9 ms·

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually almost always the case, to my knowledge - 365 days a year of efficient production - Good for the environment to save so much in transport - Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil. To be honest, the only con I see is that this perfectly automated gardens produce much less tasty food because they are given the exact amount of water and minerals needed to generate the product, but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.

Darmody 6y ago
- Price will go down in the future - Similar farms can be built on Mars. - Diversity of crops in places where it would be complicated otherwise
- baq 6y ago
  > Similar farms can be built on Mars. I'm an Elon fanboi but please let's start with desertified populated regions first so we have time to build a Mars colony without having to deal with civil wars
  - Darmody 6y ago
    Both objectives can be worked on at the same time. I don't really like that argument. We could say "let's end hunger first then focus on computer games, or beer, or vacations, etc". Ending world hunger is way more important than those things but you can't expect we stop doing them to focus on something that is already being addressed but is very complex.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You can't solve world hunger on the supply side. There will always be more hunger afterwards.
      - Darmody 6y ago
        I know but that's not my point.
pm90 6y ago
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming. Is this a real thing? Interesting! I wonder if, much like food additives, we could figure out what particular nutrients would be required to impart a specific flavor to produce.
- hobofan 6y ago
  AFAIK the compounds that make up the flavor are mostly known. The problem is more that if you optimize plant growth for weight per time (because weight is what you are payed for) and leave flavor out of the equation, you'll end up with fruit that has a lot of weight with little flavor. If you switch to a growth regimen that gives the plants a bit more time, you will generally get a better flavor, even under hydroponic settings. Given that you can sense a lot of compounds that make up a fruit non-destructively, I'm pretty optimistic that you could optimize for flavor too in a robotic/vertical farming setting.
- riffraff 6y ago
  AFAIU, the main problem is that hydroponic growers maximize for volume/color not taste. They could use richer nutrients, but decide not to.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
  It's likely only genetics that determine taste. Abiotic Soil contents probably have no contribution.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    Genetics defines a potential not an outcome, so it lets us with defining the methods to leverage this potential. Moreover, our taste is only loosely related to the plant optimum. Some prefer sweetness, acidity, softness, juicyness ... The soil, undersoil and climate have great impact on naturally grown plants. See wine.
    - 6y ago
tremon 6y ago
On top of that: this style of farming is additive to other uses of the same land area, not exclusive. Having a traditional 100-acre farm demands a loss of 100 acres of land in opportunity cost. Vertical farming allows to use the same land for residential or commercial development, or it allows for 100 acres of food production in only 10 acres of land.
- shmageggy 6y ago
  This is a big one, and we should aim for rewilding in the reclaimed space. Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of habitat loss and thus biodiversity loss.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    I wish we could properly account for this negative externality. To me the ideal state for every inch of land is it being a wildlife refuge. To that end I'd love to see a tax that gets charged for using land for anything else. I think it would drive a lot of improvements like vertical farming
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      As a counter example, raising grass-fed cattle on native prairie in Montana is much more "natural" than a wildlife refuge. The natural state of that land was maintained by massive wandering herds of bison. The massive bison herds and their apex predators generally don't exist any more, so a wildlife refuge can be far less "natural" than grazing land.
      - lhopki01 6y ago
        Wouldn't it be wonderful though if we could reintroduce them?
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Are there constrains wrt a given acre of land only receives a fixed average sunlight?
qayxc 6y ago
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor Correlation ≠ causation. I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest. Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses. This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops. The longer the process, the more time the produce has to collect and store the relevant substances. Artificial ripening only takes a day or two compared to weeks for naturally grown food.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  Varieties have long been selected to optimize industrial constraints, production, distribution ... Ripe often means colorful, perfumed, tasty, sweet ... and fragile. Some tomatoes won’t ever get good. They just don’t produce the compounds necessary, have thick skin, etc. However growing a decent variety in a vertical farming style would produce better tasting fruits. Collecting ripe fruits with machines is however difficult.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Amount of sunlight also makes a difference.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Not always true. Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.
  - tzumby 6y ago
    +1 I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
      OK, but that's a varietal difference, which is one of the factors that the poster identified as being important - no? Unless your parents are actually growing San Marzano tomatoes.
rat87 6y ago
>- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil. This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad
- martimarkov 6y ago
  But in a situation like the current pandemic with borders being closed this would provide a good alternative to buying from other countries. Another global pandemic might be even more damaging and might infect plants rather than humans. Also -> distributed cultivation. You don’t have a single point of failure.
