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Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

178 points by prostoalex 8y ago

thatfrenchguy 8y ago
We already produce too much food.
- pascalxus 8y ago
  not too much of the healthy variety: fruits and vegetables
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    Farmers would produce lots more of those if the price was higher.
- ska 8y ago
  Notwithstanding the article, focusing on volume as the primary metric has been the driver of many of the problems with industrial agriculture. Producing "more" isn't the only target worth thinking about.
- hangonhn 8y ago
  I think one idea is to produce good, healthy food closer to where people are instead of producing it from far away and then having to deal with transportation and preservation of food. It would allow urban dwellers cheaper and more available access to healthy foods.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Food transportation is a solved problem. There is zero evidence that this would make food cheaper or more accessible.
- chaostheory 8y ago
  There's also a lot of food waste that we are just beginning to fix.
- coldcode 8y ago
  People all over the world are starving. The correct description is that we produce too much food where it brings profit, but not enough where it keeps people from starving.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    No we produce plenty of food, full stop. Starvation is a distribution problem, not a production problem, and most commonly a local distribution problem.
    - GW150914 8y ago
      It’s also a not giving a shit problem in many cases. Everyone starving isn’t in a war zone or subject to epic corruption and seizure of goods. Some people starve and go malnourished in the US and other wealthy countries for lack of anyone really caring. A hard problem to hide not giving a shit behind is the kiss of death.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > It’s also a not giving a shit problem in many cases. Sure, not as an alternative to a distribution problem but as the reason that exists/continues in many cases. > Everyone starving isn’t in a war zone or subject to epic corruption and seizure of goods. Some people starve and go malnourished in the US and other wealthy countries for lack of anyone really caring. The idea that the capitalist core of modern developed economies isn't itself a form of systematic seizure of goods is somethingnthat the critics who gave capitalism its name would have issue with.
    - fraudsyndrome 8y ago
      knew someone that managed the packaging from the farmers to the large supermarket chains in Australia - they'd literally throw away good food that had the slightest cut/bruise. This stuff went straight into the garbage, not the composting facility or anything.
  - armenarmen 8y ago
chao- 8y ago
I have followed a few companies in this space over the years (I believe only one of which has survived), and a few in adjacent spaces, e.g. general urban farming, not necessarily "vertical". My enthusiasm aside, and based on some of the same concerns raised in the last paragraphs, I have to be that guy and bring up Betteridge's Law of Headlines. EDIT: Even the company I thought had "survived" is in the process of an extreme pivot from their original focus: https://indoorharvest.com/ https://indoorharvest.com/ They used to repurpose HVAC equipment for some aspect of indoor farming, iirc.
pascalxus 8y ago
Why don't they just do it without all those expensive lights and equipment, that's where all the biggest expsenses are. Just straight hydroponics with vertical farming. am i missing something? EDIT: I mean, do it outdoors with vertical farming, either on rooftops or around offices or parks or just outside the city (better there than 6000 miles away). the vertical aspect of it would still help reduce costs since real-estate is probably the biggest limiting factor on cost.
- NickBusey 8y ago
  Yes, you're missing light. The top layer of plants would get enough light, but the lower levels will only get some trickle-through, and that's assuming the hydro equipment doesn't block the light entirely. Either way, you won't have nearly enough to grow productive plants.
- nordsieck 8y ago
  1. Clean room farming means no need for pesticides 2. LED lights are pretty efficient, and they provide another avenue for optimization (e.g. color, intensity, timing, etc.). Whether or not those optimizations are financially effective is probably situationally dependent. 3. LED lights provide latitude independence. No idea if this is a serious reason, but I could see it being of interest to Iceland.
  - xanthopan 8y ago
    1. OTOH, it also means there's now a need for manual pollination.
    - tathougies 8y ago
      1. Leafy greens don't need pollination. It's in your best interest to avoid flowering if you want product anyone will eat. 2. Very few food plants are dioecious, and the ones that are (like asparagus and dates) are either ones where the fruit don't matter or are not likely to be grown indoors
pascalxus 8y ago
i wonder what the nutritional content of those veggies are compared to their ground grown counterparts.
- tathougies 8y ago
  Can't speak for these companies in particular, but hydroponic vegetables aren't particularly susceptible to being less nutritious. Plants make most of what they need from the air, water, and nutrients you give them. If they lack in one of those, the plant will likely wilt or die. Otherwise, the data typically shows that the vegetables are as nutritious, or likely more nutritious, since the plants have everything they need to grow, and it's in the plant's evolutionary best interest to put all their nutrition into the fruits.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
You can buy prime farm land in Saskatchewan for well under $2000 an acre.
