20 ms·

Vertical farms grow veggies on site at restaurants and grocery stores

244 points by tolbish 6y ago

Xcelerate 6y ago
People like to criticize efforts like these, but have you tasted the produce? When I was in the Bay Area, I frequently bought the greens by Plenty, and I thought they tasted fantastic. When family came to visit, they asked where I found such a great tasting mizuna mix. I don’t know if these farms will replace traditional ones, but I think there’s at the very least a niche for optimizing produce with tons of flavor.
- aphextron 6y ago
  I think you've nailed what this is. Much like the "robot burger chain" and other such ventures, it's another niche novelty for the rich.
  - adamnemecek 6y ago
    I mean so is all new tech. Over time the price will go down and be affordable by more people.
    - monadic3 6y ago
      In this case it seems directly proportional to the cost of energy, barring a solution where you use passive ways (like mirrors) to redirect light into the building.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        The sun delivers several orders of magnitude more energy and is free...
        monadic3 6y ago
        Not inside it doesn't. This understanding is quite clear in my comment. Greenhouses can only grow so far vertically without increasing energy costs.
        monadic3 6y ago
        Also, I'm really curious what you're comparing sun to.... the sun itself?
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      Why would the price of food from a 'vertical farm' (shipping container in a parking lot) go down relative to the price food from regular farms? Even if it made sense to grow using LEDs instead of direct sunlight, that could be done on rural land instead of urban parking lots. I don't think you'll ever get enough food grown in shipping containers in urban parking lots to be anything other than a curiosity for the wealthy. These things are small by garden standards, let alone farm standards. How many people could one of these shipping containers keep fed? How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people?
      - airstrike 6y ago
        Shipping costs virtually zero
        stretchcat 6y ago
        A single truck can ship more food in one trip than one of these containers could produce in a year.
      - pydry 6y ago
        The same way any new tech goes down in price - commoditization, automation and economies of scale. It's unlikely they'll feed a million people all the food they'll need but it's likely they could feed a million people all of the leafy greens they need.
        stretchcat 6y ago
        "commoditization, automation and economies of scale." Traditional farms have the clear and overwhelming advantage in all three of these. And they aren't standing still either, they benefit from the advance of technology too.
        pydry 6y ago
        The major advantage this has is that it shrinks the supply chain. Transporting fresh leafy greens is a bit of a nightmare because they go bad so quickly. I don't expect these things to compete with a farm growing potatoes for a long while or even anything which keeps well enough in a fridge.
  - ameister14 6y ago
    Yes, you nailed it - White Castle is a niche novelty for the rich.
    - neartheplain 6y ago
      Whoah, I hadn't heard of White Castle's kitchen-bot. Pretty cool. Initial trials went well, now they're rolling it out to 10 more locations: https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flippy-robot-cooks-2020-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flipp...
      - stretchcat 6y ago
        Factory produced white castle burgers have been in supermarket freezers for years (and aren't much worse than the 'fresh' ones, which are themselves firmly in the realm of junk food.) Machines making food is nothing new, but it seems a lot of people are keen on 'inventing' it. Remember the pizza company that wanted to use robots to make delivery pizzas? And the results were worse than frozen Red Baron pizzas that have been around since the 70s.
        ameister14 6y ago
        There's a pretty significant difference between robot made to order and robot made to freeze. As you said, the latter has been around for a long time. That doesn't make the former any less of an achievement. This is robotics directly replacing employees in store.
        stretchcat 6y ago
        There really isn't much difference, the quality of a frozen white castle burger is about the same as fresh made by humans, and I doubt fresh made by robots would be much better. All three are going to be pretty crap. The robot pizza company in particular was a joke. Viewed with a critical eye, the whole thing was technophiles blinded to obvious reality by their love for high tech gadgetry. Why else would you use a sophisticated robotic arm to transfer a pizza from one machine to another when a simple conveyor belt can do the job faster and need less space to do it? White Castle is doubtlessly being smarter about it, but I'm pretty sure you could replace their restaurant employees with a microwave oven. BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'. If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense, but if you were to design an automatic kitchen from the ground up, I think it makes little sense.
  - mediaman 6y ago
    In California, yes, because they are grown naturally there, and growing in a vertical farm seems kind of pointless, except as novelty. But on the East Coast, vertical farms can serve a useful economic purpose for some crops which would otherwise be trucked in from the Salinas Valley.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      The transportation costs of produce have been demonstrated to be negligible. Imported produce is typically aggressively price-competitive with the local stuff.
      - alpha_squared 6y ago
        Could that be because we don't yet have a carbon offset cost for transportation? I recognize that the actual cost would be controversial and mostly subjective, but I always wonder about how many things are 'free' or nearly just because there are otherwise hidden costs elsewhere (such as the environment).
        busterarm 6y ago
        This math has already been done. Even if you figured the carbon offset cost, transporting agriculture still beats out all of these alternatives by a lot. The math is only becomes slightly favorable to the subset of plants with high water content and lower sunlight tolerance. You can grow tomatos at nearly break-even. A diverse set of agriculture that can sustain people with balanced diets? Not a chance.
      - epistasis 6y ago
        That trucking process means getting produce optimized for transport, rather than produce optimized for flavor. The costs are not only in dollars, but in quality.
        busterarm 6y ago
        You're telling me that produce grown in its optimal environmental conditions and flash-frozen at harvest is going to taste worse than something grown in a truck in a parkinglot in Brooklyn? I call bullshit. It's pretty much universally agreed that frozen fruit is fresher and often tastes better, for example. Flavor is more about varieties being selected for mass production rather than their growing method and transportation. You can transport heirloom tomatoes. Nothing stopping you.
  - baxtr 6y ago
    Didn't literally anything common nowadays start out exactly like this?
  - blackearl 6y ago
    Most of the examples in the articles are grocery stores. The one restaurant mentioned looks like a burger joint, an upscale one, but a burger joint nonetheless. The gap between a whole foods vs a stop n shop is not that large, certainly nothing like the gap between a mcdonalds and a black tie restaurant. If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    The thing is, burgers are the same everywhere. Minimal wage isn't. So once there's a robot that can cook burger in SF and break even, it works pretty much everywhere else where the minimum wage is greater or equal. Just take a look at Miso robotics.
    - wavefunction 6y ago
      I find myself patronizing the fast-food locations that offer food prepared from fresh potatoes sliced every morning and grass-fed beef that apparently pay their workers a decent wage while costing about the same as the places that don't. The difference I suppose is that the local chains are not satisfying profit motives of stock speculators.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Once the robot exists you can duplicate it cheaper. Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. It may eventually not work out in poorer countries.
      - OldHand2018 6y ago
        > Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. Can it? The robot in SF may make financial sense because of high utilization. A low-wage worker can do 100+ useful tasks when the restaurant is not busy enough to require constant burger making. Is a burger-making robot flexible enough to match that?
        bluGill 6y ago
        The robot can also sit around doing nothing without complaint and for no extra cost. So the robot need not be used 100% of the time. Even in SF the robot will not be used much at 2am. Though I was referring to the small cities in Montana. Nobody will put a robotic burger joint where there are no people. However a town of 5000 has a lot of people who need to eat, more than enough to make it worth running numbers.
        908B64B197 6y ago
  - wernercd 6y ago
    What's available to the rich today becomes available to all tomorrow. Cars, TVs, Cell phones...
- jariel 6y ago
  It's definitely 'real lettuce' this is not a 'lettuce substitute' so I'm doubtful that the skepticism is around 'taste', and I seriously doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference by tasting anyhow. I think the 'doubt' is around economics, and possibly the nutritional value. I can see a lot of people putting these things in their basements. I mean, we call could just put actual gardens in our backyards, but that might not be 'trendy' enough ...
  - ksdale 6y ago
    A great many people cannot, in fact, put actual gardens in their backyards, due to space, or weather, or animals or insects, or lack of sunlight.
  - ramphastidae 6y ago
    It’s about practicality, not trendiness. I don’t have a backyard or basement. Even if I did have a backyard, the climate is such that sunlight or predictable weather is not guaranteed. Even if it was, there is no guarantee of safety from wild animals, pests, and soil contamination. The list goes on ...
    - jariel 6y ago
      'Practical' would to buy it from a 'farmer'. The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech' - or - a very long term vision and investment towards making something like actually practical at some scale, which may or may not ever happen.
      - bsder 6y ago