- eitland 6y ago
  > This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. Quite the contrary: at least in Norway politicians have been busily pushing your side of the story for decades and only stopped pushing it earlier this year. > It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad If you said this last year many would have agreed. This spring showed that even Norway - as rich and well connected as we are - cannot get hold of a simple thing like face masks if there is an emergency.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    In Norway, food self-sufficiency has been a political issue ever since the Napoleonic wars and the British naval blockade on Denmark-Norway 200 years ago, to the point that the importance of self-sufficiency were taught from early in primary schools at least until the 1980's. It grew in political importance as the national-romanticism movement grew, and then blew up massively in political importance after World War II demonstrated just how little it took to disrupt external supplies. One might reasonably argue it's the reason Norway isn't in the EU - Norwegian agriculture and fishery policy is based very strongly on a view on self-sufficiency that includes high subsidies not originally for the sake of farmers, but for the sake of national security. It's also behind a lot of the push for retaining rural settlements. It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.
dan-robertson 6y ago
It’s also good for the environment when land can be left to become wild instead of being actively farmed. The environment in the U.K. was greatly damaged during the Second World War when a lot of land that wouldn’t normally be farmed was farmed intensively, and that intensive farming continued after the war, greatly decreasing the land that was available to wildlife. Birds like nightingales which used to be reasonably known in the countryside now have vastly contracted populations in the U.K.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
all these mechanical parts will cause pollution both in their production and their disposal. 365 days of production will also require some heavy fertilization cycles, so more chemicals to be produced and disposed. I don't see that talked much and might very well come ahead with the efficiency of scale in having all these thing stacked instead of dispersed over a large tract of land, but these thing are an important aspect and hopefully what will come out of this deployment is some hard data about the impact they have.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  > "chemicals to be produced and disposed" I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language. Most of the time it's used, it doesn't mean anything at all. What is actually used? Fertiliser, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'. Do they need to be disposed of? Not really, plants use them up. If you are disposing of them, you are disposing of your money, because you paid for them. The whole point of these greenhouse or vertial systems is that they are closed off, so you don't have runoff like you do in the open field, and you don't need pesticides because pests don't get in. There are 99 problems with this 'tech bro' solution, but chemicals is not one of them.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    > not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'. I dunno, DHMO is pretty scary, but not as scary as the naturally occurring pesticide 1,3,7-Trimethylxanthine [0], which has become the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug despite side effects of anxiety, nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2C3%2C7-Trimethylxanthine http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2C3%2C7-Trimethylxant...
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    > I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language and I wish people would read the full sentences before entering a debate, because it was completely clear this wasn't about the specific fertilizers usage in situ, but pollutant released during production ( one of many examples https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.h... you can find, about every precursor can and is leaked in the environment ) and after usage (even assuming it's closed off, which it isn't, you need to scrub waste and put it somewhere or reprocess it at some cost) is it so bad to be curious about these cost in hyper intensive production, especially since they aren't available in this press release?
KaiserPro 6y ago
> - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop yes, but you are spending money and carbon on re-creating sunlight. > Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria. > - Good for the environment to save so much in transport None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit. > - Independence from other countries Actually this is the only real selling point. Theoretically you _could_ grow crops that are difficult to cultivate in your climate. > - 250x less water Yes, but I am sceptical. It should use less water than an open field, but the same as a greenhouse. if it truely is 250 less water then great. But I suspect thats clever comparison. There are ofcourse low cost ways to save water, like multch, or constricting water supplies and frequency just after germination. Look, the problem I have is that a lot of these systems are basically hype machines. They are invented by tech bros who've just discovered that nature exsists. But instead of looking at the vast reams of research they head straight for the vertical/hydro/LED segment. What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world Up until that point, your just pissing dollars into the wind and wasting everyone's time inveting solutions to problems that are not actual problems.
- universa1 6y ago
