2-Acre Vertical Farm Run by AI and Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm | Hacker News Reader

2-Acre Vertical Farm Run by AI and Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm

intelligentliving.co

418 pointswrycoder389 comments

So far, everyone growing vertically is growing crops that are almost entirely water because they're the only things that grow fast enough to turn a profit. They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local. It's a quality-differentiated product, not a solution to food scarcity or security.

Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent, and it's gonna be really hard when competing with the free rain, free sun, and insane automation available for field agriculture already. Even Plenty with SoftBank's extra 'nutrients' tops out at strawberries. See https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr... for some raw data on unit economics.

One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired, or https://farm.bot/ which encourages hardware hacking and food supply awareness.

> Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent

Every new tech has its Hype Cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Don't you think vertical could have an impact in rain/fertile land starved areas like the israeli desert?

With infinite energy, Israel could have infinite water. They already have unlimited light and land. This is an energy intensive technology.

So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less.

(I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)

Or maybe more traditional approach of greenhouses? Which should have relatively similar case of handling evaporative losses... And if conversion losses of Sun->EV->lights aren't too horrible, you could even cover these with solar panels... What is even the efficiency of electricity used by vertical farms?

I'd expect a greenhouse in the desert to need an enormous amount of ventilation to prevent overheating.

You could probably recover some of the water from the exhaust air with a dehumidifier. I'm not sure if that would use less power than air-conditioning the whole structure, but at that point you're pretty much back to indoors farming anyway.

Bubble foam insulation is the way to go in deserts. This is where you pump a soap water foam in between gaps of greenhouse plastic. When you want to block light/heat, fill that wall with foam. Drain to allow radiation.

Water can be recuperated with an enthalpy wheel.

> question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms

Nobody desalinates & floods fields, surely. (That's what you do if you live before the invention of water-pipe, or have a use-it-or-lose-it quota.) The Israelis are I think world leaders in growing stuff outdoors with minimal water, delivered directly to the roots. And indoors, they have greenhouses, just not the same design as in cold climates obviously.

If you deliver just the water the plants need you'll run into soil salinity problems eventually.

I'm no farmer, but both surface and buried drip irrigation are widely done. So I guess they solved that?

This sounds the “why Tesla will never work argument.” Selling rich people what they want as a starting place to pioneer new technology is a good strategy even if it doesn’t feel good to you.

Nothing wrong with starting there as long as there is a path to profitability with a mass market product! Do you think there is one for vertically grown potatoes? Or corn? Both are 10-100x less valuable per pound and both take 10-100x longer to grow, 10-100x more water, and 10-100x more energy. I am not sure Tesla was battling the same order of magnitude of order of magnitudes.

The market doesn’t really absorb boutique veggies well. How many people at a farmer’s market can sell micro greens before it becomes uneconomical?

Meanwhile Tesla has a waiting list for virtually every one of their vehicles and is the only one selling them.

It's not a question of pioneering, it's a question of base resource inputs. Tesla can promise an electric car but they can't promise one that costs less than the lithium and metals required to manufacture it, let alone the cost of labor. Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible.

Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California.

It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.

Speaking of base resource inputs, I would be concerned with the soil erosion inherent in intensive farming methods. By every estimate I've seen of the rate of topsoil depletion[0], we'll reach a crisis point in agriculture within half a century. Could vertical farming, perhaps paired with a less pollutative energy source like nuclear power, stave off that eventuality? I know a lot of people push organic farming as the solution, but it doesn't appear to be productive enough to feed a growing global population.

[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1052831

You still have the problem that you need to be able to grow plants beyond lettuce and strawberries. No one is growing cereal grains or root crops vertically. It’s not economical viable.

Why is that, exactly?

Potatoes, Carrots, Corn, Mushrooms... All grow fine in buckets. All grow fine hydroponically.

I'm not sure I see an obviously barrier preventing all of these from being vertically farmed.

Quite simply, the energy and capital costs of growing bushel of wheat are more than the bushel price of wheat. This difference isn’t just a little, but a lot. If I’m reading the table right in page 19 of the appendix linked, it’s as bad as 37x in 2019, and only projected to fall to 4.6x by 2050.

Paper https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19131

Appendix https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/200265511...

This might be a stupid question, but could a vertical farm use systems of mirrors to direct sunlight to the crops? That way the vertical farms can collect sunlight from a wide area. Maybe the mirrors could be positioned in such a way as to take up less ground space overall than an equivalent flat farm.

