Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

Feels like one of those new industry starting up presuming that carbon will have a dramatic effect on the market and policy.

Food sovereignty is a thing - an open air farm in Africa has geopolitical and weather risks. Not to mention the shipping carbon footprint and freshness issues.

Far less water, and for places that don't have that much good farmland it's a game changer.

> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Maybe due to things like increased CO2 contributions, poor quality control, and decreased food security?

Anyway, Taastrup is not prime real estate in Copenhagen. It's one of the poorer Copenhagen suburbs.

Also why bother with all that waste just to produce something that has basically zero nutritional value?

I don't know if I would call Taastrup prime real estate :D

I'm also sceptical if it will be sustainable. After all, someone needs to produce the solar panels, metals building construction etc. On the other hand taking water from Afrika might not be the best idea.

Same, but at the same time, it's preparing for a future where the borders and international shipping may be impossible, where overpopulation means we can no longer use land for farming, and where farmland becomes unusable or at least unpredictable due to climate change. Plus something about colonizing space. It's far future and dystopian, but not improbable.

Anyway, it's not the most efficient way to grow food; I live in a country where they have tons of greenhouses. Also pretty energy intensive, but yields are great and predictable, meaning that despite being one of the smallest countries of the world, we're the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Basically we do a lot with what we have. Which is also (for me) a bit unexpected given that most of the areas I've lived in and driven through is grass for cattle.

I imagine it would work quite nicely in Iceland, with abundant energy and little (any?) arable land. It’s arguably better than mining Bitcoin with that energy.

You can also significantly decrease water use, which matters in places like the Middle East that may want to reduce their dependence on food imports, and that already use desalinization to get water.

Singapore doesn’t have a lot of space but could also want to decrease its dependence on imports.

You can eliminate the risk of crop failures from drought / pests / freezes, and grow crops year round with lots of light, so yields can be quite high.

Local produce can be sold at a premium to high-class consumers, similar to the organic food industry.

And thinking farther out, this is an enabling technology for space colonization, so there’s a lot of growth potential in this technology.

Did you even read the article? Water consumption is 250 times less that typical agriculture flat fields.

Also, instead of using 1 meter square to grow 1 meter square of crops, you can use the same space to grow 14x the amount of crops.

> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Do we really need a repeat of the supply chains breaking down again to answer this question? African farmers were dismayed when their bumper crops were rotting in their fields because they couldn't export the crops or even sell the excess locally [0].

Livestock farmers also saw this as well [1].

It's hard to imagine that people haven't learned the value of having a robust local food supply chain, which is the one thing that I had hoped we had learned after the shortages and panic buying created during the 1st wave of COVID.

I agree that vertical farming has limitations, but it could be a useful adjunct to meet demand the typical soil based farming cannot deliver. Moreover, much like Holland's greenhouse farming the chances are most of it will be exported in exchange for other goods. Also, remember Denmark has a limited growing season that could in theory help them plan for larger scale operations, which they can partner with for Mars colonization as things develop in both sectors.

> I imagine it would work quite nicely in Iceland, with abundant energy and little (any?) arable land. It’s arguably better than mining Bitcoin with that energy.

Why not both? The excess heat from the mining could be used to have heated greenhouse/nurseries while still utilizing the excess heat and energy. This was working rather well in Canada [2].

0: https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/04/ghana-fa...

1: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/10/covid-19-has-ruined-pig-...

2: https://inhabitat.com/bitcoin-mining-powers-canadian-mans-in...

Earth: 29% Land, 71% Ocean

Land: 71% Habitable, 29% Not

Agricultural: 2.3% of all habitable land

Livestock: 8% of all habitable land

Looking at the stats, your question is very valid. We can drastically increase food production by marginally decreasing land dedicated for livestock and/or utilizing unused habitable land.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/11/Global-land-use-g...

Just farming in sunny places is also expensive and complicated. It's also vulnerable to drought, flooding, frost damage, pests, blockades, tailbacks at ports etc.

I'm lucky enough to live in one of the most food secure countries in the world, but not everyone is in the same position. There's value in having a food source near big population centres.

- 250x less water

- Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop

- Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs

- Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually almost always the case, to my knowledge

- 365 days a year of efficient production

- Good for the environment to save so much in transport

- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.

