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."

Comments

Re:You can build them

[BlueStrat]

I believe his question is trying to get across the idea "what not build them inside cities". The answer would be cost per square foot of land is still higher in cities.

That and most importantly, the smell. I don't care what sort of farming you do, if you're raising plants and/or animals, even with hydroponics, etc, there's going to be smells that city-folk may object to. Even were it economically-viable, you won't see them on Park Ave., in the 'nice' parts of Marha's Vineyard, or on Rodeo Dr. and anyplace else whee those with money, fame, and power reside anytime in the foreseeable future.

Building such vertical farms in historically DNC/Progressive strongholds like Chicago and Detroit would require budgeting-in additional expenses for 24/7/365 armed security on-site or they'll come back the next day to find the building's wiring and plumbing gutted by meth-head copper/aluminum thieves and the remains of the gutted building being used as a dope & whore-house by street gangs.

Strat