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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."
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.
why build them outside cities if they are indoor and vertical?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No. And no.
Caveat: if the population were ten times as high, it would be both useful and make sense.
Alternately, if we had a holyhelluvalot of nuclear power, it MIGHT make sense, since it would allow us to turn most of the planet back to wilderness. Solar won't do it, because it requires large amounts of land covered by panels, which implies wires, switching stations, repair roads, etc...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Still worth a look. Eventually this sort of scenario will need to be explored. Perhaps a different way of looking at indoor farming makes sense. Maybe on a spaceship to another world.
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
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.
why build them outside cities if they are indoor and vertical?
Presumably to cut down on transportation costs and to be able to harvest when the crop is closer to being ripe rather than harvesting weeks ahead and letting fruits and vegetables ripen during transpot.
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.
Despite that, they may have some advantages as a carefully controlled environment can ensure that the crops can be grown more easily or without as much need for herbicides or pesticides as the summary points out. You can also get a more consistent supply as indoor crops can be grown irrespective of season so there's always a relatively fixed supply instead of periods where an abundance leads to incredibly low prices and some waste and other times where shortages lead to high prices that some can't afford and many are unwilling to pay.
Personally, I think this is a great idea and will go a long way towards solving a lot of the health ills in the U.S. that are in some ways a result of food deserts in big cities where it's simply not possible for people to get fresh foods.
The *second* they become economically feasible you will see thousands of the things, and probably not in the city centers anyway. Until then you have to beat free water or nearly free water and free sunlight from the millions of farms out there already. If you can beat the transport cost maybe you can make it. But rail and LTL is pretty cheap per ton already. 'cityfolk' do not really understand the scale at which many farms work at. Take for example 1 cow. That is 2000 pounds of cow minus a few hundred that is not used (not really) most steak dinners are in the 6-12oz range. These dudes work in the thousands of the things at a time. Same with corn/soy they buy/sell the stuff by the ton not the pound. We eat a LOT of food...
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
There's a number of possible advantages:
- Land is expensive, by increasing the density we can reduce land usage (maybe keeping more land wild).
- Transportation is polluting, being closer to cities can save a lot of transportation costs
- Harvesting is also polluting, you might be able to do that more efficiently
- Eliminating/reducing pests cuts down on nasty pesticides.
- People are even more expensive
You'd have to do a ton of number crunching to see if it works, but if it does it could lead to a new green revolution. Of course it could also further decimate farm communities at the same time.
I stole this Sig
You're a fucking idiot. How do you propose creating a square meter of sunlight from less than a square meter of solar panel?
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.
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.
Possibly.But unlikely under current economics and how we tend to look at things.
Current farming techniques don't need power for lighting. But they do use a lot of diesel fuel in tilling, planting and harvesting. Also don't forget shipping thousands of miles by ship, train and trucks.
Also keep in mind that fertilizer runoff and pesticides are a big issue.
I'm not sure how they are planning to run these farns, but TFA seems to indicate that they won't need to worry about insects much, so presumably they think they can keep weeds out as well. If that's the case, then eliminating all of the chemical runoff would be welcome with regards to the environment, especially oceans and reefs.
Since this is indoors, I would guess that they won't be driving diesel tractors around. Presumably they will power this with solar, wind or even nuclear. LED lighting and electric robots may be more energy efficient than tractors, combines and other typical farm equipment.
It's probably not financially feasible,. But current farming, like many industries, aren't paying for all of the costs that they should be either. If you forced them to take care of all chemical runoff, food production would be much more expensive too. But we'll keep kicking that can down the road until it creates some sort of catastrophic rusult.
Indoor farms would require artificial light
I can't find the link right now, but I've read about a company that claims they can end up producing net-positive energy by putting solar panels on the roof of their indoor farms and then inside only have light broadcasting at the spectrum peaks for absorption in photosynthesis. They can use the solar energy from the rest of the spectrum to power other equipment, and allegedly have some left over.
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.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
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.
> Presumably to cut down on transportation costs and to be able to harvest when the crop is closer to being ripe rather than harvesting weeks ahead and letting fruits and vegetables ripen during transpot.
