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?
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.
(Obviously the construction costs could still outweigh the savings in transport and spoilage.)
Do you think that 90% of the wholesale cost of produce is transportation costs? If so, why do you think that?