If the sun shines sideways then you don’t need mirrors. (In many places in the North, at this time of year, the sun occasionally shines sideways.)

That doesn't seem very plausible: fundamentally all accessible sunlight hits the ground somewhere or other (until we start talking about space mirrors and things like that), so while you can use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (as solar thermal plants do) you can't really beat collecting x amount of solar radiation from y square meters of ground. You can build a tall structure that collect the sunlight hitting the side of it, but obviously that's going to block said sunlight from a correspondingly large area of ground in its shadow; at extreme latitudes where the sunlight mostly comes in sideways you get more concentrated sunlight that way (at the cost of an even bigger shadow), but I doubt it'd be worth the overhead.

Mirrors can neither increase photosynthetic efficiency nor reflect more light than they receive, so to get an equivalent amount of light you'd need a massive structure of mirrors the size of the fields you replace. There might be some clever optimizations possible, but between cooling to keep the plants from burning and occlusion from nutrient delivery systems, it'd be a very large net loss once capital costs are figured in

> Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible.

Actually, they do: subsidies distort the hell of out the price discovery mechanisms in Markets. At no point in time can a farmer sell a 1lb(~1/2Kg) of tomatoes at the hieght of season for for $1 or less, much less in the off-season. And yet they do because of the distortions in correctly pricing the inputs, transport and labour as a result of wanting to remain on the crop insurance and subsidy program.

This is seen the World over in various ways too, in the EU farmers are paid to let their fields go fallow and orchids entirely neglected for seasons; it's one of the biggest reason why Farming as a profession has an average age of 60+ World wide as any younger person not born into the Lifestyle or from a Legacy Farming family will quickly see how impractical it is to operate with this system in what amounts to near subsistence levels of poverty. As an outsider going into the Industry for culinary and ecological activist reasons it's incredibly daunting when you realize that in 100 years we created a system in which less than ~2% of the World's population feeds the ~98% and how fragile this system is and how much of a miracle it hasn't blown up in our faces long ago.

It's maintained by fanciful economic machinations and make-believe accounting created by Nation-states to essentially keep a slave labour class in place and avoid peasant revolts due to mass hunger to the detriment of everyone--and that often breaks down, see EU dairy farmer protests in 2012/13/20, and the widespread Indian suicides in the early 2000s and now the farmer revolts happening in New Dehli. Not to mention the amount of subsidies there are for multinationals to sell processed junk into the Market and sold to children school programs at an inflated prices that have resulted in lots of disease and have actually made the average population shorter: a possible inference and consequence of undernourishment due to consuming nutrient deficient food.

The Tesla model, while only slightly relevant due to State and Federal subsidies for EVs, is not painting as good as a picture as an analogy for the reasons you think if you have an understanding of either or both Industries: I happen to have worked in both.

But suffice it to say that up until recently (Federal subsidy of $7500 expired in 2019) in the US where most Tesla deliveries take place--specifically CA-- and where most of the fruit in the US is grown in (Central Valley) it is safe to say that EXACTLY both of those things happened to a certain degree.

Farming works at scale. Back the day when i was a kind, there were a hell of a lot of part-time farmers in bavaria. Working a day job in a factory and running a farm, usually an old family farm, as a side business. That changed, now most of those I know rented out their farmable land to larger full-time farming neighbors. none of these people were necessariyl poor, so. At least going by their equipment and cars, even back when cars were bought and not leased. It still is a hell of a job, with basically no free time.

I think it is different for others regions, were soil is less well suited and getting the necessary scale is difficult.

That’s not how the Tesla subsidies works and that is a naive interpretation of what I said. The tax credits were a transaction between the Federal government and Tesla’s customers. Tesla still got paid the $7,500 and there was no fanciful economics there.

> That’s not how the Tesla subsidies works and that is a naive interpretation of what I said. The tax credits were a transaction between the Federal government and Tesla’s customers. Tesla still got paid the $7,500 and there was no fanciful economics there.

Actually it isn't, and you are only focusing on the Federal Tax credit whereas I purposely mentioned California's EV program in my statement (but didn't elaborate for brevity's sake) that deducts the sticker price for the end consumer in various ways [0] with State/Local Government based subsidies that make Tesla's product (and other EVs for that matter) more accessible to the end consumer.

In the end I think its one of the few examples of a good use of taxes, unlike the Ag based subsidy model; but to deny it isn't a direct benefit to Tesla is to deny reality as most EV and Hybrid deliveries take place in California by a significant margin and thus proves my actual claim that you see these practices in Ag as well.

https://electrek.co/2020/11/17/california-adds-1500-incentiv...

Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress, new technology or not.

Wow, I wrote a three paragraph argument in response to the parent comment that is not nearly as explanatory or elegant as yours, but essentially says the same thing. I think the parent commenter is looking at this problem from the MBA perspective, not an engineering one.

I'm having a hard time finding a point in your comment? The point is to replace regular farming, and OP is debunking that.

I think the point is that yes, this technology as it exists today is only commercially viable for some products which are only appetizing to a wealthy elite market. But that's an advantage, it provides a stepping stone. The profits from that can be pumped into R&D to further commercialize the technology, and build a commercial ecosystem. Perhaps at some point in the future the technology will be applicable beyond the simple crops planted today.

In Tesla, the roadster not only proved that electric cars can be good, but that they can be better. Though not everyone can afford a roadster, enough people could and that car was a launch pad for R&D of electric car technology, manufacturing (which it turns out is truely the hard problem in building a car company) and consumer desire.

I absolutley agree regarding the development of EV tech. The main reason I have my doubts about tesla fulfilling all the visions people seem to have about them is manufacturing. This is a well solved problem for existing car makers, so tesla's real value would be as a brand. I dont see batteries being the USP, same as I don't see engines right now, no matter what certain engine fanboys say. Also, Panasonic is usually not getting the credit it deserves when people talk about Tesla's battery tech. As long as Elon is at the helm and manages to sell the vision peopl what to hear, tesla should be fine so. the last two years taught me as much.

It's a good strategy only if you can take the same technology downmarket eventually. It's not yet clear how downmarket Tesla can be even in the car market, and the car market is very different than food, in that only 18% of people globally, mostly the richest, have cars, but 100% of them need to eat. Another important difference is that cars don't grow out of the ground.

Right now there's a flood of capital available, so it's very hard to tell a priori which ideas have legs and which are just mirages that look good in a slide deck. This could be amazing. But it could be another Juicero or WeWork, where the unit economics just don't make any sense.

You're kidding, right? The model 3 rivals competitors in price and will only drop in price and it's a perfectly serviceable car for most people. Well as long as you don't get it "loaded"

Tesla Model 3 is 195 490 zł here.

For comparison the best selling new car was Toyota Corolla for 80 000 zł.

But the real bestselling cars are for over a decade the same - 5-10 year old VW Passat Combi from western Europe for 10-50 000 zł.

For 200 000 zł you can have a single-room flat in a big city and rent it out for considerable passive income. 2 such flats and you can live out of that (not very luxuriously but still).

That's why Tesla is considered a luxury car here. Most people drive cars worth less than 10% of a new Model 3.

The model 3 is way too large for any market that isn't the US. (which is most people). Over last year alone in Europe the M3 market share fell from 33% to 13% IIRC. In China I think the loss of market share was even larger.

In some markets, or overall, it's my impression the model 3 and the BMW 3 series compete head to head and the BMW is losing dramatically. I don't want a Tesla, but I drove a new 3-series loaner and definitely came away thinking this is why people are getting Teslas. But I decided for me, a Honda hybrid at half the price would be better.

I am definitely not kidding. The Tesla Model 3 costs twice as much as low-end new cars: https://www.motortrend.com/news/top-10-cheapest-new-cars/

It's also important to note that a lot of car purchasers buy used cars, because the low end of the new market is too expensive for them.

And really the appropriate comparison versus food is the transport sector, not cars alone. Cars are, as I said, the rich end of the market. In many places, cars are less popular than motorcycles, scooters, and bikes. I don't see any reason to think Tesla has an advantage going downmarket there. Indeed, as a luxury brand, there are significant brand barriers to them going lower in the car market, let alone down to scooters.

At first glance. I challenge you to find a technique (Being executed commercially, demonstrated in a paper, or clearly described) where high-calorie foods are grown indoors.

I'm not trying to be snarky; I'd love to see something like this, but the comment you reply to is my conclusion as well. I used to be very excited about this stuff, but the only viable crops are leafy greens sold at a high price.

I own a business selling sensors for use in hydroponics. I started because I wanted to make an impact in food availability. I've abandoned that, and continue because hobbyists, and companies like this have a use.

Idk, where I live there are massive greenhouse operations that produce insane amounts of high quality food.

The question is "Is the (total) cost of those high quality food from greenhouse ops cheaper than same quality food from traditional land agriculture?"

