
Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture? - prostoalex
https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens
======
nostromo
There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread.

1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap.
Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't
actually a problem.

2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and
then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to
using the free sun. (The absurdity of putting solar panels on a roof to make
electricity to beam LEDs on plants, losing 90% of the energy along the way,
shouldn't be lost on anyone.)

3) Shipping is cheap. It may make us feel good that a salad's greens were
created on a roof-top in Brooklyn, but using some of the most expensive real-
estate on Earth to save a few cents on shipping is beyond economically
irrational.

I actually love the idea of hydroponics for another reason entirely: it saves
a ton of water. Water is a real problem worth solving, particularly in the dry
west. Focus on this and forget about all of these other non-benefits.

~~~
rmason
In a word no. I spent twenty years as a fertilizer agronomist and I'm very
familiar with the costs of producing a crop.

The numbers simply do not work. Even when they tried in Detroit and got
buildings for five cents on the dollar they couldn't make it work.

The investors funding these enterprises do not understand agricultural
economics. I keep investigating these stories looking for some kind of
'breakthrough tech' that would dramatically reduce costs or increase yields.
I've been tracking these vertical greenhouses for fifteen years, they open and
a couple of years later they're gone.

I think what could change things for produce is solar cells and electric
trucks. It would isolate producers transportation costs from oil prices and
lower the cost of getting produce to the cities. I know technology is quickly
improving in both battery technology and solar cells.

~~~
mikro2nd
The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing:

There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I,
for one, can't wait to get an electrically powered car I don't have to drive.
But the thing I'm not seeing is electrically powered farm machinery. I think
people underestimate just how hard that problem is. These machines, when
they're working at peak times of the year (planting time, harvest) are
required to work 24 hours a day for weeks on end. There's no time to stop for
a recharge, and something like a harvester or large tractor pulling ploughs or
a planter uses a /hell/ of a lot of power. Even assuming some sort of swap-out
battery system, I'd guess that each machine would need something on the order
of three to five battery packs in order to keep up with the work demand. And
at the busy times of year even a moderately sized farm will have at least
three to five machines working at the same time.

Is anyone aware of companies developing real (not prototype/PoC) large-scale
farm machinery?

~~~
cjrp
This may be a stupid idea, but is there any reason that this kind of heavy
machinery needs a battery and couldn't just be connected to a power source via
a (admittedly, very long) cable?

~~~
mikro2nd
Very long cables at normal supply voltages (240V/380V) suffer too much voltage
drop over any distance (say) >150m. Remember that we're talking of multi-
kilometre distances, not a mere hectare or two.

Not only that, but anyone who has used an electric lawnmower on a larger area
will tell you that cables are a fucking hazard to navigation when you're
trying to move a machine trailing a cable. They constantly get tangled, driven
over and cut.

So anything at a reasonable voltage to run heavy machinery at a long distance
from the nearest supply would need to be... I don't accurately know -- ask an
electrical engineer for a definitive answer, but... something like 1.1kV.
Cable that's sufficiently well insulated for moderately high voltage is /very/
expensive and deadly if the insulation gets compromised. Doesn't sound very
feasible to me. Maybe someone with more EE knowledge can prove me wrong --
this is just my gut-feel conjecture. I got kicked out of the EE program at
university for being bored to tears by this sort of stuff.

~~~
philliphaydon
We run trains over multiple kilometres with overhead wires why can’t we do it
with tractors???

~~~
ryanmercer
>why can’t we do it with tractors???

Trains run in straight lines, farm equipment has various widths and it's not
just 'tractors' and you're going up and down rows of farmland that might be
tens or hundreds of acres wide and that aren't always in the shape of a square
or rectangle (it's often far easier to work around large glacial boulders or
trees for example, as well as ditches/running water/property lines etc). You'd
have to string millions and millions, if not billions and billions, of miles
of electrical cable across fields.

There's 915 million acres of active farmland in the U.S., that's 1.4 million
square miles/3.7 million square kilometers. The larger combines can be about
40ft wide so if every scrap of farmland was in literally-square acre parcels
you're going to need 5.2 power lines minimum to cover the width of a
literally-square acre so you're easily talking 5 million miles of power lines.

