World’s Biggest Indoor Vertical Farm Near NYC to Use 95% Less Water | Hacker News Reader

World’s Biggest Indoor Vertical Farm Near NYC to Use 95% Less Water

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156 pointsrottyguy112 comments

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I was reading this and trying to parse the economics. I mean 70k square feet is about two acres [@ 43560/acre] and at 75x efficiency per square foot it works out to about 150 acres of farmland. Lets call it a quarter section [160 acres]. Now a quarter section is the size farm my boy's Great Grandpa Fred farmed with his German speaking father and a mule in Kussuth County, Iowa the better part of 100 years ago. Enough land in a year with no major misfortune to support a family farm as a business but that today would perhaps need subscribed city folk and organic certification and a used tractor to be a gentleman's break even hobby.

At this point in the rant I was going to write, I was going to write about how little food two million pounds is and how it would never make a dent in the logistics of feeding people. And as I composed that part in my head, "two million pounds" seemed a queer [with no sexual connotation] way of marketing the output. And the whole thing made little sense economically...I mean even at Whole Foods, two million pounds of tomatoes might barely keep the lights on and the employee parking lot full.

I thought "What are they smoking?" And it looks to me like this is an effort to get out in front of marijuana legalization. Two million pounds at even a piddly $1000/per does make sense with the big bucks of the Big Apple's stoners spitting distance away. And since that is consistent with my heuristic that when someone looks like an idiot and they're not a teenager, then I'm probably the idiot if I assume that they are, so I figure that getting ready for growing weed is about the best sense of the venture I'm going to make.

Agreed. Right now the only thing that's economically viable to grow with these setups is cannabis. But it does lay a good foundation for innovation and research.

I wonder. If cannabis is legalized presumably the price will fall and take out of the realm of economic viability.

Good question. My estimates from ~6 months ago suggested I could sustain 90% drop in price and still be sustainable and profitable, albeit, less lucrative. ($2k/lb -> $200/lb)

All that matters is unit economics — if a single tomato takes significantly less money to grow in that farm than in an ordinary one, these "two million pounds" will turn into billions pretty soon.

My gut is that tomatoes will never offer an acceptable IRR for a real-estate investor. Compared to dirt, it's capital intensive.

The risk profile doesn't match that pool of capital either: real-estate investors tend to heavily weight track records and historical outcomes.

The best ROI for indoor farming, other than perhaps marijuana, is going to be almonds trees. That'll take some serious engineering effort, and it'll be worth billions of dollars to whomever figures it out.

So much of the water directed at almond trees today is entirely wasted. Just being able to strictly control how much water each almond tree gets, and therefore dramatically reducing water waste, will justify indoor almond farming all by itself.

We should be aggressively genetically altering almond trees to be smaller, while yielding near the same output, and requiring a lot less water.

I just want to point out that two million pounds of pot at $1000/per is already worth billions from a facility about the combined size of a CVS and Walgreens sharing a street corner.

At that point, the price will fall dramatically.

That price is highly dependent on the illegality and subsequent scarcity. If we have two million pound farms in the city, the price is going to drop by a LOT.

Direct watering methods are doable. I can't point to any research, but I seem to remember that the water/calorie ratio for almonds is pretty good.

Most tomatoes are actually grown in greenhouses (a quick Google tells me 89% for Canada, for example). So the step to vertical farms would be easier than for a crop that's grown outside.

In climates such as experienced in Canada, greenhouse tomatoes are a sensible approach. In places like Florida or California, outdoor growth is more typical.

For comparison, Florida ships [1] a similar but smaller number of tomatoes to that produced by all of Canada[2].

[1]: http://www.floridatomatoes.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/To...

[2]: There's a wikipedia page of countries ranked by tomato production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tomato_pr...

The volume weight ratio of leafy greens, is much higher compared to tomatoes. Second the shelf life of leafy greens is lower compared to fruit crops.

In respect to transportation costs, shelf life and transportation distance, it makes sense growing these crops near their distribution points.

Second not to forget the benefit of CO2 reduction in urban area's, as there is less and less space for nature in urban areas.

The only downside is the energy usage, this has been reduced using LED lighting, but is still compared to traditional greenhouse or open-field growing.

I don't disagree. Weed is the leafy green with the best potential returns.

Well, but you could use solar power to supply power to those LEDs… oh, wait…

This can theoretically be more efficient than growing plants under sunlight. Chlorophyll mostly absorbs light in the 400nm to 700nm band which is about half of all the photons that hit lights. Even in that band ~24%[1] of the energy in them in lost due to the higher energy photons (closer to the 400nm side) being converted to lower energy photons.

