
World’s Biggest Indoor Vertical Farm Near NYC to Use 95% Less Water - rottyguy
http://weburbanist.com/2016/06/05/worlds-biggest-indoor-vertical-farm-near-nyc-to-use-95-less-water/
======
brudgers
[Warning metric not used]

I was reading this and trying to parse the economics. I mean 70k square feet
is about two acres [@ 43560/acre] and at 75x efficiency per square foot it
works out to about 150 acres of farmland. Lets call it a quarter section [160
acres]. Now a quarter section is the size farm my boy's Great Grandpa Fred
farmed with his German speaking father and a mule in Kussuth County, Iowa the
better part of 100 years ago. Enough land in a year with no major misfortune
to support a family farm as a business but that today would perhaps need
subscribed city folk and organic certification and a used tractor to be a
gentleman's break even hobby.

At this point in the rant I was going to write, I was going to write about how
little food two million pounds is and how it would never make a dent in the
logistics of feeding people. And as I composed that part in my head, "two
million pounds" seemed a queer [with no sexual connotation] way of marketing
the output. And the whole thing made little sense economically...I mean even
at Whole Foods, two million pounds of tomatoes might barely keep the lights on
and the employee parking lot full.

I thought "What are they smoking?" And it looks to me like this is an effort
to get out in front of marijuana legalization. Two million pounds at even a
piddly $1000/per does make sense with the big bucks of the Big Apple's stoners
spitting distance away. And since that is consistent with my heuristic that
when someone looks like an idiot and they're not a teenager, then I'm probably
the idiot if I assume that they are, so I figure that getting ready for
growing weed is about the best sense of the venture I'm going to make.

~~~
jongpieter
The volume weight ratio of leafy greens, is much higher compared to tomatoes.
Second the shelf life of leafy greens is lower compared to fruit crops.

In respect to transportation costs, shelf life and transportation distance, it
makes sense growing these crops near their distribution points.

Second not to forget the benefit of CO2 reduction in urban area's, as there is
less and less space for nature in urban areas.

The only downside is the energy usage, this has been reduced using LED
lighting, but is still compared to traditional greenhouse or open-field
growing.

~~~
mason240
Transportation accounts for a minuscule amount of the total resources used to
grow food on an industrial scale.

~~~
hackuser
> Transportation accounts for a minuscule amount of the total resources used
> to grow food on an industrial scale

Interesting.

Is that still the case if the true costs of greenhouse gasses emitted by
transportation and refrigeration are accounted for?

Does that mean the 'buy locally' idea has little climate impact?

Also, to save my lazy, busy fingers from doing it myself, do you happen to
know a good link to research on this subject?

~~~
ars
> Does that mean the 'buy locally' idea has little climate impact?

No, buy locally has a large climate impact - only not in the direction you
think. Local uses much more energy than non-local.

Local has no environmental benefits whatsoever - only negatives.

The only thing it has going for it is some nebulous social benefits of knowing
your farmer.

I avoid local because it means the produce was grown not in the climate where
it grows best, but rather forced (i.e. lots of extra resources) to grow near
me.

~~~
jestar_jokin
But isn't part of the "buying local" movement also buying produce that's in
season for your climate?

If you're buying local pineapples in Duluth, I can see it would defeat the
purpose.

~~~
ars
Even if it's in season doesn't mean your climate is the best place to grow it.

