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Can We Build Indoor 'Vertical Farms' Near The World's Major Cities? (vox.com)
Vox reports on the hot new "vertical farming" startup Plenty:
The company's goal is to build an indoor farm outside of every city in the world of more than 1 million residents -- around 500 in all. It claims it can build a farm in 30 days and pay investors back in three to five years (versus 20 to 40 for traditional farms). With scale, it says, it can get costs down to competitive with traditional produce (for a presumably more desirable product that could command a price premium)... It has enormous expansion plans and a bank account full of fresh investor funding, but most excitingly, it is building a 100,000 square foot vertical-farming warehouse in Kent, Washington, just outside of Seattle... It recently got a huge round of funding ($200 million in July, the largest ag-tech investment in history), including some through Jeff Bezos's investment firm, so it has the capital to scale...; heck, it even lured away the director of battery technology at Tesla, Kurt Kelty, to be executive of operations and development...
The plants receive no sunlight, just light from hanging LED lamps. There are thousands of infrared cameras and sensors covering everything, taking fine measurements of temperature, moisture, and plant growth; the data is used by agronomists and artificial intelligence nerds to fine-tune the system... There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn't have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs... Relative to conventional agriculture, Plenty says that it can get as much as 350 times the produce out of a given acre of land, using 1 percent as much water.
Though it may use less water and power, to be competitive with traditional farms companies like Plenty will also have to be "even better at reducing the need for human planters and harvesters," the article warns.
"In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible."
The plants receive no sunlight, just light from hanging LED lamps. There are thousands of infrared cameras and sensors covering everything, taking fine measurements of temperature, moisture, and plant growth; the data is used by agronomists and artificial intelligence nerds to fine-tune the system... There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn't have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs... Relative to conventional agriculture, Plenty says that it can get as much as 350 times the produce out of a given acre of land, using 1 percent as much water.
Though it may use less water and power, to be competitive with traditional farms companies like Plenty will also have to be "even better at reducing the need for human planters and harvesters," the article warns.
"In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible."
But will it be useful and does it make sense?
Indoor farms would require artificial light and production costs would be higher than for ordinary farming.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Just saw some cool vertical plant growth at Epcot center that looked pretty cool, not sure how well it would work at scale but certainly worth investigating.
Okay, MANY parts of this made me chuckle... but one line made it pretty obvious the people behind this do not have a lot of actual experience with growing things...
”There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn't have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs...”
Yeah, good luck with the assumption there aren’t lots of pests which will find their way into your nice high-tech greenhouse and happily establish residence. There are ways to control them - there are even organic ways to control them - but it involves a fair bit of money and/or work.
#DeleteChrome
It's not that nature "designs" brilliant systems. Rather, it's that an ecosystem is just that. An ecosystem. Unexpected feedback loops, such as the timing of exposure to rain, sunlight, and annual flooding versus the existence of predators or consumers of vegetation creating their own chemical environments can have unexpected and even impossible to anticipate destructive effects on a crop species. It's very easy, at the planning stages, to leave out or underestimate losses from unexpected interactions.
The plumbing challenges, alone, are going to be nightmarish. Unexpected system failures could ruin an entire crop, even worse than unexpected storms or floods, because of the inevitable centralization of control of a commercial location in a single facility. I'd be very cautious about investing in this.
With scale, it says, it can get costs down to competitive with traditional produce (for a presumably more desirable product that could command a price premium)...
So this like for rich people, right?
The one question I'd have is 'why'. What's the benefit? So you can grow stuff closer to large concentrations of consumers? What for? So you save in transport? Ok. Valid point. Do you conserve more energy by not transporting it than you expend by artificial lighting, watering and whatever else you get for "free" from nature, and building of those "farms"? I dare say no.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Rather than building large, expensive systems that require massive planning and upkeep, perhaps it's better to design smaller, simple-to-maintain systems for the individual consumer. Indoor gardening systems, window planters, et cetera have been around forever. Let's just improve them, make them even more affordable and efficient, and encourage mass adoption.
The idea is not necessarily to totally replace the commercial farm, but rather to relieve the burden placed upon them to feed the population.
So for these vertical farms to work the cost of their product has to be roughly equal to or less than the cost of farming in an open field + transport + crop loss. Bear in mind that open field farming has minimal electricity costs and at least some of the irrigation comes from rain. It's basically the cost of transmuting diesel fuel into food crops. It takes a lot of space but the upside is that cost per unit area tends to be rather low.