So right there plants are only 25% efficient at collecting energy from photons. This is why you see indoor plants grown under red LEDs. Modern commercially available solar panels are about 21% efficient so that is actually getting close to plant can do (I'm not going to include inefficiencies in power conversion right now). Solar panels in the high 40% efficiency range exist, but they are crazy expensive and only used on things like satellites.

So using current (very advanced) technology we could actually get about double the plant output per area land by using the most advanced solar panels we have to collect light energy to power LEDs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

You are ignoring conversion, storage, transport, LED, and LED -> plant losses.

You're ignoring land use. You can't build a huge conventional farm in the middle of the city. You can, however, cover all the buildings with solar panels. This gives you land that supports a high population and grows food in the same place. Heck, since you're using LEDs you could put the vertical farms underground, giving every resident access to fresh vegetables right in their own building.

I was responding to

>This can theoretically be more efficient than growing plants under sunlight

Which doesn't seem to be talking about all of the other externalities, just about sunlight vs man made light.

Transportation accounts for a minuscule amount of the total resources used to grow food on an industrial scale.

If it is an off season then transportation is from the other side of the globe.

Still a very small part of the total cost.

The farmer pulling a turnip trailer thirty miles to the local Friday Farmer's market with an F350 dually can easily consume more energy and produce more CO2 per turnip than one shipped at industrial scale half round the world. The "last mile" can often be the least efficient.

> Transportation accounts for a minuscule amount of the total resources used to grow food on an industrial scale

Interesting.

Is that still the case if the true costs of greenhouse gasses emitted by transportation and refrigeration are accounted for?

Does that mean the 'buy locally' idea has little climate impact?

Also, to save my lazy, busy fingers from doing it myself, do you happen to know a good link to research on this subject?

I have read some Dutch research which showed tha tomatoes grown in Spain had significantly lower CO2 emissions than the same tomatoe grown in the Netherlands, including the transport to the market, which I think was in the Netherlands. I have the paper (in Dutch) lying around somewhere.

The main reason was that the Dutch heat and light their horticultural crop and the Spanish did neither (or much less). The Durch have significantly higher yield per sqm, which is necessary, as their infrastructure (greenhouses, land) is much more expensive. It is slowly changing, as the Dutch are building low energy greenhouses now, but I am not certain if it is fast enough. The greenhouses in place are relatively expensive infrastructure to replace and the profit margins are negligible at the moment.

From an environmental point of view it is tricky, as the Dutch use a lot less pesticides on their horticultural crop than the Spanish do. So it us not all obvious what is better or worse. Although I read recently that in total the Dutch use more pesticides than any other European growers, but I think that is on outside crops, not those in the greenhouse.

Thanks, that's very informative.

> Does that mean the 'buy locally' idea has little climate impact?

No, buy locally has a large climate impact - only not in the direction you think. Local uses much more energy than non-local.

Local has no environmental benefits whatsoever - only negatives.

The only thing it has going for it is some nebulous social benefits of knowing your farmer.

I avoid local because it means the produce was grown not in the climate where it grows best, but rather forced (i.e. lots of extra resources) to grow near me.

But isn't part of the "buying local" movement also buying produce that's in season for your climate?

If you're buying local pineapples in Duluth, I can see it would defeat the purpose.

Even if it's in season doesn't mean your climate is the best place to grow it.

If it was the best place, then it would be competitive on the open market, and produce from your area would be the primary produce on the market - without any hokey social movements.

That's only true if you want to claim that the "best" place to grow $randomFruit cannot be more profitably used doing $randomThing. Downtown San Francisco could be the world best microclimate for tomatoes but it still probably wouldn't be worth using the land for that instead of an apartment.

CO2 reduction is great, but isn't profitable in itself.

Well, my buddy and I were considering using for our automated hydroponics system, a wood pellet stove. It would provide heating, as well as saturate the air inside with more CO2.

Higher CO2 would, we believe, increase photosynthesis, decrease growing season, and make better tasting plants. We would use a tiny bubbler and a feedline from outside for O2 rich air for the fishes.

> Higher CO2 would, we believe, increase photosynthesis

Have you guys done a small-scale test?

We were going to, but medical emergency hit. We delayed it, and am in somewhat a holding phase.

It might not just increase CO2 inside. It might also increase CO. Be careful with that...

