53 ms·

2-Acre Vertical Farm Run by AI and Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm

418 points by wrycoder 6y ago

ggm 6y ago
Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting, compared to 'traditional' classic modern intensive farm price. An observation from the article also could be answered: what areal space is required to generate the power? Neither of these are meant to be thunderclap proof-it-fails critique, they're just interesting. In food miles, freshness and lack of need for water, fertiliser and pesticides its winning hands down for feeding its urban population surrounding it. Repurposed brownfield site, existing buildings would also reduce impact. I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Supporting towns. Jobs are empowering, even crap ag. jobs but a reality here is that farming is overwhelmingly industrialised and jobs are either kept in the family or massively exploitative piece rate so this isn't a killer argument against either, but I do worry the rural area depopulation is a continuing trend.
- AmVess 6y ago
  Traditional farms aren't going to be upset by this approach. It more of an answer to how we are going to feed 14 billion people than it is a threat to our current way of growing things to eat.
  - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
    Also, by not growing these products on other farmland, other crops, which aren’t suitable for vertical solutions, can be grown on that land. There is a shortage of farmable land, so this is another piece in the puzzle. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...
- loceng 6y ago
  Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well. The only concern I have is soil, nutrient supplementation quality - profit focus would dictate trying to include bare minimum nutrients which doesn't necessarily yield the best food but "good enough" being produced.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Yep, we already see this in many cultivars today - they are less nutritious than many heirloom varieties because they prioritize production (paid by the pound).
    - ggm 6y ago
      I suspect these target a market intensely focussed on nutritional value, as well as price. Good food commands a premium. Yes, naked competition would force costs down and if nutritional value was costly that would drop, but this technology is early phase, may well still be more expensive than bulk commercial agriculture and succeed because of the variance of price and value and the huge amount of price elasticity inherent in food choices. I think you're arguing too strongly from reductionist economic theories. I already am willing to pay significantly higher prices for brie over US cheese blocks, and I pay over the odds for tomatoes I like. In Food economics, competition is not solely driven by price basically.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        That may be true for people who are well off, but there is a large segment of the population who are food insecure and many others that do not have that level of disposable income. Then you have the segments of the population that don't see any benefit to more nutritious foods and thing they are all the same. For example, why is organic farming not the predominant method?
  - hourislate 6y ago
    >Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well. The first comment on the articles page was addressing some of that impact. Does it feed insects and birds and support biodiversity? Does it sequester carbon in the soil, making below-ground life healthy, increasing access of plants to nutrients, and hence produce healthier food? Does it help water infiltrate into the ground, this replenishing ground water and aquifers? Does convert sunlight into latent heat via plant transpiration, and thus support the Small Water Cycles that cool the surface of the earth and convey water (via rain) downwind to drier land? Does it engage the senses with beautiful sights and smells? Does it engage humans in an honest day's work, making them proud contributors to society?
- giantg2 6y ago
  Use of nuclear could preclude the power issue.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    So I know nuclear is supposed to be able to handle current power needs of humanity for quite a while, but if we fill earth with super intensive vertical farms powered by artificial light... Anyone ran the numbers on how long uranium would last running sun-less agriculture for a few billion people?
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I'd imagine the few billion number is high. The cost would likely prevent this from being deployed in the majority of the world.
      - andy_ppp 6y ago
        What they say in their interview is scaling this to make it economically is possible if they just have the scale. Personally I’m extremely skeptical of their success...
        giantg2 6y ago
        I imagine that's only in first world countries.
        andy_ppp 6y ago
        Why? Everything to run one of these would be cheaper in India (for example)...
        giantg2 6y ago
        And what is the price for the produce in those areas? Less as well. In these areas, it's highly unlikely this system would be feasible if land costs are relatively low and energy prices are a relatively higher expense compared to incomes in higher earning countries (as a percentage of income).
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Too late for that. My family are big baseball fans, and we go to the baseball hall of fame for tournaments or indications every few years. That drive from Albany to Cooperstown is progressively more depressing first as small dairy was destroyed by deregulation and later as agricultural policy put everyone out of business unless you grow corn or flowers or farm tourism.
- driverdan 6y ago
  > Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting They didn't mention it because it's impractically high right now. As an experiment this is interesting but it's nowhere near cost effective yet.
- njharman 6y ago
  > I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Your fear is a century late. Really, all of civilized history late. The very clear trend of civilization is loss of agricultural jobs.