- farwind 8y ago
  If it's anything like Montana and Wyoming, I wouldn't exactly call it prime farm land -- The weather and climate make it particularly hard to consistently turn a profit, and you need to be prepared to weather several years in a row with no reasonable crop.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    It's prime for Saskatchewan. Better than Montana or Wyoming land, but not a lot better. It's certainly not Kansas. As for profits, the 2010s have been very good to Saskatchewan farmers. Decent crops and great prices, especially for lentils.
- Semiapies 8y ago
  And there's plenty of prime farmland in the US and Mexico, already. But the real cost center of farming is labor, not transport, and the claimed automation savings are pretty dubious. Especially given every previous vertical farming startup claimed the same gigantic savings from automation before they went under. My head aches a little bit just reading about the comparison of "spring mix" costs. Spring mix is a product built on a big markup for the act of peeling and combining romaine lettuce and other crops. You might as well say, "Hey, a salad at a salad bar is $12, let's compete with that!" A sensible comparison would be with plain romaine lettuce or whatever. If these startups could provide cheap, high-quality romaine lettuce or whatever at any real scale, we wouldn't be hearing the umpteenth repetition of funding hype for vertical farming, we'd be hearing about how well vertically farmed crops were selling.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
antisthenes 8y ago
Clearly not, because there's nothing inherently new in arranging shelves vertically. It's almost as comical as alluding that the hanging gardens of Babylon disrupted ancient farming and were used for the production of food.
- thewizardofaus 8y ago
  Welcome to sillycon valley
- tathougies 8y ago
  Hydroponic farming can save 95% of water used to produce food. To say that that advantage is not 'inherently new' is to do it a disservice.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Like tathougies said, it's all about water management. You need an input of roughly 594,000 gallons of water for 1 acre of corn with a yield of around 200 bushels (11,200 pounds of corn).
maliker 8y ago
Maybe for expensive microgreens. Otherwise your energy costs are prohibitive. Utah State’s Extension service did a good analysis [1]. Indoor farming energy costs only add about 30% to your cost of tomatoes, but 10,000% for wheat. Of course this assumes you can get an acre of indoor space for the same price as an acre of cropland. And can also amportize your hardware costs over many growing seasons to drive them to zero. Probably not good assumptions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be
iancmceachern 8y ago
If you want to find out more about indoor farming for yourself we sell kits, supplies and provide support for folks looking to get into this space. At both www.openagriculturesupply.com and www.growcomputer.io
nostromo 8y ago
There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of putting solar panels on a roof to make electricity to beam LEDs on plants, losing 90% of the energy along the way, shouldn't be lost on anyone.) 3) Shipping is cheap. It may make us feel good that a salad's greens were created on a roof-top in Brooklyn, but using some of the most expensive real-estate on Earth to save a few cents on shipping is beyond economically irrational. I actually love the idea of hydroponics for another reason entirely: it saves a ton of water. Water is a real problem worth solving, particularly in the dry west. Focus on this and forget about all of these other non-benefits.
- ggm 8y ago
  3) Shipping is cheap. No, thats an externality you don't care about. Its not cheap in social consequence terms. hauling food by road from centralized warehouses is a twofold sin. Firstly, its food miles and NO, CO2 and other burdens. Secondly, its why e coli spreads across the USA: too much centralisation of distribution. "cheap" food is actually at root, the problem. It needs to be affordable, but high quality. We're stuck on cheap, which drives to cheetos.
  - shalmanese 8y ago
    It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.
    - mulmen 8y ago
      Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?
aldoushuxley001 8y ago
Vertical Farming will only achieve widespread adoption when we have significantly cheaper energy. Until then, it will be reserved mainly for leafy greens, rather than the substantial vegetables that can more effectively sustain a population.
vilhelm_s 8y ago
According to [1], lettuce grown by California farmers cost 993,567,000/84,000 = $11,900 per acre. According to this article, electricity and power costs $216,000 for a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm, or $313,000/acre. It seems hard to make that competitive. [1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=california https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...
- joshuamcginnis 8y ago
  $993,567,000 is the total value of lettuce production for the year, not the cost.
  - vilhelm_s 8y ago
    I guess it's about the same? I imagine the profit margins are not very high.
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    Would the yield per acre be higher because of no need for pesticides, and less loss of bad quality yields? Cos we know organic is more expensive as it yields far less than gm crops. And would crops grow faster with 24/7 sunlight vs 12 hours?!?
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      I mean, the reason all of these vegetables are grown in California is basically because it is already a controlled environment. It's sunny all the time, and it doesn't get much rain, so you are just irrigating at the optimal time for the crop in question.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    Yeah, but that's at a profit, so the costs are less, which makes vertical agriculture even less competitive.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
