For what it is worth I have been casually reading about vertical farming and think this may be a very valuable technique to feed more people with less resources.
I'm looking forward to reading this blog post when it is accessible.
It's up for me, try again. In disagreement with the posts above -- I think innovation in food production is possible, neccessary, and looks like it is underway.
Where I live, the average farm loses money every year. The only reason farming exists in its current form in this area is because of government subsidies. There are big lobbying groups to make sure that specific methods are paid for by taxes, even if they aren't efficient. Also, the average age of farmers is over 60, so they are extremely unlikely to try innovative methods. Only once the current generation dies off will there be any major changes, because right now everything is prescribed and paid for.
I was able to click through, and also the same content (save for a few pictures) is available in pdf form [0].
As someone else who has been casually interested in vertical farming, I was pretty disappointed with this piece. It didn't give me any new information, and it didn't give any sense of progress that has been made or challenges to be overcome. It's really an introductory fluff piece for people unfamiliar with the concept.
I doubt we are going to see a revolution in farming. The reason traditional farming is most likely still much cheaper than vertical farming is because of all the government's implicit and explicit subsidies. For example: For most farmers water is free so the 99% reduction in water usage won't reduce the price for the consumer in the aisle. I think if we wan't a real shift in agriculture (a shift towards more ecological vertical farming), we would require an actual market price for water. And most people (farmers and non-farmers) hate that idea.
Only in California and the Colorado basin is water allocation and pricing a real concern. The Midwest and south have water surplus and produce immensely more food than CA. So I don't think this has a significant impact.
The math has to be done on a case by case basis. Why are all potatoes grown in Idaho? Because soil and climate conditions there are really good for potatoes. You can grow potatoes in Idaho and ship them to Kansas for less -- less land use, less effort, less energy-cost, less environmental impact -- than you can grow them locally.
There are going to be some crops and some urban environments where vertical farming is the best option. There are going to be some where it is not.
I think they just mean that the waste materials can be used to provide inputs to the next production cycle. Obviously the loop is not close because there is energy coming in, and grown plants going out.
There was a lot of discussions about the benefits, and some discussion that was missed. However, vertical farming is still not cost effective compared to more traditional greenhouses. And that's for the highest value crops like lettuce and tomatoes. Commodity crops and animal agriculture are the biggest resource users in this system and vertical farming is no where close to finding a substitute for those. The cost of production will need to come down below the alternatives and that will be challenging, although not impossible in principle.
Why isn't it as cost effective? Is that just from a higher start-up cost or is it significantly more expensive to run in the long run? Seems like it would be cheaper (closed environment).
Anecdote: I heard that peaches were grown in Greenhouses to avoid rot & bugs and it's been very helpful.
Two major , expensive costs - the factory, the equipment, land,etc.very expensive - but maybe this can be solved. maybe.
But there's also the required energy:
"just to meet a year's U.S. wheat production with vertical farming would, for lighting alone, require EIGHT TIMES as much electricity as all U.S. utilities generate in an entire year"
Yeah, traditional farming uses the sun directly as a major input, and vertical farming has to use a lot of electricity to make up for that -- which is why all the "positive" energy comparisons you see for vertical farming are to other indoor methods.
But without cheap, abundant, clean power to replace the way traditional farming uses the sun, vertical farming is either not going to be economically viable on a large scale, or is going to be trading one set of negative externalities for another (traditional farming's externalities from runoff, etc., for the externalities from the power production for vertical farming), or both.
Lots of construction and real estate expenses. The more your farm resembles an actual building rather than a greenhouse or polytunnel, the more expensive. It also sounds like it requires energy and skilled labour. Using externally powered lighting is going to be hugely expensive. Where is that energy coming from, anyway, and is it renewable?
I don't think people realise how low farm-gate prices for commodity foods are.
Farming comes with huge amounts of negative environmental externalities (lost ecosystems, runoff, pesticides). I'm curious how the cost effectiveness would change if farms were properly taxed for their environmental impact.
> I'm curious how the cost effectiveness would change if farms were properly taxed for their environmental impact.
Conversely, I wonder if the viability changes if urban areas would subsidize the underlying (most likely expensive) land costs for vertical farming, due to food being required to survive.
> Conversely, I wonder if the viability changes if urban areas would subsidize the underlying (most likely expensive) land costs for vertical farming, due to food being required to survive.
Well, the viability of living in urban areas would certainly change if another land use competing with housing and existing commercial uses was subsidized by taxing existing residents.
I don't think anyone is claiming that vertical farming needs to disrupt all traditional farming. Vertical farms would bring food production to urban areas, where the people are. That benefit would be lost on growing livestock fodder.
> Vertical farms would bring food production to urban areas, where the people are.
i.e., it would drive already high urban real estate prices higher, by competing with existing urban real estate uses, while not being cost effective, because increased output per square foot of land footprint would be offset by the higher cost per square foot of land footprint of urban land.
It seems like the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense in places that have very limited access to land with inexpensive shipping costs to populated areas like densely populated islands, but a lot less economic sense in most of the rest of the world.
If solar and battery tech were strong enough, could people have shipping containers buried underground and dedicated to growing using artificial lights? The vertical, compactus-style grow beds.
Could bury these things under drive ways, under lawns, garages, decks, pools, etc.
> If solar and battery tech were strong enough, could people have shipping containers buried underground and dedicated to growing using artificial lights?
Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. -- Capt. Montgomery "Scotty" Scott
Because a nontrivial portion of the environmental costs of modern food production is all the dinosaur bones being burned to shlep it from farm to factory to warehouse to store to home.
Not to say that vertical farming is cost-free; it's most definitely not. It does avoid (edit: or at least reduce) that major (hidden) cost, though.
What fraction of the energy costs that go into food production are involved in its transport?
Urban areas are valuable. People in cities have less environmental impact than people spread out. The people displaced by an urban farm don't disappear -- they either stay out of the city or go to another city.
With some very quick searching, I'm seeing a few references suggesting an average of between 10-15%, and an average distance of some 1500 miles from farm to plate. In actuality, those probably vary widely, though.
> Not to say that vertical farming is cost-free; it's most definitely not. It does avoid that major (hidden) cost, though.