According to some researches[1], city residents already generate less CO2 per capita, because they live in a densely packed area and can use resources efficiently (e.g., subways). It makes much more sense to keep people closer to each other and keep farms farther away. (After all, cabbages only have to be transported once in its lifetime. Human beings move in and out every single day.)

[1] http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-cancels-...

This is true, but it's offset by the suburban sprawl around them. Not everyone who works in the city, lives in the city, so there's longer commutes, etc.

http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-cancels-...

The much smaller one in London grows herbs for restaurants so weed isn't too far off.

I would be concerned about security though having it in a big city - why not in the middle of nowhere, like a data centre?

I would imagine that it's harder to pull of a bank-heist-equivalent in a city like Newark - with police, FBI, etc. nearby and usually on call - than out in the country where the nearest law enforcement might consist of a sleepy sheriff and a deputy.

The market will sort out if some configuration of this tech is profitable. For me, the real value in researching and developing systems like this is the non-terrestrial applications. Mars is the exact environment where maximising lbs of edible plant per cubic foot or gallon of water is most important.

There are a bunch of (sometimes hydroponic) indoor greenhouses popping up all around Florida since the near miss in decriminalizing medical marijuana on the last ballot. They mostly just grow crap loads of lettuce and tomatoes (tomatoes and marijuana have extremely similar growing requirements and cycles) which they sell to "organic" places and literally throw away (or in some cases give away) the rest because at this point they're just working out the kinks in their production systems until the real money maker becomes legal.

It really hit me when a friend of mine told me about a greenhouse that was experimenting with RFID to track its lettuce production and I thought that seemed like an awfully expensive way to track a product nobody cared about...

If anyone is curious the way FL has gone about awarding licenses for potential marijuana growers has been a pretty drama filled saga and is a great example of corruption in today's society

This.

I was going to sign the petition and was perfectly happy until I read the fine print for who was going to get a license.

The general public was not going to be able to commercially grow, only 22 (if I remember) growers were going to be able to sell it.

No.

But the missing point here is:

The land used is actually TINY and vertical. The complete climate control means we can grow any food in any weather. No more growing in south america and shipping to new york. All of a sudden massive farming is possible in a few acres of greenhouses to support a major city. No need for machinery to plow the land or anything. Just fresh food grown literally locally to a city. No pesticides because there's no bugs. Great harvests year-round.

So this has the potential to make completely sustainable farming anywhere in any climate with minimal need for water and soil.

I agree the footprint is tiny. But the amount of farmland is vast. At the equivalent of 150 acres it pencils out to about 5000 vertical farms to equal the farmland of New Jersey. 50,000 to equal the farmland of New York State and 850,000 to equal that of Texas. [1] For comparison, New York City has approximately 1,000,000 buildings and structures [2].

Just running back of envelope calculations using cropland instead of farmland:

   20 million people in NYC Metropolitan Statistical Area [wikipedia]
   324 million people in the US [wikipedia]
   406 million acres of crop land in US [3]
   ---------
   25 million acres of cropland for NYC MSA [per capita basis]

That's about 165,000 high tech farms at 1:150 acres. At 70,000 square feet per farm it's 11.5 billion square feet. For comparison, there are 2 billion combined total square feet of office space in the major US markets[4]. Converting all of it to vertical farming would be equivalent to the per capita cropland for the NYC MSA if my calculation is high by more than 500% and if pastureland (another 30 million acre equivalents [3]) aren't part of the picture.[5]

More locally converting all Manhattan's 500 million square feet of office space [4] to vertical farming could provide about 5% of the cropland equivalent for the New York City MSA. Or roughly half the 945,000,000 square feet of vertical farms to provide Manhattan's population of 1.6 million people with a per capita cropland equivalent.

[1]: http://www.stuffaboutstates.com/agriculture/farm_by_total_ac...

[2]: http://www.nyc.gov/html/sirr/downloads/pdf/final_report/Ch4_...

[3]: http://www.ers.usda.gov/about-ers/strengthening-statistics-t...

[4]: http://www.colliers.com/-/media/files/marketresearch/uniteds...

[5]: For equity, cropland does include a lot of cotton even if it's not that much relative to pastureland. On the other hand, major food crops like corn and soy and citrus don't provide the same vertical density as leafy greens.

While I agree that the world's appetite for leafy greens will not be sated by growing them in warehouses, the debate over whether worldwide food production can ever migrate to this type of system should probably be framed in terms of something like protein or calories produced per acre. What this movement is really about (it seems to me) is figuring out a way to feed the developing world in a way that does not involve converting tons of new rainforest to farmland or inundating additional watersheds.