If it was the best place, then it would be competitive on the open market, and
produce from your area would be the primary produce on the market - without
any hokey social movements.

~~~
jacalata
That's only true if you want to claim that the "best" place to grow
$randomFruit cannot be more profitably used doing $randomThing. Downtown San
Francisco could be the world best microclimate for tomatoes but it still
probably wouldn't be worth using the land for that instead of an apartment.

------
kefka
There's something neat going on here.

Projects like this take growing that happens in the rural areas to the city.
We've always had a strife between country and city life, and country life is
where food is grown. With this change, we're seeing food done in the city as
well.

Of course this could be seen as potentially bad for farmers, as they lose a
bit more control...

But there's some awesome upsides:

Potentially completely robotic. I was looking into with a friend about an
automated greenhouse. It fell through due to medical disasters, but we had the
nuts and bolts figured out. The gist is hydroponics with tilapia serving as
protein and fertilizer for the plants. It would take around 10 mins/day for up
to 100sq. ft. (it's considered that 25 sq ft is enough to feed a human
indefinitely.)

Provides food for a city. Now, instead of having to rely on 'elsewhere', we
can point to the building where our food comes from. The gist here is that
there's now food security.

Lower transportation costs. Now, instead of food coming from 'elsewhere', it
comes from the building over there. Distribution costs are cheaper, storage is
onsite and local.

Is not subject to the growing season. With this system in place, the growing
season is now 24/7/365.

Is also not subject to a host of pests or other environmental damaging
effects. Everything is controlled: light, rain, drainage, nutrients. So yields
will be much higher than on land.

Organic can be much easier. Since there's few/no pests, neonitonoids and
similar aren't needed, nor are other nasty insecticides and herbicides.

Yes, it does cost more, due to using electricity. However solar is getting
cheaper. These buildings could also be used in conjunction with spillover from
power plants: There's no reason why the day/night cycle can't be switched, so
that the grow building is using power at night, when power is usually not
consumed (and is cheaper).

Edit: Seriously, modded down already? How about whoever did that _also_ leave
a comment why this is not good content?

~~~
mason240
This is not going replace farming anymore than me growing a spinach plant in a
pot at home.

It's actually a little disappointing to see just how out of touch the people
in this thread are with farming. Growing food outside, in the ground is always
going to be cheaper than building a building.

~~~
kefka
>This is not going replace farming anymore than me growing a spinach plant in
a pot at home.

Well, I've got 200 sq ft my wife and I are growing by hand. We have manual
tools, compost, dirt, and muscles. And your spinach example is a pretty bad
one. Why? Spinach grows better when its cold out and earlier in the season. If
you plant a week or 2 later, it doesn't really grow and then when the heat
hits, it bolts. Bolted spinach and lettuce tastes bitter and bad. It'd sure be
nice to be able to grow spinach in ideal conditions... but I can't do that in
the ground.

>It's actually a little disappointing to see just how out of touch the people
in this thread are with farming. Growing food outside, in the ground is always
going to be cheaper than building a building.

"always going to be cheaper" is a really long time. Sure you mean to put it
that way?

I'm no farmer, but I grow quite a bit of my food. I guess amateur farmer is
probably more accurate. Right now, the economic equation is on the side of
"grow in dirt, on property". But 1 acre only gets you an acre of stuff at
ideal yield. Add 10 more stories on that same plot of land, and you get 10
acre yield (ideal).

And, you're also not counting having a self sufficient city as an intangible.
Something like that is the start of an arcology. That technology stack also
seems rather important to grow for a spacefaring culture.

~~~
randomdata
_> I guess amateur farmer is probably more accurate._

Gardner is the usual term. And there is a huge chasm between gardening and
farming, which is what I expect the parent is trying to get at.

Myself, I grow food on hundreds of acres. Yet I wouldn't know the first thing
about growing spinach on a 200 sq ft plot. It's just a completely different
skill set. To try and draw an analogy that fits HN, the difference is kind of
like knowing how to use your Windows PC at home and knowing how to manage a
huge data centre full of 1,000s of Linux systems at work.

It will be interesting to see what the future brings, but considering that we
traditional farmers get a lot of things for for free (solar energy, rain,
etc.), it will be difficult to beat that on cost. Depends on what you are
growing, I suppose.

~~~
fencepost
I'm curious - do you have any ballpark numbers on the impact that weather has
on your profitability? Not just for growing conditions (cloudy/sunny,
rain/drought) but also for extreme weather events if and when they occur?

------
pjc50
... and how much energy by comparison with conventional outdoor farming?

