This is another in a long, long series of breathlessly promoted "urban"/"vertical" farming concepts. In virtually every case the description is projection. The economies rarely work out except for leafy greens in extremely dense urban regions without reliable access to countryside or greenhouse options.
... or locally grown organic super-fresh superfood greens for a major tourist economy like Las Vegas?
It could work for niche stuff, but energy costs is always what kills these ideas for the mainstream market. Sunlight is free. If we had Mr. Fusion maybe it could work.
Edit: I suppose it could work in the Middle East too where energy may be cheap enough (solar, cheap gas) vs. the cost of shipping it from Europe or further away.
It's true, this might be one of the optimal markets for this kind of farming. You're right about the other niches. There will be a few. Blueberries in Brooklyn. Us hipsters need our avocado toasts and rare fruit brunches in all seasons.
With unlimited power, everything changes. We get the incredible luxury of scientifically produced vegetables. They can be optimized to perfection in harmony with consumer tastes. Every season brings a new designer crop...
Well, maybe it could happen without unlimited power. We can dream.
Yes. I must also add that Las Vegas and Dubai are in areas with tremendously abundant year round solar power. There is rarely even a cloud in the sky. When the sun is up these days upwards of 40% of the power in Southern California can be solar. Not sure about Nevada but the potential is definitely there.
Around noon PST you'll see upwards of 11GW of solar. (This includes rooftop installations if they have smart meters.)
Of course it's more efficient to just put the plant's leaves in the sun, but water isn't free either and you lose far more water that way. I wonder if cost of water in the desert could outrun the cost of indirect solar -> electricity -> calories? It could be true in the US Southwest, but it could definitely be true in Dubai or Saudi Arabia. In places like that desalination is one of the only sources of fresh water, and that's likely more energy intensive than indoor farming.
So yes it could work in a few markets, but it's not going to replace conventional agriculture broadly.
Yup; in additiona it needs e.g. calories per m2 and cost. In the article I see a lot of leaves (very low caloric count) with a lot of employees around it in lab coats - that just can't be profitable. It can't compete with thousands of acres of high-calorie products like corn or potatoes harvested by just one guy in a combine. At the moment (According to a quora post, https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-can-be-fed-year-round-...), right now we use 0.5 acres of farmland per person; I'm sure that can be optimized a bit so let's say 0.25 acres per person, or ~1000 m2. That's an area of 30x30 meters. The Empire State Building, to name a random example, is ~130x57 meters, or about 7500m2 (very rough calculation). Therefore, you can feed about 7.5 people per floor. Give or take, very rough back of the napkin calculation.
7.5 people per floor isn't a lot and it's very expensive. Maybe useful for colonizing Mars where money isn't that big of a deal, but definitely not feed-the-world level scaling.
Calories per m2 is not a useful metric, dollars per m2 is the appropriate one. They are not attempting to feed the world, they are attempting to get premium leafy greens to market quickly.
Accurate. Personal health has completely bypassed the calorie as a useful metric btw. You can't survive on a diet of 1,800 calories of vegetable oil per day
The key to successful hydrophonic farming is, surprisingly, marketing.
I've visited a couple of these in Europe. There's a lot of manual labor and electricity involved and it's very expensive. The only way to make it work is to sell your lettuce as '100% environmentally friendly, zero pesticides' and ask 10x the price of 'regular' lettuce.
But honestly, I've never really tased the difference and I wonder if the environmentally-friendly stuff holds true if you really look into it.
the taste depends on the nutrient solution used in culture...
some people enjoy the "clean" taste of defined hydroponic medium, however there are complex sugars esters and volatile organics that are responsible for the flavour of the product...
bioponic medium consists of organic substances humic and fulvic acids that provide a product far superior to a bland hothouse tomato taste...
as far as environmentally friendly, there is considerable plastics waste resulting from greenhouse operations that have a wastefull process...
hydroponic methods use, and reuse nutrient solutions and water as well as minimal solid medium...couple this with a caring attitude and a hydroponic operation can be very environmentally friendly if the factory farm mentality is avoided...
