Plenty, Indoor Farming Startup, Raises $200M | Hacker News Reader

Plenty, Indoor Farming Startup, Raises $200M

techcrunch.com

157 pointsstenlix67 comments

See previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (1).

As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens, but much harder for other plants.

See this video [2] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)".

A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead - correct link[3]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw

[3] https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787

This is absolutely crucial. I love indoor farming, I've built some hydroponics systems before, automated a bunch and spoke with my municipality about urban farming projects.

But anyone who looks into it long enough finds that indoor-farming only works for leafy greens. Not because they're leafy greens, but because they're low-caloric plants.

i.e. a whole head of lettuce is about 50 calories. No wonder you can grow it under artificial lighting in water.

That works for a commercial solution: a (hyper) 'local' head of lettuce, produced without any pesticides, by turning a shop or office or otherwise urban environment into 'nature', is lovely and can (with some ignorance on the part of the customer) sell at a premium. But indoor farming still does nothing to impact our ecological footprint at any scale. Once you can produce our staple foods in a manner that's less energy intensive inside than outside, that'd be amazing. But I haven't ever seen anything like that proposed on a major scale.

I don't think growing staples within cities will be economically viable within our lifetimes. As a general rule, agricultural land use orders itself around it's markets according to transportation. The more delicate the produce, the closer the producers must be to a city. There's even a (very simple, it's from the 19th century) model for this, which is the Von Thünen's model of land use.

I wish I had some actual data easy at hand to show you, but this is more or less observable from history. Until active refrigeration, spoilage losses associated with the more delicate agricultural products pretty much put them outside of the reach of the majority of urban dwellers. If you wanted any sort of fresh dairy, fresh meat, fresh vegetables or fresh fruit in say, the early 19th century, you'd better live on a farm. So whereas a farmer might have had fresh milk, a city worker would have cheese, and instead of fresh meat, cured meat, and so on.

But anyway, in short of the whole world becoming one huge city, it's unlikely that staples would ever be grown inside them.

>There's even a (very simple, it's from the 19th century) model for this, which is the Von Thünen's model of land use.

Fun fact, Von Thünen's model was the original inspiration for "zone planning." https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-...

Do people really care about environmental impact , when buying their vegetables ?

Considering that transportation fuel is a relatively small cost of product , using something like biofuel is easy.

>using something like biofuel is easy.

Or better yet, an EV truck (ala Tesla Semi) ultimately powered by stationary PV.

Per the video, studies vary on whether biofuels input more or less fossil fuel energy as they output in biofuel energy. But in the best case it's still terribly inefficient, requiring 30-200x more land versus using PV arrays to power electric vehicles.[1] And using rooftop PV (sometimes dismissed because it's more expensive) reduces the resulting pressure on wilderness and agricultural land by 'reusing' land that's already been developed.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2013/01/18/are-photovoltaics-or-bi...

For what it's worth, leafy green affordability and availability is a big concern in urban areas, at least in the USA.

Are sure you know all that is being produced in indoor farms? What about what Growing Power is doing in Wisconsin and Illinois? In addition to producing leafy greens in their indoor vertical farms, they also produce fish, fruit, carrots, eggplant, tomatoes, corn, green beans, etc.

> Are sure you know all that is being produced in indoor farms?

I don't understand what you're asking.

But regarding Growing Power, as far as I know it's a small-scale demo farm that is used for educational purposes that's mostly funded by donations and a hell of a lot of good will in the form of volunteers, free material etc. I mean just take a look at their donor-page [0].