busterarm 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw "Vertical Farming Won't Save The Planet"
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  The title of that presentation is ‘turning fossil fuels to food’. Fossil fuels are over, finished so the video is probably not forward looking. I will watch it later anyways ...
  - nradov 8y ago
    Fossil fuels will continue to be heavily used for hundreds of years, although the rate of consumption growth may start to trend down.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    Way to miss the forest for the trees. That talk is about how inefficient vertical farming is, _even using fossil fuels_ which are much more efficient than solar at the moment. Where do you think most of grid power comes from right now? Plants collect the sun's energy better than solar panels do and the sun is significantly more powerful than lamps.
sinnet11 8y ago
A biggest problem with farming these days is labor. Period. Growers (farmers) cannot manage 6000 acres of land. They rely on their crop consultants to tell them where to spray and what they need to spray. Once you start automate these tasks, e.g. crop scouting, then the grower and the consultant can use data to spray less and produce a higher quality crop.
- XalvinX 8y ago
  If Trump gets his way, expect this 'problem' to reach critical levels, since the vast majority of it is done by undocumented people from Mexico, Central and South America. If every illegal immigrant was thrown out tomorrow, the price of lettuce would go to $15 a head, and nearly every other type of produce not automated would also skyrocket. Most fruit and many vegetables require a lot manual labor to grow, harvest and pack... And, Mr. Trump, white people won't do this work willingly, not at $3 an hour and not with having to live in pesticide-drenched shanty towns and having to shit in buckets or ditches and so forth.. What supports that $1.29 head of lettuce is, basically, human suffering that is only endured because things suck even worse in El Salvadore and similar places. Earlier presidents knew this and intelligently left the borders very, very porous. And it isn't just agriculture, but many other industries too.
  - oblio 8y ago
    No, you're wrong! Robots will automate everything. It doesn't matter that we can't even fully automate detecting traffic signs, with the whole might of Google behind it, but surely robots will be able to perform the super finicky manual labor tasks required by agriculture before the poorest people in a country run out of money to buy food that is now 10x more expensive. I'm being sarcastic, I agree with you. Automation is nowhere near to what it needs to be and probably won't be for more than 10 years from now.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    Similar problem in the UK with Brexit - farmers had got used to a supply of inexpensive seasonal workers mostly from eastern Europe: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/09/lack-of-migrant-workers-left-food-rotting-in-uk-fields-last-year-data-reveals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/09/lack-of-...
jniedrauer 8y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines is relevant here.
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
I still think it's quite cool. Even if it's crazy expensive right now, producing food factory-style in a very controlled environment should allow us to "software"-ize the entire process. Food as code. Which removes a big cost: thinking. Thinking is expensive. Maybe we could grow food in a shipping container in a controlled environment. Then we can put a very precise cost on the production of food and deploy it anywhere, relying a lot less on weather and water availability. The ability to estimate costs accurately is itself very valuable.
- jsilence 8y ago
  Humans have been farming for thousands of years. A lot of the required thinking has been done and the results are beeing taught by agricultural schools. Sustainable integrated farming is possible today. Our department is in a project researching why these methods are not more widely adapted by the farmers (project in Germany).
mirimir 8y ago
Maybe food in caves after The Event. Such as potatoes ;)
drewm1980 8y ago
They link to a non-GDPR-walled version here: https://civileats.com/2018/07/02/can-vertical-farms-reap-their-harvest-its-anyones-bet/ https://civileats.com/2018/07/02/can-vertical-farms-reap-the...
roryisok 8y ago
Every time I read an article about vertical farming its always leafy greens, and very occasionally strawberries and tomatoes. It doesn't seem like vertical farms can grow anything else
- azernik 8y ago
  Not competitively - the added cost of indoor equipment isn't that high compared to the already-high costs of those products, whereas the competition in bulk grains production is a lot tougher.
- roel_v 8y ago
  Sure, because those are the crops with the highest profit margin and that are hard to store and transport. You can pump grain through tubes into silos and store it for months while transporting and processing.
  - roryisok 8y ago
    That makes sense
- antoniuschan99 8y ago
  That's where we're at in terms of the technology right now. Leafy greens harvest fast vs other plants. And are hydroponic friendly vs other plants.
jlebrech 8y ago
what about a really tall greenhouse? then the energy is free
XalvinX 8y ago