There are already farms adjacent to cities. Farms have been adjacent to cities for pretty much the entire history of human civilization.
These days there are CSA farms just outside of cities and even new housing developments built around CSA farms.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> 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?
Also they don't decrease transportation, they increase it. Fertilizer and supplies have to be trucked in, and waste transported out. But most importantly, any space dedicated to "urban farms" means less space for other things, such as housing. Which is going to reduce transport more: Avoiding a truck of produce once every 3 months, or avoiding dozens of people commuting to and from the suburbs every weekday?
Families living in urban apartments have only half the environmental footprint of families living in single family homes in the suburbs. Pushing more people out of the urban cores to make room for farms is not helpful.
These would be low calorie foods such as peppers.
Nope. It could involve high calorie munchies after smoking the crop.
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.
> I'm sure you wouldn't mind citing your sources, right?
Have you ever tried to grow anything in your life? I suspect not.
A good, location appropriate crop can almost be treated like a weed. Water is free. Light is free. The real world examples of this kind of thing are restricted to expensive cash crops like pot and kale for good reason. They aren't economical for anything else.
Wake me when they are using this stuff to grow potatoes, onions, carrots, and cabbage.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's not conversion efficiencies, it's about people who think you can power a commercial airliner with solar panels on the wings. Just ignore the laws of physics and anything is possible.
Solar won't do it ...
Solar converts about 20% of incident sunlight to electric power. Cropland is less than 1% efficient.
If solar panels on cheap desert land collect the energy, and it is used to power LEDs at very specific wavelengths optimized for photosynthesis, in pest-free and weed-free indoor facilities with perfect nutrients, and enriched CO2, all using plants genetically modified for these conditions, ... it would likely still be uneconomical, but not obviously so.
Food deserts are located in lower-class residential neighborhoods of poor cities (and I link to Richmond, a 20 minute drive from SF without traffic). You can go miles without a store aside from corner stores, which have little/no fresh produce. Residents may not have a car, may have kids, and often work difficult jobs that keep them from having free time to make regular long trips to grocery store across town. Maybe you've taken a lot of vacations to some wonderful cities, but areas with food deserts are not the sort of places anybody goes to unless they live there.
There are many supermarkets and Mexican markets in Richmond. Fresh food is available with effort. But there's also definitely a lot of residents who do not have any convenient way to get to a store with fresh food.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
Caveat: if the population were ten times as high, it would be both useful and make sense.
Alternately, if we had a holyhelluvalot of nuclear power, it MIGHT make sense
So once again, China will be the first to try these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... indicates that plants like 400-700nm wavelength light, especially at the 700 end. There's other inefficiencies in the structure of the photosynthetic system that bring it down to about 3-6%, but just the wavelength issue throws away half the sunlight (47%). Using solar collectors to power 700nm LEDs could help a lot.
Also, tall building = wind, the solar can be on the (assuming northern hemisphere) south wall as well as the roof... the ground level footprint is not the only determining factor.
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.
> There are already farms adjacent to cities.
Yes, but those farms are generally limited to growing seasons and crop variety. Most of the year, fresh fruits and vegetables for cities like Chicago are shipped from somewhere south, like AZ, CA, or other countries.
The smell of no animals, no soil, very little insects, and very little pesticides? Closed environment. Did you even read TFS? I live in a town with farms. Several times a year, the smell is very bad. This building would be a fraction of the smell. I welcome it. There's land designated in agriculture land but not economically farmable. Developers spend years trying to convince the locals to remove from the reservation to let them build condos and shit, and the locals shot it down because they want to ensure future food supplies. This is a win - win. The 200 mile diet would take off in Vancouver.
"t would likely still be uneconomical, but not obviously so."
But it can't be worse than traditional farming that gets tons of subsidies, protection for everything under the sun and still farmers kill themselves by the dozen because they can't make it.
I missed the part of the discussion where the cost of building specifically inside the city, as opposed to outside. I don't know why someone even brought up building inside the city, that's just a non-starter. Suburbs or other commercial warehouse type park outside major areas, good idea.
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.
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.
