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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

• 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?
      • markdown 8y ago
        Meat (aside from fresh fish) is rarely flown.
        • mulmen 8y ago
          That’s not really the point. Unless you go grocery shopping at the (air)port something else brings the goods to your store.
      • mdorazio 8y ago
        I think the parent comment is referencing the huge economies of scale you get on shipping things in bulk with respect to CO2 emissions. If you have 1,000 legs of lamb in a shipping container, the per-leg CO2 cost is low in comparison to one leg of lamb in a car, even if the distances are very different. A heavy truck gets maybe 6mpg compared to your car getting 25, but if the truck is carrying 1000x more items, the truck would have to go ~250 times farther to break even. I'm not sure how it breaks out for air cargo (probably not great), but ocean and rail are both more efficient than trucks.
        • flukus 8y ago
          The problem is that's only amortizing on side of the equation. If you were to pick up that leg of lamb and a dozen other things on the way home from work then the additional CO2 cost from the lamb itself is negligible. It's like saying cars produce less emissions than bikes by including the manufacturing costs of the bike but not the car.
          • mdorazio 8y ago
            Sure, it also depends what kind of car you're driving, how much traffic there is, how far you are from the grocery store, etc. etc. The original parent point I was trying to clarify is that transportation impact on the environment for most food products is low on the list of things we should be worrying about.
    • clay_the_ripper 8y ago
      While I could believe that this is true, I would love to see some evidence to back up this claim. You would also need to account for the entirety of emissions, including, as a previous commenter said, other emissions involved in the supply chain.
      • conception 8y ago
        It's not true sadly. http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air-emissions/carbon-emissions http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air... If you go with a to of lamb for simplicity thats 10g/km. It's about 10km so 100,000g. The truck is like, let's go on the high end 100g/km and what, 100km? That's still only 10kg of co2. Unless of course I'm missing something.
        • extrapickles 8y ago
          The chart assumes you are moving 1 ton of material, so its 20kg of co2 to ship 1 ton of lamb 100km.
      • roel_v 8y ago
        The answer is, as usual, 'it depends'. There are journals full of people modeling things like this. What is sure though, is that the claim 'local is always better' is not true. But it's easy to attack absolutes because they're almost always wrong.
    • xg15 8y ago
      So: CO2 for meat from NZ: Shipping + last mile CO2 for locally produced meat: last mile How is meat from NZ producing less CO2 than locally produced?
      • jcranmer 8y ago
        You're using one (18-wheeler) truck for all of the different kinds of food for the last mile in terms of distribution center-to-supermarket, but one (pickup) truck each for the different sources for the farm-to-farmer's market. Not to mention that the distribution center is likely closer than the farms.
        • xg15 8y ago
          But food doesn't grow in distribution centers. At some point you have to transport the food out of the farm. That would result in the following chains (simplified): Local: Farm -(1)-> Farmer's market -(4)-> Consumer's home National: Farm -(1)-> Distribution center -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home International: Farm -(1)-> Harbor/Distribution center of producing country -(2)-> Harbor/Distribution center of consuming country -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home Where (1) is the farmer's pickup truck, (2) is a massive high-seas-capable container vessel, (3) is the 18-wheeler and (4) is the consumer's audi. Yes, (2) and (3) may be vastly more efficient in CO2 per transported item - but it doesn't change the fact that they happen in addition to (1) and (4).
          • saalweachter 8y ago
            I would note it's frequently an 18-wheeler from the farm to a distribution center as well.
          • jcranmer 8y ago
            That's not the case. When you talk about large-scale farming, the (1) in the latter chains are actually (3).
    • stevesimmons 8y ago
      > If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile. If you want to attack CO2 costs, 90% of lamb's CO2 production occurs on the farm. Only 10% is from processing, distribution, retail, cooking, and waste disposal [1]. Let's charitably assume 1/3 of the post-farm CO2 emissions are from distribution and half of those could be saved by producing closer to the point of consumption. So farm production only needs to be 1.8% (=(10/3/2)/90) more efficient in NZ for it to be net beneficial. Presumably NZ is particularly efficient for lamb, otherwise it wouldn't be such a major export. [1] To pick one reasonably creditble data source, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#cite_note-meat_eaters_guide-56 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... which ends with this graph: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f10d258e827ef20e23c991d33480 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f...
