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ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

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Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#91

Post by ansible »

orasis wrote: post #40

I own 20 ZipGrow towers and have become quite disillusioned with them across 3 growing seasons. The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem. You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants. Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced: - pump dying - Leak in base causing all…

People have been making flood and drain systems for years, controlled by a super-reliable mechanical system. The downside is that these are typically much larger and heavier. The ones I've seen have a bed of gravel as the grow medium. It also has many gallons of water in the system, and no doubt that evaporation is more of a concern.

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#92

Post by asdkjh345fd »

zo1 wrote: post #88
syntaxing wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please elaborate on that? This was actually one of my concerns since I would assume the "flavor(?)" is coming from whatever is in the water.

The "food" you give to the plants is in the water, including oxygen. They get everything they need from it, the taste is identical, and I have no doubt that a double-blind study would show that if it hasn't already. There is no "magic" inside soil other than its a media that happens to allow nutrients to exist next to the roots that absorb them, while allowing the plant to support its own weight and stay fixed. You c…

>They get everything they need from it

Except carbon which they get from the air.

>the taste is identical

Identical to what? Strawberries grown in boron deficient soil taste worse than strawberries grown in soil with adequate boron. There is no yield difference, the plant does not die from the low boron. But it is unable to make large enough quantities of certain flavonoids that contribute to the flavor of the berries. We do not know how to synthetically feed plants in hydroponic situations well enough to even get optimal yield, much less optimal flavor or nutrition. Maximum yields from healthy soil still exceed maximum yields from synthetic fertilization.

>There is no "magic" inside soil other than its a media that happens to allow nutrients to exist next to the roots that absorb them, while allowing the plant to support its own weight and stay fixed.

That is a really unfortunate misconception. The difference is very real, but it is science not magic. Soil is not an inert media, it is a massive and complex ecosystem with an entire food web. Fungi actually penetrate the roots of plants and directly exchange nutrients and energy with them. Microbes can create entire amino acids, and directly give them to plants in exchange for glucose. This is very different from an inert medium that simply holds ions in water for plants to absorb. Hormones released by the plant roots appear to change the organic acid production of certain fungi, which affects how much of which minerals are solublized from the mineral component of the soil (dirt). Millions of years of co-evolution have created a system where plants are able to direct microbes to meet their specific nutritional needs at any particular time. In the process, these microbes defend the plants they have formed these symbiotic relationships with from other microbes, such as those that cause fungal diseases like blight.

>it's the same as traditional farming except they have to be water-soluble

They have to be water-soluble with conventional farming too. This is the big problem with conventional agriculture, it is really just industrial scale hydroponics done using the ground as a cheap medium. Traditional farming predates synthetic fertilizer and relied on soil.

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#93

Post by asdkjh345fd »

hogFeast wrote: post #20
flagada wrote: post #3

I don't really understand the whole "urban agriculture" crowd. People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).

Look at the Netherlands. They have no land and one of the largest agricultural producers in the world. More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment...the benefits are pretty much endless. It isn't about "urban" but using what we have more efficiently.

>They have no land and one of the largest agricultural producers in the world.

That's a bit of a misconception. Most people get the impression from the headlines that they produce a lot of food, but that is not really the case. The Netherlands is the world's second largest EXPORTER of "agricultural products", by dollar value. 10% of that is consulting and equipment. Another 10% is flowers. Those are not food. Even in the remaining 80%, it is mainly products that are high in monetary value, but low in land efficiency, like cheese and flavorless hydroponic tomatoes. The Netherlands actually only produces 50% of the calories needs of their population, and exports away a good chunk of that. They rely on importing staples to feed their population.

>More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment

The Netherlands model is none of those things. It is just used as a propaganda tool for a corporate greenwashing campaign to convince people that spending lots of money on environmentally destructive and wasteful technology is good for the environment, when it is actually being done because it is good for the bank accounts of a small minority of wealthy people.

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#94

Post by orasis »

syntaxing wrote: post #63
orasis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they were quite expensive and I'll probably just end up giving them away.

Would you happen to be in California? I would love to buy one from you (after this whole shelter in period)!

I would but I’m not near CA

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#95

Post by knodi123 »

tomp wrote: post #30
elcritch wrote: post #19

I worked for the company that developed the technology. Personally not much of a green-thumb myself, but it's great to see how much you can grow with vertical towers, either in a greenhouse or indoors with LED lights. You can grow about 3-4x what you would get with a flat grow bed for many plants [1]. While the towers are great, the real trick is the grow media as you want it robust enough to survive while not suffoc…

Do you have any idea, why do people concentrate on aquaponics, not aeroponics? Is it just simply easier to implement, or better researched? Or is it actually better (higher yield, closed-loop system, ...)?