giantg2 6y ago
That's nice. But honestly, what are average people supposed to do anymore? If we keep making everything more difficult and more difficult to compete with, then how can average people survive? I would like to retire and have a small farm, but this basically says it's not possible to compete.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Their selection of crops seems fairly limited.[1] I don't know that corn or soybeans, for example, would do well vertically. [1] https://www.plenty.ag/our-produce/ https://www.plenty.ag/our-produce/
- giantg2 6y ago
  I guess people downvote just because they don't agree. But it's true. The number of people on assistance continues to grow and the easier jobs are outsourced to lower cost countries. Edit: looks like some others have upvoted.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  We've already got sort of a dystopia in software engineering. Get into FAANG and you're good for life. Combined FAANG (say 10 biggest tech companies) is over 5 trillion dollars, more than a lot of countries' GDPs with sovereignty. I suspect in year 2100, we will have no small businesses but giant monolith corporations that will drive everything from content censorship to citizen governance through proxies, everyone's savings are going to be in their stocks which keep increasing at an ever increasing pace. Traditional currencies have been devalued and replaced by corporate-owned coins. Neuralink will ensure utter dominance of a few. Abstract things we consider today are commodicized and traded. Future kind of sucks to be honest. We're past golden prime years. I just want to run a small tea shop and hang out with the locals.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Small businesses haven’t been wiped out by FAANG though. It’s not a zero sum game.
deleted 6y ago
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hbrundage 6y ago
So far, everyone growing vertically is growing crops that are almost entirely water because they're the only things that grow fast enough to turn a profit. They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local. It's a quality-differentiated product, not a solution to food scarcity or security. Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent, and it's gonna be really hard when competing with the free rain, free sun, and insane automation available for field agriculture already. Even Plenty with SoftBank's extra 'nutrients' tops out at strawberries. See https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr... for some raw data on unit economics. One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired, or https://farm.bot/ https://farm.bot/ which encourages hardware hacking and food supply awareness.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  > Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent Every new tech has its Hype Cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
- Invictus0 6y ago
  Don't you think vertical could have an impact in rain/fertile land starved areas like the israeli desert?
  - hedora 6y ago
    With infinite energy, Israel could have infinite water. They already have unlimited light and land. This is an energy intensive technology. So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less. (I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)
yongjik 6y ago
They could have at least told us how much electricity and human labor it uses per pound of produce - it doesn't instill confidence that the article only talks about space usage, when the important question is "at what cost?".
- oblib 6y ago
  Yeah, this article was lacking those and other details. Most every claim was made in a generic way that seemed to imply most any crop could be grown this way when in truth they are pretty much growing salad greens only.
blackrock 6y ago
When can we start using CRISPR to bioengineer crops that can be economically grown? Say I want to grow an apple. I would like it to sprout its fruit from a small unit, like a branch, that’s hooked up to the nutrient bath. Then this small unit can be mechanically organized and sorted by the robotic farm operating system. The whole system would work in orchestration, where seedlings are germinated into saplings. Then put into a grow box, to collect its nutrients. And then put into an assembly line for it to grow, and be harvested. Then when it is ripe, it gets harvested by a robotic arm picker. All fully automated, organically grown, no pesticides or very limited usage. Then automatically washed and hermetically packaged for sale at your local grocery store. Or delivered to you by Amazon Grocery Services.
- pp19dd 6y ago
  If you haven't seen Bert Hubert's breakdown of the Covid vaccine source code, worth a look: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... Think he describes a reality where we know a lot today and yet still have ways to go in order to do something that intentional to an apple. His presentation on DNA computing in general (linked at bottom) goes into some depth there. What caught my eye is that a common apple has a DNA size roughly as large and complex as the human genome itself, with a disclaimer that the DNA size doesn't translate to complexity. But meanwhile, we don't even know how many genes a human being has (estimate changed in 20 years from 100k down to ~20k), but a level beneath that complexity we don't even know "how our own cells know where a gene begins" (quoted from his presentation).
brandelune 6y ago
It outproduces salad, but not potatoes, wheat, and most of all humus. Also the need for heavy machinery has a real cost in green house gas emissions (same issue as with electric cars). There are real ecological services provided by a healthy land and natural agriculture that can't be provided by such food factories. As @systemvoltage wrote, this is good for a heavily centralized system that's owned by big corporations looking for big profits but that's not a solution to the global environmental and soon to come (and it's already here for a lot of us) food/water crisis.
- SirSourdough 6y ago