> No more growing in south america and shipping to new york.

You have GOT to be kidding! Or you didn't do the math.

How is artificial light better than shipping? I guess maybe you don't realize how efficient shipping is these days - it accounts for only a small fraction of the energy used to provide food.

> completely sustainable farming

That's a very strange definition of sustainable.

This article was an oversimplification of the story in terms of why there is a vertical farm in Newark, at least.

If you google around a bit, the reason for building in Newark is simply that they needed a HQ with attached research facility within commutable proximity of the NYC talent market, and Newark made economic sense. The city of Newark is looking for green tech to move to the city, in the hopes of economic growth and luring other startups to Newark. So they were given a favorable deal to move onto a recently cleared brownfield site. It looks like their proximity to NYC consumers is just an added bonus.

However, the company initially was focused on the manufacture of patented technology and was originally focused on developing these urban farms in order to sell the equipment. The only veggies that the work in this setup so far are leafy greens. So you're likely very right about what this tech is intended to grow...

Some articles I found:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/realestate/commercial/in-n...

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/03/30m_vertical_farm_...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-30/aerofarms-...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/05/429345848/gre...

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/12/10/aerofarms-rai...

There's something neat going on here.

Projects like this take growing that happens in the rural areas to the city. We've always had a strife between country and city life, and country life is where food is grown. With this change, we're seeing food done in the city as well.

Of course this could be seen as potentially bad for farmers, as they lose a bit more control...

But there's some awesome upsides:

Potentially completely robotic. I was looking into with a friend about an automated greenhouse. It fell through due to medical disasters, but we had the nuts and bolts figured out. The gist is hydroponics with tilapia serving as protein and fertilizer for the plants. It would take around 10 mins/day for up to 100sq. ft. (it's considered that 25 sq ft is enough to feed a human indefinitely.)

Provides food for a city. Now, instead of having to rely on 'elsewhere', we can point to the building where our food comes from. The gist here is that there's now food security.

Lower transportation costs. Now, instead of food coming from 'elsewhere', it comes from the building over there. Distribution costs are cheaper, storage is onsite and local.

Is not subject to the growing season. With this system in place, the growing season is now 24/7/365.

Is also not subject to a host of pests or other environmental damaging effects. Everything is controlled: light, rain, drainage, nutrients. So yields will be much higher than on land.

Organic can be much easier. Since there's few/no pests, neonitonoids and similar aren't needed, nor are other nasty insecticides and herbicides.

Yes, it does cost more, due to using electricity. However solar is getting cheaper. These buildings could also be used in conjunction with spillover from power plants: There's no reason why the day/night cycle can't be switched, so that the grow building is using power at night, when power is usually not consumed (and is cheaper).

Edit: Seriously, modded down already? How about whoever did that also leave a comment why this is not good content?

This is not going replace farming anymore than me growing a spinach plant in a pot at home.

It's actually a little disappointing to see just how out of touch the people in this thread are with farming. Growing food outside, in the ground is always going to be cheaper than building a building.

Instead of being disappointed in us, can you educate us why you think that farming will never change?

I never said it won't change, just that growing food in a field will always be cheaper than in building. Many people in this thread are saying that advances in automation, GMOs, or energy generation will make growing in a building cheaper. It will, but all those advances will apply to field farming as well.

Well, that's not true. The two key advances of indoor farming are preventing water waste and being able exponentially increase farmable area, by stacking levels. Those two advances will get cheaper and easier for the forseeable future - meanwhile fresh water and farmable land gets scarcer and thus more expensive. The cost of each option will definitely approach parity long before "always" is over.

>This is not going replace farming anymore than me growing a spinach plant in a pot at home.

Well, I've got 200 sq ft my wife and I are growing by hand. We have manual tools, compost, dirt, and muscles. And your spinach example is a pretty bad one. Why? Spinach grows better when its cold out and earlier in the season. If you plant a week or 2 later, it doesn't really grow and then when the heat hits, it bolts. Bolted spinach and lettuce tastes bitter and bad. It'd sure be nice to be able to grow spinach in ideal conditions... but I can't do that in the ground.

>It's actually a little disappointing to see just how out of touch the people in this thread are with farming. Growing food outside, in the ground is always going to be cheaper than building a building.

"always going to be cheaper" is a really long time. Sure you mean to put it that way?

