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'Infarm' Startup Wants To Put a Farm In Every Grocery Store (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the farm-of-the-future dept.

Infarm, a 40-plus person startup based in Berlin, imagines a future where every grocery store has its own farm packed with herbs, vegetables and fruit. "The plants themselves are being monitored by multiple sensors and fed by an internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system," reports TechCrunch. "Growing out from the center, the basil is at ascending stages of its life, with the most outer positioned ready for you, the customer, to harvest." From the report: The concept might not be entirely new -- Japan has been an early pioneer in vertical farming, where the lack of space for farming and very high demand from a large population has encouraged innovation -- but what potentially sets Infarm apart, including from other startups, is the modular approach and go-to-market strategy it is taking. This means that the company can do vertical farming on a small but infinitely expandable scale, and is seeing Infarm place farms not in offsite warehouses but in customer-facing city locations, such as grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls, and schools, enabling the end-customer to actually pick the produce themselves. In contrast, the Infarm system is chemical pesticide-free and can prioritize food grown for taste, color and nutritional value rather than shelf life or its ability to sustain mass production. Its indoor nature means it isn't restricted to seasonality either and by completely eliminating the distance between farmer and consumer, food doesn't get much fresher. When a new type of herb or plant is introduced, Infarm's plant experts and engineers create a recipe or algorithm for the produce type, factoring in nutrition, humidity, temperature, light intensity and spectrum, which is different from system to system depending on what is grown. The resulting combination of IoT, Big Data and cloud analytics is akin to "Farming-as-a-Service," whilst , space permitting, Infarm's modular approach affords the ability to keep adding more farming capacity in a not entirely dissimilar way to how cloud computing can be ramped up at the push of a button.

85 comments

  1. Grocery Store Employees by slk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The employees at my local grocery store are mostly incapable not damaging packaged goods, and do not appear to possess sufficient brainpower or attention to detail to not stick a gallon of milk on top of a bunch of bananas. The chance of them successfully operating a vertical farm is somewhere between epsilon and zero.

    --
    ERROR: Null .sig, core dumped.
    1. Re:Grocery Store Employees by TWX · · Score: 1

      well if you're going to milk a bunch of bananas I don't think it's going to work too well.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Rei · · Score: 1

      The basic concept is that you don't "operate" it, you plug it in, connect the fresh and wastewater supply, and beyond that it's just scheduled nutrient refills. Monitoring and any troubleshooting is done remotely, not by the local staff. They don't discuss what sort of growth medium they're using or whether the customer is expected to take the whole plant (roots, medium and all), but one presumes that keeping that simple is also part of their design goals.

      Like they said, it's not a new concept. And it's never going to make sense for "calorie-intensive" crops. But for herbs, lettuce, etc, it's at least plausible. At the very least it'd make for a nice loss leader for upscale grocery chains.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    3. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      you plug it in, connect the fresh and wastewater supply, and beyond that it's just scheduled nutrient refills

      Sounds like the perfect woman.

    4. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not a new concept at all. Besides, you wouldn't need more than a few specialists to keep it in tune. Most grocery stores already have specialists (bakery, deli, meats). I see it going further too - aquaculture can do fish and fresh water crustaceans well as well which feed the plants in a continuous cycle. Now were talking fresh trout, tilapia, crawfish, mussels, perch, catfish, bass, possibly walleye. Certainly a smaller store wouldn't be able to dedicate the space but larger stores could. The setup doesn't necessarily have to be visible to the public or to regular staff if there is concern about screwing it up. The saved refrigerator space in a store alone would probably cover most if not all need.

    5. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      It's 2017 and we still have these hate-filled xenophobic mysoginistic posts. Not funny. For shame.

    6. Re: Grocery Store Employees by gerf · · Score: 2

      Don't you realize how filthy aquatic farms are? I don't want one within 100m of my food.

    7. Re: Grocery Store Employees by mpwrk1 · · Score: 1

      High intensity glasshouses show that you don't just plug it in and sit back. Many things can go wrong including some related to food safety. A lovely idea, but not too meaningful.

    8. Re: Grocery Store Employees by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There are tons of problems with the "vertical farm" concept. The economics of it make no sense at all. If you grow food in the city, and it takes 3 months to go from seed to harvest, you save shipping one box of produce into the city from the countryside. However, if you use that same space to house one family, you could have avoided 65 round-trip commutes from the suburbs. Meanwhile you are growing crops under electric lights rather than sunlight, and dumping agricultural waste into the sewer rather than recycling it into the soil. Using expensive urban real estate for "farming" is insane.

