12 ms·

Pressures that have always existed for vertical farms have come to a head

72 points by zeristor 4y ago

zeristor 4y ago
https://archive.vn/HndV7 https://archive.vn/HndV7
ggm 4y ago
The article basically says that if you use solar and wind, with a battery stack it's going to be fine once you're over the capex part of the investment. But it's wrapped up in the 10x price increase in non-self sourced power and European politics. For the right market, and product it's fine. That market disappeared when discretionary spending shrank in the heartland markets and they made a decision to minimise capex without hedging their power cost inputs. (Or came to the end of the hedge) So it's a pivot to markets either with cheaper power or with other cost issues in fresh green leafy veg and micro herbs. Ones with less or expensive water, who are also making a pivot to green energy (hint: as they say.. Arabian peninsula) come to mind. Vertical farms aren't the only industrial sector to come unstuck on assumptions about power input cost. Lots of German industry assumes cheap gas.
- zeristor 4y ago
  As does the fertiliser industry.
  - ggm 4y ago
    Yes! Gas is a primary input feedstock.. something I was amazed to discover.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Gas is the source for the hydrogen to be bonded to nitrogen to make ammonia, just now. There are efforts to shift to hydrogen electrically extracted ("electrolysed") from water, with the electric power obtained from renewables, but it is very early days. If your electrolysers and ammonia synthesis equipment are not too expensive, you can operate just when sun is out or wind blows, and not need to rely on stored or imported energy, or back-up generation. But high capital cost may favor 24/7 operation even at times when power costs more. The world today produces ammonia in the millions of tons annually, but will produce many times as much when ammonia becomes a favored liquid fuel. It will be synthesized using solar in the tropics, and wind where that is reliable, and exported for backup generation. Nobody will need to store more energy than a week or two's worth, because when you expect to run low you order in.
      - antupis 4y ago
        This shift is currently happening Nordics and it is rather fast, I think there is already like several billions of worth projects that start producing green hydrogen and ammonia.
        biorach 4y ago
        Citation?
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        A first big electrolysis -> ammonia plant is under construction there. Another one of similar magnitude meant to provide fuel for ships is supposed to be done in 2026. We will need hundreds more, almost all of which won't break ground until after these start delivering.
- 0xfaded 4y ago
  If you had said energy generation capacity right now, you would sell the energy instead of growing lettuce.
inthepipe 4y ago
I’m really surprised you’d need 600 million to run this company. Like why not start with one farm in the tens of millions of dollars range and run that profitably first? VCs would save a lot of money.
ajmurmann 4y ago
I wonder how economics of vertical fawns would change if we priced land being used for anything but being a wildlife reserve as a negative externality.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Well, if enough people starve to death it'll drive down demand.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Almost all the land under cultivation is in places "we" have no such say about.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Not much since peoples housing would also be more expensive, as would energy generation. What we need is an energy efficient way of producing food with minimal cost and which doesn't turn arable land into a vast monoculture. Alas, we need food more, and experimenting with food supply can be... disruptive...
farmaway 4y ago
Another problem with hydroponics is its reliance on industrially-produced fertilizers, chiefly those containing nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. The phosphate and potassium parts of this equation are today mined from finite mineral deposits. Sooner or later these mines will close, and we'll have to close to the loop on phosphate and potassium (and molybdenum, calcium, etc.) production and consumption. How will hydroponic farmers adapt? Where will they economically obtain the necessary nutrient solution additives? Are there practical techniques to extract these nutrients from traditional sources, like urine or manure? The aspiring Mars colonist or hydroponic homesteader will need to figure this out, or return to traditional "regenerative" farming practices which compost biological waste and return all used-up nutrients and their constituent elements to the soil. And for someone like a Moon or Mars colonist, even regenerative farming isn't simple. Composting relies on bacteria to convert waste products like nitrogen-containing urea, whose nitrogen isn't bioavailable to plants, back into useful and bioavailable forms like ammonium. Keeping cultures of bacteria alive and healthy indefinitely will be essential to a colony's continued survival. Are there practical chemical processes to replace the function of these microbes, e.g. to convert urea to ammonia without urease enzymes? I don't know. Maybe someone with more knowledge can comment on this. I hope this problem can be solved. Hydroponics has many benefits, from dramatically lowered water consumption vs. soil-based agriculture, to higher yields driven by precisely-managed nutrient ratios. Spacefaring farmers will appreciate the weight saved by leaving all that excess water and soil on Earth. It'd be a shame to abandon this technology simply because we couldn't pivot away from fossil fertilizers.