
A Farm Grows in the City - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-farm-grows-in-the-city-1494813900?mod=e2fb
======
macawfish
Have you ever tasted wild herbs? There's just no way this will ever replicate
wild herbs.

I recently ate an out of season "heirloom tomato" grown in Mexico and shipped
to my local coop in Minnesota. It was "organic", and it looked like an
heirloom tomato. But it had no taste. It was clearly grown in depleted soil.
I've grown heirloom tomatoes, as well as beefsteak and other more conventional
varieties. Food grown in a garden _tastes better_. There are _more nutrients
available to them_. Plants are chemical-mineral-sun beings. They grow
abundantly in diverse ecosystems and offer their fruits with no violence.

Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.

People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old"
technologies. Paper. Knots. Gardening. Cooking. Woodworking. Compost. Herbal
medicine. Music. Many of these artforms (sciences, really) are miles ahead of
the fancy capitalist stuff in terms of their nuance, their simplicity, their
integration with human wellbeing.

And they're _free_.

~~~
sloppycee
I'm pretty sure the reason your fruits and veggies don't taste right is
because they have to be shipped unripened to prevent spoilage. It's why fruit
from the farmers market tastes better, it was grown until ripe and shipped
locally.

Technologies, like the ones mentioned in this article, change the entire
supply chain; fruits and vegetables become "in-season" all year round. They
will no longer have to be shipped unripened, and should have a better flavour.

~~~
arcaster
I really enjoy keeping a number of honey bee colonies in the summer on my
rooftop in Boston. However, you lost me at "herbal medicine".

~~~
Rmilb
Just because something is natural does not mean it is healthy, safe or
effective, but dismissing all types of herbal medicine that some people have
been using for thousands of years seems too dismissive. I hate to be that guy,
but the science is starting to pile up for the medicinal pot group.

~~~
seunosewa
There is a word for any herbal medicine that actually works: medicine. It gets
studied and the active ingredient is extracted and synthesized by
pharmaceutical companies.

~~~
macawfish
That's the thing, there aren't "active" and "inactive" ingredients. There are
webs of phytochemicals that have dynamic interactions with one another and
with the human body. Reductive medicine is missing that point over and over
again. It's not possible to extract single ingredients that have the same
effects as the qualitative mixtures phytochemicals in plants. Not only that,
interacting with the plants on a human, physical level is nurturing in and of
itself. There are so many pathways for information to get into the body. I
want to _drink lavender tea_ when I'm feeling a _particular kind of anxiety_.
The smell alone calms me. The color is soothing. The way the tea feels when I
drink it is warm. I enjoy the way it tastes. The taste and smell remind me of
memories and moods. _It works very well_. It doesn't cover "general anxiety"
for me. I wouldn't offer it as a prescription to someone who tells me they
have "anxiety". It works better in cases of "spiritual crisis", to help
maintain a bigger picture after a death or tragedy, than it does for acute
frantic, nervous feelings. In those cases, I prefer valerian, chamomile or
holy basil.

You're bullshitting me if you think I'm gonna prefer to take a pill with "holy
basil extract" over a delicious cup of holy basil tea. Absolutely not.

And tell me how to "extract" rooibos? What parts are you going to put into
pills? Can you extract the taste? Can you extract the nutrients? Would you
make one pill for the antioxidants and another for the vitamin C?

It used to be thought that THC was "the active ingredient" in cannabis. Well,
it turns out that THC and CBD, along with numerous other varieties of
cannabinoids, interact dynamically in the body, modulating one anothers'
effects. Studies have shown that CBD quells the psychosis inducing effects of
THC very well. But CBD on its own isn't necessarily a strong antipsychotic.
It'd need to be taken in large doses to have that effect.

The idea that "germs cause disease" is a similar misconception. Bacterial
infections are symptoms of larger ecological imbalances in the body's
microbiome. Sometimes infections are really _caused_ by antibiotics (if you
wanna point fingers), as is the case with C. Difficile infections that take
hold in guts whose flora have been nuked by antibiotics.

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j-c-hewitt
I think these kinds of stories play well to governments, the press, and some
groups of people as _ideas_ or as cool photo opportunities, but they don't
translate into meaningful agricultural production.

I encourage people to scroll around Google Maps (or better yet, drive) through
some of America's most productive agricultural regions. The sheer scale of
American farmland dwarfs any possible urban farm development.

I know from personal experience growing seedlings in my basement here that new
LED grow lights make it much more cost and energy efficient to run a
greenhouse than it used to be. But fertile soil is a massive input cost that
you can't really get around for most full sized plants. I spent hundreds of
dollars recently on garden soil for a small set of raised beds. I have a tiny
flock of six chickens supplementing my compost pile.

Anyone can grow bad produce indoors. I think the real problem (having lived in
urban, rural, and suburban areas) they're trying to address is the
transportation cost of bringing quality produce to the city. Right now many
cities are not really set up for affordable freight transportation. Cities
like NYC are almost designed to make it pointlessly expensive and complicated
to bring freight in from the country to the store. Commercial truck traffic
gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to
the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to
buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns
and cities.

So if you are trying to deploy technology to make quality food more available
to American cities the solution is probably not just hanging up some grow
lights and growing weak plants in trays. It is to attack the largest sources
of the added costs. The 'local' label has salience to high end grocery
shoppers because they believe that it indicates quality. If 'local' comes to
be associated with tray farms using poor inputs, it will stop being associated
with quality in the minds of Whole Foods shoppers.

It'd be great if America had the sort of urban freight network that was state
of the art in Japan in 1980 instead of trying to come up with pretend-
technology patches to much larger cost of living problems.

