How to convince your friends vertical farming is the next big thing
urbanverticalproject.wordpress.com
urbanverticalproject.wordpress.com
Others have addressed this:
"... 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."
I would be fine with sitting at an office tower "window seat" that looked out through 5 feet of agricultural activity.
I'm not sure if all the car gas might be a showstopper.
NB: I'm still skeptical about urban farming, and too much urban farming completely destroys the "open space" aspect.
Eg, if you're growing a mild-sunlight plant in high-sunlight climes like arizona, you could have a collection grid half the size of the delivery grid.
I wonder if it would be any easier to recycle water in a city/building than if used for "normal" farming?
Maybe this is an old installation and the technology has since improved, but my instinct is that solar panels powering batteries to light LEDs would be much more efficient.
Citation needed on the "more efficient" part. Sure, if you assume that the photovoltaics, transmission systems, and LED lights themselves are all 100% efficient (and that there is no energy cost to maintain any of those systems) so that you are transforming the spectrum for free, it would be more efficient, but none of those things are true, and some of them are very far from true.
Regardless, most plants utilize only a small part of the light spectrum. Photovoltaics can capture a much, much larger spectrum and convert it to electricity. They don't need to be 100% efficient; just efficient enough that they can deliver all the parts of the spectrum that plants use without any of the parts they don't.
And this is before any serious attempts to reduce carbon emissions, which is expensive.
Source: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=20372
For vertical farms that only use natural light, they only collect light equal to the building surface area (actually it's a bit worse on the sides). So, it would work fine for just the top story of the building plus a few crops on the sides.
Source: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15471
It's not possible today; but by converting green light to red through solar cells and LEDs, it will eventually be possible to deliver more light to the plants than they would have received from the sun.
Also, vertical farming allows you to build a solar array somewhere sunny and transmit the electricity to an urban area. So rather than having a farm there, you would have a solar farm that transmits energy to a vertical farm in the city. Again; this is many years off, but vertical farming and solar power go hand-in-hand. What we build today doesn't make a lot of sense commercially, but as a species we absolutely need to invest in unprofitable vertical farming projects because in 100 years, they may be our only reliable way to farm food.
Solar PV is 16% efficient now. So the LEDs would have to put out light at least 6 times better than sunlight to break even.
Not to mention the LEDs+PV cost money, whereas the sunlight is free.
You need higher efficiency solar, which is feasible with non PV techniques.
How much better is the light from LEDs than sunlight?
[1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/372352/22413458/136558...
Vertical farming is currently a very niche industry, and will remain that way for some time. But eventually, the technology will catch up, and vertical farming solves a lot of problems we're very likely to have given our current trajectory (loss of farmland due to climate change, water shortages, soil contamination, etc).
Water conservation could be a benefit. But why not use the same techniques on flat ground instead of in a building?
[1] (couldn't get the original source but it's referenced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles#Energy_used_in_prod...)
For an alternative framework (rather than an alternative technique) take a look at Agroecology http://www.srfood.org/en/report-agroecology-and-the-right-to...
Indoor farming is really farming in a greenhouse with multiple levels of plants inside for most plants, only a few are actually grown with artificial lights.
Lets say you have 3 stories, of which the "center" of the bottom 2 is used for workers. You still get additional space compared to a single story for the same land cost. If the cost of construction is less than the cost of land, it works perfectly [as is the case in singapore].
About a third of a farm is just space for the workers to move around and harvest things We are talking literally single light bulb is all the supplemental light you need which isn't what your blog post you linked to is willing to admit.
You can see how they layer things in the image, the limits really aren't there in the way you imply in high-land-cost areas.
The dramatic improvements in output, quality, and water use will make vertical farming superior in nearly all cases within a few decades. It'll make sense everywhere traditional farming occurs, not just in densely populated areas. That's not the case today, but it will be the case tomorrow, given this is the first inning of a multi-trillion dollar global revolution in food production. People in the future will think it's crazy that we used to grow so much of our food outside.
Anecdote: I heard that peaches were grown in Greenhouses to avoid rot & bugs and it's been very helpful.
But there's also the required energy:
"just to meet a year's U.S. wheat production with vertical farming would, for lighting alone, require EIGHT TIMES as much electricity as all U.S. utilities generate in an entire year"
Additionally, not all vertical farming relies on artificial lighting.
But without cheap, abundant, clean power to replace the way traditional farming uses the sun, vertical farming is either not going to be economically viable on a large scale, or is going to be trading one set of negative externalities for another (traditional farming's externalities from runoff, etc., for the externalities from the power production for vertical farming), or both.
I don't think people realise how low farm-gate prices for commodity foods are.
Conversely, I wonder if the viability changes if urban areas would subsidize the underlying (most likely expensive) land costs for vertical farming, due to food being required to survive.