[0] http://www.growingpower.org/about/funding/

It's not supposed to be taken seriously as a commercial farming project, if you ask me. And besides that, a lot of their farming is quite standard stuff, virtually only high-value crops (i.e. half a crop of lettuce that is 25 calories or 1% of your diet, but easily 10-20% of your food budget, and has relatively little ecological impact. I mean just take a look at Plenty's front page: lettuce and mint are front and centre, from a food impact point of view they might as well be producing spices. Not saying it isn't commercially viable, but they focus on a small part of our food chain). A minority is produced in anything other than typical greenhouses that have existed for many years and I'm not seeing staple foods like rice or corn produced this way. Things like the vertical farm by growing power are as far as I know just a concept, pretty similar to the other 1 million urban farm buildings created by 1 million clueless design students. (with all due respect, as I've studied to create an urban farm building myself in my own city!)

Thanks for the info. Since you seem to have some knowledge on the topic, do you happen to know how they determined that Plenty produced "crops at yields 530 times greater than that of a typical field"? It seems like there should be a more nuanced discussion around that number judging by the healthy skepticism in the comments. Any thoughts appreciated!

It is quite a claim - I wonder if it doesn't rely on one, a comparison of the footprint of the structure vs. the same area of farm field (which obviously favors the vertical farm), and two the difference between growing things in a protected, controlled indoor environment vs. a field with weather, insects, etc.

Not quite the same as pure vertical farming, but greenhouse + aquaponics + high levels of automation seems to work well for certain varieties of vegetables that naturally vine. E.g. like the Houwelings tomato farm:

http://www.houwelings.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRyBKWqLzI8

But that still limits you to naturally vining crops (so that you can keep growing the plant longer than normal and automate the extension of the vine), natural light for the greenhouse, etc. No way a tomato would thrive under artificial light, they love the sun too much :)

>greenhouse + aquaponics + high levels of automation seems to work well

Indeed, that's a big point in the video. Artificially lit farming can't compete with field production or heated/unheated greenhouses.

link to time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&t=34m14s

Great video. My major takeaway: vertical farming is not economical for many crops due to the cost of electricity. Another takeaway: vertical farming might work well for some crops that are mostly water by weight and have low energy requirements (e.g. bazel, lettuce).

I wonder how the numbers work out. I guess they'd want to avoid (1) limiting themselves to certain crops and (2) limiting themselves to specific geographical areas in order to make their market as large as possible.

The short article doesn't provide info about the technology to be used in "indoor farming", so I can't say too much about it.

However based on past experience with growing crops under artificial light, I wonder if the investment makes sense. There are a number of issues that have to be addressed, the most urgent is providing enough light for plants to grow. Sunlight is very expensive to replicate with human-made light sources, the energy requirements are steep even with the most efficient illumination available.

Indoor culture is still subject to "standard" problems like insects, plant diseases, nutrient and water supply requirements. These are handled routinely in growing "under glass" so probably nothing novel in it for indoor production.

Except for human interplanetary travel, the applications for "indoor growing" are hard to imagine. It used to be people would grow cannabis indoors where doing so was illegal, the priced fetched for the product justified the expense of the operation. For food crops, who would pay the high cost that has to be charged just to break even?

One year I successfully produced a small bounty of tomatoes in the dead of winter under artificial light. When all was done and said I calculated the 5cm tomatoes were worth about $25 each ($30 adjusted for inflation). Even with economies of scale and better technology, who would pay $10 or more for a mere tomato when it's readily available at a nearby grocery for a tenth the cost?

If I'm somehow missing the boat, I'm sure someone will lend me a clue.

What kind of light were you using?

I currently use 5w LED grow lights for garden vegetable hydroponics. They are very cost effective. At about 12p/kwh, make it easy and say lights on for 10 hours a day, that would be 1 kwh every 20 days per light, so 12p per 20 days per light.

From what I understand from people who need to also provide heat to their crops, what they save in electricity cost with LEDs, they end up spending in heating costs. So in some cases it can be a bit of a wash

At the time I was using metal halide/HP sodium lamps. Not as efficient as LED to be sure (LED gives >1.5 times the output per watt) but at scale, even with LED, the energy input required remains substantial. LED does have advantages, e.g., easier to supply illumination at plant level, but indoor growing is still not a cheap or easy thing to accomplish.