Does it? By competing with existing urban land uses, if adopted any substantial scale it forces the existing uses to spread out over larger areas, increasing the energy costs of transportation associated with those uses, while also creating a major new demand for energy in food production which replaces some of the use of energy in food transportation.
Seems to me your are shifting around the fossil-fuel related energy use externalities, but I haven't seen any analysis showing it to be a net win even in that narrow regard.
The other added benefit is that the plants get to the site faster which increases the shelf life and reduces the amount thrown out due to wilting and such on the shelves.
Growing hydroponically also reduces crop loss from about 50% down to about 10-15%.
That's just not true. Vertical farming isn't about building a whole new facility with fancy LED lights. It's about effectively utilizing space to get the most calories/input. There's no reason a traditional greenhouse can't grow crops vertically in their existing infrastructure.
Additionally, it seems like you are writing off the idea because "Commodity crops and animal agriculture are the biggest resource users in this system and vertical farming is no where close to finding a substitute for those"
Vertical farming isn't going to just poof magically fix everything. It's meant as a supplement to an unhealthy food system.
And I think the cost of production will come down.
What's making this transition difficult is the economic viability. It only makes sense in densely populated areas but those areas also have ridiculous property values and higher utility costs. That makes it increasingly difficult for these farms because the margins in farming aren't that great. I work for a vertical farming company (Verticulture Farms) and we've been struggling to find a place where we can expandthat makes financial sense.
That's certainly true today. I'm sure Verticulture Farms is in it for the long haul though.
The dramatic improvements in output, quality, and water use will make vertical farming superior in nearly all cases within a few decades. It'll make sense everywhere traditional farming occurs, not just in densely populated areas. That's not the case today, but it will be the case tomorrow, given this is the first inning of a multi-trillion dollar global revolution in food production. People in the future will think it's crazy that we used to grow so much of our food outside.
That's definitely true. As the cost of LED fixtures go down and the cost of food goes up, it'll definitely becone profitable quickly and there will be a surge in appearances of vertical farms.
What's making this transition difficult is the economic viability. It only makes sense in densely populated areas but those areas also have ridiculous property values and higher utility costs. That makes it increasingly difficult for these farms because the margins in farming aren't that great. I work for a vertical farming company (Verticulture Farms) and we've been struggling to find a place where we can expandthat makes financial sense.
Worth checking out - I'm an early adopter for the Grove aquaponics system which is similar in idea but meant for individual homes (http://grovelabs.io). Not cost effective yet, but hoping they continue to grow and refine their research and process to a point that it will be in the near future.
A rational, fact-supported argument is not sufficient to convince some people of anything.
If I want to convince all of my friends, I will also need an emotionally-loaded propaganda documentary with more anecdotal, scripted illustrations of the human impact on a handful of stereotypical everyman characters.
I have been convinced for about 20 years that large-scale indoor farming will become cost-competitive with standard industrialized farming around 2040. The epic drought in California may have accelerated my estimate to 2035.
We won't be at the tipping point until a profitable cornfield is replaced by a greenhouse-like structure with a roof 30m above ground level.
I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine about vertical farming. He's big into his food, cares about food quality.
Anyway, I bring it up, he's not impressed, in fact far from it. The impression I got was that it ruined the emotional impact behind the origin of food. Instead of growing in fields, in natural time-honoured traditional way (I should mention at this point that my friend believed in buying organic, just to nip the pesticides/herbicides argument in the bud), we'd be replacing that with what amounted to growing in a lab.
If you're going to convince anyone, beyond tech heads and those that only care about cost, you're going to need to address the story of food, its role in our culture. I strongly doubt it would get anywhere close to the mainstream without the type of emotionally-led marketing that logfromblammo suggests.
Why do you need to "convince" anybody? If companies want to build urban farms, let them compete and we'll see what happens.
My money says that if you are really hung up about the energy transport costs of food, you should just build an electric transport system into the city, from the farm outside the city.
A lot of this research is very interesting for things like space colonies, so I pay attention, but on earth it's a solution in search of a problem.
I don't. However, I was pointing out for those that want to try, there's more to it than listing the technical benefits.
To use another example, most people accept that investment in public transportation is a very good thing (both for the environment and the vitality of a city), yet people still plow huge sums of money into their cars, because cars = freedom. In cities like New York where many people don't seem to own cars, is their freedom restricted? Doesn't seem that way. Cars only = freedom if your other options are subpar.
Why bring this up? Reliance on cars is an example of what results when people think individualistically, whereas investment in public transport (and investment includes use) is an example of when people think collectively. Some changes require an amount of consensus. Whilst I agree you could let companies try it and let the market decide, I expect you'll encounter NIMBYism before too long. It's no problem to me though, I've got no horse in this race, will wait to see how it plays out.
Organic is a big point in favor of indoor farming. Animal pests can be discouraged by displacing the air in the grow room with 90% N2 + 10% O2 + 0.15% CO2 [1] whenever humans or pollinators don't need to be present. Weeds can be controlled by ensuring that live weed seeds cannot enter the facility.
[1] Lower oxygen may lead to root stress. Flooding-adapted species, like rice, could make do with less during sunlit hours. Higher CO2 can damage some plants. The 90:10:0.15 mix of N2:O2:CO2 is probably as hostile as you can make it to animals without damaging the plants in some way.
Let's not forget algae. Solazyme is already producing various food components for food companies, from algae, in highly efficient and dense factories, and at a competitive price.And i think with time it might be a cheap carbohydrates source.
And those food components are much better than natural components - because you can tailor the exact chemical composition of them.
And with technologies like molecular gastronomy, or making great meat substitutes out of protein(like beyond meat), food components could become the basis for a lot of food variety.
Many people are concerned about the economics of this, but in my mind, trying to scale food production is itself the problem. I know I sound over-idealistic, and usually am not well received when I ask this, but I'll ask anyway -- If every home had a room dedicated to vertical farming, instead a room for watching TV, what would that do for the problem?
You do know that plants literally grow out of thin air, don't you? The nutrients pulled from the soil are like our nutrients - required, but not the main substance of the plants. Water is needed to transport the nutrients and support cell growth and structure, but most water input into traditional farming just ends up as run off. Much of the actual substance of a plant is pulled from the air.
If you can optimize the water usage, and provide the nutrients, the rest of the inputs into plant growth are quite minimal.