    9. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's 2017 and we still have these hate-filled xenophobic mysoginistic posts. Not funny. For shame.

      .
      .
      .

      It's 2017 and we still have these humorless SJW twerps who have no ability to discern a joke ^

    10. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's a very *different* Internet service.

    11. Re:Grocery Store Employees by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      If there's one thing worse than the employees it's the customers. At least 10% of them don't know how to use the self-checkout properly yet they still go through them. Heck look at the trouble people still have with putting their PIN with their credit card. And then you want them to harvest the right produce from this. I'm willing to bet someone gets stuck in there at least once a week. Never mind the hygiene issues. At least with what they have now (pre-picked bunches stacked up) there's no need for people to touch everything but this system is encouraging people to touch every leaf.

    12. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Gay+Boner+Sex · · Score: 2

      ShanghaiBill,

      Perhaps you have only been to large cities like Shanghai. Where I grew up in the greater NYC area, there was abandoned ghetto not too far from the densest population centers. If you knew a little better, many cities have skyscrapers in a small section and then single story housing/buildings surrounding as far as the eye can see. Many hydroponic crops grow much faster. 2x and sometimes 10x speed-ups can be accomplished, no problem. Leafy greens taking longer than a month? Big problem with how you're doing it. And the fertilizers going into the sewers, well, that was solved a long time ago. Do your homework, brother. It's a great industry to be in and by from. :)

      --GBS

    13. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      banana milk shake = hand job?

    14. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You came to a technophile website and are complaining about the technophiles? Gynoids are easier to debug and program than humans.

    15. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And in 2017, women are still self-centered narcissists lacking the ability to reason or be accountable for anything.

    16. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't. Please tell. I imagined they are closed systems.

    17. Re:Grocery Store Employees by havana9 · · Score: 1

      The solution is simple: change local grocery store it this is possible. I suppose that offering low wages, long working hours and a bad workplace, makes really easy to attract people that can't find other works and then demotivate them further. I know several grocery store and supermarket with clerks that are making a really good work, have a big attention to the clients and the store is always spotless. I konow other grocery stores and supermarkets that are a hellhole.

    18. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Rei · · Score: 2

      Have to side with you, despite your username (although your notion of 2-10x "speedups" from hydroponics is... let's just say "optimistic" to be nice - and yes, I have plenty of experience with both hydroponics and growing crops under lights, and no, not that kind of crop ;) ). Lettuce and herbs don't take three months to grow; it's crops like grains and tomatoes that take that long. And for most of their life they're far smaller than their final size. Even if that wasn't the case, the GP's logic makes no sense. Are they seriously proposing to house a family in the amount of space that is taken up by a box of hydroponic lettuce?

      For realistic numbers for herbs or greens - say, a 2,5m high unit taking up 2m of floor space with 8x 30cm-high rows, 1 month from planting to harvest, minimum growth media space of 8cm, maximum mature plant space of 50cm, average of say 20cm - and a wasted space fraction of say 20% - you get 80 plants (representing a couple cubic meters of total volume) per month, 2-3 mature plants per day. Filling up an entire tiny apartment's worth of space (say, 30 square meters) would yield 15 times that much.

      If you want to talk crops that can actually take a few months from seed to harvest, tomatoes might be an example (and IMHO probably aren't a good idea, as they're more of an energy-intensive crop than herbs and greens - although not as bad as caloric crops like grains, tubers, etc). But in that case, while it may be 90 days to harvest, that's only 90 days to the start of harvesting. A tomato plant, kept properly, can stay productive for years - continuously. Of course, when you're talking long-lifespan continuous producers, having some sort of automated "farm" becomes less meaningful, all you really need is a proper grow tent setup.

      I live in a place where hydroponics is a big thing (Iceland). And in the winter, it's almost entirely done under lights. But they don't do it in grocery stores in vertical farms, it's done under glass. The lettuce and herbs, for example, are planted in an automated system in little cheap plastic mini-pots filled with some sort of growth medium (peat?), and for "harvest" they just take the whole pot and put it in an open-ended plastic bag and ship it to stores. While I can't imagine a cheapo chain like Bónus changing that system, I could imagine a high-end one like Hagkaup having their own "in-store" growth system as a loss-leader. Or, for a US equivalent, something like Whole Foods.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    19. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Rei · · Score: 2

      Well... as a general rule with hydroponics, most aren't really closed systems. You mix up a batch of concentrate, and from that mix up your initial solution. You then monitor solution level, EC and pH daily. Water is added to maintain solution level, concentrate is added to maintain EC, and acidic or basic nutrients (such as nitric acid or potassium hydroxide) are added to control pH. After a month to a couple months, the balance of individual nutrients in the solution is considered to be too out of whack to use, you drain it, and start over.

