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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> The robots will do everything from re-planting young seedlings to watering, trimming and harvesting crops.

Has the author been to a farm in the past 20 years? Most crops today are not planted by hand, or watered by hand, or harvested by hand. (Harvesting is still the most labor intensive part of farming for a few fruits, but automation isn't far off.)

I think the most interesting part of this farm is not the automation, but the water saving, the reduction in pesticides, and the decision to use grow lights indoors instead of sunlight.

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>and the decision to use grow lights indoors instead of sunlight

This is the part of indoor automated farming I don't get. You have this free, abundant source of energy needed to grow plants, and you don't use it... why? Seems like a massive inefficiency. Indoors is fine to protect the crops and control the environment, but why not above ground with a clear roof to let sunlight in?

Oddly enough, and this is completely anecdotal, I've had much better luck growing outdoor plants than indoor plants. If an indoor plant gets some kind of pest (spider mites, aphids, etc) then you pretty much have to sit around spraying it and its peers with oils or alcohol day after day until you're confident the infestation is gone.

With outdoor plants, there are so many natural predators to pests that things tend to form a balance. In addition to that, yes, there is the world's most abundant (and inexhaustible) energy source just sitting there waiting to be used.

So I'd be really interested to know the benefits of indoor growing as well (besides the obvious reasons with regards to not wanting DEA aircraft spotting your crops).

Predators are used in large greenhouses: http://www.thanetearth.com/faqs-pesticides.html

> With outdoor plants, there are so many natural predators to pests that things tend to form a balance.

Although you're not looking for balance, you're looking for a huge abundance of a single crop.

> In addition to that, yes, there is the world's most abundant (and inexhaustible) energy source just sitting there waiting to be used.

That energy source doesn't work quite so well if you start stacking things vertically and isn't necessarily reliable. Reducing inefficiencies in growth may be more beneficial than saving some power.

Fujitsu runs a similar farm. For them, one of the advantages was that because they were growing in a disused clean room, formerly a fab, they could control air quality such that bacteria were negligible. This led to produce which could sit on shelves much longer without spoiling. Fujitsu charged a premium since retailers typically lose a portion of their lettuce value to spoilage or discounting.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/fujitsu_grows_lettuc...

Pro tip: forget the sprays to deal with pests. Buy ladybugs and let them loose. They will do a far more effective job in a much more efficient manner.

Physical space is often a constraint. Green houses which cover large areas which are needed in areas where it gets cold in winter and you want certain types of food. The other is that the quantity of sunlight varies throughout the year in everywhere that isn't on the equator. Grow lights allow you to go from seed to harvest faster. Consider that the earth is not infinitely large and there is already a substantial portion of arable land covered in crops and there are few ways to increase productivity while still planting in the ground. Also consider costs of managing land with a limited staff and transportation.

>The other is that the quantity of sunlight varies throughout the year in everywhere that isn't on the equator. Grow lights allow you to go from seed to harvest faster

Why not have both? Grow lights when the sun isn't optimal, and the sun when it is. Wouldn't it be a huge cost saving measure to use free light instead of burning energy on grow lights when you don't need it?

If you want to grow vertically, you need to be able to control light as your own farm will be blocking the sun from half or more of the crops

I'm sure they ran the calculations and decided that electricity is cheaper than sunlight.

An immediate guess would be that with artificial lighting you can stack fields one on top of another. Something you cannot do with sunlight.

If you want to use the sun, you'd farm outdoors traditionally. You're right at the core of it, that's why most farming still happens outside.

Building a specialized building is a compromise putting you into an uneconomical position, you'd only provide additional light to the top-most layer of plants (small operating savings) at the cost of building specialized architecture (large capital expense).

From what I understand, the vertical indoor farms are mostly low-calorie high-moisture crops so far like lettuces. Compared to many crops, energy is not the primary input, it's water, space and time. These vertical indoor farms economize by controlling the environment they grow in to avoid wasting water, accelerating growth cycle with grow lighting to avoid wasting time, and stack plants vertically to avoid wasting space. Supposedly it makes sense to pay the premium for electrical energy to be able to save on the other inputs. For higher-calorie crops I imagine the math works out to be quite far from break-even.

