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Comment by Osiris30 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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!)

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

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.

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.

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