That's the city's fault. Zone that shit properly, trade approvals in favourable areas for stores in poor areas.
Unless you eat about 15kg of tomatoes per day, you are going to starve to death without corn, wheat or soybeans.
Because we couldn't grow different things in different kinds of farms.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
So, no sources, just your personal experience? Jesus fucking Christ. I'm sure required water is rarely free. I know it's not in my area. Pro-tip, farms convert to hydroponic and come out way ahead (peppers, in my personal experience). The farmers I know had to diversify their properties so good harvest years could offset bad harvest years and the other industries help smooth out ups and downs. Indoors is always a good year, so long as your setup and processes aren't bad.
There's a number of possible advantages: - Land is expensive, by increasing the density we can reduce land usage (maybe keeping more land wild).
Land is only expensive in a city. A house in San Francisco with a 3000 sqft. lot (0.07 acre) is $1.2 million, but a 20-acre plot in the not-so-distant Central Valley is $2 million. Even if you could build the multi-story indoor farm for free, it's still 10x more costly for the same amount of arable land. Now I'm not sure how such a farm will be taxed in SF, but I imagine the property tax on it will be much higher as well.
- Transportation is polluting, being closer to cities can save a lot of transportation costs
Not really. This replaces the problem of shipping food into the city with the problem of shipping fertilizers, laborers and water into the city. Besides, we already have efficient transport in the form of railroads, but they've been neglected for too long and can't keep up with the capacity. A concerted effort there would yield much better results.
- Harvesting is also polluting, you might be able to do that more efficiently
Not sure how being indoors makes a difference here. You still need some machinery to do the harvest and the machinery still needs energy.
- Eliminating/reducing pests cuts down on nasty pesticides.
Yes, but traditional farms can use bug nets too, they just don't because pesticides are cheaper and safe enough.
- People are even more expensive
Not sure how this is an advantage.
Kent, WA, is far from Park Ave. no worries there, we are full of Aerospace manufacturing and supporting industries. I'd be more worried about the powder-coating shop across the street.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
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.
Richmond has a median income over $100k/year.
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.
The smell of no animals, no soil, very little insects, and very little pesticides?
Spoken as someone who has obviously never been around the hydroponic nutrient solutions used for indoor-growing.
Dude, the stuff *reeks*! Even in the relatively small quantities used for a small home vegetable garden with just a few plants, you can smell it from down the block
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.
You build them on rooftops. The gigantic, non-load bearing roofs found on malls and the like notwithstanding, most roofs can bear crops if you grow them aeroponically. Then only the reservoirs weigh very much.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not a problem if you are willing to farm close to where you want to sell using more conventional means.
That's not realistic. Most people live in cities, and most land near cities is too expensive to use for farmland. But you can produce a lot more food per square foot if you go vertical, so it makes good sense to do in cities as long as you're growing something that you can produce quickly and sell for good money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's addressed in the article, as is about every objection below too.
I don't know if it will work or not but please RTFA before posting a question addressed in the article.
LED lighting has reached a price point where the company thinks it makes much better financial sense than only 5 years ago (when another company mentioned in the article tried it and failed).
The farming uses about 1% of the water used for the best competing farm product (and water prices are going up).
It uses nutrients- not compost, fertilizer, etc. So while they will need to be transported in, they are not as bulky.
The reason for reduced transportation is allowing the plants to ripen more fully and to reduce nutrient loss during transportation that occurs currently by about 45%.
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I would like to see some independent lab studies on the resulting produce. Is it lacking anything?
The plants look healthy enough in the pictures.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm sure required water is rarely free. I know it's not in my area.
It depends on the crop. I looked up water usage for corn once and was surprised to find that a large portion (it was at least a third) was irrigated solely with rainfall.
The farmers I know had to diversify their properties so good harvest years could offset bad harvest years and the other industries help smooth out ups and downs.
Small farms which don't convert their crop into value-added crops are going away. Diversification is important to most industries, though. You can produce a variety of crops instead of working in a variety of fields, if you're willing to for example dehydrate, heat seal, and ship.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
In many poor areas, no.
That's why they call them food deserts.