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Fortunately, there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies. Electric power to run the LEDs, if obtained from renewables, is protected from cost shocks, but such power might be more profitably sold at such times than used to drive LEDs and sell the produce.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    > there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies Bold statement, I'd be impressed if it holds up by mid-century.
wolverine876 4y ago
SV and many HN readers have lived in a golden age of entrepeneurship, when people widely believed in optimism, innovation, change, and our ability to improve our world and solve any problem; that it could be done by one person in a garage or anyone in the company; and a belief in merit above all, which requires a belief in truth. Now the socio-political trend is extremely in the other direction: Disparage, shame, and ridicule any intent to improve the world and any interest or intent in innovation; that competition for survival, rather than improving our world, is the only purpose; that only corporations and wealthy people can accomplish anything; that only 'bosses' have worthwhile ideas; and fetishizing power, corruption, and 'post-truth', and exercising that for profit rather than merit. We were right the first time - you can see all that was accomplished. Those truths haven't changed. But it's harder going when so many disparage them.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  Let's review these accomplishments shall we? Implemented a global digital panopticon, check. Bricked news media as a credible source of information, check. Eliminated affordable housing as a concept in major metro areas around the globe, check. Centralized merchandising to the point that one dude can afford to buy Wyoming while hundreds of millions of would-be shop keepers and artisans are forced to participate in the online equivalent of a protection racket just to maintain solvency, check. Implemented and normalized methods for atomizing society, check. And now we're on the cusp of unrecoverably eliminating the trust metric for all content online permanently thanks to late breaking improvements in AI. All of that is certainly innovative, but where are the improvements?
  - hattmall 4y ago
    Availability, ease of acquiring and applying knowledge. Also logistics and availability of products is amazing, we take a lot for granted. I can get almost anything in any midsize town with a few trips during business hours. Almost anything else can be delivered in a few days. We have definitely hit some snags like the collapse of Google search results, drm, and several other major human hostile monetization strategies but the reality is that we can do a lot more a lot faster as an individual or with your own team than you could in very recent history.
aetherson 4y ago
I think it was a HN comment (on a different article) that opened my eyes to something alluded to in this article: vertical farming and hydroponics in general basically doesn't grow stuff with (significant quantities of) calories. It grows expensive leafy greens, but for staple foods, you need soil. This basically made me regard vertical farming as... not fundamentally important to the future of food.
- gricardo99 4y ago
  your conclusion may be correct but there could be circumstances that change the calculation. For example, if moving expensive leafy greens to vertical farms frees up soil, water and other resources for staples.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    My issues is that they still need energy input. And this takes land, specially for renewables. And that land is close or even more than just laying the same on flat ground.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Tomatoes and strawberries have been grown vertically. There's an ultra-premium vegetable and fruit sector, but it's inherently tiny. High energy prices right now are mostly the result of the Ukraine war. It's painful now, but it is accelerating the conversion from fossil fuels. At least if this doesn't expand into a larger war.
    - rsj_hn 4y ago
      The high energy prices are not because of the war but because of the sanctions regime. The thing is, sanctions basically never end. It's impossible to lift them. We still have sanctions against Cuba since 1962. No one even cares about Cuba anymore. The sanctions against Iran remain in place since 1979, and have only ever gotten stricter. Same for Syria, which we began to sanction in 1986. It's called "the sanctions escalator", because it only ever moves up. New sanctions are now being introduced against China. There is no reason to think that, after the war is over, the sanctions will be lifted. I mean, why would they be lifted? Europe is not going to return to Russia the assets that were frozen/seized or start wanting to trade with Russia -- or vice versa -- moreover there are already new pipelines and trade agreements made within Eurasia that exclude Europe as a market for energy. This is a permanent change ushering in a new cold war and a new multipolar world, where it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for commodities to cross bloc boundaries. Russia's commodities are going to be flowing east and south, Saudi Arabia's will be flowing mostly to China, while North American commodities will be staying mostly in North America. After permanently and irreparably rupturing the previous trade relationships, Europe is going to have to become more energy independent, and I think they realize now that the previous energy dependence they had was a strategic weakness for them. They will need to learn to do with less energy at least until they ramp up domestically produced replacements such as nuclear or renewables + storage.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