To be honest, the only con I see is that this perfectly automated gardens produce much less tasty food because they are given the exact amount of water and minerals needed to generate the product, but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.

Ground is a super expensive component of farming in Western Europe.

Investing in Africa adds transportation costs and with perishables a lot of tariffs and restrictions will apply that are much easier to solve on shorter distances.

Finally, there are non-economic reasons such as independence for food production, water efficiency, energy efficiency (including transportation) and quality control.

Personally I think that food should be grown as close to the point of consumption as feasible, if that's Africa for Europe then so be it but if it can be done closer then that's better.

> why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Climate change will make most of Africa uninhabitable?

The answer is very simple: Food is what is called strategic interest for a given country.

Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food.

E.g It is said that "Arab's spring" was about "people wanting freedom". It was really about food being ultra expensive in the north of Africa and speculators hoarding most of the rice and cereal in the world so they could benefit from the situation.

We have seen recently what happens when countries ignore strategic interests. US companies that made face mask and ventilators like 3M sent manufacturing overseas to places like China. When the Covid emergency broke, China did this:

1. China has higher priority to any other country. 2. If your country criticizes China(and the communist party CCP) in any way, you must censor them or there is no face mask for the people in your country. No censorship, no masks. 3. If necessary, China will nationalize factories. 4. The surplus will be sold to the highest bidder. China will send already paid cargo for higher bidders. 5. You praise China, even when the virus came from it. You demand no investigation.

That was self inflicted damage done by the West ignoring strategy 101.

You can not let other countries control your basic food supplies or anything strategic. Europe can not send most of their food by sea because the US has the biggest navy in the world. So if you do something they don't like, they just can block your supply chain and make food prices skyrocket and change governments so they become puppy States.

In fact, one of the secrets of US' success was that it could expand from the East Coast to the West by land with no European interference.

My question is, we know they expect to be profitable by a set date, but what will their prices be per pound? Does part of their plan include asking for a premium ?

Renewable energy will certainly spread to the shipping industry and that alone will increase the number of markets served. The key is opening these markets so farmers in Africa have more destinations for their goods as the pandemic has shown what happens when your existing market slows greatly.

Food is absolutely the most important, foundational aspect of any nation. It is so fundamental, that countries will rather create stockpiles and let it rot rather than risk running even the remote chance that they will run out of food. When you run out of food... everything breaks down, quite literally. It is thus in every nations interest to be as self-sufficient in their food production as possible.

This is a very welcome development. Currently, only countries blessed with large sizes and specifically large arable lands are even capable of being self sufficient in their food production. This kind of hyper localized food production might just be the answer for nations of the future that don't want their population or geo-political influence to be limited by their size.

Additionally, climate change has the possibility of severely disrupting both the production and supply chains for food. Being able to grow food anywhere, without worrying about soil fertility, is incredible.

For places like, say, UAE it could be national security issue (you are 9 meals away from a revolution). It's a great back up in case of natural disasters.

I don’t think LED lights are the ultimate solution. They could use light pipes during the day when it’s sunny to route sunlight from outside and distribute it inside possible using fiber optics.

Eg https://youtu.be/DN8GXTmR6RI

This is a passive system and would require little to no power.

Another argument is that produce has to be packed unripe in a truck to come all the way to copenhagen from spain without spoiling, which results in a usually bland product.

>Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

I think you are not fully grasping the logistics of your plan. Most of Africa is pretty much landlocked, meaning shipping needs to happen by road (that do not exist today). This alone makes your plan more expensive than vertical farms.

Logistics in the food industry is a very complicated mess, with timelines so tight that we need to hack the riping process by picking fruits early and have them ripe on route, which negatively affects the quality of the produce (and with that the price that the average consumer is willing to pay).

Counterintuitively, I have previously been told that you can actually grow more than one square meter of plants with one square meter of solar panels. The reason for this is that LED lighting can be designed to produce exactly the frequencies plants actually absorb, and distributed optimally through the day. Current solar technology isn't sufficient to make that cheaper than regular farming for staple crops, but I can certainly imagine it getting there for anything that's grown in a greenhouse today.

This is the criticism of farmers.

I know a guy who made a fool of himself for becoming an enthusiast, starting a company promoting vertical farming, only to find out the Economics don't work.