In that case, proposing indoor farming is equivalent to asking people to give up precious urban space for gardening... and then plastering walls around it so that we can have indoor farming.
The question is moot, because most humans have decided they're going to watch TV and not garden. There are hundreds of millions (at least) of people living in urban and suburban areas who could be gardening today, indoors or outdoors or both, with far less investment and expense than this method entails. Very few do. There's no reason to think that you're going to convince those who are not to start by adding the further requirements that they (a) dedicate a room to it, (b) buy a bunch of expensive shelving, (c) buy a bunch of expensive LED lights, (d) triple their electricity bill (at least), and (e) double their water bill (at least).
Maybe if food prices are 50x what they are today this starts to seem interesting. Like Victory Gardens. Of course, if that happened, then electricity and urban (potable!) water prices would immediately become unaffordable as well and we would simply end up at a new equilibrium with higher urban water and electricity prices, slightly lower food prices, and a few extra indoor gardeners making up those margins.
And don't tell me that solar-generated electricity is the answer here. A PV module is about 16% efficient; absorbing sunlight directly is 100% efficient (in both cases, photosynthesis itself is then about 45% efficient). So you would need 6x as much land dedicated to PV modules as you would need to dedicate to outdoor, rooftop, or windowbox gardens to get the same output. This is a problem of physics; even a 100% efficient PV module would be only marginally useful, in that it would allow capturing energy on land that is not itself suited for agriculture.
No free lunches, and that's before we're talking about wholesale changes in human behavior.
I agree, which is why I said I was overly idealistic. But we are at (or approaching) a point where wholesale changes in human behavior are needed. We've spent the last 100 years getting more and more obsessed with TV, movies, and pop culture. It is time to swing our culture back the other way. And to start those changes, you need to ask questions and build up new (or old) ideas..
So I ask the question. Thinking about making large societal changes is a first step towards actually making a change.
If the predicate is wholesale changes in human behavior, there are plenty of less costly ways people could, and can, produce their own food. Imposing a moral judgment on people obsessed with things you don't happen to like is orthogonal to that. People will change their behaviors when the market dictates that they change them, and when that happens they will change them in the direction dictated by the market. Your personal preferences for how others should spend their time will not factor.
Clearly, you and I are not going to see eye to eye. "The market" is a societal construct to begin with. Money is a societal construct. "Less costly" is a concept based on top of those things. In my mind, humans starving to death is a pretty high cost, no matter how much cash a solution would require.
> Clearly, you and I are not going to see eye to eye.
For sure. The market is not a social construct at all; beings that want to reproduce (i.e., everyone) are going to adopt the lowest-cost means of doing so. Growing plants indoors will always be a higher-cost solution. "Money" has nothing to do with it. What you're really saying is that you want huge numbers of less-fit humans to survive and reproduce. That's a profound statement that deserves its own article and a tremendous depth of thought to evaluate. As you probably imagine, I don't share your goal.
That's my gut instinct— and there are so many secondary services which nature provides you for free out there, like pollination.
And yet, the article does make some pretty compelling points, especially about year-round yield, continuous yield, and isolation from environmental factors like drought, pests, etc.
What's actually most exciting to me is greater integration of food production directly into the places where people live and work. Why have a separate vertical farm when it could be the two floors above your company cafeteria, and the lettuce in your lunch literally never left the premises? _That_ is really exciting to me.
Vertical farming is an energy nightmare. It requires at least 1000x more energy than conventional agriculture because you have to provide supplemental light for the plants to grow indoors.
Others have addressed this:
"... the light required to grow the 500 grammes of wheat that a loaf of bread contains would cost, at current prices, £9.82. (The current farm gate price for half a kilo of wheat is 6p.) That’s just lighting: no inputs, interest, rents, rates, or labour. Somehow this minor consideration – that plants need light to grow and that they aren’t going to get it except on the top storey – has been overlooked by the scheme’s supporters. I won’t bother to explain the environmental impacts."
You lose out on density, but I do wonder about putting these vertical units around the outside of office towers somehow? So you get many of the advantages of isolation, but you also benefit from free natural light? It seems insane to harvest solar energy just to pump it back into grow lamps.
I would be fine with sitting at an office tower "window seat" that looked out through 5 feet of agricultural activity.
There is something to be said about esthetics. Cities make a point to keep open space, and pay a high price to do so, because open spaces are psychologically valuable for people who live in cities.
NB: I'm still skeptical about urban farming, and too much urban farming completely destroys the "open space" aspect.
I wish I had the link on hand but there was a study not to long ago that being surrounded by more plants dramatically increases well being and relieves stress. I wouldn't be surprised if it plays an equal or greater roll in mental health than spacial openess.
So, this sounds like it could be great for very arid areas, where it might be easy(?) to build a massive solar farm in the desert, and run a cable to the city -- but not sustainable to water the same area where one can put solar? Switch solar for wind turbines in areas with little sun light and strong winds.
I wonder if it would be any easier to recycle water in a city/building than if used for "normal" farming?
I'm based at a university where there are a couple of solar-tracking devices feeding fibre optic cables to a corridor in a nearby building. The light from the 1 metre-wide trackers is laughable. You can see the light source but it's not strong enough to practically illuminate anything.
Maybe this is an old installation and the technology has since improved, but my instinct is that solar panels powering batteries to light LEDs would be much more efficient.
No, but it is possible to convert that sunlight into solar energy and use that to power LEDs. More efficient too; since you can use LEDs that emit the proper spectrum for the plants you're growing.
> No, but it is possible to convert that sunlight into solar energy and use that to power LEDs. More efficient too; since you can use LEDs that emit the proper spectrum for the plants you're growing.
Citation needed on the "more efficient" part. Sure, if you assume that the photovoltaics, transmission systems, and LED lights themselves are all 100% efficient (and that there is no energy cost to maintain any of those systems) so that you are transforming the spectrum for free, it would be more efficient, but none of those things are true, and some of them are very far from true.
Sorry; I meant "potentially more efficient". Anything relating to vertical farming is decades away from being commercially viable on a large scale; so it's not a crazy assumption that the efficiency of all those systems will be greatly improved by then.
Regardless, most plants utilize only a small part of the light spectrum. Photovoltaics can capture a much, much larger spectrum and convert it to electricity. They don't need to be 100% efficient; just efficient enough that they can deliver all the parts of the spectrum that plants use without any of the parts they don't.