Basically, land costs get too high to build a large supermarket that sells food to poor people. Expensive real estate is only affordable for supermarkets that sell premium food to rich people.
So if you can afford to pay 15 a pound for premium meat, you are set. But if you are looking for $3 per pound bargain meat, then you are out of luck. Even more so for vegetables.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Getting to be a huge cash crop now.
This would keep the crops protected.
With a 100% corn diet, you'd need ~1,000 WTCs worth of floor space to grown enough calories for Manhattan.
Unless you eat about 15kg of tomatoes per day
Urban farms are unlikely to grow tomatoes either. Tomatoes need a lot of direct sunlight. They will not fruit well under LED light. They also benefit little from pest free environments, since tomato plants are already toxic to most insects. Unlike arugula and endive, the freshness of tomatoes is measured in days, not hours.
you are going to starve to death without corn, wheat or soybeans.
Urban farms are a supplement to traditional rural farms, not a replacement. They are inappropriate for calorie dense staples.
But it can't be worse than traditional farming that gets tons of subsidies
The subsidies go to staple crops like corn, sugar, and dairy. These are NOT what urban farms grow.
still farmers kill themselves by the dozen because they can't make it.
Farmers are doing well economically. The average farm family makes almost twice the median income, although not all that income comes from farming. Many farmers, or family members, have other jobs. Suicide is correlated with age, and many farmers are old. It is also correlated with gun ownership, and farmers are more likely to own guns.
And how much is that in "average income"?
Median income has no meaning, especially if you don't tell us what the median is.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Deaths per terawatt hour produced?
How in the holy name of fuck do you figure this?
Nuclear POWER has possibly the lowest death rates in the entirety of the power industry.
And NO, you cannot simply chalk up random cancer deaths to nuclear power.
And NO, you can't simply chalk up the use of atomic bombs to nuclear power.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Tomatoes last weeks.
Only the modern for transport optimized "tastes like nothing" might spoil faster.
We used to harvest them green and put them on a window shelf, they maturing there several weeks till being red and tasty.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You're an idiot.
A solar facility would still have to have a grid tie.
Especially if you're talking about powering the entire planet.
Then the main problems become off-peak production, line and conversion losses.
You can't simply hook an 8 gauge wire up to a powerplant in Arizona and run it to central China.
For solar facility to provide peak power for the entire globe at a specific time you have to build it in a semi-specific general location and build it of sufficient size (basically 2-3x (more actually if you plan on "pumping" to the entire globe to account for power losses) the capacity you'd spec for nuclear).
Then, to keep the power flowing, you'd have to build ANOTHER one a few hours away so that, as one plant comes down off peak, the next plant is ramping up to peak.
The reason you'd have to do this is because power storage technology simply isn't "there" for this kind of 24x7 capacity.
You then ALSO have to deal with solar facility heat island effects on the environment.
Plus, when all those panels wear out in 25-50 years, what then?
Currently there are no comprehensive plans for recycling solar panels.
So that means MEGATONS on landfill.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Actually, no you wouldn't need artificial lighting all the time. I don't remember what book I read it in but there was a plan to bring sunlight into building using a variation on fiber optics. Basically it would be a big ass light pipe coming from the ceiling. You would need artificial lighting at night.
An there is where indoor vertical farms start to make a shit load of sense. Think about it. A totally indoor system, you could control the light, the soil, water, and even the atmosphere of the plants. You can tailor each environment to one type of plant.
An more over food growing wouldn't be a seasonal affair. The outside environment would have no effect on growing. Well unless there was tornado or something.
Food would be far more healthy for you too. There wouldn't be a need for any kind of pest control since there are no pests. No need for any kind of genetic manipulation of any kind for pests or weather.
Wastes would be to a minimal too. Everything could be recycled, even the water. Water that wasn't used by the plants could be easily captured and reused. Farming would also take on a lower environmental foot print. Two or three fields or more, could take up the space of just one.
So hell yeah, It makes all kinds of sense.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.