  Surely the reduction in land used must have a significant environmental impact. For the crops in question, you are talking about the ability to have a 2-acre building surrounded by a 718 acre nature reserve to get the same results as a 720 acre monocrop. I find it hard to believe that the long-term environmental impact of installing equipment would actually outweigh preserving 99.7% of the land.
  - the__alchemist 6y ago
    Good point. However: You need to account for the environmental impact of the grow lights.
  - jtdev 6y ago
    Are you sure you want to trade farming of land for whatever development or use of that land may occur when/if our hypothetical 720 acre farm is retired from ag production? Their seems to be an assumption that the next owner will be a steward of these lands.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      We don't really have other uses for the vast amounts of land our food (and energy crop) production currently consumes.
      - 6y ago
yaacovtp 6y ago
Big difference in growing baby greens which are harvested early in a plants life vs growing for the fruit or seeds.
adzsroka 6y ago
This is incredible!
darig 6y ago
Wait a few years when various molds take hold and the only solution is to replace everything, when you're already in the red and operating at thin margins. Tale as old as time.
MichaelZuo 6y ago
This is really cool stuff! If the claimed numbers square up this would be a pretty big deal for the urban areas of Canada & US which have lots of medium priced/quality land too expensive for farms or cheap warehouses but too cheap/contaminated/poorly zoned/etc. for housing and offices.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  Vertical farms would be last thing I would allow on contaminated land... If we can't build regular buildings to standard that keep contaminations out, why would we allow another vector there?
  - MichaelZuo 6y ago
    Well of course the vertical farm will be built to a clean room standard, far greater than standard construction. Or at least that seems to be the only possible way for their product to have ‘zero pesticides’.
mikedilger 6y ago
Wow, those purple suited AI-driven Robots sure do look human! Impressive.
dflock 6y ago
To everyone arguing about lettuce: lettuce is for practice. Weed & shrooms will be legal soon.
- dsrees 6y ago
  Then they need to stop toting this as a food solution for inner cities, food deserts, and a way to decrease miles on your food. Last I checked, weed and shrooms don't make a balanced diet
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Mushrooms already grow in basements with no light whatsoever.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
It doesn’t look like the produce produced by this farm (from the pictures) provides much nutritional value. Creating overpriced herbs, salads and micro greens in little plastic pots maybe commercially viable but we need vegetables like legumes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and brocolli (and in the US maize) to feed the world.
exabrial 6y ago
> all the packaging is 100% recyclable, made of recycled plastic eeek. It's my understanding right now plastic recycling... well, isn't. I wish they would eliminate the material completely.
- SirSourdough 6y ago
  There are package-free / fully reusable packaging grocery stores popping up. I really think its something that could become the norm with pretty little pain for people. Worth looking to see if there is one in your area to push the death of single-use plastics along.
Causality1 6y ago
The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm. This author must have a truly low opinion of me to think I'd fall for that horseshit. Before you can tell what effect the conditions have on yield you have to compare the grow area. Each vertical pane contributes to the grow area. What is the grow area of the vertical farm? It's not even in the damn article at all. What's the cost per kilogram of plant matter? Per kg of dry yield? Plenty’s farms grow non-GMO crops and don’t use herbicides or pesticides. Ah, there it is. This isn't a project to save the world; it's a project to lure investors and then lose money for ten years before getting bought out and shut down.
deleted 6y ago
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emanuensis 6y ago
Growing staples is the main failing of all these vertical farms, and they are just boutique-ish without that capability. But if energy were free could we not grow staples vertically? We ARE on the cusp of that. And there is a lot of emphasis here. Virtually free energy could come now, with present technology, anywhere on earth with Geothermal... if it was just invested in. (Requires upfront costs).
dash2 6y ago
Interesting discussion here far outclasses the article itself, which looks like a thinly-disguised press release on a horribly spammy website. I wonder if there are better sources available.
hyko 6y ago
The article is a bit light on details. Where are the scientific papers on this? Until we get the details, the headline is kind of meaningless. I’m pretty sure I could produce the same amount of macronutrients as a 2 acre vertical farm in an even smaller factory if I had $400 million dollars in inputs to play with.
baron816 6y ago
Can someone explain to me why “vertical” farms need to be vertical? Why not just use greenhouses, along with all of the AI/other technologies? Where are most of the productivity gains coming from?
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  It’s actually an elegant idea. But there are some design flaws. CEA includes many ways to control environment for Ag...glasshouse, hoophouses, polyvtunnels, hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics.. Installing vertical farms at this scale is hubris. Even though it’s a good idea. This will never scale. VC logic fail. Also: no productivity gains. You heard it here first: no vertical farm is making a profit. And they never will.
efitz 6y ago