        > 'Practical' would to buy it from a 'farmer'. And if the nearest one is 400 miles away? Then my produce is STILL optimized for transport and storage over taste and freshness. > The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech' I agree. It annoys me when they tout this as "volume" or "scale". However, you can't get VC funding unless you promise that so that's the price of your marketing. Shrug. Nevertheless, I do hope one of these catches on somehow. Several of my favorite restaurants had their own gardens. However, they are limited by the weather and season to certain crops. If someone can slap a steel container down and use these technologies to grow out of area/out of season vegetables and fruits I'm all for it. It would also have the side benefit of breaking up some of the gigantic monocultures we currently have in agriculture.
- deedub 6y ago
  Maybe a little different compared to the Bay area, but I live outside Jackson, Wyoming. It's currently about 16F outside and there is 12" of snow on the ground. We have access to fresh locally grown tomatoes, lettuce, and other things like that year round. https://verticalharvestfarms.com/ https://verticalharvestfarms.com/ Just as you mention, it is high quality and tastes great! Also, it isn't trucked in from Salinas Valley CA which is 1,000 miles away.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    https://extension.umn.edu/growing-systems/deep-winter-greenhouses https://extension.umn.edu/growing-systems/deep-winter-greenh...
  - chris_va 6y ago
    Of course, grow-lights in Wyoming will be mostly coal powered, whereas a field in Salinas is renewable energy. Assuming I am doing the math right, shipping 1 ton of food 1000 miles (refrigerated) is roughly ~30-40kg of CO2, or about 7g-CO2 per tomato (6oz tomato). A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic, 40W/sqft), so about 20Wh/g, or about 1.4kg-CO2 per tomato for coal. Maybe more like 1kg-CO2 for the mix in Wyoming. ... depends on what you are trying to optimize, I guess, and how much natural light you can harvest in the vertical greenhouse.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      For what it is worth, a tomato truck carries 50,000lbs of tomatoes from the field to a processor. Supply chains are complex, but refrigerated semis can carry a similar load of processed vegetables.
      - cryptoquick 6y ago
        Do refrigerated semis use more fuel? And if so, by what factor more?
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
- scsilver 6y ago
  Just watched an interview with someone from Appharvest, a vertical farm company. One of the most interesting advantages of these grow operations is that they can develop seeds for taste and nutrients, rather than for transport or pest resistance. The billions in research that have gone into developing resistant and durable produce can be channeled into developing the best tasting and looking products. As we see a hugely growing demand for quality in food options by the middle and upper classes, the product offering the best taste will have a large leg up on the cheap mass produced produce. This demand is not limited to individual consumers, restaurants and chefs, who already seek quality ingredients by sourcing from local trusted growers, will likely put additional demand on these low/no pesticide, and taste optimized produce. I cant wait to taste the best tomatoes of my life. Im lucky enough to have traveled to places like Bali and Italy, where the local produce is unconstrained by bean counting hyper optimization. It tastes better and quality of life is better because of it.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Not breeding for transport could be big. But it's not entirely new at all, certain cooking herbs like basil are often entering the kitchen alive in the pot they are grown in or even cultivated right there on the window sill. A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > Not breeding for transport could be big. But it's not entirely new at all, certain cooking herbs like basil are often entering the kitchen alive in the pot they are grown in or even cultivated right there on the window sill. What actual experience do you have with such models? This is actually incredibly rare, specifically growing on-site, especially now as COVID has ravaged the culinary Industry irreparably in the US. I've been a cook, ran kitchens (with in an emphasis in farm to table and agro-tourism), and did/do supply chain and have a focus on food-tech. I can tell you that anything closely resembling the model you described was very short lived at Michelin Star restaurants in the E. Coast, or a few with actual farms in addition to their brick an mortar operation: think French Laundry in NorCal or Blue Hill in NY. This is actually a very good model for all involved, that may not have had much viability ~10 years ago when I first got really involved, but with COVID making people aware of how weak the food supply chain is this may do well. People are dining out less and lower overall food costs are likely to make this viable, despite not being all encompassing upon deployment. I really hope last year's shortages were a wake up call, and want to see more of this take off. This entire system is in dire need of repair, now that the disruption has taken its toll. > A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages. Could be, but you have to understand most of the Industry, specifically the affluent ones that would even try this in CA or NY let alone middle America that operates on the thinnest of margins, are beyond life support. These places are not coming back. What you suggest is interesting, and I had a similar idea before which could help curb some of the baked in pershibaility in the food supply but this will just translate to longer times for ROI which as I said is already stretched super thin due to high overhead and operational costs and think margins. But, its definitely worth exploring if the travel times are less than 30 mins and would have to be limited in scope: greens, herbs and other fast-growing crops. Proper fruit trees, grains etc... are out of the question. My model was simple: ship in starter plants to unused land in cities that incorporate Ag into the Education system and have them participate in wide scale farm and smaller scale green house operations (this already exists in Denver) and have them supply the restaurants. What ever they don't sell they could help feed the community. Help create secondary and tertiary business models with local entrepreneurs and philanthropists--I thought of someone like Chamath would be super interested to be honest. I actually wanted to pitch this to my former boss, Kimbal Musk, as an adjunct of an already existing model with Big Green and Squared Roots learning gardens and the container garden models respectively. I had devised a whole system with to-do things after I came back from a stint at SpaceX after having worked at his Flagship in Boulder. Unfortunately, COVID ruined that, but the plan makes sense none the less and I would gladly make efforts to volunteer even though I'm retired from both Ag and Culinary now.
- dr_orpheus 6y ago
  Taste aside, what was the cost of produce? Other articles I have seen that actually included price [1] showed that the vertical farming produce was 3x the price of what you could get at Whole Foods. And that is for organic presumably high quality produce. Cost compared to Walmart was something like 10x as much. https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr...
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855745 : I posted this yesterday. It’s from 2019 but still very enlightening.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I'm not exactly critical of vertical farming, but I've noticed that the stories always seem to gloss over what works well and what doesn't. Plenty™, for example, does arugula and kale, but their stories say "veggies" in a way that leads you to believe it's working for a much broader set of "veggies". Verticalfield, featured in this story, has pictures of tomatoes, and mentions mushrooms and strawberries. But on their website, the FAQ says ""Vertical Field can grow up to 200 varieties of crops, such as leafy greens, herbs, and lettuces". Again, arugula, kale, some herbs, etc.
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    Vertical farming seems to be good for crops that are mostly water and not very useful for cereals (or anything else with much caloric content). So there's a profit to be made for urban luxury vegetables, and that's about it.
    - cwkoss 6y ago
      I think leafy greens tend to work best in vertical farming, but wouldn't call them 'luxury vegetables'. Most diets should include some leafy greens for the non-caloric-nutrients and fiber.
      - iancmceachern 6y ago
        I agree in concept. In practice, here in SF a pack of plenty vertically farmed lettuce is $5 and a head of lettuce from the Safeway down the street is $1. On a budget there is really only one option.
        tremon 6y ago
        End-user price may not be an accurate reflection of production cost. Do both receive the same amount of subsidies, for example?
    - iancmceachern 6y ago
      This.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  I'm interested in seeing if there are benefits to nutrient-dense and microbiome-boosting vegetables from these types of grow operations. So much has been sacrificed upon the goal of transport-sturdy vegetables, I have to wonder if taste was not the only factor we lost over the decades.
- Jkvngt 6y ago
  I've often tasted greens grown in these types of situations and they're never as good as the ones which come out of the soil.
- russdill 6y ago
  I realize a ton of the taste of food comes from context, which really does matter and can lead to more enjoyable food, but I'd still like to see a blind taste test in such a situation.
  - Dma54rhs 6y ago
    Sounds like a reasonable test to do, but we do know very well we prefer crops developed for transportation over long distances which means not too soft. Not soft and good taste for whatever reason are related.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  Fully agree! Locally here in Cincinnati there is a company called 80 Acres farms doing indoor vertical farming. Their greens are by far the most incredible I've ever tasted!
- iancmceachern 6y ago
  We agree, we love their lettuce and greens!!
- razster 6y ago
  Imagine farm land with these modules placed end to end. Running off solar and abled to produce year round in all weather conditions. Once batteries are perfected.
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    Is a there containerised module on the market yet? It seems a good fit.
- melomal 6y ago
  I set up a garage hydroponics 'farm' (produced about 3-5kg of microgreens) with the intention of going to local restaurants. Honestly, the flavour is out of this world and that's pretty much with everything you grow too with hydro/aeroponics. From first hand experience though, the electricity is a huge cost plus being in Poland right now, my labour costs would have swallowed up any profits. These won't replace traditional farms BUT a farm growing fields of lettuce could and should be replaced for other variants of root vegetables etc. Lettuce, leafy greens and herbs IMO should be grown in vertical farms as it's low effort and really it's all about getting maximum taste into each leaf. Lettuce doesn't really provide that much in terms of nutritional benefits, especially when it's been transported for hundreds/thousands of miles so local or as close to the end user it vital.
