A Farm Grows in the City
wsj.com
wsj.com
I recently ate an out of season "heirloom tomato" grown in Mexico and shipped to my local coop in Minnesota. It was "organic", and it looked like an heirloom tomato. But it had no taste. It was clearly grown in depleted soil. I've grown heirloom tomatoes, as well as beefsteak and other more conventional varieties. Food grown in a garden tastes better. There are more nutrients available to them. Plants are chemical-mineral-sun beings. They grow abundantly in diverse ecosystems and offer their fruits with no violence.
Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.
People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old" technologies. Paper. Knots. Gardening. Cooking. Woodworking. Compost. Herbal medicine. Music. Many of these artforms (sciences, really) are miles ahead of the fancy capitalist stuff in terms of their nuance, their simplicity, their integration with human wellbeing.
And they're free.
Having a 1 acre garden as a hobby, is huge ecological violence since industrialized agriculture requires far less than half an acre per person and the loss of habitat is the same.
I'm not sure how this is true. Perhaps you can persuade me?
A one acre garden is not a "hobby" in my opinion. The amount of work involved in cultivating an entire acre is immense. As well, a personal garden is unlikely to be a monoculture which is even worse ecologically in my opinion than a loss of efficiency. Plus there's all that Round-up...
This could actually apply to the hunter&gatherer because those didn't care much about sustainability. When a region was picked/hunted empty they simply moved to a new region, few enough of us around back then so this actually worked and regions had time to recover.
Now imagine nearly 7 billion humans living the same way: Gathering/hunting everything in their closest region until most of it is gone just to move on to a new region, no permaculture at all. It wouldn't take long before there wouldn't be anything left to hunt or gather.
>A one acre garden is not a "hobby" in my opinion. The amount of work involved in cultivating an entire acre is immense.
Not every one-acre garden is actually cultivated, that's how some people are able to have them as a hobby ;)
Can you explain how this hobby is so violent? I don't think I am following the line of thought.
The typical one acre hobby garden is farmed with far fewer chemicals than the typical commercial farm. There is far more diversity and a better balance of minerals. Compost is often used and waste is effectively recycled.
..context dropping..compared to the lawn or parking lot that might be there?
Wouldn't the area needed for the active involvement of people require more space than commercial agriculture, where large machines can do a lot on a small footprint? A sprayer with 12 inch tires and a 120 foot boom can effectively 'weed' 118 feet of growing area with just two feet required for the tires. I'm not so sure a person with a hoe can beat that.
And s sprayer only spray, it does not harvest anything. They actually make UAV sprayer, though...
A traditional seed drill, for crops that can be suitably planted with one, plants rows 7.5 inches apart and spacing within the row is even closer. There is really no room for a human to comfortably exist within that space without tramping the crop. I'm not sure I understand how a hexagonal pattern opens up space for a person in that circumstance without reducing the growth area?
> And s sprayer only spray, it does not harvest anything.
For many crops you're not concerned about, even desire, wiping out the entire plant.
> They actually make UAV sprayer, though...
Certainly. Crop dusting has been a thing for as long as flying has been a viable human achievement. Although with larger and larger machines on the ground able to have a smaller and smaller footprint relative to the working area (and precision technology ensuring that the machine obeys an exact footprint), the practice seems to be going out of favour.
Humanity is currently migrating into solar power. There's no way you will gain any area by adding conversions on the way through the plants. You get better reliability, easier pest controls (without additives), and lots of other things, but you can never gain in area use.
Technologies, like the ones mentioned in this article, change the entire supply chain; fruits and vegetables become "in-season" all year round. They will no longer have to be shipped unripened, and should have a better flavour.
You're bullshitting me if you think I'm gonna prefer to take a pill with "holy basil extract" over a delicious cup of holy basil tea. Absolutely not.
And tell me how to "extract" rooibos? What parts are you going to put into pills? Can you extract the taste? Can you extract the nutrients? Would you make one pill for the antioxidants and another for the vitamin C?