For what it's worth, Iceland, right at the polar circle, is particularly proud of their tomato production.

The answer here seems to be 'free energy', in this case due to volcanoes. You can read interesting articles online which detail the experiences.

I would assume this is not for everyone. I would suspect that the main customers would be people not hooked up to the grid, that generates their own energy. As storage costs are steep, using overhead to grow plants seems like a good way to do it. Also, there are many remote areas where during winter or certain periods it is hard to access. Having your own source of vegetables might be important.

The company that develops and improves technology for in-home growing can also think about providing its solutions to space missions, including colonisation.

I doubt if the mentioned examples are worth $200M, but it might be they have an amazing business/growth plan.

If you're in a remote area, why not use a regular greenhouse?

Not all areas let you do this. I am talking about difficult remote, like mountain ranges, lighthouses, isles of the cost of Scotland etc. Not all remote means woods and fields around.

Greenhouses work all the way to the arctic circle. At which point your not going to be getting much energy from solar power. (One trick is to use reflectors to collect more sunlight then concentrate it onto a smaller area, same result as having solar power at a tiny fraction of the cost.) Other option is to use a lot of insulation then tilt the structure. ex: http://waldenlabs.com/5-northern-greenhouse-examples/

Further, solar power takes the same area as you can use to grow crops anyway.

FWIW Iceland gets about 4 hours of daylight near the winter solstice, not a generous amount to be sure. Still, it reduces the requirement for artificial illumination, and with "free" energy from geothermal sources it may be practical enough to grow under glass with supplemental LED illumination. Obviously most anywhere in the US will get more winter daylight which should make greenhouse culture easier to pursue.

Though I couldn't get the link you gave to cooperate, I have seen examples of cold weather greenhouse installations before, so I know that it can work.

You could get a wind power for example, that requires less quality space than solar.

Wind turnbines don't scale down very well. The intermittent nature is also a poor fit for growing plants without storage.

But, if you have excess power from a large turbine it could work.

PS: Solar has surprisingly high energy density. Try running some numbers for this stuff.

> However based on past experience with growing crops under artificial light, I wonder if the investment makes sense. There are a number of issues that have to be addressed, the most urgent is providing enough light for plants to grow. Sunlight is very expensive to replicate with human-made light sources, the energy requirements are steep even with the most efficient illumination available.

Um... How much is premium pot per ounce? That's what they are going to be growing. Indoors.

Sure, but that's the thing, costs make growing "ordinary" crops impractical. The economics of the cannabis industry are probably going to change as legalization spreads. It's unclear, certainly to me, what that will do re: small growing operations in the future. We'd need to hear from an expert on that subject.

Since indoor farming is best for low caloric leafy greens, I assumed the long term strategy of these companies was based on the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. As in, grow leafy veggies or tomatoes in vertical, urban farms for now to work out the logistical and scale issues, then switch to substantially higher value crop as the political situation changes.

Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride.

I can't believe I had to scroll all the way down here to find this comment. If true, then this is a variation of land banking, but I agree with you on how unstable the political picture is at the moment for pot legalization, hence making this business model a little dicey.

However, I've yet to run across an explanation that squares the "they're positioning themselves for growing pot" hypothesis with the question, "why indoors?". If pot is legalized, why grow it more expensively indoors, when it can be another cash crop for far cheaper outdoors?

Because premium pot is "sinsemilla" (kept without seeds) in order to increase the psychoactive substance production. Sometimes pollination occurs even at indoor very controlled setups, good luck trying to grow sinsemilla in open field.

More control over the product. You can grow "clones" of a plant which effectively make them identical to each other but if one gets more light, more humidity, literally just about anything, it can alter the resulting trichomes and terpenes. By controlling more variables you can have a slightly more reliable product.

And people can get very picky about their weed.

> Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride.

I think it's too late for this to happen. As it turns out, people -- of all color, income, creed -- love weed and so culturally, it's become more and more acceptable.

