Vertical farming is an energy nightmare. It requires at least 1000x more energy than conventional agriculture because you have to provide supplemental light for the plants to grow indoors.<p>Others have addressed this:<p>"... the light required to grow the 500 grammes of wheat that a loaf of bread contains would cost, at current prices, £9.82. (The current farm gate price for half a kilo of wheat is 6p.) That’s just lighting: no inputs, interest, rents, rates, or labour. Somehow this minor consideration – that plants need light to grow and that they aren’t going to get it except on the top storey – has been overlooked by the scheme’s supporters. I won’t bother to explain the environmental impacts."<p>-- <a href="http://www.monbiot.com/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.monbiot.com/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/</a>
What's making this transition difficult is the economic viability. It only makes sense in densely populated areas but those areas also have ridiculous property values and higher utility costs. That makes it increasingly difficult for these farms because the margins in farming aren't that great. I work for a vertical farming company (Verticulture Farms) and we've been struggling to find a place where we can expandthat makes financial sense.
There was a lot of discussions about the benefits, and some discussion that was missed. However, vertical farming is still not cost effective compared to more traditional greenhouses. And that's for the highest value crops like lettuce and tomatoes. Commodity crops and animal agriculture are the biggest resource users in this system and vertical farming is no where close to finding a substitute for those. The cost of production will need to come down below the alternatives and that will be challenging, although not impossible in principle.
The problem here is that in many cases, you're replacing things that have historically been free (light, water, air) with things that are not free (LED lights, irrigation systems, exhaust/air circulators). The increase in complexity also incurs a lot of additional overhead costs. Modern "horizontal" farming is already largely automated; so vertical farming doesn't deliver any savings on that front.<p>Don't get me wrong -- I am a fan of vertical farming and I think that it's an important technology for us to develop because we're going to eventually trash the planet and we need some way to grow food -- but there are way too many economic problems with it for it to be much more than a novelty right now. IMO the most promising near-term use case is marijuana - there are already regulatory reasons to incur most of the costs of vertical farming, so it's less of a disadvantage (not to mention that high-grade stuff has to be grown indoors to prevent cross-pollenation).
Many people are concerned about the economics of this, but in my mind, trying to scale food production is itself the problem. I know I sound over-idealistic, and usually am not well received when I ask this, but I'll ask anyway -- If every home had a room dedicated to vertical farming, instead a room for watching TV, what would that do for the problem?
I doubt we are going to see a revolution in farming. The reason traditional farming is most likely still much cheaper than vertical farming is because of all the government's implicit and explicit subsidies. For example: For most farmers water is free so the 99% reduction in water usage won't reduce the price for the consumer in the aisle. I think if we wan't a real shift in agriculture (a shift towards more ecological vertical farming), we would require an actual market price for water. And most people (farmers and non-farmers) hate that idea.
So instead of less expensive land outside cities, we should grow food on expensive land inside them. Ok.<p>And instead of less expensive nonpotable water supplies, we should use expensive potable urban water supplies to irrigate it. Ok.<p>And instead of 100% efficient sunlight to drive photosynthesis, we should use either 40% efficient fossil fuel derived electricity or 16% efficient PV derived electricity to do it. Ok.<p>Also, instead of polluting creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff from farms, we should pollute creeks and rivers with agricultural runoff mixed in with urban sewage (sorry, there's no such thing as a "closed system"). Ok.<p>And finally, instead of paying $2 for an organically-grown, sustainably-farmed head of lettuce at the farmers' market, we should pay $12 for a hydroponically-grown head of lettuce.<p>This article contained zero analysis of economics. Comparisons made were with "other indoor growing methods", not with outdoor sunlight-powered methods. No analysis was undertaken to show that transportation costs make up the difference. No explanation was provided for the added burden on urban (potable!) water supplies. The electricity demands made by this method are obviously unmanageable, yet no solution to this problem was offered (I guess instead of polluting the planet with industrial ag, we pollute it by burning 10x as much coal?). The problem of waste is hand-waved away by calling the operation a "closed system"; nothing lasts forever, and eventually the materials used will have to be discarded, along with residues from the inorganic inputs. "Weather-related crop failures" are dismissed; one wonders where the author thinks urban water supplies and electricity for climate control come from (hint: outdoors!).<p>If you want to improve the efficiency of farming, I'm all for it. You've got a scalable, sustainable way to use less water? Great, go implement it on an existing farm and put your competition out of business. But this is not that. It's a gimmick that is at best marginally economical in places with the world's highest real estate costs and customers willing to pay far above the market rate for gimmicky products. That is not a situation that describes most people on this planet. It's one thing to sell a few thousand heads of lettuce to stockbrokers in Singapore; it's another thing entirely to convince a billion Chinese people to leave their entire country fallow so that they can pay a month's income for one of those heads of lettuce while breathing air so heavily polluted by coal smoke that they drop dead at 25. Good luck with that.