It used to be thought that THC was "the active ingredient" in cannabis. Well, it turns out that THC and CBD, along with numerous other varieties of cannabinoids, interact dynamically in the body, modulating one anothers' effects. Studies have shown that CBD quells the psychosis inducing effects of THC very well. But CBD on its own isn't necessarily a strong antipsychotic. It'd need to be taken in large doses to have that effect.
The idea that "germs cause disease" is a similar misconception. Bacterial infections are symptoms of larger ecological imbalances in the body's microbiome. Sometimes infections are really caused by antibiotics (if you wanna point fingers), as is the case with C. Difficile infections that take hold in guts whose flora have been nuked by antibiotics.
Why not? What environment or characteristic of plants grown in the wild is impossible to recreate in a controlled environment? Arguably, plants can be grown "in-season" all year round with technology like this, and be sold fresh the same day it is picked.
> Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.
Maybe growing food within the cities will help us to feed a dense local population, while at the same time minimising the impact on the countryside. Thus leaving the countryside natural for those who want to appreciate it.
Living in Britain, I despair at the eradication of the countryside. Natural environment has been almost exclusively replaced by farm land to grow food for our ever growing population, and we are still quite a long way from being self-sufficient.
Also, work like this will help if we want to colonise space.
> People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old" technologies
Are you the arbiter on what everyone else should be appreciating? Although you are free to appreciate and enjoy anything you like, other people such as myself derive deep pleasure from observing the constant onward march of technology and industry.
Many of the modern varieties of mass-produced produce have been bred to overcome pests and harsh conditions. not flavor. By moving the plants indoors we overcome both issues and can grow in optimal conditions where we can focus on taste and texture. Plus by growing close to the point of consumption the food is fresher and tastier and can be harvested when ripe and not a week before so as is currently the case. Additionally the nutrient levels in CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) crops is usually above a field grown crop (https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/are-hydroponic-veg...)
I encourage people to scroll around Google Maps (or better yet, drive) through some of America's most productive agricultural regions. The sheer scale of American farmland dwarfs any possible urban farm development.
I know from personal experience growing seedlings in my basement here that new LED grow lights make it much more cost and energy efficient to run a greenhouse than it used to be. But fertile soil is a massive input cost that you can't really get around for most full sized plants. I spent hundreds of dollars recently on garden soil for a small set of raised beds. I have a tiny flock of six chickens supplementing my compost pile.
Anyone can grow bad produce indoors. I think the real problem (having lived in urban, rural, and suburban areas) they're trying to address is the transportation cost of bringing quality produce to the city. Right now many cities are not really set up for affordable freight transportation. Cities like NYC are almost designed to make it pointlessly expensive and complicated to bring freight in from the country to the store. Commercial truck traffic gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns and cities.
So if you are trying to deploy technology to make quality food more available to American cities the solution is probably not just hanging up some grow lights and growing weak plants in trays. It is to attack the largest sources of the added costs. The 'local' label has salience to high end grocery shoppers because they believe that it indicates quality. If 'local' comes to be associated with tray farms using poor inputs, it will stop being associated with quality in the minds of Whole Foods shoppers.
It'd be great if America had the sort of urban freight network that was state of the art in Japan in 1980 instead of trying to come up with pretend-technology patches to much larger cost of living problems.
High density city-"farming" makes economic sense in certain contexts: - high density living environments - inefficient or expensive transport costs - lack of available farming land relative to population (expect net-food-importers like Singapore to lead here) - northern hemisphere (full-year growing cycle increases appeal and cost efficiency) - cities not located in close proximity to farmland (e.g. Abu Dhabi, Dubai)
They don't replace organic, and subvert the "local" farm-to-table movement and I'll be surprised if they can match the taste of produce grown in a robust/diverse ecosystem. But they do provide a market need for controlled environments and consistent output that dials into local demand.
Pros and cons, but inevitable part of our agricultural future.
On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag. While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price-competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.
>On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag. While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price-competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.
Why? When people can afford it, they tend to want to upgrade what kinds of food that they eat. The quality issue is not something that is easy to sidestep just because of the law of conservation. Output can't exceed input. It is a huge operation to move soil and fertilizer around. It is expensive even in rural areas. Hydroponics have certain fertility, plant type, and plant quality limitations and cost more money to set up. Not to mention the issue of devoting expensive urban real estate to agricultural production.
