Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#121

Post by roel_v » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #73

dalbasal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points all. The aesthetic appeal of this sort of indoor farming, and the space-age-ness gives the topic a tendency to over-excitement. I'd also add (4) Mostly, urban/vertical/cubicle farms produce high quality/price leafy herbs & veg. It's not replacing vast cereal fields. That's a very small portion of agriculture overall, definitely by land use but also by most measures. All that said, the are real space-age-i…

There is a pretty good case to wean us off cereals. They aren’t the best diet health wise. We only consume so much because they are calorie dense and easy to grow.

Like what? Potatoes? There are a few high calorie-per-area staples that we know how to grow, process, prepare and store at scale. Sure there might be a 'revolution' (like when electricity was discovered), but there are no obvious candidates to what you're saying, nor a real incremental progress path to follow.

And 'easy to grow' is rather dismissive of the vast amounts of progress we've had to make to come to the point we are now...

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#122

Post by Chyzwar » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:39 AM UTC

jaskerr wrote: post #42

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 don't have data, but I do have anecdotal evidence to contradict #1. I live in upstate NY, where farm land is cheap (in relative terms). We are seeing an influx of Amish, who can no longer afford land in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (To be clear, they might be able to afford land, but at such a cost as to risk the enterprise and family. The Amish won't do that.) We are also seeing new farmers moving here from states such…

You can start farming on land that you lease. When you have enough hardware and capital you start buying gradually. Starting as a farmer is very difficult but not for these reasons alone. Learning craft is super difficult. Sometimes you have one shot during a season to try something. My parent had higher education, where born into families with farming traditions but still took a decade to master vegetable production.

Amish cannot afford land because they suck at farming. They lack education and intentionally do not use modern farming techniques.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#123

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:40 AM UTC

jaskerr wrote: post #42

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 don't have data, but I do have anecdotal evidence to contradict #1. I live in upstate NY, where farm land is cheap (in relative terms). We are seeing an influx of Amish, who can no longer afford land in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (To be clear, they might be able to afford land, but at such a cost as to risk the enterprise and family. The Amish won't do that.) We are also seeing new farmers moving here from states such…

No, because: when the land becomes expensive you just move somewhere else, as evidenced by your own statement.

Yes, because: there isn't an unlimited supply of land at the bottom of the gravity well.

But I'm willing it bet it's cheaper to irrigate the desert than grow food in multi-story buildings.

There's an intermittent push to put agriculture in nothern Australia, which is presently very sparsely populated.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#124

Post by roel_v » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:41 AM UTC

jaskerr wrote: post #42

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 don't have data, but I do have anecdotal evidence to contradict #1. I live in upstate NY, where farm land is cheap (in relative terms). We are seeing an influx of Amish, who can no longer afford land in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (To be clear, they might be able to afford land, but at such a cost as to risk the enterprise and family. The Amish won't do that.) We are also seeing new farmers moving here from states such…

" where farm land is cheap (in relative terms)"

To put this into context for me, what cost do you call 'cheap'? And that land they're being outpriced from, how much does that sell for?

For comparison, agricultural land in the Netherlands is around 50-60k euros (60-70k USD) per hectare, so about half that per acre; in Belgium it's a little bit less but not much. When I look at those prices and do some back of the envelope calculations, my mind boggles at the efficiency they need to make enough to pay back the loans to buy this land in the first place (I do enough work in agricultural economics to know that it's more complicated than that at the micro scale, but still, overall, someone has to make money).

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#125

Post by mikro2nd » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:44 AM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #73

dalbasal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points all. The aesthetic appeal of this sort of indoor farming, and the space-age-ness gives the topic a tendency to over-excitement. I'd also add (4) Mostly, urban/vertical/cubicle farms produce high quality/price leafy herbs & veg. It's not replacing vast cereal fields. That's a very small portion of agriculture overall, definitely by land use but also by most measures. All that said, the are real space-age-i…

There is a pretty good case to wean us off cereals. They aren’t the best diet health wise. We only consume so much because they are calorie dense and easy to grow.

You would also have to wean us off meat, including poultry. Not all meat, sure, but the bulk is cereal-fed in CAFO factory operations. Similarly you'd have to wean us off most of the dairy produce and dairy-derived food we like, because grass-fed is not going to produce the quantities we've grown accustomed to. Then you'd have to wean us off bread and beer, and a whole host of extracted starches and sugars that are used in manufacturing much of the so-called processed foods. Because that's where most of the cereals are going.