1 sq km of vertical farm + 1 sq km of sunlight collectors = worse in every way than 1 sq km of horizontal farm. And that's assuming perfect efficiency, which is wildly unrealistic.
Do you think 1 sq km of farmland causes more negative externalities than building and maintaining a skyscraper + 1 sq km of solar panels? That sounds really implausible, can you explain a bit?
Though Monbiot is cited in the original article, he doesn't really understand vertical farming. Not only are energy costs plummeting (which he doesn't address), but not all vertical farms rely on artificial light. Click back into the article and check out Sky Greens.
I used to work for a company with a very mechanical system similar to Sky Greens (City-Hydroponics) and the costs end up being transferred into maintenance. All those moving parts cause a lot of problems.
For vertical farms that only use natural light, they only collect light equal to the building surface area (actually it's a bit worse on the sides). So, it would work fine for just the top story of the building plus a few crops on the sides.
This isn't as big a problem as you would think. It's actually theoretically possible for a combination of solar cells and LEDs to increase the amount of usable energy delivered to the plant: plants absorb light in the red and blue parts of the spectrum, and reflect green light. A solar cell can capture light energy across the entire spectrum and convert it to electricity, then the LED grow lights output an optimized spectrum.
It's not possible today; but by converting green light to red through solar cells and LEDs, it will eventually be possible to deliver more light to the plants than they would have received from the sun.
Also, vertical farming allows you to build a solar array somewhere sunny and transmit the electricity to an urban area. So rather than having a farm there, you would have a solar farm that transmits energy to a vertical farm in the city. Again; this is many years off, but vertical farming and solar power go hand-in-hand. What we build today doesn't make a lot of sense commercially, but as a species we absolutely need to invest in unprofitable vertical farming projects because in 100 years, they may be our only reliable way to farm food.
Completely true! I'm speaking about whatever tech we will have in a few decades; we're definitely not there right now.
Vertical farming is currently a very niche industry, and will remain that way for some time. But eventually, the technology will catch up, and vertical farming solves a lot of problems we're very likely to have given our current trajectory (loss of farmland due to climate change, water shortages, soil contamination, etc).
Transportation of food doesn't take much energy. A UK national study found only 12% of the energy cost for all food production is needed for transportation [1].
Water conservation could be a benefit. But why not use the same techniques on flat ground instead of in a building?
Growing in a building allows you to control the environment to grow year round and you can keep the plants quarantined from the outside world to minimize contamination from insects which eliminates the need for pesticides.
But...you have to have a climate-controlled building. If you already have one, and have extra space, then ok. But there's no way you can build a roof over the entire state of Iowa for instance. Very much a niche hobby for people in the city.
The only vertical farming I see as part of a sustainable future is Agroforestry. As for the rest of vertical farming, their wastefulness becomes even more evident once one considers that the nutritional profile of its production is often comparable (or even inferior) to that of weeds.
I share your enthusiasm but see vertical farming as part of a new urban agroecology to incorporate into buildings rather than taking up acreage by themselves. I think the technology is being developed for mixed use buildings.
This is why you'll notice most existing vertical farms don't grow things like corn or soybeans. They grow microgreens. Organic-foodie pricing aside, I think it's largely because that's the only crop that really takes to this style of farming and can still make money. The aforementioned crops just need too much space and energy to work commercially.
That's true. Cross like corn and tomatoes already grow vertically so there's not as much that can be done about that as opposed to a leafy gran that is growing a foot or so in a 20ft room. It only makes sense to layer it there.
This is why there were a number of glass towers in the article.
Indoor farming is really farming in a greenhouse with multiple levels of plants inside for most plants, only a few are actually grown with artificial lights.
Light requirements for crops are proportional to the volume of the vertical farm. Light input is proportional to the surface area (actually a little). So vertical farm light requirements are much bigger than the amount of light hitting the building.
That's true for a warehouse or similar scenario. I believe the parent was talking about in a greenhouse. You can layer to a degree and then you only need supplemental lighting for the understories.
You are ignoring the fact a farm space isn't 100% plants. You need spaces for workers to move and so forth.
Lets say you have 3 stories, of which the "center" of the bottom 2 is used for workers. You still get additional space compared to a single story for the same land cost. If the cost of construction is less than the cost of land, it works perfectly [as is the case in singapore].
About a third of a farm is just space for the workers to move around and harvest things We are talking literally single light bulb is all the supplemental light you need which isn't what your blog post you linked to is willing to admit.
I see how skygreens can produce high-value crops that don't require much light in a small amount of space. But they're still using a lot of energy that isn't required in conventional farming. What is their energy input per kCalorie produced?
The problem here is that in many cases, you're replacing things that have historically been free (light, water, air) with things that are not free (LED lights, irrigation systems, exhaust/air circulators). The increase in complexity also incurs a lot of additional overhead costs. Modern "horizontal" farming is already largely automated; so vertical farming doesn't deliver any savings on that front.
Don't get me wrong -- I am a fan of vertical farming and I think that it's an important technology for us to develop because we're going to eventually trash the planet and we need some way to grow food -- but there are way too many economic problems with it for it to be much more than a novelty right now. IMO the most promising near-term use case is marijuana - there are already regulatory reasons to incur most of the costs of vertical farming, so it's less of a disadvantage (not to mention that high-grade stuff has to be grown indoors to prevent cross-pollenation).
Take a look at pictures of actual vertical farms vs. artist concepts and compare their use of natural light and then tell me if this is truly as "sustainable" as they say. Growing things is more than getting the soil right. It's (for most plants) the use of chlorophyll to make sugars which (again for most plants) is harnessing the equivalent of sunlight.
Aquaponics are definitely sustainable and just downright awesome and we should invest more in them, but without sunlight you're just running a power hungry "grow op".
I'm working for aquaponic company Verticulture Farms and I couldn't agree with you more. Multitrophic systems are definitely the way of the future. Plants/fish/crustaceans, all grown organically and locally.
_ ... there are no fertilizers needed. There are no pesticides needed. There is no chemical runoff. Even if you make a worst-case assumption that each farm will use synthetic nutrient solutions, these solutions are used in a closed, recirculating system with no chance for environmental contamination._
Can someone explain how this is so? What is the alternative to a "synthetic nutrient solution"?