  • dalbasal 8y ago
    I appreciate the commitment to social consequences, but I think you're mis-estimating. Shipping is cheap, also in terms of the energy (for example) required to ship too. There are social consequences to using real estate for farming, using artificial lighting and to producing the vegetable factory too.
    • ggm 8y ago
      I should have said I think think indoor farming is silly(ish) I live in Australia. the costs of shipping fruit by road from Victoria to Queensland are indeed cheap. Especially when you don't factor road quality, driver rates of pay, loss of jobs in the Queensland agricultural sector. And look, we have tomatoes all year round: crappy ones, with good shelf life, because thats what you need when you ship them by freight truck 1500km to shave 10c per KG off the price, so you can undercut the local produce. I also know cheap food fuels the economy. I think people have got a bit twisted on cheap. Good food should be cheap enough we can afford it, and expensive enough people can afford to grow it, and if you drive to rationalist economic scale answers too hard, you wind up with three farmers and thirty thousand un-employed ex agicultural workers. And, you wind up with acid-sulphate soil, contaminated water tables, monsanto owning the seed genome. I'd rather we did some shipping and some local. I'm not particularly hung up on vertical farms, greenhouses are mostly ok with me. The loss of farming land close to cities to make houses is part of the Queensland South East corner story. We're a giant conurbation, of prime river floodland, some of the best soil in the country. It should be growing Asparagus. Its growing blocks of flats instead.
• lighthazard 8y ago
  I agree with all your points. However, I believe there are additional costs to land farming like insects, weather damage, etc. So, yes, the sun is free but that comes with the caveats of the elements. Not sure how much crop is lost due to insects/drought/other factors but perhaps this helps.
  • generic_user 8y ago
    Commercial farms generally have some form of Crop insurance along with equipment insurance etc. I don't think very small one man farms that sell directly at farmers markets are eligible for most of the programs. But most of those people grow in residential areas not properly zoned for agriculture. Vertical could be interesting to try in those micro backyard farms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_insurance
• debt 8y ago
  Also, enetically modified seeds and engineered fertilizer increase yield and decrease time between harvest among other efficiencies. Seems like that’s the best place to start for improving farming. Make crops that yield more for less.
• saas_co_de 8y ago
  The other big problem with this story is that they are looking at the retail price in the store and comparing it to a retail price that doesn't include the food distribution system. Farmers get a ridiculously small percentage of the retail price on food. The price per pound in a store is usually comparable (same order of magnitude) to the wholesale price per ton. The production cost for this tech is probably at least 10X traditional farming. It makes no sense because we have too much food. The biggest nutritional problem in society is obesity and we burn 1/3 of our corn crop on ethanol and feed a good part of the rest (and soy) to cattle and pigs because there is nothing else to do with it.
  • jsilence 8y ago
    Totally agreed. And on top of that: ~70% of the farmland is used to produce animal fodder. Beef production is straining our agricultural system. If we ate less beef, we'd be able to farm the rest much more sustainable, even if it would be with lower yields.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  Good points all. The aesthetic appeal of this sort of indoor farming, and the space-age-ness gives the topic a tendency to over-excitement. I'd also add (4) Mostly, urban/vertical/cubicle farms produce high quality/price leafy herbs & veg. It's not replacing vast cereal fields. That's a very small portion of agriculture overall, definitely by land use but also by most measures. All that said, the are real space-age-ish merits to this. It's like a showcase for various technologies, at (small, but still) production scale.
  • mc32 8y ago
    Also, for these fast growing, relative high margin produce, having fresh product out of season that is near-local, I think has a demand.
    • mygo 8y ago
      I believe that this is a relatively reliable marker for whether 5-star restaurants will be in the area. quick on-demand access to fresh, never-frozen, produce. They also tend to go for out-of-season / exotic produce, which is doesnt need to be grown in end-world-hunger quantities.
      • FrozenVoid 8y ago
        Why a restaurant wouldn't run their own private vertical farm where they would control the quality and amount of supply? That would remove supply volatility and transport costs entirely, and even some bulk products can be produced at smaller scale organically.
        • greggman 8y ago
          my guess is they have a limited amount of time to manage such a thing and the scale isn't large enough to cover the variety they'd want
        • azernik 8y ago
          Because there are serious costs to bringing everything in-house; you've got to get hold of the capital, you lose any economies of scale that come from addressing a larger market, etc. With regards to transportation costs, you're assuming that a restaurant running a private vertical farm could do so on its storefront premises, which is a big assumption. Most pricey restaurants are space-limited.
