
The Vertical Farm - karmel
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/the-vertical-farm
======
simopaa
I think that the most important potential with vertical farming is not the
smaller area requirement, but the tremendous water saving that can be
achieved.

For example in areas like the Middle-East, agricultural irrigation takes a
huge and increasing toll on the water resources [1]. This along with the large
rivers of the world (where the irrigation water usually comes from) being
constantly more polluted may well increase tensions in these arid regions.

If by vertical farming techniques the need for water can be reduced as
dramatically as the article states ("Aeroponic farming uses about seventy per
cent less water than hydroponic farming, which grows plants in water;
hydroponic farming uses seventy per cent less water than regular farming"),
this by itself seems like a worthy effort for certain regions on the planet.

[1]
[http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/Y1860E/y1860e05.htm](http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/Y1860E/y1860e05.htm)

~~~
thinkcontext
The water issue is independent of whether the farm is vertical or not. There
are plenty of hydroponic farms that are in a traditional horizontal
orientation, I presume aeroponics can be setup this way as well. So, I do
think the smaller area is the main advantage, though I'm not convinced it is a
compelling enough reason given the increased energy, land and capital costs.

I agree that water should be treated as more valuable and scarce than it
currently is. You mentioned the Middle East, I saw this concept for a
"seawater greenhouse" recently in Qatar and was intrigued

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/11/desert-farming-
experi...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/11/desert-farming-experiment-
yields-first-results)

In the US, I'm curious about the scalability of these water saving
technologies. Could they replace a significant percentage of vegetable
production of drought stricken California? As I understand it now, hydroponics
is used primarily for winter production, even that competes with Colorado
River dependent Arizona.

~~~
simopaa
You are absolutely correct about that the water aspect is not vertical related
in any way. I'm just used to seeing vertical and aeroponics going so hand-in-
hand that I totally forgot about the possibility to have horizontal aeroponic
greenhouses.

I'm very curious as well about all of these water reducing efforts, since that
may well be the largest thing that threatens the food supply in the coming
decades.

------
Animats
_" The willingness of a certain kind of customer to pay a lot for salad
justifies the investment."_ It's a hipster thing.

The greens thing may not scale. With salad greens, most of what you grow is
salable product. With most vegetables, you grow a lot of plant that gets
discarded.

There have been companies doing vertical farming in Japan for a few years, but
they're mostly lettuce factories. There's one operation in Japan growing
strawberries, but "they are currently selling their medium size strawberries
at around $5 per berry, not per package. They only sell through their own
channels or at high-end department stores in Tokyo, and they admit that their
product is not for people to purchase at supermarkets for daily consumption,
but a luxury product for gifts."

There's talk of vertical farming for tomatoes, but nobody seems to be doing
this profitably on a significant scale.

~~~
louhike
First, "hispter thing" doesn't mean a thing. And for the profitability, it may
improve through time, so this kind of farms should be not discarded. Electric
cars are mostly a luxury for now, but it will clearly comme to mass market
soon. For a lot of products, it is neccessary to sell it as a luxury first to
be able to improve the process enough to make it available to all.

~~~
chillingeffect
Yes, "hipster thing" does mean something:

It means an experimental, short-term foray into something very few people are
doing and which is currently non-sensical or unprofitable and whose near-term
potential is unknown.

That experimental willingness for a small group to take something on without
knowing always been a feature of humanity and the essence of the hacker
spirit.

If one wishes to abstain from any such trend, it's certainly their prerogative
to dismiss it simply as a "hipster thing." There is little need for than a few
rare people to try it out. This doesn't mean that anything "hipster" should
ever be taken as a shorthand for "bad," which often happens in poor sources of
information.

We tend to dismiss "hipsters" because we deride their lack of cohesion and
perceive it as an assault on our values. Finally, our derision is ironically
necessary because it gives the hipsters the necessary challenge to evaluate an
idea, process, technology or way of life from a non-idealized perspective.
"You may like that fixie, but it is good enough that when everyone is laughing
at you, you'll still ride it?"

Anyway: vertical farming in urban centers is foolishness. The real estate is
simply too valuable. NYC already has a 10% tax. This is a grad school trope
and NGO scam with base-level appeal to hippies

------
m-i-l
Very interesting. A couple of thoughts:

1\. How about automating harvesting? The article suggests that there is a
fairly sizeable unskilled workforce, potentially involved in harvesting,
packing etc. I think I read elsewhere that the costs involved in this are
relatively low and that there might be little cost benefit in automating.
However, an automated solution could potentially have other benefits, e.g.
opportunity for a "pick on demand fresh for me at the time I schedule" option,
e.g. via an app (assuming automated inventory etc.). Going one step further,
if you had automated planting, pruning etc. you might even be able to create
"black boxes" which would in effect be fresh produce vending machines.

