6 ms·

Farming in the Sky

31 points by clumsysmurf 11y ago

jqm 11y ago
This is great if humanity can live on lettuce and tomatoes (both a small part of the taco filling last time I was at Taco Bell). When they get alternatives to grains, pulses, meats and milk then real advancement in food production will being made.
- nine_k 11y ago
  «The crops are fertilized and irrigated by deep-blue tanks of living tilapia, swimming around just out of sight.» Here comes your meat, sort of.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  To be fair, meat and milk are luxuries. Humanity can live just fine on grains and pulses alone. Lettuce... not so much.
rmason 11y ago
The technology has been around since the seventies when a whole wave of stories were published about how the future of farming would be in skyscrapers. I am reminded of pg's classic essay, suits are back. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html Historically these greenhouses depended on being able to sell a higher quality product during winter months than produce imported from California, Florida and Mexico. The technology is better and now that more people are interested in organic there's an audience that will pay higher prices than the supermarket year around. But it is a small audience, these greenhouses will never feed large numbers of people.
- davidiach 11y ago
  That's a great article. I've read most of pg articles but missed this one. Thanks for sharing it.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
So far it's always been a great idea, just not very sustainable. I mean imagine building a home for every plant you eat. It'd be kind of crazy right? You'd need to provide many of the things a typical home has: shelter, electricity, plumbing, food supply, structures etc. But this is really what is proposed in these types of farms. Instead of available soil, you build a large structure, pots, racks and tracks. Instead of rainwater and rainwater distribution systems (clouds) you build pipes and tubes and plumbing and install pumps to move it all around. And you provide the plants nutrients in this way. And then you build a large shelter to keep everything away from the elements that mostly grow the plants outside. And then you install artificial lighting and electricity systems to pump energy into the solar panels that we know as leaves, to generate food. For the longest time this has been hugely expensive. And to feed 7 billion people with about 2-3 plants or whatever it is, worth each day (in cereal, greens, fruits and legumes etc), you need to build billions of little plant homes. And that was just never very economical. Let's not forget that a hectare yields an average of about 5.000 kg of cereal. Wheat goes for about $200 per metric ton, so a hectare nets you about $1k. Now that's 107k square footage. That's incredibly cheap. Now imagine you want to replace that with a hectare of factory or say the plant houses I described earlier. That's a huge capex investment in the tens of millions compared to the hectare of soil which is priced around $10-15k and can be leased for a few hundred. To compete on price you'd need very high production in cheap economies of scale to offset your fixed costs on building this huge greenhouse structure with infrastructure for every individual plant. But that's also where the land is much cheaper. It's virtually impossible to run vertical farms on soil, so you need a soilless medium which isn't a problem, but it means you need plumbing to every plant. No biggie. But the same for light, you can't do a vertical farm on scale (i.e. rows and rows) and expect sunshine to reach the bottom plants who sit in the shade. So you need artificial lighting and heating, and that's very expensive compared to sunlight. High value crops, sure it's fine. (e.g. see every indoor weed farm with artificial lighting etc). But as the future of agriculture (where staple foods worldwide are cheap cereals, legumes, corn etc), no way. Unless you have very large advances in material science (cheap, sturdy materials to pump out large greenhouses cheaply and sustainably) and energy (cheap solar pv/thermal, wind, geothermal). And that's what we're seeing now. So it's definitely getting more appealing by the day and it's something I've been very interested in pursuing because I just adore the idea of automated farming on some levels (I love to hike in nature, but large corn fields aren't really nature to me and don't excite me more than the idea of an automated corn factory!), but I still don't see how the economics make sense. And it's more than finance, it's touted as an environmental solution because these farms can be located near the point of consumption. But that's just one part of the story, and incredibly myopic if it's the only part of the story that's considered. For example the problem in community supported agriculture I see is that people will drive a car individually, once a week, to a small location that doesn't get economies of scale, to pick up a tiny amount of food. Because they're under the impression it's more environmentally friendly than a large shipping container moving their beans across the ocean. When in reality their food miles is a bit like saying it's environmentally more friendly drive 2 miles to a store, than to cycle 5 miles to a store for your groceries because 'it's less food miles that way'. Sustainability is a very serious issue and I'm not entirely convinced such factory-style farming is more sustainable (see inherent investments to move from soil to building plant houses). In terms of water usage, it's actually amazing to use a soilless medium, and water is one of this century's biggest challenges. But in terms of materials and energy... I'm very skeptical.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
