
Vertical farming: Does it really stack up? - ph0rque
http://www.economist.com/node/17647627?story_id=17647627
======
electromagnetic
> The world’s population is expected to increase to 9.1 billion by 2050 ...
> Feeding all those people will mean increasing food production by 70%

According to the World Bank we're already at almost 6.8 billion people. This
means we'd need to feed an extra 33% of the worlds population, meaning we'd
need approximately 33% more food as our food usage already factors in losses
from production, delivery, etc.

The only way you get 70% is if you made 9.1 the divisor when it is the
dividend. You take where we will be 9.1, divide it by where we are 6.8 and you
get how much more production we need 33% (IE 133% of present). If 9.1 is the
divisor you get ~75%, more likely 70% as this will have been based off of a
few year older (but likely slightly more accurate) population counts.

So, to put it simply, a whole bunch of people in the UN can't do basic math.

> Soil erosion will not be a problem because the food will be grown
> hydroponically—in other words, in a solution of minerals dissolved in water.

In other words - it will taste like nothing. Ever tried a hydroponically grown
tomato? Ever tried one after eating a local vine ripened or even a home grown
tomato? If you have, I bet you never tasted the hydroponic tomato.

I've eaten hydroponic tomatoes over the past decade and never noticed a
difference or improvement, so how long before its actually edible, and
actually worth purchasing? I even frequently see the hydroponic tomatoes to be
paler and more tasteless than even the cheap tomatoes imported from half way
across the country that were picked weeks before ripeness.

~~~
aspiringsensei
Many people are eating for survival, not epicurean delights. I hear your
complaints about lack of taste, but I don't think they invalidate the method
of growing hydroponically.

~~~
electromagnetic
I don't think they invalidate the method, no. However, we're talking about
building these structures in areas where the majority of people are not eating
for survival.

Vertical Farms will be built where Vertical Buildings are built - cities.
Cities contain a hugely disproportionate amount of western civilizations
population and even more wealth. People in cities are generally paying for
higher quality food than people in rural areas, so it seems rather asinine to
construct vertical farms only to export the produce out of the city into
poorer areas where hydroponic crops are more likely to be purchased.

Vertical farms would be far more likely to succeed if they were producing high
quality foods, not low quality foods. Sell vine ripened tomatoes picked
_yesterday_ and you'll make a killing compared to the hydroponic tomatoes they
would be selling. I've seen hydroponic tomatoes selling for 1/4 of the price
of California vine ripened tomatoes (I live in ontario, we're the last stop,
they're harvested like a month before they should be ripe). You should easily
be able to make 8 times the amount selling 'harvested yesterday, vine ripened
tomatoes' in a big city than you would hydroponic.

My contention isn't that vine ripened won't feed people. It's that they're
planning on feeding the wrong people the wrong food which is just a market
failure begging to happen. You might as well be trying to sell a Vegan some
beef for how accurate they're targeting the local market.

You could get a luxury product, harvested within 10 miles of your home
(beating the pants off of the 100 mile challenge) with as much freshness as
farmers market produce and it's expected to be environmentally friendly, and
could be made organic with far less risk of spoiling from pests and disease.
_All_ of these are huge sale points and _none_ of them will be made with
budget cost hydroponic crap.

If you built one of these, met all those marks, you'd be selling your produce
to the local high end restaurants because your produce would be at least 2-3
days fresher.

Hydroponics is the equivalent of bottom-lineism in businesses. They're trying
to reduce costs to boost profitability, rather than simply finding a way to
raise the price that will keep people buying. Do you think Apple was looking
at the bottom line when it decided to unibody aluminium shells? Or when they
included a higher resolution screen?

Tech companies everywhere disregard the bottom line because they know people
will pay for a superior product. Everyone here on HN knows people will pay for
a superior product. Google had a superior product (not just technologically,
but usability, etc. too) , and it nailed Yahoo that had poor search and poor
usability.

Why sell an inferior product when you can sell a superior product, maximize
your profit per sq ft not minimize it. Produce a tomato worth $4/lb not
$0.99/lb-continuously on sale for 1/3 off. Make an eco-organic-super-fresh
tomato and sell it for $8/lb and sell it to rich idiots.

------
jdietrich
All farming essentially boils down to the conversion of energy into a form
which people can eat. Grass turns sunlight into carbohydrate. Cows turn grass
into meat. The bottom of the chain is sunlight, the top is us, farming sits in
the middle. Our choices in farming are essentially one of how efficiently we
can convert solar energy into food calories. Modern farming and food
production is heavily reliant on oil to fuel tractors and make synthetic
fertiliser, but the primary energy input is still sunlight.

