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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."
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
What are you talking about? Food comes from juiceros.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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)
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!!!
Poor is relative.
In Europe no one is poor.
If you are "poor" you get welfare.
Grocery stores are everywhere ... there is no lack of good, fresh and "cheap enough" food.
Minimum wages has nothing to do with the topic.
If you want to find a "food desert" then it might be remote towns in Switzerland (or Austria). But those get supplied my "market trucks", moving supermarkets going from village to village and selling stuff for the exact same price as they do in the supermarkets in the big cities.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.