I just don’t believe these numbers. I’d like to see an independent study by a non-financially-involved university before I believe that some techies have figured out a way to boost yields more than two orders of magnitude over modern agriculture. Either there is some gimmick - a specific plant or strain or whatever - or the energy costs are 3 or more orders of magnitude over normal agriculture - or the numbers are cooked in some other way. I’d be as excited as anyone if someone could pull off a 360x or 400x yield in a useful food crop, but these guys would be trillionaires if they had actually done so.
hannob 6y ago
Here's a skeptical take on vertical farming: https://globalecoguy.org/no-vertical-farms-wont-feed-the-world-5313e3e961c0 https://globalecoguy.org/no-vertical-farms-wont-feed-the-wor... Johathan Foley is usually well informed on these topics.
kevas 6y ago
Anyone know where I can find a breakdown of a vertical farm's expenditures by category?
smusamashah 6y ago
For all things done too purely and cleanly, is there a hidden harm/cost in being too pure and clean? Do we miss out something useful which could have otherwise been a part of it in only a natural environment?
cellover 6y ago
Stop hacking my vertical scroll-farming! This inertia thing when scrolling is unbrearable.
- castis 6y ago
  For a website called 'intellgent living' you'd think there would be more intelligence involved. Crap website from start to finish.
ldng 6y ago
I'm really curious as to why we have not started to build stacked fields. How deep go root crops ? Could we do, say, 10 stories building and have one story every two filled with soil ? What would be the challenges ? It could be a way to do intensive yet biological agriculture.
- messe 6y ago
  > I'm really curious as to why we have not started to build stacked fields. How do you propose to light it? They need energy to grow, and it needs to be done in such a way that your overall cost is cheaper that sunlight (which on a bright day provides roughly 1kW per square meter in energy).
  - ldng 6y ago
    I don't know, hence my questions :-) Could a good mirroring system could do the trick ? Or like it is already done in a lot a closed system ? At which density does that start to be economically viable ? But my main question really is, is it even being investigated or already considered unfeasible ?
    - messe 6y ago
      > Could a good mirroring system could do the trick ? To get the same amount of energy, the total area of the mirrors would have to be about the size of the equivalent field.
- iancmceachern 6y ago
  I like this. Not because it's a good idea (it may be, but IMO is not), but because its exactly the kind of high level, open ended, open minded approach that is needed. I think that a lot of folks approach this problem thinking that land, fertilizer and water are the main issues. It makes sense, they are indeed the main inputs to plants. They are not however the main costs and inputs for large scale agriculture. For large scale ag the main costs from a societal standpoint are energy, labor and waste. Land where you farm is cheap and plentiful. Same with water and fertilizer (relatively). Labor needs to be imported, along with energy and managing storage and waste, including the food/grain market fluctuations are the main challenges. These are not solved by vertical farming. These are solved by automating tractors and harvesting equipment, making the path to market from the farm more straightforward and efficient, and figuring our our labor issues and not just ignoring them or hand waving saying robots will do it.
tim333 6y ago
It's interesting this stuff works ok so if we want to grow food on Mars or some mucked up future earth we can. Though at the moment I'm happy with my plants getting out in the sun. Environment wise I think artificial meat may be the big future positive change.
herodoturtle 6y ago
That one photo in the article looks like a screenshot out of The Expanse ^_^
082349872349872 6y ago
TL;DR: out-produces by acre (and acre-foot), not by dollar. I'm pretty sure we've already known for decades that there are few non-economic limits to intensification, but it's nice to have the (practical?) example.
chadcmulligan 6y ago
Some of you may find this interesting - tomatoes from a solar furnace and uses seawater, totally sustainable and running afaik. https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-tomato-farm-opens-port-augusta-41643/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-... https://www.sundropfarms.com https://www.sundropfarms.com
ConfusedDog 6y ago
Maybe SpaceX would be interested in it for the Mars mission. This kind of agriculture/botany is really similar to one of those Expanse episodes...
aaron695 6y ago
> 2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm Can someone show me on a map where this 2+ acre building is, just so I know it's real? It would have to be epic, tall and densely packed. Lots of infrastructure around it to do 320 times normal output. To do consistently and at this 2 acres they claim to have done at scale seems unlikely. This claims SF is only 50,000 sq ft https://www.bdcnetwork.com/farming-ready-grow https://www.bdcnetwork.com/farming-ready-grow with no pictures to show they are using all the space. Just the same cut away videos and low shot images to make things look big.
valuearb 6y ago
Wow! I haven’t read such an impressive set of claims from a startup since Theranos.
AHappyCamper 6y ago
There is a LOT of fluff in this poorly written article. 70% of it is saying, "It's horrible. It's so dangerous. They're covering it up", without damn well just stating the facts. So tedious to read through.... uuurrgghh...
dr_orpheus 6y ago
The way that the article is phrased as food/area hints at where/why vertical farming could be a benefit. It seems unlikely that in the near future vertical farming will overtake traditional farming methods where land is plentiful. Indeed, the costs of the food being grown are still 5x higher. But where land/transportation costs are the most prohibitive for food this could potentially be viable.
anfilt 6y ago
All the lighting used so the plants can photosynthesize is not free... I also doubt power carbon neutral. So how much area of renewable energy sources would it take to run this farm? A traditional farm does not need powered light sources...
vkou 6y ago
I'm pretty sure this 2-acre farm will produce two to three orders of magnitude less calories than 720 acres of wheat. or rice.