------
maliker
Maybe for expensive microgreens. Otherwise your energy costs are prohibitive.

Utah State’s Extension service did a good analysis [1]. Indoor farming energy
costs only add about 30% to your cost of tomatoes, but 10,000% for wheat.

Of course this assumes you can get an acre of indoor space for the same price
as an acre of cropland. And can also amportize your hardware costs over many
growing seasons to drive them to zero. Probably not good assumptions.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be)

------
contingencies
_Why Vertical Farming Won 't Save the Planet_[0] is a lecture by the
preeminent authority in the field, Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University
Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, who has studied plant growth in
controlled environments for most of his career and has consulted on all NASA
missions with these goals. In particular see 13m26s[1] and 37m17s[2].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=13m26s)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=37m17s)

------
vilhelm_s
According to [1], lettuce grown by California farmers cost 993,567,000/84,000
= $11,900 per acre.

According to this article, electricity and power costs $216,000 for a
30,000-square-foot vertical farm, or $313,000/acre.

It seems hard to make that competitive.

[1]
[https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...](https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=california)

~~~
joshuamcginnis
$993,567,000 is the total value of lettuce production for the year, not the
cost.

~~~
philliphaydon
Would the yield per acre be higher because of no need for pesticides, and less
loss of bad quality yields? Cos we know organic is more expensive as it yields
far less than gm crops.

And would crops grow faster with 24/7 sunlight vs 12 hours?!?

~~~
saalweachter
I mean, the reason all of these vegetables are grown in California is
basically because it _is_ already a controlled environment. It's sunny all the
time, and it doesn't get much rain, so you are just irrigating at the optimal
time for the crop in question.

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sinnet11
A biggest problem with farming these days is labor. Period. Growers (farmers)
cannot manage 6000 acres of land. They rely on their crop consultants to tell
them where to spray and what they need to spray. Once you start automate these
tasks, e.g. crop scouting, then the grower and the consultant can use data to
spray less and produce a higher quality crop.

~~~
XalvinX
If Trump gets his way, expect this 'problem' to reach critical levels, since
the vast majority of it is done by undocumented people from Mexico, Central
and South America.

If every illegal immigrant was thrown out tomorrow, the price of lettuce would
go to $15 a head, and nearly every other type of produce not automated would
also skyrocket.

Most fruit and many vegetables require a lot manual labor to grow, harvest and
pack... And, Mr. Trump, white people won't do this work willingly, not at $3
an hour and not with having to live in pesticide-drenched shanty towns and
having to shit in buckets or ditches and so forth..

What supports that $1.29 head of lettuce is, basically, human suffering that
is only endured because things suck even worse in El Salvadore and similar
places.

Earlier presidents knew this and intelligently left the borders very, very
porous. And it isn't just agriculture, but many other industries too.

~~~
arethuza
Similar problem in the UK with Brexit - farmers had got used to a supply of
inexpensive seasonal workers mostly from eastern Europe:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/09/lack-
of-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/09/lack-of-migrant-
workers-left-food-rotting-in-uk-fields-last-year-data-reveals)

------
etaioinshrdlu
I still think it's quite cool. Even if it's crazy expensive right now,
producing food factory-style in a very controlled environment should allow us
to "software"-ize the entire process. Food as code. Which removes a big cost:
thinking. Thinking is expensive.

Maybe we could grow food in a shipping container in a controlled environment.
Then we can put a very precise cost on the production of food and deploy it
anywhere, relying a lot less on weather and water availability. The ability to
estimate costs accurately is itself very valuable.

~~~
jsilence
Humans have been farming for thousands of years. A lot of the required
thinking has been done and the results are beeing taught by agricultural
schools. Sustainable integrated farming is possible today. Our department is
in a project researching why these methods are not more widely adapted by the
farmers (project in Germany).

------
KaiserPro
In the UK land is reasonably expensive, but its cheaper than hiring and
fitting out buildings in dense urban areas.

