midwest like usual. And New York has one of the cleaner electricity mixes in the US. It's worse if you use a fossil-heavy mix to power the lights. I could see large scale use of greenhouses in the future, particularly things like this: http://www.sundropfarms.com/ http://www.sundropfarms.com/ Greenhouses and perhaps soil-free growing may be great ways to produce food in places that face extreme weather or lack soil or natural precipitation. But one level construction only, illuminated by natural sunlight. You can ship a ton of dried beans or wheat across oceans for significantly less energy than it takes to grow the same calories locally via artificial illumination.

the8472 10y ago
> Artificial lighting is a very expensive way to drive photosynthesis compared to natural sunlight, and remains more expensive even with optimistic assumptions about future LED efficiency and falling costs for clean electricity. What if we are talking theoretical limits instead of what is practical today? Couldn't capturing the full spectrum of sunlight (e.g. through multi-junction cells) and then emitting an optimized spectrum for plants to absorb boost efficiency? Photosynthesis efficiency is also affected by temperature. So at least in hot climates having the plants indoors while capturing the sunlight outside could yield increased efficiency when compared to fields exposed to direct sunlight.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  You can have the plants indoors and protected from temperature extremes in a single story greenhouse with natural illumination. Theoretically, an infinite-junction solar cell can achieve up to 68.7% efficiency under non-concentrated sunlight. The best demonstrated so far is about half of that: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517121811.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517121811.h... Efficiency under concentrated illumination is higher but concentrating designs require direct illumination and have their performance fall off a cliff under even partially cloudy conditions. Spectral tuning of the light sources can make illumination more photosynthetically efficient, and so can evening out the illumination intensity. If you could get lights and multi-junction solar cells that operated at the theoretical limit it might be more efficient than natural sunlight growing, but that's a tall order to achieve in practice. To achieve a net environmental benefit not only does it have to be more efficient than single-story natural illuminated structures, it has to be enough more efficient to pay back the environmental costs of manufacturing the extra equipment required up-front in the vertical case.
  - the8472 10y ago
    I was particularly thinking about applications in arid climates. Where just spraying water on plants or cooling large greenhouses has inefficiencies on its own. Or is cooling horizontal greenhouses easy enough, even in deserts?

jlebrech 10y ago

maybe one of those farms could directly replace the produce aisle of the supermarket. the benefit is that unsold produce would just get bigger.

Animats 10y ago

"The willingness of a certain kind of customer to pay a lot for salad justifies the investment." It's a hipster thing. The greens thing may not scale. With salad greens, most of what you grow is salable product. With most vegetables, you grow a lot of plant that gets discarded. There have been companies doing vertical farming in Japan for a few years, but they're mostly lettuce factories. There's one operation in Japan growing strawberries, but "they are currently selling their medium size strawberries at around $5 per berry, not per package. They only sell through their own channels or at high-end department stores in Tokyo, and they admit that their product is not for people to purchase at supermarkets for daily consumption, but a luxury product for gifts." There's talk of vertical farming for tomatoes, but nobody seems to be doing this profitably on a significant scale.

jsilence 10y ago
Tomato production in greenhouses is already vertical if you consider that the plants are grown up to 6m (20ft) high. The plant length at the end of the growing period is roundabout 15m-20m (50-65ft), since the plants are treated in a way that keeps one main branch growing at the top while pruning everything below harvest line. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/19/c4/53/19c4539e7860d1288ecbdeaddedd5347.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/19/c4/53/19c4...
new299 10y ago
This probably makes sense in Japan more than anywhere else. There's an active market for small numbers of near perfect fruit attractively packaged and sold for use as gifts. $5 is still on the high-side. But a pack of perhaps 8 fruit for 30USD is pretty normal. You'd actually find that in a lot of supermarkets in Tokyo and beyond, not just very high end places.
louhike 10y ago
First, "hispter thing" doesn't mean a thing. And for the profitability, it may improve through time, so this kind of farms should be not discarded. Electric cars are mostly a luxury for now, but it will clearly comme to mass market soon. For a lot of products, it is neccessary to sell it as a luxury first to be able to improve the process enough to make it available to all.

wonko1 10y ago

Reminds me of Toshiba, and their project to repurpose semiconductor facilities to grow vegetables: http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba_starts_vegetable_production_at_its_Clean_Room_Farm_in_Yokosuka/102062 http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba...