418 points by wrycoder 6y ago

ggm 6y ago

Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting, compared to 'traditional' classic modern intensive farm price. An observation from the article also could be answered: what areal space is required to generate the power? Neither of these are meant to be thunderclap proof-it-fails critique, they're just interesting. In food miles, freshness and lack of need for water, fertiliser and pesticides its winning hands down for feeding its urban population surrounding it. Repurposed brownfield site, existing buildings would also reduce impact. I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Supporting towns. Jobs are empowering, even crap ag. jobs but a reality here is that farming is overwhelmingly industrialised and jobs are either kept in the family or massively exploitative piece rate so this isn't a killer argument against either, but I do worry the rural area depopulation is a continuing trend.

AmVess 6y ago
Traditional farms aren't going to be upset by this approach. It more of an answer to how we are going to feed 14 billion people than it is a threat to our current way of growing things to eat.
- bjelkeman-again 6y ago
  Also, by not growing these products on other farmland, other crops, which aren’t suitable for vertical solutions, can be grown on that land. There is a shortage of farmable land, so this is another piece in the puzzle. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...
loceng 6y ago
Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well. The only concern I have is soil, nutrient supplementation quality - profit focus would dictate trying to include bare minimum nutrients which doesn't necessarily yield the best food but "good enough" being produced.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Yep, we already see this in many cultivars today - they are less nutritious than many heirloom varieties because they prioritize production (paid by the pound).
  - ggm 6y ago
    I suspect these target a market intensely focussed on nutritional value, as well as price. Good food commands a premium. Yes, naked competition would force costs down and if nutritional value was costly that would drop, but this technology is early phase, may well still be more expensive than bulk commercial agriculture and succeed because of the variance of price and value and the huge amount of price elasticity inherent in food choices. I think you're arguing too strongly from reductionist economic theories. I already am willing to pay significantly higher prices for brie over US cheese blocks, and I pay over the odds for tomatoes I like. In Food economics, competition is not solely driven by price basically.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      That may be true for people who are well off, but there is a large segment of the population who are food insecure and many others that do not have that level of disposable income. Then you have the segments of the population that don't see any benefit to more nutritious foods and thing they are all the same. For example, why is organic farming not the predominant method?
- hourislate 6y ago
  >Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well. The first comment on the articles page was addressing some of that impact. Does it feed insects and birds and support biodiversity? Does it sequester carbon in the soil, making below-ground life healthy, increasing access of plants to nutrients, and hence produce healthier food? Does it help water infiltrate into the ground, this replenishing ground water and aquifers? Does convert sunlight into latent heat via plant transpiration, and thus support the Small Water Cycles that cool the surface of the earth and convey water (via rain) downwind to drier land? Does it engage the senses with beautiful sights and smells? Does it engage humans in an honest day's work, making them proud contributors to society?
giantg2 6y ago
Use of nuclear could preclude the power issue.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  So I know nuclear is supposed to be able to handle current power needs of humanity for quite a while, but if we fill earth with super intensive vertical farms powered by artificial light... Anyone ran the numbers on how long uranium would last running sun-less agriculture for a few billion people?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I'd imagine the few billion number is high. The cost would likely prevent this from being deployed in the majority of the world.
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      What they say in their interview is scaling this to make it economically is possible if they just have the scale. Personally I’m extremely skeptical of their success...
      - giantg2 6y ago
        I imagine that's only in first world countries.
        andy_ppp 6y ago
        Why? Everything to run one of these would be cheaper in India (for example)...
        giantg2 6y ago
        And what is the price for the produce in those areas? Less as well. In these areas, it's highly unlikely this system would be feasible if land costs are relatively low and energy prices are a relatively higher expense compared to incomes in higher earning countries (as a percentage of income).
Spooky23 6y ago
Too late for that. My family are big baseball fans, and we go to the baseball hall of fame for tournaments or indications every few years. That drive from Albany to Cooperstown is progressively more depressing first as small dairy was destroyed by deregulation and later as agricultural policy put everyone out of business unless you grow corn or flowers or farm tourism.
driverdan 6y ago
> Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting They didn't mention it because it's impractically high right now. As an experiment this is interesting but it's nowhere near cost effective yet.
njharman 6y ago
> I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Your fear is a century late. Really, all of civilized history late. The very clear trend of civilization is loss of agricultural jobs.

giantg2 6y ago

That's nice. But honestly, what are average people supposed to do anymore? If we keep making everything more difficult and more difficult to compete with, then how can average people survive? I would like to retire and have a small farm, but this basically says it's not possible to compete.

