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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

#121

Post by HALtheWise »

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…

Counterintuitively, I have previously been told that you can actually grow more than one square meter of plants with one square meter of solar panels. The reason for this is that LED lighting can be designed to produce exactly the frequencies plants actually absorb, and distributed optimally through the day. Current solar technology isn't sufficient to make that cheaper than regular farming for staple crops, but I can certainly imagine it getting there for anything that's grown in a greenhouse today.

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

#122

Post by dontTango »

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…

This is the criticism of farmers.

I know a guy who made a fool of himself for becoming an enthusiast, starting a company promoting vertical farming, only to find out the Economics don't work.

On a similar note I recommend engineers get Engineering jobs, not business jobs. The money is tempting, but you will never learn about specifications and quality metrics otherwise. (Note I'm not including programmers as engineers)

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

#123

Post by pi-err »

I've always been a fan of those projects but it's clear they've now mostly turned to greenporn.

For this specific project: nothing makes sense. The farm is operated by "Nordic Harvest", with claims that it can produce 200 tons of products in 2021 on a 7000 sqm footprint. The products would be fresh herbs and salads (the website only displays fresh herbs). So the total output of herbs on year 1 would be more than the equivalent surface of beetroot, one of the heaviest products. The site says the farm uses "no fertilizer" then comes to explain than they only use "natural fertilizer". The entire thing looks like a byproduct of the windmill industry, which is crumbling because of intermittent surplus of cheap electricity. All details on https://www.nordicharvest.com/

This reminds me of for urban farming in Paris a couple years ago, where I witnessed most "startup farms" from inception to failure: it's a perfect PR choreography. Some company builds a "farm" on its roof (with bee hives), advertises it as a totem of some vacant post-carbon strategy, collects fiscal incentives, then the farm never gets to see its 3rd year because it's so impossibly hard to even dream of reaching profitability or large-scale production. In Paris, the "largest farm in the world" is twice the size of this dutch "world largest" and actually operated by Unibail Westfield (and produces barely anything): https://www.urw.com/en/press-room/press-news/world-largest-u...

There are exceptions in urban farming (Lufa in Montreal, some sites in Singapore) but the PR pressure and laziness of journalist coverage is ruining it from the inside.

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

#124

Post by tzumby »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #115
qayxc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

+1 I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes

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

#125

Post by vidarh »

eitland wrote: post #116
vidarh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I didn't mean to sound like I was contradicting you. Just more background. This used to be a big deal, until people started forgetting about it, and now people are suddenly remembering it again.

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

#126

Post by ars »

daanlo wrote: post #114
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…

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 ar…

It takes around 3 to 5 days to ship anything anywhere in the US. If you buy food once a week, the increased shipping speed of local hardly registers.

Most of the time is taken by other things, not shipping. So the negatives of local (higher energy usage, less efficient use of resources) are not really worth it.

Local means growing food either in a greenhouse or in a place not ideally suited for it. It also means smaller less efficient operations.

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

#127

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

tzumby wrote: post #124
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1 I make pizza using San Marzano canned tomatoes and they taste better than my parents home grown organic tomatoes

OK, but that's a varietal difference, which is one of the factors that the poster identified as being important - no? Unless your parents are actually growing San Marzano tomatoes.

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

#128

Post by tpmx »

dsego wrote: post #118

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.

In this case the money seems to come from e.g. the danish government VC fund Vækstfonden.

There was a very similar play in Sweden that went bankrupt last year after consuming a lot of tax money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantagon

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

#129

Post by coldcode »

xondono wrote: post #120
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 i…

Transport of perishables costs way more than growing them in the first place; so doing it locally is cheaper, less polluting and much fresher. Saying you could do it remotely is about as convincing as making ice in your house as opposed to shipping it from a cold winter halfway around the world.

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

#130

Post by ajmurmann »

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…

One more point the article makes that's missing from your list: It uses less space.

We currently use enormous amounts of land on agriculture. It would be fantastic if we could give all that land back to nature.

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