I haven't heard of Plenty before. At first I thought they wanted to build indoor farms in cities, but I guess you could still build them someplace else (where real estate is fairly cheap) and make turnaround faster by taking advantage of indoor technology instead of using fields. [The articles mentions LocalGarden and FarmedHere, which I guess is where my impression came from.]

Is that where they hope to make their money - getting consumers to pay for fresher food? Or else, can they grow better produce indoors? Just trying to understand their value proposition.

Not long ago I was reading about a different thing called Farmbot. There's a discussion online about how much area you'd need to grow all your own food. They calculated something like 250 square meters using black beans. I was really impressed by how much space food production takes up. It's funny to think that just to survive, each of us living in a city depends on a big chunk of land somewhere else.

https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot-grow...

A few things make this a good value prop:

- It's much easier to grow plants inside because you don't have to worry about weird weather like frost or insects or fungus etc.

- You can claim organic status and that puts you in a higher price bracket

- You don't need to spend anywhere near as much on transportation so that saves you lots of cash

- You can have much tighter control of supply/demand dynamics (for instance ship smaller batches) because of local proximity

I'm sure there are more but those are the ones that spring to mind.

It's also possible to control a plant's life cycle, and harvest multiple times per year.

On the other hand, it's rare that the economics favor artificial light. Until energy becomes truly cheap, farms are mostly better off with the big fusion reactor in the sky.

One advantage I heard is the lights in these vertical farms only emit the wavelengths plants absorb while solar panels absorb across all wavelengths

They try to make solar panels absorb across as broad a spectrum as possible, but they don't absorb everything by default. It's an ongoing research goal to add spectrum without increasing cost.

Agriculture LEDs are designed to only emit 'growing' wavelengths. But the efficiency losses in converting sunlight to electricity via solar (20% typical) and from electricity to LED light (better, but not great) don't make it any better than growing in a glasshouse.

Would it be practical to make a vertical farm that takes advantage of the sunlight available, and just supplements it in the obscured areas? A vertical greenhouse kind of thing?

The answer is "yes", to a degree. Do a google image search for "aeroponics epcot center" and you will see some in action.

A few things that make it less good value:

- Its not new tech, its greenhouses with indoor lighting

- Its an enclosed large monoculture of plants, which means you are prone to pest and fungus. [see note]

- It has a very large electricity demand (heat and electricity)

- It is labour intensive.

[note]

growing plants in the city is difficult, mainly because the food triangle is so distorted. In central london there are loads of aphids from the lime trees, and lots of powder mildew.

Now considering these setups are aimed at green leafy rapid growth plants, you're going to be spending lots of importing ladybirds. (not much you can do about powder mildew though)

I've been led to believe you'd be best served with a clean room setup of some level, clean clothes and all.

edit: anyway, within the city is a ridiculous proposal at scale, if housing is scarce already. Except for huge price differentials as from cannabis.

The clean room would explain the cost. if the yield is really 500x traditional farms, that explains why its still more expensive than "organic" produce

Add the tasteless flavorless variety the indoor garden produce. All those shiny indoor grown roma tomatoes imported from Canada so bland and flavorless in taste.

There's no shortage in players in this space: Alterrus (built Vancouver's vertical farm, filed bankruptcy), infarm (Germany), aerofarms (US), growup (UK).

There are lots of issues to settle with vertical farming. One is organic labelling, which is N/A for detached soil in most (all?) countries. They can't compete in the non-organic market.

There's currently nothing "sustainable" or "ecologic" about these indoor farms. They are used to grow leisure low-calorie high price ingredients for hipsters.

Assuming they manage the convince a large player in the organic retail biz to play they can create some sort of a "label" and go from there. Not that big of an issue.

Big enough of an issue for everyone that's tried so far it seems.

This is not how food labelling usually works.

For the current state of hydroponics in the US: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to-we...