The alternative is natural nutrients from plants rather than lab created Burien which are essential chemicals. If you try a synthetic nutrient plant by itself you probably won't think anything is wrong. But if you taste it side by side from a natural source like nutrients from fish then the difference is mind blowing. The synthetic nutrients really do change taste for the worse and it makes me wonder if it has any affects on the body.
I'm still not following. Are these "vertical farms" then aquaponics affairs, where the fish tank waste is what feeds the plants? Or is it like organics, where a crop like peas concentrates nitrogen from the air in order to fertilize something else?
Aquaponics is one closed loop option for acquiring organic nutrients for the plants. You can read more if you Google "organic vs synthetic nutrients" and click the first link by The Grow Scene. They explain it pretty well there and in only a few short paragraphs.
I'm convinced after reading that. I knew about NASA researchers trying to grow lettuce crops with LEDs to support long missions in space even in the 80s. LEDs have come a long ways since then. I'm glad to see it happening today commercially. Quick and low growing plants like lettuce and greens are well suited for vertical farming. I haven't read specifically about it but I'm not as convinced something with a long growing cycle and tall plant such as corn or sugarcane is as feasible, so it will continue to be a regional crop where it's naturally supported. I'm just happy to see the innovation and full scale use of LED indoor growing!
So instead of less expensive land outside cities, we should grow food on expensive land inside them. Ok.
And instead of less expensive nonpotable water supplies, we should use expensive potable urban water supplies to irrigate it. Ok.
And instead of 100% efficient sunlight to drive photosynthesis, we should use either 40% efficient fossil fuel derived electricity or 16% efficient PV derived electricity to do it. Ok.
Also, instead of polluting creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff from farms, we should pollute creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff mixed in with urban sewage (sorry, there's no such thing as a "closed system"). Ok.
And finally, instead of paying $2 for an organically-grown, sustainably-farmed head of lettuce at the farmers' market, we should pay $12 for a hydroponically-grown head of lettuce.
This article contained zero analysis of economics. Comparisons made were with "other indoor growing methods", not with outdoor sunlight-powered methods. No analysis was undertaken to show that transportation costs make up the difference. No explanation was provided for the added burden on urban (potable!) water supplies. The electricity demands made by this method are obviously unmanageable, yet no solution to this problem was offered (I guess instead of polluting the planet with industrial ag, we pollute it by burning 10x as much coal?). The problem of waste is hand-waved away by calling the operation a "closed system"; nothing lasts forever, and eventually the materials used will have to be discarded, along with residues from the inorganic inputs. "Weather-related crop failures" are dismissed; one wonders where the author thinks urban water supplies and electricity for climate control come from (hint: outdoors!).
If you want to improve the efficiency of farming, I'm all for it. You've got a scalable, sustainable way to use less water? Great, go implement it on an existing farm and put your competition out of business. But this is not that. It's a gimmick that is at best marginally economical in places with the world's highest real estate costs and customers willing to pay far above the market rate for gimmicky products. That is not a situation that describes most people on this planet. It's one thing to sell a few thousand heads of lettuce to stockbrokers in Singapore; it's another thing entirely to convince a billion Chinese people to leave their entire country fallow so that they can pay a month's income for one of those heads of lettuce while breathing air so heavily polluted by coal smoke that they drop dead at 25. Good luck with that.
The reason for growing in the city is to reduce transportation cost and time.of it gets in the store the same day the plants were harvested then it increases freshness/nutritional value and it increases the shelf life.
Growing indoors also allows for a greater control over the growing environment. You can grow any particular grow all year round with much less crop loss. This also eliminates the need for pesticides since you're closing off the plants from insects. Therfore, the "agricultural runoff"is definitely not the same as from an open farm. The only "runoff" is a handful of times a year (maybe 4ish) where the reservoirs are emptied and cleaned.
Organically grown plants are GMO free and therefore need a lot more pesticides to keep it looking good. So if you want to pay the cheaper price for a mouth of chemical then that's on you. A lot of people aren't.
I agree that the electricity usage is an issue but this is something that is being solved. Year by year we see lights getting more efficient and solar panels getting more efficient as well.
When it comes to running out of farmable land and fresh water becoming more scarce and a growing population though, the cost of electricity is a worthwhile trade off in my opinion. You can't wait until the last minute to make the transition away away from traditional agriculture and into more future proof methodologies.
> The reason for growing in the city is to reduce transportation cost and time.of it gets in the store the same day the plants were harvested then it increases freshness/nutritional value and it increases the shelf life.
So let's see some analysis on the cost of growing in the city vs. cost of transportation plus spoilage. Data, numbers, the good stuff!
> This also eliminates the need for pesticides since you're closing off the plants from insects.
You don't need to grow indoors to grow pesticide-free. Nor do you need to grow indoors to protect plants from pests.
> Organically grown plants are GMO free and therefore need a lot more pesticides to keep it looking good. So if you want to pay the cheaper price for a mouth of chemical then that's on you.
Holy conflation, Batman! First of all, "organic" is a family of growing methods; one could grow GM stock using organic methods if one wished, though in most places it will be difficult to get certification. Second, by definition "organic" methods prohibit or greatly restrict the use of pesticides. So you're contradicting yourself here; someone growing non-GM food organically is by definition not using them.
> I agree that the electricity usage is an issue but this is something that is being solved. Year by year we see lights getting more efficient and solar panels getting more efficient as well.
As I explained, this doesn't matter. A 100%-efficient PV module connected to a 100%-efficient LED bulb with a 100%-efficient transmission and distribution system is at best going to provide the same growing area as the area of those PV modules. The physics of the situation simply do not allow anything more than that, and in this universe, where we obey the laws of thermodynamics, they don't even allow that. Surface farming will always be more efficient than covering the surface with PV modules and farming somewhere else. If you cannot accept this, then your entire argument reduces to "indoor farming is a perpetual motion machine" and you should expect it to be taken as such.
> When it comes to running out of farmable land and fresh water becoming more scarce and a growing population though,
If you don't have fresh water, you cannot farm anywhere, period. A tap in an urban building is not inhabited by magical water fairies; that water comes from the same places that traditional farms get theirs. If you believe you have a more water-efficient way to farm, why not combine that with the most energy-efficient farming method as well and employ it on the surface? Don't waste such an important advance by trying to sell it in a bundle with magic and perpetual motion.