tyingq 6y ago
Their selection of crops seems fairly limited.[1] I don't know that corn or soybeans, for example, would do well vertically. [1] https://www.plenty.ag/our-produce/ https://www.plenty.ag/our-produce/
giantg2 6y ago
I guess people downvote just because they don't agree. But it's true. The number of people on assistance continues to grow and the easier jobs are outsourced to lower cost countries. Edit: looks like some others have upvoted.
systemvoltage 6y ago
We've already got sort of a dystopia in software engineering. Get into FAANG and you're good for life. Combined FAANG (say 10 biggest tech companies) is over 5 trillion dollars, more than a lot of countries' GDPs with sovereignty. I suspect in year 2100, we will have no small businesses but giant monolith corporations that will drive everything from content censorship to citizen governance through proxies, everyone's savings are going to be in their stocks which keep increasing at an ever increasing pace. Traditional currencies have been devalued and replaced by corporate-owned coins. Neuralink will ensure utter dominance of a few. Abstract things we consider today are commodicized and traded. Future kind of sucks to be honest. We're past golden prime years. I just want to run a small tea shop and hang out with the locals.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Small businesses haven’t been wiped out by FAANG though. It’s not a zero sum game.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hbrundage 6y ago

So far, everyone growing vertically is growing crops that are almost entirely water because they're the only things that grow fast enough to turn a profit. They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local. It's a quality-differentiated product, not a solution to food scarcity or security. Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent, and it's gonna be really hard when competing with the free rain, free sun, and insane automation available for field agriculture already. Even Plenty with SoftBank's extra 'nutrients' tops out at strawberries. See https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr... for some raw data on unit economics. One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired, or https://farm.bot/ https://farm.bot/ which encourages hardware hacking and food supply awareness.

smitty1e 6y ago
> Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent Every new tech has its Hype Cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
Invictus0 6y ago
Don't you think vertical could have an impact in rain/fertile land starved areas like the israeli desert?
- hedora 6y ago
  With infinite energy, Israel could have infinite water. They already have unlimited light and land. This is an energy intensive technology. So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less. (I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)

yongjik 6y ago

They could have at least told us how much electricity and human labor it uses per pound of produce - it doesn't instill confidence that the article only talks about space usage, when the important question is "at what cost?".

oblib 6y ago
Yeah, this article was lacking those and other details. Most every claim was made in a generic way that seemed to imply most any crop could be grown this way when in truth they are pretty much growing salad greens only.

blackrock 6y ago

When can we start using CRISPR to bioengineer crops that can be economically grown? Say I want to grow an apple. I would like it to sprout its fruit from a small unit, like a branch, that’s hooked up to the nutrient bath. Then this small unit can be mechanically organized and sorted by the robotic farm operating system. The whole system would work in orchestration, where seedlings are germinated into saplings. Then put into a grow box, to collect its nutrients. And then put into an assembly line for it to grow, and be harvested. Then when it is ripe, it gets harvested by a robotic arm picker. All fully automated, organically grown, no pesticides or very limited usage. Then automatically washed and hermetically packaged for sale at your local grocery store. Or delivered to you by Amazon Grocery Services.

pp19dd 6y ago
If you haven't seen Bert Hubert's breakdown of the Covid vaccine source code, worth a look: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... Think he describes a reality where we know a lot today and yet still have ways to go in order to do something that intentional to an apple. His presentation on DNA computing in general (linked at bottom) goes into some depth there. What caught my eye is that a common apple has a DNA size roughly as large and complex as the human genome itself, with a disclaimer that the DNA size doesn't translate to complexity. But meanwhile, we don't even know how many genes a human being has (estimate changed in 20 years from 100k down to ~20k), but a level beneath that complexity we don't even know "how our own cells know where a gene begins" (quoted from his presentation).

brandelune 6y ago

It outproduces salad, but not potatoes, wheat, and most of all humus. Also the need for heavy machinery has a real cost in green house gas emissions (same issue as with electric cars). There are real ecological services provided by a healthy land and natural agriculture that can't be provided by such food factories. As @systemvoltage wrote, this is good for a heavily centralized system that's owned by big corporations looking for big profits but that's not a solution to the global environmental and soon to come (and it's already here for a lot of us) food/water crisis.

SirSourdough 6y ago
Surely the reduction in land used must have a significant environmental impact. For the crops in question, you are talking about the ability to have a 2-acre building surrounded by a 718 acre nature reserve to get the same results as a 720 acre monocrop. I find it hard to believe that the long-term environmental impact of installing equipment would actually outweigh preserving 99.7% of the land.
- the__alchemist 6y ago
  Good point. However: You need to account for the environmental impact of the grow lights.
- jtdev 6y ago
  Are you sure you want to trade farming of land for whatever development or use of that land may occur when/if our hypothetical 720 acre farm is retired from ag production? Their seems to be an assumption that the next owner will be a steward of these lands.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    We don't really have other uses for the vast amounts of land our food (and energy crop) production currently consumes.
    - 6y ago

yaacovtp 6y ago

Big difference in growing baby greens which are harvested early in a plants life vs growing for the fruit or seeds.

adzsroka 6y ago

This is incredible!

darig 6y ago

Wait a few years when various molds take hold and the only solution is to replace everything, when you're already in the red and operating at thin margins. Tale as old as time.