I'm no farmer, but I grow quite a bit of my food. I guess amateur farmer is probably more accurate. Right now, the economic equation is on the side of "grow in dirt, on property". But 1 acre only gets you an acre of stuff at ideal yield. Add 10 more stories on that same plot of land, and you get 10 acre yield (ideal).

And, you're also not counting having a self sufficient city as an intangible. Something like that is the start of an arcology. That technology stack also seems rather important to grow for a spacefaring culture.

Like I said, completely out of touch. You are not going to grow enough to sustain yourselves on 200 square feet, and what ever you do grow will require more resources than growing that same amount on an industrial agribusiness scale.

> Like I said, completely out of touch.

Sigh. Is that all you do; respond by insults and innuendo? How about some proof... if you have any.

> You are not going to grow enough to sustain yourselves on 200 square feet,

200 sq ft is enough to provide fish and vegetables for 8 people, indefinitely. This only works when using aquaponics with combined plants and tilapia. See more here:

http://portablefarms.com/2016/feed-your-family-aquaponics-sy...

http://upriser.com/posts/this-aquaponic-farm-holds-20-000-lb...

> and what ever you do grow will require more resources than growing that same amount on an industrial agribusiness scale.

No. That wasn't your initial argument. Cost is your only argument, and one I have already conceded.

What is the cost of food security? What are the costs of having better tasting food than one can buy at the store? I've given other comparisons as well, none of which are about cost.

Or what about the next drought? It kills 80% of the crops. Those nice closed-loop hydroponics are immune to those effects.

> I guess amateur farmer is probably more accurate.

Gardner is the usual term. And there is a huge chasm between gardening and farming, which is what I expect the parent is trying to get at.

Myself, I grow food on hundreds of acres. Yet I wouldn't know the first thing about growing spinach on a 200 sq ft plot. It's just a completely different skill set. To try and draw an analogy that fits HN, the difference is kind of like knowing how to use your Windows PC at home and knowing how to manage a huge data centre full of 1,000s of Linux systems at work.

It will be interesting to see what the future brings, but considering that we traditional farmers get a lot of things for for free (solar energy, rain, etc.), it will be difficult to beat that on cost. Depends on what you are growing, I suppose.

I'm curious - do you have any ballpark numbers on the impact that weather has on your profitability? Not just for growing conditions (cloudy/sunny, rain/drought) but also for extreme weather events if and when they occur?

Compared to farming, this system uses a lot less water (which is basically free right now) and a lot more electricity (which is more expensive). So you can just imagine it being viable if the cost of those utilities reverses. Could happen if for example we get efficient solar power and the negative projections of fresh water availability come true.

Ignore the downvotes, I think they are from bots. At least I really enjoyed reading your post.

However I'm not convinced that growing in the city is worthwhile. One could reduce the energy costs by using simple green houses (artificial light only at night using cheap power, as you proposed) built on cheap plots of land (even in a desert). This could be much cheaper (Capex+Opex) and the only disadvantage is that the greenhouse must be located in rural areas.

> At least I really enjoyed reading your post.

Thank you :)

> However I'm not convinced that growing in the city is worthwhile. One could reduce the energy costs by using simple green houses (artificial light only at night using cheap power, as you proposed) built on cheap plots of land (even in a desert). This could be much cheaper (Capex+Opex) and the only disadvantage is that the greenhouse must be located in rural areas.

I agree with you that I think at this time, it is a questionable decision for foodstuffs (marijuana is a whole other ballgame). But, I think there's some areas of "food independence" that could mitigate the cost aspects.

There's been a good amount of talk about UBI, including the recent failed Switzerland vote. But in reality, a part of that money would be used on food. What if... a closed loop system like this was made, and plots were guaranteed on a per-person basis? We already now that plants+fish of 25 sq ft is enough to feed a human.. If we scale up and out, tax revenue could pay for this and everybody is now food-secure.

It's not an end-all-be-all. It has a lot of flaws that would need to be worked out. However, smaller greenhouse-like systems could be used with LED light on only at night (to supplement an equatorial climate). These could be built, I think, cheaply. Solar plus batteries don't have to be horribly priced, considering both technologies are greatly lowering in price.

I also live in Indiana. There's a lot of farmland here, and also a lot of small towns. Poverty is pretty bad, and you can combine it with a lack of transportation grid. I could see this as a way to guarantee food security for small towns, especially if we can figure out how to pump these out cheaply and efficiently.