> Commercial truck traffic gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns and cities.
Let's do a little estimating: A crate of milk at $4 per gallon is $24 and is about 1x1x2 feet. If you pack an 8x16x8 box truck, which is way smaller than the maximum size limits, that's 512 crates, so about $13,000 back there. That's also about 26000 lbs, which is within the MGW of some trucks that size.
You're lucky I didn't use bacon as an example because a 1x1x2 crate filled with up to 48 pounds of bacon can be sold for much more than a 1x1x2 crate filled with 48 pounds (6 gallons) of milk.
Now consider how long it takes a truck, even denied access to parkways (in NYC, trucks DO have access to interstates, such as the BQE, Van Wyck, Verazzano, Triboro, GWB, I-95, etc etc etc) to get around. Maybe a couple hours. How much better could you make it? How much driver pay and extra gas and such is being spent in the extra hour or so? Let's be generous and say $500. So we're talking no more than a 5% change in the price of the goods in there. Stop and go traffic with that kind of weight is not great for fuel, but it's a lot better when deliveries are done off hours. Off hours, it's easy to catch a "green wave" on the wonderful one-way avenues in Manhattan and never have to stop again till you need to make your turn.
You're alleging a 400% increase, not a 5% increase. My numbers are off, this is an estimate, but this is probably the order of magnitude of this effect. You are going to need sources to make such a shocking statement.
Part of the reason your food costs so much is you're shopping at the wrong damn stores. Go to Key Foods or something. A real normal cheap grocery store, not like, Gristedes or some such. Most foods costs about the same as NJ or Arkansas.
Also, most food goes through the Hunts Point distribution centers, which are conveniently located off of I-95 which permits heavy trucks including full 18 wheelers. No idea where you're getting your info. From there they can take the BQE all over inner Brooklyn/Queens with access to Manhattan via any of the major east river bridges except the Brooklyn (some smaller trucks may even meet the restrictions for the tunnels)
Making our "Freight infrastructure" any better with roads is a waste of money that at best, may, at the cost of billions, reduce food prices 5-10%. It'd be much better to use a fraction of that money to subsidize food stamp programs or something, with much more effect.
The only real problem with all the trucks on our local streets, is it's annoying and dangerous to pedestrians. A good start here would be just enforcing (and educating regarding) the existing mandatory truck route system better. Trucks have an extensive map of permitted routes in NYC, and it's really not that hard to deal with, but you do regularly see trucks violating the same.
Sure, transportation isn't all of it. Most of it is probably labor and real estate. But how awful it is to drive a truck in NYC versus how easy it is to make commercial deliveries in just about any other city or town in America has a lot to do with it, especially because the article babbles an awful lot about the challenge of delivering stuff to cities from rural areas. It's way more complicated to deliver goods to Manhattan (an island) than in most American places which just involve pulling off an interstate exit and making a delivery.
If the question is whether or not it makes sense to focus on
a( Heavy public investment into fake-tech urban farms
or
b( Identifying the really big sources of the costs and working to bring those down
I think b( is the better way to go. I think we could probably agree on that. I don't really know the specifics because I'm shooting off the hip about another lame urban farming article. Come to think of it real estate prices are probably what make up the bulk of the added cost on top of what the consumer pays in other markets and not delivery costs. But the purported problem that these farms are supposed to fix are the cost of bringing food from rural areas to cities.
Personally I doubt that even if the magical infrastructure fairy gave the mayor a quintillion dollar grant to spend on infrastructure improvements that anything positive would happen (it would probably get much worse somehow). But again, the problem that this is supposed to fix is the cost of bringing food in from rural areas.
However most of the costs for urban farms have to do with replicating things that rural farms have for free. Instead of using the sun urban farms have to pay for electricity, lighting, wiring, etc.
* Sunlight: electricity costs and capital costs for lighting * Water: even with an efficient hydroponic system city water is more expensive * Growing medium: either dirt or a hydroponic system, which requires maintenance and a capital outlay * the farm building itself: unlike fields, buildings cost money to build and maintain
An efficient urban farm could theoretically use land more efficiently (by growing more crops per square foot) and use less water, but those inputs are cheap. Transportation would also be less expensive.