MichaelZuo 6y ago

This is really cool stuff! If the claimed numbers square up this would be a pretty big deal for the urban areas of Canada & US which have lots of medium priced/quality land too expensive for farms or cheap warehouses but too cheap/contaminated/poorly zoned/etc. for housing and offices.

Ekaros 6y ago
Vertical farms would be last thing I would allow on contaminated land... If we can't build regular buildings to standard that keep contaminations out, why would we allow another vector there?
- MichaelZuo 6y ago
  Well of course the vertical farm will be built to a clean room standard, far greater than standard construction. Or at least that seems to be the only possible way for their product to have ‘zero pesticides’.

mikedilger 6y ago

Wow, those purple suited AI-driven Robots sure do look human! Impressive.

dflock 6y ago

To everyone arguing about lettuce: lettuce is for practice. Weed & shrooms will be legal soon.

dsrees 6y ago
Then they need to stop toting this as a food solution for inner cities, food deserts, and a way to decrease miles on your food. Last I checked, weed and shrooms don't make a balanced diet
jessaustin 6y ago
Mushrooms already grow in basements with no light whatsoever.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

It doesn’t look like the produce produced by this farm (from the pictures) provides much nutritional value. Creating overpriced herbs, salads and micro greens in little plastic pots maybe commercially viable but we need vegetables like legumes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and brocolli (and in the US maize) to feed the world.

exabrial 6y ago

> all the packaging is 100% recyclable, made of recycled plastic eeek. It's my understanding right now plastic recycling... well, isn't. I wish they would eliminate the material completely.

SirSourdough 6y ago
There are package-free / fully reusable packaging grocery stores popping up. I really think its something that could become the norm with pretty little pain for people. Worth looking to see if there is one in your area to push the death of single-use plastics along.

Causality1 6y ago

The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm. This author must have a truly low opinion of me to think I'd fall for that horseshit. Before you can tell what effect the conditions have on yield you have to compare the grow area. Each vertical pane contributes to the grow area. What is the grow area of the vertical farm? It's not even in the damn article at all. What's the cost per kilogram of plant matter? Per kg of dry yield? Plenty’s farms grow non-GMO crops and don’t use herbicides or pesticides. Ah, there it is. This isn't a project to save the world; it's a project to lure investors and then lose money for ten years before getting bought out and shut down.

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emanuensis 6y ago

Growing staples is the main failing of all these vertical farms, and they are just boutique-ish without that capability. But if energy were free could we not grow staples vertically? We ARE on the cusp of that. And there is a lot of emphasis here. Virtually free energy could come now, with present technology, anywhere on earth with Geothermal... if it was just invested in. (Requires upfront costs).

dash2 6y ago

Interesting discussion here far outclasses the article itself, which looks like a thinly-disguised press release on a horribly spammy website. I wonder if there are better sources available.

hyko 6y ago

The article is a bit light on details. Where are the scientific papers on this? Until we get the details, the headline is kind of meaningless. I’m pretty sure I could produce the same amount of macronutrients as a 2 acre vertical farm in an even smaller factory if I had $400 million dollars in inputs to play with.

baron816 6y ago

Can someone explain to me why “vertical” farms need to be vertical? Why not just use greenhouses, along with all of the AI/other technologies? Where are most of the productivity gains coming from?

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
It’s actually an elegant idea. But there are some design flaws. CEA includes many ways to control environment for Ag...glasshouse, hoophouses, polyvtunnels, hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics.. Installing vertical farms at this scale is hubris. Even though it’s a good idea. This will never scale. VC logic fail. Also: no productivity gains. You heard it here first: no vertical farm is making a profit. And they never will.

efitz 6y ago

I just don’t believe these numbers. I’d like to see an independent study by a non-financially-involved university before I believe that some techies have figured out a way to boost yields more than two orders of magnitude over modern agriculture. Either there is some gimmick - a specific plant or strain or whatever - or the energy costs are 3 or more orders of magnitude over normal agriculture - or the numbers are cooked in some other way. I’d be as excited as anyone if someone could pull off a 360x or 400x yield in a useful food crop, but these guys would be trillionaires if they had actually done so.

hannob 6y ago

Here's a skeptical take on vertical farming: https://globalecoguy.org/no-vertical-farms-wont-feed-the-world-5313e3e961c0 https://globalecoguy.org/no-vertical-farms-wont-feed-the-wor... Johathan Foley is usually well informed on these topics.