ThePhysicist 4y ago
I think the sun provides around 5.000-10.000 lux (lm/m²) illuminance in temperate climates on an average day. Modern LEDs produce around 200 lm/W, so I think you need around 10-15 W/m² to grow stuff inside that would normally grow outside, e.g. corn (of course you can optimize the spectrum to save some energy, I'll disregard that here for the sake of simplicity). That's around 0.25 kWh/m²/day of vertical farm, or 7.5 kWh/m²/month. So, for one hectare of food you'd need 75.000 kWh/month of electricity, only for the lighting. Given these numbers I don't know how vertical farming could replace outdoor farming for most staple crops. Maybe if a miracle in energy production occurs, but even then many other challenges remain.
- chongli 4y ago
  Solar energy is only one factor in the equation. Another one is water. Indoor farming lets you get your energy and water from different places. This is potentially a breakthrough because of the relative difficulty of moving large quantities of water around (not to mention food destined for market) compared to electricity.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    But in this scenario you just want a greenhouse that recirculates water but you still don't want to stack your plants to take advantage of natural light.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Whenever you harvest the fruits and veggies you take water out of the system. You also lose water due to evaporation and people coming/going from the greenhouse. So while you may be a lot more water efficient in a greenhouse you're still a consumer of water. Furthermore, I am thinking of places like Canada (where I live) that get very little sunlight in the winter, despite having incredible abundance of fresh water. We could grow a lot of vegetables in the winter and power the artificial lighting using wind, hydroelectricity, or nuclear. This would allow us to avoid importing so many vegetables from California or Mexico.
- 4y ago
squokko 4y ago
Vertical farms don't make sense, and never will, except as a curiosity/novelty/luxury product. There's only so many calories you can grow with the incident sun on a piece of ground.
- ls15 4y ago
  > Vertical farms don't make sense, and never will, except as a curiosity/novelty/luxury product. If you rely on cheap energy, then yes. If you grow under the sun, vertical systems and hydro-/aeroponics still make a lot of sense, IMO. Check what these guys are growing under the sun in grow towers: https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs I think this would be impossible to reproduce with traditional horizontal farming.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  They make all sense given cheap energy. For example, Iceland grows most of its tomato consumption locally around the year despite a lack of sun in seasons like this one (currently 4-ish hours of not-that-strong daylight), doing that under artificial light in greenhouses, getting both heat and electricity from cheap geothermal power sources. So when at some point in future we manage to get cheap renewable replacements to fossil fuels, all of this becomes very relevant.
Havoc 4y ago
It is fundamentally a very questionable proposition: Use Free Sun vs block out free sun with a roof and then spend money on electricity to generate light.
- kitd 4y ago
  Sunlight isn't the only factor.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    Agreed. Energy cost is an important factor though & farming is a dicey financial proposition as is without powering a warehouse full of LEDs
eimrine 4y ago
Why these vertical farms can not use a sunlight daily and a LEDlight nightly?
markisus 4y ago
I'm not sure why the article mentions AppHarvest, who isn't doing a vertical farm; AppHarvest makes massive greenhouses. From their balance sheet it looks like they are selling their products at a massive discount and won't be in business much longer if they don't get some funding soon. > Management believes there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. [1] [1] https://investors.appharvest.com/node/8546/html https://investors.appharvest.com/node/8546/html
fnordpiglet 4y ago
This feels like a cyclic process that both drives efficiency and improves as energy access and utilization efficiency improves.
deterministic 4y ago
Years ago I did the math on installing a small vertical farm in my home to provide me with all the green vegetables I eat. I quickly realised that it would cost more in electricity, equipment etc. than just buying it from the local grocery store. However using a greenhouse would make it a lot cheaper because of the free sun energy. But too much hassle for my liking.