Iowa farmland is less than $9,000/acre[0]: in Staten Island (the cheapest borough) land prices are $37.62/square foot[1] or $1.64 million/acre: so yields would need to be over 180x better to break even on the land alone!
Absent some huge breakthroughs on the pricing of all of the inputs (or astronomical increases in transportation costs) the economics for generally don't work for crops.
[0] http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/2016/12/13/iowa... [1] https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/486631/
These are the prices I get from going to nearby fine fare / key foods type places in the Lower East Side, and they're pretty much the same prices I remember seeing in NJ and Arkansas, with some variation. Individual supermarkets do vary a lot though, so if you don't have a bike/car and just go to the one that happens to be closest to you, it may seem way worse than it actually is.
I don't know if real estate makes a difference. The dollar pizza places stay in business somehow, making it up on volume. Suburban supermarkets seem to compensate for their cheaper real estate by wasting way more of it, with huge stores with tons of aisles and 100 brands of each kind of product, and then 4x that land spent on parking. I wouldn't be surprised if such a facility spends the same or more on their lease as a random C-Town in Brooklyn.
Also, I kind of agree with a lot of other stuff you said, just responded to what I found interesting to respond to :)
If you had read the article, you'd know this is a hydroponic system. No soil. Yields are substantially higher and less water is consumed. Hydroponics are pretty interesting technology.
> Anyone can grow bad produce indoors.
Yeah, if they just stick some dirt under a random LED light. That's not what they're doing here. A different article I recently read about the same farm in Newark mentioned some gourmet chef next door raving about the quality of the greens.
Like, if you can make it work for just one plant that there's a sizable market for, like say, tomatos, that alone is enough to sustain a huge industry. Like, if you then extend it to other crops, that's cool I guess, but there's no economic need to. In order for your thesis that this is all bogus and useless to hold, hydroponics has to be industrially infeasible for ALL plants of any market value.
It makes sense to start out with high value density crops like herbs or something (and it seems the Newark facility is starting with leafy greens for that reason)
As with almost all of these type of stories, it's "filler" material for journalists who need to write something to justify their paychecks and it's free advertisement for the companies. Nothing more, nothing less. Companies contact WSJ|NYTimes|etc to do pieces on them all the time. It's free publicity and journalists need to write something and of course the media has to sell ads. It's a form of busybody work.
At least this is a break from the relentless "solar savior elon musk" craze on social and traditional media.
Anyone who thinks the U.S. is crowded should book a window seat on a daytime cross-country flight and see if they still think that when they land.
Urban farm development is high density farming which doesn't require the same available area and often produces crops with higher nutrient density. It seems technically feasible for medium density urban areas to produce a large percentage of edible food locally in the near future; though that doesn't guarantee a viable business model will exist.
[0]https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
I absolutely agree with this - but I don't understand what the selling point is. You can't use greenhouses in an urban setting - if you've ever seen a modern hydroponic greenhouse light up the night sky you know why - and the efficiency loss from entirely replacing sunlight is staggering.
I guess I don't get it.. what's the selling point that I'm missing?
This could be enough of a selling point for certain high end restaurants.
The loss of sunlight does seem staggering to overcome, but plants can only use a few narrow spectrum bands of light which can be efficiently replaced with led.
I'm not following; any modern greenhouse has automated humidity and temperature control (and, more important than humidity, artificially increased and controlled CO2 levels).
What sets the temperature and humidity control apart from a modern hydroponic greenhouse ag operation like Houwelings? http://www.houwelings.com/files-2/why-greenhouse.php
> plants can only use a few narrow spectrum bands of light which can be efficiently replaced with led.
Yes on the light spectrum - but I'm not sure what you mean by "efficiently replaced"; my understanding is that the energy required to replace sunlight with best-in-class LEDs remains substantially more kWh/lb of produce than shipping as far as across the entire country.
