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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.
#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.
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.
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.
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.