Chris2048 6y ago
So, the plants are grown purely on LED light? What's the electricity cost per kg produce?
- criley2 6y ago
  Here's an interesting angle: What's the energy/kg to produce on site versus the energy/kg to grow a thousand miles away, transport and store, transport and store, transport to final destination?
  - busterarm 6y ago
    You also have to add to the on-site the cost of not using that space for something else.
    - tonyhb 6y ago
      In that case, lets add the environmental and biodiversity costs of farmland.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        Not at all. The farmland is highly unlikely to be used for any other purpose. We're trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, not moral judgments.
        TT3351 6y ago
        Removing native flora and fauna and replacing it with domesticated varieties has a clear impact on the environment
        busterarm 6y ago
        What was the environmental impact of replacing whatever was in these urban environements with concrete, steel and asphalt? Literally just looking at the economics here, I'll say again.
jimnotgym 6y ago
> Controlled-environment agriculture systems such as hydroponics operations can be much more efficient, More efficient than flying it in maybe, but not more efficient than growing it in the garden using sunlight
- kevinmgranger 6y ago
  I hate unqualified "efficient". They really ought to say in terms of what. Hydroponic vertical growing is more water and ground-space efficient though, isn't it?
  - mcescalante 6y ago
    Agreed, wish they qualified "efficient". Another example may be that hydroponic growing is typically faster than in soil, for example leafy lettuce such as bibb can be ready nearly twice as fast when grown with hydroponics.
- busterarm 6y ago
  I always love seeing these examples where peoples' hopes and dreams easily overcome their ability to perform basic math. There is simply no beating the energy output of the sun for agriculture purposes. These systems are certainly worth study, but as a commercial operation it's basically snake oil.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Certainly for commodities at scale, no beating the agricultural infrastructure. But for a premium produce for a premium product, it can pay. You may not even be able to get from a grocery store, what you can grow for your own needs.
    - AlanSE 6y ago
      Companies are already selling LED growing units for inside the home for food (like aero-garden). The interest is there, what's missing is for it to make significant inroads into the grocery/restaurant food chain.
srockets 6y ago
A model of farming is capturing the sun's energy in the grown produce. This is why farming takes so much land: to get more of the sun. Growing in warehouses or vertically forces you to substitute the sun with artificial lights: even if those are powered by the sun, there's a huge loss of energy in the system, hence increased cost.
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  Are you sure? Growing produce remotely has additional inherent costs that don't exist in vertical farms, such as wasted water, the need for very heavy machinery, the issue of transporting and transporting within certain timeframes. The last 2 problems include the cost of oil/gasoline, and the maintenance of a whole array of systems, from oil extraction pipelines to road maintenance. This, to me, sounds like vertical farms in the grand scheme could be more efficient.
  - gtvwill 6y ago
    Go set up a artificial growth environment and try run it for a cycle longer than a month. It takes huge amounts of resources to maintain that environment. And no it's not chemical free. Also yes water is used and wasted. If you ain't doing bulk washing your applying huge amounts of product to keep algae blooms out of your systems. Try run that environment for a year. I give it 2-3 month before your first insect/pest bloom. Less if your unlucky. An I'd be blown away if you fix your first pest bloom the first try. Vertical farms are sick on paper...that ignores masses of requirements to actually get the task done.
    - cevn 6y ago
      Very true. I have an aerogarden setup and best way to use it is to swap the plants into real ground and do a fresh clean after they've grown for a few months, otherwise gnats / fungus will take over. It also seems to require much more water than watering the plants in ground, I assume because they are getting maximum rate from roots and almost infinitely growing them .
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
These article talk about 'veggies' - but nearly all these vertical farms seem to be growing fairly low calorie/nutrient rich vegetables: leafy greens, herbs and some fruits etc. There's no root vegetables, grains which make up the cornerstone of our diets.
- samstave 6y ago
  how can i architect my own vertical garden that "covers the ground" of the diet I am used to?
  - vkou 6y ago
    Step one is to quit your day job. Step two is to put in ~12 hours a day, 7 days a week of work into homesteading. Step three is to dip on your savings to buy farming equipment, consumable inputs, and groceries for the remaining half of your food that you won't be able to grow yourself. If you'd like to try before you buy, my parents' homestead up in Canada could always use another pair of hands. Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. You'll have to share the room with ~15-30 baby chicks, though. You'll quickly get used to the smell. I understand that this won't give you a vertical garden, but unlike a vertical garden, it will go most of the way to meeting your daily caloric and nutritional needs.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      > Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. Even if he wanted to work for free, unless he's in Olympic-athlete shape and mentally tough, it's still a raw deal for the farm if they can get migrant workers instead. Most Americans who've been here more than one generation don't make it to their first lunchtime. There's a total disconnect in our society about what people eat and where it came from. Hence the monthly "vertical farming" article about growing kale.
  - cstejerean 6y ago
    I grew up having to grow pretty much everything we ate (by necessity as you couldn’t buy anything in stores). And whatever we didn’t grow ourselves we helped relatives or neighbors with and shared in harvest. I personally don’t understand the appeal of going back to that. I’m so glad I can just buy whatever I want at the grocery store these days and don’t need to spend all my free time on harvesting calories.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
This is where e-farming can own its niche. Cut out all the agricultural overhead, grow what you need on demand at the site of the demand, perhaps at a premium quality for a premium product. You can't get more 'local' than that!
- gtvwill 6y ago
  Yeah your premium product in a greenhouse is missing the thing that makes veggies premium...which is terroir. Trust me you can grow great food, it'll just have the same terroir/character as anybody else on the same nute regime as you. Premium comes from the ground and it's also cheaper and easier to produce.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Premium can come from the variety. Most varieties are not available at any price - just the commodities? And suppose we find the nute program that makes them taste good. Then its a good thing they taste the same as everybody else - they taste good! That's the goal, not just some exclusive hipster cachet.
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  You can't really grow "on demand", since it takes at bare minimum 3 weeks (for lettuce) from seed to harvest.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    That's close enough. Fresh local lettuce in winter in most northern climates becomes possible, if you can predict demand a score of days into the future.
hahla 6y ago
Has anyone looked into the viability of something like this from the restaurants perspective (costs aside)? I would image a busy restaurant would need more than 90kg/200lbs of produce each month?
- waiseristy 6y ago
  A busy restaurant could consume 200lbs of produce in a day!
- offby37years 6y ago
  You'd need an entire farm.
AlanSE 6y ago
I'm very excited about this. This isn't going to replace farms anytime soon, but there's a pretty solid economic niche for it within the food choices that customer preference justifies today. The best argument for this method of food production is by looking at criticism of existing food production. https://www.consumerreports.org/pesticides-in-food/stop-eating-pesticides/ https://www.consumerreports.org/pesticides-in-food/stop-eati... Reading stuff like this is truly, deeply, depressing. In our modern lives, we are supposed to eat lots of vegetables (which we don't), but we're also supposed be picky about which ones we get. Just the thought of that is exhausting. Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer. Vertical farms offer consumers several things which are almost impossible to come by otherwise. This is extraordinarily good to have for market entry. Higher energy use is a strike, but you have to consider the whole picture. I definitely think there's a place for this, the benefits that offset higher energy intensity are very substantive.
- stretchcat 6y ago
  > Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer. Spoiler: field workers who don't get bathroom breaks. I think a lot of people don't understand that farming is messy work. After highschool I worked at a bean processing plant where my job was to pick dead small animals (usually rodents, snakes, and frogs) out of the beans as they sped by on a conveyor belt. The machines needed to harvest the massive quantities of food our civilization requires do not discriminate between beans and the animals living in bean fields. But here is the thing; almost nobody gets sick from this. Wash your produce. Raccoons do it, and so should you. If you do, you'll almost certainly be fine just like nearly everybody else. It's gross, but it's not really a problem.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Salmonella is different. It can get into the plant. Stomata can absorb pathogens. Likely contaminated irrigation water.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
There are so many greens to grow other than letttce. Vertical farms are only good for greens and soft herbs. And it’s possible to pack it with nutrient dense herbs.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Local food that cuts transport end storage costs is the future. Vertical farms will replace most of what we grow in large fields. Almost all of large factory sized farms ..at least in Ca..goes to feed the rest of the country. As hydroponics and roof top gardens and vertical farms and warehouse farms and shipping container farms become the norm in places where they have winter and have now hacked it with no need for California produce...California itself have to rethink its Ag policies. And work towards growing our own and sustainably. And locally. Automating and mechanizing a lot of it because Ag labour is going to dry up soon. Not to mention water.
