11 ms·

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 though

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.

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.