72 points by zeristor 4y ago

https://archive.vn/HndV7 https://archive.vn/HndV7

ggm 4y ago

The article basically says that if you use solar and wind, with a battery stack it's going to be fine once you're over the capex part of the investment. But it's wrapped up in the 10x price increase in non-self sourced power and European politics. For the right market, and product it's fine. That market disappeared when discretionary spending shrank in the heartland markets and they made a decision to minimise capex without hedging their power cost inputs. (Or came to the end of the hedge) So it's a pivot to markets either with cheaper power or with other cost issues in fresh green leafy veg and micro herbs. Ones with less or expensive water, who are also making a pivot to green energy (hint: as they say.. Arabian peninsula) come to mind. Vertical farms aren't the only industrial sector to come unstuck on assumptions about power input cost. Lots of German industry assumes cheap gas.

zeristor 4y ago
As does the fertiliser industry.
- ggm 4y ago
  Yes! Gas is a primary input feedstock.. something I was amazed to discover.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Gas is the source for the hydrogen to be bonded to nitrogen to make ammonia, just now. There are efforts to shift to hydrogen electrically extracted ("electrolysed") from water, with the electric power obtained from renewables, but it is very early days. If your electrolysers and ammonia synthesis equipment are not too expensive, you can operate just when sun is out or wind blows, and not need to rely on stored or imported energy, or back-up generation. But high capital cost may favor 24/7 operation even at times when power costs more. The world today produces ammonia in the millions of tons annually, but will produce many times as much when ammonia becomes a favored liquid fuel. It will be synthesized using solar in the tropics, and wind where that is reliable, and exported for backup generation. Nobody will need to store more energy than a week or two's worth, because when you expect to run low you order in.
    - antupis 4y ago
      This shift is currently happening Nordics and it is rather fast, I think there is already like several billions of worth projects that start producing green hydrogen and ammonia.
      - biorach 4y ago
        Citation?
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        A first big electrolysis -> ammonia plant is under construction there. Another one of similar magnitude meant to provide fuel for ships is supposed to be done in 2026. We will need hundreds more, almost all of which won't break ground until after these start delivering.
0xfaded 4y ago
If you had said energy generation capacity right now, you would sell the energy instead of growing lettuce.

inthepipe 4y ago

I’m really surprised you’d need 600 million to run this company. Like why not start with one farm in the tens of millions of dollars range and run that profitably first? VCs would save a lot of money.

ajmurmann 4y ago

I wonder how economics of vertical fawns would change if we priced land being used for anything but being a wildlife reserve as a negative externality.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Well, if enough people starve to death it'll drive down demand.
moloch-hai 4y ago
Almost all the land under cultivation is in places "we" have no such say about.
2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
Not much since peoples housing would also be more expensive, as would energy generation. What we need is an energy efficient way of producing food with minimal cost and which doesn't turn arable land into a vast monoculture. Alas, we need food more, and experimenting with food supply can be... disruptive...

farmaway 4y ago

Another problem with hydroponics is its reliance on industrially-produced fertilizers, chiefly those containing nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. The phosphate and potassium parts of this equation are today mined from finite mineral deposits. Sooner or later these mines will close, and we'll have to close to the loop on phosphate and potassium (and molybdenum, calcium, etc.) production and consumption. How will hydroponic farmers adapt? Where will they economically obtain the necessary nutrient solution additives? Are there practical techniques to extract these nutrients from traditional sources, like urine or manure? The aspiring Mars colonist or hydroponic homesteader will need to figure this out, or return to traditional "regenerative" farming practices which compost biological waste and return all used-up nutrients and their constituent elements to the soil. And for someone like a Moon or Mars colonist, even regenerative farming isn't simple. Composting relies on bacteria to convert waste products like nitrogen-containing urea, whose nitrogen isn't bioavailable to plants, back into useful and bioavailable forms like ammonium. Keeping cultures of bacteria alive and healthy indefinitely will be essential to a colony's continued survival. Are there practical chemical processes to replace the function of these microbes, e.g. to convert urea to ammonia without urease enzymes? I don't know. Maybe someone with more knowledge can comment on this. I hope this problem can be solved. Hydroponics has many benefits, from dramatically lowered water consumption vs. soil-based agriculture, to higher yields driven by precisely-managed nutrient ratios. Spacefaring farmers will appreciate the weight saved by leaving all that excess water and soil on Earth. It'd be a shame to abandon this technology simply because we couldn't pivot away from fossil fertilizers.