For high-value produce it probably is. More and more people are becoming aware of the dangers of all the chemicals (and often GMOs that are required to even endure all those chemicals) and the organic food movement is accelerating more or less exponentially. The only way to really grow a lot of food organically is indoors where you can carefully control the environment, and sterilize the whole system periodically as necessary. I cannot imagine staples like wheat or rice would ever make sense to grow this way, but I could certainly see smaller beer and (say) sake breweries grow their own, as well as small-scale bakeries and even Italian restaurants and the like. Long ago I had the idea of using cheap plastic or glass fiber optic cables to simply bring sunlight inside buildings, for plants as well as indoor tanning and to reduce depression for people living underground or whatever. I think a system could be easily designed to bring sunlight in directly instead of first making electricity and then powering batteries. Of course some electricity for pumps and fans will be needed but much less overall would be required this way. By adding edible, herbivorous water animals to the system somehow, such as carp, snails, loaches, etc. you could reduce fertilizer needs while also utilizing leaves, roots, and so forth more effectively. The fecal matter from these animals would of course help fertilize, and also create CO2. Speaking of CO2, well, the world seems to have a lot of that these days, so naturally that can be piped in from a nearby factory or power plant or whathaveyou to massively increase the speed of plant growth (also would possibly help with heating in the winter...) As far as protein goes, Spirulina is super efficient to grow, as is hempseed. Perhaps friendly insects or earthworms could also be involved, to add to the freshwater animals already mentioned. A really well-thought-out system could really supply a lot of nutritious fresh food for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people would buy beer from a company that grew organic wheat and hops right in their brewery too..people will pay a lot for the peace of mind and better taste coming from organic ingredients.
skbohra123 8y ago
No.
drbojingle 8y ago
yea. On mars.
ryanmercer 8y ago
If anyone is really interested in this hit me up on reddit via ryanmercer or hit contact over at http://www.ryanmercer.com http://www.ryanmercer.com this is a subject I'm really passionate about both for use on Earth and for investigation/use off-world.
replies_to_all 8y ago
No, 100% no. Land is cheap and there is A LOT of it. The Sun is FREE, lights cost money. So it's a greenhouse with a roof on it? Shipping is cheap.
contingencies 8y ago
Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet[0] is a lecture by the preeminent authority in the field, Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, who has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career and has consulted on all NASA missions with these goals. In particular see 13m26s[1] and 37m17s[2]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=13m26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=37m17s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be...
KaiserPro 8y ago
In the UK land is reasonably expensive, but its cheaper than hiring and fitting out buildings in dense urban areas. This is before we start costing up Electricity, fitout, soil import, water and pest control. 1) because for what ever reason they chosen to grown things in a _completely black room_ that means that you now have a significant energy bill for no real reason. 2) you have to import soil, soil is heavy, a pain to handle, and in this setup has a limited half live. 3) Labour, there is not obvious mechanisation going on here. (sure each box might be planted by a machine, but who puts it in place?) 4) water, again, the roof stops any source of free water. 5) pests, you are in a closed room monoculture, a pest like aphids if its lettuce, will run rampant, and will not attract predators. (also a problem for greenhouses) In conclusion, this is expensive, highly carbon intensive, poorly mechanised, and largely pointless.
jonbarker 8y ago
Policy idea that will never get passed: provide a tax credit for those who eat more efficiently using some ratio of CO2 emissions over calories consumed. Add some measure for food waste in there too.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  Or tax everyone else's produce to make it artificially more expensive until the one with lower CO2 footprint is cheaper Same for packaging
schwede 8y ago
What about equipment and machinery? How do you use a tractor on a vertical farm? That challenge seems more expensive to solve than buying more land.
malchow 8y ago
Its Δ value comes entirely from water-saving, but water-saving on traditional horizontal farming is likely to yield larger food benefits than vertical farming. See, e.g. http://waterbit.com http://waterbit.com. (Disclosure: I am an investor.) The big thing is that most farms could both use less water and concomitantly yield more crop. It's good to make plants work for it. And IME yields better tasting food, too.
antoniuschan99 8y ago
They didn't mention nutrient cost which is pretty high in some cases. Also I'm working on a diy home vertical Garden system people might be interested in that is automated https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi90BiwlHEm/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=st7yqnjyud6k https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi90BiwlHEm/?utm_source=ig_share... But I think there's even easier ways to produce leafy greens without any power required for irrigation https://youtu.be/pZZO1tYqcwk https://youtu.be/pZZO1tYqcwk Also it makes sense why Soft Bank invested in one of the vertical farms. A lot of produce is shipped into Japan. I tried to visit the Pasona HQ which was an office building that also produced vegetables but they demolished the building this year :$.
PoarNeemn 8y ago
ITT: Millenials living in cities that have no idea how farming works.