I think a lot of it is based on locale. Many of the foods may not be easy or possible to grow local, imports are expensive, food grows faster in greenhouses, additionally you can have many grow cycles over the entire year including winter, where that may not be possible with just typical land. They are growing greenhouse operations exponentially, it is a multi-billion dollar business in our locale.

Certainly in any remote or isolated community. Definitely in Hawaii - and in Northern Canada (where fresh produce is flown in by air every day, and a head of lettuce goes for over $7 and a thing of orange juice for $26 [1]).

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/margaret-whitley/food-prices-c...

Yes - likely growing lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe some simple berries... That’s the same stuff that’s been growing in hothouses for over a century.

I think GPs point is that those aren’t the high-calorie, high value crops needed to make this a real revolution in food production.

Show me vertical vineyards, maize, grains, stone fruits, apples etc.

It seems to me that vineyards should be the easiest thing to 'verticalize' since you're growing vines anyway. You should be able to cover the entire sunward side of a skyscraper with vines and harvest the grapes using a robot hanging off a crane.

> It seems to me that vineyards should be the easiest thing to 'verticalize' since you're growing vines anyway. You should be able to cover the entire sunward side of a skyscraper with vines and harvest the grapes using a robot hanging off a crane.

Except when you realize that the most highly valued added product (wine) relies on soil/region specific soil (terroir). No one buying table grapes, even at Whole Foods, is going to spend the kind of money to make something like that at scale. I've worked in a vineyard for a Summer in Croatia, it's how I got run my own Kitchen in Italy soon after as it crated a good 'marketing hook' for a chef, and I can go into why that skyscraper idea is impractical for anything fruit bearing but suffice it to say: it won't work unless you want a small, low yield plaything that can be outperformed from anything in most common grape growing regions even if hyper-local expenses are removed. Hell, even using them as a cover crop/ornament on a trellis in a backyard garden may yield better results.

Cash crops, as specified, are based on economies of scale for a reason and are actually very efficient when properly done and have 10,000+ years of refinement behind them--crop rotation, efficient irrigation, cover crops in the off season, livestock grazing for fertility and micro-organism replenishment. With the advent of more automation, and no till methods we are seeing increases in yield, despite global climate change. Water scarcity, irrigation and water table replenishment and growing organically is something I wished we placed a greater focus on and would do more good for us and our Ecosystem as a whole than anything else hindering cash crop modality if I'm honest.

I sincerely wish people were forced to have to farm as part of their formal education, and continued gardening as their is so much deadly ignorance in regards to where our food comes from and the maladies it creates as a result of being so far from it: obesity and heart disease kills more in the West than anything else.

With that said, I see this as very good data for Mars colonization and food production; but for terrestrial purposes its absurd for anything but Hype/Marketing an expensive and impractical bridge with fanciful ideas of 'closing the gap between food deserts' when urban farming is the real answer in the US (see: Detroit). This model only semi-worked when they were aligned to expensive fine dining restaurants, now that those have been systemically destroyed and may never come back, I don't see it having much if any potential as I've eaten greenhouse stuff that aren't herbs or salad from Holland and its awful!

We could honestly make more headway in solving hunger, food scarcity if they just allotted community gardens in vacant land not in use and mandated fruit bearing trees be used instead of ornamental ones in urban landscaping and reinstated gleaning as a form Community Supported Agriculture.

> we are seeing increases in yield, despite global climate change

I'm ignorant about this. I want to learn more.

I've read that increasing CO2 %, increasing temperature, and increasing water availability will improve plant yields. Is this true?

I also understood that one of the positive feedbacks for the climate response is the increased amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, water vapour being a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. I'm confused about how we can have more water vapour in the atmosphere and yet less water availability, presumably because less rain - these things appear to be conflicting.

I understand that the change in climate will change the established weather patterns that we're used to now, and create drought in areas that are currently wet. I don't understand why we can't adapt to this and move our farms to where the water is.

In short: I keep hearing this, that global climate change will reduce our ability to grow plants, and I don't understand why this is true or how the science for it works. Can anyone shed some light on it, please?

> I've read that increasing CO2 %, increasing temperature, and increasing water availability will improve plant yields. Is this true?

Depends on the crop/cultivar and where and when it is being grown, but I distinctly recall 2019's Peach bumper crop in Colorado as I made a peach salad on my station that sold like crazy which was used as a sauteed fruit with our pork chop entree!, too and we still had more come in than we could use And this was sold alongside a melon and heirloom tomato salad that also sold well, but was always constantly running out sooner into service because of the immense surplus of peaches we had that year [0]. Looking deeper into that later in the Fall after we looked over the (record breaking) numbers I looked back at the reasons why which included the weather in the Western Slope: no snap frosts, very little hail and warmer/balmier albeit wetter weather in the Summer in Colorado.