• lightedman 8y ago
  I'm afraid the majority of misunderstanding is coming from you. So let's break down what vertical farming can really do. 1. Land which is zoned for agricultural purposes in many places where people live is not cheap simply because of development costs (desert, mountains.) Sure the land is cheap, but getting it into a usable state for farming is not. So being able to maximize what you can produce in one area is quite a necessity. To boot, buildings tend to be a little easier to manage when it comes to pest control and waste products. 2. The sun is horribly inefficient, contributes to a huge amount of water waste, and single-layer crop growth is inefficient as well for our growing global population. You're actually better off growing plants with LEDs (and in some cases the crop doesn't need light at all) using harvested solar energy. 3. Shipping is cheap LOCALLY. Try moving anything of any reasonable bulk anywhere more than a few miles and the prices jack up rapidly, plus now you're spewing pollution all over the place transporting things that could've been grown locally in tiny buildings. "I actually love the idea of hydroponics for another reason entirely: it saves a ton of water." Not always. Evaporation losses and transpiration/respiration losses are actually greater in some crops when it comes to hydroponics (as an example, a single cannabis plant can blow through gallons of nutrient solution daily in hydro while maybe using half as much in soil or a soil-less medium.) I think you're mixing up hydroponics with vertical farming in various places and really messing up the facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZTikdxj8AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZTikdxj8AI - Check this out. This is the very building I worked upon in the UK during my stay out there. There are tens like it across the globe feeding starving populations in extremely difficult conditions (growing more than grass.) Vertical does what your traditional agriculture simply cannot do - high-volume production with scarce resources in a tightly-controlled and environmentally-friendly space, in places where such things are generally impossible. Next place I'm gunning for an installtion - Antarctica.
• jaskerr 8y ago
  I don't have data, but I do have anecdotal evidence to contradict #1. I live in upstate NY, where farm land is cheap (in relative terms). We are seeing an influx of Amish, who can no longer afford land in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (To be clear, they might be able to afford land, but at such a cost as to risk the enterprise and family. The Amish won't do that.) We are also seeing new farmers moving here from states such as Wisconsin. They have family in those states, but they can't afford the startup costs including land. Here they can. I think land costs are more complicated than you make out.
  • Chyzwar 8y ago
    You can start farming on land that you lease. When you have enough hardware and capital you start buying gradually. Starting as a farmer is very difficult but not for these reasons alone. Learning craft is super difficult. Sometimes you have one shot during a season to try something. My parent had higher education, where born into families with farming traditions but still took a decade to master vegetable production. Amish cannot afford land because they suck at farming. They lack education and intentionally do not use modern farming techniques.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    No, because: when the land becomes expensive you just move somewhere else, as evidenced by your own statement. Yes, because: there isn't an unlimited supply of land at the bottom of the gravity well. But I'm willing it bet it's cheaper to irrigate the desert than grow food in multi-story buildings. There's an intermittent push to put agriculture in nothern Australia, which is presently very sparsely populated.
    • magduf 8y ago
      Shipping produce from northern Australia to the Americas or Europe is going to mean you'll either have a bunch of spoiled produce, or produce that was picked far too early and has no taste or nutritional value. Are you planning to ship food by jet to deal with this?
  • roel_v 8y ago
• keithnz 8y ago
  we ( http://www.mywildeye.com/ http://www.mywildeye.com/ ) are doing a lot of IoT stuff on the west coast of California, New Zealand, and Australia in the agricultural space. You can do a lot lot better with water usage simply by understanding what your water is doing.
  • lightedman 8y ago
    Why do that when you just install a water reclamation system and turn everything into a closed-loop system, only adding water when required? Why IoT yourself into a security situation where a hacker can nail your system and kill your crop in short time? Hydroponics has the disadvantage of bad effects showing up much faster and hitting much harder than buffered mediums like natural soil, so if you're confident and have your system 'set' so you only need to check once a week, you can have your entire crop dead halfway before you're supposed to check again. If the system is only checking water, the hacker can modify that so it tells you the wrong thing to do, and you kill your crop. That's just a bad scenario all-around.
  • rorykoehler 8y ago
    You can do better but you will never beat hydro
    • jsilence 8y ago
      yield of hydroponic wheat is significantly lower than conventional production in soil. Prof. Bugbee and team worked on this at NASA.
