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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."
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.
Most "urban farm" proposals that I have seen focus on growing "greens" such as arugula, endive, baby spinach, radicchio, broccoli sprouts, wheatgrass, etc. These are crops that sell at a very high premium for freshness. These crops grow very quickly, and are ready for harvest just a few weeks after planting. They also benefit biggly from growing in a pest-free environment, since insects can damage the appearance as well as triggering a bitter akaloid toxin response from the plant, and these crops sell at a premium if they are labeled as "pesticide free" and "locally grown".
Nobody is seriously considering growing feed corn or soybeans in cities.