ZipGrow: Vertical farming/urban agriculture system
shop.zipgrow.com
shop.zipgrow.com
The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem.
You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants.
Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced:
- pump dying - Leak in base causing all water gone in 24 hours - clogged emitters - water choosing off route through tower and not hitting the plants on top - emitters getting blown off causing water to spray outside tower - circuit breakers trip from pump
Overall I’ve probably lost half of everything I’ve planted in a zipgrow.
A professional operation with a daily maintenance routine could probably use them, but they are no panacea.
Soil is an amazing technology.
If you're an average person who isn't interested in dedicating their life to hydroponics, the Aerogarden is going to be the safer bet. It's small-ish, it's simple, it has a nice touch screen and beeps reminders at you.
I've build several of these over the years. There's no need to spend extra money. But the soil and the sun are free if you can get it and imo better.
0: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
You can grow using media such as sand, rocks, water, air, sponge, even packing peanuts. And in terms of fertilizer, it's the same as traditional farming except they have to be water-soluble. I spent a lot of time researching hydroponics, and once you peel back the layers, it really is simple with no magic involved.
Edit. Obviously this might be different for root vegetables like potatoes (they don't do well sitting in water). Though I've seen some articles with NASA attempting them with some luck in soil-less media.
Except carbon which they get from the air.
>the taste is identical
Identical to what? Strawberries grown in boron deficient soil taste worse than strawberries grown in soil with adequate boron. There is no yield difference, the plant does not die from the low boron. But it is unable to make large enough quantities of certain flavonoids that contribute to the flavor of the berries. We do not know how to synthetically feed plants in hydroponic situations well enough to even get optimal yield, much less optimal flavor or nutrition. Maximum yields from healthy soil still exceed maximum yields from synthetic fertilization.
>There is no "magic" inside soil other than its a media that happens to allow nutrients to exist next to the roots that absorb them, while allowing the plant to support its own weight and stay fixed.
That is a really unfortunate misconception. The difference is very real, but it is science not magic. Soil is not an inert media, it is a massive and complex ecosystem with an entire food web. Fungi actually penetrate the roots of plants and directly exchange nutrients and energy with them. Microbes can create entire amino acids, and directly give them to plants in exchange for glucose. This is very different from an inert medium that simply holds ions in water for plants to absorb. Hormones released by the plant roots appear to change the organic acid production of certain fungi, which affects how much of which minerals are solublized from the mineral component of the soil (dirt). Millions of years of co-evolution have created a system where plants are able to direct microbes to meet their specific nutritional needs at any particular time. In the process, these microbes defend the plants they have formed these symbiotic relationships with from other microbes, such as those that cause fungal diseases like blight.
>it's the same as traditional farming except they have to be water-soluble
They have to be water-soluble with conventional farming too. This is the big problem with conventional agriculture, it is really just industrial scale hydroponics done using the ground as a cheap medium. Traditional farming predates synthetic fertilizer and relied on soil.
on edit: example remarking on freshness being a feature https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723373
Just plant a tomato in a pot, put it by the window and wait. I could find you citation about the "freshness" of your garden products, but nothing beat experiencing it for yourself.
Hydroponics and LEDs are good for mass-producing a bit of basil and a lot of tomatoes, but the taste is just not there. They're bland, and unsavory.
For those interested in starting your own farm or just gardening I'd highly recommend "UpStart Farmers" [2]. A friend of mine help's moderate it and is really focused on helping people learn vertical farming and aquaponics. They have an enormous selection of content regarding various aspects such as nutrient mixes, dealing with pests, etc. The community is also active and helpful to each other.
FYI: This is from the Canadian licensee's of the original Bright Agrotech that was acquired by Plenty Ag [3]. I'm bullish that indoor farming will be a big boon in providing more localized and therefore fresh and nutritional vegetables and leafy greens for much of the world's population. The economics are slowly improving with LED efficiency increases and capital infusion to scale farms.
1: https://search.proquest.com/openview/ccf876147b3e8a224da6770... 2: https://www.upstartfarmers.com 3: https://www.plenty.ag/the-feed/plenty-acquires-bright-agrote...
Do you know what happened to the company? Did they go bankrupt and have to liquidate their IP?
Their first "major" greenhouses were behind the building that my company was in. Really interesting people.
People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
As far as the urban agriculture crowd goes, they're concerned about the length of their logistics lines to their tables. Raspberries grown half a mile down the street in winter is better for the environment than flying them in from another hemisphere... provided you get the energy costs of the indoor farming system low enough.