178 points by prostoalex 8y ago

thatfrenchguy 8y ago

We already produce too much food.

pascalxus 8y ago
not too much of the healthy variety: fruits and vegetables
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  Farmers would produce lots more of those if the price was higher.
ska 8y ago
Notwithstanding the article, focusing on volume as the primary metric has been the driver of many of the problems with industrial agriculture. Producing "more" isn't the only target worth thinking about.
hangonhn 8y ago
I think one idea is to produce good, healthy food closer to where people are instead of producing it from far away and then having to deal with transportation and preservation of food. It would allow urban dwellers cheaper and more available access to healthy foods.
- nradov 8y ago
  Food transportation is a solved problem. There is zero evidence that this would make food cheaper or more accessible.
chaostheory 8y ago
There's also a lot of food waste that we are just beginning to fix.
coldcode 8y ago
People all over the world are starving. The correct description is that we produce too much food where it brings profit, but not enough where it keeps people from starving.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  No we produce plenty of food, full stop. Starvation is a distribution problem, not a production problem, and most commonly a local distribution problem.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    It’s also a not giving a shit problem in many cases. Everyone starving isn’t in a war zone or subject to epic corruption and seizure of goods. Some people starve and go malnourished in the US and other wealthy countries for lack of anyone really caring. A hard problem to hide not giving a shit behind is the kiss of death.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > It’s also a not giving a shit problem in many cases. Sure, not as an alternative to a distribution problem but as the reason that exists/continues in many cases. > Everyone starving isn’t in a war zone or subject to epic corruption and seizure of goods. Some people starve and go malnourished in the US and other wealthy countries for lack of anyone really caring. The idea that the capitalist core of modern developed economies isn't itself a form of systematic seizure of goods is somethingnthat the critics who gave capitalism its name would have issue with.
  - fraudsyndrome 8y ago
    knew someone that managed the packaging from the farmers to the large supermarket chains in Australia - they'd literally throw away good food that had the slightest cut/bruise. This stuff went straight into the garbage, not the composting facility or anything.
- armenarmen 8y ago

chao- 8y ago

I have followed a few companies in this space over the years (I believe only one of which has survived), and a few in adjacent spaces, e.g. general urban farming, not necessarily "vertical". My enthusiasm aside, and based on some of the same concerns raised in the last paragraphs, I have to be that guy and bring up Betteridge's Law of Headlines. EDIT: Even the company I thought had "survived" is in the process of an extreme pivot from their original focus: https://indoorharvest.com/ https://indoorharvest.com/ They used to repurpose HVAC equipment for some aspect of indoor farming, iirc.

pascalxus 8y ago

Why don't they just do it without all those expensive lights and equipment, that's where all the biggest expsenses are. Just straight hydroponics with vertical farming. am i missing something? EDIT: I mean, do it outdoors with vertical farming, either on rooftops or around offices or parks or just outside the city (better there than 6000 miles away). the vertical aspect of it would still help reduce costs since real-estate is probably the biggest limiting factor on cost.

NickBusey 8y ago
Yes, you're missing light. The top layer of plants would get enough light, but the lower levels will only get some trickle-through, and that's assuming the hydro equipment doesn't block the light entirely. Either way, you won't have nearly enough to grow productive plants.
nordsieck 8y ago
1. Clean room farming means no need for pesticides 2. LED lights are pretty efficient, and they provide another avenue for optimization (e.g. color, intensity, timing, etc.). Whether or not those optimizations are financially effective is probably situationally dependent. 3. LED lights provide latitude independence. No idea if this is a serious reason, but I could see it being of interest to Iceland.
- xanthopan 8y ago
  1. OTOH, it also means there's now a need for manual pollination.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    1. Leafy greens don't need pollination. It's in your best interest to avoid flowering if you want product anyone will eat. 2. Very few food plants are dioecious, and the ones that are (like asparagus and dates) are either ones where the fruit don't matter or are not likely to be grown indoors

pascalxus 8y ago

i wonder what the nutritional content of those veggies are compared to their ground grown counterparts.

tathougies 8y ago
Can't speak for these companies in particular, but hydroponic vegetables aren't particularly susceptible to being less nutritious. Plants make most of what they need from the air, water, and nutrients you give them. If they lack in one of those, the plant will likely wilt or die. Otherwise, the data typically shows that the vegetables are as nutritious, or likely more nutritious, since the plants have everything they need to grow, and it's in the plant's evolutionary best interest to put all their nutrition into the fruits.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

You can buy prime farm land in Saskatchewan for well under $2000 an acre.