      Note that if you want a fully closed-loop system, it's not an answer to measure the concentration of each nutrient individually in the solution (a much more difficult task than EC measurement) and add them each individually. Because the goal isn't to maintain nutrient levels in the solution at a constant amount, it's to maintain uptake levels in the plants at a proper amount. If you want that, you need to take periodic plant tissue samples and measure the nutrient concentrations in the plants, and adjust the solution based on whether they're too high or low. As a general rule, this only applies to macronutrients; you usually don't have to be too cautious with micronutrients. You just deliver them in rough proportion to the macronutrients and you're good.

      For an "in-store farm", I'd almost certainly expect it to be based around periodic solution flushes. It's much simpler. That said, even when dumping your nutrient solution at regular intervals, the wastage is far lower than with conventional farming.

      BTW, one of the nice things about hydroponics is that it makes biofortification easier. For example, plants don't need iodine - it's actually somewhat harmful to them. But while in small quantities in the solution it makes no difference to their growth rate, they incorporate significant amounts of it into their biomass, transforming foods that are traditionally iodine-devoid into valuable dietary sources of iodine. Growing under lights also lets you have some interesting effects. While controlling frequencies in the visible spectrum affects plant growth factors (for example, triggering early blossoming or delaying it for more leaf growth), the really neat stuff comes from UV; UV exposure causes plants to produce various "sunscreen" compounds (akin to how we tan with increased melanin production). This affects their colour, flavour, and nutrient composition. Even non-plants can benefit from this; mushrooms do not require light, but when exposed to UV during growth, many mushrooms change from being almost devoid in vitamin D to crazy-rich in it.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    20. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Rei · · Score: 1

      High intensity glasshouses aren't exactly the same thing. Vertical microfarms generally pursue sterility and plant isolation, meaning that you don't have the same challenges with pest and disease management. They also do more to maintain precise controlled conditions and handle process steps automatically. This all comes at a cost of significantly higher capital costs per unit output, mind you.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    21. Re:Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The chance of them successfully operating a vertical farm is somewhere between epsilon and zero.

      In other words, the change is limited in the true meaning of the word. ;)

    22. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The employees at my local grocery store are mostly incapable not damaging packaged goods, and do not appear to possess sufficient brainpower or attention to detail to not stick a gallon of milk on top of a bunch of bananas. The chance of them successfully operating a vertical farm is somewhere between epsilon and zero

      I think you'd do better to concentrate on your own inability to construct valid sentences.

    23. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Must be something in the water where you live .. that's not my experience at all

    24. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's still costly and inefficient, but, before Amazon bought it, maybe Whole foods would have gone for it. It would allow for a more selective and fresher product.

    25. Re: Grocery Store Employees by dougdonovan · · Score: 1

      not a bad idea, everyone has a "start" button and gates is living larger than large. good luck to the farmers.

    26. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      Don't you realize how filthy aquatic farms are? I don't want one within 100m of my food.

      You must never have been to France. When you buy a trout in a poissonnière the clerk scoops one out of a live tank, guts and slices it right there, and wraps it up still vibrating.

    27. Re: Grocery Store Employees by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      I'm picturing a system in the not too distant future where people customize their vegetables with smartphone apps controlling gro lights. While the first pass (increasing vitamin D in mushrooms for example) doesn't bother me much, I get the heebiejeebies from thinking about what about what a decade of research (and perhaps some additional control inputs) could do.

      Those kind of mushrooms come to mind (so to speak). Or super carrots.

      Brave New World, indeed.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    28. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      What helps a lot there is the infinite free hot water. Keeping greenhouses warm is just as big a problem in cold climates as the lack of winter light.

    29. Re: Grocery Store Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your mother doesn't count. She'd like you if you were Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and Unkle Adolf all rolled into one.

    30. Re: Grocery Store Employees by xession · · Score: 1

      dumping agricultural waste into the sewer rather than recycling it into the soil.