About half a kilometer from my house in a rural area is a leafy greens farm that has two sections, hydroponics and soil grown. Both are covered by nets and are pesticide-free. They claim demand is for the soil grown is higher because people prefer the taste. I don't really notice much difference.
im curious, do you smoke?
somepeople have very particular tastebuds...
also peatmoss "potting soil" is not soil it is artificial media but does have "flavour" im wondering what is being considered soil, and what is hydroponic media...
true soil is mineral, organic matter, bacteria and fungi and thier metabolic products...hydroponic media is some form of nutritional complement in solution, often in an inert medium such as "rockwool" or free solution aquaponics with no solid carrier just liquid. bioponics is a catch word of sorts that describes something like the effluent from a compost heap adjusted to physiological specifications for the crop in culture... it may be interesting to try a "p3ps1 challenge" with different cultures espescially with tomatoes and cucumbers...
I don't smoke. But it's not me anyway. It's what the growers tell me is preferred by their customers, which are mainly local restaurants. The soil is the local dirt that has been amended with compost so it's nothing special. The hydroponic system they use is just roots dangling in closed tubes through which hydroponic solution is pumped at regular intervals.
Aquaponics is when you combine fish farming and hydroponics, circulating the water from the fish pond which is full of fish poop to feed the plants, and utilizing the plants to filter the water, in a semi-closed system. That's not what they are doing at the nearby farm.
I had a fairly large aquaponics system for a while. 30 meter diameter pond with tilapia and a long channel full of gravel that was planted with various vegetables through which pond water was pumped at regular intervals. The pond was large enough and had enough plants in it that it achieved balance on its own without having to continuously run the pump. So maintenance was easy and no fear of the fish dying. In fact, it got out of control with the tilapia multiplying like crazy.
some are like this, but not all...
you ended up creating a large scale biological fiter that rendered the tank filter obsolete other than to eutrophize the fish tank environment[good]
the basic play is to balance the system of give and take between plants as a nitrogen sink, and a biological nitrogen source...
the cycle of nitrosomas and nitrobacter conversion of ammoniacal substance to nitrite and nitrate available for plant assimilation occurs in the particulate accumulated in the gravel bed...
fish are convienient and tasty but very often a compost tailings lagoon is used...there is a wide acceptance of bio remediation of sewage, hor farm runoff in the niagara escarpment area...
Just for reference, total consumption of leaf lettuce in the US is in the neighborhood of 3 billion pounds annually. Leaf lettuce is the most valuable vegetable crop, it runs about $0.45 per pound. So they're spending $30m on a facility that can produce wholesale product worth $450,000 a year, gross revenue... I'm not sure the math on that works out.
They are not looking to grow iceberg lettuce that bounces around on a truck for a week. They are going to grow premium greens, the article mentions chervil and mizuna, that are going to be eaten the same day it is harvested.
around southern ontario, hydroponic leaf lettuce is close to $3.00 a head...
a head will mature in 3 weeks from transplant from starter trays...
that means 21 heads of lettuce in some state of growth between leafling and finished product if you do a continuous production culture...
8 inches is adequate linear spacing for fancy leaf lettuce thus 168 linear inches per batch repetition thats 14 feet or 2 units of 7 feet...
almost everyone has the spatial capacity to produce thier own continuous supply of leaf lettuce at home, if they dont mind tending them as they would a common house plant...
Oh BTW ...how much does one pay for a nice ceaser salad nowadays?
get an old drawer from a captains bed a few pieces of 4" pipe a bag of your favorite fertilizer (organic or othewise) and some full spectrum LED panels, ready to go except for a wack old futon mattress to lay ontop...
then lettuce grow hmm, what would we grow hidden away under the couch?
A vanity metric is a metric that doesn't mean anything but sounds impressive. "Number of free trial downloads" is a vanity metric when what matters to the business is paying customers.
"Pounds of produce produced by a produce company" is a real metric, not a vanity one -- it's just not that impressive of a number in this case.
Due to the wide range of produce prices per pound it has little relation to a specific farm’s profit. Making it a Vanity metric.