farwind 8y ago
If it's anything like Montana and Wyoming, I wouldn't exactly call it prime farm land -- The weather and climate make it particularly hard to consistently turn a profit, and you need to be prepared to weather several years in a row with no reasonable crop.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  It's prime for Saskatchewan. Better than Montana or Wyoming land, but not a lot better. It's certainly not Kansas. As for profits, the 2010s have been very good to Saskatchewan farmers. Decent crops and great prices, especially for lentils.
Semiapies 8y ago
And there's plenty of prime farmland in the US and Mexico, already. But the real cost center of farming is labor, not transport, and the claimed automation savings are pretty dubious. Especially given every previous vertical farming startup claimed the same gigantic savings from automation before they went under. My head aches a little bit just reading about the comparison of "spring mix" costs. Spring mix is a product built on a big markup for the act of peeling and combining romaine lettuce and other crops. You might as well say, "Hey, a salad at a salad bar is $12, let's compete with that!" A sensible comparison would be with plain romaine lettuce or whatever. If these startups could provide cheap, high-quality romaine lettuce or whatever at any real scale, we wouldn't be hearing the umpteenth repetition of funding hype for vertical farming, we'd be hearing about how well vertically farmed crops were selling.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

antisthenes 8y ago

Clearly not, because there's nothing inherently new in arranging shelves vertically. It's almost as comical as alluding that the hanging gardens of Babylon disrupted ancient farming and were used for the production of food.

thewizardofaus 8y ago
Welcome to sillycon valley
tathougies 8y ago
Hydroponic farming can save 95% of water used to produce food. To say that that advantage is not 'inherently new' is to do it a disservice.
ryanmercer 8y ago
Like tathougies said, it's all about water management. You need an input of roughly 594,000 gallons of water for 1 acre of corn with a yield of around 200 bushels (11,200 pounds of corn).

maliker 8y ago

Maybe for expensive microgreens. Otherwise your energy costs are prohibitive. Utah State’s Extension service did a good analysis [1]. Indoor farming energy costs only add about 30% to your cost of tomatoes, but 10,000% for wheat. Of course this assumes you can get an acre of indoor space for the same price as an acre of cropland. And can also amportize your hardware costs over many growing seasons to drive them to zero. Probably not good assumptions. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be

iancmceachern 8y ago

If you want to find out more about indoor farming for yourself we sell kits, supplies and provide support for folks looking to get into this space. At both www.openagriculturesupply.com and www.growcomputer.io

nostromo 8y ago

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of putting solar panels on a roof to make electricity to beam LEDs on plants, losing 90% of the energy along the way, shouldn't be lost on anyone.) 3) Shipping is cheap. It may make us feel good that a salad's greens were created on a roof-top in Brooklyn, but using some of the most expensive real-estate on Earth to save a few cents on shipping is beyond economically irrational. I actually love the idea of hydroponics for another reason entirely: it saves a ton of water. Water is a real problem worth solving, particularly in the dry west. Focus on this and forget about all of these other non-benefits.

ggm 8y ago
3) Shipping is cheap. No, thats an externality you don't care about. Its not cheap in social consequence terms. hauling food by road from centralized warehouses is a twofold sin. Firstly, its food miles and NO, CO2 and other burdens. Secondly, its why e coli spreads across the USA: too much centralisation of distribution. "cheap" food is actually at root, the problem. It needs to be affordable, but high quality. We're stuck on cheap, which drives to cheetos.
- shalmanese 8y ago
  It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?

aldoushuxley001 8y ago

Vertical Farming will only achieve widespread adoption when we have significantly cheaper energy. Until then, it will be reserved mainly for leafy greens, rather than the substantial vegetables that can more effectively sustain a population.

vilhelm_s 8y ago

According to [1], lettuce grown by California farmers cost 993,567,000/84,000 = $11,900 per acre. According to this article, electricity and power costs $216,000 for a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm, or $313,000/acre. It seems hard to make that competitive. [1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=california https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

joshuamcginnis 8y ago
$993,567,000 is the total value of lettuce production for the year, not the cost.
- vilhelm_s 8y ago
  I guess it's about the same? I imagine the profit margins are not very high.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  Would the yield per acre be higher because of no need for pesticides, and less loss of bad quality yields? Cos we know organic is more expensive as it yields far less than gm crops. And would crops grow faster with 24/7 sunlight vs 12 hours?!?
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    I mean, the reason all of these vegetables are grown in California is basically because it is already a controlled environment. It's sunny all the time, and it doesn't get much rain, so you are just irrigating at the optimal time for the crop in question.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Yeah, but that's at a profit, so the costs are less, which makes vertical agriculture even less competitive.
rorykoehler 8y ago