> A tap in an urban building is not inhabited by magical water fairies; that water comes from the same places that traditional farms get theirs.
Well, the same general class of places, maybe not the same place. Which may make the issue worse -- moving farming from existing locations to cities may further concentrate water use in urban areas, leaving them needing to meet the existing urban needs plus food production needs -- which may have a very high cost in terms of new water delivery infrastructure.
Right. I was trying to afford the benefit of the doubt in every possible way. At the very best, theoretically, this type of farming is as efficient as the usual kind. In reality, it's much worse, always.
It seems like making more land for horizontal farming (converting unusable land, reclaiming from the sea, etc.) should be way more cost-efficient. Heck, even growing stuff on boats would be more efficient than using skyscrapers, because of the free sunlight and water.
125 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED
For what it is worth I have been casually reading about vertical farming and think this may be a very valuable technique to feed more people with less resources.
I'm looking forward to reading this blog post when it is accessible.
As someone else who has been casually interested in vertical farming, I was pretty disappointed with this piece. It didn't give me any new information, and it didn't give any sense of progress that has been made or challenges to be overcome. It's really an introductory fluff piece for people unfamiliar with the concept.
[0]: http://www.fdnearth.org/files/2012/09/Why-vertical-farms_Fin...
The math has to be done on a case by case basis. Why are all potatoes grown in Idaho? Because soil and climate conditions there are really good for potatoes. You can grow potatoes in Idaho and ship them to Kansas for less -- less land use, less effort, less energy-cost, less environmental impact -- than you can grow them locally.
There are going to be some crops and some urban environments where vertical farming is the best option. There are going to be some where it is not.
Anecdote: I heard that peaches were grown in Greenhouses to avoid rot & bugs and it's been very helpful.
But there's also the required energy:
"just to meet a year's U.S. wheat production with vertical farming would, for lighting alone, require EIGHT TIMES as much electricity as all U.S. utilities generate in an entire year"
Additionally, not all vertical farming relies on artificial lighting.
But without cheap, abundant, clean power to replace the way traditional farming uses the sun, vertical farming is either not going to be economically viable on a large scale, or is going to be trading one set of negative externalities for another (traditional farming's externalities from runoff, etc., for the externalities from the power production for vertical farming), or both.
I don't think people realise how low farm-gate prices for commodity foods are.
Conversely, I wonder if the viability changes if urban areas would subsidize the underlying (most likely expensive) land costs for vertical farming, due to food being required to survive.
Well, the viability of living in urban areas would certainly change if another land use competing with housing and existing commercial uses was subsidized by taxing existing residents.
i.e., it would drive already high urban real estate prices higher, by competing with existing urban real estate uses, while not being cost effective, because increased output per square foot of land footprint would be offset by the higher cost per square foot of land footprint of urban land.
It seems like the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense in places that have very limited access to land with inexpensive shipping costs to populated areas like densely populated islands, but a lot less economic sense in most of the rest of the world.
Could bury these things under drive ways, under lawns, garages, decks, pools, etc.
Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. -- Capt. Montgomery "Scotty" Scott
Not to say that vertical farming is cost-free; it's most definitely not. It does avoid (edit: or at least reduce) that major (hidden) cost, though.
Urban areas are valuable. People in cities have less environmental impact than people spread out. The people displaced by an urban farm don't disappear -- they either stay out of the city or go to another city.
Does it? By competing with existing urban land uses, if adopted any substantial scale it forces the existing uses to spread out over larger areas, increasing the energy costs of transportation associated with those uses, while also creating a major new demand for energy in food production which replaces some of the use of energy in food transportation.
Seems to me your are shifting around the fossil-fuel related energy use externalities, but I haven't seen any analysis showing it to be a net win even in that narrow regard.
Growing hydroponically also reduces crop loss from about 50% down to about 10-15%.
Additionally, it seems like you are writing off the idea because "Commodity crops and animal agriculture are the biggest resource users in this system and vertical farming is no where close to finding a substitute for those"
Vertical farming isn't going to just poof magically fix everything. It's meant as a supplement to an unhealthy food system.
And I think the cost of production will come down.
The dramatic improvements in output, quality, and water use will make vertical farming superior in nearly all cases within a few decades. It'll make sense everywhere traditional farming occurs, not just in densely populated areas. That's not the case today, but it will be the case tomorrow, given this is the first inning of a multi-trillion dollar global revolution in food production. People in the future will think it's crazy that we used to grow so much of our food outside.
If I want to convince all of my friends, I will also need an emotionally-loaded propaganda documentary with more anecdotal, scripted illustrations of the human impact on a handful of stereotypical everyman characters.
I have been convinced for about 20 years that large-scale indoor farming will become cost-competitive with standard industrialized farming around 2040. The epic drought in California may have accelerated my estimate to 2035.
We won't be at the tipping point until a profitable cornfield is replaced by a greenhouse-like structure with a roof 30m above ground level.
I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine about vertical farming. He's big into his food, cares about food quality.
Anyway, I bring it up, he's not impressed, in fact far from it. The impression I got was that it ruined the emotional impact behind the origin of food. Instead of growing in fields, in natural time-honoured traditional way (I should mention at this point that my friend believed in buying organic, just to nip the pesticides/herbicides argument in the bud), we'd be replacing that with what amounted to growing in a lab.
If you're going to convince anyone, beyond tech heads and those that only care about cost, you're going to need to address the story of food, its role in our culture. I strongly doubt it would get anywhere close to the mainstream without the type of emotionally-led marketing that logfromblammo suggests.
My money says that if you are really hung up about the energy transport costs of food, you should just build an electric transport system into the city, from the farm outside the city.
A lot of this research is very interesting for things like space colonies, so I pay attention, but on earth it's a solution in search of a problem.
I don't. However, I was pointing out for those that want to try, there's more to it than listing the technical benefits.
To use another example, most people accept that investment in public transportation is a very good thing (both for the environment and the vitality of a city), yet people still plow huge sums of money into their cars, because cars = freedom. In cities like New York where many people don't seem to own cars, is their freedom restricted? Doesn't seem that way. Cars only = freedom if your other options are subpar.
