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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?

#51

Post by mulmen »

shalmanese wrote: post #45
ggm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#52

Post by mulmen »

tathougies wrote: post #21
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 i…

The black leaf thing is interesting. Is that an oversimplification or do plants really only absorb visible light?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#53

Post by joshuamcginnis »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #48

According to [1], lettuce grown by California farmers cost 993,567,000/84,000 = $11,900 per acre. According to this article, electricity and power costs $216,000 for a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm, or $313,000/acre. It seems hard to make that competitive. [1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

$993,567,000 is the total value of lettuce production for the year, not the cost.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#54

Post by clay_the_ripper »

shalmanese wrote: post #45
ggm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

While I could believe that this is true, I would love to see some evidence to back up this claim. You would also need to account for the entirety of emissions, including, as a previous commenter said, other emissions involved in the supply chain.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#55

Post by pippy »

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…

vertical farming will only be economically viable with near free power and massive transport taxes. Nuclear power would be the only realistic viable option.

Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment, vertical farming would be a smart choice for humanity. but sadly with out current perceptions of nuclear power and the stranglehold that globalism has, it will likely never happen.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#57

Post by T2_t2 »

pippy wrote: post #55
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…

vertical farming will only be economically viable with near free power and massive transport taxes. Nuclear power would be the only realistic viable option. Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment, vertical farming would be a smart choice for humanity. but sadly with out current perceptions of nuclear power and the stranglehold that globalism has, it will likely never happen.

> Given the damage that agriculture has done to the environment

Has it? I thought that the worst thing for the environment was subsistence farming.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#58

Post by [deleted] »

Semiapies wrote: post #23
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 prod…

[deleted]

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#59

Post by vilhelm_s »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #53
vilhelm_s wrote: post #48

According to [1], lettuce grown by California farmers cost 993,567,000/84,000 = $11,900 per acre. According to this article, electricity and power costs $216,000 for a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm, or $313,000/acre. It seems hard to make that competitive. [1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

$993,567,000 is the total value of lettuce production for the year, not the cost.

I guess it's about the same? I imagine the profit margins are not very high.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#60

Post by sinnet11 »

A biggest problem with farming these days is labor. Period. Growers (farmers) cannot manage 6000 acres of land. They rely on their crop consultants to tell them where to spray and what they need to spray. Once you start automate these tasks, e.g. crop scouting, then the grower and the consultant can use data to spray less and produce a higher quality crop.
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