Aside from environmental effects, it’s also just a more secure logistics chain. A person needs water, food, and shelter to survive. Sometimes it feels strange to me that the trend of the past centuries has been to increase the distance between a person and those sources — to introduce more points of failure between you and the things you need in order to survive.
In the UK you can grow crops all year round outdoors [0], and the growing seasons could easily be extended with a passive greenhouse (polycarbonate is more insulating than glass). You can also use tried and tested preservation techniques like canning and fermenting to keep food for other seasons.
[0] https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/vegetables-all-year-round
Vertical farming only really works as either artistic preference for maximum visual appeal or the kind of science fiction where you assume only a small handful of technology advanced.
But that’s hardly required as solar panels to LED’s can’t reach 100% efficiency. Further, the limited lifespan of solar panels and LED’s means you need to cover their construction etc which requires resources.
Ultimately, looking at theoretical limits it’s simply a net loss.
PS: Monoculture is far from required, it’s an outgrowth of current automation rather than having any theoretical advantage.
Those blurple lights are just awful, and not only do the LEDs have far less energy efficiency being old tech, but their supposed "optimal" wavelengths are anything but. They are blasting out extremely narrow wavelengths of light and trying to make it more continuous by using a bunch of slightly different narrow range colors, but it doesn't work as well as one would hope, especially when they are coming from different point sources.
That 1200 watts is only really covering a 6 by 6 foot square worth of growth area at about 35 watts a square foot at 200 lumens per watts. It could be slightly larger but only if you want most plants to grow extremely slow or be really weak, and you can go up to 50 watts per square foot before requiring supplemental CO2 but not all plants like that amount of light.
Converting that to 1 acre worth of coverage, which is what is about what is needed to feed a single human for one year, you are looking at about 1,500,000 watts running 12-18 hours per day. That is a ridiculous amount of energy. Even assuming you can get away with 1/3 of that area by super careful and efficient growth year round that is still a half million watts in lighting costs alone. Not to mention all the other work and costs.
I don't see indoor farms being good for anything other than extreme specialty plants or extremely fragile plants until we can pull essentially limitless energy out for far cheaper than we can get even with fossil fuels.
This is for an indoor leafy green, mostly sallad, aquaponics growing facility.
Perhaps with a bigger more automated setup I could do slower growth, but there are other costs like ventilation or dehumidification or possibly heating or cooling too that don't really change a lot whether the plants are growing fast or slow, which makes faster growth possible optimal financially, even if I might be losing out a few percentage worth of light absorption.
And that's sort of the problem. The normal centralised supply chain optimises for normal usage patterns, and adapting to abnormal usage patterns causes widespread issues in the short term.
A decentralised supply chain is (at least in theory) better able to adapt to local distrubances.
You're absolutely right. De-centralized systems can definitely respond better to local disturbances. Conversely, they're sometimes more vulnerable to larger scale disturbances that can more easily overwhelm the capacity of smaller systems to absorb shocks.
The reason decentralization doesn't make a lot of sense is because we need to produce food cheap and at scale to feed the world. Putting thousands of dollars into vertical farming equipment that doesn't fit into the apartments of most people on the planet is kind of silly.
There's also simply division of labour at work here. It's uneconomical for large portions of the population to spend their time farming.
It's essentially just a recreational hobby for wealthy people or maybe reasonable on a Mars Colony, but here it does not make much sense.
Note that this product site touts how much lettuce the system can grow.
More radical claims about how vertical farms will reduce CO2 emissions or feed a growing world population are aspirational to the point of delusion. Vertical farming isn't going to replace the calories that people get from potatoes and beans grown in big plots of dirt outdoors. If you ate potatoes grown in a nearby vertical farm instead of ones grown in Idaho and shipped across the country, you'd actually be increasing your carbon footprint.
It takes only a little energy to move a potato a thousand miles cross-country. It takes a lot of energy to grow a potato under artificial light. Even though renewable energy is ~20x better in life cycle emissions than fossil energy, it takes more than 20x as much energy to grow potatoes under artificial light. From a CO2 life cycle perspective you're better off eating potatoes that had ordinary diesel powered tractors, trains, and trucks involved in their production and delivery than to eat potatoes that were grown in a wind-powered vertical farm next door to you.
AFAIK traditional artificial light sources do indeed dissipate much more energy for the same amount of 'useful light', and also produce so much heat that they cannot be placed near the plant.