      • rorykoehler 8y ago
        Thanks will check it out. Goes against everything I've experienced
    • lightedman 8y ago
      There are plenty of crops which are actually more wasteful and yield less (or hit an ROI wall which is unfavorable) when grown in hydro rather than in regular soil. Wheat is one, corn is another, barley is another (however, the two smaller grasses, just as fodder grass, are quite efficient when grown hydroponically and indoors, with a rapid turnaround time.) Hydro isn't a fix-all solution for crops.
• grizzles 8y ago
  Can't mirrors/fiber optics/windows instead of walls solve #2?
  • _rpd 8y ago
    In the end you need just too much collection area - more than the square footage of each floor put side to side. It's easier to put the 'collection area' somewhere remote as solar panels and bring in the light as electricity. The energy cost isn't that big a deal compared to the labor cost.
    • jsilence 8y ago
      in our model calculations the energy costs are in the same ballpark like labour. thus energy costs are the main culprit. transporting "the light" from elsewhere to the crop has a ~90% loss (20% - 25% solar efficiency times transport losses of 20% times LED efficiency of 40% - 50%). so you need ten times the area elsewhere to be space efficient on a premium priced area. also viewed from crop product pricing the economics simply don't add up. there are much more profitable things you can do on urban real estate. (I'm working in the field of agricultural economics)
      • yorwba 8y ago
        Others (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17467755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17467755) have highlighted that plants only use a few specific wavelengths. Have you included that in your calculations, i.e. are you comparing (sunlight -> electricity -> LED at optimal wavelength -> photosynthesis at that wavelength) vs. (sunlight -> photosynthesis)?
    • imtringued 8y ago
      What is the benefit of vertical farming if you need to occupy 10x more land with solar panels than conventional farming?
      • logfromblammo 8y ago
• pippy 8y ago
  vertical farming will only be economically viable with near free power and massive transport taxes. Nuclear power would be the only realistic viable option. Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment, vertical farming would be a smart choice for humanity. but sadly with out current perceptions of nuclear power and the stranglehold that globalism has, it will likely never happen.
  • T2_t2 8y ago
    > Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment Has it? I thought that the worst thing for the environment was subsistence farming.
    • olly67 8y ago
      >Has it? I thought that the worst thing for the environment was subsistence farming. Who says that subsistence farming is bad? I've always heard that large-scale industrial agriculture is bad because it destroys the soil. Or that it breaks the soil up so it then blows or washes away.
      • oblio 8y ago
        If that were true modern industrial agriculture would self-destruct within 5 years.
        • cmrdporcupine 8y ago
          IMHO modern industrial agriculture isn't using the soil ( in the strict definition of soil) anymore. It is basically just using the ground as a growing medium and then providing the nutrients that the soil would provide through applications of nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium. Every year I watch the sand from the farm next door runoff in spring rains into the ditch, which ends up in the creek across the road, which then runs down into Lake Ontario. There's no soil left. On almost all the farms here. But they can still grow things through 'artificial' means.
    • 8y ago
• oh_sigh 8y ago
  Regarding #2, I wonder if it may be possible to get greater than 100% efficiency here by panels absorbing a wide spectrum of light, but only emitting on the certain frequencies that are generally most beneficial for growing/fruiting plants?
  • woah 8y ago
    That would require the solar panel to be more efficient at capturing solar energy than a plant
    • llukas 8y ago
      Aaand this is true! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency 1-2% of best plants vs 22% of best commercial panels! :)
      • jsilence 8y ago
        But you are not getting rid of the low plant efficiency. any other losses will simply come on top. nothing beats direct sunlight.
      • nicholas73 8y ago
        This is not exactly correct. The link explains why by breaking down the stages of efficiency loss. The solar panels only mitigate the first step, so you are look at 22% vs 47% for plants. Then, the 22% is not including losses from converting the electricity to lighting (or heck, the energy to create those panels in the first place). LEDs can select the most favorable wavelengths however so maybe it can approach parity again.
        • mcbits 8y ago
          I wonder if it's really necessary to convert the light to electricity as an intermediate step. I'm imagining a filter that's mostly transparent but has a fluorescent coating to convert UV to visible light that the plants can use, effectively brightening the sun in the useful part of the spectrum. Unfortunately Google is giving me the wrong kind of results for "fluorescent filter".
• rorykoehler 8y ago
  Industrial farming is ravaging the land that could otherwise be used for ecologically positive purposes. What you say looks simple on the surface however when you take a holistic view of the biosphere much of it needs to be further interrogated.