The last piece is a good automation kit, which I've been working on in Node-Red and sensors/actuators. The idea is that this stuff should be as much no-touch as possible, with exception for harvest. And I think that's not only doable, but also cheaply. And, well, save the world in the process :) But I think too big sometimes.

>Yes, it does cost more, due to using electricity. However solar is getting cheaper.

Its kind of funny to talk about how solar will be cutting the costs when solar is exactly what the competition is.

Sun -> plant

Sun -> Solar Panel -> Light bulbs -> plant.

But Photovoltaics is only one method. There's also hydro and geothermal and wind. (Which yes, I know are indirectly from the sun.)

Having electricity->lightbulbs->plants means separating oneself from the standard growing cycle, along with all the elements of growing outdoors. Being outside of the growing cycle means you could have different climates in a single large building. And having enclosed buildings for growing means being relatively immune to insects, invasive plants, mold, fungi, and other nasties that can wreck havoc on your crops.

... and how much energy by comparison with conventional outdoor farming?

Anything under an existing farm + 95% the energy it takes to treat/move the water is a win I would have thought.

It would be but they'll be lucky to only use 100 times as much electrical/mechanical energy as a traditional far. If you include sunlight they'll use less energy than a traditional farm but that comes for free at no environmental cost.

You're forgetting the vast energy provided free to a regular farm by sunlight. Average daily solar energy falling on each square meter of the Earth is 6 kWh [1].

You're right that irrigation is a significant energy cost: for example [2], irrigating 135 acres in Nebraska will use 50,000 kWh over the course of one season.

But an acre has 4046 square meters. Based on the global average, that same 135 acres will collect 3,277,260 kWh of solar energy over the course of a single day. That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations, just for lighting.

Optimizing spectrum can cut the lighting energy in half, and other measures like packing plants more tightly can help, but even if you reduce it by 90% it still dwarfs the energy expense of regular farms.

It may be a reasonable expense for particular crops that don't want full sun anyway, but energy usage isn't likely to ever be an advantage for indoor farms. An acceptable disadvantage in certain cases, maybe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth

[2] http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-Irrigat...

> That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations, just for lighting.

To reproduce natural sunlight, but is that level actually needed for adequate plant growth?

No, which is why I included the sentences after that. It's a lot of energy even if it reduced the lighting requirement by 99%. It might be feasible for certain crops, but it's still going to be much more energy than an outdoor farm uses.

Seems to me greenhouses are a better way to go: free lighting, while still using less water and chemicals.

But if you reduce the energy by 99%, you can reduce the size of the farm by 97%, cover it with solar cells (at 30% efficiency), that's still a big win!

Why can't a farm capture natural sunlight and redistribute it?

Even a low-tech method like mirrors ought to do it. As long as all the wavelengths that the plants need are reflected by the mirror. Why not?

To collect as much sunlight as the regular farm, you'll have to spread mirrors over the same area. So why not save all that money and plant the crops directly on the ground? If you want them indoors, to save water and chemicals, use greenhouses; you can use cheap plastic sheeting instead of expensive mirrors.

The sunlight of a regular farm is largely wasted. The plants are spread apart because of their moisture and soil needs and most of ths sunlight hits dirt.

Now, there may be bacteria in the regolith which we don't know about, and we'll find out why they are neededin certain proportions... but even so, we can be collecting dirt from all over the place for the next crop...

It seems that sunlight hitting plants that are "closer together" and stacked vertically will be far more efficient. Besides, some plants don't even need the full sunlight to grow!

Actually on most farms there's probably not a bit of dirt to be seen under the crop being raised, at least not for bulk crops like corn and soybeans and once the growing season is well under way. Any dirt not covered in the desired crop isn't bare and absorbing sunlight, it's space that's probably growing weeds or other undesirable plants (e.g. soybeans during a corn year for places that rotate their crops).

"same 135 acres will collect 3,277,260 kWh of solar energy over the course of a single day."

3 terawatt-hours? No, something is wrong there. Peak solar energy at the earth's surface is about 1 KW per square meter.[1] Over 24 hours, you average maybe a third of peak. 135 acres is 54.5 hectares, or 545,000 square meters; about half a square kilometer. So we get about 4360 kWh over a day. That's raw sunlight; solar cells are maybe 15-20% efficient in conversion. (Corn plants are about 1.5% efficient in conversion)

[1] https://livingonsolarpower.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/basic-so...

Left conveniently not discussed in the article. Based on the drawing in the article, it looks like they use no natural lighting at all.