Going vertical just spreads the same amount of light over a broader area. Your
yield only increases if you use electric lighting, which is only economically
viable if electricity gets very, very cheap. Using vertical sheds to farm
cattle doesn't help, because the land use to house cattle is negligible
compared to the land needed to grow their feed. Vertical farming doesn't help
reduce soil depletion, because it depends on what we use now to amend poor
soil - oil-based fertilisers. Vertical farming is a perfectly reasonable
solution if we solve cold fusion, but there are a whole lot of other problems
that magically disappear if we discover a limitless source of practically free
energy.

Food is just a proxy for energy and any future food crisis is likewise a proxy
for an energy crisis. Much as it'd be easy if we could solve it all, we can't.
We've been living on millennia of stored energy and that store is coming to an
end. We cannot escape the fact that we will have to dramatically reduce our
energy use. Easy solutions to the problem of energy are tremendously
appealing, but the laws of physics are a harsh mistress. The future of our
species rests entirely upon joules, watts and kilocalories. Vertical farming
is an appealing but irrational fantasy, rooted of the same fallacies as food
pills and jetpacks.

~~~
emmett
"We cannot escape the fact that we will have to dramatically reduce our energy
use."

I'm not sure I agree with this statement (though I like your first two
paragraphs)...in the end, couldn't we replace most of our fossil fuel usage by
just ramping up nuclear? I'm pretty sure there's enough supply there with
breeder reactors to power our civilization long enough to invent something
else.

~~~
jdietrich
Fission is non-renewable. We might get 50 years of economical generation with
current technology, maybe more with breeder reactors. Germany spent 3.6
billion euros on the SNR-300 reactor and never got useful output from it, nor
America from the 8 billion dollar Clinch River reactor. Monju at least
produced power, but only for four months before it blew up. At this stage,
economical breeder reactors are an entirely hypothetical proposition. The next
generation of reactors in development are only around 15% more efficient than
the best extant facilities.

We cannot continue to act on the hope that some future generation will fix our
energy problems with a hypothetical technology. It is energy policy of the
dot-com bubble. There is an outside possibility that technology might save us,
but it is just that, a possibility. There is no roadmap, no plan, merely some
things that might work, maybe, some day. Without such a hypothetical
breakthrough, there is simply no possibility of continuing our current rate of
energy production.

I highly recommend Dr David MacKay's book "Energy Without the Hot Air". In it,
he surveys the production possibilities of all the currently viable
technologies, gives current consumption levels of British people, and leaves
the reader to decide how to make one number match the other. It is impeccably
researched and available to read for free online -
<http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/>

~~~
uvdiv
You can just as easily dig up ordinary LWRs from that era with that same
degree of ridiculous cost overrun -- the kind of LWRs of which are cheap today
and exist in the hundreds. It was not so much the particular design, SFR or
LWR, but the toxic and obstructionist political climate common to both. Carter
banned fuel reprocessing -- the key part of the Clinch River fuel cycle --
while that plant was being built. Wikipedia says that SNR-300 construction was
interrupted for 4 years from political outrage at Three Mile Island, and a
redesign ordered when it was half built.

>The next generation of reactors in development are only around 15% more
efficient than the best extant facilities.

I'm not sure what figure you're referring to, but breeder reactors with full
reprocessing are 200 times more efficient than LWRs.

~~~
jdietrich
My point is that _every_ breeder reactor ever built has been a massive
boondoggle. Certainly there were political reasons behind the failure of some
of them, but it remains a completely unproven technology. The technology may
well work brilliantly, but we can't base the future of our civilisation on the
assumption that eventually we will build a breeder that actually works. The
history of nuclear technology is littered with expensive dead-ends.

Breeders might hypothetically be very efficient indeed, but the plants we are
actually building or have actual plans to build are PWRs and BWRs with only
marginally better efficiency.

------
michaelchisari
This was pointed out in the previous thread, but I'd like to remind people
that the photos of gorgeous, 100-story spires in the heart of Manhattan are
pure pipe dreams by architects and designers.

However, if you look at vertical farming as a series of low-rise greenhouse
warehouses ringing a city, like a lightly stacked up Thanet Earth, then I
think there's a strong case for them.

<http://www.thanetearth.com/>

~~~
Retric
The only way vertical farming becomes reasonable is with cheap energy, and
high food costs.

Cattle actually come close to this because they don't need sunlight to grow so
you can have multi story feed fed cattle farms. However, it's still cheaper to
use more land than to build multi story cattle farms.