This is before we start costing up Electricity, fitout, soil import, water and
pest control.

1) because for what ever reason they chosen to grown things in a _completely
black room_ that means that you now have a significant energy bill for no real
reason.

2) you have to import soil, soil is heavy, a pain to handle, and in this setup
has a limited half live.

3) Labour, there is not obvious mechanisation going on here. (sure each box
might be planted by a machine, but who puts it in place?)

4) water, again, the roof stops any source of free water.

5) pests, you are in a closed room monoculture, a pest like aphids if its
lettuce, will run rampant, and will not attract predators. (also a problem for
greenhouses)

In conclusion, this is expensive, highly carbon intensive, poorly mechanised,
and largely pointless.

------
bryanlarsen
You can buy prime farm land in Saskatchewan for well under $2000 an acre.

~~~
Semiapies
And there's plenty of prime farmland in the US and Mexico, already. But the
real cost center of farming is _labor_ , not transport, and the claimed
automation savings are pretty dubious. Especially given every previous
vertical farming startup claimed the same gigantic savings from automation
before they went under.

My head aches a little bit just reading about the comparison of "spring mix"
costs. Spring mix is a product _built_ on a big markup for the act of peeling
and combining romaine lettuce and other crops. You might as well say, "Hey, a
salad at a salad bar is $12, let's compete with that!" A sensible comparison
would be with plain romaine lettuce or whatever.

If these startups could provide cheap, high-quality romaine lettuce or
whatever at any real scale, we wouldn't be hearing the umpteenth repetition of
funding hype for vertical farming, we'd be hearing about how well vertically
farmed crops were _selling_.

------
roryisok
Every time I read an article about vertical farming its always leafy greens,
and very occasionally strawberries and tomatoes. It doesn't seem like vertical
farms can grow anything else

~~~
roel_v
Sure, because those are the crops with the highest profit margin and that are
hard to store and transport. You can pump grain through tubes into silos and
store it for months while transporting and processing.

~~~
roryisok
That makes sense

------
pascalxus
Why don't they just do it without all those expensive lights and equipment,
that's where all the biggest expsenses are. Just straight hydroponics with
vertical farming. am i missing something?

EDIT: I mean, do it outdoors with vertical farming, either on rooftops or
around offices or parks or just outside the city (better there than 6000 miles
away). the vertical aspect of it would still help reduce costs since real-
estate is probably the biggest limiting factor on cost.

~~~
tathougies
Everyone here is saying there's not enough light. That's not actually true.
The sun produces more than enough energy to grow all the plants. The issue is
one of distribution. You have to distribute very particular wave lengths of
light to the entirety of the structure and all the plants. This is a hard
problem. Mirrors are inefficient. Fiber optics don't do exactly what you want,
and plus, a lot of the light energy is unusable, because it's the wrong
wavelength. Most modeling done in the space indicates that -- with current
technology -- it's more efficient to capture the sunlight, convert it to
electricity, and then use the electricity to produce light at the correct
wavelengths.

As a whole, this means there's less energy available to irradiate the plants,
but there's more energy in the wavelengths the plants can respond to, so it's
more efficient.

I mean... think about it. Every time you look at a tree and see green, that is
light that the plant has wasted. Hydroponic lighting is typically that deep
purple, red, and blue, that plants can absorb. The goal is to make the plant
leaves black, indicating that all light is being absorbed. Otherwise, you're
just wasting light.

~~~
mulmen
The black leaf thing is interesting. Is that an oversimplification or do
plants really only absorb visible light?

~~~
tathougies
Plants only absorb very particular aspects of light. As far as I remember,
it's only visible light, yes.

More information here:
[http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7A.html](http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7A.html)

Hydroponic lighting is optimized for those particular wavelengths in the ~450
nm and ~650 nm peeks. Some plants absorb additional wavelengths, and could
likely be targeted with other lights. The key though is that chlorophyll are
like mitochondria -- highly preserved between species -- and they evolved to
only absorb particular frequencies.

~~~
mulmen
That’s really interesting, thanks for the explanation. Makes me think of
tuning LED lighting the same way a mechanic might set spark timing. Obviously
in reality the right lighting for a plant is known but it’s neat to be able to
_see_ the effect.