      I didn't see where it said what type of farming they were intending to do but there are very successful aquaponic systems that recycle nearly everything and don't even use soil. Also, you mitigate the need for pesticides, which greatly benefits the bee population, and heavy fertilizers which runoff into the watershed and enormously pollute downstream systems. I encourage you to read about how far from the Mississippi delta, fishermen have to travel to continue their operations (hint: a long damn way).

      you could have avoided 65 round-trip commutes from the suburbs

      So you're going to ignore the concept that this system is intended to be localized in grocery stores? Last I checked, suburbs, while vacant of most businesses, do often have nearby banks, convenience stores and grocery stores. Maybe I travel to different cities than you. Nonetheless, even if there were "65 round trip commutes", a good portion of your produce travels all the way from places like Florida, California, and even South America, which are far from large swathes of the country. These people are going to the grocery store already, so there is a net-zero impact on fuel consumption for consumers and a negative fuel impact for delivery of produce.

      And, while not vertical farms, this concept is already tried and true for large parts of Europe, which gets a lot of their produce from an enormous group of greenhouses in Spain, rather than the typical farm. Locating these closer to their distribution points, makes a lot of sense if the technology allows.

      http://www.amusingplanet.com/2...

  2. I have a startup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It aims to put a cock in every ass - balls deep!

    1. Re:I have a startup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      that's gay

    2. Re:I have a startup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      not true! both men and women are welcome to engage my services. balls deep for all!

    3. Re:I have a startup by Gay+Boner+Sex · · Score: 1

      Interesting. Is it Linux based?

    4. Re:I have a startup by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 3, Funny

      No. It's Windows-based since it requires a backdoor.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  3. Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But will I get free shipping? ;)

  4. Abuse of the term, "farm" by TWX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wish that the term farm would stop being applied to what amount to gardens. A garden has to get pretty damn big and have a pretty big yield before the scale of farm as a term really applies.

    I guess part of my distaste for the abuse of the term stems from smug, self-important people referring to their urban gardening experiments as farms. Great, you've got some plants growing and producing fruit and vegetables. Is the yield even enough to feed your household for a season? If it's not even adequate for subsistence then it may be difficult to call a farm.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I guess part of my distaste for the abuse of the term stems from smug, self-important people referring to their urban gardening experiments as farms.

      As opposed to smug self-importnt people such as yourself who have such a need for hate that you direct it toward harmless people who would dare call a garden a farm. You are the one with a problem, sensitive boy.

    2. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      At least he has the balls to post his smugness by name Mr AC.

    3. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Great, you've got some plants growing and producing fruit and vegetables. Is the yield even enough to feed your household for a season? If it's not even adequate for subsistence then it may be difficult to call a farm.

      At the high end, it's actually pretty amazing how much yield you can get out of a small space by going vertical. There are people feeding themselves on a quarter acre. I don't think I'd necessarily like to eat what they're eating, but if you were to fill the empty overhead space in a supermarket with some aeroponics (which weigh very little and thus can be supported creatively, so long as you keep the reservoirs on the ground — maybe even underground so as to take advantage of consistent ambient temperature and to avoid using floor space) then you actually could produce a significant and valuable amount of fresh, high-quality produce for certain purposes.

      Probably the ideal product for supermarket production is high end, loose leaf salad greens. They grow quickly enough and cost enough per-pound for the production to be meaningful, and greens ship poorly enough to where producing them on-site would provide significant advantage to the customer in terms of freshness and thus lifespan in the refrigerator. They also have to be shipped refrigerated, which is part of their fairly high price per pound. I've seen salad greens grown under shade cloth in Boquete, Panama, in a PVC pipe flood and drain hydro system using clay balls in plastic pots, and have heard of a couple of businesses profitably producing greens in urban warehouses here in the states.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is humans being more directly connected to the food source though. They are growing food. I think to go to far the other way and disconnect from this would not be good. Like drone delivery of vegetables exclusively or something like that...

    5. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by aNonnyMouseCowered · · Score: 1

      I suspect most farmers can't survive on their own. A peanut farmer still needs to buy his bread and milk. Or are you thinking of those old picture book farmers who raise everything from their own cows, chickens and pigs right down to their own corn, lettuce and tomatoes? That or you're looking at some extremely paranoid but wealthy survivalist with a hydroponic greenhouse fifty feet underground.

    6. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by redmid17 · · Score: 1

      How small do you think these "farms" are? They are selling produce for an entire store, which is probably going to be frequented by thousands of people a week.