Indoors all the light, water, and nutrients, and crop handling have to be artificially provided, all of which costs more money than an open field under normal circumstances. Buildings + HVAC + lighting + irrigation = expensive. BUT indoors you can control the environment completely and optimize so presumably there is the opportunity for a gain in crop yields as well as reduced losses of crops due to pests, weather, etc. Plus you can farm indoors all year with minimal worry about location AND you can be closer to your destination market. You also can grow crops on multiple vertical levels so the amount of land needed is less which somewhat offsets the cost of the building.
It's not clear to me whether indoor farming can be done economically but it seems worth trying. I tend to believe there will be at least some use cases where it makes sense. It will have to get some significant scale to be economically competitive so someone will have to take a big financial risk to try to make it work. But if they succeed the benefits could be huge.
Nowhere does this adcopy of an article tell us how much the vegetables cost even with that ominous warning at the end. How much per kg of potatoes?
This omission is quite telling i'd say.
This tech is great for space and the main investor is,surprise!, one of the silicon valley space nut billionaires complete with his own rocket company.
It's interesting and needed tech to be sure, but not for earth except maybe for the future super-rich who don't want to eat the same gene edited, pesticide riddled food from Monsanto crops us normal plebs will have to eat cause we cannot afford the good expensive stuff like this.
Start with everbearing strawberries and tomatoes. Then add in additional plants as available or on request. After several generation the plants can be selected for better indoor growing properties, like smaller plant size or better flavor without concern about shipability.
While vertical crops could potentially produce vast amounts of food with lower environmental impact given sufficiently low energy costs, it seems a bit dangerous to have such a condensed supply chain.
If something were to happen to the mega tower feeding Manhattan resulting in a lost crop, what would people do?
Losing a crops happens all the time, but because there are so many farms, it doesn't really have any impact on the food supply. If you shut down all the farms and have a few towers, losing a tower to Jihadists in an airplane would have a devastating impact.
Just saw some cool vertical plant growth at Epcot center that looked pretty cool, not sure how well it would work at scale but certainly worth investigating.
They've had some version of those at Epcot for 35 years. I visited Epcot in the 80s and saw demos of hydroponics and automated gardening. Never amounted to much outside of some cool science demos because it cost WAY more than traditional farming.
That said, the state of the art has progressed a LOT since then so maybe they can finally figure out how to make it economically competitive.
- Feel good idiotic idea
- Large government subsidies for the non-viable project to remotely work and ultimately fail
- No work opportunities for people in order to push the UBI agenda
- Only imagined environmental benefits
- Destruction of the economy
A big energy user (and environmental problem) in agriculture is not the direct growth of plants. We feed a significant amount of the grown plants to domestic animals in order to eat higher up on the food chain. Additionally large amounts of food tend to be wasted.
If they can market these to make eating more lower on the food chain "sexy" it would have a great impact. If they can actually match the market demand and planting in order to reduce pre-consumer waste, this would be big too.
(The pessimist in me is that everything will be plastic wrapped and more will be tossed in the name of "freshness.")
The one question I'd have is 'why'. What's the benefit?
Potentially several:
1) Crop losses due to weather no longer a concern.
2) Reduced exposure to pests and pathogens
3) Less transport costs to get product to market (esp for big cities)
4) Increase crop yields due to optimized conditions
5) Less horizontal footprint required so cost of land cheaper
6) Complete control over conditions (light, water, nutrients, soil (if any) etc.
7) Less need for chemicals and fertilizers
8) Less pollution from runoff of chemicals and fertilizers as they can be controlled on site
9) Can be located anywhere
Disadvantages:
1) Buildings are expensive
2) All water, light, and nutrients have to be artificially provided which costs $
3) The equipment isn't being produced at sufficient scale to get full economies of scale. (again $)
4) Competing traditional farms aren't required to control their pollution and runoff (again $)
5) Competing traditional farms have less up front capital costs because they're already in operation
So basically the only disadvantage to farming indoors is cost. Unfortunately that's by far the most important consideration. They're basically gambling that the increased yields and reduced transport costs will offset the expensive of the building and controlling the conditions. Unclear if it will be possible to make it competitive but it's arguably a worthwhile gamble.
Hmm, this is interesting because some farm soil can be exhausted and will no longer produce. I wonder if land that is set up this way could some how be worse or better. So aside from availability of water and light, would the soil remain arable with nutrient levels.