Why bring this up? Reliance on cars is an example of what results when people think individualistically, whereas investment in public transport (and investment includes use) is an example of when people think collectively. Some changes require an amount of consensus. Whilst I agree you could let companies try it and let the market decide, I expect you'll encounter NIMBYism before too long. It's no problem to me though, I've got no horse in this race, will wait to see how it plays out.
[1] Lower oxygen may lead to root stress. Flooding-adapted species, like rice, could make do with less during sunlit hours. Higher CO2 can damage some plants. The 90:10:0.15 mix of N2:O2:CO2 is probably as hostile as you can make it to animals without damaging the plants in some way.
And those food components are much better than natural components - because you can tailor the exact chemical composition of them.
And with technologies like molecular gastronomy, or making great meat substitutes out of protein(like beyond meat), food components could become the basis for a lot of food variety.
If you can optimize the water usage, and provide the nutrients, the rest of the inputs into plant growth are quite minimal.
Why bring it inside? Gardening is a thing and has been for a long time. It can be really cheap too.
I'm not sure we actually gain anything by this.
Maybe if food prices are 50x what they are today this starts to seem interesting. Like Victory Gardens. Of course, if that happened, then electricity and urban (potable!) water prices would immediately become unaffordable as well and we would simply end up at a new equilibrium with higher urban water and electricity prices, slightly lower food prices, and a few extra indoor gardeners making up those margins.
And don't tell me that solar-generated electricity is the answer here. A PV module is about 16% efficient; absorbing sunlight directly is 100% efficient (in both cases, photosynthesis itself is then about 45% efficient). So you would need 6x as much land dedicated to PV modules as you would need to dedicate to outdoor, rooftop, or windowbox gardens to get the same output. This is a problem of physics; even a 100% efficient PV module would be only marginally useful, in that it would allow capturing energy on land that is not itself suited for agriculture.
No free lunches, and that's before we're talking about wholesale changes in human behavior.
So I ask the question. Thinking about making large societal changes is a first step towards actually making a change.
For sure. The market is not a social construct at all; beings that want to reproduce (i.e., everyone) are going to adopt the lowest-cost means of doing so. Growing plants indoors will always be a higher-cost solution. "Money" has nothing to do with it. What you're really saying is that you want huge numbers of less-fit humans to survive and reproduce. That's a profound statement that deserves its own article and a tremendous depth of thought to evaluate. As you probably imagine, I don't share your goal.
Yes, I really do. I believe wars have been fought over people putting fitness requirements on survival and reproduction.
And yet, the article does make some pretty compelling points, especially about year-round yield, continuous yield, and isolation from environmental factors like drought, pests, etc.
What's actually most exciting to me is greater integration of food production directly into the places where people live and work. Why have a separate vertical farm when it could be the two floors above your company cafeteria, and the lettuce in your lunch literally never left the premises? _That_ is really exciting to me.
Others have addressed this:
"... the light required to grow the 500 grammes of wheat that a loaf of bread contains would cost, at current prices, £9.82. (The current farm gate price for half a kilo of wheat is 6p.) That’s just lighting: no inputs, interest, rents, rates, or labour. Somehow this minor consideration – that plants need light to grow and that they aren’t going to get it except on the top storey – has been overlooked by the scheme’s supporters. I won’t bother to explain the environmental impacts."
-- http://www.monbiot.com/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/
I would be fine with sitting at an office tower "window seat" that looked out through 5 feet of agricultural activity.
I'm not sure if all the car gas might be a showstopper.
NB: I'm still skeptical about urban farming, and too much urban farming completely destroys the "open space" aspect.
Eg, if you're growing a mild-sunlight plant in high-sunlight climes like arizona, you could have a collection grid half the size of the delivery grid.
I wonder if it would be any easier to recycle water in a city/building than if used for "normal" farming?
Maybe this is an old installation and the technology has since improved, but my instinct is that solar panels powering batteries to light LEDs would be much more efficient.
Citation needed on the "more efficient" part. Sure, if you assume that the photovoltaics, transmission systems, and LED lights themselves are all 100% efficient (and that there is no energy cost to maintain any of those systems) so that you are transforming the spectrum for free, it would be more efficient, but none of those things are true, and some of them are very far from true.
Regardless, most plants utilize only a small part of the light spectrum. Photovoltaics can capture a much, much larger spectrum and convert it to electricity. They don't need to be 100% efficient; just efficient enough that they can deliver all the parts of the spectrum that plants use without any of the parts they don't.
And this is before any serious attempts to reduce carbon emissions, which is expensive.
Source: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=20372
For vertical farms that only use natural light, they only collect light equal to the building surface area (actually it's a bit worse on the sides). So, it would work fine for just the top story of the building plus a few crops on the sides.
Source: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15471
It's not possible today; but by converting green light to red through solar cells and LEDs, it will eventually be possible to deliver more light to the plants than they would have received from the sun.
Also, vertical farming allows you to build a solar array somewhere sunny and transmit the electricity to an urban area. So rather than having a farm there, you would have a solar farm that transmits energy to a vertical farm in the city. Again; this is many years off, but vertical farming and solar power go hand-in-hand. What we build today doesn't make a lot of sense commercially, but as a species we absolutely need to invest in unprofitable vertical farming projects because in 100 years, they may be our only reliable way to farm food.
Solar PV is 16% efficient now. So the LEDs would have to put out light at least 6 times better than sunlight to break even.
Not to mention the LEDs+PV cost money, whereas the sunlight is free.
You need higher efficiency solar, which is feasible with non PV techniques.
How much better is the light from LEDs than sunlight?
[1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/372352/22413458/136558...
Vertical farming is currently a very niche industry, and will remain that way for some time. But eventually, the technology will catch up, and vertical farming solves a lot of problems we're very likely to have given our current trajectory (loss of farmland due to climate change, water shortages, soil contamination, etc).
Water conservation could be a benefit. But why not use the same techniques on flat ground instead of in a building?
[1] (couldn't get the original source but it's referenced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles#Energy_used_in_prod...)
For an alternative framework (rather than an alternative technique) take a look at Agroecology http://www.srfood.org/en/report-agroecology-and-the-right-to...