    7. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This also applies a lot of food-religion buzz words, i.e. "local", "fresh", when any grocery store is neither and a farmer's market isn't fresh...You'd literally need to have picked it within 12 hours for it to make much of a difference in taste, and its nutritional value doesn't really change over the few days/weeks when it's in the grocery store, depending on the plant.

      Though in this case, that could actually be different for once. However, the organic crowd would be disappointed because this would invariably need synthetic fertilizer and climate control. Though organic is completely pointless and full of shit anyways, so no loss there.

    8. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fuck off namefag.

    9. Re: Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      These systems are 12 times more effective than traditional farm and they can be stack on top of each other. So by big do you mean area they require or the harvest they produce? And they mentioned that it scales.

    10. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by techno-vampire · · Score: 1

      At the high end, it's actually pretty amazing how much yield you can get out of a small space by going vertical.

      Yes, there's a lot of space between the shelves and the ceiling in the average supermarket, but have you ever wondered why? It's so that all of the hot air generated by the machinery, the employees and the customers has someplace to go, because hot air rises. This way, they get the ventilation they need without using as much electricity for cooling as they'd otherwise need. Now, what happens if you fill that space up with hydroponics, along with all of the electrical machinery you need to make those "farms" work? Do you still get all of the cooling and air circulation you need? I don't know, but I doubt it. Candidly, this idea doesn't sound as well thought out as it sounds on the surface, but I'm willing to be persuaded.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    11. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As if that's the worst part :) Indoor farming is the worst idea for energy conservation since living in the desert and relying on A/C in every building. The idea that this can be done cost-effectively for anything except maybe lettuce or other fast-growing leafy plants is hilarious. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc. will all still be farmed under the sun.

    12. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Rei · · Score: 1

      Grocery stores have high ceilings not only for heat management, but also for:

      1) Fire safety. It becomes harder for flame to reach the roof, and smoke accumulates at a much higher height. Sprinkler system design also becomes easier.
      2) It creates a more "open" feel, which customers prefer. Some grocery stores even put mirrors on the upper walls to make the space feel even more open. The vertical height is also used for displays, signs, etc.
      3) In some cases, excess inventory is stacked vertically.
      4) Simpler, more even illumination

      In general, if you're building retail and you have no particular reason to limit vertical height, you use high ceilings. Heat is one of the factors, but not the only one, and is managed by HVAC regardless. And gee, news flash, "Electronic device outputs heat, details at 11!"

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    13. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      I wish that the term farm would stop being applied to what amount to gardens. A garden has to get pretty damn big and have a pretty big yield before the scale of farm as a term really applies.

      Yeah, because language is impervious to change. Notions of what a garden and a farm are are changing to reflect the convergence between the two. It is a convergence that makes the difference irrelevant at the small/in-house scale.

      I guess part of my distaste for the abuse of the term stems from smug, self-important people referring to their urban gardening experiments as farms.

      Pot tells kettle. Who's the smug, self-important person now that you made your supremely subjective opinion obvious? Yeah, here is me, here is my point, where is my cookie?

      Great, you've got some plants growing and producing fruit and vegetables.

      Dude, vertical/hydroponic farms produce enormous yields relative to size. Singapore, for example, produces enough this way to compensate the expense of importing crops from neighboring countries. Greenhouses have always had this capability.

      This isn't some hippie science fiction shit. It is real... and it is not news.

      The points of these facilities is not to replace industrial farming, but to compliment and supplement at the local level (thus eliminating waste due to transportation and adding additional sources of income.) A vertical or hydroponic farm uses (IIRC) 20 times less water than regular farming.

      This about affordable and supplemental production of crops close to where they are going to be consumed. In the aggregate, yes, they can produce (and do produce) enough to feed many households. How's this different from a farm? A farm is made out of many parcels, many of which (until recently) DID NOT necessarily produce enough for a household (until the introduction of mechanized agriculture.)

      Is the yield even enough to feed your household for a season?

      Funny guy. Many farms have existed to provide excess produce without a need to supply a household for a season. This is the 21st century. There are large industrial scale farms for... roses. They are farms and yet they do not produce anything edible. Or how about a coffee plantation? That's a farm by the way it operates. I don't care how many fucktons of coffee it produces, it won't feed a household.

      If it's not even adequate for subsistence then it may be difficult to call a farm.

      No. The definition of a farm is an area of land devoted to crop production. Size and yield are not part of the definition. Look it up, or buy a dictionary.