KaiserPro 6y ago
Thats just lettiuice and similar leafy based products. If you want a whole meal then you'll need to do what de kas did in holland: https://restaurantdekas.com/ https://restaurantdekas.com/ And its totally tasty.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
I once tried to convince the folks at store no:8 ...Walmart’s incubator and start up division to do this for all their stores. I crunched the numbers and Walmart is the ONLY one that can pull it off profitably. Amazon warehouses are far behind, but it’s possible. At Walmart store no:8, they engaged me for 3-4 emails and then ghosted me entirely. But even if someone there were to reconsider my proposal and take it off on their own, I think it still holds promise. Anyone can grow locally and minimize their foot print. Only Walmart can generate profits. I said it two something years ago and I still stand behind my analysis even though in the time in between Amazon has expanded, bought Whole Foods and now have warehouses. Amazon will get there someday..but if I were a betting person, I’d bet on Walmart. Despite the scorn they invite, they have the best supply chain experts and logistics solutions.
bserge 6y ago
The advances in LED lighting over the past 10 years is nothing short of amazing. Used to be you needed heavy, big and hot multi-killowat HPS lamp installations for the best indoor farming, but not anymore! I set up a small experimental indoors farm myself, and I used cheap LED lamps you can get anywhere, three different temperatures, interspersed on a custom frame above the plants. I realized I know nothing about soil, because it turns out there's more to it than just dumping it in a pot. Soil composition and density are really important, moreso than the pH (that a lot of people focus on) in my experience. I would've definitely fucked up with a hydroponic setup that I first considered. Soil is much better and we really don't appreciate it as much as we should. It's literally the source of life. These plants needed more root aeration, the first batch was terribly small, but still pretty good. Second batch was much better thanks to a custom soil/pebbles setup (soil in the center, pebbles around the fabric pot), then I realized the lumen output needed to be much higher for perfect results. I wanted to try some COB LEDs, which output more lumen, but I could not find any (and importing would take too long and cost way too much), plus I really wanted to see what simple SMD LEDs could do. So I trashed the whole thing in favor of custom Tipi style tents for individual plants with the LED lamps spread all around and above. Not the most efficient use of space, but it turned out to be the best for growth. ~2 months from seed to harvest, electricity cost was laughably low (~$20 total per plant) and heat generation was practically non-existent. I also had plants outdoors, tbh the sun-grown tomatoes tasted better, but the other greens were just as good grown indoors. Still not sure if LED production is environmentally friendly or sustainable, but it sure is revolutionary.
- RotANobot 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experiment. I’m curious about soil composition and density as you pointed out its importance. I definitely feel like my lack of success is mainly with my soil. Do you have any resources to share about it?
  - bserge 6y ago
    I've read some stuff online, but everyone's using soil from shops it seems. I picked it from a farm nearby, crushed it as fine as I could, mixed it with my own compost (various vegetables and leaves), after a while outdoors all of it just gets processed by bacteria, it quite literally disappears, all of it becomes soil. When putting it in the fabric pots (really good stuff, forget anything else) I mixed it with a small amount of pebbles and twigs to prevent it from compacting (which severely impacts growth, as roots can't push through it); I had nothing else and that seemed to do the trick. But the thing is I used a makeshift metal cylinder to fill the pot with soil in the center and a layer of pebbles all around and at the bottom. The idea was that the plant would grow and get nutrients from the soil, then as the roots grow out into the pebbles they'd get more oxygen and water. It's actually sort of a soil/hydroponic hybrid setup if I think about it. Seems to have worked great. I also used simple NPK fertilizer, the plants react if you use too much (leaves turn yellower, tips start burning), so you know when to stop. There's a lot of information out there, but honestly I learned more with hands-on experience than from reading dozens of articles and forum threads. I thought it would be rather simple, but it's definitely not just "plant it and forget it". I appreciate plant life more now, it's quite fascinating when you get into it haha.
kakoni 6y ago
So container size farms. Is there something smaller in this vertical farming space, household scale?
nipponese 6y ago
No mention of power consumption...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  They're using LED right? Shouldn't be that bad
gt565k 6y ago
Are there any startups that offer containers like that which allow people to drop it in their backyard and do some uban farming for themselves? I've been interested in permaculture and hope to start gardening once I get a house.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Glad there are a lot of people questioning the economic fundamentals of this stuff. The real problem is the agricultural policy which is doubling down unhealthy things. These technical gimmicks which are dubious as to whether they deliver real value to not help with that.
jonplackett 6y ago
Anyone know what the nutrient content is compared to 'grown in the ground'? I know veg used to have a lot more before industrial farming.
gnicholas 6y ago
I'm interested in this sort of thing because I recently saw a Prop 65 warning on organic spinach purchased from Whole Foods. Apparently there are high levels of cadmium in soil that gets picked up by spinach. [1] I have no idea how bad cadmium is, or how much of it is in spinach. But it's a real bummer to learn that a food that I thought of as very, very healthy (organic spinach) has a downside like this. Growing it in containers would be one way to get around soil issues like these, which are unfortunately becoming more common (see arsenic in rice). 1: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/proposition-65-notices-of-the-month-99216/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/proposition-65-notices-of-...
- grillvogel 6y ago
  do people actually take prop 65 warnings seriously?
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    I don’t worry too much about most items, but foods that I eat a lot of (I often eat 2-3 bags of frozen spinach a week) are more concerning.
  - kosievdmerwe 6y ago
    Yeah the problem with me for prop 65 things: "Is the level detected actually harmful?" and "Is where it's detected actually likely to lead to me being exposed?" I suspect for most things the answer is no.
oneplane 6y ago
Why is this title using the parent-to-kids term 'veggies', is vegetables outdated or something?
- HeckFeck 6y ago
  It's actually a paid endorsement from VeggieTales.
jennerGg 6y ago
It's coming home! www.greenloop.io
max_ 6y ago
What are some of the great books & resources one might want to have if the want to get into Hydroponics?
miohtama 6y ago
Any hope we could grow staples like potato and rice vertically some day?
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Seems like vining fruits would do well this way? Raspberries, grapes, kiwi, tomatoes, ... What would it do to the capital expense vs. productivity to use solar + battery storage for 24 hour growing? Or do plants need a 'rest' and a night? Maybe solar on the roof and a basement farm to minimize heating? I love the idea and had not considered the aspect of breeding seeds for taste & nutrients (thx scsilver). Or the fact that they can provide year-round fresh fruits. Though don't underestimate the cost of maintaining the temperature in the Rockies in the winter (per deedub)...
sharpercoder 6y ago
I live next to the biggest greenhouse area in the world. Since the pandemic in March last year, I exclusively eat lunches of about 600grams with around 20 types of veggies. It feels amazing after doing so, I never have an after-lunch dip any more. Some performance sports I do got 5-10% directly measurable improvements (cycling and bouldering) after switching to these lunches. Not completely sure it is the cause, but all signs direct to it. I simply cut these veggies in small and balance the salad out on sweet, sour, salty and calories. After a few months of doing this I started to crave these salads. Most of the veggies come from the greenhouse area, but not all. You can tell most of them, since they are quite clean already and do not have any dirt/soil on it. Taste of these veggies is mostly different, not necessarily bad, although I would not describe it typically as being richer in taste. Redish is less sharp, carrots are much more crispy and less fibery, letuces are much fresher (they come with clod, so dont degrade a bit, even after two weeks in the refrigerator), tomatos are more watery but also much, much more varied (small, ultra sweet super juicy ones; bigger fleshy with delicious sour pits; characterfull flavory ones; many more), chickory which is sweeter, bell pepper which are more varied and edible as fruits, sweeter, juicier, cucumbers as small, medium and large where the small ones are really tender, many herbs such as mint, coriander, sellery, rosemary, parsley come as plants which I consume over about two weeks.
deleted 6y ago
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erichocean 6y ago
We have this at home, salads are amazing.
pencilcode 6y ago
Since it’s missing all the nutrients in the soil and only has those purposefully put in, in the long run I suspect it will be optimized for profit and we’ll get very poor food as a baseline, worse than the one grown in soil on average.
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  Greenhouses have been doing this for decennia. All necessary nutrients are there. A large portion of the produce is optimised for bulk. A smaller portion of the produce is optimised for taste. You get what you pay for.
areactnativedev 6y ago
I don't see anything about temperature regulation, wouldn't that be a big energy consuming part? Especially if I picture a container out under the roasting sun or in biting cold.
HeckFeck 6y ago
This reminds me of the off-world greenhouses that grew vegetables in The Expanse. Science fiction and science fact compliment each other again.