  • kungtotte 8y ago
    And to add, transportation may have a low upfront cost in dollars but it has a massive impact on the environment in the long run.
  • jsilence 8y ago
    the amount of farmland area you could substitute with urban vertical farming is neglible. way below one percent.
    • rorykoehler 8y ago
      This is like the famous 'we'll only need 64kb ram' quote. I look forward to it being proven completely and absurdly wrong in the coming years.
      • oblio 8y ago
        For every statement that in hindsight is hilarious because we've surpassed it by miles, there's thousands and thousands of statements that are wrong because of their sheer optimism. Just watch The Jetsons :)
      • jsilence 8y ago
        No, it is actually not. To elaborate: a) Urban Farming commonly produces leafy greens and water rich produce like tomatoes and cucumbers. This is commonly known as 'horticulture'. The horticulture to 'farmland farming' ratio is already less than 1:10. A larger part of horticulture are crop that grow pretty well on the fields and that are commonly not produced under glass in CES (controlled environment systems). These are crops like Kale, Cabbage, Beans, Peas, Potatoes, Carrots etc. The ratio of CES to horticulture is also well above 1:10. So in summary even if we'd take all the CES production into the cities, it would be well below 1% b) Viewed from the other side, from the available area. Even in a relatively boring and unpopular city like for example Dortmund/Germany it is extremely hard to find available plots that would be suitable for UF. If the plot is in a residential zone the square meter price is 200-400€. Commercial zone: 80-100€. Agricultural (outside city boundaries): 3-5€. So inner city plots are waaay more expensive than agricultural land. We are currently trying to find roundabout three acres of inner city space for an urban farm. With the help of the municipality. It is going to become very hard to find something. To find anything...
• mac01021 8y ago
  Would land and shipping both be cheap if we ceased to externalize a lot of the cost of each? Both land use [1] and shipping [2] contribute significant fractions of our society's carbon budget. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/285/5427/574 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/285/5427/574 [2] https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/shipping-emissions-17-global-co2-making-it-elephant-climate-negotiations-room https://www.transportenvironment.org/press/shipping-emission... That said, I'm not so sure about 2-story, LED-lit warehouses for growing food either...
  • foobar1962 8y ago
    > Would land and shipping both be cheap if we ceased to externalize a lot of the cost of each? No. But neither would the energy and equipment used to do this vertical farming either. IMHO it's only a "thing" because it can be presented as a disrupting-startup-venture to attract capital. Like those "farm-in-a-box" things.
    • azernik 8y ago
      That energy and equipment is priced a lot better than land use, on average.
  • stale2002 8y ago
    Yes, it would still be cheap in comparison. You are correct that there are externalities. But even if we priced in thise externalities, it would most currently NOT 100X the price (which is what would be required to make vertical farming cost competitive). I would be extremely surprised if those externalities even came close to 2Xing the price of "normal" farming.
• rmason 8y ago
  In a word no. I spent twenty years as a fertilizer agronomist and I'm very familiar with the costs of producing a crop. The numbers simply do not work. Even when they tried in Detroit and got buildings for five cents on the dollar they couldn't make it work. The investors funding these enterprises do not understand agricultural economics. I keep investigating these stories looking for some kind of 'breakthrough tech' that would dramatically reduce costs or increase yields. I've been tracking these vertical greenhouses for fifteen years, they open and a couple of years later they're gone. I think what could change things for produce is solar cells and electric trucks. It would isolate producers transportation costs from oil prices and lower the cost of getting produce to the cities. I know technology is quickly improving in both battery technology and solar cells.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    I think I read somewhere that most leafy greens are grown hydroponically. But there's only so many leafy greens you can grow before you saturate peoples already weak appetite.
    • tomp 8y ago
      > already weak appetite What do you mean by this? The fatness epidemic hardly suggests our appetites are weak... unless you mean appetite specifically for leafy greens...
      • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
        I meant leave greens specifically, sorry.
    • rusk 8y ago
      > peoples already weak appetite. This is the tragedy of modern commercial yield-driven market-gardening horticulture. That this is how people think salad tastes. You can grow anything in your garden, or in a window box or whatever, and even if you've limited knowledge and don't do a pretty good job of it, it'll taste about (finger in the air) 4 to 5 times better than 85% of the stuff you buy in the shops.