On a similar note I recommend engineers get Engineering jobs, not business jobs. The money is tempting, but you will never learn about specifications and quality metrics otherwise. (Note I'm not including programmers as engineers)

Plants use two (they're probably fine with just one) specific wavelenghts of light, so if you're solar power is broadband you can be saving energy this way.

Doing vertical farming on earth, lets us practice here, so we can do this on space colonies reliably later.

It's a luxury product and I'm pretty sure their market is restaurants. Since freshly harvested just tastes better, now good restaurant must source produce locally so are limited by seasons.

This opens the possibility of "farm" to plate under a few hours for what is out of season.

and how are you gonna ship fertilizers and ship out highly time sensitive produce from africa where theres no political stability and no roads,no qualified manpower and no law infrastructure?

also ,do you think it makes much sense flying cabbage to Holland from africa?

> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

That's where some of Europe's fruit and veg comes from now, more every year. However, in the long run I would question how sustainable a trade that effectively amounts to transferring water from Africa to Europe is, especially as African domestic markets grow.

I agree with you for the most part, but also do disagree. It's complicated. Like water consumption is absolutely far more efficient 10 to 100 times less water used per plant depending on the setup between outdoor to indoor hydroponics. The climate control factor is also a big plus. Sudden heat waves or cold snaps are not as big of a concern with indoor farming. Some places, protection from hail is a huge factor. Even just smoothing out the edges of harsh weather is a huge benefit. These are the tried, true, real world benefits that are both proven and economically efficient already in some small scale vertical farms along with large scale traditional farming plus with hydroponic farming. This doesn't even mention the year round, local supply of certain foods.

However, the electricity issue is the obvious problem along with the artificial light itself. The lights themselves to properly grow plants are not cheap and I saw a study that on an industrial scale, they're also not that reliable (lots of replacements). I have my doubts about the long term nutritional factor of using artificial light. We are evolutionary developed for plants that process the sun for their different forms of photosynthesis. I'd trust plants raised on the light of a fusion reactor more (tongue in cheek, chill). I did read something where researchers are trying to breed certain crops to respond better to artificial light, but I don't know at what stage they're at with it.

Wind energy is still not 100% reliable for obvious reasons and there's only a ~20% efficiency of solar right now on the commercial market (unless something has happened I don't know about). If you're aware of the conversation of energy, I doubt I need to really go into more of that. However, it's a good extra step forward for further market investment in renewables with essentially an extra market to purchase said products (still a win-win).

Without being a party pooper, I still see vertical farming as having potential. All crops? Probably not, to be honest and serious. 25% at least of produce that's available in your average market? Absolutely. We're just not there yet to achieve that, but you have to start someone to work out the "at-scale" and commercial viability issues. This is all good steps forward as long as you see it as such. If you think it more than that, then you're going to get disappointed and miss the lessons that can be learned.

Beating that dead horse, there are plenty of problems that need to be addressed. Plantagon comes to mind as to their failures, but that was a bit more money related due to not realizing the infrastructure requirements (plus, from the articles I read, I smell a bit of... corruption? con-artist? bullshit?). Respecting the problems at hand and trying to fix them is far better than just going, "We need to change everything to vertical farming now! You're a piece of shit if you think otherwise!" Which is kind of where a lot of these conversations and articles go. None of which is beneficial for anyone.

You're idea of investing in Africa is generally the tried and true commercial agricultural method of expanding food supplies. Nothing wrong with it, as long as you don't go Belgium's King Leopold II about it. But I'm not 100% against diversifying food supplies at some sacrifice to efficiency both short and long range in time and distance. I think the pandemic shows how important it is to never have "one source" of anything. The logistics dangers never show up in the good times, but they can make the bad times really bad. I like the vertical farm idea due to the decentralized concept.

There's pros and cons to the vertical farming movement. I don't believe we're at a point where a major portion of the food supply can come from it. I really think a decent portion (20%-30%) can come from it within the end of the 2020s with better economic efficiency than traditional farming. Beyond that, no one can really predict it without their personal biases playing a factor. Once we can shut up the fanboys and wannabe environmentalists who have bullshit degrees in nothing actually useful from spouting stupidity and diverting investments to con-artists, real progress can be made and some benefits can be seen relatively quickly. I want to double down on that statement, the over hype and fanboys do nothing good for any technology. Their rhetoric diverts investments from those who make real progress in a field to con-artist ponzi scheming assholes. The more emotionally charged something is, the more this happens.