I don't know that you will ever fix this problem top/down. The problem is one of demand. Poor people prefer low cost staple foods. It is also true that we don't have much of a cooking culture in all poor communities in this day and age.. possibly providing a supply of fresh foods would generate or tap some unmet demand in those communities but... I'm just not confident of that. Might be better to just cut ag subsidies.
I just don't see the point of this. People can grow microgreens enough to feed their families in window sills... I'd be more interested in yams or other calorie dense options like that.
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.
Most farmers don't have the resources to do a lot of watering unless that is just a requirement of the crop. I don't do any produce type farming but I can't think of a single friends farm that gets water other than rainfall. Sometimes you have a bad year but that's what crop insurance is for.
And how much is that in "average income"?
Do you know how to use Google? No? The median income for full time farmers in 2018 is projected to be $119k. That is net income per household.
Median income has no meaning
Did you take math since 4th grade? Do you seriously not know what "median" means?
especially if you don't tell us what the median is.
Median income for American households is ~ $59k. That is about half what the median full time farming household makes.
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.
The advantage of artificial lighting is growth around the clock, not limited by natural sunlight, making the process more efficient and economical. Vertical farms do use light more efficiently, but the fundamental problem remains: solar irradiance scales with area, vegetation with volume. It isn't possible to overcome the increase in exponent by fiddling with efficiencies.
Piping the light around with optics or collecting it with PV is nonsensical, since the plants still need to collect the incident sunlight over an area roughly equivalent to that with traditional farming. Either way, this will add a resource intensive collection system, and further impose the cost and environmental burden of transmitting and/or storing that energy so that it is available at night. Remember, the crop yield is proportional to the light absorbed, and letting your vertical farm idle 2/3 of the day isn't productive.
To make vertical farming truly shine, it must to be coupled with a very compact and inexpensive energy source. This is the primary attraction of nuclear: it is incredibly energy dense, and it scales with volume, not area, requiring very little land and resources. All of the supposedly "green" energy technologies scale with area, and produce an enormous sprawling infrastructure that doesn't preserve nature; it competes with it.
I just don't see the point of this. People can grow microgreens enough to feed their families in window sills...
People CAN do many things, but they don't want to. I grow most of my own fruit and vegetables, keep chickens in my backyard, have a beehive, and ferment my own yogurt. But I also realize that most people have no interest in doing any of those things.
I'd be more interested in yams or other calorie dense options like that.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Yams require a long growing season with lots and lots of direct sunlight. They grow long vines that require plenty of space. They can be transported easily and can be stored for months with no loss of taste or quality. Also they are cheap. I can't imagine a dumber crop to grow under lights in a city.
not a lot; amorphous silicon is about the same as photosynthesis, and polycrystaline silicon has maybe double the frequency response. So you're only 2:1 if there were no conversion inefficiencies. But there are. Nuclear to greenhouse might have a business case, maybe, if we could shoot the NIMBYs. Solar cells to vertical farming is scamming the investors.
China has Tibet, they have no shortage of farmland. Indoor farming requires long term maintenance, something that China tends to ignore.
An 8 guage wire, running at 5 million volts DC will power all of China, run from Death Valley CA (might have to use an orbital ring to keep the power wires from arcing). Molten Salt power storage is a mature technology, and scalable to any size we want. Drive electrons in through a resistive heater, draw heat out to turn a steam turbine running a generator.
A lot of the time they re-use abandoned buildings. They use disused underground tunnels in london for indoor farms https://www.independent.co.uk/...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"Currently there are no comprehensive plans for recycling solar panels.
There are firms out there recycling panels now, that should increase within your 25-50 years time frame.
"Research studies conducted on the topic of recycling solar panels have resulted in numerous technologies. Some of them even reach an astonishing 96% recycling efficiency, but the aim is to raise the bar higher in the future"
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Chinese energy experts are estimating that by 2050 the percentage of China's energy requirements that are satisfied by coal-fired plants will have declined to 30-50% of total energy consumption and that the remaining 50-70% will be provided by a combination of oil, natural gas, and renewable energy sources, including hydropower, nuclear power, biomass, solar energy, wind energy, and other renewable energy sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically they're expecting to replace 4 Gwh mainly with nuclear, hydro, wind, oil and gas.