  > What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. Growing up on a farm in Germany, this is just what I would call decent farming and this is not rocket science. The knowledge how to do this is there and imho it does not involve some "tech disruption". Agriculture, at least in Germany, is highly mechanized/technized and in the end it does not matter if you look at conventional/"industrial" or ecological/bio-farming. You need to take care of nutrients, humus creation, ... . This involves "artificial" fertilizer, regularly taking soil samples, to check what nutrients are there, crop rotation, etc... Sure you can just "raid" the soil and move on after ten years, but good luck finding new area in Germany to farm on ;-) And this is more or less independent of scale of farming.
wainstead 6y ago
And it addresses the potential issue of “peak phosphorus”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
- orwin 6y ago
  Peak phosphorus is one of the peak i'm less worried about in my lifetime or my children's lifetime. Morocco reserves are probably underestimated, as are Algerian reserves. As long as Morocco stay stable and is help by its economic partners during hard times (France and Spain mostly), it wont' be an issue. But you're right, hydroponics solve this issue.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    I don’t know the geography well enough to know if this is a problem, but I thought half of the area claimed by the Moroccan government wants independence and has a long-running low-energy struggle going on to achieve that end? (Slightly more energetic than I thought: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/world/middleeast/western-sahara-morocco-polisario.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/world/middleeast/western-...)
  - wainstead 6y ago
    Yeah, I’m not worried much about it either... it would be a benefit to reduce phosphorus mining in general due to its environmental impact, but even that can probably be addressed in other ways.
ben_w 6y ago
1. How many of these points can be achieved, and to what relative quality, with greenhouses? 2. Given sunlight is ~1 gigawatt per square kilometre, and given the light level plants need, to the extent that this allows winter production of: (a) staple crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes: this will need implementation of all the improvements to the global power grid that eco-optimists like me call for and which eco-pessimists claim will never be sufficient, and because the energy has to come from elsewhere in winter they will be lacking exactly the same sort of independence they have now with food imports. (I don’t count this as “not independent” because if I did then no city would be, no apartment would be, no non-farmer would be). (b) high-value non-staple foods such as lettuce, kale, peppers: it doesn’t provide enough calories for food-independence. While absolutely you could put a small unit the size of a shipping crate in every village and have the local shops stock it’s lettuce output on their shelves, I see this as a fantastic solution to e.g. greening the Sahara [0] and terraforming the Moon/Mars, but mainly only a cash-crop thing in industrialised nations on Earth. [0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97 https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97
- Kye 6y ago
  >> "[0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97 https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97" I don't think it's "greening the Sahara" so much as "trying to keep the last bits of green." This is on the Nile.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    It looks to me like it’s about 200km from the Nile.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I would generally agree, but I don't see solving the problems caused by "cash crops" as very good and not unlike solar and wind solving the problems of extremes first. If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great. I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the trozical fruits that are being airmailed and then largely discarded. Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food. I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
daanlo 6y ago
I co-founded a home vertical farm company a few years ago (not in operation any more). Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons: 1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste. 2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor. The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark. The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.
- ars 6y ago
  It takes around 3 to 5 days to ship anything anywhere in the US. If you buy food once a week, the increased shipping speed of local hardly registers. Most of the time is taken by other things, not shipping. So the negatives of local (higher energy usage, less efficient use of resources) are not really worth it. Local means growing food either in a greenhouse or in a place not ideally suited for it. It also means smaller less efficient operations.
Loic 6y ago
The real cost (building, etc.) will results in a way more carbon intensive production as anything else. If you consider that Denmark electricity is 66 to 75% oil/gas/coal produced, the real environmental impact of this farm will be disastrous. The 250x less water is compared to open field production without water drop control, it will be at the same level of water consumption than all the greenhouses you see, they will not be better. This argument is as such not a good one.
ajmurmann 6y ago
One more point the article makes that's missing from your list: It uses less space. We currently use enormous amounts of land on agriculture. It would be fantastic if we could give all that land back to nature.
- makerofspoons 6y ago
  It should also be noted reducing agricultural land use is a great way to mitigate climate change: https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/7-things-know-about-ipcc-special-report-land-and-climate https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/7-things-know-about-ipcc-sp...
theferalrobot 6y ago
> 250x less water Compared to what exactly and for what crop? Rain is free and is all that is needed for plenty of crops
- sauwan 6y ago
  Have you ever seen how we do conventional agriculture these days?
  - Retric 6y ago
    Yep, irrigation is location dependent as annual rainfall varies a lot. New Orleans, Louisiana gets 62 inches of rain per year where Las Vegas gets 4. In many areas water conservation is mostly pointless. Indoor farming needs to irritate 100% of their needs so they can actually need more irrigation than farms in other areas. PS: Hawaii is really interesting as it varies so much. With some areas seeing over 25 feet of rain per year. http://rainfall.geography.hawaii.edu/rainfall.html http://rainfall.geography.hawaii.edu/rainfall.html