It takes time to make the economics favorable by incrementally improving the technology. Once indoor vertical farming does become favorable, it will have huge benefits over outsourcing food production to Africa or elsewhere.

National security for one; it times of war no one can starve your population into submission by cutting off shipments of food into your country. Your crops are also more resilient to pestilence and disease if grown in a controlled indoor environment.

All this makes it a worthwhile line of exploration, no?

> Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Perhaps because the Danes rather be self-sufficient with respect to food, than depend on the development and continued cooperation of a country in Africa?

I personally have a deep love for the idea of mechanizing agriculture in a fully sustainable way to the point you could drop a few pods anywhere and provide healthy, nutritious and free food for any population, for free, forever. What a gift for our children that would be.

I think this kind of thing is really only economical for niche products like micro greens and fancy lettuce with high markups. It can be grown under perfect conditions, then transported and used the same day it's harvested.

So, pretty cool from a technical and culinary perspective, but it's never going to produce staple crops economically. It seems kind of silly to portray it as being particularly eco-friendly or as addressing concerns like food security.

6) reduce waste, stop feeding meat instead of people

Vertical farms start with salads ('crunchy water') because they are easy crops to start such a process with. Once established and verified they will for sure move away from just leafy greens. The typical plan for a startup in this domain runs in the decades, not just a few years, and they're pretty capital intensive compared to software start-ups. Think of the salad producing vertical farm as you would of an MVP for a SaaS company and it makes more sense.

> 5) make a system of payments that allows both mixed crops (ie fruit/lumber/nuts) as well as livestock and arable.

I don't understand that statement. Is that a tech/internet software payment solution ? Or do you mean that a farmer/breeder should be able to use his fields/pastures for either livestock and agriculture ?

Let us not make the best an enemy of the good. The overall benefits from vertical farming are good when implemented correctly. Sure it isn't a perfect solution that solves everything, but it is on the road to better solutions. And in my opinion a part of our future farming solutions.

6) Eat less meat.

Shit ton of land, water and other resources are used to grow grains just for the meat industry. If a portion of those resources are used to grow food for humans instead of animals, it would reduce a ton of waste and pollution.

Yep, it's all about cost of energy. The solar farm that powers a vertical farm will always take up more space than the vertical farm saves.

We have a nice podcast episode about this, maybe this interests you: https://www.predictions-podcast.com/2020/03/29/vertical-farm...

Someone claimed a while back most of these vertical farms would switch to growing weed once it became legal in the state(s) they have farms.

I’m not sure if any other crop beside weed would turn a significant profit. You might be able to get a government contract to grow some other controlled substance and turn a small profit.

The only other way it would work would be if it was a co-op owned by residents or subsidized by the local government.

What are some high-calorie/nutritional value plants that work well in vertical farming? Maybe if those were grown cheaply enough people would adapt their recipes to incorporate them.

In this case the money seems to come from e.g. the danish government VC fund Vækstfonden.

There was a very similar play in Sweden that went bankrupt last year after consuming a lot of tax money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantagon

Two reasons. Leafy greens are easy to grow hydroponically because they grow quickly. The problem with them is that they have nearly zero calories.

People invest money into growing them hydroponically because they don't keep, or transport well, which makes them incredibly expensive out-of-season. The high margins make it economical. Nobody's going to be growing rice hydroponically, for instance, because rice retails for 75 cents a pound.

Size is the main thing, plants like corn haven't had much in the way of vertical constraints so until we adapt new shorter breeds of them you can only grow so much per cubic meter and the economics doesn't work out compared to an open field. There's also the economics of how much goes into the non edible parts of the plant, this is much lower in leafy greens. Aside from that they just don't keep as well as more robust crops, so they have to be a lot fresher.

The main issue is providing enough lighting/energy rather than growth medium.

Everything is possible to grow with hydroponics although it is a little tricky.

Anyone doing this in New York? I walk past the empty Hudson Yards every day.

Not really. 91M acres of corn is grown in the US annually. I don't see that being put indoors. It would be best to grow high calorie and protein rich food in indoor farms. I could imagine cell cultured meat or insect farms really disrupt farming. From a cost standpoint, vertical plant farms will have enormous difficulty competing with any outdoor farms.