While clearly crop dependent, even in a glass building:

"The environmental writer George Monbiot calculated that the cost of providing enough supplementary light to grow the grain for a single loaf would be about $15" [1]

A quick search reveals that typical crop photosynthetic efficiency is around 1-2% [2], and I'm guessing that's likely calculated based on the light that falls directly on the leaf.

The sun delivers >1 kW per square meter in the middle of the day. That's a whole lot of power to replace, even accounting for savings through focusing on the most important wavelengths.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming#Energy_use

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

There's also a note at the very very bottom of the article that "it seems that the energy issue might be reduced by the introduction of a new generation of LED grow lights which reduce the energy required by just providing the plants with the part of the radiation spectrum that they require for growth."

It's not clear whether this is from Monbiot or the person who provided the numbers, but either way I invite you to consider the changes in quality, availability and pricing for standard LED bulbs as replacements for incandescent bulbs in the six years since that article was published.

I'll chime in with some personal research -- not all plants need 100% full sun. You can quickly argue that you have waste at the plant level if you're dedicating "open air" to a plant that doesn't need it. First plant that comes to mind is Kale. Doesn't need full sun, but likes being "open." Stacking the plants vertically allow you to control the sun and better disperse it more evenly. There may be waste, but there's also a lot of waste that occurs naturally.

You also don't need the full visible light spectrum. You only need a small subset that the plants will absorb.

If you're going to generatethe light yourself, you can save a lot of energey by only emitting the correct spectrums of light.

There seems to be energy conservative alternatives for lettuce via a vertical greenhouse system at Singapore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFQOkzEjxQ http://www.skygreens.com/

This is the country that fined a Tesla owner for indirect emissions. http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a28417/singapore-g...

It seems like NYC is a poor place to house this. Ideally, if you wanted it to be viable and not just a proof-of-concept, you'd find somewhere with cheap electricity, cheaper land/rent than NYC[1], and expensive fresh produce. My guess is Iceland would be a good spot, and I'd be a little surprised if they didn't have something like this already in the works. Iceland also has another side benefit for traditional greenhouses: the ground can naturally heat the houses. http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-utilization/greenhouses/

[1] It's actually in Newark, not sure what property prices are like there.

Cheap to extremely cheap. Newark has been plagued with low employment and violence for a long time, although it is currently going through a bit of an uptick thanks mostly to investments in the downtown area and general positive attention due to Corey Booker.

The issue with Newark is good access to clean water and air pollution. Newark (especially the Passaic River that cuts through the city) has a long history of terrible pollution, and the shipyards and airport contribute to some generally poor air quality.

Couldn't an indoors farm use a closed air system? Actually, no - it would probably consume CO2 and produce O2, so there would need to be some exchange with the external world, but it would probably be beneficial to do it in a controlled manner, to avoid loosing water and getting pollution in.

More factors com into play then just energy costs. Warmth, distance-to-market, water, real estate just to name a few.

That's why I listed other factors, too, including real estate and, in an unusual manner, warmth.

The NYC location is great for marketing, too

For folks in the Northeast US, the Backyard Farms brand of tomatoes has a similarly fascinating growing process[1]. They're grown in greenhouse in Maine that's the size of 20 football fields[2]. There are no pests and therefore no pesticides; no dirt, so no washing.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms

It's a crazy building in the middle of nowhere, central Maine, about file miles away from where I grew up. I bike by it when visiting home and it's wonderfully strange.

There have been pests, though: http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backy...

"Near NYC" :(

C'mon - throw Newark a bone already!

I know how it feels. I've just taken to aying that I go to college next to NYC.

Wouldn't issues with weeds and pests also be way better? You just don't let them in?

If they could sell crops with zero herbicides or pesticides you'd think they could clean up.

There's a few restaurants and organizations I'm aware of doing this in Hong Kong. E.g.:

http://www.iveggie.com.hk/index.php/en/

I believe they were using 1000 kWh of power per day a few years ago and their estimated carbon footprint was estimated at around 13x that of a traditional farm by a local environmental group.

I think the costs only really worked out where they could charge a significant premium, such as use in their restaurant.

Yes. These systems are usually pretty well contained and a lot of care is taken to isolate growth areas from pathogens. Your biggest concern is bacterial cultures or fungal growth. But even that is usually handled pretty easily and cheaply.

Not really, once they've gotten in the only intervention is aggressive quarantining and drenching everything with pesticides. Outside, there's much better access to things that eat pests, e.g. wasps/spiders/viruses, and infestations are less likely to be catastrophic.