bryanlarsen 6y ago
KaiserPro had good rebuttals to some of your points[1] so I won't repeat those, but here are some more: > - 250x less water Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0. > transport Bulk transport is incredibly efficient. IIRC, many food products spend more carbon on transport from the grocery store to home than they do getting to the grocery store. I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415773
- brnt 6y ago
  > I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton. I wouldn't mind seeing that calculation!
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    > The research showed that for each tonne of NZ lamb produced and imported, 688kg of CO2 is emitted. When compared to the 2849.1kg of CO2 emitted in UK production, the most sustainable lamb would appear to be that from NZ. https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/ https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam...
    - brnt 6y ago
      Thanks! See table 5: https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10182/4317/food_miles.pdf https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10182... NZ-UK Transport does take about 20% of the energy budget, so it's not insignificant, but farming lamb is just a lot less energy intensive in NZ.
- kitd 6y ago
  Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0. A few days ago there was a post here about water now being traded as a commodity. In many parts of the world, the water supply is far from guaranteed and must be shared with the local environment, population and other farmers. Using 1/250 of the water otherwise supplied by rain is pretty compelling. And that's without the arguments about reducing the need for pesticides and fertilisers.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor I too think that a vegetable and fruit need sun, win and soil to taste the best. Cannot prove it though. It's also possible that the type of tomato they choose to plant will taste like cardboard even if grown in a regular farm.
adamnemecek 6y ago
Also you can stack these infinitely. You can turn 1 acre into 10 acres by stacking 10 on top of each other.
deeviant 6y ago
Average cost of acre of farm land in US: $3160 Average cost of a cheap warehouse in US (this is being generous as the cost is likely far higher for a vertical farm) $20 square ft [1] Thus, Land/building cost standard farming method: $3160 per acre[2] Land/building cost of equivalent vertical farm: $871200 per acre Which is 275x higher. Once again, using warehouse costs is being generous to vertical farms. It's likely more than $20/sq f to commission a vertical farm. What ever land use benefits of vertical farming are at the very least partially offset by the fact it requires a building, which has it own set of ecological impacts. It's very hard for me to imagine any amount of bullet points to make up for 275x+ increased land/build cost. But if there was a market, it's probably in high end organic stuff for well-to-do people, rather than the a case of then technological wizardry feeding the masses. [1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average+construction+cost+per+square+foot+of+warehouse+space https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average... [2] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average+cost+of+a+ance+of+farm+land https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average... Note: I used US numbers, but much of the world has a similar ratio, although I'm sure somebody can find an exception if they looked.
- ac29 6y ago
  You're ignoring the fact that vertical farms have layers. In this article, they are growing 14 layers, so to match the output of one acre of farmland requires 1/14 of an acre of building, if all else is the same. Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not. Other factors such as precise control of climate, nutrients, and pests will also increase the output of vertical farms. I think in the end, you are right - vertical farms will be more expensive. But its going to be nothing like 275x as expensive.
  - deeviant 6y ago
    > You're ignoring the fact that vertical farms have layers. In this article, they are growing 14 layers, so to match the output of one acre of farmland requires 1/14 of an acre of building, if all else is the same. I also used 20 per sq foot which is an gross underestimation for actual cost per square foot of a vertical farm to compensate for this. I wouldn't be surprised if each "layer" itself has a per square foot cost that is a significant fraction of the equivalent cost of a farmland sq foot. > Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not. Vegetables are grown in California 7-8 months a year. So there is room here for an advantage to vertical farms, but is it really a significant advantage? Most CA growers own or lease land in AZ and CA and flip flop between the two as the season dictates, so there is there no real advantage here in terms of availability and as I already outlined the cost is far below a vertical farm so if you can't give vertical farm a price or available advantage what advantage do they have? And to answer my own previous question, for all the "shop local" trends out there, transportation costs are minimal, which is why you can buy produce from even another country at cut-rate prices, so these are probably not a big factor. I would guess the most significant promise of vertical is probably less inputs. Inputs traditionally cost more than land in farming (I actually do know about this as I work for an AG company and have been in the precision Ag industry for 10 years). However, inputs don't cost (200x/150x/100x/50x/whatever number you want to go with for vertical farm land cost multiplier) more than land cost. I guess the argument can be made that I just put everything in cost terms and not in some sort of ecological benefit terms but that is just the world we live in, solar didn't blow up because people started to care, it blew up because it became economically viable.
stronglikedan 6y ago
The controlled environment probably makes pest control a heck of a lot easier as well.

