Comment by danblick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danblick | Hacker News Reader

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.

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