4 ms·

Multi-story vertical farming doesn't make much sense unless we're living underground after a thermonuclear exchange of some sort with wide implications. What m

• Ekaros 4y ago
  Also, if transport is really the big concern, shouldn't we work on optimizing that? Multiple solutions, from automation, to electric vehicles in many ways or even trains. It is not like the cargo is that time sensitive and distances that big.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Transportation cost is far less a concern in agriculture than transportation time, and that really only for time-sensitive crops which cannot be feasibly frozen, refrigerated, or processed. The other exception is goods which are consumed in quantity but cannot be light-weighted, most notably fresh dairy. Previously this might have included eggs, but their production has been hugely upscaled (with corresponding problems evidence presently in the form of bird-flu pandemics, flock culls, and consequent high prices for eggs and poultry). For bulk agricultural commodities, that is, staple grains, time-sensitivity is measured in months to years, and shipping is virtually a non-issue. For anything that can survive freezing, once a cold-chain is established, there's similarly little issue. This includes a great deal of meat, including much of what's served as "fresh" or uncooked, such as restaurant sushi (salmon sushi is in fact flash-frozen then thawed, in large part to kill parasites). Some fish and shellfish is best consumed fresh, though much is not and may be frozen or otherwise preserved (e.g., canned or pickled fish). Many non-frozen commodities can be refrigerated, notably apples and bananas, though there may be some cosmetic defects which occur, or mealiness for apples stored from the end of one harvest season to the beginning of the next. Transport is most critical in fresh fruits and some vegetables, though there are frequently alternatives (with some slight decrease in texture, though usually not in nutrition which may in fact be superior to unfrozen alternatives). These are generally not staples, and most households or food-service organisations can make do with substitutes. Much greater concerns for food generally are overall affordability, access, "food deserts" in which traditional grocery stores don't exist --- a problem previously largely applicable to blighted urban areas but not increasingly experienced in rural regions and some suburbs. This has also long been an issue with native communities such as reservations in the US and elsewhere. General nutritional balance is another issue, as is access to either food storage and preparation (particularly as housing becomes an increasingly fraught issue in more developed countries) or foodservice (commercial and noncommercial meal and food preparation). Vertical farming is ... very much a solution in search of a problem. The challenges are interesting, I'll grant, but not especially relevant. And largely, transportation pales relative to distribution, particularly in conjunction with other inequality factors. As for meal prep, it's interesting to reflect that the concept of equipping every single residence with full food storage and preparation facilities is a recent development (20th century, often surprisingly late) even in much of the developed world, and is compounded by the tendency to both "nuclear family" and small household (1--2 members) residences. In the late 19th century, individual apartments would have lacked food-preparation with residents eating shared meals in rooming houses, restaurants, pubs, or at work, and many households were both multi-generational and included (and fed) a significant service class. There were exceptions, but the modern 1--4 person household in which multiple meals had to be prepped and served daily is quite modern.
• monero-xmr 4y ago
  The market already solved this for the high value goods - marijuana and tomatoes, which are grown in green houses.
  • Oxidation 4y ago
    That's pretty glib, because when they built large greenhouses, people probably said "the market already solved this for high value goods like tomatoes: buy them from Italy and use a fast clipper to get them here in time". Vertical farms probably indeed don't work out in the current day where we have sunlight, enough land to use it, and transport. Probably most careful analysis would have shown that, but, for things where the analysis has wide-enough error bars, when money is cheap enough, "the market" shows things don't work by incinerating gobs of investor cash and falling over. In the cheap-money era we just had, it was apparently a worthwhile gamble for some. And if you're worth billions and get suckered by a chancer with a flashy pitch deck to invest in something that could have trivially been shown to be economically doomed by some random internet-commenter grousing, then honestly you deserved to lose the money.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      The people building green houses did a real market analysis and saw that the glib analysis was wrong for their city - that is they could find a niche where they could sell for a profit. Many of them also started small to verify the niche really existed - selling a few from their backyard greenhouse, and when demand was proven to exist expanded.
      • Oxidation 4y ago
        Perhaps, but if you told me a vertical farm only worked at a scale above X thousands of square metres due to economies of scale, I'd find that quite plausible. So I can see why an investor might not wonder too hard why the scale is so large. On the other side, the dream-sellers have only until the writing on the wall becomes legible to extract the cash, so they can't mess around doing the HP garage thing for a decade. Given the actual consistent result, it's still probably on the investors for being credulous marks with a case of techno-FOMO and high on their own supply, but I don't think it's always been necessarily so simple on the face of it to be debunked by a bunch of grouchy Internet contrarians in 31 seconds (though probably, again based on the result, was always debunkable by decent independent due-diligence). After all, it's not hard to imagine a world where SpaceX is a smoking crater in 2015 and we're all going "well obviously you couldn't have landed a rocket, what did they think would happen?!". Another example: the jury's still out on if Uber's long bet on a pivot into self driving taxis can pay off before they bleed out, and you can find plenty of "obviously..." analyses saying they'd be dead or that they'd be the only transport in town by 2020. Neither of those could start in a niche, they were all-or-nothing. And those greenhouses that did start in a niche would have had huge attrition too, again, at the time, each probably seemed like a good plan to invest the family savings into. It's not unthinkable, to me at least from the outside, that vertical farming had a chance of being a capital-intensive, high-barrier, high-payoff industry. In that I'd be surprised by it about as much as I was by SpaceX's technical payoff about 7 years ago: "huh, so that does work, crazy". And all that said, if you're an investor who would rather gamble the money than spend a fraction of the promised returns on due diligence, then thanks for the trickle-down, I suppose. And probably just as well farming isn't about to end up in the hands of Farming Uber even faster than it already is becoming.