      You are just being pedantic for no reason.

    14. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You cannot put enough farm space in a building in the footprint of a large supermarket to feed that volume of customers without it getting really expensive just to build up and maintain. This is could only be for boutique items for fancy, low nutrient, easy to grow produce like fresh salad greens that people would be willing to pay too much for.

    15. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by TWX · · Score: 1

      The point isn't that all farms are subsistence farms, but that the to qualify it needs the acreage to be able to provide for subsistence farming. Obviously the old, "40 acres and a mule," addage doesn't specifically apply anymore if one has mechanized tools to assist in the process of farming, but there's a lower limit that is more than a suburban residence is going to provide.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    16. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by TWX · · Score: 1

      In a nutshell, the reason that conventional farming and ranching still produces the vast majority of the food we eat is because it's the least expensive means to produce that food. Hell, in a lot of parts of the country we don't even artificially irrigate the fields, we simply sculpt the dirt and embed seeds in it during a certain time of the year and let the rains and time do a large part of the work. Fields do require maintenance and monitoring, and equipment that does the work needs maintenance as well, but assuming that the weather cooperates we simply let nature carry the course we set it upon.

      Hydroponics, indoor farming, UV and other spectrum-manipulation lighting, etc are all employed because there's something making traditional farming problematic. Lack of space. Desire for a plant/crop that doesn't grow or doesn't do well in the local climate. Hell, the illegal marijuana grow operations probably are doing the most to help advance this kind of farming simply because they can't be out in the open lest they get busted.

      Transitioning to this kind of indoor farming doesn't make any sense unless there's a real reason for it, and waiting a couple of extra days for lettuce to leave the fields around Yuma Arizona so far hasn't proved to be enough reason for most people.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    17. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now that is an interesting idea. Design a big-box store so the reservoirs are on the ground, and aeroponic systems hold plants in green houses on the roof. The roots are sprayed with a water/nutrient mixture.

      Unfortunately, InFarm is a hoax. Anyone who says artificial lights are more eco-friendly than sunlight is a charlatan. InFarm should be shut down.

    18. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is possible to grow 50 heads of lettuce in 1 square foot in one year. If the entire roof of a big box store were a greenhouse, I wonder if they could grow most of their own fresh fruits and vegetables?

    19. Re:Abuse of the term, "farm" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ---------- 4chan is that way

  5. Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can't believe this is not coming out of Palo Alto!

  6. Can you say "scam" ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Frankly it sounds like another one of those Kickstarter scams in which the principals end up with a few million dollars and nothing is ever actually created,
    which those who are not childishly naive will understand was the REAL business plan from the beginning.

    Alternatively, this is a good example of the kind of idea that is dreamed up by people who have no practical experience in the related fields, so they are unable to understand how utterly impractical their idea really is.

    1. Re:Can you say "scam" ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Alternatively, this is a good example of the kind of idea that is dreamed up by people who have no practical experience in the related fields, so they are unable to understand how utterly impractical their idea really is.

      Oh, you mean Europeans?

    2. Re:Can you say "scam" ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Oh, you mean Europeans?

      Oh, you mean the people who conquered the world?

  7. There should be a pony too by Required+Snark · · Score: 1

    As long as they are engaged in such irrational thinking, they might as well be wishing for a pony to go with the farm.

    --
    Why is Snark Required?
    1. Re:There should be a pony too by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      What do you mean? A Rarity or a Fluttershy?

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  8. What could possibly go wrong? by quonset · · Score: 3, Insightful

    fed by an internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system

    Ah yes, the allure of everything internet. As we've seen with the rock-solid security built into IoT, what could possibly go wrong? All that matters is it's on the internet.

  9. Won't/can't work as anything but a curiosity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My friend, plant scientist Stan Cox, has written several pieces about such ideas in the past. The energy requirements alone make them impractical...
    "
    Based on figures in a 2013 paper published by indoor plant-growth expert Toyoki Kozai of Japan’s Chiba University and on the assumption of efficient LED lighting, I estimate that plants like potato or tomato that produce a fleshy food product require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each kilogram of edible tissue they produce, not counting the water stored in the food.

    That requirement approximates the annual electricity consumption of the average American home refrigerator — and that’s a big energy bill to produce just two and a quarter pounds of food dry matter.
    "
    http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_farming_partner/

    1. Re: Won't/can't work as anything but a curiosity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What about lettuce?