Of course, this might be different in inner-city environments and there are people that supply some types of pests' pests for use in greenhouses.

Couldn't you compartmentalise the food so that you'd only need to throw away a single "block" of food if it gets contaminated?

The way they want to do it may very well be the first true way to do organic farming, if by organic you mean "farming that delivers products with less mutagenic and cancerogenic content".

Contemporary organic farming replaces applying pesticides with pest-resistant breeds of plants, which simply make their own pesticides. This does not result, as commonly understood, in a reduction in exposure to pesticides, only to applied pesticides.

You can read more in this excellent post by Richard Muller on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about...

> You just don't let them in?

Completely unrealistic at scale. A lot of organism are in humus.

As far as keeping pests out I just realized. Maybe you could remove all the oxygen to kill any pests? The plants don't need it. Or even temporarily remove the o2 until the pests die.

Food isn't supposed to grow without soil, minerials, fungus, and sunlight. It's going to be empty of nutrition and flavor. A shell of an idea of what constitutes lettuce or a carrot, tomato or potatoe.

These data center clean rooms for factory food is just riddled with issues, abstracted layers of nonsense tech that wirks worse then the natural systems already working and present in nature.

That's not necessarily true. It depends mostly on the quality of nutritional supplements used. I have my own experimental indoor garden under LEDs (though I still use substrate, not hydroponics yet) and their taste is by no means inferior to that brought in the organic outdoor gardens.

Man this stuff gets me pumped up. I've always wanted to be a farmer, but it never made economical sense to pursue. I've been dabbling (more than just dabbling...) with hydroponics, LEDs and automation for grows. Within the next 3-5 years I'll probably be able to finally pursue this dream with all these advancements. Love it! Can't wait!

It makes even less economic sense to farm indoors.

Except for when it's winter time and nothing can grow outside. :) But even then, only if the infrastructure is already in place.

If you're interested in indoor farming, you'd probably be interested in aquaponics[1] -- the successful integration of hydroponics & aquaculture.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0

Not really on the same scale but there's a farm in a former air raid shelter beneath London.

http://growing-underground.com/

Damn. I was going to say we need this in Japan, but it does mention a Japanese one. I wonder what the costs are like though? Worker hours and electrical).

You might enjoy reading this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-... :)

Nice, thank you!

related post I made 12 days ago, but reported by IEEE https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006

OT: A good way to explore more about vertical indoor farming is playing the game Minecraft on a public server (the reddit server (nerd.nu) is good). You will see many working examples that will simply blow your mind away.

I wish I'd seen this and had a chance to reply earlier. I think a lot of commenters are missing some key points. First, this is still pretty early-stage stuff, and it's quite likely that almost everyone working in this field right now is not going to get rich any more than most of the people working on gasoline-powered horseless carriages got rich.

My personal prediction is that this kind of thing is going to be a lot more common in 40 years regardless of whether the current stuff is going to be used for growing pot - and pot itself will become a much less profitable crop with legalization, though the security advantages of this kind of indoor volume growing (fields and fences? why bother?) may prolong that.

What's going to be a bigger factor over time is climate change - not in the form of "zomg we're all going to cook and the plants will all die!" but in the form of increased atmospheric water and energy and extreme weather events. How many monsoon-style torrential rains per decade does it take to have a significant impact on farming? Growing up in the Midwest I used to regularly hear "farm reports" on the radio about crop damage due to hailstorms and heavy thunderstorms; for a lot of farmers it won't take a lot of damage to make their farms economically unviable. Some of this may disproportionately impact areas where a lot of food is grown[1], but it's not going to be isolated to those areas [2]. The water carrying capacity of air increases by more than 38% between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius (20g/kg to 27.7g/kg), and while a 5 degree change might be extreme, we're certainly going to blow right past a 2 degree change. That extra water (and the heat energy it holds) are going to be seen in weather.

There may also be some significant changes in building - for example, an all-glass skyscraper (if unobstructed) might well have an outer "shell" 5 feet from interior windows, with vertical plantings of some sort within that space - plants/greenery either for or just visible to the occupants, and if you go more extreme you might see exteriors covered with transparent photovoltaics [3] that pass through frequencies of light that are used by plants while simultaneously powering LEDs that convert the other frequencies into something the plants can use.

Remember, the folks working on this stuff right now are the Apple Newton developers of their industry. What are the iPads of the industry going to look like?

[1] http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wksh...

[2] http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.ph...

[3] http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells

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