I've experimented with both. Aeroponics is a LOT more complicated- you really need a high-pressure system if you want good results (fogponics with an ultrasonic humidifier doesn't work well enough). And a high pressure system has to worry about clogs in the nozzles, and it has more moving parts, and some of those parts need to be well sealed.... vs. hydroponics which can be as complicated as turning on and off an aquarium pump.

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#96

Post by AngryData »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #71
AngryData wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to breed plants specifically for LED lights. All the newest and most efficient and cost effective LEDs are white spectrum now and emulate the sun far closer than any other light ever has. What matters is how efficiently can you make the lights run, and right now it is pretty damn good getting about 200 lumens per watts on those grow LEDs (versus about half that for a shitty standard household LED)

Isn't it counterproductive to waste LEDs optimized for our perception to plant growth which doesn't fully utilize the spectrum of sunlight? I thought that is WHY grow lights have this purple sheen, be it traditional flourescent ones, or contemporary LEDs, or a mix of red and blue ones.

Despite the 'common knowledge', plants do utilize most of the visible light spectrum, even green, just in different amounts. And on top of that these white LEDs aren't just a single static white, their light spectrum are tuned to specific growth spectrum and can be ordered however you want, but all come out visibly to us as white of slightly different shades.

Those blurple lights are just awful, and not only do the LEDs have far less energy efficiency being old tech, but their supposed "optimal" wavelengths are anything but. They are blasting out extremely narrow wavelengths of light and trying to make it more continuous by using a bunch of slightly different narrow range colors, but it doesn't work as well as one would hope, especially when they are coming from different point sources.

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#97

Post by heurist »

flagada wrote: post #9
heurist wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food production in US is increasingly consolidated into hands of large agriculture corporations. Why not decentralize, make the system more robust to shock (look what's happening with grocery stores today)?

I entirely agree, this would be great. I don't see why it has to be done in cities though. Farmers in smaller co-ops can provide a similar decentralisation.

Not all parts of US can be farmed

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#98

Post by AngryData »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #85
AngryData wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you do pull out fusion, you will always have too huge loss between solar panels and LEDs. As efficient as LEDs are now, and I know because I just built 1200 watts of the latest and most efficient LEDs that are available, they are nowhere near cost effective in comparison tot he sun. Plants are not nearly as inefficient as people believe, especially when you consider the fact that solar panels themselves can al…

I am curious about the 36 sqft (3.34 square meter) and 1200 watt. As we end up with considerably less watt per area. We use about 100 watt per square meter. You have about 360 watt per square meter. So we use less than a third. Preliminary tests show very good growth rates. We will have better data in a few months. This is for an indoor leafy green, mostly sallad, aquaponics growing facility.

Technically I can still get growth down to 11-12 watts, closer to your levels, but it is definitely much slower growth and it won't be enough later on. Technically I run about 20 watts during the initial vegetative state, but once plants start flowering or fruiting there is a markedly different end result if I don't turn the lights up to around 35 watts a square foot, which is what most other people ive seen report. I mostly just run it at 35 all the time because I want them fruiting and producing as much as they can as fast as possible. But if you are growing leafy greens your plants are never even entering the flowering stage because you will be picking it by then.

Perhaps with a bigger more automated setup I could do slower growth, but there are other costs like ventilation or dehumidification or possibly heating or cooling too that don't really change a lot whether the plants are growing fast or slow, which makes faster growth possible optimal financially, even if I might be losing out a few percentage worth of light absorption.

Re: ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system

#99

Post by bjelkeman-again »

AngryData wrote: post #98
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious about the 36 sqft (3.34 square meter) and 1200 watt. As we end up with considerably less watt per area. We use about 100 watt per square meter. You have about 360 watt per square meter. So we use less than a third. Preliminary tests show very good growth rates. We will have better data in a few months. This is for an indoor leafy green, mostly sallad, aquaponics growing facility.

Technically I can still get growth down to 11-12 watts, closer to your levels, but it is definitely much slower growth and it won't be enough later on. Technically I run about 20 watts during the initial vegetative state, but once plants start flowering or fruiting there is a markedly different end result if I don't turn the lights up to around 35 watts a square foot, which is what most other people ive seen report.…

Ok, we don't have fruiting plants. So that can make a difference.
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