This was true for almost all stone-fruit that year, too. Whereas the heirloom tomatoes were limited in the early Summer hit a snag because they kept bursting due to the extra rain or had to be grown in lower elevation counties in Boulder, Weld, Ft Collins and in the Southern Counties. This would get better, as one who has farmed/gardened would predict, in the later Summer to Fall despite the rain as more plants were planted and were maturing to uptake the water.

> I understand that the change in climate will change the established weather patterns that we're used to now, and create drought in areas that are currently wet. I don't understand why we can't adapt to this and move our farms to where the water is.

This is my biggest concern (one that I understand well) as our prediction models and the Ag supply chains and distribution models we've created and been reliant on and how fragile they are under simple variable changes as proven by COVID this year. We could, should and WILL HAVE TO adapt but the issue is that we have such a centralized food system that its so monolithic with massive labour shortages and is hard to correct that without a local system to meet the demand (which is the case for most city dwellers) is exactly how Society breaks down.

> I keep hearing this, that global climate change will reduce our ability to grow plants, and I don't understand why this is true or how the science for it works. Can anyone shed some light on it, please?

Its way more complex than that, and is really impossible to give a complete answer as countless books are written on specific topics that range from: water depletion due to lack of rain and drought, soil erosion, bee/pollinator collapse etc... I can help if you narrow down what specific aspect you're asking, but essentially what you're describing is the fear of ecological collapse as much of Man's intervention and actions have led to immense consequences we never took into account.

I also think that the Sun's activity is playing a bigger part in weather, specifically the role cloud formation has on rising temperature as a result of cosmic ray ejection, that we do not speak about enough.

https://coloradosun.com/2019/05/29/western-slope-peaches-bum...

Terrific replies, thread. Thank you.

> is really impossible to give a complete answer as countless books are written on specific topics

And it seems the story keeps getting worse.

My latest terror is the analysis showing how warming is drying plant life due to "vapor pressure deficit". While this article is about forest fires, I can't help but wonder what's happening to fruit trees, perennials, vines, etc.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/09/most-imp...

Thank you, great reply. I guess it's not a simple answer to a simple question.

I've worked in a vineyard for a Summer in Croatia Which region of Croatia if you don't mind me asking? My family has a vineyard (800 liters, for our personal consumption) so I know the hassle you are talking about. From what I can tell there has been some advancement regarding automation in the area of vine making over the past years with tractor attachments that allow automatic and precise spraying of fungicides as well as machines that automatically pick the grapes (shake,comb and vacuum). By that I mean, that it has become available even to smaller-medium producers as I see people using it. As you probably know, a lot of what a winemaker does is adaption of the vineyard to seasonal conditions by adjusting variety and quantity of spraying with (usually) fungicides, reducing the leaves and reducing the grapes (in order to increase overall sugar and quality). This variation would be something that would be reduced using greenhouse/indoor growing.

> a Which region of Croatia if you don't mind me asking?

Bok, dobro dan:

Umag professionally, and then the countryside in Zagreb to help a friend and her village harvest later that year and begin the wine and olive oil pressing.

It took a whole village of maybe 25 rotating of various ages people to do both orchards and it was rather small, maybe 2 heactres each? But we were casual and stopped to eat and dink, chat and nap.

Whereas the one in Umag was back breaking slave labour as it was way larger ~20 hectares broken up into various fields depending on cultivar, as they mainly focused on white wine based grapes we sold by the bottle at the nearby campsite and at bio markets/stores, they had some other fruit for rakija. But it was me and an another guy who were the only apprentices in a staff of 4 plus the 3 owners who mainly focused on sales and very light field work in the mornings so me and the other guy each worked 13-16 hour days back then 6 days a week and a lot of that was just pruning leaves and unripened grapes and adjusting the vineyards to the trellis which is what made that farm most of its money. I'm glad I made the pivot to Italy when I did as I preferred to work in gardens and develop a menu and then run the kitchen for an Agrotourism in Maranello! Those 16-18 hour days were much more better spent in my opinion.

One day in Croatia the other guy in Umag was out taking care of the tomato fields and I was actually spraying the copper and Organic/Bio fungicide mixture with the blower machine in the red field and making my way to the white when I saw the plume of a bomb go off that contained sulfide in a neighbors much larger field nearby, which typically was used for low-end wines that give you headaches or were used for gemišt, and I had to run like hell to avoid getting sprayed on as that stuff hurts when you inhale it. I actually left the blower behind until the sky air cleared.