244 points by tolbish 6y ago

People like to criticize efforts like these, but have you tasted the produce? When I was in the Bay Area, I frequently bought the greens by Plenty, and I thought they tasted fantastic. When family came to visit, they asked where I found such a great tasting mizuna mix. I don’t know if these farms will replace traditional ones, but I think there’s at the very least a niche for optimizing produce with tons of flavor.

aphextron 6y ago
I think you've nailed what this is. Much like the "robot burger chain" and other such ventures, it's another niche novelty for the rich.
- adamnemecek 6y ago
  I mean so is all new tech. Over time the price will go down and be affordable by more people.
  - monadic3 6y ago
    In this case it seems directly proportional to the cost of energy, barring a solution where you use passive ways (like mirrors) to redirect light into the building.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      The sun delivers several orders of magnitude more energy and is free...
      - monadic3 6y ago
        Not inside it doesn't. This understanding is quite clear in my comment. Greenhouses can only grow so far vertically without increasing energy costs.
      - monadic3 6y ago
        Also, I'm really curious what you're comparing sun to.... the sun itself?
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    Why would the price of food from a 'vertical farm' (shipping container in a parking lot) go down relative to the price food from regular farms? Even if it made sense to grow using LEDs instead of direct sunlight, that could be done on rural land instead of urban parking lots. I don't think you'll ever get enough food grown in shipping containers in urban parking lots to be anything other than a curiosity for the wealthy. These things are small by garden standards, let alone farm standards. How many people could one of these shipping containers keep fed? How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people?
    - airstrike 6y ago
      Shipping costs virtually zero
      - stretchcat 6y ago
        A single truck can ship more food in one trip than one of these containers could produce in a year.
    - pydry 6y ago
      The same way any new tech goes down in price - commoditization, automation and economies of scale. It's unlikely they'll feed a million people all the food they'll need but it's likely they could feed a million people all of the leafy greens they need.
      - stretchcat 6y ago
        "commoditization, automation and economies of scale." Traditional farms have the clear and overwhelming advantage in all three of these. And they aren't standing still either, they benefit from the advance of technology too.
        pydry 6y ago
        The major advantage this has is that it shrinks the supply chain. Transporting fresh leafy greens is a bit of a nightmare because they go bad so quickly. I don't expect these things to compete with a farm growing potatoes for a long while or even anything which keeps well enough in a fridge.
- ameister14 6y ago
  Yes, you nailed it - White Castle is a niche novelty for the rich.
  - neartheplain 6y ago
    Whoah, I hadn't heard of White Castle's kitchen-bot. Pretty cool. Initial trials went well, now they're rolling it out to 10 more locations: https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flippy-robot-cooks-2020-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flipp...
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      Factory produced white castle burgers have been in supermarket freezers for years (and aren't much worse than the 'fresh' ones, which are themselves firmly in the realm of junk food.) Machines making food is nothing new, but it seems a lot of people are keen on 'inventing' it. Remember the pizza company that wanted to use robots to make delivery pizzas? And the results were worse than frozen Red Baron pizzas that have been around since the 70s.
      - ameister14 6y ago
        There's a pretty significant difference between robot made to order and robot made to freeze. As you said, the latter has been around for a long time. That doesn't make the former any less of an achievement. This is robotics directly replacing employees in store.
        stretchcat 6y ago
        There really isn't much difference, the quality of a frozen white castle burger is about the same as fresh made by humans, and I doubt fresh made by robots would be much better. All three are going to be pretty crap. The robot pizza company in particular was a joke. Viewed with a critical eye, the whole thing was technophiles blinded to obvious reality by their love for high tech gadgetry. Why else would you use a sophisticated robotic arm to transfer a pizza from one machine to another when a simple conveyor belt can do the job faster and need less space to do it? White Castle is doubtlessly being smarter about it, but I'm pretty sure you could replace their restaurant employees with a microwave oven. BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'. If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense, but if you were to design an automatic kitchen from the ground up, I think it makes little sense.
- mediaman 6y ago
  In California, yes, because they are grown naturally there, and growing in a vertical farm seems kind of pointless, except as novelty. But on the East Coast, vertical farms can serve a useful economic purpose for some crops which would otherwise be trucked in from the Salinas Valley.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    The transportation costs of produce have been demonstrated to be negligible. Imported produce is typically aggressively price-competitive with the local stuff.
    - alpha_squared 6y ago
      Could that be because we don't yet have a carbon offset cost for transportation? I recognize that the actual cost would be controversial and mostly subjective, but I always wonder about how many things are 'free' or nearly just because there are otherwise hidden costs elsewhere (such as the environment).
      - busterarm 6y ago
        This math has already been done. Even if you figured the carbon offset cost, transporting agriculture still beats out all of these alternatives by a lot. The math is only becomes slightly favorable to the subset of plants with high water content and lower sunlight tolerance. You can grow tomatos at nearly break-even. A diverse set of agriculture that can sustain people with balanced diets? Not a chance.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      That trucking process means getting produce optimized for transport, rather than produce optimized for flavor. The costs are not only in dollars, but in quality.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        You're telling me that produce grown in its optimal environmental conditions and flash-frozen at harvest is going to taste worse than something grown in a truck in a parkinglot in Brooklyn? I call bullshit. It's pretty much universally agreed that frozen fruit is fresher and often tastes better, for example. Flavor is more about varieties being selected for mass production rather than their growing method and transportation. You can transport heirloom tomatoes. Nothing stopping you.
- baxtr 6y ago
  Didn't literally anything common nowadays start out exactly like this?
- blackearl 6y ago
  Most of the examples in the articles are grocery stores. The one restaurant mentioned looks like a burger joint, an upscale one, but a burger joint nonetheless. The gap between a whole foods vs a stop n shop is not that large, certainly nothing like the gap between a mcdonalds and a black tie restaurant. If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  The thing is, burgers are the same everywhere. Minimal wage isn't. So once there's a robot that can cook burger in SF and break even, it works pretty much everywhere else where the minimum wage is greater or equal. Just take a look at Miso robotics.
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    I find myself patronizing the fast-food locations that offer food prepared from fresh potatoes sliced every morning and grass-fed beef that apparently pay their workers a decent wage while costing about the same as the places that don't. The difference I suppose is that the local chains are not satisfying profit motives of stock speculators.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Once the robot exists you can duplicate it cheaper. Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. It may eventually not work out in poorer countries.
    - OldHand2018 6y ago
      > Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. Can it? The robot in SF may make financial sense because of high utilization. A low-wage worker can do 100+ useful tasks when the restaurant is not busy enough to require constant burger making. Is a burger-making robot flexible enough to match that?
      - bluGill 6y ago
        The robot can also sit around doing nothing without complaint and for no extra cost. So the robot need not be used 100% of the time. Even in SF the robot will not be used much at 2am. Though I was referring to the small cities in Montana. Nobody will put a robotic burger joint where there are no people. However a town of 5000 has a lot of people who need to eat, more than enough to make it worth running numbers.
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
- wernercd 6y ago
  What's available to the rich today becomes available to all tomorrow. Cars, TVs, Cell phones...
jariel 6y ago
It's definitely 'real lettuce' this is not a 'lettuce substitute' so I'm doubtful that the skepticism is around 'taste', and I seriously doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference by tasting anyhow. I think the 'doubt' is around economics, and possibly the nutritional value. I can see a lot of people putting these things in their basements. I mean, we call could just put actual gardens in our backyards, but that might not be 'trendy' enough ...
- ksdale 6y ago
  A great many people cannot, in fact, put actual gardens in their backyards, due to space, or weather, or animals or insects, or lack of sunlight.
- ramphastidae 6y ago
  It’s about practicality, not trendiness. I don’t have a backyard or basement. Even if I did have a backyard, the climate is such that sunlight or predictable weather is not guaranteed. Even if it was, there is no guarantee of safety from wild animals, pests, and soil contamination. The list goes on ...
  - jariel 6y ago
    'Practical' would to buy it from a 'farmer'. The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech' - or - a very long term vision and investment towards making something like actually practical at some scale, which may or may not ever happen.
    - bsder 6y ago