moloch-hai 4y ago
Fortunately, there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies. Electric power to run the LEDs, if obtained from renewables, is protected from cost shocks, but such power might be more profitably sold at such times than used to drive LEDs and sell the produce.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  > there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies Bold statement, I'd be impressed if it holds up by mid-century.

wolverine876 4y ago

SV and many HN readers have lived in a golden age of entrepeneurship, when people widely believed in optimism, innovation, change, and our ability to improve our world and solve any problem; that it could be done by one person in a garage or anyone in the company; and a belief in merit above all, which requires a belief in truth. Now the socio-political trend is extremely in the other direction: Disparage, shame, and ridicule any intent to improve the world and any interest or intent in innovation; that competition for survival, rather than improving our world, is the only purpose; that only corporations and wealthy people can accomplish anything; that only 'bosses' have worthwhile ideas; and fetishizing power, corruption, and 'post-truth', and exercising that for profit rather than merit. We were right the first time - you can see all that was accomplished. Those truths haven't changed. But it's harder going when so many disparage them.

forgetfreeman 4y ago
Let's review these accomplishments shall we? Implemented a global digital panopticon, check. Bricked news media as a credible source of information, check. Eliminated affordable housing as a concept in major metro areas around the globe, check. Centralized merchandising to the point that one dude can afford to buy Wyoming while hundreds of millions of would-be shop keepers and artisans are forced to participate in the online equivalent of a protection racket just to maintain solvency, check. Implemented and normalized methods for atomizing society, check. And now we're on the cusp of unrecoverably eliminating the trust metric for all content online permanently thanks to late breaking improvements in AI. All of that is certainly innovative, but where are the improvements?
- hattmall 4y ago
  Availability, ease of acquiring and applying knowledge. Also logistics and availability of products is amazing, we take a lot for granted. I can get almost anything in any midsize town with a few trips during business hours. Almost anything else can be delivered in a few days. We have definitely hit some snags like the collapse of Google search results, drm, and several other major human hostile monetization strategies but the reality is that we can do a lot more a lot faster as an individual or with your own team than you could in very recent history.

aetherson 4y ago

I think it was a HN comment (on a different article) that opened my eyes to something alluded to in this article: vertical farming and hydroponics in general basically doesn't grow stuff with (significant quantities of) calories. It grows expensive leafy greens, but for staple foods, you need soil. This basically made me regard vertical farming as... not fundamentally important to the future of food.

gricardo99 4y ago
your conclusion may be correct but there could be circumstances that change the calculation. For example, if moving expensive leafy greens to vertical farms frees up soil, water and other resources for staples.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  My issues is that they still need energy input. And this takes land, specially for renewables. And that land is close or even more than just laying the same on flat ground.
- Animats 4y ago
  Tomatoes and strawberries have been grown vertically. There's an ultra-premium vegetable and fruit sector, but it's inherently tiny. High energy prices right now are mostly the result of the Ukraine war. It's painful now, but it is accelerating the conversion from fossil fuels. At least if this doesn't expand into a larger war.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    The high energy prices are not because of the war but because of the sanctions regime. The thing is, sanctions basically never end. It's impossible to lift them. We still have sanctions against Cuba since 1962. No one even cares about Cuba anymore. The sanctions against Iran remain in place since 1979, and have only ever gotten stricter. Same for Syria, which we began to sanction in 1986. It's called "the sanctions escalator", because it only ever moves up. New sanctions are now being introduced against China. There is no reason to think that, after the war is over, the sanctions will be lifted. I mean, why would they be lifted? Europe is not going to return to Russia the assets that were frozen/seized or start wanting to trade with Russia -- or vice versa -- moreover there are already new pipelines and trade agreements made within Eurasia that exclude Europe as a market for energy. This is a permanent change ushering in a new cold war and a new multipolar world, where it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for commodities to cross bloc boundaries. Russia's commodities are going to be flowing east and south, Saudi Arabia's will be flowing mostly to China, while North American commodities will be staying mostly in North America. After permanently and irreparably rupturing the previous trade relationships, Europe is going to have to become more energy independent, and I think they realize now that the previous energy dependence they had was a strategic weakness for them. They will need to learn to do with less energy at least until they ramp up domestically produced replacements such as nuclear or renewables + storage.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