So... most of humanity on a more-or-less vegan diet.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#126

Post by yorwba » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

jsilence wrote: post #88

_rpd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end you need just too much collection area - more than the square footage of each floor put side to side. It's easier to put the 'collection area' somewhere remote as solar panels and bring in the light as electricity. The energy cost isn't that big a deal compared to the labor cost.

in our model calculations the energy costs are in the same ballpark like labour. thus energy costs are the main culprit. transporting "the light" from elsewhere to the crop has a ~90% loss (20% - 25% solar efficiency times transport losses of 20% times LED efficiency of 40% - 50%). so you need ten times the area elsewhere to be space efficient on a premium priced area. also viewed from crop product pricing the econom…

Others (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17467755) have highlighted that plants only use a few specific wavelengths. Have you included that in your calculations, i.e. are you comparing (sunlight -> electricity -> LED at optimal wavelength -> photosynthesis at that wavelength) vs. (sunlight -> photosynthesis)?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#127

Post by roel_v » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:49 AM UTC

T2_t2 wrote: post #57

pippy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess people mostly downvote you because your statement is not popular, but it's not quite correct either. 'Subsistence farming' isn't one well defined thing. There are form of subsistence farming that are very bad; for example, I'm doing work on agriculture in Madagascar now where people (due to a lack of knowledge and systemic thinking) do agriculture by slashing down rainforest to get access to the very fertile soil underneath. That soil inevitably washes out fast (because the trees and more in particular the roots that hold the soil are removed), so a few seasons later they move on to the next patch of rain forest and so on. This is one of the major environmental threats on the island.

That said, 'subsistence farming' in temperate climates as it was practiced say in the 18th and 19th century in Europe is quite different. It revolved around permanent settlements (so people couldn't move on quite as easily) and used crop rotation and animal manure for keeping productivity if not high then at least at sufficient levels. We couldn't live from a system like that today, and it was bad for the environment in the sense that it made people put essentially all land into cultivation, but it wasn't as immediately destructive as other forms of subsistence farming are.

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#128

Post by mikro2nd » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:56 AM UTC

rmason wrote: post #106

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…

In a word no. I spent twenty years as a fertilizer agronomist and I'm very familiar with the costs of producing a crop. The numbers simply do not work. Even when they tried in Detroit and got buildings for five cents on the dollar they couldn't make it work. The investors funding these enterprises do not understand agricultural economics. I keep investigating these stories looking for some kind of 'breakthrough tech'…

The "breakthrough tech" I'm NOT seeing:

There's all the excitement over electric cars and electrical trucks, and I, for one, can't wait to get an electrically powered car I don't have to drive. But the thing I'm not seeing is electrically powered farm machinery. I think people underestimate just how hard that problem is. These machines, when they're working at peak times of the year (planting time, harvest) are required to work 24 hours a day for weeks on end. There's no time to stop for a recharge, and something like a harvester or large tractor pulling ploughs or a planter uses a /hell/ of a lot of power. Even assuming some sort of swap-out battery system, I'd guess that each machine would need something on the order of three to five battery packs in order to keep up with the work demand. And at the busy times of year even a moderately sized farm will have at least three to five machines working at the same time.

Is anyone aware of companies developing real (not prototype/PoC) large-scale farm machinery?

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#129

Post by roel_v » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 7:58 AM UTC

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…

But even then it's not that simple. You need different wavelengths at different phenological stages, and what wavelengths you need depend on the crop (and variety, but you can at least control that for crops you can multiply vegetatively) you're growing, and then still you need to distribute that light to all leaves and not just the top ones. So now you need either LED's that can emit many different wave lengths, or you need many LED's that are only in use part of the time (killing your capital expenditure efficiency), or you need to move plants around to be under the right lights. And you need to move the light source to places where they can hit the leaves as much as possible, but you also need to keep the excess heat away from the plants (which is a problem even with today's highly efficient LED's - I mean, these are not like that IKEA nightlight you bought last week for $5.)

Re: Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?

#130

Post by roel_v » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:05 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #52

tathougies wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Research is inconclusive, but there are indications that UV light (although not required for photosynthesis) can have effects on yields and either on resistance against pests (insects/molds/fungi) or directly attack/kill/weaken those pests. So basically 'it depends', and people do their own tests and then determine if, in their specific circumstances, it is a net positive (economically) to add UV lights to their setups.

I think this is the main message. People in this thread are talking in absolutes about 'agriculture', but the reality is that there are many, many things that we don't understand well enough at the above-micro-level scale to be able to say 'you need to measure x, y and z and then we can calculate/model the optimal setup to grow something'. People are basically relying on (informed) trial and error, with feedback cycles measures in months or years, so it just takes a long long time for progress to be made - and even then, we usually don't know exactly why something works in a specific case. It's not like 'oh let's run an A/B test for the best color of our 'buy' button for a few days'.