busterarm 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw "Vertical Farming Won't Save The Planet"

rorykoehler 8y ago
The title of that presentation is ‘turning fossil fuels to food’. Fossil fuels are over, finished so the video is probably not forward looking. I will watch it later anyways ...
- nradov 8y ago
  Fossil fuels will continue to be heavily used for hundreds of years, although the rate of consumption growth may start to trend down.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Way to miss the forest for the trees. That talk is about how inefficient vertical farming is, _even using fossil fuels_ which are much more efficient than solar at the moment. Where do you think most of grid power comes from right now? Plants collect the sun's energy better than solar panels do and the sun is significantly more powerful than lamps.

sinnet11 8y ago

A biggest problem with farming these days is labor. Period. Growers (farmers) cannot manage 6000 acres of land. They rely on their crop consultants to tell them where to spray and what they need to spray. Once you start automate these tasks, e.g. crop scouting, then the grower and the consultant can use data to spray less and produce a higher quality crop.

XalvinX 8y ago
If Trump gets his way, expect this 'problem' to reach critical levels, since the vast majority of it is done by undocumented people from Mexico, Central and South America. If every illegal immigrant was thrown out tomorrow, the price of lettuce would go to $15 a head, and nearly every other type of produce not automated would also skyrocket. Most fruit and many vegetables require a lot manual labor to grow, harvest and pack... And, Mr. Trump, white people won't do this work willingly, not at $3 an hour and not with having to live in pesticide-drenched shanty towns and having to shit in buckets or ditches and so forth.. What supports that $1.29 head of lettuce is, basically, human suffering that is only endured because things suck even worse in El Salvadore and similar places. Earlier presidents knew this and intelligently left the borders very, very porous. And it isn't just agriculture, but many other industries too.
- oblio 8y ago
  No, you're wrong! Robots will automate everything. It doesn't matter that we can't even fully automate detecting traffic signs, with the whole might of Google behind it, but surely robots will be able to perform the super finicky manual labor tasks required by agriculture before the poorest people in a country run out of money to buy food that is now 10x more expensive. I'm being sarcastic, I agree with you. Automation is nowhere near to what it needs to be and probably won't be for more than 10 years from now.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Similar problem in the UK with Brexit - farmers had got used to a supply of inexpensive seasonal workers mostly from eastern Europe: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/09/lack-of-migrant-workers-left-food-rotting-in-uk-fields-last-year-data-reveals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/09/lack-of-...

jniedrauer 8y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines is relevant here.

etaioinshrdlu 8y ago

I still think it's quite cool. Even if it's crazy expensive right now, producing food factory-style in a very controlled environment should allow us to "software"-ize the entire process. Food as code. Which removes a big cost: thinking. Thinking is expensive. Maybe we could grow food in a shipping container in a controlled environment. Then we can put a very precise cost on the production of food and deploy it anywhere, relying a lot less on weather and water availability. The ability to estimate costs accurately is itself very valuable.

jsilence 8y ago
Humans have been farming for thousands of years. A lot of the required thinking has been done and the results are beeing taught by agricultural schools. Sustainable integrated farming is possible today. Our department is in a project researching why these methods are not more widely adapted by the farmers (project in Germany).

mirimir 8y ago

Maybe food in caves after The Event. Such as potatoes ;)

drewm1980 8y ago

They link to a non-GDPR-walled version here: https://civileats.com/2018/07/02/can-vertical-farms-reap-their-harvest-its-anyones-bet/ https://civileats.com/2018/07/02/can-vertical-farms-reap-the...

roryisok 8y ago

Every time I read an article about vertical farming its always leafy greens, and very occasionally strawberries and tomatoes. It doesn't seem like vertical farms can grow anything else

azernik 8y ago
Not competitively - the added cost of indoor equipment isn't that high compared to the already-high costs of those products, whereas the competition in bulk grains production is a lot tougher.
roel_v 8y ago
Sure, because those are the crops with the highest profit margin and that are hard to store and transport. You can pump grain through tubes into silos and store it for months while transporting and processing.
- roryisok 8y ago
  That makes sense
antoniuschan99 8y ago
That's where we're at in terms of the technology right now. Leafy greens harvest fast vs other plants. And are hydroponic friendly vs other plants.