Darmody 6y ago

- Price will go down in the future - Similar farms can be built on Mars. - Diversity of crops in places where it would be complicated otherwise

baq 6y ago
> Similar farms can be built on Mars. I'm an Elon fanboi but please let's start with desertified populated regions first so we have time to build a Mars colony without having to deal with civil wars
- Darmody 6y ago
  Both objectives can be worked on at the same time. I don't really like that argument. We could say "let's end hunger first then focus on computer games, or beer, or vacations, etc". Ending world hunger is way more important than those things but you can't expect we stop doing them to focus on something that is already being addressed but is very complex.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    You can't solve world hunger on the supply side. There will always be more hunger afterwards.
    - Darmody 6y ago
      I know but that's not my point.

pm90 6y ago

> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming. Is this a real thing? Interesting! I wonder if, much like food additives, we could figure out what particular nutrients would be required to impart a specific flavor to produce.

hobofan 6y ago
AFAIK the compounds that make up the flavor are mostly known. The problem is more that if you optimize plant growth for weight per time (because weight is what you are payed for) and leave flavor out of the equation, you'll end up with fruit that has a lot of weight with little flavor. If you switch to a growth regimen that gives the plants a bit more time, you will generally get a better flavor, even under hydroponic settings. Given that you can sense a lot of compounds that make up a fruit non-destructively, I'm pretty optimistic that you could optimize for flavor too in a robotic/vertical farming setting.
riffraff 6y ago
AFAIU, the main problem is that hydroponic growers maximize for volume/color not taste. They could use richer nutrients, but decide not to.
DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
It's likely only genetics that determine taste. Abiotic Soil contents probably have no contribution.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  Genetics defines a potential not an outcome, so it lets us with defining the methods to leverage this potential. Moreover, our taste is only loosely related to the plant optimum. Some prefer sweetness, acidity, softness, juicyness ... The soil, undersoil and climate have great impact on naturally grown plants. See wine.
  - 6y ago

tremon 6y ago

On top of that: this style of farming is additive to other uses of the same land area, not exclusive. Having a traditional 100-acre farm demands a loss of 100 acres of land in opportunity cost. Vertical farming allows to use the same land for residential or commercial development, or it allows for 100 acres of food production in only 10 acres of land.

shmageggy 6y ago
This is a big one, and we should aim for rewilding in the reclaimed space. Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of habitat loss and thus biodiversity loss.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  I wish we could properly account for this negative externality. To me the ideal state for every inch of land is it being a wildlife refuge. To that end I'd love to see a tax that gets charged for using land for anything else. I think it would drive a lot of improvements like vertical farming
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    As a counter example, raising grass-fed cattle on native prairie in Montana is much more "natural" than a wildlife refuge. The natural state of that land was maintained by massive wandering herds of bison. The massive bison herds and their apex predators generally don't exist any more, so a wildlife refuge can be far less "natural" than grazing land.
    - lhopki01 6y ago
      Wouldn't it be wonderful though if we could reintroduce them?
Chris2048 6y ago
Are there constrains wrt a given acre of land only receives a fixed average sunlight?

qayxc 6y ago

> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor Correlation ≠ causation. I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest. Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses. This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops. The longer the process, the more time the produce has to collect and store the relevant substances. Artificial ripening only takes a day or two compared to weeks for naturally grown food.

jeromenerf 6y ago
Varieties have long been selected to optimize industrial constraints, production, distribution ... Ripe often means colorful, perfumed, tasty, sweet ... and fragile. Some tomatoes won’t ever get good. They just don’t produce the compounds necessary, have thick skin, etc. However growing a decent variety in a vertical farming style would produce better tasting fruits. Collecting ripe fruits with machines is however difficult.
jacquesm 6y ago
Amount of sunlight also makes a difference.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Not always true. Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.
- tzumby 6y ago
  +1 I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    OK, but that's a varietal difference, which is one of the factors that the poster identified as being important - no? Unless your parents are actually growing San Marzano tomatoes.