The article says the USDA would make a decision on April 19th of this year but I can't find what that decision was. Do you know?

Yeah, I was wondering about the organic labelling. Also about the claim that there are "no pesticides or chemicals of any kind used in the cultivation of Plenty’s crops". Presumably they have to add nutrients to the water?

At first glance, it seems attractive to put a giant CO2 sink in urban areas where it can reduce those pesky greenhouse gasses. But on closer inspection you will find that they actually pump CO2 into these facilities to improve crop growth.

>a giant CO2 sink

Just to set the numbers straight:

  Very clean US city: 10^10 [Kg*CO2/year]
  Absurdly hefty tree, in his prime: 10^2 [kg*CO2/year]
  vertical farm: _____

Such is the impact of the giant sink.

It's not a sink.

I am amazed and wish them luck, but it's almost impossible to imagine the economics of this. Whatever equation you write up there are at least two impossible factors: indoor land vs. outdoor "land" price is like 4000-10000 times higher, and growth time / logistics time is like 1000? I can imagine this in a fine restaurant though, picking a tomato in front of your eyes and chopping it, not too shabby!

As others here have pointed out, it undoubtedly only makes economic sense in a few niche scenarios right now. Premium hyper-local urban boutique veggies used in small quantities, or perhaps supplementing MREs in very remote, isolated military/industrial compounds (possibly including Mars?).

However, if we were facing the specter of a global nuclear winter - or similar effects from a large asteroid impact, ground/water pollution, etc. - I think something would be worked out with regard to the 'cost of renting' large indoor spaces.

This round is likely to be a combination of equity, debt and non-dilutive capital like project finance -- and it is not the first 9-figure deal in indoor ag, just the first made public this way. Indoor ag is growing quickly and investor appetites are up.

I am co-founder of a venture-backed indoor ag company. Here is a good summary of the "on the ground" view authored from the woman who runs Indoor Ag Con where Plenty presented a couple months ago: https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor-ag.html

The calorie problem is true. You can't feed the world on leafy greens. Many startups are trying to combine aquaponics to provide protein with leafy greens. Those startups are not as far along as Plenty.

Cannabis is great but the cost and price are both on an almost inevitable path to commodification. It's high-value now but it will not always be high value.

Insects may be the greatest area for advancement in indoor ag. Insects can be used for protein, vitamins and nutrients and calories from fat concentrations.

The real advantage is something analogous to alternative energy's advantages: distributed infrastructure with lower risk and lower volatility.

SoftBank is on a rip, wow.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/t...

The country has negative interest rates. That money has to go to work somewhere.

SoftBank raised $100 billion (!!) for investment: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/20/softbank-vision-fund-first.... It's no wonder that SoftBank seems like it participates in many startup funding rounds.

This seems like a bad idea - there are only so many good startups at any given moment to fund, so a lot of the money will go towards non-viable startups.

There was a question posted in the techcrunch comments section regarding Nitrogen fertiliser from natural gas being used heavily in vertical farms such as this. I understand thats the case for a lot of agriculture regardless. That having been the case, regardless of how 'green' these companies try to go, aren't they really just using fossil fuels en mass the same as everyone else ?

It's no different than shipping your product in plastic containers.

Sure, there's a dead dinosaur somewhere up the supply chain but unless whatever your company's industrial process is is incredibly inefficient it's not a big deal.

>Sure, there's [fossil fuels] somewhere up the supply chain but... it's not a big deal.

It is if you want sustainable food production.

An unsustainable system is by definition in the process of destroying itself. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to continue having food for generations to come.

This smells like a long play on cannabis. As it becomes further legalized across the country the demand will grow for suppliers.

Farming startup that literally raises money is kinda fun.

Growing money on... leafy plants?

Their idea is very cool. their logo looks like a toilet paper brand.

Indoor farms makes sense to me as a dual-use house plant, i.e. if I'm going to have house plants, they may as well be edible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com