~~~
Already__Taken
Anything under an existing farm + 95% the energy it takes to treat/move the
water is a win I would have thought.

~~~
DennisP
You're forgetting the vast energy provided free to a regular farm by sunlight.
Average daily solar energy falling on each square meter of the Earth is 6 kWh
[1].

You're right that irrigation is a significant energy cost: for example [2],
irrigating 135 acres in Nebraska will use 50,000 kWh over the course of one
season.

But an acre has 4046 square meters. Based on the global average, that same 135
acres will collect 3,277,260 kWh of solar energy over the course of a _single
day_. That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations,
just for lighting.

Optimizing spectrum can cut the lighting energy in half, and other measures
like packing plants more tightly can help, but even if you reduce it by 90% it
still dwarfs the energy expense of regular farms.

It may be a reasonable expense for particular crops that don't want full sun
anyway, but energy usage isn't likely to ever be an advantage for indoor
farms. An acceptable disadvantage in certain cases, maybe.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth)

[2] [http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-
Irrigat...](http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-
Irrigation.pdf)

~~~
EGreg
Why can't a farm capture natural sunlight and redistribute it?

Even a low-tech method like mirrors ought to do it. As long as all the
wavelengths that the plants need are reflected by the mirror. Why not?

~~~
DennisP
To collect as much sunlight as the regular farm, you'll have to spread mirrors
over the same area. So why not save all that money and plant the crops
directly on the ground? If you want them indoors, to save water and chemicals,
use greenhouses; you can use cheap plastic sheeting instead of expensive
mirrors.

~~~
EGreg
The sunlight of a regular farm is largely wasted. The plants are spread apart
because of their moisture and soil needs and most of ths sunlight hits dirt.

Now, there may be bacteria in the regolith which we don't know about, and
we'll find out why they are neededin certain proportions... but even so, we
can be collecting dirt from all over the place for the next crop...

It seems that sunlight hitting plants that are "closer together" and stacked
vertically will be far more efficient. Besides, some plants don't even need
the full sunlight to grow!

~~~
fencepost
Actually on most farms there's probably not a bit of dirt to be seen under the
crop being raised, at least not for bulk crops like corn and soybeans and once
the growing season is well under way. Any dirt not covered in the desired crop
isn't bare and absorbing sunlight, it's space that's probably growing weeds or
other undesirable plants (e.g. soybeans during a corn year for places that
rotate their crops).

------
tgb
It seems like NYC is a poor place to house this. Ideally, if you wanted it to
be viable and not just a proof-of-concept, you'd find somewhere with cheap
electricity, cheaper land/rent than NYC[1], and expensive fresh produce. My
guess is Iceland would be a good spot, and I'd be a little surprised if they
didn't have something like this already in the works. Iceland also has another
side benefit for traditional greenhouses: the ground can naturally heat the
houses. [http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-
utilization/greenhouses/](http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-
utilization/greenhouses/)

[1] It's actually in Newark, not sure what property prices are like there.

~~~
sharpercoder
More factors com into play then just energy costs. Warmth, distance-to-market,
water, real estate just to name a few.

~~~
tgb
That's why I listed other factors, too, including real estate and, in an
unusual manner, warmth.

------
hallman76
For folks in the Northeast US, the Backyard Farms brand of tomatoes has a
similarly fascinating growing process[1]. They're grown in greenhouse in Maine
that's the size of 20 football fields[2]. There are no pests and therefore no
pesticides; no dirt, so no washing.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms)

~~~
mjhoy
It's a crazy building in the middle of nowhere, central Maine, about file
miles away from where I grew up. I bike by it when visiting home and it's
wonderfully strange.

There have been pests, though:
[http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-
backy...](http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backyard-
farms-to-destroy-crop_2013-07-10/)

------
OhHeyItsE
"Near NYC" :(

C'mon - throw Newark a bone already!

~~~
gravypod
I know how it feels. I've just taken to aying that I go to college next to
NYC.

------
mrfusion
Wouldn't issues with weeds and pests also be way better? You just don't let
them in?

If they could sell crops with zero herbicides or pesticides you'd think they
could clean up.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Not really, once they've gotten in the only intervention is aggressive
quarantining and drenching everything with pesticides. Outside, there's much
better access to things that eat pests, e.g. wasps/spiders/viruses, and
infestations are less likely to be catastrophic.

Of course, this might be different in inner-city environments and there are
people that supply some types of pests' pests for use in greenhouses.

~~~
tomp
Couldn't you compartmentalise the food so that you'd only need to throw away a
single "block" of food if it gets contaminated?