Well, the viability of living in urban areas would certainly change if another land use competing with housing and existing commercial uses was subsidized by taxing existing residents.
i.e., it would drive already high urban real estate prices higher, by competing with existing urban real estate uses, while not being cost effective, because increased output per square foot of land footprint would be offset by the higher cost per square foot of land footprint of urban land.
It seems like the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense in places that have very limited access to land with inexpensive shipping costs to populated areas like densely populated islands, but a lot less economic sense in most of the rest of the world.
Could bury these things under drive ways, under lawns, garages, decks, pools, etc.
Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. -- Capt. Montgomery "Scotty" Scott
Not to say that vertical farming is cost-free; it's most definitely not. It does avoid (edit: or at least reduce) that major (hidden) cost, though.
Urban areas are valuable. People in cities have less environmental impact than people spread out. The people displaced by an urban farm don't disappear -- they either stay out of the city or go to another city.
Does it? By competing with existing urban land uses, if adopted any substantial scale it forces the existing uses to spread out over larger areas, increasing the energy costs of transportation associated with those uses, while also creating a major new demand for energy in food production which replaces some of the use of energy in food transportation.
Seems to me your are shifting around the fossil-fuel related energy use externalities, but I haven't seen any analysis showing it to be a net win even in that narrow regard.
Growing hydroponically also reduces crop loss from about 50% down to about 10-15%.
Additionally, it seems like you are writing off the idea because "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"
Vertical farming isn't going to just poof magically fix everything. It's meant as a supplement to an unhealthy food system.
And I think the cost of production will come down.
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).
If you can optimize the water usage, and provide the nutrients, the rest of the inputs into plant growth are quite minimal.
Why bring it inside? Gardening is a thing and has been for a long time. It can be really cheap too.
I'm not sure we actually gain anything by this.
Maybe if food prices are 50x what they are today this starts to seem interesting. Like Victory Gardens. Of course, if that happened, then electricity and urban (potable!) water prices would immediately become unaffordable as well and we would simply end up at a new equilibrium with higher urban water and electricity prices, slightly lower food prices, and a few extra indoor gardeners making up those margins.
And don't tell me that solar-generated electricity is the answer here. A PV module is about 16% efficient; absorbing sunlight directly is 100% efficient (in both cases, photosynthesis itself is then about 45% efficient). So you would need 6x as much land dedicated to PV modules as you would need to dedicate to outdoor, rooftop, or windowbox gardens to get the same output. This is a problem of physics; even a 100% efficient PV module would be only marginally useful, in that it would allow capturing energy on land that is not itself suited for agriculture.
No free lunches, and that's before we're talking about wholesale changes in human behavior.
So I ask the question. Thinking about making large societal changes is a first step towards actually making a change.
For sure. The market is not a social construct at all; beings that want to reproduce (i.e., everyone) are going to adopt the lowest-cost means of doing so. Growing plants indoors will always be a higher-cost solution. "Money" has nothing to do with it. What you're really saying is that you want huge numbers of less-fit humans to survive and reproduce. That's a profound statement that deserves its own article and a tremendous depth of thought to evaluate. As you probably imagine, I don't share your goal.
Yes, I really do. I believe wars have been fought over people putting fitness requirements on survival and reproduction.
The math has to be done on a case by case basis. Why are all potatoes grown in Idaho? Because soil and climate conditions there are really good for potatoes. You can grow potatoes in Idaho and ship them to Kansas for less -- less land use, less effort, less energy-cost, less environmental impact -- than you can grow them locally.
There are going to be some crops and some urban environments where vertical farming is the best option. There are going to be some where it is not.
And instead of less expensive nonpotable water supplies, we should use expensive potable urban water supplies to irrigate it. Ok.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
Growing indoors also allows for a greater control over the growing environment. You can grow any particular grow all year round with much less crop loss. This also eliminates the need for pesticides since you're closing off the plants from insects. Therfore, the "agricultural runoff"is definitely not the same as from an open farm. The only "runoff" is a handful of times a year (maybe 4ish) where the reservoirs are emptied and cleaned.
Organically grown plants are GMO free and therefore need a lot more pesticides to keep it looking good. So if you want to pay the cheaper price for a mouth of chemical then that's on you. A lot of people aren't.
I agree that the electricity usage is an issue but this is something that is being solved. Year by year we see lights getting more efficient and solar panels getting more efficient as well.
When it comes to running out of farmable land and fresh water becoming more scarce and a growing population though, the cost of electricity is a worthwhile trade off in my opinion. You can't wait until the last minute to make the transition away away from traditional agriculture and into more future proof methodologies.
So let's see some analysis on the cost of growing in the city vs. cost of transportation plus spoilage. Data, numbers, the good stuff!
> This also eliminates the need for pesticides since you're closing off the plants from insects.