• FrozenVoid 8y ago
  The current vertical farming is in its infancy, sooner or later, new optimizations will emerge that will allow major increases in productivity(e.g. producing only the exact wavelengths of light optimal for growth, computer rationed water supply, advances in genetic editing like CRISPR, better knowledge of small-scale processes when studied in isolation such as their nutrient/energy needs, the selection and study of nutrient rich strains, how plants respond to increases in light/sound/vibration, etc). The idea that natural environment is optimal for growth is a conservative assumption that we need to replicate it exactly. There many factors out of control with natural environment that we apply pesticides, fertilizers, greenhouses, soil tilling, herbicides and weed removal, etc. A closed vertical farm environment will allow much cheaper overall control over production process.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Short of a free and unlimited source of energy, growing most food under the sun is going to be the norm for quite some time.
• Arn_Thor 8y ago
  1) Depends where you live. In a lot of the world's biggest cities in terms of population you've got to travel really far to find land. Probably still cheaper to transport the goods into town than grow it locally, but that comes at the expense of freshness, time, and taxing a freight network that could be used to transport other things. Not to mention places like the Vatican, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc, which don't really have land to use. 2) Sure, it's ironic to harness solar energy to give light to plants, but it might well be more effective. Plants can in a theoretic perfect world collect 11% of the sun's energy for use in photosynthesis according to Wikipedia. In effect the figure is more like 3% to 6%. A majority of solar panels have an efficiency of between 15-17%. The building's owner might actually be able to sell surplus energy to the market after lighting and warming/cooling their plants. That's not mentioning wind power which is readily available at the top of tall structures. As for the lighting, I'm not sure where your claim that you're losing 90% of energy comes from... LEDs are quite effective. 3) As I've pointed out above, your dismissal of this idea rests on quite a few incorrect assumptions. Shipping is cheap..ish.. but there's an opportunity cost associated with it. Hong Kong, for example, is extremely reliant on imports of food. 47% of the city's fruit go through one market, 317,000 tonnes of it in 2014. If just a portion of that, by weight, was taken off the streets by urban farming on brownfield plots, rooftops, or property that for regulatory reasons can be neither residential or industrial (noise/safety) the cost of shipping other goods would drop. I'm glad you mention the water. By 2050 the World Bank estimates the number of urban dwellers with seasonal water shortages will reach 1.9bn people. If urban farming can help this issue, even if all the other benefits weren't present, it would be worth it.
  • brohee 8y ago
    To address your point two : a crystalline Si PV panel has 25% efficiency, and the best white leds are about 45% efficiency. So the sunlight->panel->led->light conversion does waste ~90% of the sunlight. This is made less bad by not lighting plants with white light but purple light, but clearly solar panel on the roof, plants indoor don't make much sense. Now, the reasoning is completely different if the electricity is produced elsewhere, transporting produce may not be that expensive, but transporting electricity is a lot cheaper. The main benefit from urban farming is definitely reduced time from harvesting to the plate, and the ability to consume varieties that don't transport well...
• tremon 8y ago
  I disagree with your point 3): the reason shipping is considered cheap, has to do with low fuel expenses and people ignoring other costs like pollution. Since cargo ships travel over 90% of their time in international waters, they are not bound by any pollution laws and can get away with burning the dirtiest (and thus cheapest) fuel they can find. For example, international shipping accounts for 8% of the global SO2 emissions. Luckily, there is some movement to move to cleaner fuels instead [1], but that is slow progress. [1] https://www.theicct.org/blogs/staff/end-era-heavy-fuel-oil-maritime-shipping https://www.theicct.org/blogs/staff/end-era-heavy-fuel-oil-m...
  • rusk 8y ago
    Actual shipping long-distance, by ship, is unsuitable for perishable goods like these. Overland, or by air is how much of these goods will typically get to market.
• naasking 8y ago
  > 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. Short-term economical considerations aren't the only considerations. Cities that can't sustain themselves through local resources are vulnerable to strategic attacks on infrastructure, as but one example.
  • ryanmercer 8y ago
    Not even attacks on infrastructure. Cities have alarmingly little amount of food, most cities only have a few DAYS of food in grocery stores. Get a natural disaster, a decent strike, thread of a hurricane (notice how shelves get bare on the news in cities expecting hurricanes... it's not because everyone is coming and buying 10 cases of water each and 100 cans of beans and 40 gallons of milk, it's because everyone is coming and buying a few days of groceries at once. Go to groceries at random times, figure out when their trucks come, you'll be able to go 2-3x a week and see bare shelves around the time the trucks are scheduled to come).
