Hacker News Reader

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.

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-...

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...

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)

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.

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.

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 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.