You don't need to grow indoors to grow pesticide-free. Nor do you need to grow indoors to protect plants from pests.
> Organically grown plants are GMO free and therefore need a lot more pesticides to keep it looking good. So if you want to pay the cheaper price for a mouth of chemical then that's on you.
Holy conflation, Batman! First of all, "organic" is a family of growing methods; one could grow GM stock using organic methods if one wished, though in most places it will be difficult to get certification. Second, by definition "organic" methods prohibit or greatly restrict the use of pesticides. So you're contradicting yourself here; someone growing non-GM food organically is by definition not using them.
> I agree that the electricity usage is an issue but this is something that is being solved. Year by year we see lights getting more efficient and solar panels getting more efficient as well.
As I explained, this doesn't matter. A 100%-efficient PV module connected to a 100%-efficient LED bulb with a 100%-efficient transmission and distribution system is at best going to provide the same growing area as the area of those PV modules. The physics of the situation simply do not allow anything more than that, and in this universe, where we obey the laws of thermodynamics, they don't even allow that. Surface farming will always be more efficient than covering the surface with PV modules and farming somewhere else. If you cannot accept this, then your entire argument reduces to "indoor farming is a perpetual motion machine" and you should expect it to be taken as such.
> When it comes to running out of farmable land and fresh water becoming more scarce and a growing population though,
If you don't have fresh water, you cannot farm anywhere, period. A tap in an urban building is not inhabited by magical water fairies; that water comes from the same places that traditional farms get theirs. If you believe you have a more water-efficient way to farm, why not combine that with the most energy-efficient farming method as well and employ it on the surface? Don't waste such an important advance by trying to sell it in a bundle with magic and perpetual motion.
Well, the same general class of places, maybe not the same place. Which may make the issue worse -- moving farming from existing locations to cities may further concentrate water use in urban areas, leaving them needing to meet the existing urban needs plus food production needs -- which may have a very high cost in terms of new water delivery infrastructure.
And those food components are much better than natural components - because you can tailor the exact chemical composition of them.
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.
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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.
I'm looking forward to reading this blog post when it is accessible.
As someone else who has been casually interested in vertical farming, I was pretty disappointed with this piece. It didn't give me any new information, and it didn't give any sense of progress that has been made or challenges to be overcome. It's really an introductory fluff piece for people unfamiliar with the concept.
[0]: http://www.fdnearth.org/files/2012/09/Why-vertical-farms_Fin...
If I want to convince all 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.
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.
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.
I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine about vertical farming. He's big into his food, cares about food quality.
Anyway, I bring it up, he's not impressed, in fact far from it. The impression I got was that it ruined the emotional impact behind the origin of food. Instead of growing in fields, in natural time-honoured traditional way (I should mention at this point that my friend believed in buying organic, just to nip the pesticides/herbicides argument in the bud), we'd be replacing that with what amounted to growing in a lab.
If you're going to convince anyone, beyond tech heads and those that only care about cost, you're going to need to address the story of food, its role in our culture. I strongly doubt it would get anywhere close to the mainstream without the type of emotionally-led marketing that logfromblammo suggests.
My money says that if you are really hung up about the energy transport costs of food, you should just build an electric transport system into the city, from the farm outside the city.
A lot of this research is very interesting for things like space colonies, so I pay attention, but on earth it's a solution in search of a problem.
I don't. However, I was pointing out for those that want to try, there's more to it than listing the technical benefits.
To use another example, most people accept that investment in public transportation is a very good thing (both for the environment and the vitality of a city), yet people still plow huge sums of money into their cars, because cars = freedom. In cities like New York where many people don't seem to own cars, is their freedom restricted? Doesn't seem that way. Cars only = freedom if your other options are subpar.
Why bring this up? Reliance on cars is an example of what results when people think individualistically, whereas investment in public transport (and investment includes use) is an example of when people think collectively. Some changes require an amount of consensus. Whilst I agree you could let companies try it and let the market decide, I expect you'll encounter NIMBYism before too long. It's no problem to me though, I've got no horse in this race, will wait to see how it plays out.
[1] Lower oxygen may lead to root stress. Flooding-adapted species, like rice, could make do with less during sunlit hours. Higher CO2 can damage some plants. The 90:10:0.15 mix of N2:O2:CO2 is probably as hostile as you can make it to animals without damaging the plants in some way.
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".
Can someone explain how this is so? What is the alternative to a "synthetic nutrient solution"?
And yet, the article does make some pretty compelling points, especially about year-round yield, continuous yield, and isolation from environmental factors like drought, pests, etc.
What's actually most exciting to me is greater integration of food production directly into the places where people live and work. Why have a separate vertical farm when it could be the two floors above your company cafeteria, and the lettuce in your lunch literally never left the premises? _That_ is really exciting to me.