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Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

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Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#111

Post by patall »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #86
jacquesm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical farms start with salads ('crunchy water') because they are easy crops to start such a process with. Once established and verified they will for sure move away from just leafy greens. The typical plan for a startup in this domain runs in the decades, not just a few years, and they're pretty capital intensive compared to software start-ups. Think of the salad producing vertical farm as you would of an MVP for…

Salads are economic to produce because they have no calories. Calories = Light (energy) + Fertiliser. Efficiency of an LED is like 40%, and Photosynthesis efficiency is like 2%. In other words calories are expensive and ineffieicent to produce through artificial lighting, no amount of 'startuping' will change that. Also nothing here is new, we've had greenhouses, artificial lighting, hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponi…

While your premise is probably right, note that the 2% efficiency of photosynthesis is for sun light. Growth lamps such used here will certainly emit at wave length optimized to the absorption spectra of the crop.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#112

Post by lovemenot »

imtringued wrote: post #103
lovemenot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the ratio of growth area to exposed surface area. 14x in this case. It's a vertical farm to maximise this ratio. Light pipes may be slightly more efficient than PV in energy conversion during daylight hours, but they do not scale horizontally as the farm scales vertically. For this project in Denmark, the energy comes from abundant wind, not weak and intermittent sun.

I think you should take into account that plants can differ enormously. Small plants that don't grow in tight grids get some fancy 14x multiplier but once you actually try to grow a space efficient plant like wheat it just doesn't work out. The crop is already maximizing exposure to the sun to an incredible degree. Vertical farming can't increase this "efficiency" other than by adding more layers which will always in…

Thanks. I just learned something about crops.

Personally, I like light pipe tecnology. But I still don't get it. If wheat is already maxised for land/light and cannot be improved then what could be the theoretical advantage to indoor growing of wheat partially under light pipes?

Area/energy-wise the best it can ever grow indoors is surely no better than on the roof.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#114

Post by daanlo »

user568439 wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

I co-founded a home vertical farm company a few years ago (not in operation any more).

Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons: 1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste. 2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor.

The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark.

The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#115

Post by simonebrunozzi »

qayxc wrote: post #35
user568439 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

> but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor Correlation ≠ causation. I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest. Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses. This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops…

Not always true.

Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#116

Post by eitland »

vidarh wrote: post #91
eitland wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. Quite the contrary: at least in Norway politicians have been busily pushing your side of the story for decades and only stopped pushing it earlier this year. > It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad If you said this last year many would have agr…

In Norway, food self-sufficiency has been a political issue ever since the Napoleonic wars and the British naval blockade on Denmark-Norway 200 years ago, to the point that the importance of self-sufficiency were taught from early in primary schools at least until the 1980's. It grew in political importance as the national-romanticism movement grew, and then blew up massively in political importance after World War I…

> It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.

That's what I mean by decades :-)

I'm 40 now, so this means at least since I was 10.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#117

Post by Loic »

user568439 wrote: post #19
Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

- 250x less water - Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop - Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs - Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually a…

The real cost (building, etc.) will results in a way more carbon intensive production as anything else. If you consider that Denmark electricity is 66 to 75% oil/gas/coal produced, the real environmental impact of this farm will be disastrous.

The 250x less water is compared to open field production without water drop control, it will be at the same level of water consumption than all the greenhouses you see, they will not be better. This argument is as such not a good one.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#118

Post by dsego »

After the success of vacuum trains, underground superhighways, solar roadways and rocket travel, I guess this is the next logical step? At least you have something to sink our money into, rinse and repeat. Maybe even involve some EU green & eco funds.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#119

Post by akudha »

KaiserPro wrote: post #53

Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else. all They grow are great salad crops. Thats about it. If you're going holistic, you can farm fish at the same time. But that introduces a load of complications. Look, if you want to make the world a better place you need to: 1) come up with a simple system that can create good quality soil (think…

6) Eat less meat.

Shit ton of land, water and other resources are used to grow grains just for the meat industry. If a portion of those resources are used to grow food for humans instead of animals, it would reduce a ton of waste and pollution.

Re: Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

#120

Post by xondono »

Barrin92 wrote: post #3

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming. You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients…

>Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

I think you are not fully grasping the logistics of your plan. Most of Africa is pretty much landlocked, meaning shipping needs to happen by road (that do not exist today). This alone makes your plan more expensive than vertical farms.

Logistics in the food industry is a very complicated mess, with timelines so tight that we need to hack the riping process by picking fruits early and have them ripe on route, which negatively affects the quality of the produce (and with that the price that the average consumer is willing to pay).

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