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Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

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Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#21

Post by tathougies »

pascalxus wrote: post #4

Why don't they just do it without all those expensive lights and equipment, that's where all the biggest expsenses are. Just straight hydroponics with vertical farming. am i missing something? EDIT: I mean, do it outdoors with vertical farming, either on rooftops or around offices or parks or just outside the city (better there than 6000 miles away). the vertical aspect of it would still help reduce costs since real-…

Everyone here is saying there's not enough light. That's not actually true. The sun produces more than enough energy to grow all the plants. The issue is one of distribution. You have to distribute very particular wave lengths of light to the entirety of the structure and all the plants. This is a hard problem. Mirrors are inefficient. Fiber optics don't do exactly what you want, and plus, a lot of the light energy is unusable, because it's the wrong wavelength. Most modeling done in the space indicates that -- with current technology -- it's more efficient to capture the sunlight, convert it to electricity, and then use the electricity to produce light at the correct wavelengths.

As a whole, this means there's less energy available to irradiate the plants, but there's more energy in the wavelengths the plants can respond to, so it's more efficient.

I mean... think about it. Every time you look at a tree and see green, that is light that the plant has wasted. Hydroponic lighting is typically that deep purple, red, and blue, that plants can absorb. The goal is to make the plant leaves black, indicating that all light is being absorbed. Otherwise, you're just wasting light.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#22

Post by farwind »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #13

You can buy prime farm land in Saskatchewan for well under $2000 an acre.

If it's anything like Montana and Wyoming, I wouldn't exactly call it prime farm land -- The weather and climate make it particularly hard to consistently turn a profit, and you need to be prepared to weather several years in a row with no reasonable crop.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#23

Post by Semiapies »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #13

You can buy prime farm land in Saskatchewan for well under $2000 an acre.

And there's plenty of prime farmland in the US and Mexico, already. But the real cost center of farming is labor, not transport, and the claimed automation savings are pretty dubious. Especially given every previous vertical farming startup claimed the same gigantic savings from automation before they went under.

My head aches a little bit just reading about the comparison of "spring mix" costs. Spring mix is a product built on a big markup for the act of peeling and combining romaine lettuce and other crops. You might as well say, "Hey, a salad at a salad bar is $12, let's compete with that!" A sensible comparison would be with plain romaine lettuce or whatever.

If these startups could provide cheap, high-quality romaine lettuce or whatever at any real scale, we wouldn't be hearing the umpteenth repetition of funding hype for vertical farming, we'd be hearing about how well vertically farmed crops were selling.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#24

Post by maliker »

Maybe for expensive microgreens. Otherwise your energy costs are prohibitive.

Utah State’s Extension service did a good analysis [1]. Indoor farming energy costs only add about 30% to your cost of tomatoes, but 10,000% for wheat.

Of course this assumes you can get an acre of indoor space for the same price as an acre of cropland. And can also amportize your hardware costs over many growing seasons to drive them to zero. Probably not good assumptions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#28

Post by nostromo »

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread.

1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem.

2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of putting solar panels on a roof to make electricity to beam LEDs on plants, losing 90% of the energy along the way, shouldn't be lost on anyone.)

3) Shipping is cheap. It may make us feel good that a salad's greens were created on a roof-top in Brooklyn, but using some of the most expensive real-estate on Earth to save a few cents on shipping is beyond economically irrational.

I actually love the idea of hydroponics for another reason entirely: it saves a ton of water. Water is a real problem worth solving, particularly in the dry west. Focus on this and forget about all of these other non-benefits.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#29

Post by ggm »

nostromo wrote: post #28

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of…

3) Shipping is cheap.

No, thats an externality you don't care about. Its not cheap in social consequence terms. hauling food by road from centralized warehouses is a twofold sin. Firstly, its food miles and NO, CO2 and other burdens. Secondly, its why e coli spreads across the USA: too much centralisation of distribution.

"cheap" food is actually at root, the problem. It needs to be affordable, but high quality. We're stuck on cheap, which drives to cheetos.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#30

Post by lighthazard »

nostromo wrote: post #28

There's a lot of misunderstanding of agriculture in this thread. 1) No, land is not expensive. In agricultural areas, land is quite cheap. Organizing shelves of crops vertically solves for a problem that isn't actually a problem. 2) The sun is free and electricity isn't cheap. Putting plants indoors and then buying electricity to create light is going to be expensive compared to using the free sun. (The absurdity of…

I agree with all your points. However, I believe there are additional costs to land farming like insects, weather damage, etc. So, yes, the sun is free but that comes with the caveats of the elements. Not sure how much crop is lost due to insects/drought/other factors but perhaps this helps.
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