~~~
mceoin
Cities have two things in abundance due to human input/output: fertilizer and
water. They lack sunlight but with cheap energy LEDs fill that gap.

High density city-"farming" makes economic sense in certain contexts: \- high
density living environments \- inefficient or expensive transport costs \-
lack of available farming land relative to population (expect net-food-
importers like Singapore to lead here) \- northern hemisphere (full-year
growing cycle increases appeal and cost efficiency) \- cities not located in
close proximity to farmland (e.g. Abu Dhabi, Dubai)

They don't replace organic, and subvert the "local" farm-to-table movement and
I'll be surprised if they can match the taste of produce grown in a
robust/diverse ecosystem. But they do provide a market need for controlled
environments and consistent output that dials into local demand.

Pros and cons, but inevitable part of our agricultural future.

On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the
industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag.
While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with
fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher
end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural
modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price-
competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.

~~~
j-c-hewitt
Farm-to-table is a mark of quality for gourmets because the food tastes better
and has more nutrition when it has more expensive inputs. Feed a pig nothing
but acorns and he's gonna taste great, but he's gonna be really expensive.
Feed a pig nothing but hyperprocessed nutrient foam or whatever and he's gonna
taste bad but he's gonna be cheaper.

>On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the
industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag.
While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with
fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher
end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural
modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price-
competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.

Why? When people can afford it, they tend to want to upgrade what kinds of
food that they eat. The quality issue is not something that is easy to
sidestep just because of the law of conservation. Output can't exceed input.
It is a huge operation to move soil and fertilizer around. It is expensive
even in rural areas. Hydroponics have certain fertility, plant type, and plant
quality limitations and cost more money to set up. Not to mention the issue of
devoting expensive urban real estate to agricultural production.

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bryanlarsen
"Getting food to people who live far from farms—sometimes hundreds or
thousands of miles away—is costly and strains natural resources."

For many foods, more gasoline is used getting it from the grocery store home
than is used to get it to the grocery store from across the world. Ships and
trains and large tractor trailers are quite efficient.

OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge
amounts of energy.

~~~
cr0sh
> OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge
> amounts of energy.

I don't know if it's been tried or not for indoor gardening, but why not use
heliostats coupled with reflection (mirrors) or refraction (lightpipes) to
guide the sunlight indoors?

I know such systems have been used for general lighting and art works...

~~~
zimzam
Because if you are growing 1 acre of lettuce across 10 floors of a building
(1/10th acre per floor) now you need to collect 1 acre of sunlight from a
1/10th acre sized roof. Where do you get the other 9/10th of an acre of
sunlight from?

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terravion
This is a very interesting article and does the thing that the media often
does of missing the point: these are the ultimate factor farms--literally
factories that crank out leafy greens--and we're close to an economic
transition on perishable, constant demand, high value items like leafy greens.
Cannabis passed this point several years ago. This is a really hard transition
though for the actual food supply that makes the bulk of our calories. Free
water and energy from the sky is really hard to beat.

~~~
Osiris30
Agreed. See this video "Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of
Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments
for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the
environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)"

A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube
page is dead. correct link
[https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787](https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787))

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

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kator
I keep thinking all of these are designed as pre-emptive investments before
marijuana is legalized. They figure out the problems of mass production and
management and the second the laws pass they flip the switch as the biggest
supplier with right down the street access.

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grizzles
To me, the distributed version of this idea is the really exciting development
here. With a decade it will be commonplace to have a totally automated
bookshelf looking appliance that you do nothing more than put in your
backyard, give soil+seeds+water to, and use as your own personal Grocery
Store. And when it happens, we'll have companies like Farmbot.io and the other
3d printer folks like Adrian Bowyer to thank for it.

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sxates
What occurred to me reading this is that one of the biggest costs to urban
farming is the real estate. But with self-driving car-shares on the horizon
and potentially much lower needs for parking structures, perhaps this might be
a good way to repurpose some old parking garages. Lots of sq.ft., structural
support for heavy inventory, open to air and sun, etc. Might work.

------
contingencies
Where do I find up to date hard yield and input data on fully artificially lit
hydroponic or aeroponic systems for various crops?

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m_coder
I really wonder what how much food could be produced if all the lawn and empty
lots in a city were effectively productive as vegetable plots. I know that it
can't be used because people like their lawns and things but often there is
unused space in densely populated areas.

~~~
terravion
It isn't even that they like their lawns. It is the cost of labor to do this.
The Salinas and Imperial valleys (where 85% of US veggies are grown)
concentrate labor and other inputs in a way that you never could in small
plots.

It is the same thing as we could assemble cars in almost any workshop or
hangar, but we build cars at scale in only a few places.

~~~
hs44
The trick would be getting people to have and grow their own edible lawns.
Then the cost is the same as keeping the lawns of today, but there's a more
useful return. It's only a values issue. In Russia for example small gardeners
produce 40% of the nations food.
[http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-
dacha.htm](http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-dacha.htm)

And perhaps the evolution of tools like
[https://farmbot.io/](https://farmbot.io/) An intelligent 'lawmmower' makes
your permaculture for you.

~~~
randomdata
_> Then the cost is the same as keeping the lawns of today_

By far, the biggest cost of my lawn is the 5 minutes per week I have to spend
cutting it. How does an edible lawn compete with that?