This is also why these vertical farms aren't about to solve social issues that people attach hope to them for, low calorie vertical farm produce isn't going to provide for the dietary needs of enough people to impact the the problem of transporting foods from agricultural areas to metropolitan areas basically at all.

> Building a specialized building is a compromise putting you into an uneconomical position, you'd only provide additional light to the top-most layer of plants (small operating savings) at the cost of building specialized architecture (large capital expense).

Couldn't you improve upon things by redirecting the light with fiber optics? Of course, I suspect there's a surface area problem with scaling something like that, so perhaps not.

Not a farmer, but the risk of natural disasters or a crazy early freeze would make sense to completely control it in the long run.

See this article... the artificial light helps them grow the food faster and the lights are very efficient.

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/former-semiconduc...

Indoor offices also use artificial lights despite the workers usually only being there during the day. It's probably because the sun is unreliable and expensive to direct into all the spaces that aren't on the roof directly exposed to the sky.

Thinking of vertical farms as offices for plants makes a lot of sense.

At least partially because you don't have to reproduce the whole spectrum of sunlight, but just those portions that are used by the plants for photosynthesis. Even after solar cell efficiency and other losses, you might still be able to deliver more of the light you want to the plants, in addition to being able to control the day/night cycle.

Some vegetables can be overclocked, with a faster day/night cycle than 24 hours. Lettuce can be forced to grow about twice normal speed.

You don't need the night cycle at all for the vegetation stage, just flowering, so run these suckers 24/7 and you get more crops, more often.

Do you really think they would invest this much R&D, yet somehow never thought to consider the cost or efficiency advantages of piping natural light?

I'm no expert but lighting has gotten a lot more efficient recently:

http://www.designrecycleinc.com/led%20comp%20chart.html

LEDs are also well suited to farming because you can tune their output spectrum:

http://www.lighting.philips.com/main/products/horticulture/c...

Light-emitting plasma (LEP) and white lasers are also making waves. LEDs suffer from narrow beam and canopy penetration, which can be compensated using a rail system.

See: http://plantozoid.com/plasma-grow-light-revolution/

You can stack fields so you grow 20X the amount per square meter/foot/whatever than you would with sunlight. True there are vertical solutions that use mirrors but these become unwieldy to design and maintain (cleaning the dust off the mirrors etc) so it's simpler to just go with the led shelf solution.

Adding to that, this allows you to grow vast amounts of food in urban environments meaning that it is a cheaper/shorter journey from field to table. Logistics is a major expense in farming and a huge harm factor in relation to our environment.

I could see a more distributed food production, avoiding the production madness on natural soil. So country side could be countryside again, farmers could get a healthier life style while cities get cost less food with less pesticides too. I also wonder if this would be interesting on a per-house basis.

Most plants photosynthesise on a very narrow band of light. It's actually more efficient to generate electricity using solar panels and reemit using specific wavelength leds. Plants are around 2% efficient while solar panels are around 20%.

Also as has been said below it allows you to stack plants in a way that would be impossible if you were using sunlight.

Additional thoughts are that greenhouses are terrible at retaining heat (interestingly the origin of greenhouses used to have a thick southern facing brick wall to act as a heat soak to maintain an even heat throughout the night) and so if you're trying to keep a certain heat level having glass might end up costing you way more in energy because of the need to heat than you gain from the sun.

People still do good things with greenhouses. I recently watched a video from a guy growing veggies through the winter in his greenhouse. He did have a non-glass southern wall but it wasn't the type for storing heat. Instead, he was using drums of water inside the greenhouse as thermal mass, which kept the temperature up during the night.

And people still grow plants by hand. The future is still going to be automated farms just as the present day is mechanised farms.