~~~
tathougies
It may be well known but there are many practical considerations. It certainly
requires a lot of tuning. For example, if you want to target all four peaks of
absorption by cholorphyll a and b, that’s four wavelengths, but many people
settle for just two due to cost. It’s all a giant optimization problem!

------
antoniuschan99
They didn't mention nutrient cost which is pretty high in some cases.

Also I'm working on a diy home vertical Garden system people might be
interested in that is automated

[https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi90BiwlHEm/?utm_source=ig_share...](https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi90BiwlHEm/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=st7yqnjyud6k)

But I think there's even easier ways to produce leafy greens without any power
required for irrigation

[https://youtu.be/pZZO1tYqcwk](https://youtu.be/pZZO1tYqcwk)

Also it makes sense why Soft Bank invested in one of the vertical farms. A lot
of produce is shipped into Japan. I tried to visit the Pasona HQ which was an
office building that also produced vegetables but they demolished the building
this year :$.

------
drewm1980
They link to a non-GDPR-walled version here:

[https://civileats.com/2018/07/02/can-vertical-farms-reap-
the...](https://civileats.com/2018/07/02/can-vertical-farms-reap-their-
harvest-its-anyones-bet/)

------
malchow
Its Δ value comes entirely from water-saving, but water-saving on traditional
horizontal farming is likely to yield larger food benefits than vertical
farming. See, e.g. [http://waterbit.com](http://waterbit.com). (Disclosure: I
am an investor.)

The big thing is that most farms could _both_ use less water and concomitantly
yield more crop. It's good to make plants work for it. And IME yields better
tasting food, too.

------
chao-
I have followed a few companies in this space over the years (I believe only
one of which has survived), and a few in adjacent spaces, e.g. general urban
farming, not necessarily "vertical".

My enthusiasm aside, and based on some of the same concerns raised in the last
paragraphs, I have to be that guy and bring up Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

EDIT: Even the company I thought had "survived" is in the process of an
extreme pivot from their original focus:
[https://indoorharvest.com/](https://indoorharvest.com/) They used to
repurpose HVAC equipment for some aspect of indoor farming, iirc.

------
ryanmercer
If anyone is really interested in this hit me up on reddit via ryanmercer or
hit contact over at [http://www.ryanmercer.com](http://www.ryanmercer.com)
this is a subject I'm really passionate about both for use on Earth and for
investigation/use off-world.

------
busterarm
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)
"Vertical Farming Won't Save The Planet"

~~~
rorykoehler
The title of that presentation is ‘turning fossil fuels to food’. Fossil fuels
are over, finished so the video is probably not forward looking. I will watch
it later anyways ...

~~~
busterarm
Way to miss the forest for the trees. That talk is about how inefficient
vertical farming is, _even using fossil fuels_ which are much more efficient
than solar at the moment.

Where do you think most of grid power comes from right now?

Plants collect the sun's energy better than solar panels do and the sun is
significantly more powerful than lamps.

------
jonbarker
Policy idea that will never get passed: provide a tax credit for those who eat
more efficiently using some ratio of CO2 emissions over calories consumed. Add
some measure for food waste in there too.

~~~
alex_duf
Or tax everyone else's produce to make it artificially more expensive until
the one with lower CO2 footprint is cheaper

Same for packaging

------
schwede
What about equipment and machinery? How do you use a tractor on a vertical
farm? That challenge seems more expensive to solve than buying more land.

------
aldoushuxley001
Vertical Farming will only achieve widespread adoption when we have
significantly cheaper energy.

Until then, it will be reserved mainly for leafy greens, rather than the
substantial vegetables that can more effectively sustain a population.

------
iancmceachern
If you want to find out more about indoor farming for yourself we sell kits,
supplies and provide support for folks looking to get into this space. At both
www.openagriculturesupply.com and www.growcomputer.io

------
mirimir
Maybe food in caves after The Event. Such as potatoes ;)

------
pascalxus
i wonder what the nutritional content of those veggies are compared to their
ground grown counterparts.