  10. "infinitely expandable scale" by Oligonicella · · Score: 2

    I certainly hope the people who are actually trying to implement this understand math better than the summary writer.

    1. Re:"infinitely expandable scale" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a vocabulary issue. People don't know the word "indefinitely" any more. And here I'm talking about readers, not writers.

  11. Nature finds a way by TheOuterLinux · · Score: 1

    You cannot expect there to be no insects just because it's indoors. Nature finds a way. This will do more harm than good. And, you know they'll charge more for something that tastes fake. I'll take a tomato with a couple of bug bites from the actual outdoors before I'd eat that air conditioned robo crap.

    1. Re:Nature finds a way by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      It's just hydroponics. You've probably had some and didn't realize. I have an AeroGarden hydroponics kit in my kitchen and when I use the commercial variety of seeds it only tastes a bit better than the store because it's fresher. But when I use heirloom varieties where the taste hasn't been bred out of the vegetables it's amazing. It's the same thing with these. It will mostly depend on what varieties of plants they use.

    2. Re:Nature finds a way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i'm develloping a farming robot in my house , very much the same thing as my previous (manual) hydro setup but with a raspberry pi that monitors environmental variables every minutes , and switching pumps , lights , fans on and off , i'ts not grafting medusa DNA on a tomatoe plant

  12. Don't know if it will be successful by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have my doubts about this. The supermarket will be giving up a lot of floor space for just one or two items. I have a small hydroponic unit in my kitchen and I use it for lettuce instead of herbs. But when I start lettuce it takes three to four weeks for me to be able to pick leaves off. Even if the company has been able to shave that down to a couple of weeks that's a lot of trays of herbs sitting there not earning money for the store while a few trays are. I'm sure that the store would rather have the space devoted to something else that would be earring money.

    Then the store will have to pay for extra electricity (lights and heating) and water. There will be extra staff time to take care of the unit and help people to have problems getting the produce themselves.

    The company could have put in a unique refrigerator containing their picked herbs and opened a facility in each city (or offered the stores one in a region). I don't expect to see one of these "farm" in a store that I go to.

    1. Re:Don't know if it will be successful by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      I think a better plan would be to have fresh produce grown in professional farms, and then brought to the store when it's about ready to sell. You could still put them in a climate controlled display to keep them in optimal condition until they get sold, but that requires a lot less care.

    2. Re:Don't know if it will be successful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is a whole lot of hype, and very few details about what this "System" can actually grow, how much of it, and for how much money. The number of people going to a store for a pinch of Basil and a few leaves of that nasty astringent Arugula are vanishingly small. People who want fresh Spices and Herbs that can be grown in this manner, (No Cinnamon or Tea...), are already doing so on window sills. Hell, _I_ used to grow... Herbs... on a window sill; Mom taught me how.
      Strawberries maybe; I grew those too, in stacked Planter boxes. (The Irish grew Strawberries that way for centuries. Piles of manure, mixed with poor dirt and seaweed on the ground were reserved for Potatoes.)

      About the only food that can be grown this way in mass quantities are Zucchinis. Do we really want to go back to the Zucchini Wars of the Seventies? Children stealing out just before Dawn to leave paper bags full of fresh Zucchinis on unsuspecting neighbor's doorsteps? Not only were lives lost, but it led to a lot of youthful unprotected sex- with Zucchinis. And some melons. Also of doubtful nutritional or any other value.
      No, instead of reading the crackpot Philosophy of a long-dead Japanese failure of a lazy farmer, I want to see a Business Plan. I want to see Kilowatt-hours in for Kilocalories out of proposed crops. I want to see how much very expensive unsubsidized Urban Water will be needed. Bathrooms... what about Bathrooms? Right now E. Coli is a big problem on the Industrial Farms where Workers take dumps between furrows because there simply aren't enough Bathrooms. Shoppers spending hours pinching off a sprig of basil here and there will need to be accommodated, or regular Arugula inspections and cleanings will be needed.
      Where will the Composting heaps be for the 50-90% of Vegetation that can't or won't be eaten? And don't get me started on Bathrooms again.

      Right now on their Employment pages they are looking for a Head Grower, Food Scientists, and Plant Researchers because they haven't any yet.
      This is literally a Pipe Dream of those who probably spend a lot more time smoking Herb than eating it.