The advantages that automated warehouse farms give will be too great to not do. Faster grow cycles, no need for fertiliser, pesticides, or herbicides, closer to consumers, space efficiencies and so on.

First, sugar cane converts 8% of the light absorbed by the plant is preserved as chemical energy.

Second, photosynthesis is actually fairly efficient, the issue is plants are living organisms and we only care about energy stored not energy used. Net result, plants still need about 45% of sunlight even if you stick with the 'perfect' bands.

Sugar cane is very much the exception. Most crop plants (which have over the years been selected for efficiency indirectly) manage 1-2%. No one is suggesting growing sugar cane indoors yet, just purely on the basis of it's height you won't gain much by stacking it.

Also you haven't addressed stacking, heat retention or for that matter nighttime light.

The important point was Sugar cane is not better at photosynthesis than other plants. It simply 'wastes' less energy on growth and 'life'.

Break even would take 50% efficient solar collectors and 90% efficient lights including transmission and conversion losses. Clearly, we are nowhere near that point.

PS: The only reasonable option would be solar collectors that focus on different parts of the spectrum and let light through to the plants under them.

You don't need 50% efficient solar collectors. That'd be the case if 1 meter squared of plants had 1 meter squared of leaves. Even at full growth there are large gaps and for most of the growing time there are even larger gaps. 1 meter squared of solar panels is always going to be 1 meter squared. Also plants can't use light above 10,000 lux while solar panels will just generate more power.

And again how do you stack plants? How do you keep them warm enough? How do you grow them during the night?

Your solar collectors are not operating at night either. Break even means having 10 square miles of solar farm and 1 square mile of dense indoor farming needs to be more efficient than 11 square miles of farming and that extra needs to cover infrastructure costs.

You can play with the arrangements of plants in a greenhouse just as easily as a factory. EX: Stacking plants using clear trays and nutrient bath allows for using more light in the same space.

Anyway, the reason why this 'works' is crazy subsidies in Japan which actually has quite a bit of farm land, plus a market for ultra premium lettuce for decorative reasons.

Where are you getting 10 square miles of solar farm to support 1 square mile of dense indoor farming? Energy can be stored or brought in from other areas during the night.

And no you can't stack in a greenhouse for the same reason that there are hardly any plants growing on the jungle floor.

This sort of thing is already being done in London and Sweden. It's the level of automation that is making this news. Of course it starts at the high end but eventually all food will be grown like this just because it'll be the most efficient overall.

You focus entirely on the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants when there are so many other variables as for why this is a good idea.

Running these for decorative lettuce in a big city is one thing, when farmers use this for corn in Iowa you might have a point.

Shipping bulk rice from US to China is cheaper in terms of energy than shipping electricity required to grow that same Rice.

PS: Another sanity check. The US has 922 Million Acres of farmland. At 1kw/m * 8h / day that's vastly more than the world total energy usage. You can't even replace that with fusion power as the waste energy would directly produce significant global worming. (4046 sq M / Acre * 8kwh/day = 32 Megawatt hours per Acre * .92 billion = 30,000 Twh per day, world electricity is under 30,000Twh per year. ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi...

Grains will be the last thing to change and that won't be for a very long time.

Also you have to take into account increased yields, faster grow times, lower fertiliser, pesticide, herbicide and tractor fuel costs.

Your sanity check is way off. Solar panels only get about 22W/m^2 though out the year on average and they're more efficient than plants. Second the maximum plants can use is about 100W/m^2 and that is at maximum midday strength. Now lets take into account varying intensity of sunlight, growing seasons, leaf orientation, gaps between plants and other factors and your energy requirements are much lower.

Research is still being done but most plants grow very well with the full red spectrum and 10-20% of the blue spectrum. This vastly reduces the energy required.

22W/m^2 is either really out of date or your thinking far north.

If you really want more farmland and have a lot of energy there are simply much better options, desalination and irrigation of west Texas for example.