Indoor farming is really farming in a greenhouse with multiple levels of plants inside for most plants, only a few are actually grown with artificial lights.
Lets say you have 3 stories, of which the "center" of the bottom 2 is used for workers. You still get additional space compared to a single story for the same land cost. If the cost of construction is less than the cost of land, it works perfectly [as is the case in singapore].
About a third of a farm is just space for the workers to move around and harvest things We are talking literally single light bulb is all the supplemental light you need which isn't what your blog post you linked to is willing to admit.
http://www.skygreens.com/
You can see how they layer things in the image, the limits really aren't there in the way you imply in high-land-cost areas.
Don't get me wrong -- I am a fan of vertical farming and I think that it's an important technology for us to develop because we're going to eventually trash the planet and we need some way to grow food -- but there are way too many economic problems with it for it to be much more than a novelty right now. IMO the most promising near-term use case is marijuana - there are already regulatory reasons to incur most of the costs of vertical farming, so it's less of a disadvantage (not to mention that high-grade stuff has to be grown indoors to prevent cross-pollenation).
Aquaponics are definitely sustainable and just downright awesome and we should invest more in them, but without sunlight you're just running a power hungry "grow op".
Can someone explain how this is so? What is the alternative to a "synthetic nutrient solution"?
And instead of less expensive nonpotable water supplies, we should use expensive potable urban water supplies to irrigate it. Ok.
And instead of 100% efficient sunlight to drive photosynthesis, we should use either 40% efficient fossil fuel derived electricity or 16% efficient PV derived electricity to do it. Ok.
Also, instead of polluting creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff from farms, we should pollute creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff mixed in with urban sewage (sorry, there's no such thing as a "closed system"). Ok.
And finally, instead of paying $2 for an organically-grown, sustainably-farmed head of lettuce at the farmers' market, we should pay $12 for a hydroponically-grown head of lettuce.
This article contained zero analysis of economics. Comparisons made were with "other indoor growing methods", not with outdoor sunlight-powered methods. No analysis was undertaken to show that transportation costs make up the difference. No explanation was provided for the added burden on urban (potable!) water supplies. The electricity demands made by this method are obviously unmanageable, yet no solution to this problem was offered (I guess instead of polluting the planet with industrial ag, we pollute it by burning 10x as much coal?). The problem of waste is hand-waved away by calling the operation a "closed system"; nothing lasts forever, and eventually the materials used will have to be discarded, along with residues from the inorganic inputs. "Weather-related crop failures" are dismissed; one wonders where the author thinks urban water supplies and electricity for climate control come from (hint: outdoors!).
If you want to improve the efficiency of farming, I'm all for it. You've got a scalable, sustainable way to use less water? Great, go implement it on an existing farm and put your competition out of business. But this is not that. It's a gimmick that is at best marginally economical in places with the world's highest real estate costs and customers willing to pay far above the market rate for gimmicky products. That is not a situation that describes most people on this planet. It's one thing to sell a few thousand heads of lettuce to stockbrokers in Singapore; it's another thing entirely to convince a billion Chinese people to leave their entire country fallow so that they can pay a month's income for one of those heads of lettuce while breathing air so heavily polluted by coal smoke that they drop dead at 25. Good luck with that.
Growing indoors also allows for a greater control over the growing environment. You can grow any particular grow all year round with much less crop loss. This also eliminates the need for pesticides since you're closing off the plants from insects. Therfore, the "agricultural runoff"is definitely not the same as from an open farm. The only "runoff" is a handful of times a year (maybe 4ish) where the reservoirs are emptied and cleaned.
Organically grown plants are GMO free and therefore need a lot more pesticides to keep it looking good. So if you want to pay the cheaper price for a mouth of chemical then that's on you. A lot of people aren't.
I agree that the electricity usage is an issue but this is something that is being solved. Year by year we see lights getting more efficient and solar panels getting more efficient as well.
When it comes to running out of farmable land and fresh water becoming more scarce and a growing population though, the cost of electricity is a worthwhile trade off in my opinion. You can't wait until the last minute to make the transition away away from traditional agriculture and into more future proof methodologies.
So let's see some analysis on the cost of growing in the city vs. cost of transportation plus spoilage. Data, numbers, the good stuff!
> This also eliminates the need for pesticides since you're closing off the plants from insects.
You don't need to grow indoors to grow pesticide-free. Nor do you need to grow indoors to protect plants from pests.
> Organically grown plants are GMO free and therefore need a lot more pesticides to keep it looking good. So if you want to pay the cheaper price for a mouth of chemical then that's on you.
Holy conflation, Batman! First of all, "organic" is a family of growing methods; one could grow GM stock using organic methods if one wished, though in most places it will be difficult to get certification. Second, by definition "organic" methods prohibit or greatly restrict the use of pesticides. So you're contradicting yourself here; someone growing non-GM food organically is by definition not using them.
> I agree that the electricity usage is an issue but this is something that is being solved. Year by year we see lights getting more efficient and solar panels getting more efficient as well.
As I explained, this doesn't matter. A 100%-efficient PV module connected to a 100%-efficient LED bulb with a 100%-efficient transmission and distribution system is at best going to provide the same growing area as the area of those PV modules. The physics of the situation simply do not allow anything more than that, and in this universe, where we obey the laws of thermodynamics, they don't even allow that. Surface farming will always be more efficient than covering the surface with PV modules and farming somewhere else. If you cannot accept this, then your entire argument reduces to "indoor farming is a perpetual motion machine" and you should expect it to be taken as such.
> When it comes to running out of farmable land and fresh water becoming more scarce and a growing population though,
If you don't have fresh water, you cannot farm anywhere, period. A tap in an urban building is not inhabited by magical water fairies; that water comes from the same places that traditional farms get theirs. If you believe you have a more water-efficient way to farm, why not combine that with the most energy-efficient farming method as well and employ it on the surface? Don't waste such an important advance by trying to sell it in a bundle with magic and perpetual motion.
Well, the same general class of places, maybe not the same place. Which may make the issue worse -- moving farming from existing locations to cities may further concentrate water use in urban areas, leaving them needing to meet the existing urban needs plus food production needs -- which may have a very high cost in terms of new water delivery infrastructure.
https://youtu.be/usTT3RuWu_g?t=4m44s