> As you probably know, a lot of what a winemaker does is adaption of the vineyard to seasonal conditions by adjusting variety and quantity of spraying with (usually) fungicides, reducing the leaves and reducing the grapes (in order to increase overall sugar and quality).

I know the farm-hands (like me back then) do that, the winemaker is usually the owner who seldom does much of the labour in my experience besides occasionally walk the fields and prepare the barrels and bottles in my experience during harvest. And he usually has an apprentice(s) do much of that as they're usually much older.

> This variation would be something that would be reduced using greenhouse/indoor growing.

How so? The vines are permanent once planted and are dormant in the Fall-late Spring in most wine making regions, so that is money you're losing because you cannot grow other crops, moreover from my limited experience on those farms the roots underneath need to have be really established before you're able to get any reasonable yield as the first years/decade is always going to be so-so vintages as the soil and microbiology underneath creates the taste you're looking for and is altered with time--different types of compost, more sand-soil ratios etc... These are all losses if greenhouse spaces is built for that end alone instead of fast-growing, low input things like salads and herbs in the winter and early planted nightshades in the early Spring to capture the higher premium on being first to Market.

Again, I don't know how the lack of restaurants is going to alter all of this, to be honest.

Cool. My family has a vineyard in the central part of Istria. In our case we do everything ourselves, but I know that professionals use hired hands, both documented and undocumented ones. We stooped using the copper sulfate for the exactly reasons you describe. My dad (who does most of the work) has a somewhat allergic reaction to it so he tries to compensate with other stuff. BTW, it seems that you have quite a nice success story there although the begging of it is quite familiar to many of us from Croatia. (low wage, s*ity bosses, shady working conditions) I see your point with the greenhouse. You are right, thinking in terms of output per square meter, it doesn't makes sense to have anything that is dormant and doesn't produce a stable revenue, unless it's something very specific for which the market (customer) is prepared to pay a huge amount. Considering the region we are talking about, the thing that pops in my mind and falls in the super-high return category is the truffle. (and they are trying!)

> BTW, it seems that you have quite a nice success story there although the begging of it is quite familiar to many of us from Croatia. (low wage, s*ity bosses, shady working conditions)

It made me who I am today, and I'm very thankful; but I still have friends in Croatia and I understand the plight well, such that I do want to move back to Dalamatia but only on the basis that I have secured remote work as I refuse to ever work locally again. Croatia is lovely place to live provided you don't have to work there, or at least depend on it as you major source of income, that's for sure.

> Considering the region we are talking about, the thing that pops in my mind and falls in the super-high return category is the truffle. (and they are trying!)

It's funny, I ran a kitchen in Lovran overlooking the Adriatic before I worked in those farms/agrotourisms and used to buy black truffles at a discount since there were so many and most restaurants in the area were closed for the season by November especially if I didn't need them to be fresh to garnish/finish a dish: and were used soups, stocks, bases etc...

The thing about truffles is that it really depends on how well you can make them travel to get into the hands of chefs in as short of time as possible, but again after COVID the culinary Industry may never be the same. And I don't care who you are and what kitchen you came from but I can't think of a single professional chef/cook who would buy black truffles, let alone white, on a weekly/monthly basis for cooking at home so the lack of demand would vastly reduce the price even if it could be actively cultivated instead of foraged in the Forest as it is now.

Personally speaking, I'm not that big of a fan as the black ones always tasted like very good garlic to me, I never got to use white truffles as I missed the season and only made rissoto from the rice they use to carry them in which was good but not worth the price, in my opinion.

And truffle oil is an abomination.

“Terroir” is just marketing gobbledygook, just like they once said that California wines would never compete with French wines. Get a plant the right climate and nutrients and the fruit will produce well. No mysticism to it.

> “Terroir” is just marketing gobbledygook

A lot of it is definitely blatant Marketing, but having been in the culinary Industry and tasted countless wines from various regions their is definitely a reason why that phrase to describe a certain experience has persisted. Certain Pinot Noirs from various regions taste, smell and feel unique in your mouth and accentuate a dish differently than others.

And I'm not a wine snob by any means; I usually just drink whatever is Organic or preferably Biodynamic or leave it the the sommelier if I know them and is really just matching the right amount of tannins (or lack thereof) that matches the dish I'm eating or making, and I saw the leap that you're describing in California happen in my lifetime.