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Solar won't do it, because it requires large amounts of land covered by panels, which implies wires, switching stations, repair roads, etc...
"Solar won't do it"? You do realize nearly ALL crops we currently consume are grown exclusively with solar power, right? Claiming that we can't grow our crops using solar power (directly or indirectly) is just an idiotic claim.
You could power the entire globe by covering an area roughly the size of Spain. Close to half of that could be supplied by "simply" (it's not simple) converting existing rooftops to solar. That is more than enough to power all agriculture around the globe. Even if we sacrificed non-arable land for solar panels we could easily generate enough solar energy to power enough indoor farms to supply the world.
The question is whether we can do so economically. There is no question solar can provide adequate energy to power every farm on the planet.
These guys should team up with a company that runs data centres. MS, Amazon or Google... Those guys site their data centres beside a power dam. The waste heat is perfect for green houses, and the DC staff, could likely easily maintain farmbot equipment as well. And the power for the lighting will be cheaper than as well. It's amassively synergistic with data centres...
I'm in Montreal, my choice would be to talk to OVH out in Beauharnois: world's biggest data centre, a mostly empty ex-aluminum smelter, beside a 1.6 gigawatt power dam, next to a city of four million people that have six months of winter. Quebecers are pretty *grano* as well, organic would be a big seller here.
Seattle just doesn't strike me as the easiest place to start with.
Wow, I knew the USA are a bit backyardly, but you have no supermarkets?
Nice troll jackass. Read about food deserts and educate yourself. Every country has them. Including whatever backwater you hail from.
what stops the cows falling off ? velcro boots ?
Nullius in verba
If something were to happen to the mega tower feeding Manhattan resulting in a lost crop, what would people do?
A) It wouldn't be a single tower. It would necessarily be a bunch of buildings, probably more resembling warehouses than towers.
B) It wouldn't be any different than a farm failing now due to a weather event or crop failure. You simply pay more and get the product from elsewhere just like today.
C) The operational costs of large towers would likely be prohibitive.
"In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible."
After the city jobs are automated, people will move back to the country on subsistence farms since it'll be the only thing left for them to do -- completely withdrawing from the greater economy and building their own from nothing. Knowledge and technology will still help with this, like mentioned in TFA. However, it won't be able to compete with larger megacorp factory-farms that employ the same tech.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
> 100,000 square foot
That's just over 2 acres.
It takes 3 to 5 acres to feed a family.
So they are going to do what, make it 1 million stores high?
This is a joke, right?
What about just using sunlight? Too crazy?
What about it? A) it isn't available in a lot of places reliably or for much of the year. B) The availability of the sun can't be optimized further than it already has been. C) Sunlight is not even close to the only variable in play. Weather, pests, pollution, fertilizer, seasons, climate, etc all matter and indoor farming can take a LOT of those variables out of play.
You only get so much solar flux per unit of area anyway.
Again, so what? There is more than enough available. We have VAST areas devoted to growing crops not to mention plenty of non-arable land available.
Do you remember the Jarvik heart? That was nearly 40 years ago and people thought that kind of bionics would be commonplace by now.
Yes I remember the Jarkik heart when it was in all the headlines. I'm old enough and I've actually seen a Jarvik 7 in person. People talked about it but there was not widespread belief that bionics would be routine. Like any technology advancement there was a lot of prognosticating and a media circus but we also saw what happened to Barney Clark (spoilers: he suffered a lot) so there wasn't a lot of optimism by the public.
Just because something can be done by nature doesn't mean that we are any where near as good at replicating it with technology.
True in some cases. In other cases we are actually quite good or even better. Just because one problem proves difficult doesn't mean we can't solve any problems.
I think it could easily be true in Washington, Denver, and a couple other markets. Especially if it had a retail space as well, to sell premium products directly.
Although they lost me at weed-free; I was 100% thinking weed would be the money maker, since it is a product that legally pretty much has to be grown indoors to begin with.
Also they don't decrease transportation, they increase it. Fertilizer and supplies have to be trucked in, and waste transported out.
That's no different than traditional farms. Traditional farms are basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and they require a lot of stuff to be transported a loooong way. Plus once you get a number of indoor farms located close together you can build a compact supply chain. You can process the fertilizer literally next door. Same with the waste. With traditional farming that is impossible because it is necessarily and irreducibly geographically dispersed.