    3. Re:Don't know if it will be successful by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      I think you're correct. When I was growing up, our family lived on a quarter acre plot of land, which is pretty big for most suburban plots, with a decent-sized garden in back with very good river-basin soil. We couldn't even completely feed our own family of four with that large garden. A single isle unit will likely be ravaged into barren emptiness within the first few days, after which it will take weeks to "restock" itself, during which time it's completely useless to the store. This should be obvious to anyone who looks at the large amounts of highly perishable items that are put on display every morning at a decently-sized supermarket. No matter how efficient hydroponic farming is, I don't see how it can keep up with supermarket demands at that small scale.

      Supermarkets are mostly distribution centers, and in some limited cases, preparation centers, not places to grow food. The idea is to pack as much selection into as small a space as possible with as wide a variety of goods as possible. I just don't see how this can really work in practice.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    4. Re:Don't know if it will be successful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Strawberries? They take an insane amount of light, over months, to grow. Zucchinis too. This won't be cost effective under artificial light. As you said, herbs and maybe lettuce are the only things this suits, and whoop-de-doo because nobody could ever grow those at home.

      Not sure where you're going on the bathroom thing though. Stores have bathrooms already :)

    5. Re:Don't know if it will be successful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seeing as how this is a Berlin start-up it just shows that Silicon Valley doesn't truly have a monopoly on silly ideas after all.

  13. Monsanto (or whatever new name they're using now) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Did they ask Monsanto?
    They can't allow anyone to grow their own food.

  14. Hype words by FredrikKarlsson · · Score: 0

    How many hype-words, such as IoT, can you count in this article?

    1. Re: Hype words by infuriatedweasel · · Score: 1

      I would have completed a row an my buzzword-bingo card if only they'd added 'Artificial intelligence.' I had 'IoT', 'as-a-service', 'big-data', and 'cloud'.

  15. agriculture makes sense in volume/person by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So a single person uses 6oz/day. Now this might be a single plant let's say. Now multiply that by the # of people / day, and then multiply that by the number of days for a plant to mature say 60 days. So perhaps 500*60 or 30k plants...that's quite a few plants. Now add-in water, air conditioning, light, etc. It's going to be elite Whole Foods consumers who will be able to afford a fee leaves of Basil for $10.

  16. still not autonomous enough for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    why go to he farm-grocery when i ALREADY have an hydro farm in my garage ? 72 square feet of glorious all year round veggy production for the last 2 years

  17. I'll ask the same question again by holophrastic · · Score: 1

    ...and the nutrition comes from where exactly?? No sunlight, dense farming, and stale soil. Tell me where the nutrition comes from. No wait, let me guess. They pour a mysterious ooze onto it. Great.

    I think I'll choose my plants growing under the sun, under the rain, with worms, and bugs, and rabbits, and, dirt-I-mean-soil-I-mean-what's-that-word-oh-yeah-we-used-it-to-name-our-planet earth.

  18. This is a scam by RecycledElectrons · · Score: 1

    This is a scam. They replacr sunlight with flouresceny tubes and then make these lying claims in their web site:

    "PIONEERING ON-DEMAND FARMING SERVICES TO HELP ... REDUCING THEIR ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT.

    REDUCE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT
    BY ...

    "IF EVERY CITY ON EARTH WERE TO GROW 10% OF ITS PRODUCE INDOORS, IT WOULD ALLOW US TO TAKE 340,000 SQUARE MILES OF FARMLAND BACK TO FOREST. THAT, IN TURN, COULD ABSORB ENOUGH CARBON DIOXIDE TO BRING THE LEVEL IN EARTHâ(TM)S ATMOSPHERE BACK TO WHERE IT WAS IN 1980."
    PROF. DICKSON D. DESPOMMIER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY"

    They are liars.

    Something like this could work, but they would need to use natural sunlight, and get rid of those chemicals by going to an aquaponics system.

  19. Expensive Real Estate by pubwvj · · Score: 1

    The problem with putting farms in urban areas and even worse in stores is that is VERY expensive real estate. Almost all farming is done out in rural areas where the real estate prices and taxes are lower. If you farm in a high cost area you end up having to pass on both of these costs (buying land, ongoing real estate taxes each year) to your consumers. That means either your prices must be higher or your profits lower.

    I'm a farmer. I bought land outside where my markets are so that I can farm on lower cost land paying less taxes to help keep my costs down. This is basic economic market forces.

    Putting farms inside stores is a very expensive proposition which means the product produced must be expensive enough to justify this higher cost of production.