2\. Does this scale to larger perennial plants, e.g. fruit trees? If vertical
farming is only viable for salad greens (where you harvest pretty much the
entire plant and then start again), not just from a cost perspective (value
per kilo of produce, frequency of harvests, space occupied by plants, etc.)
but also from a practical perspective (e.g. does aeroponics even work for
trees - a quick read of wikipedia is inconclusive) then it isn't going to make
the world a better place.

~~~
tom_mellior
> However, an automated solution could potentially have other benefits, e.g.
> opportunity for a "pick on demand fresh for me at the time I schedule"
> option, e.g. via an app (assuming automated inventory etc.).

If the pick-up times are at reasonable times (not 3 a.m.), they would already
have people on site. The system could tell them to pick _X_ amount of plant
_Y_. So "on demand" doesn't necessarily mean "no humans involved".

> Going one step further, if you had automated planting, pruning etc. you
> might even be able to create "black boxes" which would in effect be fresh
> produce vending machines.

From the article and the company's website it seems that the growing cloths
must be washed from time to time, possibly after each harvest. I guess you
wouldn't want to build a washing machine into the system, but it might be
done...

> Does this scale to larger perennial plants, e.g. fruit trees?

Even if _this_ system doesn't do that, growing trees indoors might be
interesting from the perspectives of controlling temperature, wind, and
especially water runoff/evaporation.

> salad [...] isn't going to make the world a better place

You might say the same thing about fruit trees. The key crops would probably
be legumes and rice.

------
mxuribe
This is a great story. I - for one - hope that this technology and method of
growing (provided it stays nice and healthy) succeeds. As a side benefit, if
other competitors rise up and begin populating old, large metros (that were
titans of jobs and industries decades ago), like Detroit, etc...well, that's
another great benefit! Imagine all the jobs created, and not for getting more
people to click things on the web. Also, I hear all the time that we need more
farmers (to keep up with increased need for food growth), and yet others
stating that we need more technologists/engineers (to solve some vexing human
problems)...This farming technology appears to be a confluence of a need for a
merged type of worker: the techno-farmer! Crazy, eh? But, I think, very cool.

------
GrumpyNl
You still think that salades are grown on, as we call it in Holland, full
ground? This is how its done now, 5 layers on top of each other and no more
dirty ground. [http://www.food-nutrition.nl/artikelen/groenteteelt-op-
een-h...](http://www.food-nutrition.nl/artikelen/groenteteelt-op-een-hoger-
plan/)

------
philipkglass
_Most of America’s baby greens are grown in irrigated fields in the Salinas
Valley, in California. During the winter months, some production moves to
similar fields in Arizona or goes even farther south, into Mexico. If you look
at the shelves of baby greens in a store, you may find plastic clamshells
holding five ounces of greens for $3.99 (organicgirl, from Salinas), or for
$3.29 (Earthbound Farm, from near Salinas), or for $2.99 (Fresh Attitude, from
Quebec and Florida). Harwood’s magic number of eight dollars a pound would be
on the cheap side today. Four dollars for five ounces comes to about thirteen
dollars a pound._

 _AeroFarms supplies greens to the dining rooms at the Times, Goldman Sachs,
and several other corporate accounts in New York. At the moment, the greens
can be purchased retail only at two ShopRite supermarkets, one on Springfield
Avenue in Newark and the other on Broad Street in Bloomfield. The AeroFarms
clamshell package (clear plastic, No. 1 recyclable) appears to be the same
size as its competition’s but it holds slightly less—4.5 ounces instead of
five. It is priced at the highest end, at $3.99. The company plans to have its
greens on the shelves soon at Whole Foods stores and Kings, also in the local
area. Greens that come from California ride in trucks for days. The driving
time from AeroFarms’ farm to the Newark ShopRite is about eleven minutes._

All of this makes sense. People will pay a premium for fresh produce and
herbs, particularly if growing them close to consumption means that you can
optimize for deliciousness rather than for transport-durability and long shelf
life. I expect vertical farming to work well in this niche.

But the rest of it -- feeding all of New York City using just the space
available in NYC, "Feeding the World in the 21st Century", "what might come of
it when we’re nine billion humans on a baking, thirsting globe?" \-- that's
nonsense. For staple crops that provide most of the calories in a vegetarian
diet, there is no net economic or environmental benefit to vertical farming.
And there are good reasons to suspect that there will _never_ be such benefits
even as the technology evolves.

It's the _vertical_ stacking of greenhouses that doesn't make sense outside of
a high-priced freshness niche, and that's because of the requirement for
artificial lighting. Artificial lighting is a very expensive way to drive
photosynthesis compared to natural sunlight, and remains more expensive even
with optimistic assumptions about future LED efficiency and falling costs for
clean electricity. The energy requirements to grow e.g. soybeans in a vertical
farm inside the NYC city limits wipe out all the environmental benefits of
"locavorism," compared to just transporting them from the Midwest like usual.
And New York has one of the cleaner electricity mixes in the US. It's worse if
you use a fossil-heavy mix to power the lights.

I could see large scale use of greenhouses in the future, particularly things
like this: [http://www.sundropfarms.com/](http://www.sundropfarms.com/)

Greenhouses and perhaps soil-free growing may be great ways to produce food in
places that face extreme weather or lack soil or natural precipitation. But
one level construction only, illuminated by natural sunlight. You can ship a
ton of dried beans or wheat across oceans for significantly less energy than
it takes to grow the same calories locally via artificial illumination.