Farm area equivalent has some direct relationship with profit and would be allowed. But in that case it would be a tiny farm and show they would be better off spending 1/3 as much on buying land an 30 minuets from the city than going vertical.
Seems environmentally unfriendly to rely 100% on electricity in one of the sunnier places in the country — you'd think there'd be a way to pipe in daylight via fiber optic cords during the day, and transition to LEDs as the sun begins to set and during the night.
That said I'm really excited to see vertical farming grow as a market, ideally in denser cities like SF or NYC where proximity to the nearest farms can be a few hours away depending on what you want to buy.
I certainly agree with you. The idea is indeed great but one has to be very sure about its economies of scale when setting up a vertical farm. I have a small setup in my apartment and it needs a lot of upfront setup cost and recurring monitoring, electricity cost etc.
Vertical farms, if designed in a sustainable way, can be profitable in a long run. Since it can be automated one should automate it completely saving on man power.
Also, understanding of what crop to grow, how to grow and most important how to sell it will make any vertical farm profitable.
> Vertical farms, if designed in a sustainable way, can be profitable in a long run
This comes down to the cost of urban real estate versus the cost of transportation. As that ratio shifts, the optimal distance from city centre, for an urban farm, moves.
1m² of crop requires 1m² of sunlight. If you have 1000m² of crops and 100m² of sunlight hitting the roof you will need to get that missing 900m² from somewhere else.
Depends if it offsets the inefficiency of watering. As water becomes more and more of an issue the power needed to run LED grow lights isn't the biggest issue.
I believe farms like this use a lot less water to grow the same yield.
Did not get the whole idea behind www.growcomputer.io. Practically my need is a monitoring and automation suite. Something like autogrow (https://autogrow.com/product-category/hardware/) which can monitor PH/EC/TEMP/HUM and automate nutrient supply.
Maybe not so terrible. Of course "some" crops are more valuable than other, but I bet than growing vegetables is only half of the business here.
The dirty secret of the agriculture is that this green creatures love manure, and need it to growth well.
I happens than Las Vegas Hotels generate large amounts of animal waste each day and need to pay for getting rid of all this stuff asap by road or pipeline... Connect the dots.
Read between the lines. This isn't about growing free range soy and cruelty free tomatoes. The goal here is to have a proven method for growing stuff indoors so that by the time they can use it for pot the kinks have already been worked out and they can just scale right away and dominate a regional market before the competition gets off the ground.
If they can sell to grocers in order to make the business equivalent of sleep(untilpotbecomeslecal()) sustainable then good for them but that's not really the primary goal here. Indoor vertical farming just doesn't work out except in niche cases of very high margins or legal requirements that require things be farmed indoors. City land is just too expensive to grow stuff on unless you're growing a really lucrative crop. Other than pot that's not much that meets one/both of those requirements.
edit: This isn't a condemnation, I'm just calling it like I see it.
Is this sustainable at all? Good solar panels have 20% efficiency so this will result in at least 5x more land use. Heck this doesn't work out even with 100% efficiency. The same amount of farmland would still have to be covered in solar panels. This may make sense on mars or on the moon but definitively not on earth.
Photosynthesis is about 1% efficient so when you combine optimal watering and nutrition with 20-hr light cycles (last I looked at it, some darkness was useful), you still have a highly efficient system
Hydroponic technique by any other name still smells as a liquified nutrient extract solution...
the method is millenia old, as in ancient greek and babylonian...
most people practice a form of modified slop culture on thier windowsill...
those who understand how far they can push a plant to yield more , make out like gangbusters...
nothing new in las vegas to see here citizen, now move along...
"Oasis Biotech" ...
if we find the c.v. for thier technicians we may see something interesting[speculation]
a biotech facility may use plants as the carrier for novel genes in order to produce biochemical or pharmaceutical products, even an oral vaccine bearing plant product...a classical "plantized" operation in a lab and industrial compound is expensive to design construct and operate...
genetic engineering of plants can be cheap and forgiving in the event of failures, thus not financially catastrophic...
these sorts of startups may be a good stock pick