      > 'Practical' would to buy it from a 'farmer'. And if the nearest one is 400 miles away? Then my produce is STILL optimized for transport and storage over taste and freshness. > The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech' I agree. It annoys me when they tout this as "volume" or "scale". However, you can't get VC funding unless you promise that so that's the price of your marketing. Shrug. Nevertheless, I do hope one of these catches on somehow. Several of my favorite restaurants had their own gardens. However, they are limited by the weather and season to certain crops. If someone can slap a steel container down and use these technologies to grow out of area/out of season vegetables and fruits I'm all for it. It would also have the side benefit of breaking up some of the gigantic monocultures we currently have in agriculture.
deedub 6y ago
Maybe a little different compared to the Bay area, but I live outside Jackson, Wyoming. It's currently about 16F outside and there is 12" of snow on the ground. We have access to fresh locally grown tomatoes, lettuce, and other things like that year round. https://verticalharvestfarms.com/ https://verticalharvestfarms.com/ Just as you mention, it is high quality and tastes great! Also, it isn't trucked in from Salinas Valley CA which is 1,000 miles away.
- busterarm 6y ago
  https://extension.umn.edu/growing-systems/deep-winter-greenhouses https://extension.umn.edu/growing-systems/deep-winter-greenh...
- chris_va 6y ago
  Of course, grow-lights in Wyoming will be mostly coal powered, whereas a field in Salinas is renewable energy. Assuming I am doing the math right, shipping 1 ton of food 1000 miles (refrigerated) is roughly ~30-40kg of CO2, or about 7g-CO2 per tomato (6oz tomato). A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic, 40W/sqft), so about 20Wh/g, or about 1.4kg-CO2 per tomato for coal. Maybe more like 1kg-CO2 for the mix in Wyoming. ... depends on what you are trying to optimize, I guess, and how much natural light you can harvest in the vertical greenhouse.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    For what it is worth, a tomato truck carries 50,000lbs of tomatoes from the field to a processor. Supply chains are complex, but refrigerated semis can carry a similar load of processed vegetables.
    - cryptoquick 6y ago
      Do refrigerated semis use more fuel? And if so, by what factor more?
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
scsilver 6y ago
Just watched an interview with someone from Appharvest, a vertical farm company. One of the most interesting advantages of these grow operations is that they can develop seeds for taste and nutrients, rather than for transport or pest resistance. The billions in research that have gone into developing resistant and durable produce can be channeled into developing the best tasting and looking products. As we see a hugely growing demand for quality in food options by the middle and upper classes, the product offering the best taste will have a large leg up on the cheap mass produced produce. This demand is not limited to individual consumers, restaurants and chefs, who already seek quality ingredients by sourcing from local trusted growers, will likely put additional demand on these low/no pesticide, and taste optimized produce. I cant wait to taste the best tomatoes of my life. Im lucky enough to have traveled to places like Bali and Italy, where the local produce is unconstrained by bean counting hyper optimization. It tastes better and quality of life is better because of it.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Not breeding for transport could be big. But it's not entirely new at all, certain cooking herbs like basil are often entering the kitchen alive in the pot they are grown in or even cultivated right there on the window sill. A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Not breeding for transport could be big. But it's not entirely new at all, certain cooking herbs like basil are often entering the kitchen alive in the pot they are grown in or even cultivated right there on the window sill. What actual experience do you have with such models? This is actually incredibly rare, specifically growing on-site, especially now as COVID has ravaged the culinary Industry irreparably in the US. I've been a cook, ran kitchens (with in an emphasis in farm to table and agro-tourism), and did/do supply chain and have a focus on food-tech. I can tell you that anything closely resembling the model you described was very short lived at Michelin Star restaurants in the E. Coast, or a few with actual farms in addition to their brick an mortar operation: think French Laundry in NorCal or Blue Hill in NY. This is actually a very good model for all involved, that may not have had much viability ~10 years ago when I first got really involved, but with COVID making people aware of how weak the food supply chain is this may do well. People are dining out less and lower overall food costs are likely to make this viable, despite not being all encompassing upon deployment. I really hope last year's shortages were a wake up call, and want to see more of this take off. This entire system is in dire need of repair, now that the disruption has taken its toll. > A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages. Could be, but you have to understand most of the Industry, specifically the affluent ones that would even try this in CA or NY let alone middle America that operates on the thinnest of margins, are beyond life support. These places are not coming back. What you suggest is interesting, and I had a similar idea before which could help curb some of the baked in pershibaility in the food supply but this will just translate to longer times for ROI which as I said is already stretched super thin due to high overhead and operational costs and think margins. But, its definitely worth exploring if the travel times are less than 30 mins and would have to be limited in scope: greens, herbs and other fast-growing crops. Proper fruit trees, grains etc... are out of the question. My model was simple: ship in starter plants to unused land in cities that incorporate Ag into the Education system and have them participate in wide scale farm and smaller scale green house operations (this already exists in Denver) and have them supply the restaurants. What ever they don't sell they could help feed the community. Help create secondary and tertiary business models with local entrepreneurs and philanthropists--I thought of someone like Chamath would be super interested to be honest. I actually wanted to pitch this to my former boss, Kimbal Musk, as an adjunct of an already existing model with Big Green and Squared Roots learning gardens and the container garden models respectively. I had devised a whole system with to-do things after I came back from a stint at SpaceX after having worked at his Flagship in Boulder. Unfortunately, COVID ruined that, but the plan makes sense none the less and I would gladly make efforts to volunteer even though I'm retired from both Ag and Culinary now.
dr_orpheus 6y ago
Taste aside, what was the cost of produce? Other articles I have seen that actually included price [1] showed that the vertical farming produce was 3x the price of what you could get at Whole Foods. And that is for organic presumably high quality produce. Cost compared to Walmart was something like 10x as much. https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr...
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855745 : I posted this yesterday. It’s from 2019 but still very enlightening.
tyingq 6y ago
I'm not exactly critical of vertical farming, but I've noticed that the stories always seem to gloss over what works well and what doesn't. Plenty™, for example, does arugula and kale, but their stories say "veggies" in a way that leads you to believe it's working for a much broader set of "veggies". Verticalfield, featured in this story, has pictures of tomatoes, and mentions mushrooms and strawberries. But on their website, the FAQ says ""Vertical Field can grow up to 200 varieties of crops, such as leafy greens, herbs, and lettuces". Again, arugula, kale, some herbs, etc.
- i_am_proteus 6y ago
  Vertical farming seems to be good for crops that are mostly water and not very useful for cereals (or anything else with much caloric content). So there's a profit to be made for urban luxury vegetables, and that's about it.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    I think leafy greens tend to work best in vertical farming, but wouldn't call them 'luxury vegetables'. Most diets should include some leafy greens for the non-caloric-nutrients and fiber.
    - iancmceachern 6y ago
      I agree in concept. In practice, here in SF a pack of plenty vertically farmed lettuce is $5 and a head of lettuce from the Safeway down the street is $1. On a budget there is really only one option.
      - tremon 6y ago
        End-user price may not be an accurate reflection of production cost. Do both receive the same amount of subsidies, for example?
  - iancmceachern 6y ago
    This.
yourapostasy 6y ago
I'm interested in seeing if there are benefits to nutrient-dense and microbiome-boosting vegetables from these types of grow operations. So much has been sacrificed upon the goal of transport-sturdy vegetables, I have to wonder if taste was not the only factor we lost over the decades.
Jkvngt 6y ago
I've often tasted greens grown in these types of situations and they're never as good as the ones which come out of the soil.
russdill 6y ago
I realize a ton of the taste of food comes from context, which really does matter and can lead to more enjoyable food, but I'd still like to see a blind taste test in such a situation.
- Dma54rhs 6y ago
  Sounds like a reasonable test to do, but we do know very well we prefer crops developed for transportation over long distances which means not too soft. Not soft and good taste for whatever reason are related.
reportingsjr 6y ago
Fully agree! Locally here in Cincinnati there is a company called 80 Acres farms doing indoor vertical farming. Their greens are by far the most incredible I've ever tasted!
iancmceachern 6y ago
We agree, we love their lettuce and greens!!
razster 6y ago
Imagine farm land with these modules placed end to end. Running off solar and abled to produce year round in all weather conditions. Once batteries are perfected.
- lovemenot 6y ago
  Is a there containerised module on the market yet? It seems a good fit.
melomal 6y ago
I set up a garage hydroponics 'farm' (produced about 3-5kg of microgreens) with the intention of going to local restaurants. Honestly, the flavour is out of this world and that's pretty much with everything you grow too with hydro/aeroponics. From first hand experience though, the electricity is a huge cost plus being in Poland right now, my labour costs would have swallowed up any profits. These won't replace traditional farms BUT a farm growing fields of lettuce could and should be replaced for other variants of root vegetables etc. Lettuce, leafy greens and herbs IMO should be grown in vertical farms as it's low effort and really it's all about getting maximum taste into each leaf. Lettuce doesn't really provide that much in terms of nutritional benefits, especially when it's been transported for hundreds/thousands of miles so local or as close to the end user it vital.