• ryanmercer 8y ago
  >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. No it solves the problem of not having to truck food hundreds or thousands of miles, or ship food halfway around the world. Cities are dense, most cities have less than a week of food in them (seriously, go to a grocery at odd hours, figure out when the trucks come, you'll see aisles with nearly bare shelves where the most common products have sold out sometimes 2-3x a week). Vertical growing allows you to place food growing operations just on the edges of population centers, or even inside population centers. You can drastically cut down how far you have to move food. You can allow fruits and vegetables to get closer to ideal maturity before harvesting instead of picking early and artificially aging with gasses at distribution centers just before the product goes to stores. We throw away something like 1/4-1/3 of food in the United States depending on what data you look at. ONE QUARTER TO ONE THIRD of all food ends up in the trash, some of that is spoilage in the prodution and retail chain and some of it is neglect by the end user. Moving your growing operations much closer to the delivery point not only helps improve quality of the food and reduce damage & spoilage in transit but drastically reduces the amount of fossil fuels needed to transport food. The U.S. imports 50 percent of its fresh fruits, 20 percent of its fresh vegetables. >The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. This is true and one current limitation to doing this. However getting people more open to nuclear, advancement of the PV industry and hopefully practical fusion in the near future will all help with this considerably. >Shipping is cheap Financially, not environmentally. See above... 50% of our fruit in the US is imported. That means it is picked well before being ripe, loaded into cargo containers and fumigated, shipped hundreds or many thousands of miles at which point some % is lost to spoilage or just damage, can sit at a port for days or weeks in the event of a strike, gets unloaded to truck or rail and shipped to regional distribution centers, is then either sold to factories or to retail chains and often artificially ripened via calcium carbonate or just flat out gassing it with ethylene, if going to retail it'll often get trucked to yet another distribution center before being trucked to the store and put on a shelf. That's insanely inefficient. >In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Compared to buying an acre in a downtown perhaps, farm land with decent soil, decent annual precipitation and water rights can be quite expensive as far as undeveloped land goes.
• nyrosis 8y ago
  Don't forget about the lessons of "The Bio Dome". As I recall plants like trees deprived of environmental stress like wind tend to fall over. That is one example. What concerns me, is all of these plants would be deprived of many environmental stresses. How that would effect them over time is a big unknown. Trying to induce environmental stress should be something we try to do now in insulated environments.
• vanderZwan 8y ago
  Point two is why I'm so disappointed in many of my friends from back when I studied physics who are really into this idea. Like, it's basic thermodynamics, guys! If we want to make agriculture sustainable we should try to break even energy wise, not waste even more with the physical equivalent to more layers of abstraction!
  • Faark 8y ago
    I've read a few times vertical farms use LED that only emit very specific wavelengths. The solar panel on the roof would capture energy on spectrum unused by plants, making the sun light => electric energy => LED light thingy not as bad as it seems intuitively. Is that possible? Though i'd guess semi transparent solar panels above fields capturing light plants wouldn't use could be even more efficient, if it will ever exist.
• 11235813213455 8y ago
  2) it could be a greenhouse
• hanniabu 8y ago
  I've worked in this field. I'll list a few points for it. 1) Pesticide free. There's a lot of chemicals that go into growing crops and they contaminate our bodies, water, and soil. 2) Sun is free, but sun exposure and temperature aren't consistent year round. 3) Shipping may be cheap, but the time of travel from the farm to the table is long. Growing locally increases the amount of time a plant can be on the shelf or fridge before going bad. Food waste is a big problem from a waste and cost perspective. 4) You've touched on the water aspect. It's an issue that this can solve. 5) Going back to farming and food waste, much of the crop grown is scrapped due to insect or animal damage, rot, or other reasons. 6) Soil type and exhaustion. Only certain type of plants can be grown in certain soils and environments and only for so long before the soil is exhausted of nutrients. 7) In hydroponics you can control the taste of the product by the light spectrum and nutrients. Some customers ask for specific tastes, which is something farms can't provide. 8) Hydroponics is just the first step. The next step is integration of microbials and aquaculture with aquaponics.
  • contravariant 8y ago
    >7) In hydroponics you can control the taste of the product by the light spectrum and nutrients. Some customers ask for specific tastes, which is something farms can't provide. I think you're selling farmers short there, I reckon quite a few of them could affect the taste of their produce, but can't because the market just buys from them in bulk with no regard for taste.
