
Farming in the Sky - clumsysmurf
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/05/farming-in-the-sky/392045/?single_page=true
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rmason
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
That's a great article. I've read most of pg articles but missed this one.
Thanks for sharing it.

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jp555
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!

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jqm
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
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
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-
li...](http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-livestock)

~~~
jqm
Interesting point. Also there are many areas suitable for animal grazing that
aren't good for crops.

The problem is grain fed meet and milk from an efficiency standpoint.

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jqm
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
To be fair, meat and milk are luxuries. Humanity can live just fine on grains
and pulses alone. Lettuce... not so much.

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IkmoIkmo
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.

~~~
falcolas
I think the biggest problem with land-based farms is that there is only so
much land available for it, and that land is also highly valued for other
properties (such as residential and commercial ventures).

I don't think it's unreasonable to see us get to a point where the only room
we have to grow our crops is upwards (or on another planet, but that's even
further out on the timeline).

~~~
fennecfoxen
> I think the biggest problem with land-based farms is that there is only so
> much land available for it, and that land is also highly valued for other
> properties (such as residential and commercial ventures).

I don't think you really understand the distribution of land use and
urbanization in the world if you think construction of houses and shops are a
substantial limiting factor in its agriculture. Your remedial assignment is to
drive from Denver to Chicago.

As for growing plants on another planet... and shipping them back to Earth...
if you've got that sort of an energy budget to waste shipping food around why
aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or some
nonsense like that?

~~~
falcolas
> Your remedial assignment is to drive from Denver to Chicago.

And yours is to drive from Boston to Miami. Or London to Glasgow. Or Osaka to
Tokyo.

Cherry picking a route through the breadbasket of America as an example of
typical land distribution between urban and agricultural doesn't make for a
convincing argument.

> why aren't you just building nuclear-powered underground greenhouse-caves or
> some nonsense like that?

Because any such location would be more valuable as a spot to pack more
humans. Proximity (particularly when you start working on a planetary scale)
to urban centers is worth a lot of money.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> And yours is to drive from Boston to Miami. Or London to Glasgow. Or Osaka
> to Tokyo.

I haven't driven from Boston to Miami in one trip, but I've traversed that
entire corridor. My grandparents once owned a few acres on a private lake near
Eastford, CT. Lots of cool old dairy-farms, apple orchards, berry-picking,
bird-watching, wildlife, _et cetera_. Most of I95 south of Alexandria is
rather boring -- hours and hours of trees -- if you're starting by DC it's a
little more fun to divert along US 301, passing through horse territory and
then rolling through Fort AP Hill. More travel time, but on the northern part
of the route you're more likely to pass the occasional roadside produce
stands.

The southernmost bits are the ones I'm less familiar with, though those are
possibly the most interesting as in Florida in particular there are places
where urban development threatens the most sensitive ecosystems... but the
Everglades were never known for agriculture. Agriculture does moreover
threaten ecosystems across the midwest (one recent example: monarch
butterflies have been suffering massive population drops in the past few years
because Roundup-Ready crops have led to widespread herbicide application that
kills the weeds that they'd use for food).

But agriculture itself is not under substantial pressure from urban land use
at this time. Look, let's ask the US Department of Agriculture:
[http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib-economic-
informatio...](http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib-economic-information-
bulletin/eib14.aspx) (2002).

Urban land, 2.6% of the nation's land area. Crop land, 19.5%. Grassland
pastures/ranges: 25.9%.
-[http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/249911/eib14fm_1_.pdf](http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/249911/eib14fm_1_.pdf)

"In 2002, urban land in the United States was less than 3 percent of total
land area, but housed 79 percent of the U.S. population." \-
[http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/250013/eib14g_1_.pdf](http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/250013/eib14g_1_.pdf)

Space for physical people has always been a nonissue next to space for their
agriculture and other people-supporting land uses.

------
irrigation
"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
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
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.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Man that sounds lovely. (I assume you do independent development,
freelancing/consulting, or work remotely in dev?)

Just the other day I was checking out the blog by
[http://foodcyclist.com/farm-blog/](http://foodcyclist.com/farm-blog/)

He's not a super techie, he has a few websites and it's not always super
professionally structured, but check it out. He's basically a dude who got
into farming later in life, first did an apprenticeship, and then started his
own community supported agriculture (CSA) business.

His initial focus was chickens which you mentioned wanting to do. It's looks
like it's pretty easy for him. He orders chicks online, they have enough food
in their bellies to survive the trip in the mail (sounds crazy but apparently
it's a normal thing). He has a heat lamp and a basic food/water installation.
He designed his own pens for the older chicken for which he has a blueprint
online for free, they're actually very neat. And then he has to do the
butchering which is the worst part, but he has about 60 customers for his CSA
who paid him upfront for the season (I think about 20 weeks), and he delivers
one whole chicken to them per week, so about 50 per week, and he actually has
a very high chicken price at about $25 or so. Anyway so all these people
basically paid him in advance, so he starts with $30k and can make the
investments he needs to. (seller discretionary cashflow is about $8k per
year).

I can easily see how producing 1 chicken per week for your family, plus eggs,
is a piece of cake. He's now also moving into other things, eggs, crops, hogs
and vineyards and his own brewery. You can see some of his financial plans for
2015 here: [http://www.farmmarketingsolutions.com/about/income-
reports/2...](http://www.farmmarketingsolutions.com/about/income-
reports/2015-farm-budget/)

The cool thing is he's trying to be 100% transparent. Very interesting insight
into small-scale farming. Providing for yourself is pretty easy, not trivial
but very very doable. Providing for a CSA also looks like a very decent
business, it's hard work but you can compete because people pay a premium for
this stuff. On a larger scale I'm skeptical, selling wholesale really sucks
and it just doesn't seem to be worth it unless you automate it (which seems
only economical when you get economies of scale, i.e. a large scale) largely,
or go big on certification and find a bio/eco/sustainability/local niche that
wholesalers are seeing increased demand for themselves, too. Anyway I know
that's not really your goal here but I thought I'd share the link :) All the
best

~~~
irrigation
That is a _fantastic_ blog, thank you very much. I love reading stuff like
that.

I have the luxury, of sorts, that the farm doesn't really need to support
anyone financially (the primary income still coming from `traditional'
sources), and ultimately just having a selection of foods available for my own
immediate and extended family would be awesome. I've done the home vegetable
garden thing for years, and would really like to take it to the next level.
One of the next things about a lot of crops is that minimal effort often gets
you 70% to the best outcome, so while a dedicated farmer carefully tends
everything to fully optimize, I find the bounty and selection of just a
variety of lazily planted tomato plants incredible.