. But most importantly, any space dedicated to "urban farms" means less space for other things, such as housing.
All it means is that we reorganize a bit. Dedicating some buildings to farming isn't going to cause some massive displacement.
Families living in urban apartments have only half the environmental footprint of families living in single family homes in the suburbs.
Even if true it's irrelevant. I'm not going to pick where I live for the environmental footprint and neither are you.
Pushing more people out of the urban cores to make room for farms is not helpful.
Who said they had to be pushed out of the core? All you need is for the farms to be close. You don't have to transform midtown Manhattan into farmland. Put the warehouses with the farms a few miles from city center in the suburbs.
There are already farms adjacent to cities. Farms have been adjacent to cities for pretty much the entire history of human civilization.
There are but lets be honest, the VAST majority of the food is produced a long way away from the cities. Your average meal has traveled 1500 miles to get to your plate. The ONLY way you are going to reduce this substantially is to do some sort of indoor farming. Lots of crops cannot just grow anywhere and there is the problem of seasons too. Hard to grow leafy greens when it is snowing.
That's just over 2 acres.
You're still thinking in 2 dimensions.
It takes 3 to 5 acres to feed a family.
It's not really that simple. Your assuming traditional agriculture with traditional crop yields, traditional crop spacing, etc. Those all change when you farm indoors and control all the variables. You can get more crops out of the same space indoors AND you can do it more times per year. And your estimates are too high. It's more like 1.5-2 acres to feed a family of 4. There would be no point to indoor farming if they couldn't get better yield out of the same footprint.
So they are going to do what, make it 1 million stores high?
No but if profitable there would eventually be a lot of buildings making food. It's not an either/or sort of problem. Indoor farms may be able to solve certain problems. Traditional farms aren't going to disappear in the lifetime of anyone reading this.
This is a joke, right?
Not even a little bit. It might turn out to be economically impossible but it's definitely not a joke.
In other words, to compete, it's going to have to create as few jobs as possible.
Sadly, people are the worst possible investment,
Any business that can remove them from its model will have an overwhelming advantage over "traditional" enterprises. But then, what do you do with all the people? The ones you rely on to buy your products. Consumerism without consumers is a meaningless failure.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Why not put them on the sides of tall buildings instead of all this cladding such as the kind that recently caused the Grenfell fire in London? plants would be good insulation and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be as flammable.
I don't see why it needs to be a gamble.
Really? You think nothing could go wrong? Nothing unexpected could crop up or costs couldn't be different than you expect?
You can find out how much everything costs and do some basic math.
You cannot find out in advance how much everything will cost. I've never seen a business plan where that actually happened and I've seen a LOT of business plans. The only thing you can be certain of is that a lot of your assumptions about costs and revenues will be wrong. Probably by a lot. You just hope you are wrong in the direction that works out well for you. Here is a short and incomplete list of things you won't know in advance:
1) Cost of real estate
2) Cost of capital equipment
3) Cost of labor
4) Efficiency of labor
5) Crop yields
6) Energy costs
Good luck actually getting any one of those right prior to asking for funds to start the business.
No, not a joke, but an idea in integrated efficiency. Build data farms next to or underneath these vertical food farms. The data centers already have a robust energy infrastructure, and the farms have biomass infrastructure, and together they have synergies.
Assume that the farm is built with a conventional greenhouse outer structure to capture daytime light, and that it uses the LED's as described in the article for nighttime or interior use.
Then, together, they could operate this way:
1 - In colder weather, heat runoff from the data center will keep the greenhouse heated. This means no heating costs for the farm, and it can operate year round with one major expense eliminated.
2 - In warmer weather where the farm could operate as ordinary greenhouses do, the excess heat from the data center could be used to accelerate non-human food or non-food farming, such as algae or bacteria for food, drug production, and biomass fuel.
3 - Depending on how much sunlight is allocated to the food farming, any biomass thus produced could in turn be used as fuel for running the data center.
4 - If the incoming sunlight could be filtered, everything between 500-700 nm could be diverted to silicon solar cells which have a peak absorption in that range, which is also the range that chlorophyll has no absorption. All captured light could be used where it is most efficient, allowing each "bucket of sunlight" to do double duty with relatively high efficiency, the green-yellow light supplying the data farm, the higher and lower energies supplying the food farm.