PS: You can bump plant efficiency from 10 to 20% from using a narrow frequency of light, but that's a fairly low cap. And 10%(plant) > {20%(panel) * 20%(plant) =} 4%, which is why I said you need to have 50% panels to 'break even'.

Japanese farming is notoriously manual, inefficient, and protected by heavy tariffs.

It shows - in a good way - in the quality of the produce, though.

Pretty skeptical about that. Rice is rice.

>Rice is rice.

Coming from a long line of rice farmers...I can assure you that this is really not the case. Rice has HUGE variations between various rice cultivars, and HUGE variations in the end result depending on how the grains are polished. Environmental factors and cultivation/growing methods also influence the taste and nutritional profile of the grain.

A lot of people, particularly in the West, just simply aren't aware of these differences because they've historically never had access to much other than regular milled white rice.

You're also overlooking the fact that Japan's farmers grow nearly every sort of vegetable and fruit produce imaginable.

Ha ha ha! As an American living in Japan, who doesn't even particularly like rice, I would have once thought so too, but have learned that's not true in the slightest. That would probably be like saying to somebody in my native Northern California, "Hey, grapes are grapes."

I have also learned rice is not the only foodstuff Japan makes that kicks ass. Peaches, garlic, strawberries, and melons are among several plant-based foods I have had here, with a quality that I never experienced back home in US and A (or anywhere else). (Of course, one perfect, individually-wrapped peach night cost $8, but that's another story.)

Then of course there's the beef...

NorCal is also a major producer of rice...just not in the hill country but in and about Sacramento all along the river.

Agreed. The price is high but the quality is unparalleled in terms of taste, texture and appearance.

Humans can be excellent quality assurance machines, they're just very high maintenance.

You must be kidding me. Fruits for example may look perfect in Japan but I will take any ugly looking fruit from France over them anytime. Most of the time they cant compete thats why they have heavy tariffs on imports.

I can only go by what you can buy in Paris vs Tokyo and Osaka, but I disagree. Perhaps you frequent more regional areas with a better selection of produce.

Anyone who visits Japan in late summer should try Okayama white peaches. Warning: may ruin you for all other fruit.

There is a surprising phenomenon in microeconomics called the Alchian–Allen effect[1]. Quoting from Wikipedia, "[W]hen the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is true because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product." The quality of Japanese produce could be due to the effect of the higher prices on consumer decision-making rather than any advantages of small-scale farming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchian%E2%80%93Allen_effect

>There is a surprising phenomenon in microeconomics

I was waiting for some counter-intuitive twist, but that seems like common sense and basic math.

Not really sure how the concept earned a name.

Paying $1 extra for a better apple is worth it if you value the better flavor by at least that much. It shouldn't matter whether the choice is between $4 and $5 or between $10 and $11 - how did that dollar become less valuable, or the apple tastier?

"Humans act like money is proportionate when it's actually linear," is the crux of a wide variety of "surprising" microeconomic facts. People are more likely to drive across town to save money on a fancy pen that could cost $4 or $8 than they are to drive across town to save money on a suit that could cost $320 or $324.

(Yes, there are cases where there are good arguments that the utility of money isn't linear, but these are not those cases.)

Seems this would be counter-intuitive only in a vacuum; that is to say, were there no such thing as opportunity cost. Perhaps that's what you meant by "utility of money" not being linear. And, I agree with that point.

Where we differ is that I don't see how you are acknowledging that in only some cases. The degree may change, but not the underlying concept.

It is not like that. Because there is also quantity. Lets assume that good apples are $5, great $10 - for $10 I get one kg of great and 2 of $5. The great apple have to provide twice bang for the buck to be competitive.

If we slap 20$ tariff - for $30 bucks i get 1kg of great apples or 1.2 kg of good apples.

(That is assuming I want to eat roughly a kg of apples)

I think the whole progression of economics has been to start out by building models on wrong assumptions about how humans make decisions, and how the world should work, then refining them as actual data is gathered and science is done.

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