ThePhysicist 4y ago

I think the sun provides around 5.000-10.000 lux (lm/m²) illuminance in temperate climates on an average day. Modern LEDs produce around 200 lm/W, so I think you need around 10-15 W/m² to grow stuff inside that would normally grow outside, e.g. corn (of course you can optimize the spectrum to save some energy, I'll disregard that here for the sake of simplicity). That's around 0.25 kWh/m²/day of vertical farm, or 7.5 kWh/m²/month. So, for one hectare of food you'd need 75.000 kWh/month of electricity, only for the lighting. Given these numbers I don't know how vertical farming could replace outdoor farming for most staple crops. Maybe if a miracle in energy production occurs, but even then many other challenges remain.

chongli 4y ago
Solar energy is only one factor in the equation. Another one is water. Indoor farming lets you get your energy and water from different places. This is potentially a breakthrough because of the relative difficulty of moving large quantities of water around (not to mention food destined for market) compared to electricity.
- imtringued 4y ago
  But in this scenario you just want a greenhouse that recirculates water but you still don't want to stack your plants to take advantage of natural light.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Whenever you harvest the fruits and veggies you take water out of the system. You also lose water due to evaporation and people coming/going from the greenhouse. So while you may be a lot more water efficient in a greenhouse you're still a consumer of water. Furthermore, I am thinking of places like Canada (where I live) that get very little sunlight in the winter, despite having incredible abundance of fresh water. We could grow a lot of vegetables in the winter and power the artificial lighting using wind, hydroelectricity, or nuclear. This would allow us to avoid importing so many vegetables from California or Mexico.
4y ago

squokko 4y ago

Vertical farms don't make sense, and never will, except as a curiosity/novelty/luxury product. There's only so many calories you can grow with the incident sun on a piece of ground.

ls15 4y ago
> Vertical farms don't make sense, and never will, except as a curiosity/novelty/luxury product. If you rely on cheap energy, then yes. If you grow under the sun, vertical systems and hydro-/aeroponics still make a lot of sense, IMO. Check what these guys are growing under the sun in grow towers: https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs I think this would be impossible to reproduce with traditional horizontal farming.
PeterisP 4y ago
They make all sense given cheap energy. For example, Iceland grows most of its tomato consumption locally around the year despite a lack of sun in seasons like this one (currently 4-ish hours of not-that-strong daylight), doing that under artificial light in greenhouses, getting both heat and electricity from cheap geothermal power sources. So when at some point in future we manage to get cheap renewable replacements to fossil fuels, all of this becomes very relevant.

Havoc 4y ago

It is fundamentally a very questionable proposition: Use Free Sun vs block out free sun with a roof and then spend money on electricity to generate light.

kitd 4y ago
Sunlight isn't the only factor.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Agreed. Energy cost is an important factor though & farming is a dicey financial proposition as is without powering a warehouse full of LEDs

eimrine 4y ago

Why these vertical farms can not use a sunlight daily and a LEDlight nightly?

markisus 4y ago

I'm not sure why the article mentions AppHarvest, who isn't doing a vertical farm; AppHarvest makes massive greenhouses. From their balance sheet it looks like they are selling their products at a massive discount and won't be in business much longer if they don't get some funding soon. > Management believes there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. [1] [1] https://investors.appharvest.com/node/8546/html https://investors.appharvest.com/node/8546/html

fnordpiglet 4y ago

This feels like a cyclic process that both drives efficiency and improves as energy access and utilization efficiency improves.

deterministic 4y ago

Years ago I did the math on installing a small vertical farm in my home to provide me with all the green vegetables I eat. I quickly realised that it would cost more in electricity, equipment etc. than just buying it from the local grocery store. However using a greenhouse would make it a lot cheaper because of the free sun energy. But too much hassle for my liking.