jlebrech 8y ago

what about a really tall greenhouse? then the energy is free

XalvinX 8y ago

For high-value produce it probably is. More and more people are becoming aware of the dangers of all the chemicals (and often GMOs that are required to even endure all those chemicals) and the organic food movement is accelerating more or less exponentially. The only way to really grow a lot of food organically is indoors where you can carefully control the environment, and sterilize the whole system periodically as necessary. I cannot imagine staples like wheat or rice would ever make sense to grow this way, but I could certainly see smaller beer and (say) sake breweries grow their own, as well as small-scale bakeries and even Italian restaurants and the like. Long ago I had the idea of using cheap plastic or glass fiber optic cables to simply bring sunlight inside buildings, for plants as well as indoor tanning and to reduce depression for people living underground or whatever. I think a system could be easily designed to bring sunlight in directly instead of first making electricity and then powering batteries. Of course some electricity for pumps and fans will be needed but much less overall would be required this way. By adding edible, herbivorous water animals to the system somehow, such as carp, snails, loaches, etc. you could reduce fertilizer needs while also utilizing leaves, roots, and so forth more effectively. The fecal matter from these animals would of course help fertilize, and also create CO2. Speaking of CO2, well, the world seems to have a lot of that these days, so naturally that can be piped in from a nearby factory or power plant or whathaveyou to massively increase the speed of plant growth (also would possibly help with heating in the winter...) As far as protein goes, Spirulina is super efficient to grow, as is hempseed. Perhaps friendly insects or earthworms could also be involved, to add to the freshwater animals already mentioned. A really well-thought-out system could really supply a lot of nutritious fresh food for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people would buy beer from a company that grew organic wheat and hops right in their brewery too..people will pay a lot for the peace of mind and better taste coming from organic ingredients.

skbohra123 8y ago

No.

drbojingle 8y ago

yea. On mars.

ryanmercer 8y ago

If anyone is really interested in this hit me up on reddit via ryanmercer or hit contact over at http://www.ryanmercer.com http://www.ryanmercer.com this is a subject I'm really passionate about both for use on Earth and for investigation/use off-world.

replies_to_all 8y ago

No, 100% no. Land is cheap and there is A LOT of it. The Sun is FREE, lights cost money. So it's a greenhouse with a roof on it? Shipping is cheap.

contingencies 8y ago

Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet[0] is a lecture by the preeminent authority in the field, Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, who has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career and has consulted on all NASA missions with these goals. In particular see 13m26s[1] and 37m17s[2]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=13m26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=37m17s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be...

KaiserPro 8y ago

In the UK land is reasonably expensive, but its cheaper than hiring and fitting out buildings in dense urban areas. This is before we start costing up Electricity, fitout, soil import, water and pest control. 1) because for what ever reason they chosen to grown things in a _completely black room_ that means that you now have a significant energy bill for no real reason. 2) you have to import soil, soil is heavy, a pain to handle, and in this setup has a limited half live. 3) Labour, there is not obvious mechanisation going on here. (sure each box might be planted by a machine, but who puts it in place?) 4) water, again, the roof stops any source of free water. 5) pests, you are in a closed room monoculture, a pest like aphids if its lettuce, will run rampant, and will not attract predators. (also a problem for greenhouses) In conclusion, this is expensive, highly carbon intensive, poorly mechanised, and largely pointless.

jonbarker 8y ago

Policy idea that will never get passed: provide a tax credit for those who eat more efficiently using some ratio of CO2 emissions over calories consumed. Add some measure for food waste in there too.

alex_duf 8y ago
Or tax everyone else's produce to make it artificially more expensive until the one with lower CO2 footprint is cheaper Same for packaging

schwede 8y ago

What about equipment and machinery? How do you use a tractor on a vertical farm? That challenge seems more expensive to solve than buying more land.

malchow 8y ago

Its Δ value comes entirely from water-saving, but water-saving on traditional horizontal farming is likely to yield larger food benefits than vertical farming. See, e.g. http://waterbit.com http://waterbit.com. (Disclosure: I am an investor.) The big thing is that most farms could both use less water and concomitantly yield more crop. It's good to make plants work for it. And IME yields better tasting food, too.

antoniuschan99 8y ago

They didn't mention nutrient cost which is pretty high in some cases. Also I'm working on a diy home vertical Garden system people might be interested in that is automated https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi90BiwlHEm/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=st7yqnjyud6k https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi90BiwlHEm/?utm_source=ig_share... But I think there's even easier ways to produce leafy greens without any power required for irrigation https://youtu.be/pZZO1tYqcwk https://youtu.be/pZZO1tYqcwk Also it makes sense why Soft Bank invested in one of the vertical farms. A lot of produce is shipped into Japan. I tried to visit the Pasona HQ which was an office building that also produced vegetables but they demolished the building this year :$.

PoarNeemn 8y ago

ITT: Millenials living in cities that have no idea how farming works.