GrumpyNl 10y ago

You still think that salades are grown on, as we call it in Holland, full ground? This is how its done now, 5 layers on top of each other and no more dirty ground. http://www.food-nutrition.nl/artikelen/groenteteelt-op-een-hoger-plan/ http://www.food-nutrition.nl/artikelen/groenteteelt-op-een-h...

simopaa 10y ago

I think that the most important potential with vertical farming is not the smaller area requirement, but the tremendous water saving that can be achieved. For example in areas like the Middle-East, agricultural irrigation takes a huge and increasing toll on the water resources [1]. This along with the large rivers of the world (where the irrigation water usually comes from) being constantly more polluted may well increase tensions in these arid regions. If by vertical farming techniques the need for water can be reduced as dramatically as the article states ("Aeroponic farming uses about seventy per cent less water than hydroponic farming, which grows plants in water; hydroponic farming uses seventy per cent less water than regular farming"), this by itself seems like a worthy effort for certain regions on the planet. [1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/Y1860E/y1860e05.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/Y1860E/y1860e05.htm

gjem97 10y ago
Right, but then we're really talking about aeroponic farming, not vertical farming.
- SamBam 10y ago
  But the vast majority of vertical farms are aeroponic farms, are they not? It's way more efficient to do aeroponic if you are vertical farming, and it's way more efficient to do vertical if you are aeroponic farming. The two work together.
thinkcontext 10y ago
The water issue is independent of whether the farm is vertical or not. There are plenty of hydroponic farms that are in a traditional horizontal orientation, I presume aeroponics can be setup this way as well. So, I do think the smaller area is the main advantage, though I'm not convinced it is a compelling enough reason given the increased energy, land and capital costs. I agree that water should be treated as more valuable and scarce than it currently is. You mentioned the Middle East, I saw this concept for a "seawater greenhouse" recently in Qatar and was intrigued http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/11/desert-farming-experiment-yields-first-results http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/11/desert-farming-experi... In the US, I'm curious about the scalability of these water saving technologies. Could they replace a significant percentage of vegetable production of drought stricken California? As I understand it now, hydroponics is used primarily for winter production, even that competes with Colorado River dependent Arizona.

kfk 10y ago

The combo is high yield, fast growth, good price and dense areas (as in, you can serve your market on a bike). I did not yet run the numbers, but I think it can be profitable. Take rucola, which grows very fast, if you can make 0.5kg per square meter every 2 weeks, then it's eur ~1.25 (1kg = ~5 euros) per square meter per week. With 10,000 m2, it's eur 12.5k per week. 10,000 m2 is a 100x100m square - not much, you can probably rent that much worth of loan in residential areas and pay in vegetables (1 box per week, etc.). I think this is pretty doable. Go to market is pretty much done. Good story for being local, etc. Probably even tastier product if you know how to play with a greenhouse.

m-i-l 10y ago

Very interesting. A couple of thoughts: 1. How about automating harvesting? The article suggests that there is a fairly sizeable unskilled workforce, potentially involved in harvesting, packing etc. I think I read elsewhere that the costs involved in this are relatively low and that there might be little cost benefit in automating. However, an automated solution could potentially have other benefits, e.g. opportunity for a "pick on demand fresh for me at the time I schedule" option, e.g. via an app (assuming automated inventory etc.). Going one step further, if you had automated planting, pruning etc. you might even be able to create "black boxes" which would in effect be fresh produce vending machines. 2. Does this scale to larger perennial plants, e.g. fruit trees? If vertical farming is only viable for salad greens (where you harvest pretty much the entire plant and then start again), not just from a cost perspective (value per kilo of produce, frequency of harvests, space occupied by plants, etc.) but also from a practical perspective (e.g. does aeroponics even work for trees - a quick read of wikipedia is inconclusive) then it isn't going to make the world a better place.

tom_mellior 10y ago
> However, an automated solution could potentially have other benefits, e.g. opportunity for a "pick on demand fresh for me at the time I schedule" option, e.g. via an app (assuming automated inventory etc.). If the pick-up times are at reasonable times (not 3 a.m.), they would already have people on site. The system could tell them to pick X amount of plant Y. So "on demand" doesn't necessarily mean "no humans involved". > Going one step further, if you had automated planting, pruning etc. you might even be able to create "black boxes" which would in effect be fresh produce vending machines. From the article and the company's website it seems that the growing cloths must be washed from time to time, possibly after each harvest. I guess you wouldn't want to build a washing machine into the system, but it might be done... > Does this scale to larger perennial plants, e.g. fruit trees? Even if this system doesn't do that, growing trees indoors might be interesting from the perspectives of controlling temperature, wind, and especially water runoff/evaporation. > salad [...] isn't going to make the world a better place You might say the same thing about fruit trees. The key crops would probably be legumes and rice.

mxuribe 10y ago

This is a great story. I - for one - hope that this technology and method of growing (provided it stays nice and healthy) succeeds. As a side benefit, if other competitors rise up and begin populating old, large metros (that were titans of jobs and industries decades ago), like Detroit, etc...well, that's another great benefit! Imagine all the jobs created, and not for getting more people to click things on the web. Also, I hear all the time that we need more farmers (to keep up with increased need for food growth), and yet others stating that we need more technologists/engineers (to solve some vexing human problems)...This farming technology appears to be a confluence of a need for a merged type of worker: the techno-farmer! Crazy, eh? But, I think, very cool.