~~~
rbranson
The bottom line is that it's a cute futuristic fantasy. We need to get PEOPLE
off of the farm land and into vertical buildings FIRST. There are millions of
acres of arable land totally wasted by people's unused front lawns and
abandoned parking lots. We have to protect this precious land and not just let
developers sprawl all over it in the name of cheap, discardable pseudo-
communities.

~~~
anamax
> We need to get PEOPLE off of the farm land and into vertical buildings
> FIRST. There are millions of acres of arable land totally wasted by people's
> unused front lawns and abandoned parking lots. We have to protect this
> precious land and not just let developers sprawl all over it in the name of
> cheap, discardable pseudo-communities.

Why?

While suburbia may offend you, replacing suburbia with hive-living wouldn't
significantly increase the amount of arable land in use.

The places that have food shortages have them because of bad governance, which
hive-living won't fix.

~~~
michaelchisari
The ecological benefits of urban density are much greater than you give it
credit for. And I think a characterization of "hive-living" doesn't nearly do
justice to the cultural, social, and economic benefits of a vibrant city.

~~~
anamax
> The ecological benefits of urban density are much greater than you give it
> credit for.

And you know this, how? Let me suggest that you probably overstate the costs
of suburbia.

> And I think a characterization of "hive-living" doesn't nearly do justice to
> the cultural, social, and economic benefits of a vibrant city.

You're assuming that everyone values the things that you do in much the same
way. That may be true of the other folks in your tribe, but extrapolating
universality from that demonstrates my point.

~~~
iron_ball
Calling it a "hive" and city dwellers a "tribe" has strong negative
connotations you cannot be unaware of. Be open-minded when calling for
openmindedness.

~~~
anamax
There's nothing negative about "tribe".

As far as "hive" goes, it's apt. It's accurate and the connotations point out
the other side of the claimed advantages.

> Be open-minded when calling for openmindedness.

I'm not calling for openmindedness. I'm pointing out cherry-picking, and a
couple of other problems.

I don't care where other people choose to live. However, if they're going to
argue that their choice is superior, I think that it's fair to see if their
argument makes sense. What part of that do you disagree with?

Which reminds me - I'm certain that I'll see you make the same complaints when
an urbanist commits my sins, right?

~~~
iron_ball
Of course. I grew up in the suburbs and I liked it there. I appreciate your
vote of confidence.

------
jameskilton
Previous discussion on how this stuff doesn't add up:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1701724>

It's an interesting idea for a second, until one starts to actually crunch the
numbers.

------
dmitri1981
Here is an excellent rebuttal of the whole concept:
<http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/>

~~~
jerf
In summation, the bottleneck is light, or, basically, energy.

This is one of the reasons it's so important for us to press on with
technology and not just try to keep things the same; we need better, more
cost-effective energy, such as with better nuclear power plants. If we have
that, there's a lot of things like this that open up to us that can allow us
to save energy in other ways. If we don't progress, though, we'll be stuck
with a resource-expensive society and no way to escape from the trap.

~~~
michael_dorfman
That's not really a fair summation, if you ask me. Yes, light is the immediate
bottleneck, but as Monbiot says, it requires "all the usual rules of business,
economics, physics, chemistry and biology to be suspended to make way for his
idea."

Even with more cost-effective energy, this is still a terrible idea.

~~~
michaelchisari
Monbiot makes the common mistake of starting with Manhattan real estate for
his rebuttal, which I think is naive enough to be considered a strawman
argument.

As for lighting, the trick is to figure out how to use natural lighting for a
majority of the input. Obviously, again, this is why 100-story skyscrapers
aren't practical, but sub-10 story warehouses could be. Although some are
investigating architectural ideas like mirrors and other hacks.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I don't think Manhattan real estate is a strawman-- the point is, in order for
this concept to work, you would need to be able to buy a city block in
_whatever_ metropolitan area for cheaper than you could buy enough land in the
outskirts to grow an equivalent quantity, plus the transportation costs.

And sub-10-story warehouses only magnifies the problem-- then you need to buy
even _more_ city blocks.

~~~
puredemo
A city block in many metros is not that much money though. Think Cleveland.

------
alan-crowe
The article portrays indoor agriculture as more expensive that traditional
agriculture outdoors in a field. On the other hand the article claims big
improvements in crop yields due to the controlled environment to add to the
savings in transport costs. So the idea is looking viable right up to the time
that the huge electricity bill for the grow-lights arrives.