Efficiencies and economies would vary with time of year, latitude of each synergistic facility, and so on. So, operations and costs might not be so perfectly automated, but it could work. Right now, we are generating massive amounts of spent heat every time Facebook steals your data, you buy dog food on Amazon, or somebody mines bitcoin. That excess heat should be seen as an already captured natural resource that can be reused.
Dude... what... the... fuck... is... your... obsession... with... using... these... all... the... time...? You're... doing... it... wrong...
This replaces the problem of shipping food into the city with the problem of shipping fertilizers, laborers and water into the city.
This is an incorrect analysis. Cities already have water and labor so that's not an issue as a general proposition. As for fertilizer and other supplies, if there is a sufficient number of indoor farms clustered together, the supply chain will develop nearby. You can literally park the fertilizer plant next door to the indoor farm in principle unless you are (foolishly) locating in the heart of downtown. Plus you can supply several farms with a lot less driving. Right now farms are irreducibly geographically dispersed. That isn't true with indoor farms because you can park them much closer together.
Yes, but traditional farms can use bug nets too, they just don't because pesticides are cheaper and safe enough.
Missing the point. Indoors the pests have a harder time getting to the crops so you need fewer pesticides. And "safe" is debatable.
Getting to be a huge cash crop now.
This would keep the crops protected.
The word "can" in "can we X?" is ambiguous.
"Can" might mean, (1) "Is it physically or logically possible?"
Or "can" might mean, (2) "Is it feasible to do?"
Or "can" might mean, (3) "Will we make money trying to do this?"
The thing is as you go down the list it gets harder and harder to say "yes", both in overcoming the possible objections and in the work you have to do to get to certainty. I am quite certain that a farm along these line could be built. I wouldn't be surprised if, given sufficient money, it could produce crops. I'd be astonished if it paid for itself in five years as promised.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Disclaimer: I farm. For real. Not iFarm gaming but rather I farm as in I do the real thing growing plants and animals which I deliver to customers year round.
I bought land in the cheapest area that was reasonably close to my markets.
I get free energy from the sun which shines down on us.
I get free fertilizer from the air.
I get free water from the sky and don't even have to use pumps.
I get free growth medium.
Now let's examine the proposed vertical city farms where they're going to use:
Expensive real estate paying high taxes;
Expensive electricity to provide light which is expensive for both the bulbs and the electricity and the labor of maintenance;
Expensive synthetic fertilizers to feed their crops;
Expensive pumps and piping to move the water they buy up their tower; and
Expensive growth mediums or hydroponic systems to grow their crops in.
But wait! It gets worse for them! They're going to produce cheap, low value, low nutrition, commodity crops which they'll get bottom dollar for. What a great way to turn a million dollars into nothing. Big lose.
I on the other hand produce a high end niche meat product where I do vertical integration controlling my feeds, livestock genetics, breeding, raising all on on pasture, then processing in my own on-farm USDA inspected butcher shop and delivered directly to my customers weekly with my own delivery service. I make top dollar.
Vertical farms have been proposed for cities for a long time, the last half century at least. But, they have never translated into the real world for real profitable farming. If it isn't profitable then it isn't sustainable.
People really have no idea about how big a business farming really is and how dependent it is on clean cheap water and sunshine. These people are talking about hydroponics. With the LED's they can grow any plant they want, any time of the year. As far as number of workers; they can ship whole plants to factories to be processed if really needed. But I have seen the trend in grocery stores where with compact plants they sell them with the root ball still intact.
Further since they are so compact and use less water in growing they can afford to desalinate and recycle their water and chemical nutrients. And AI is sufficient enough to create robot harvesters and pruners over the next 20 years. But the issue here is the buildings. These are not standard reusable buildings. They are three dimensional warehouses. Building laws will need to get changed. Lots of industrial elevators and very few offices and windows.
But the interesting thing is that should there be a nuclear holocaust in the future these building will be able to keep humans species going.
Straight away this proposal looks like it was designed to attract Silicon Valley VCs. What they're proposing to do is create automated farms with very little labour, more than likely at less than a 10:1 ratio. That's the sweet spot for startups: Disrupt an existing business model by reducing the number of workers needed by at least 90% then you can disrupt the market by having lower labour costs, i.e. put tens of thousands of people out of work.
Currently, no machine can pick crops like agricultural workers can: It's skilled labour.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
"Creating as few jobs" is nothing new. I'm a farmer myself, but the creation of more food by less people has been happening for thousands of years. It has "freed up" all those people from producing food for themselves mostly to do A LOT more interesting things.