rat87 6y ago

>- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil. This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad

martimarkov 6y ago
But in a situation like the current pandemic with borders being closed this would provide a good alternative to buying from other countries. Another global pandemic might be even more damaging and might infect plants rather than humans. Also -> distributed cultivation. You don’t have a single point of failure.
eitland 6y ago
> This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. Quite the contrary: at least in Norway politicians have been busily pushing your side of the story for decades and only stopped pushing it earlier this year. > It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad If you said this last year many would have agreed. This spring showed that even Norway - as rich and well connected as we are - cannot get hold of a simple thing like face masks if there is an emergency.
- vidarh 6y ago
  In Norway, food self-sufficiency has been a political issue ever since the Napoleonic wars and the British naval blockade on Denmark-Norway 200 years ago, to the point that the importance of self-sufficiency were taught from early in primary schools at least until the 1980's. It grew in political importance as the national-romanticism movement grew, and then blew up massively in political importance after World War II demonstrated just how little it took to disrupt external supplies. One might reasonably argue it's the reason Norway isn't in the EU - Norwegian agriculture and fishery policy is based very strongly on a view on self-sufficiency that includes high subsidies not originally for the sake of farmers, but for the sake of national security. It's also behind a lot of the push for retaining rural settlements. It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.

dan-robertson 6y ago

It’s also good for the environment when land can be left to become wild instead of being actively farmed. The environment in the U.K. was greatly damaged during the Second World War when a lot of land that wouldn’t normally be farmed was farmed intensively, and that intensive farming continued after the war, greatly decreasing the land that was available to wildlife. Birds like nightingales which used to be reasonably known in the countryside now have vastly contracted populations in the U.K.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

all these mechanical parts will cause pollution both in their production and their disposal. 365 days of production will also require some heavy fertilization cycles, so more chemicals to be produced and disposed. I don't see that talked much and might very well come ahead with the efficiency of scale in having all these thing stacked instead of dispersed over a large tract of land, but these thing are an important aspect and hopefully what will come out of this deployment is some hard data about the impact they have.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
> "chemicals to be produced and disposed" I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language. Most of the time it's used, it doesn't mean anything at all. What is actually used? Fertiliser, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'. Do they need to be disposed of? Not really, plants use them up. If you are disposing of them, you are disposing of your money, because you paid for them. The whole point of these greenhouse or vertial systems is that they are closed off, so you don't have runoff like you do in the open field, and you don't need pesticides because pests don't get in. There are 99 problems with this 'tech bro' solution, but chemicals is not one of them.
- ben_w 6y ago
  > not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'. I dunno, DHMO is pretty scary, but not as scary as the naturally occurring pesticide 1,3,7-Trimethylxanthine [0], which has become the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug despite side effects of anxiety, nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2C3%2C7-Trimethylxanthine http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2C3%2C7-Trimethylxant...
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  > I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language and I wish people would read the full sentences before entering a debate, because it was completely clear this wasn't about the specific fertilizers usage in situ, but pollutant released during production ( one of many examples https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.h... you can find, about every precursor can and is leaked in the environment ) and after usage (even assuming it's closed off, which it isn't, you need to scrub waste and put it somewhere or reprocess it at some cost) is it so bad to be curious about these cost in hyper intensive production, especially since they aren't available in this press release?

KaiserPro 6y ago

> - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop yes, but you are spending money and carbon on re-creating sunlight. > Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria. > - Good for the environment to save so much in transport None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit. > - Independence from other countries Actually this is the only real selling point. Theoretically you _could_ grow crops that are difficult to cultivate in your climate. > - 250x less water Yes, but I am sceptical. It should use less water than an open field, but the same as a greenhouse. if it truely is 250 less water then great. But I suspect thats clever comparison. There are ofcourse low cost ways to save water, like multch, or constricting water supplies and frequency just after germination. Look, the problem I have is that a lot of these systems are basically hype machines. They are invented by tech bros who've just discovered that nature exsists. But instead of looking at the vast reams of research they head straight for the vertical/hydro/LED segment. What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world Up until that point, your just pissing dollars into the wind and wasting everyone's time inveting solutions to problems that are not actual problems.

universa1 6y ago
> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. Growing up on a farm in Germany, this is just what I would call decent farming and this is not rocket science. The knowledge how to do this is there and imho it does not involve some "tech disruption". Agriculture, at least in Germany, is highly mechanized/technized and in the end it does not matter if you look at conventional/"industrial" or ecological/bio-farming. You need to take care of nutrients, humus creation, ... . This involves "artificial" fertilizer, regularly taking soil samples, to check what nutrients are there, crop rotation, etc... Sure you can just "raid" the soil and move on after ten years, but good luck finding new area in Germany to farm on ;-) And this is more or less independent of scale of farming.