Chris2048 6y ago

So, the plants are grown purely on LED light? What's the electricity cost per kg produce?

criley2 6y ago
Here's an interesting angle: What's the energy/kg to produce on site versus the energy/kg to grow a thousand miles away, transport and store, transport and store, transport to final destination?
- busterarm 6y ago
  You also have to add to the on-site the cost of not using that space for something else.
  - tonyhb 6y ago
    In that case, lets add the environmental and biodiversity costs of farmland.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Not at all. The farmland is highly unlikely to be used for any other purpose. We're trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, not moral judgments.
      - TT3351 6y ago
        Removing native flora and fauna and replacing it with domesticated varieties has a clear impact on the environment
        busterarm 6y ago
        What was the environmental impact of replacing whatever was in these urban environements with concrete, steel and asphalt? Literally just looking at the economics here, I'll say again.

jimnotgym 6y ago

> Controlled-environment agriculture systems such as hydroponics operations can be much more efficient, More efficient than flying it in maybe, but not more efficient than growing it in the garden using sunlight

kevinmgranger 6y ago
I hate unqualified "efficient". They really ought to say in terms of what. Hydroponic vertical growing is more water and ground-space efficient though, isn't it?
- mcescalante 6y ago
  Agreed, wish they qualified "efficient". Another example may be that hydroponic growing is typically faster than in soil, for example leafy lettuce such as bibb can be ready nearly twice as fast when grown with hydroponics.
busterarm 6y ago
I always love seeing these examples where peoples' hopes and dreams easily overcome their ability to perform basic math. There is simply no beating the energy output of the sun for agriculture purposes. These systems are certainly worth study, but as a commercial operation it's basically snake oil.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Certainly for commodities at scale, no beating the agricultural infrastructure. But for a premium produce for a premium product, it can pay. You may not even be able to get from a grocery store, what you can grow for your own needs.
  - AlanSE 6y ago
    Companies are already selling LED growing units for inside the home for food (like aero-garden). The interest is there, what's missing is for it to make significant inroads into the grocery/restaurant food chain.

srockets 6y ago

A model of farming is capturing the sun's energy in the grown produce. This is why farming takes so much land: to get more of the sun. Growing in warehouses or vertically forces you to substitute the sun with artificial lights: even if those are powered by the sun, there's a huge loss of energy in the system, hence increased cost.

PartiallyTyped 6y ago
Are you sure? Growing produce remotely has additional inherent costs that don't exist in vertical farms, such as wasted water, the need for very heavy machinery, the issue of transporting and transporting within certain timeframes. The last 2 problems include the cost of oil/gasoline, and the maintenance of a whole array of systems, from oil extraction pipelines to road maintenance. This, to me, sounds like vertical farms in the grand scheme could be more efficient.
- gtvwill 6y ago
  Go set up a artificial growth environment and try run it for a cycle longer than a month. It takes huge amounts of resources to maintain that environment. And no it's not chemical free. Also yes water is used and wasted. If you ain't doing bulk washing your applying huge amounts of product to keep algae blooms out of your systems. Try run that environment for a year. I give it 2-3 month before your first insect/pest bloom. Less if your unlucky. An I'd be blown away if you fix your first pest bloom the first try. Vertical farms are sick on paper...that ignores masses of requirements to actually get the task done.
  - cevn 6y ago
    Very true. I have an aerogarden setup and best way to use it is to swap the plants into real ground and do a fresh clean after they've grown for a few months, otherwise gnats / fungus will take over. It also seems to require much more water than watering the plants in ground, I assume because they are getting maximum rate from roots and almost infinitely growing them .

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

These article talk about 'veggies' - but nearly all these vertical farms seem to be growing fairly low calorie/nutrient rich vegetables: leafy greens, herbs and some fruits etc. There's no root vegetables, grains which make up the cornerstone of our diets.

samstave 6y ago
how can i architect my own vertical garden that "covers the ground" of the diet I am used to?
- vkou 6y ago
  Step one is to quit your day job. Step two is to put in ~12 hours a day, 7 days a week of work into homesteading. Step three is to dip on your savings to buy farming equipment, consumable inputs, and groceries for the remaining half of your food that you won't be able to grow yourself. If you'd like to try before you buy, my parents' homestead up in Canada could always use another pair of hands. Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. You'll have to share the room with ~15-30 baby chicks, though. You'll quickly get used to the smell. I understand that this won't give you a vertical garden, but unlike a vertical garden, it will go most of the way to meeting your daily caloric and nutritional needs.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. Even if he wanted to work for free, unless he's in Olympic-athlete shape and mentally tough, it's still a raw deal for the farm if they can get migrant workers instead. Most Americans who've been here more than one generation don't make it to their first lunchtime. There's a total disconnect in our society about what people eat and where it came from. Hence the monthly "vertical farming" article about growing kale.
- cstejerean 6y ago
  I grew up having to grow pretty much everything we ate (by necessity as you couldn’t buy anything in stores). And whatever we didn’t grow ourselves we helped relatives or neighbors with and shared in harvest. I personally don’t understand the appeal of going back to that. I’m so glad I can just buy whatever I want at the grocery store these days and don’t need to spend all my free time on harvesting calories.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

This is where e-farming can own its niche. Cut out all the agricultural overhead, grow what you need on demand at the site of the demand, perhaps at a premium quality for a premium product. You can't get more 'local' than that!

gtvwill 6y ago
Yeah your premium product in a greenhouse is missing the thing that makes veggies premium...which is terroir. Trust me you can grow great food, it'll just have the same terroir/character as anybody else on the same nute regime as you. Premium comes from the ground and it's also cheaper and easier to produce.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Premium can come from the variety. Most varieties are not available at any price - just the commodities? And suppose we find the nute program that makes them taste good. Then its a good thing they taste the same as everybody else - they taste good! That's the goal, not just some exclusive hipster cachet.
toomanybeersies 6y ago
You can't really grow "on demand", since it takes at bare minimum 3 weeks (for lettuce) from seed to harvest.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  That's close enough. Fresh local lettuce in winter in most northern climates becomes possible, if you can predict demand a score of days into the future.

hahla 6y ago

Has anyone looked into the viability of something like this from the restaurants perspective (costs aside)? I would image a busy restaurant would need more than 90kg/200lbs of produce each month?

waiseristy 6y ago
A busy restaurant could consume 200lbs of produce in a day!
offby37years 6y ago
You'd need an entire farm.

AlanSE 6y ago

I'm very excited about this. This isn't going to replace farms anytime soon, but there's a pretty solid economic niche for it within the food choices that customer preference justifies today. The best argument for this method of food production is by looking at criticism of existing food production. https://www.consumerreports.org/pesticides-in-food/stop-eating-pesticides/ https://www.consumerreports.org/pesticides-in-food/stop-eati... Reading stuff like this is truly, deeply, depressing. In our modern lives, we are supposed to eat lots of vegetables (which we don't), but we're also supposed be picky about which ones we get. Just the thought of that is exhausting. Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer. Vertical farms offer consumers several things which are almost impossible to come by otherwise. This is extraordinarily good to have for market entry. Higher energy use is a strike, but you have to consider the whole picture. I definitely think there's a place for this, the benefits that offset higher energy intensity are very substantive.

stretchcat 6y ago
> Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer. Spoiler: field workers who don't get bathroom breaks. I think a lot of people don't understand that farming is messy work. After highschool I worked at a bean processing plant where my job was to pick dead small animals (usually rodents, snakes, and frogs) out of the beans as they sped by on a conveyor belt. The machines needed to harvest the massive quantities of food our civilization requires do not discriminate between beans and the animals living in bean fields. But here is the thing; almost nobody gets sick from this. Wash your produce. Raccoons do it, and so should you. If you do, you'll almost certainly be fine just like nearly everybody else. It's gross, but it's not really a problem.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Salmonella is different. It can get into the plant. Stomata can absorb pathogens. Likely contaminated irrigation water.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

There are so many greens to grow other than letttce. Vertical farms are only good for greens and soft herbs. And it’s possible to pack it with nutrient dense herbs.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Local food that cuts transport end storage costs is the future. Vertical farms will replace most of what we grow in large fields. Almost all of large factory sized farms ..at least in Ca..goes to feed the rest of the country. As hydroponics and roof top gardens and vertical farms and warehouse farms and shipping container farms become the norm in places where they have winter and have now hacked it with no need for California produce...California itself have to rethink its Ag policies. And work towards growing our own and sustainably. And locally. Automating and mechanizing a lot of it because Ag labour is going to dry up soon. Not to mention water.