~~~
the8472
> Artificial lighting is a very expensive way to drive photosynthesis compared
> to natural sunlight, and remains more expensive even with optimistic
> assumptions about future LED efficiency and falling costs for clean
> electricity.

What if we are talking theoretical limits instead of what is practical today?

Couldn't capturing the full spectrum of sunlight (e.g. through multi-junction
cells) and then emitting an optimized spectrum for plants to absorb boost
efficiency?

Photosynthesis efficiency is also affected by temperature. So at least in hot
climates having the plants indoors while capturing the sunlight outside could
yield increased efficiency when compared to fields exposed to direct sunlight.

~~~
jsilence
A very informed and informative lecture filled with facts that supports the
former argument:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)

Myself I am a chemical engineer working in agricultural research. We are
working on aquaponics and also test vertical growbeds. Vertical growbeds
underperform significantly unless you put expensive light on them.

Generating the electricity for light through PV uses about ten times the area
compared to using direct sunlight. No way to counter that by using the full
spectrum.

~~~
allannienhuis
Except that you can transport the electricity much cheaper and with less
pollution than you can the produce, and optimize the produce for things other
than overcoming transport effects/concerns. So the PV installations can be far
away on cheap land while the produce is grown right in the city where it's
consumed.

Not saying it's a good idea, just that it seems there are some offsetting
concerns.

~~~
jsilence
Except what you say is not exactly true. Transportation losses for electricity
are roundabout 25% - 30%. For a good comparison it makes sense to compare area
efficiency. Plants in green houses can use 95% - 97% of direct sunlight
depending on glazing type. Artificial lighting has the following calculation:

* 25% PV efficiency best case * 75% transport efficiency * 50% LED light efficiency best case

This amounts to a total area efficiency of 9.5%. So artificial light has a ten
times worse area efficiency compared to using direct sunlight.

Transport energy consumption for the product on the other hand is often over
estimated. Transporting amounts to something between 1% - 5% of the total
energy cost of produce, depending on type and distance of course.

The vertical farm fallacy lies in the assumption that area is the scarce
resource. This is simply not true if you move outside the city borders. Area
within the city is very valuable and incredibly expensive. Even if you only
pay a comparably low rent, lets say 2.5$/sqm (25ct/sqft), that amounts to
~30.000$ rent per year (for a 1000sqm indoor farm). You can buy farmland for
this amount of money and forward from that the cost for area is not there any
more.

In my (our faculty) opinion the sweet spot for urban farming ist in the peri
urban part around the city. Area is still cheap, you can use direct sunlight
with little or no artificial light and transportation cost and energy can be
slashed by 90%.

Depending on the industry in that area there may even be some synergy
potentials with residual heat and other materials (eg. compostable stuff from
near by production).

Dutch Prof. P. Smeets proposes argoparks as a sustainable urban agriculture
concept. We are in favour of that.

Edit: Clarified on indoor farm area.

~~~
adrianN
Transport efficiency for electricity is way higher than 75%. Total
transmission losses are around 7% in the US. Plant efficiency is worse than
95%, because chlorophyll only responds to certain wavelengths well. LED
lighting for plant growth doesn't use white LEDs.

~~~
jsilence
Ok, I was not aware that there has been a lot of progress on reducing
transport losses in the electricity grid over the last decades. Thanks for the
heads up! But even taking this into account area efficiency of direct sunlight
compared to artificial light still differs significantly (25% * 95% * 50% =
12%).

Plants actually _do_ use the green light of the spectrum, just not as much,
thus leaves appear in green color. How high would you estimate the efficiency
gain by using a better spectrum? My guess would be that this gain would be
below 50%. So area efficiency of artificial light would still be below 20%.
And the calculation has been made "best case". 25% photovoltaic efficiency are
lab figures for the very best cells possible. Installed base is lower still,
monocrystallin cells 20 - 22 %, polycrystallin 15 - 20 %.

------
kfk
The combo is high yield, fast growth, good price and dense areas (as in, you
can serve your market on a bike). I did not yet run the numbers, but I think
it can be profitable. Take rucola, which grows very fast, if you can make
0.5kg per square meter every 2 weeks, then it's eur ~1.25 (1kg = ~5 euros) per
square meter per week. With 10,000 m2, it's eur 12.5k per week. 10,000 m2 is a
100x100m square - not much, you can probably rent that much worth of loan in
residential areas and pay in vegetables (1 box per week, etc.).

I think this is pretty doable. Go to market is pretty much done. Good story
for being local, etc. Probably even tastier product if you know how to play
with a greenhouse.

------
jlebrech
maybe one of those farms could directly replace the produce aisle of the
supermarket. the benefit is that unsold produce would just get bigger.

------
wonko1
Reminds me of Toshiba, and their project to repurpose semiconductor facilities
to grow vegetables:

[http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba...](http://www.cleanroomtechnology.com/news/article_page/Toshiba_starts_vegetable_production_at_its_Clean_Room_Farm_in_Yokosuka/102062)