And solar isn't even 5% of RENEWABLES.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
they can also take over abandoned buildings so no need to build.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Here's a start
http://homeguides.sfgate.com/grow-hydroponic-root-crops-37413.html
https://www.maximumyield.com/can-you-grow-potatoes-hydroponically/7/1828
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The ones with low taste are optimised for shelf life.
Nuclear is not classed as renewable. It is not fossil fuel either.
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.
"... although not all that income comes from farming."
So apparently not doing that well economically.
Side note: A lot of that extra income in agricultural states comes from trucking... which is about to undergo it's own upheavals.
https://www.npr.org/sections/m...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
So the median is below average?
You meanwhile understand why comparing medians or use it in arguments makes no sense?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
I know this. I simply quoted.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Calories matter because every last one of us needs about 1 million of them each year. They certainly aren’t the only thing we need; we also need vitamins and minerals, fats and protein. But if we don’t have those 1 million calories, other needs fade into the background. There’s not much point in talking about phytonutrients if people are starving.
corn
Urban farms are a supplement to traditional rural farms, not a replacement.
That is like growing the sprinkles on a cake, all show and no substance.
No, Yummly
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.
I remember when using averages on the internet would incite all kinds of derision and that median was better indicator. I guess it all depends on what you are trying t prove with statistics.
An 8 gauge wire (3.3mm), running at 5 million volts DC will carry 120MW of power.
Because people get really upset when you use averages.
That's more money than I make.
I grew up in a poorer immigrant neighborhood and everyone cooked. All of the time. People didn't start going out to eat until the mid 1990's.
EXACTLY!
Both metrics (median versus average/mean (( I honestly believe now that many people mix up mean with median)) ) are completely useless if you have no max/min and no idea about the distribution of the curve or the sample size. Obviously if one is posting average and median of wages the sample size will probably be the whole country, or enough people to be confident that it matches the country's distribution.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The profit comes from a quick grow cycle of high-value greens. Vegetables that take longer to grow than radishes (such as wheat) or that require more resources (such as potatoes which need actual soil), then the profit margins fall.
So, no, you can't grow other stuff there "profitably."
Same reason you can tell where sandstone turns to shale out west; it's where ranches turn into farms.
What is it with pro nuclear folks downvoting stuff.
Sheesh
You are an irrational nuclear booster.
Despite all the problems we've had with nuclear.
Despite the surcharges current utility customers and tax payers are paying to cover for nuclear cleanup costs an order or magnitude higher than projected (and that completely ignores additional millions per year to *guard* nuclear waste because it's a weapon in it's own right so it can't just be discarded- it must be protected as well).
For the rest of your issues, there is a comparable problem with nuclear.
There will be a distributed mixture of solar, wind, and other alternative energy generation systems mixed with home use and battery systems. Already battery systems are allow fossil plants to avoid spinning up and down as often (so they can run more efficiently).
The answer isn't all or nothing. The answer is a blend of sources, of which solar and wind will be a very large component. A small amount of natural gas plants provide the balance. There is no need for nuclear or coal in a 25-50 year window.
Both solar and batteries are dropping in price about 5% per year and increasing in capability about 5% per year.
The panels might wear out in 50 years but they won't "wear out" in 25 years. We already have a 25 year track record and most should produce 80% at 25 years and over 40% at 50 years barring mechanical failures (such as leads breaking due to thermal wear.).
The fact is china and germany already have high and successful commitments to alternative energy. It works.
If you turn down the histronics 85% , you have a good point about waste disposal.
Solar energy manufacturers are no more moral or ethical than fossil and nuclear energy manufacturers.
They *will* take the money and run and externalize their costs and pollution onto the rest of society.
So we must ensure that the cost of solar panels reflects their total cost including disposal.
--
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That has nothing to do with what I am saying.
You can have farms inside cities that grow some things and farms like we have today to grow the rest.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Great. Not sure what that has to do with what I said.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
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.
I can definitely see a market for this assuming costs can be controlled.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
What is the resistance of an 8 gauge wire strung twice over the Pacific from Death Valley CA to Beijing? And how much power does it dissipate at 5MV?
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