------
foxhop
Food isn't supposed to grow without soil, minerials, fungus, and sunlight.
It's going to be empty of nutrition and flavor. A shell of an idea of what
constitutes lettuce or a carrot, tomato or potatoe.

These data center clean rooms for factory food is just riddled with issues,
abstracted layers of nonsense tech that wirks worse then the natural systems
already working and present in nature.

~~~
kbart
That's not necessarily true. It depends mostly on the quality of nutritional
supplements used. I have my own experimental indoor garden under LEDs (though
I still use substrate, not hydroponics yet) and their taste is by no means
inferior to that brought in the organic outdoor gardens.

------
wcchandler
Man this stuff gets me pumped up. I've always wanted to be a farmer, but it
never made economical sense to pursue. I've been dabbling (more than just
dabbling...) with hydroponics, LEDs and automation for grows. Within the next
3-5 years I'll probably be able to finally pursue this dream with all these
advancements. Love it! Can't wait!

~~~
rmah
It makes even less economic sense to farm indoors.

~~~
wcchandler
Except for when it's winter time and nothing can grow outside. :) But even
then, only if the infrastructure is already in place.

------
joslin01
If you're interested in indoor farming, you'd probably be interested in
aquaponics[1] -- the successful integration of hydroponics & aquaculture.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0)

------
petepete
Not really on the same scale but there's a farm in a former air raid shelter
beneath London.

[http://growing-underground.com/](http://growing-underground.com/)

------
marak830
Damn. I was going to say we need this in Japan, but it does mention a Japanese
one. I wonder what the costs are like though? Worker hours and electrical).

~~~
newmanships
You might enjoy reading this:
[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-
firm-to-open-worlds-first-robot-run-farm) :)

~~~
marak830
Nice, thank you!

------
Dowwie
related post I made 12 days ago, but reported by IEEE
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006)

------
asimuvPR
OT: A good way to explore more about vertical indoor farming is playing the
game Minecraft on a public server (the reddit server (nerd.nu) is good). You
will see many working examples that will simply blow your mind away.

------
fencepost
I wish I'd seen this and had a chance to reply earlier. I think a lot of
commenters are missing some key points. First, this is still pretty early-
stage stuff, and it's quite likely that almost everyone working in this field
right now is not going to get rich any more than most of the people working on
gasoline-powered horseless carriages got rich.

My personal prediction is that this kind of thing is going to be a lot more
common in 40 years regardless of whether the current stuff is going to be used
for growing pot - and pot itself will become a much less profitable crop with
legalization, though the security advantages of this kind of indoor volume
growing (fields and fences? why bother?) may prolong that.

What's going to be a bigger factor over time is climate change - not in the
form of "zomg we're all going to cook and the plants will all die!" but in the
form of increased atmospheric water and energy and extreme weather events. How
many monsoon-style torrential rains per decade does it take to have a
significant impact on farming? Growing up in the Midwest I used to regularly
hear "farm reports" on the radio about crop damage due to hailstorms and heavy
thunderstorms; for a lot of farmers it won't take a lot of damage to make
their farms economically unviable. Some of this may disproportionately impact
areas where a lot of food is grown[1], but it's not going to be isolated to
those areas [2]. The water carrying capacity of air increases by more than 38%
between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius (20g/kg to 27.7g/kg), and while a 5 degree
change might be extreme, we're certainly going to blow right past a 2 degree
change. That extra water (and the heat energy it holds) are going to be seen
in weather.

There may also be some significant changes in building - for example, an all-
glass skyscraper (if unobstructed) might well have an outer "shell" 5 feet
from interior windows, with vertical plantings of some sort within that space
- plants/greenery either for or just visible to the occupants, and if you go
more extreme you might see exteriors covered with transparent photovoltaics
[3] that pass through frequencies of light that are used by plants while
simultaneously powering LEDs that convert the other frequencies into something
the plants can use.

Remember, the folks working on this stuff right now are the Apple Newton
developers of their industry. What are the iPads of the industry going to look
like?

[1]
[http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wksh...](http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wkshop_jan2012-MikeDettinger131.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.ph...](http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.php)

[3] [http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-
cells](http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells)