Let's not forget algae. Solazyme is already producing various food components for food companies, from algae, in highly efficient and dense factories, and at a competitive price.And i think with time it might be a cheap carbohydrates source.<p>And those food components are much better than natural components - because you can tailor the exact chemical composition of them.<p>And with technologies like molecular gastronomy, or making great meat substitutes out of protein(like beyond meat), food components could become the basis for a lot of food variety.
Worth checking out - I'm an early adopter for the Grove aquaponics system which is similar in idea but meant for individual homes (<a href="http://grovelabs.io" rel="nofollow">http://grovelabs.io</a>). Not cost effective yet, but hoping they continue to grow and refine their research and process to a point that it will be in the near future.
Vertical farming: Another 'solution' that won't work
<a href="http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/12/13/vertical-farming/" rel="nofollow">http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/12/13/vertical-farming/</a>
I'm convinced after reading that. I knew about NASA researchers trying to grow lettuce crops with LEDs to support long missions in space even in the 80s. LEDs have come a long ways since then. I'm glad to see it happening today commercially. Quick and low growing plants like lettuce and greens are well suited for vertical farming. I haven't read specifically about it but I'm not as convinced something with a long growing cycle and tall plant such as corn or sugarcane is as feasible, so it will continue to be a regional crop where it's naturally supported. I'm just happy to see the innovation and full scale use of LED indoor growing!
Page must be dying from Hacker News hits<p>ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED<p>For what it is worth I have been casually reading about vertical farming and think this may be a very valuable technique to feed more people with less resources.<p>I'm looking forward to reading this blog post when it is accessible.
A rational, fact-supported argument is not sufficient to convince some people of anything.<p>If I want to convince <i>all</i> of my friends, I will also need an emotionally-loaded propaganda documentary with more anecdotal, scripted illustrations of the human impact on a handful of stereotypical everyman characters.<p>I have been convinced for about 20 years that large-scale indoor farming will become cost-competitive with standard industrialized farming around 2040. The epic drought in California may have accelerated my estimate to 2035.<p>We won't be at the tipping point until a profitable cornfield is replaced by a greenhouse-like structure with a roof 30m above ground level.
Take a look at pictures of actual vertical farms vs. artist concepts and compare their use of natural light and then tell me if this is truly as "sustainable" as they say. Growing things is more than getting the soil right. It's (for most plants) the use of chlorophyll to make sugars which (again for most plants) is harnessing the equivalent of sunlight.<p>Aquaponics are definitely sustainable and just downright awesome and we should invest more in them, but without sunlight you're just running a power hungry "grow op".
_ ... there are no fertilizers needed. There are no pesticides needed. There is no chemical runoff. Even if you make a worst-case assumption that each farm will use synthetic nutrient solutions, these solutions are used in a closed, recirculating system with no chance for environmental contamination._<p>Can someone explain how this is so? What is the alternative to a "synthetic nutrient solution"?
It seems like making more land for horizontal farming (converting unusable land, reclaiming from the sea, etc.) should be way more cost-efficient. Heck, even growing stuff on boats would be more efficient than using skyscrapers, because of the free sunlight and water.
Just in case anyone, like me, read the headline and wanted to see the old 'Green Desk' feature on Brass Eye, I found it here:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/usTT3RuWu_g?t=4m44s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/usTT3RuWu_g?t=4m44s</a>