The Cornell lecture I linked to elsewhere talks about this: https://youtu.be/VrpyUA1pQqE?t=1842
By only using 460 nm and 640 nm light you reduce unnecessary spectra for a chlorophyll b containing plant. Compared to other lighting sources which emit a broad specta of light, LED is much more efficient in terms of usable photons / kwH though it is likely still cheaper to ship from a freely lit greenhouse in a high light density area.
The selling point is the value addition of having a high degree of temperature and lighting control; and hinges on that leading to the additional production of certain flavors and nutrients that wouldn't be possible with less control.
Thanks for the video btw, it comes to the opposite conclusions about heat retention in closed vs open systems.
The CO2 output of these farms is higher than modern industrial agriculture, even if you assume all the traditional produce is shipped across the entire continental US. Cornell has some good lectures on this subject: https://youtu.be/VrpyUA1pQqE?t=1842
So, urban farms are worse for the environment - is the selling point cost then? I did a back-of-the-envolope trying to guesstimate this a while back on a similar post about container farms. Granted, a larger factory-style farm will have higher efficiency, but the basic problem of entirely replacing sunlight with artificial light, vs a green house that simply augments, remains.
Indoor farm
Freight farms has a cost estimate page(1) that gives us, for lettuce, something like:
50-100lb/week, lets say 75lb, so 3,900lb of lettuce a year
$17,600/year operating cost
$17,600/3,900lb = ~$4.51/lb of lettuce
But fine - lets pretend the container farm itself is free, and that somehow plug setting, harvesting, packaging, and equipment maintenance is happily done by people working for nothing: $4.51/lb of lettuce it is.
Traditional farm
The university extension system provides great estimates of production costs for tons of crops. For lettuce, using traditional soil and machinery, production including labor, packaging and chilling UC Davis estimates(2):
$7,754 total overhead per acre
9.38tons of lettuce per acre, 18,760lb a year
$7,754/18,769lb = ~$0.41/lb of lettuce
$6,000/40,000lbs = ~ $0.15/lb of lettuce to transport
$0.41 + $0.15 = $0.56/lb
Assuming labor is free for the container farm, you're gifted all the capital assets of it, and that the traditional farm is shipping its' produce across the continental US, the production cost is $4.51/lb for container farm, $0.56/lb for regular soil.
(1) https://www.freightfarms.com/blog/data-from-our-growers-operating-the-lgm-as-a-business
(2) https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/7d/96/7d96db67-49ca-442f-9543-4482187c9cd1/lettuceleaforganiccc09.pdf
(3) https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/wa_fv190.txtI genuinely don't understand the benefit; to my knowledge, outside of them being higher CO2 output, higher real estate cost, and substantially higher energy usage, none of these indoor facilities even reach the calorie density of a modern hydroponic greenhouse like Houwelings; http://www.houwelings.com/
I guess I should say: Hats off to the people that think they can compete with a modern ag operation like Houwelings in growing weed, if they can do that while paying both urban real estate rates and the electricity bill for replacing the sun they know something I don't.
Didn't I just read an article on here last week about high quality cheap produce in NYC Chinatown?
For many foods, more gasoline is used getting it from the grocery store home than is used to get it to the grocery store from across the world. Ships and trains and large tractor trailers are quite efficient.
OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge amounts of energy.
I don't know if it's been tried or not for indoor gardening, but why not use heliostats coupled with reflection (mirrors) or refraction (lightpipes) to guide the sunlight indoors?
I know such systems have been used for general lighting and art works...
You would be better off building a greenhouse right where you would have placed the heliostats.
A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead. correct link https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787)
The supply chain there is not just weak, it is actively antagonized by various police forces. My guess is that if cannabis was 100% legal, the indoor grow operations would not make economic sense; we'd just have giant farms or greenhouses in mexico or the southwest.
It is the same thing as we could assemble cars in almost any workshop or hangar, but we build cars at scale in only a few places.
And perhaps the evolution of tools like https://farmbot.io/ An intelligent 'lawmmower' makes your permaculture for you.
By far, the biggest cost of my lawn is the 5 minutes per week I have to spend cutting it. How does an edible lawn compete with that?
Robots? Anyone know the state of automation when it comes to small scale gardening? Picking or zapping weeds and pests with a laser or whatever.