For some locations this may be somewhat economical and provide some diversification risk mitigation. Saudi Arabia might like to import less food, use less water producing. It may not be a large paradigm shift anytime soon but economics with tech improving. Plenty is trying to drum-up business so their claims reflect optimism accordingly. Climate volatility and conflicts probably will help push further developments.
What can be done to get the global population down to ~500M or so?
Free vasectomies and tubal ligations, and yearly bonuses/perks for being parasite free will work.
...and have the luxury to do them, but your average tenement apartment dweller (which SJWers have a hard on for us living like beed) cannot. Hard to raise hogs and have trees and rows of veggies and beehives when you're allotted 500 square feet of "living" space.
Vertical farms are already proven and they can and should exist right inside the city as well as the suburbs. Some crops are more suited than others for vertical farming so selection is important. But thinking back there have even been chicken ranches in high rise buildings in cities. Both eggs and meat are raised and sold with the ground floor being the sales area. Fish farming is also another ideal crop for vertical farms. And the parts of a fish not usually eaten could be used to feed pigs in a vertical farm as well. On top of all of that the excess energy that could be captured by a high rise farm building could be sold to the power companies. The money and the investors are the first step and then trying various combinations will set off endless studies on just what tactics will produce the most profit. On top of all of that cities can use agricultural pieces of land for vertical farming in such a way that every neighborhood has distinct boundaries thus creating unity in neighborhoods. i have often wondered why more mushroom farms have not been created indoors. With mushrooms you don't even need grow lights.
It's not uncommon to find agricultural plots in the multiple-hundreds of acres, and plots are this large for a reason: anything smaller and you start losing the economies of scale. Sure, you can grow "high-density" with hydroponics, and with respect to a vertical farm it is "high-density", but with respect to the needs of a nearby city, a vertical farm is particularly low-density compared to farmland. An acre is about 4 square kilometers. You'd need 25 floors of a vertical farm to equal 100 acres of farmland. That seems excessively costly for *just* 100 acres of growing space. The physical footprint, alone, is enormous, and the costs scale with the height of the building. It *could* be useful with respect to growing out-of-market foods under controlled conditions, but I don't see this being a particularly cost-effective plan, generally, at least not until we've destroyed our farmland and this is the last remaining option.
If the community you would sell into is poor, and by law your are forced to pay people a minimum wage to maintain a supermarket that is above what that community can bear, you cannot be profitable and sell in that community. FDR was successful in forcing all businesses in communities that could not afford to pay his Washington D.C. declared minimum wage out of business. Hence food deserts.
"Creating jobs" is a dumb reason to do anything.
Digging holes and filling them back in "creates jobs". And it's stupid.
Doing something the hard way "creates jobs". And it's stupid.
Bad economics.
But it's good politics.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Big vertical hydroponic farms are a proven way to steal $ from all willing investors.
As others have noted hydroponics stinks for many reasons. Aquaponics is a proven technology producing food for family & commercial use. Aquaponics avoids chemicals, water waste, byproducts, pest controls & hazardous wastes. Https://friendlyaquaponics.com offers all you need to know for building aquaponic systems from 3 gallon aquarium size to full licensed commercial multi-acre systems. Go learn it & you will avoid all hydroponics Https://friendlyaquaponices.com is not a hardware seller. Their income is from selling produce, not B. S..
The whole scheme sound like something from a bad science fiction movie. What got us to where we were a few hundred years ago was evolution and an ecology of numerous factors, numerous living organisms from microscopic to big. The premise of this ultra-hydroponic gardening seems to start by removing as much living things from the project as possible.
I wouldn't be surprised if the end product has an adequate supply of measurable fats, proteins, carbs, vitamins and minerals, but people who try to live off of it aren't healthy. Or die from a minor bacteria or virus or autoimmune disease, because as they developed in childhood they were not exposed to enough dirty things.
I think I remember a quip attributed to Brian Eno, along the lines of: 'only in America can you take dozens or hundreds of nutrients out of food, add back in 9 vitamins and call it enriched.'
You can make a reasonable estimate for most of them. And if you did, you'd know it's not going to work unless your end product is cocaine.
Have you ever actually tried to do this sort of estimate in good faith? I'm pretty sure you have not because if you had you would not be nearly so confident and glib. Yes you can make estimates but they will be wrong. You're just trying to make sure they aren't off by orders of magnitude. You also have the problem of stacking variances. Even if you nail one of the estimates, the others collectively add up to a net result that is pretty far off from reality.