~~~
tathougies
Can't speak for these companies in particular, but hydroponic vegetables
aren't particularly susceptible to being less nutritious. Plants make most of
what they need from the air, water, and nutrients you give them. If they lack
in one of those, the plant will likely wilt or die. Otherwise, the data
typically shows that the vegetables are as nutritious, or likely more
nutritious, since the plants have everything they need to grow, and it's in
the plant's evolutionary best interest to put all their nutrition into the
fruits.

------
drbojingle
yea. On mars.

------
jniedrauer
Betteridge's law of headlines is relevant here.

------
skbohra123
No.

------
XalvinX
For high-value produce it probably is. More and more people are becoming aware
of the dangers of all the chemicals (and often GMOs that are required to even
endure all those chemicals) and the organic food movement is accelerating more
or less exponentially. The only way to really grow a lot of food organically
is indoors where you can carefully control the environment, and sterilize the
whole system periodically as necessary.

I cannot imagine staples like wheat or rice would ever make sense to grow this
way, but I could certainly see smaller beer and (say) sake breweries grow
their own, as well as small-scale bakeries and even Italian restaurants and
the like.

Long ago I had the idea of using cheap plastic or glass fiber optic cables to
simply bring sunlight inside buildings, for plants as well as indoor tanning
and to reduce depression for people living underground or whatever. I think a
system could be easily designed to bring sunlight in directly instead of first
making electricity and then powering batteries. Of course some electricity for
pumps and fans will be needed but much less overall would be required this
way.

By adding edible, herbivorous water animals to the system somehow, such as
carp, snails, loaches, etc. you could reduce fertilizer needs while also
utilizing leaves, roots, and so forth more effectively. The fecal matter from
these animals would of course help fertilize, and also create CO2.

Speaking of CO2, well, the world seems to have a lot of that these days, so
naturally that can be piped in from a nearby factory or power plant or
whathaveyou to massively increase the speed of plant growth (also would
possibly help with heating in the winter...)

As far as protein goes, Spirulina is super efficient to grow, as is hempseed.
Perhaps friendly insects or earthworms could also be involved, to add to the
freshwater animals already mentioned.

A really well-thought-out system could really supply a lot of nutritious fresh
food for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people would buy beer from a
company that grew organic wheat and hops right in their brewery too..people
will pay a lot for the peace of mind and better taste coming from organic
ingredients.

------
jlebrech
what about a really tall greenhouse? then the energy is free

------
thatfrenchguy
We already produce too much food.

~~~
coldcode
People all over the world are starving. The correct description is that we
produce too much food where it brings profit, but not enough where it keeps
people from starving.

~~~
dragonwriter
No we produce plenty of food, full stop. Starvation is a distribution problem,
not a production problem, and most commonly a _local_ distribution problem.

~~~
GW150914
It’s also a not giving a shit problem in many cases. Everyone starving isn’t
in a war zone or subject to epic corruption and seizure of goods. Some people
starve and go malnourished in the US and other wealthy countries for lack of
anyone really caring. A hard problem to hide not giving a shit behind is the
kiss of death.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It’s also a not giving a shit problem in many cases.

Sure, not as an alternative to a distribution problem but as the reason that
exists/continues in many cases.

> Everyone starving isn’t in a war zone or subject to epic corruption and
> seizure of goods. Some people starve and go malnourished in the US and other
> wealthy countries for lack of anyone really caring.

The idea that the capitalist core of modern developed economies _isn 't_
itself a form of systematic seizure of goods is somethingnthat the critics who
gave capitalism its name would have issue with.

------
antisthenes
Clearly not, because there's nothing inherently new in arranging shelves
vertically.

It's almost as comical as alluding that the hanging gardens of Babylon
disrupted ancient farming and were used for the production of food.

~~~
tathougies
Hydroponic farming can save 95% of water used to produce food. To say that
that advantage is not 'inherently new' is to do it a disservice.