KaiserPro 6y ago

Thats just lettiuice and similar leafy based products. If you want a whole meal then you'll need to do what de kas did in holland: https://restaurantdekas.com/ https://restaurantdekas.com/ And its totally tasty.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

I once tried to convince the folks at store no:8 ...Walmart’s incubator and start up division to do this for all their stores. I crunched the numbers and Walmart is the ONLY one that can pull it off profitably. Amazon warehouses are far behind, but it’s possible. At Walmart store no:8, they engaged me for 3-4 emails and then ghosted me entirely. But even if someone there were to reconsider my proposal and take it off on their own, I think it still holds promise. Anyone can grow locally and minimize their foot print. Only Walmart can generate profits. I said it two something years ago and I still stand behind my analysis even though in the time in between Amazon has expanded, bought Whole Foods and now have warehouses. Amazon will get there someday..but if I were a betting person, I’d bet on Walmart. Despite the scorn they invite, they have the best supply chain experts and logistics solutions.

bserge 6y ago

The advances in LED lighting over the past 10 years is nothing short of amazing. Used to be you needed heavy, big and hot multi-killowat HPS lamp installations for the best indoor farming, but not anymore! I set up a small experimental indoors farm myself, and I used cheap LED lamps you can get anywhere, three different temperatures, interspersed on a custom frame above the plants. I realized I know nothing about soil, because it turns out there's more to it than just dumping it in a pot. Soil composition and density are really important, moreso than the pH (that a lot of people focus on) in my experience. I would've definitely fucked up with a hydroponic setup that I first considered. Soil is much better and we really don't appreciate it as much as we should. It's literally the source of life. These plants needed more root aeration, the first batch was terribly small, but still pretty good. Second batch was much better thanks to a custom soil/pebbles setup (soil in the center, pebbles around the fabric pot), then I realized the lumen output needed to be much higher for perfect results. I wanted to try some COB LEDs, which output more lumen, but I could not find any (and importing would take too long and cost way too much), plus I really wanted to see what simple SMD LEDs could do. So I trashed the whole thing in favor of custom Tipi style tents for individual plants with the LED lamps spread all around and above. Not the most efficient use of space, but it turned out to be the best for growth. ~2 months from seed to harvest, electricity cost was laughably low (~$20 total per plant) and heat generation was practically non-existent. I also had plants outdoors, tbh the sun-grown tomatoes tasted better, but the other greens were just as good grown indoors. Still not sure if LED production is environmentally friendly or sustainable, but it sure is revolutionary.

RotANobot 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your experiment. I’m curious about soil composition and density as you pointed out its importance. I definitely feel like my lack of success is mainly with my soil. Do you have any resources to share about it?
- bserge 6y ago
  I've read some stuff online, but everyone's using soil from shops it seems. I picked it from a farm nearby, crushed it as fine as I could, mixed it with my own compost (various vegetables and leaves), after a while outdoors all of it just gets processed by bacteria, it quite literally disappears, all of it becomes soil. When putting it in the fabric pots (really good stuff, forget anything else) I mixed it with a small amount of pebbles and twigs to prevent it from compacting (which severely impacts growth, as roots can't push through it); I had nothing else and that seemed to do the trick. But the thing is I used a makeshift metal cylinder to fill the pot with soil in the center and a layer of pebbles all around and at the bottom. The idea was that the plant would grow and get nutrients from the soil, then as the roots grow out into the pebbles they'd get more oxygen and water. It's actually sort of a soil/hydroponic hybrid setup if I think about it. Seems to have worked great. I also used simple NPK fertilizer, the plants react if you use too much (leaves turn yellower, tips start burning), so you know when to stop. There's a lot of information out there, but honestly I learned more with hands-on experience than from reading dozens of articles and forum threads. I thought it would be rather simple, but it's definitely not just "plant it and forget it". I appreciate plant life more now, it's quite fascinating when you get into it haha.

kakoni 6y ago

So container size farms. Is there something smaller in this vertical farming space, household scale?

nipponese 6y ago

No mention of power consumption...

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three_seagrass 6y ago
They're using LED right? Shouldn't be that bad

gt565k 6y ago

Are there any startups that offer containers like that which allow people to drop it in their backyard and do some uban farming for themselves? I've been interested in permaculture and hope to start gardening once I get a house.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Glad there are a lot of people questioning the economic fundamentals of this stuff. The real problem is the agricultural policy which is doubling down unhealthy things. These technical gimmicks which are dubious as to whether they deliver real value to not help with that.

jonplackett 6y ago

Anyone know what the nutrient content is compared to 'grown in the ground'? I know veg used to have a lot more before industrial farming.

gnicholas 6y ago

I'm interested in this sort of thing because I recently saw a Prop 65 warning on organic spinach purchased from Whole Foods. Apparently there are high levels of cadmium in soil that gets picked up by spinach. [1] I have no idea how bad cadmium is, or how much of it is in spinach. But it's a real bummer to learn that a food that I thought of as very, very healthy (organic spinach) has a downside like this. Growing it in containers would be one way to get around soil issues like these, which are unfortunately becoming more common (see arsenic in rice). 1: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/proposition-65-notices-of-the-month-99216/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/proposition-65-notices-of-...

grillvogel 6y ago
do people actually take prop 65 warnings seriously?
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I don’t worry too much about most items, but foods that I eat a lot of (I often eat 2-3 bags of frozen spinach a week) are more concerning.
- kosievdmerwe 6y ago
  Yeah the problem with me for prop 65 things: "Is the level detected actually harmful?" and "Is where it's detected actually likely to lead to me being exposed?" I suspect for most things the answer is no.

oneplane 6y ago

Why is this title using the parent-to-kids term 'veggies', is vegetables outdated or something?

HeckFeck 6y ago
It's actually a paid endorsement from VeggieTales.

jennerGg 6y ago

It's coming home! www.greenloop.io

max_ 6y ago

What are some of the great books & resources one might want to have if the want to get into Hydroponics?

miohtama 6y ago

Any hope we could grow staples like potato and rice vertically some day?

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Seems like vining fruits would do well this way? Raspberries, grapes, kiwi, tomatoes, ... What would it do to the capital expense vs. productivity to use solar + battery storage for 24 hour growing? Or do plants need a 'rest' and a night? Maybe solar on the roof and a basement farm to minimize heating? I love the idea and had not considered the aspect of breeding seeds for taste & nutrients (thx scsilver). Or the fact that they can provide year-round fresh fruits. Though don't underestimate the cost of maintaining the temperature in the Rockies in the winter (per deedub)...

sharpercoder 6y ago

I live next to the biggest greenhouse area in the world. Since the pandemic in March last year, I exclusively eat lunches of about 600grams with around 20 types of veggies. It feels amazing after doing so, I never have an after-lunch dip any more. Some performance sports I do got 5-10% directly measurable improvements (cycling and bouldering) after switching to these lunches. Not completely sure it is the cause, but all signs direct to it. I simply cut these veggies in small and balance the salad out on sweet, sour, salty and calories. After a few months of doing this I started to crave these salads. Most of the veggies come from the greenhouse area, but not all. You can tell most of them, since they are quite clean already and do not have any dirt/soil on it. Taste of these veggies is mostly different, not necessarily bad, although I would not describe it typically as being richer in taste. Redish is less sharp, carrots are much more crispy and less fibery, letuces are much fresher (they come with clod, so dont degrade a bit, even after two weeks in the refrigerator), tomatos are more watery but also much, much more varied (small, ultra sweet super juicy ones; bigger fleshy with delicious sour pits; characterfull flavory ones; many more), chickory which is sweeter, bell pepper which are more varied and edible as fruits, sweeter, juicier, cucumbers as small, medium and large where the small ones are really tender, many herbs such as mint, coriander, sellery, rosemary, parsley come as plants which I consume over about two weeks.

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erichocean 6y ago

We have this at home, salads are amazing.

pencilcode 6y ago

Since it’s missing all the nutrients in the soil and only has those purposefully put in, in the long run I suspect it will be optimized for profit and we’ll get very poor food as a baseline, worse than the one grown in soil on average.

spiderfarmer 6y ago
Greenhouses have been doing this for decennia. All necessary nutrients are there. A large portion of the produce is optimised for bulk. A smaller portion of the produce is optimised for taste. You get what you pay for.

areactnativedev 6y ago

I don't see anything about temperature regulation, wouldn't that be a big energy consuming part? Especially if I picture a container out under the roasting sun or in biting cold.

HeckFeck 6y ago

This reminds me of the off-world greenhouses that grew vegetables in The Expanse. Science fiction and science fact compliment each other again.