Have you ever heard of Zillow? City land prices are 10x rural prices so right off the bat your crops are going to be 10x more expensive.
??? Only if you are an idiot an buy the same amount of acreage as a traditional farm. Or are you unaware that farms cover hundreds of acres? You buy 1/10th the land and build 10X as high vertically. In fact if you can go high enough you can actually get better crop densities for an indoor farm. The average cost of an acre of farm land in the midwest corn country is around $6000. So you could buy an acre in suburbia worth $60,000 under your assumptions and it would be a wash economically because you'd have the same growing area. Cost of land really will only be a major consideration if you want to locate in a really dense high cost area like Manhattan or downtown SF.
You can get this from the small experiment too, but there's also existing literature. Aeroponics? Hydroponics? Plenty of research exists for how efficient those systems are for different crops.
All those tell you is expected values. It does not tell you how many bushels of product you will actually bring to market. The only way to know that is to actually grow the crops. There is variability there to account for including the possibility of total crop failure.
Also, small experiments do not necessarily scale. The logistics and production efficiencies at scale are often not linear in unfavorable ways.
Get a quote from PG&E? Your farm uses less energy than a typical office so you're not going to be negotiating bulk pricing.
You really don't get the concept of variance do you? Getting a rate from your energy company doesn't tell you how much you will actually use. You can make a pretty reasonable guess on energy costs but again there is variability here. You don't know crop yields so you don't know the per unit energy costs of the product you are selling. But let's say you nail the energy cost number - there are hundreds of other cost variables you have to consider and you just hope you can get close on most of them.
Oh and an indoor farm is going to use a LOT more energy than a typical office. That's actually how some people growing weed illegally got caught. Suddenly they are consuming WAY more power than before because grow lights use a lot of energy.
It sounds like you've been investing in a lot of idiots. Ok, maybe not all of them. A business plan is not meant to be as accurate as possible, it's there to sell the idea, and unfortunately, wildly optimistic numbers is what's going to get them the investment.
You're equivocating and it's pretty obvious you have probably never actually tried to do these sorts of financial calculations. Go ahead and try it. I'll wait. You're going to find that no matter how honestly and earnestly you try to pin down the numbers that it's literally impossible to get it right and it's hard to even get it close a lot of the time. And that's not your fault, because nobody can do it with great accuracy. The best you can do is to try to get a realistic picture of the economics and get reasonably close. You are going to be wrong. The only question is by how much. So at some point someone is going to be taking a gamble to find out if it works. You do your due diligence and then you try it and hope for the best.
How much radiant energy comes from the Sun per square meter of surface area? Include dot product effects of your latitude and building walls. Parameterize by the number of floors.
Now calculate how many people live in the building, and then multiply by how much energy is required to live each day. Parameterize by the number of floors.
Solve for any number of floors. The equations don't have solutions because you'll quickly find that the energy balance is off by many orders of magnitude.
This is why cities are utterly dependent on rural farming and always will be. Basically this is a sad game of trying to eliminate "the despicables of Amerca" from the Ivory Tower Blue Cities by fanciful and impossible flights of fancy masquerading as science or technology. The truth is: most rural areas are Red and still largely Trump-loving. Pretending, wishing or screaming real loud will not change that nor will it magically break the co-dependency between the two cultures.
I can definitely see a market for this assuming costs can be controlled.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The wtc complex had 230acres of floor space. /3 it could feed 76 families.
Again you are thinking in two dimensions. It had a LOT more space than the amount of floor space. We are concerned with the VOLUME of the building rather than the SURFACE AREA in an indoor farm. You could stack each floor several levels high so you probably could get something like 5-10X the volume of crops depending on how closely you could pack them vertically.
And 230 acres could feed more like 120-150 families using traditional farming metrics. (about 1.5-2 acres per person per year) But that assumes no improvement in inventory turns (more crops per year), no improvement in crop yields, no improvement in crop planting density, etc.
In reality indoor farms will tend to specialize in certain types of crops and you aren't going to raise cattle or orange trees indoors.
Food deserts are a myth
Or at least they are, if you believe in science instead of alarmism...
One study I read (that I cannot find a link to now) actually found something like FOUR grocery stores in a square mile of what was supposed to be a "Food Desert" so the basic studies that went into this seem to be incredibly flawed, to possibly purposely misleading.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley