Infarm wants to put a farm in every grocery store
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
A few reasons to get things started:
* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.
* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.
* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.
That being said, some vegetables need to be kept away from sunlight (flemish endives come to mind). This could probably work quite well for those.
Experts can't really reliably tell the good from the mediocre, but bad wine is pretty obvious to anyone, and certainly has a lot to do with soil type and quality.
That is true, but look at the current reality when it comes to the produce sold in supermarkets. It seems like most people care about how it looks (hence the wax makeup) and how cheap it is. Our food has been commoditised to such a degree that it's more about brand perception and price, rather than taste.
A lot of the issues can go away when you can run clean rooms, cheap real estate, and a specialised workforce (or robots?). If you put it in a retail space, will customers be able to wander in (dragging in bugs), or will it be a room in the back with dedicated technicians (kind of like a commercial kitchen). And since it's not made to order, why not centralise the business end like a lot of butchers do? Sure, some butchers might still do their own work in a retail space, but they have higher margins on their product.
It also heavily depends on the region. The US has a lot of space for farmland. Maybe look at regions with a lot less arable land. Japan springs to mind. But even then, why would you move the factories into shopping malls? If farmland is at a huge premium, it seems unlikely retail space will be cheap.
Weird, I heard the opposite on an informal tour I took of a local hydroponic farm. They guy could have been full of shit, but he said that one of the biggest benefits of growing indoors was that you didn't have to use pesticides.
But this concept (as I understand it) has the plants growing where there are humans present so it is going to be a dirty environment and pests will undoubtedly be a problem that needs to be addressed in some fashion.
Do you think that 90% of the wholesale cost of produce is transportation costs? If so, why do you think that?
In urban environments yes. In suburbia though grocery stores typically can name their own rent for headlining a shopping plaza, as that brings the highly desired foot traffic.
But I don't think it's the same.
There's going to be an inflection point where the cost to transport lettuce from Mexico and California is going to be more than the cost of some vertical farm down the street.
There's also this slow drumbeat of "Save the Planet!" and "Oil is da DEBIL Bobby!". Making stuff local and "sustainable" is marketable - even at a premium. There's a reason people go to local farmers markets.
I can't say you're not wrong that "it's for the weed, man"... but I think you're limiting yourself if you think that's the ONLY reason - or even the biggest reason.
How sure are you about that? Buildings are expensive, and you can fuel up trucks with solar arrays.
No matter how automated 95% of the journey is, the last mile will require someone to be there and do deliveries. In theory local producers have less coordination problems with their consumers.
Or the store does some kind of delivery, but that's no easier or harder because of producer location.
It's also a good protection against theft and vandalism as well as preventing spreading in to the wild. There might also be legal requirements that prevent outdoors production.
Or is the goal to get acquihired the same way small tech companies get acquired by giants?
It seems they'll run into the same problems that they are running in now growing herbs against large scale producers.
Like the post above you said, economies of scale will grow far quicker on fields in the middle of nowhere because of how cheap land is.
You might think it is for marijuana but you miss the point. Self suffiency is something we should strive for, we shouldn't be dependent on other places for food or shelter or water, we should produce those things locally.
If you think ahead even more, this is important for space travel and colonizing other worlds or even different parts of the world.
This should be an open standard and shouldn't be something people can't afford. This could change how people get food and drastically adverse the effects of being in a food desert.
So tptacek is correct that a farm inside a grocery store does not solve grocery affordability for the poor, because the problem is due to transportation/access, not the cost of the goods.
The bridge between these two views would maybe be if there was a solution of vertical farming that used little real estate and was able to set up a vertical farm in a poor area and had minimal real estate footprint/low rent costs.
Paper on Food Deserts in Chicago (or just google "food deserts chicago"): http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/IL-FoodDeserts-2011.pdf
I'm not sure if you shop mostly in Whole Foods or buy individually plastic-wrapped bell peppers at Trader Joes, but go to a Mexican grocery store some time and fill a cart full of green things. Vegetables are very cheap.
I'd think it's very similar to tobacco. Vape for tobacco doesn't really expire, it's just the niccotine. And cigs keep for a long time. They get brittle over time, as do cigars, so I would think it's very similar. Again I'm not an expert, I just live in a state where it's common.
I'd guess that security and surrounds might be an issue for growing an in-demand product too? Doubt lettuce farms suffer too many break-ins!
http://globalnews.ca/news/3356810/romaine-calm-hamilton-poli...
Freshness has got nothing to do with it, the product has to be dried in a well ventilated area.
A few years ago I was pursuing aquaponics as a hobby over the summer. It was clear then that economies of scale were rapidly driving down the costs of indoor horticulture. My aquaponics project failed, but the basic economics of grocery-attached farms make a lot of sense. I built a business model to determine the economics of running a farm in a shipping container that could be deployed to an underutilized Whole Foods parking lot.
The model accounted for a 81m3 shipping container being filled top-to-bottom with fruiting plants, like tomatoes, but it's easily adjustable to other plants, like lettuces. The model is pretty sensitive to things like the productive life of the plant, lead time to productivity, and sale price.
Selling heads of lettuce for $3 each yields around $6000/yr in gross revenue per container per year.
This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
The model, in case anyone's interested: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DkjOIs7hXyxIiN_iWXK0...
A modular system like in the article could be extended to be aquaponic. If so, they could take advantage of waste food from the host retail store / restaurant as input to the fish. Such a system might do well in China where shoppers are accustomed to selecting live fish.
Wow. Indoor farming actually makes sense in the US market.
Edit: yes, I'm from Europe, obviously. And now I'm sad :/
That's why we have people eating mcdonalds everyday.
3 for lettuce is ridiculous.
The only people spending $3 for a head of lettuce are people looking for a way to separate their food from everyone else.
Early on, I had a lot of trouble getting the flood and drain system to work correctly. Substrate would get caught in the siphon, and prevent it from initiating the drain.
Once the flood and drain system was working, I ran into issues related to my use of heterogeneous substrate. I had both hydroton pellets and perlite in the grow bed. When you mix substrates of multiple densities, both of which are lighter than water, the flood and drain cycle will result in the lightest substrate filtering to the top of the bed. This caused all of my plants to sink into the water.
After solving that problem, it became a simple matter of fish nutrition. I live in Colorado, which has very hot summers. Around 90°F is typical, but in the evenings the temperature gets down quite low. As it would happen, the average daily temperature was between 60 and 70°F. Fish modulate their diet according to the temperature of the water that they're in. And my koi would not eat enough.
In the end, the project was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. But I couldn't justify repeating the effort after all of the fish died in the winter. It didn't seem humane.
> This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
Am I missing something, or did you accidentally flip the words "gross" and "net" above?
(Obviously the construction costs could still outweigh the savings in transport and spoilage.)
This was tried in LA in 2015.[1] Not sure what happened to "Green City Farms", but their last Twitter activity was in 2015 and their web site says "Error establishing a database connection".
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3044958/this-hollywood-restauran...
I'd love to see it work since you can reduce water and pesticide requirements, which is great for the environment. I'm just skeptical that you can be more than a basil and microgreens service for yuppies.
I totally support the vision and want to see this work, but I'm really not convinced it makes economic sense (I'd be happy to be proven wrong though).
1. Transportation costs: when everything grows in Ohio (and/or South America), it's going to cost a lot more to get it in front of consumers in Seattle or New York. To make matters worse, there's a built in timer on the goods. 2. Waste: something like 12% of America's food supply goes bad in transit. Then after that, some more rots on the shelf. That which doesn't is brought home, or to a restaurant and is wasted there. There's not much we can do about the last part of the equation, but having the food fresh in the store is a big step for the first two prongs. 3. Aesthetics: This one I don't fully understand, but apparently people turn down perfectly good produce because it doesn't look normal, despite being perfectly healthy and nutritious. I've always had a taste for mutant carrots, myself. It's possible (not guaranteed) that selling this produce at reduced costs and directly from the dirt where it was grown might help that.
It'll all come down to whether or not grocers sign on - my guess is that the price point on something like this will ultimately be pretty good, but it might take 10 years for the technology to develop enough to be useful out in the wild.
There's no way 40% of potatoes or flour (or vegetable oil or ...) is expiring in transit.
So food that spoils at home or is thrown away after it is served at a restaurant.
Distribution and retail losses aren't terrible.
You also forget pesticides, crop insurance, storage, etc
As for the future for vertical farming ? i'm more optimistic towards using regular greenhouses, with extra led lights optimized for the right color, and "wavelength shifter"[1] layer, that will transform sunlight to the optimal color for the plants - if that tech becomes cheap enough.
[1]They're made of fluorescent die embedded in a clear plastic layer.
so this technology in the article is in the realm of, sounds cool but not really workable. put too much thought into and it falls apart. plus how do we keep the man power needs of the store down as that is one area many are trying to affect
Clearly stores and investors are buying into this, so I must be missing some information. Or I'm overly skeptical because I dislike the idea. But how much do these store grown herbs cost?
I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.
Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.
The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.
To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.
This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.
I suspect this is the actual reasoning and target product.
Unfortunately, you can't get funding for that legally in most jurisdictions.
But republicans are still moralizing christians that wish to force their ideals upon others. Because if anything's been shown, cannabis is one hell of a tax generator and mucho underutilized commerce. But aside this illegal usage in most jurisdictions, this could suffice growing in bad environments or to people with way too much money to spend.
There could be a different segment; people who want guaranteed food supply. And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee. I could also see this as a non-profit as well, with low income and homeless getting free access.
No it doesn't.
If a farm has a bad harvest, there are other farms a store can buy from. If the store has a bad harvest. They're competing with their own customers to buy food from the next store over.
You've got DHT11's pictured in you product photos. Don't use DHT11's for, well, anything.
I deployed ~ 100. After 8 months, only 35 still work. Even when they worked, the data was so variable they were constant trouble. Of the 35 that still work, about half are now giving useless humidity readings.
Caveat emptor and all that yap.
So bare ESP8266 modules, OSH Park boards, and the sensors. After my DHT's started kicking the bucket two things helped:
1) Switching my software to only power my sensors for the time I needed to take measurements. (Once per 10 minutes). It does take some seconds to stabilize before taking the reading but the sensors spend most of their time off. I had to cut traces and add a little transistor to the boards to make this happen. That sucked.
2)I picked up some SHT71's and was able to bodge them onto the failed boards in place of the dead DHT's. All it took was a firmware update for my ESP8266. This was easy. I have not lost one since. I don't know how much 1) has to do with that.
As an added benefit, I've got my esp's deep sleeping during the off times (had to add one jumper wire to make this work... easy) and can now power them for weeks at a time with a pair of alkaline batteries.
For Sensor Comparisons, check out this site. Someone from a previous post on Hackaday turned me to it a few months back. Very comprehensive and is what led me to go with the BME280:
https://www.kandrsmith.org/RJS/Misc/Hygrometers/calib_many.h...
Those were the old versions. The new versions are using bme280.
I think for this type of thing to really change things, they need to concentrate on calories and nutrition. Things like peanuts and potatoes.
I also think there is some room for permaculture. Such as replacing ornamental city landscaping with productive food forests.
They need to make stuff that grows fast and has a relatively high price. Potatoes and peanuts don't particularly match either of those criteria.
I personally like this because of trust...I don't want pesticides in my food and I don't trust organic farmers markets who probably just bought their produce at a local grocery store then mark it up double for me ;-D. So I'd much rather grow myself if it was easy enough to do.
Grocery stores make next to no margin on their sales - by adopting this they will have to charge more than their competitors. Which means they won't get sales.
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EDIT On top of this, there is not the physical space to do this at the scale you need. Do you know how often shelves are restocked, especially in the UK where stores are tiny? How are you going to fit your equipment in such a constrained environment.
Why? What happens when the network drops out on your basil cabinet? Is there any reason not to just put the logic inside the thing?
Other than that, I can see this functioning pretty well for large suburban grocery joints if it's limited to herbs. In fact, I seem to remember seeing something approximating this at a Canadian grocery store, I don't remember where.
Energy generation
Cellphones
Social media
As farming can now be done in 3D, this may become a good idea. My main concern is city pollutants getting caught in the plants.
And even before we get to that point, a distributed agricultural system would help lessen our reliance on large-scale industrial farming operations which we are frankly not using at a sustainable (1,000+ years) rate.
This happens with decentralized farms, too. The problem is not in the kind of farm, but with the techniques used. Tractor tillage increases yields, but is hell on topsoil.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
If you're drawing on the aquifer faster then it replenishes, it'll eventually run out. Sure, it'll replenish itself - eventually - but the land you were cultivating will be unusable for decades. In the meantime, all of your nice topsoil will turn to dust, and blow away.
It's easier to conserve the soil that's already there than to make new soil. That said, there are techniques to increase the production rate of soil. Sheet mulching can create 4 inches of topsoil out of waste organic matter in 2-5 years (compared to thousands of years for natural processes).
Generally it's better to make soil "in place" because moving it breaks up important soil structures, leading to oxidization and nutrient loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_mulching
http://tobyhemenway.com/resources/how-to-the-ultimate-bomb-p...
"Damn nuclear apocalypse, it's been weeks since I had fresh basil! How can I feed my militia if I can't even bake a pizza?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...
The minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres. This comes out to a land area of a little more than 2 square miles per grocery store. Your average grocery store is 46,000 square feet. So if you did stacked farming on the area of the grocery store, you'd only need a about 1400 levels. Give 2 foot per stack, and your grocery store is only about a half mile high.
But, that said, I don't think a complete replacement is necessary for this to be significantly beneficial even on a subset of grown plants.
Why assume a vegetarian diet? And why assume that 100% of farming would be done at the grocery store?
Do you really need the vertical farm in the grocery store to grow the wheat to bake your bread or the silage to feed cattle?
The vast majority of farmland is dedicated to grains and animal feed, and that can remain.
But the vertical farm in the grocery store can take care of the fresh stuff, like herbs, lettuce and some veggies.
It's the most efficient in terms of land use (also water, etc.). I think the person you are responding to is trying to make the best possible case for the approach, in order to be as fair as possible.
(And yes, it is not necessary to grow 100% of food in stores, as you point out, for this startup to have a viable business model; but it's still interesting to see how far it could go, that's what I took that comment to be doing.)
It's like going to a seafood restaurant that has live lobsters, vs a seafood restaurant that uses already dead lobsters. Sure both are lobsters, but one is better than the other.