wainstead 6y ago

And it addresses the potential issue of “peak phosphorus”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus

orwin 6y ago
Peak phosphorus is one of the peak i'm less worried about in my lifetime or my children's lifetime. Morocco reserves are probably underestimated, as are Algerian reserves. As long as Morocco stay stable and is help by its economic partners during hard times (France and Spain mostly), it wont' be an issue. But you're right, hydroponics solve this issue.
- ben_w 6y ago
  I don’t know the geography well enough to know if this is a problem, but I thought half of the area claimed by the Moroccan government wants independence and has a long-running low-energy struggle going on to achieve that end? (Slightly more energetic than I thought: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/world/middleeast/western-sahara-morocco-polisario.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/world/middleeast/western-...)
- wainstead 6y ago
  Yeah, I’m not worried much about it either... it would be a benefit to reduce phosphorus mining in general due to its environmental impact, but even that can probably be addressed in other ways.

ben_w 6y ago

1. How many of these points can be achieved, and to what relative quality, with greenhouses? 2. Given sunlight is ~1 gigawatt per square kilometre, and given the light level plants need, to the extent that this allows winter production of: (a) staple crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes: this will need implementation of all the improvements to the global power grid that eco-optimists like me call for and which eco-pessimists claim will never be sufficient, and because the energy has to come from elsewhere in winter they will be lacking exactly the same sort of independence they have now with food imports. (I don’t count this as “not independent” because if I did then no city would be, no apartment would be, no non-farmer would be). (b) high-value non-staple foods such as lettuce, kale, peppers: it doesn’t provide enough calories for food-independence. While absolutely you could put a small unit the size of a shipping crate in every village and have the local shops stock it’s lettuce output on their shelves, I see this as a fantastic solution to e.g. greening the Sahara [0] and terraforming the Moon/Mars, but mainly only a cash-crop thing in industrialised nations on Earth. [0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97 https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97

Kye 6y ago
>> "[0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97 https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97" I don't think it's "greening the Sahara" so much as "trying to keep the last bits of green." This is on the Nile.
- ben_w 6y ago
  It looks to me like it’s about 200km from the Nile.
foolmeonce 6y ago
I would generally agree, but I don't see solving the problems caused by "cash crops" as very good and not unlike solar and wind solving the problems of extremes first. If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great. I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the trozical fruits that are being airmailed and then largely discarded. Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food. I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.

daanlo 6y ago

I co-founded a home vertical farm company a few years ago (not in operation any more). Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons: 1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste. 2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor. The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark. The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.

ars 6y ago
It takes around 3 to 5 days to ship anything anywhere in the US. If you buy food once a week, the increased shipping speed of local hardly registers. Most of the time is taken by other things, not shipping. So the negatives of local (higher energy usage, less efficient use of resources) are not really worth it. Local means growing food either in a greenhouse or in a place not ideally suited for it. It also means smaller less efficient operations.

Loic 6y ago

The real cost (building, etc.) will results in a way more carbon intensive production as anything else. If you consider that Denmark electricity is 66 to 75% oil/gas/coal produced, the real environmental impact of this farm will be disastrous. The 250x less water is compared to open field production without water drop control, it will be at the same level of water consumption than all the greenhouses you see, they will not be better. This argument is as such not a good one.

ajmurmann 6y ago

One more point the article makes that's missing from your list: It uses less space. We currently use enormous amounts of land on agriculture. It would be fantastic if we could give all that land back to nature.

makerofspoons 6y ago
It should also be noted reducing agricultural land use is a great way to mitigate climate change: https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/7-things-know-about-ipcc-special-report-land-and-climate https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/7-things-know-about-ipcc-sp...

theferalrobot 6y ago

> 250x less water Compared to what exactly and for what crop? Rain is free and is all that is needed for plenty of crops

sauwan 6y ago
Have you ever seen how we do conventional agriculture these days?
- Retric 6y ago
  Yep, irrigation is location dependent as annual rainfall varies a lot. New Orleans, Louisiana gets 62 inches of rain per year where Las Vegas gets 4. In many areas water conservation is mostly pointless. Indoor farming needs to irritate 100% of their needs so they can actually need more irrigation than farms in other areas. PS: Hawaii is really interesting as it varies so much. With some areas seeing over 25 feet of rain per year. http://rainfall.geography.hawaii.edu/rainfall.html http://rainfall.geography.hawaii.edu/rainfall.html

