The key to successful hydrophonic farming is, surprisingly, marketing.<p>I've visited a couple of these in Europe. There's a lot of manual labor and electricity involved and it's very expensive. The only way to make it work is to sell your lettuce as '100% environmentally friendly, zero pesticides' and ask 10x the price of 'regular' lettuce.<p>But honestly, I've never really tased the difference and I wonder if the environmentally-friendly stuff holds true if you really look into it.
Emirates is also building one in Dubai with the company Crop One Holdings <a href="http://croponeholdings.com/" rel="nofollow">http://croponeholdings.com/</a>
Given that droughts are becoming more common I see these initiatives as quite interesting.
<a href="https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/emirates-is-building-a-massive-vertical-farm.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/emirates-is-building-a-ma...</a>
Seems environmentally unfriendly to rely 100% on electricity in one of the sunnier places in the country — you'd think there'd be a way to pipe in daylight via fiber optic cords during the day, and transition to LEDs as the sun begins to set and during the night.<p>That said I'm really excited to see vertical farming grow as a market, ideally in denser cities like SF or NYC where proximity to the nearest farms can be a few hours away depending on what you want to buy.
Read between the lines. This isn't about growing free range soy and cruelty free tomatoes. The goal here is to have a proven method for growing stuff indoors so that by the time they can use it for pot the kinks have already been worked out and they can just scale right away and dominate a regional market before the competition gets off the ground.<p>If they can sell to grocers in order to make the business equivalent of sleep(untilpotbecomeslecal()) sustainable then good for them but that's not really the primary goal here. Indoor vertical farming just doesn't work out except in niche cases of very high margins or legal requirements that require things be farmed indoors. City land is just too expensive to grow stuff on unless you're growing a really lucrative crop. Other than pot that's not much that meets one/both of those requirements.<p>edit: This isn't a condemnation, I'm just calling it like I see it.
Is this sustainable at all? Good solar panels have 20% efficiency so this will result in at least 5x more land use. Heck this doesn't work out even with 100% efficiency. The same amount of farmland would still have to be covered in solar panels. This may make sense on mars or on the moon but definitively not on earth.
Hydroponic technique by any other name still smells as a liquified nutrient extract solution...
the method is millenia old, as in ancient greek and babylonian...
most people practice a form of modified slop culture on thier windowsill...
those who understand how far they can push a plant to yield more , make out like gangbusters...
nothing new in las vegas to see here citizen, now move along...
"Oasis Biotech" ...
if we find the c.v. for thier technicians we may see something interesting[speculation]
a biotech facility may use plants as the carrier for novel genes in order to produce biochemical or pharmaceutical products, even an oral vaccine bearing plant product...a classical "plantized" operation in a lab and industrial compound is expensive to design construct and operate...
genetic engineering of plants can be cheap and forgiving in the event of failures, thus not financially catastrophic...
these sorts of startups may be a good stock pick