Back then as a kid I saw wine as that horrible tasting stuff from a box we were forced to drink at church/school in the US, in direct contrast with my Summers in Southern Europe where I had small glass at dinner which was remarkably smoother but something I personally didn't enjoy at all and told it was because American/Californian junk was inherently inferior. Only to turn the tables around in about a decade or so and created World class products from Sonoma and Napa that commanded a premium in Europe.

Which was also a phenomenon with olive oil by the way.

Personal anecdote: I can enjoy a $35 bottle of wine from Rioja just as much as a $200 bottle from Bordeaux depending on what I'm eating and I think food plays the bigger role in if I enjoy a wine or not than the wine itself. Also my Ag focuses just as much of not more on soil microbiology than the type of cultivar that is grown with remarkably different results, so the same should apply to grapes.

Terrior is marketing gobbledygook on top of the genuine flavor differences which actually make the product taste like something interesting and worth drinking. (Even outside of wine — my New Zealand oolong tea was grown somewhere rocky, and tastes nothing like what's grown in Taiwan.) I'm sure in principle you can find some way to wedge that flavor in artificially, but it's a massive hurdle to add on the path to a respectable product.

I would be fascinated to see a scientific approach to mimicking the effects of terroir. I don't believe for one minute that it's magic, but I also don't think it's fully understood.

Some aspects are explainable, e.g. limestone-rich soil increases the acidity of grapes, which can impart notes of citrus on the wine. But what about notes of chocolate, or berries, or stone fruit? In some cases, this is totally because the winemaker actually conditions with those things, but in plenty of cases, this is actually imparted by the growing conditions.

For what it's worth, the impression I get is that Americans place a lot of stock in the varietal of grape, e.g. Pinot noir or Chardonnay, whereas the French place a lot more emphasis in the region, e.g. Bordeaux or Burgundy. Both impart different qualities (e.g. it's going to be a lot easier to find notes of pepper in a Tempranillo than in a Chardonnay).

You are correct that American wines are much more likely to be labeled with their varietal, and European wines with their place of origin. However, those places of origin are so closely tied to specific wine styles that it’s really one and the same. Red Burgundy is always going to be Pinot Noir- unless it’s labeled Beaujolais, which is always Gamay. Sure, there are some outliers (white Burgundy is almost always Chardonnay, but there are some bottling a of Aligote and Pinot Blanc) but generally you know what grape/blend you’re going to get from each of these places. New Word winemakers aren’t as tied to tradition (and hundreds of years of trial and error) in what they plant, so you’re more likely to see unusual choices.

Not going to get into terroir other than to say that to reduce it solely to the soil type is the wrong way to look at it. It’s more of a holistic view of the entire growing microclimate, including soil, topography, water table, general climate conditions, etc.

I’m a sommelier and own a wine shop, for what it’s worth.

> Not going to get into terroir other than to say that to reduce it solely to the soil type is the wrong way to look at it. It’s more of a holistic view of the entire growing microclimate, including soil, topography, water table, general climate conditions, etc.

Well said.

All of these things sound like something a tightly controlled vertical farm could reproduce at will, once they figure out the mechanics. They could even come up with new, even more preferred, "terroirs", by adjusting settings.

No doubt that they would come up with “new” terroir- every spot has its own “terroir.” My point was that it’s not something that can be quantified, so there’s no point trying to game it.

> Not going to get into terroir other than to say that to reduce it solely to the soil type is the wrong way to look at it.

We're agreed on that front. My comment about limestone was to present one scientific aspect of terroir as _I_ understand it (which is to say, as a casual wine drinker recalling something I'd heard from a winemaker some years back).

That's a fair point about a lot of varietals being very heavily coupled to places of origin, and that's especially true for the big names that we've been discussing. But a white wine from the Alsace region (for instance!) could be a Gewurztraminer, or a Riesling, or something else entirely. (That said, I wouldn't expect an Alsatian white to be an Italian varietal...)

(https://winefolly.com/deep-dive/alsace-wine-region/ suggests a pretty even split between 4 different main varietals, with a tail.)

Alsatian wines would typically be labeled with the varietal on the bottle, for just that reason- Alsace is known for a variety of world class white wines.

Where the hell are they growing tea in NZ?

495 Gordonton Road, Gordonton, Hamilton 3281

> farm as part of their formal education, and continued gardening

Enthusiastic agreement.

Maybe even get credits (and maybe even some cash) working in the school cafeteria.

My father had a veggie garden. Including heirloom seeds from the family's farming past. My siblings and I had a completely different relationship to food, compared to my school mates.