Is artificial light mandatory in urban farming? Aren't some (non fiber-optics-based) "light tubes" able to transmit light along with the necessary UV?
Cities can be plenty dense while still having enough space for people to grow potatoes for themselves and their neighbors.
Another appeal is knowing exactly what goes into your food.
Furthermore, putting farms in urban buildings means that some urban businesses or residences will ha e to be moved further out, increasing pollution. In reality, this would move the pollution to the urban areas, and not reduce it.
Lastly, I can’t think of a reason that you’d know more about farming practices if it happens in an urban environment than in a rural environment
Given the (OP) solution, I was imagining having a broccoli wall in my apartment. This would give me a lot more insight into the farming practices as I would be growing it. Also, near zero transportation externalities.
Tractors are moving tens of thousands of pounds of material at a time and are extremely efficient for the energy they utilize. Tractors may seem like they are using ass tons of fuel from looks alone, people see the huge engine and big cab and chunks of large steel and think it just eats fuel to produce crazy tons of power, but many consumer cars have more horsepower than tractors and frivolously spend fuel on saving mere seconds in both acceleration and braking which are huge wastes. Tractors don't accelerate for long periods of time or waste tons of energy braking all the time just for personal convenience. Tractors are just geared down super low and built ultra-robust with zero concern for physical size. The run better and more efficient than car motors specifically because they didn't have to make any trade offs for compactness, weight, or engine and transmission form. How many cars have turbos and super-chargers? How many of them are tuned for fuel efficiency rather than peak performance? Tractors commonly have them for the sole purpose of fuel efficiency, they never lacked power in the first place because of the lack of other restraints.
I have yet to see salad roads, but would love to see it. Diversity is "weed" edibles would be awesome.
More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment...the benefits are pretty much endless. It isn't about "urban" but using what we have more efficiently.
Mirai ( http://miraigroup.jp/en/ ) states some benefits.
That's a bit of a misconception. Most people get the impression from the headlines that they produce a lot of food, but that is not really the case. The Netherlands is the world's second largest EXPORTER of "agricultural products", by dollar value. 10% of that is consulting and equipment. Another 10% is flowers. Those are not food. Even in the remaining 80%, it is mainly products that are high in monetary value, but low in land efficiency, like cheese and flavorless hydroponic tomatoes. The Netherlands actually only produces 50% of the calories needs of their population, and exports away a good chunk of that. They rely on importing staples to feed their population.
>More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment
The Netherlands model is none of those things. It is just used as a propaganda tool for a corporate greenwashing campaign to convince people that spending lots of money on environmentally destructive and wasteful technology is good for the environment, when it is actually being done because it is good for the bank accounts of a small minority of wealthy people.
Second, it's climate change which is making outdoor farming more and more difficult by the year, as well as a push towards higher efficiency. Also, having a garden (or being around nature, things growing) has been clinically shown to reduce stress in humans.
Third, it's MUCH less climate impact to transport renewably sourced electrons over a regional grid than it is to transport decaying produce in cold storage to a grocery store. Free sunlight is still cheap, but creates dependence on the seasonality (frequency, duration) which means a variety of crops are totally non-viable in certain hemispheres. Full outdoor growing has a much higher level of exposure to pests, requiring pesticides -- whereas indoor growing under lights gives you a higher level of defensibly without that risk.
Doing that in schools teaches kids about farming, about food, and how it gets on their table. I'm doing the same at home to teach my children the same.
Also in the times of the crisis you reduce the pressure to producers and shops by consuming your own instead of going to the shop.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3037719/turn-your-kitchen-into-a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzcC6zkDDiY
I think he got a lot of flack for pointing out that the zip-grow towers are way overpriced and you can DIY them yourself reasonably well. There really isn't anything too-complicated about the ZipGrow towers, other than that they use a sponge as a media.
Service, support, ease of use and setup, and, in the case of something that might be visible in a readily trafficked area, aesthetics.
If those things are not valuable to you (and they may not be) then you are not the target audience.
First, you should use food grade plastic, then there are lights, a pump, shelving, growing medium, fertilizer, ph adjustment, extension cords, timers, cups, air tubing, and air stone, and a bunch of other stuff.
Then you have to get it all home, double and triple check you are doing it correctly.
I don't think I spent $500, but no way anyone can put together an equivalent system for $25. Like most things, there's a lot more complexity than people realize.