The missing next step in the analysis is to break out the concept of penthouse
farming. Penthouse farming is different from vertical framing in that
penthouse farming only farms the top floor, using daylight through a glass
roof. Lower floors are flats or offices as usual. If vertical farming makes
any kind of sense then penthouse farming should be very profitable.

The path to vertical farming looks something like this:

o penthouse farming starts and is just about viable

o improved techniques boost yields leading to fat profits, almost enough to
cover the cost of electricity for grow-lights for lower floors

o cost of electricity falls

o vertical farming profitable!

~~~
metageek
The article's last three paragraphs are about rooftop farming:

> _The immediate opportunity may simply be to take advantage of the space
> available on urban rooftops_

------
yock
Perhaps the easier and far cheaper first stop is to stop paying land owners to
not farm their land.

~~~
DougWebb
But then they'll grow plants whose prices are boosted by subsidies, and we
can't afford the extra subsidies. And of course limiting the volume of
subsidized plants would be seen as a socialist takeover of farming... just
imagine if the government had the nerve to tell farmers how much of a
government-subsidized crop they could grow! The farmers (aka Archer Daniels
Midland) would be outraged.

You know, I don't grow anything on my land but grass and a few decorative
plants. Where's my government handout?

~~~
electromagnetic
Buy an Irish Dexter (miniature) cow or a goat and I'm sure you'll be able to
get a subsidy for beef/milk/wool/something. It'll also save you time as you
won't have to mow the grass or trim the plants... although you may have to
watch the land mines and have to wrangle the occasional goat out of a tree,
but you might get to sit on your ass and get government handouts.

------
rmason
I will preface these comments by saying I spent over twenty years in a
previous career as a practicing agronomist.

The dirty little secret of all these vertical farming stories is that the
numbers don't add up. The Sunday NYT had an article where they talked about
growing corn in one of these buildings.

If I gave you the building and the land you couldn't make money growing corn.
They speak of turning a crop every six weeks, I don't know of a single hybrid
variety that matures in less than 78 days. Quite simply the NYT reporter
didn't ask any critical questions.

Even with high value crops like lettuce and flowers it is dubious. But farming
vacant urban land with hoop houses like they're starting to do in Detroit does
make sense, There are security risks in an urban environment but those pale
beside the costs associated with twenty stories of hydroponics.

------
3pt14159
Why isn't the conversation about floating greenhouses just off the coast of a
city. Transportation problems would be solved, nearly all the same benefits as
mentioned in the Economist article, while you would get enough energy from the
sun most of the year round.

~~~
Vivtek
I'm pretty sure it's because boats are a whole lot more expensive than land
surface. Unless you can get a _lot_ more productivity per square foot than a
field, transportation costs are still going to be low in comparison.

I don't see why this wouldn't work for high-profit produce like tomatoes or
peppers, though.

~~~
Vivtek
Afterthought: it could work for high-end produce like _ripe_ tomatoes and
things that can't be transported very far. Although there, I'd think a
penthouse farm would be even better. Except that the return on a penthouse in
a major city for residential use will probably remain higher than any possible
use for produce even after oil tops $10. Unless the produce is a prohibited
drug, in which case you still probably don't want to use the penthouse, being
better off with grow lights in the subbasement.

~~~
stcredzero
People are already making money growing tasty, ripe hydroponically grown
tomatoes in the city to sell to high-end restaurants. In New York, no less.
This is only going to work for high-end produce, though.

~~~
Vivtek
Ha! I win, then! I always get a frisson when somebody makes money in a way I
thought of. (Bastards. I mean that in the nicest possible way.)

------
geden
Post 'Brass Eye' can anyone ever take Vertical Farming seriously?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usTT3RuWu_g>

------
DanI-S
Why does it need to be a vertical stack? Why not stagger the floors, so they
all get natural light from above, like the leaves of a plant sticking out from
their stem?

~~~
ams6110
Whatever staggering you do is going to be the equivalent sun-exposed area as
the footprint projected on the ground right?

You might possibly get away with some kind of balcony arrangement on the
southern face of the building, where all levels would get sunlight, and the
rest of the building could be offices/residential/whatever. There are still
going to be huge inefficiencies in planting, tending, and harvesting compared
to open-field farming.

------
weeksie
I don't know enough about the subject but it seems like cleverly arranged
mirror arrays might alleviate a lot of the lighting issues.

~~~
dagw
Sure, but those mirrors also take up space and either increase the total
footprint of the 'farm' or decrease the space that can be used for crops. Also
since this is in the middle of a city you have to make sure that those mirrors
don't accidentally scatter too much light to into the windows of surrounding
buildings, as that will no doubt piss of the people working and living there.