irrigation 11y ago
"If every neighborhood had its own vertical farm, how many fewer semis would be choking up the metro area?" In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants. We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads. Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  In your considerations, what did you have planned to do if you did end up buying a farmstead? Pick up farming or livestock, or just live on the countryside with a big ranch available without animals but otherwise live and work like you do now presumably in a city, or a combination? I've been really interested in the idea of moving out of the city for some time but I don't know many people who've done so. They usually just moved to a smaller city (i.e. a village) without any real farmland, but a decent backyard. (something pretty rare here in Amsterdam). Thanks
  - irrigation 11y ago
    Professionally I can essentially work anywhere with a high speed connection, and my wife is in healthcare and can work anywhere near even a somewhat built up area. We would like to do low-intensity farming, have some chickens (primarily for eggs), ideally have some woodlands, and so on. My wife really wants to try keeping bees, and the honey products from that. I'd love to have enough land to have a small nanny-suite house, a bunkie off in the woods somewhere, etc. With connectivity (which is starting to appear in even really rural areas via wireless options), I really have to imagine that more of an exodus out of urban areas will happen by the people who want the more remote living and had only moved to urban areas out of proximity needs.
jp555 11y ago
There's a TON of productivity gains available using current land. India produces 5x less food per acre than the U.S. We can feed 9 billion using less farmland than we do now if all farms were as productive as the best US tech can provide. plus agriculture tech is progressing very quickly, another doubling of yields is expected in the next decade!
jqm 11y ago
The vast majority of crop land in the US is not used to produce food for humans directly, but rather for animals. (I don't have a source, but at as an agronomist and someone who grew up in agriculture, and someone who has paid careful attention when traveling I can say this is almost certainly the case or close enough to the case to be relevant for the below point...). The key to growing more high value food (protein and fat as opposed to low nutrient density fiber, vitamins and water foodstuff like this system provides) is to remove animals from the equation. This is the terrible inefficiency in modern agriculture and solving it would result in tremendous gains. I'm very excited about things like tank grown nutrient yeasts. There was an article a few weeks ago about a type that has been engineered to produce milk for instance. This type of thing is the future I believe and has great potential. A few off season indoor vegetables are great too. As condiments.
- jqm 11y ago
  Here is a some more info... http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html Corn is the largest crop in the US. 84 million acres of it were grown in 2011 (try fitting that in a hydro system in an old factory). According to the National Corn Growers Association, 80% of corn in the US is consumed by animals.. poultry, cattle, hogs, fish etc. Soybeans are the second largest crop with ~74 million acres grown in 2011. Although not as dramatic as corn, animals eat a significant share of soybeans as well. Over 30 million tons of soybean meal is used as livestock feed annually (very roughly 1/3 of soybean production according to my quick and dirty calculations). The third largest crop is hay at ~56 million acres. This is exclusively used for animal feed. These three crops together are many times the acreage of all other crops combined. Manifestly, the big savings in water, fuel, fertilizer etc would be to remove the dependence on animals in the diet.
  - PopeOfNope 11y ago
    There's evidence to suggest that by eliminating herd animals, we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot[0]. I won't argue the benefits of increasing meat and animal product consumption here, but there is evidence to support that as well. [0]: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-livestock http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-li...