    • hanniabu 8y ago
      Yes and no. If they put the resources into it I'm sure they might be able to, but the flavor change comes from the light spectrum and nutrients so that'd be very difficult for them to control out in the open elements.
    • regularfry 8y ago
      So what you're saying is that small batch sizes allow varied products to be produced at low cost with a low overheads? Wonder where I've heard that before...
    • 8y ago
• hbrundage 8y ago
  > 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. Land is cheap but we're running out of it in a lot of places. We need to stop razing forests to make more farmland, and we need 100% more calories by 2050 to feed the world, and yields are only going up by 2% / year over year, which won't even come close to 100% growth in the next 30 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/01/this-unsettling-chart-shows-were-not-growing-enough-food-to-feed-the-world/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7aad613bb7bb https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/01/this-... All that means that the vast amounts of land required for field production are going to get more expensive. The way I've seen folks pitch vertical farming is as a member of a diverse portfolio of food production investments. It is not going to replace field agriculture, especially of cash crops, but it might free up some field space by moving vegetable and insect production off the land we already have. > 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.) Absurd indeed, but I think the argument that you could just use the sun has the situation backwards. Indoor and vertical farming is about reliable quality that comes from control, and to get that control without spending too much, you need extreme density to keep rent and HVAC costs low. To get extreme density you need to go vertical and stack plants, and sadly, the sun only shines in one direction instead of nicely in each aisle/shelf. You can use something like the Zipgrow tower in greenhouses with the sun only (http://www.zipgrow.com/hydroponic-farming/ http://www.zipgrow.com/hydroponic-farming/) , but most people can make more money by going indoors and denser. You spend the extra on electricity, you grow vertically and higher, and you have lower labour costs from less walking about. Solar is also not the only renewable energy source that could power LEDs -- much of the farm land where I grew up is speckled with wind turbines and at night when vertical farm lights are on all my area's energy is provided by nuclear. > 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. Brooklyn rooftops are for amateurs. The successful vertical farms are all in the peri-urban areas right next to the grocery distribution systems where land is pretty darn cheap and transport costs are super minimal. It doesn't make any sense to use the most expensive real estate on earth without a doubt, but the big boys don't.
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  Shipping costs time as well as money. Cheap shipping also requires trade-offs that are not always advantageous with foods. For instance, it may be cheaper to grow tomatoes in Florida rather than in Manhattan, but in order to get a Florida tomato to Manhattan, the tomato itself has to be a bruise-resistant variety with predictable shape and size, harvested while green, and artificially ripened with ethylene gas. The tomato grown in Manhattan and eaten in Manhattan can be one of those bulbous, deeply-pigmented heirloom varieties, harvested while ripe, and eaten within hours, bursting with actual tomato flavor. The tomato grown in Florida must be grown during the tomato-growing season for Florida. The vertical farm tomato can be grown as easily in the local regular season or for harvest in mid-February. Rather than solar panels and LEDs, the rooftop could support advanced deck prisms that pipe natural sunlight through optical fibers. That alone is likely insufficient to meet the lighting needs of the plants, but it would be more efficient, and a watt of natural sunlight is a watt that you don't have to pump through the LEDs. The true advantage of LEDs is not in energy efficiency, but in wavelength tuning. The farming LEDs don't even produce the green light that is usually reflected by plants. Also, the red-blue balance can be altered to produce different effects on the plants. Blue light produces growth, and red light influences the plant hormones for germination, rooting, etiolation, and flowering. Tinkering with the red-blue schedule could allow the farmer to grow larger heads of lettuce or cabbage without bolting. And, as you mentioned, hydroponics and aeroponics are more water-efficient. Vertical farming will never entirely replace land-surface farming, but it will complement it. And it will allow farming underground, and in non-terrestrial habitats.
• codeisawesome 8y ago
  If hydroponics eventually leads to deforestation in pursuit of (cheap?) agricultural land becoming unviable - it would have solved a very real problem.
• CameronNemo 8y ago
  Greenhouses solve the problem of water while still using the sun. Peri-urban greenhouses also save on transportation costs while only being mildly more expensive in terms of land costs. As cities become more dense, former sprawl can be repurposed into local agricultural land.
• chrido 8y ago
  2) This is incorrect. Plants are not efficient, photosynthesis needs only a tiny part of the spectrum. Just he numbers, the efficiency of photosynthesis is 3-6% while the majority of the solar cells have around 16% efficiency or even higher. Hence it makes absolutely sense to cover everything with panels and use leds to produce the exact amount needed.