kevas 6y ago

Anyone know where I can find a breakdown of a vertical farm's expenditures by category?

smusamashah 6y ago

For all things done too purely and cleanly, is there a hidden harm/cost in being too pure and clean? Do we miss out something useful which could have otherwise been a part of it in only a natural environment?

cellover 6y ago

Stop hacking my vertical scroll-farming! This inertia thing when scrolling is unbrearable.

castis 6y ago
For a website called 'intellgent living' you'd think there would be more intelligence involved. Crap website from start to finish.

ldng 6y ago

I'm really curious as to why we have not started to build stacked fields. How deep go root crops ? Could we do, say, 10 stories building and have one story every two filled with soil ? What would be the challenges ? It could be a way to do intensive yet biological agriculture.

messe 6y ago
> I'm really curious as to why we have not started to build stacked fields. How do you propose to light it? They need energy to grow, and it needs to be done in such a way that your overall cost is cheaper that sunlight (which on a bright day provides roughly 1kW per square meter in energy).
- ldng 6y ago
  I don't know, hence my questions :-) Could a good mirroring system could do the trick ? Or like it is already done in a lot a closed system ? At which density does that start to be economically viable ? But my main question really is, is it even being investigated or already considered unfeasible ?
  - messe 6y ago
    > Could a good mirroring system could do the trick ? To get the same amount of energy, the total area of the mirrors would have to be about the size of the equivalent field.
iancmceachern 6y ago
I like this. Not because it's a good idea (it may be, but IMO is not), but because its exactly the kind of high level, open ended, open minded approach that is needed. I think that a lot of folks approach this problem thinking that land, fertilizer and water are the main issues. It makes sense, they are indeed the main inputs to plants. They are not however the main costs and inputs for large scale agriculture. For large scale ag the main costs from a societal standpoint are energy, labor and waste. Land where you farm is cheap and plentiful. Same with water and fertilizer (relatively). Labor needs to be imported, along with energy and managing storage and waste, including the food/grain market fluctuations are the main challenges. These are not solved by vertical farming. These are solved by automating tractors and harvesting equipment, making the path to market from the farm more straightforward and efficient, and figuring our our labor issues and not just ignoring them or hand waving saying robots will do it.

tim333 6y ago

It's interesting this stuff works ok so if we want to grow food on Mars or some mucked up future earth we can. Though at the moment I'm happy with my plants getting out in the sun. Environment wise I think artificial meat may be the big future positive change.

herodoturtle 6y ago

That one photo in the article looks like a screenshot out of The Expanse ^_^

082349872349872 6y ago

TL;DR: out-produces by acre (and acre-foot), not by dollar. I'm pretty sure we've already known for decades that there are few non-economic limits to intensification, but it's nice to have the (practical?) example.

chadcmulligan 6y ago

Some of you may find this interesting - tomatoes from a solar furnace and uses seawater, totally sustainable and running afaik. https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-tomato-farm-opens-port-augusta-41643/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-... https://www.sundropfarms.com https://www.sundropfarms.com

ConfusedDog 6y ago

Maybe SpaceX would be interested in it for the Mars mission. This kind of agriculture/botany is really similar to one of those Expanse episodes...

aaron695 6y ago

> 2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm Can someone show me on a map where this 2+ acre building is, just so I know it's real? It would have to be epic, tall and densely packed. Lots of infrastructure around it to do 320 times normal output. To do consistently and at this 2 acres they claim to have done at scale seems unlikely. This claims SF is only 50,000 sq ft https://www.bdcnetwork.com/farming-ready-grow https://www.bdcnetwork.com/farming-ready-grow with no pictures to show they are using all the space. Just the same cut away videos and low shot images to make things look big.

valuearb 6y ago

Wow! I haven’t read such an impressive set of claims from a startup since Theranos.

AHappyCamper 6y ago

There is a LOT of fluff in this poorly written article. 70% of it is saying, "It's horrible. It's so dangerous. They're covering it up", without damn well just stating the facts. So tedious to read through.... uuurrgghh...

dr_orpheus 6y ago

The way that the article is phrased as food/area hints at where/why vertical farming could be a benefit. It seems unlikely that in the near future vertical farming will overtake traditional farming methods where land is plentiful. Indeed, the costs of the food being grown are still 5x higher. But where land/transportation costs are the most prohibitive for food this could potentially be viable.

anfilt 6y ago

All the lighting used so the plants can photosynthesize is not free... I also doubt power carbon neutral. So how much area of renewable energy sources would it take to run this farm? A traditional farm does not need powered light sources...

vkou 6y ago

I'm pretty sure this 2-acre farm will produce two to three orders of magnitude less calories than 720 acres of wheat. or rice.