31 points by clumsysmurf 11y ago

jqm 11y ago

This is great if humanity can live on lettuce and tomatoes (both a small part of the taco filling last time I was at Taco Bell). When they get alternatives to grains, pulses, meats and milk then real advancement in food production will being made.

nine_k 11y ago
«The crops are fertilized and irrigated by deep-blue tanks of living tilapia, swimming around just out of sight.» Here comes your meat, sort of.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
To be fair, meat and milk are luxuries. Humanity can live just fine on grains and pulses alone. Lettuce... not so much.

rmason 11y ago

The technology has been around since the seventies when a whole wave of stories were published about how the future of farming would be in skyscrapers. I am reminded of pg's classic essay, suits are back. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html Historically these greenhouses depended on being able to sell a higher quality product during winter months than produce imported from California, Florida and Mexico. The technology is better and now that more people are interested in organic there's an audience that will pay higher prices than the supermarket year around. But it is a small audience, these greenhouses will never feed large numbers of people.

davidiach 11y ago
That's a great article. I've read most of pg articles but missed this one. Thanks for sharing it.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

So far it's always been a great idea, just not very sustainable. I mean imagine building a home for every plant you eat. It'd be kind of crazy right? You'd need to provide many of the things a typical home has: shelter, electricity, plumbing, food supply, structures etc. But this is really what is proposed in these types of farms. Instead of available soil, you build a large structure, pots, racks and tracks. Instead of rainwater and rainwater distribution systems (clouds) you build pipes and tubes and plumbing and install pumps to move it all around. And you provide the plants nutrients in this way. And then you build a large shelter to keep everything away from the elements that mostly grow the plants outside. And then you install artificial lighting and electricity systems to pump energy into the solar panels that we know as leaves, to generate food. For the longest time this has been hugely expensive. And to feed 7 billion people with about 2-3 plants or whatever it is, worth each day (in cereal, greens, fruits and legumes etc), you need to build billions of little plant homes. And that was just never very economical. Let's not forget that a hectare yields an average of about 5.000 kg of cereal. Wheat goes for about $200 per metric ton, so a hectare nets you about $1k. Now that's 107k square footage. That's incredibly cheap. Now imagine you want to replace that with a hectare of factory or say the plant houses I described earlier. That's a huge capex investment in the tens of millions compared to the hectare of soil which is priced around $10-15k and can be leased for a few hundred. To compete on price you'd need very high production in cheap economies of scale to offset your fixed costs on building this huge greenhouse structure with infrastructure for every individual plant. But that's also where the land is much cheaper. It's virtually impossible to run vertical farms on soil, so you need a soilless medium which isn't a problem, but it means you need plumbing to every plant. No biggie. But the same for light, you can't do a vertical farm on scale (i.e. rows and rows) and expect sunshine to reach the bottom plants who sit in the shade. So you need artificial lighting and heating, and that's very expensive compared to sunlight. High value crops, sure it's fine. (e.g. see every indoor weed farm with artificial lighting etc). But as the future of agriculture (where staple foods worldwide are cheap cereals, legumes, corn etc), no way. Unless you have very large advances in material science (cheap, sturdy materials to pump out large greenhouses cheaply and sustainably) and energy (cheap solar pv/thermal, wind, geothermal). And that's what we're seeing now. So it's definitely getting more appealing by the day and it's something I've been very interested in pursuing because I just adore the idea of automated farming on some levels (I love to hike in nature, but large corn fields aren't really nature to me and don't excite me more than the idea of an automated corn factory!), but I still don't see how the economics make sense. And it's more than finance, it's touted as an environmental solution because these farms can be located near the point of consumption. But that's just one part of the story, and incredibly myopic if it's the only part of the story that's considered. For example the problem in community supported agriculture I see is that people will drive a car individually, once a week, to a small location that doesn't get economies of scale, to pick up a tiny amount of food. Because they're under the impression it's more environmentally friendly than a large shipping container moving their beans across the ocean. When in reality their food miles is a bit like saying it's environmentally more friendly drive 2 miles to a store, than to cycle 5 miles to a store for your groceries because 'it's less food miles that way'. Sustainability is a very serious issue and I'm not entirely convinced such factory-style farming is more sustainable (see inherent investments to move from soil to building plant houses). In terms of water usage, it's actually amazing to use a soilless medium, and water is one of this century's biggest challenges. But in terms of materials and energy... I'm very skeptical.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

irrigation 11y ago

"If every neighborhood had its own vertical farm, how many fewer semis would be choking up the metro area?" In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants. We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads. Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
In your considerations, what did you have planned to do if you did end up buying a farmstead? Pick up farming or livestock, or just live on the countryside with a big ranch available without animals but otherwise live and work like you do now presumably in a city, or a combination? I've been really interested in the idea of moving out of the city for some time but I don't know many people who've done so. They usually just moved to a smaller city (i.e. a village) without any real farmland, but a decent backyard. (something pretty rare here in Amsterdam). Thanks
- irrigation 11y ago
  Professionally I can essentially work anywhere with a high speed connection, and my wife is in healthcare and can work anywhere near even a somewhat built up area. We would like to do low-intensity farming, have some chickens (primarily for eggs), ideally have some woodlands, and so on. My wife really wants to try keeping bees, and the honey products from that. I'd love to have enough land to have a small nanny-suite house, a bunkie off in the woods somewhere, etc. With connectivity (which is starting to appear in even really rural areas via wireless options), I really have to imagine that more of an exodus out of urban areas will happen by the people who want the more remote living and had only moved to urban areas out of proximity needs.

jp555 11y ago

There's a TON of productivity gains available using current land. India produces 5x less food per acre than the U.S. We can feed 9 billion using less farmland than we do now if all farms were as productive as the best US tech can provide. plus agriculture tech is progressing very quickly, another doubling of yields is expected in the next decade!

jqm 11y ago

The vast majority of crop land in the US is not used to produce food for humans directly, but rather for animals. (I don't have a source, but at as an agronomist and someone who grew up in agriculture, and someone who has paid careful attention when traveling I can say this is almost certainly the case or close enough to the case to be relevant for the below point...). The key to growing more high value food (protein and fat as opposed to low nutrient density fiber, vitamins and water foodstuff like this system provides) is to remove animals from the equation. This is the terrible inefficiency in modern agriculture and solving it would result in tremendous gains. I'm very excited about things like tank grown nutrient yeasts. There was an article a few weeks ago about a type that has been engineered to produce milk for instance. This type of thing is the future I believe and has great potential. A few off season indoor vegetables are great too. As condiments.

jqm 11y ago
Here is a some more info... http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html Corn is the largest crop in the US. 84 million acres of it were grown in 2011 (try fitting that in a hydro system in an old factory). According to the National Corn Growers Association, 80% of corn in the US is consumed by animals.. poultry, cattle, hogs, fish etc. Soybeans are the second largest crop with ~74 million acres grown in 2011. Although not as dramatic as corn, animals eat a significant share of soybeans as well. Over 30 million tons of soybean meal is used as livestock feed annually (very roughly 1/3 of soybean production according to my quick and dirty calculations). The third largest crop is hay at ~56 million acres. This is exclusively used for animal feed. These three crops together are many times the acreage of all other crops combined. Manifestly, the big savings in water, fuel, fertilizer etc would be to remove the dependence on animals in the diet.
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  There's evidence to suggest that by eliminating herd animals, we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot[0]. I won't argue the benefits of increasing meat and animal product consumption here, but there is evidence to support that as well. [0]: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-livestock http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-li...