bryanlarsen 6y ago

KaiserPro had good rebuttals to some of your points[1] so I won't repeat those, but here are some more: > - 250x less water Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0. > transport Bulk transport is incredibly efficient. IIRC, many food products spend more carbon on transport from the grocery store to home than they do getting to the grocery store. I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415773

brnt 6y ago
> I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton. I wouldn't mind seeing that calculation!
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  > The research showed that for each tonne of NZ lamb produced and imported, 688kg of CO2 is emitted. When compared to the 2849.1kg of CO2 emitted in UK production, the most sustainable lamb would appear to be that from NZ. https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/ https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam...
  - brnt 6y ago
    Thanks! See table 5: https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10182/4317/food_miles.pdf https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10182... NZ-UK Transport does take about 20% of the energy budget, so it's not insignificant, but farming lamb is just a lot less energy intensive in NZ.
kitd 6y ago
Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0. A few days ago there was a post here about water now being traded as a commodity. In many parts of the world, the water supply is far from guaranteed and must be shared with the local environment, population and other farmers. Using 1/250 of the water otherwise supplied by rain is pretty compelling. And that's without the arguments about reducing the need for pesticides and fertilisers.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor I too think that a vegetable and fruit need sun, win and soil to taste the best. Cannot prove it though. It's also possible that the type of tomato they choose to plant will taste like cardboard even if grown in a regular farm.

adamnemecek 6y ago

Also you can stack these infinitely. You can turn 1 acre into 10 acres by stacking 10 on top of each other.

deeviant 6y ago

Average cost of acre of farm land in US: $3160 Average cost of a cheap warehouse in US (this is being generous as the cost is likely far higher for a vertical farm) $20 square ft [1] Thus, Land/building cost standard farming method: $3160 per acre[2] Land/building cost of equivalent vertical farm: $871200 per acre Which is 275x higher. Once again, using warehouse costs is being generous to vertical farms. It's likely more than $20/sq f to commission a vertical farm. What ever land use benefits of vertical farming are at the very least partially offset by the fact it requires a building, which has it own set of ecological impacts. It's very hard for me to imagine any amount of bullet points to make up for 275x+ increased land/build cost. But if there was a market, it's probably in high end organic stuff for well-to-do people, rather than the a case of then technological wizardry feeding the masses. [1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average+construction+cost+per+square+foot+of+warehouse+space https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average... [2] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average+cost+of+a+ance+of+farm+land https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average... Note: I used US numbers, but much of the world has a similar ratio, although I'm sure somebody can find an exception if they looked.

ac29 6y ago
You're ignoring the fact that vertical farms have layers. In this article, they are growing 14 layers, so to match the output of one acre of farmland requires 1/14 of an acre of building, if all else is the same. Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not. Other factors such as precise control of climate, nutrients, and pests will also increase the output of vertical farms. I think in the end, you are right - vertical farms will be more expensive. But its going to be nothing like 275x as expensive.
- deeviant 6y ago
  > You're ignoring the fact that vertical farms have layers. In this article, they are growing 14 layers, so to match the output of one acre of farmland requires 1/14 of an acre of building, if all else is the same. I also used 20 per sq foot which is an gross underestimation for actual cost per square foot of a vertical farm to compensate for this. I wouldn't be surprised if each "layer" itself has a per square foot cost that is a significant fraction of the equivalent cost of a farmland sq foot. > Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not. Vegetables are grown in California 7-8 months a year. So there is room here for an advantage to vertical farms, but is it really a significant advantage? Most CA growers own or lease land in AZ and CA and flip flop between the two as the season dictates, so there is there no real advantage here in terms of availability and as I already outlined the cost is far below a vertical farm so if you can't give vertical farm a price or available advantage what advantage do they have? And to answer my own previous question, for all the "shop local" trends out there, transportation costs are minimal, which is why you can buy produce from even another country at cut-rate prices, so these are probably not a big factor. I would guess the most significant promise of vertical is probably less inputs. Inputs traditionally cost more than land in farming (I actually do know about this as I work for an AG company and have been in the precision Ag industry for 10 years). However, inputs don't cost (200x/150x/100x/50x/whatever number you want to go with for vertical farm land cost multiplier) more than land cost. I guess the argument can be made that I just put everything in cost terms and not in some sort of ecological benefit terms but that is just the world we live in, solar didn't blow up because people started to care, it blew up because it became economically viable.

stronglikedan 6y ago

The controlled environment probably makes pest control a heck of a lot easier as well.