> Enthusiastic agreement.

I'm glad you do, given your background, because while I'm a massive proponent of UBI it still doesn't solve a critical issue in the Human Condition: Purpose and the lack thereof.

I learned so much during my apprenticeship and I was honored to be taken in by some the most renown artisans in their fields that spanned: pecorino cheese makers, aceto and lambrusco brewers in Italy to a multi-genrational legacy Emnentaler cheese maker that allowed me apprentice for a day and even let me use the stick his great grandfather used in the Bernese Alps 100s of years ago to make a very rural and basic cheese.

This helped me not only further appreciate their artisan craftmanship, but it also gave greater insight that I would use in my career(s) later on in 3 separate Industries and allowed me to get opportunities to work under Michelin star chefs and get offers to work in Jame Beard award restaurants as a cook that simply cannot be gained in culinary school, which I completely bypassed to my complete benefit.

I think having community based works program alongside UBI would help solve local food insecurity and could be a critical part in solving so many more ecological issues, especially for disenfranchised and disillusioned younger millennials and Gen Z kids who we have to admit have really limited options in the traditional labour market with ever diminishing returns to be had rom their mandated 'formal education.' At least a program like that could pay for itself in the long with the work experience they gain as it could give them insight to prepare them to take on massive issues like carbon sequestration, soil erroison and water reclamation and basic survival skills for Mars colonization that will be CRITICAL in their lifetime and those to come and may be give them motivation to take their UBI with their neighbors/family and create a seed-round for a startup like Boyan Slat did to pull the plastic out of the Pacific Ocean.

I know that would help a lot of the kids who follow and are motivated by Greta Thunberg's activism and help give the younger crowds from Extinction Rebellion (all amazing movements) a productive outlet to let them utilize their anxiety to desirable ends. Because I know I felt that anxiety about our Environment since the 2008 financial crisis but didn't have any options due to student debt until I could afford to quit my Industry altogether and undertook a series of massive risks to pay it back that propelled me to flee to the other side of the World and put all of my skill-set to the test.

I now know in hindsight that I couldn't have done even a fraction of the amazing things I've done in Life if it weren't for those years of apprenticeship and how lucky I was that it even worked at all. My only wish is that the youth have a more structured path to that end as they will need it.

And to be honest after accumulating these skills I'd really like to be able pass this knowledge on to help instruct these kids to help them solve these very dire Environmental situations and if I can give them a craft in the process as I can no longer do it myself anymore I'd be glad to do so at no cost--but I wouldn't say no to reducing my tax liability.

One of the most rewarding things about going from an ignorant apprentice making a ton of mistakes along the way and learning a skill or craft well enough to then have apprentices of your own is this sort of legacy transfer of knowledge that I think is what parenthood must feel like when you see your child be able to undertake a project or task by themselves for the first time.

I've only had 3 but it was pretty cool experience that I think could scale with limited resources if the right incentives allowed to tap into the collective will and desire of the youth as I think it's Human Capital issue more than it is a lack of resources.

That was long, but I'm sure you're one of the few that would probably fully appreciate that sentiment and need given what you've written about your past.

I do appreciate it. Thank you.

Agree on all counts. I think about apprenticeship, coaching, mentoring all the time. Most of my own efforts to date have failed. Doing better would be nice.

Please continue posting on HN. I treat it as batting practice. Writing stuff out helps me refine my thinking. And the moderation (u/dang) keeps me civil.

I feel like a lot of people would find their passion a lot easier if they didn't have to worry about supporting themselves. I'm incredibly lucky to be able to build cool tech for a living (and honestly I'd do it for free if I didn't have to pay the bills) but not everyone's passion pays so well.

Also, thanks for all your replies in this thread, about farming and otherwise. Some great posts!

potatoes?

The big one would be soy beans or potatoes in vertical farms. I've seen some buzz about startups attempting it, but I am unable to find anyone who actually succeeded.

But on the other hand, vertical farming could possibly increase yields for traditional greenhouse owners, and cheap lettuce and tomatoes are definitely not a bad thing.

I should have clarified re indoors: My comment was about setups like in the article, which are reliant on electric lights. One of the biggest limitations they have is electricity cost.

If you’re pumping water at any volume you’re using electricity (or fossil fuels).

You can build head with a windmill, but moving water (gpm) requires horsepower.

Also: LEDs are very efficient vs other types of lighting.

> If you’re pumping water at any volume you’re using electricity (or fossil fuels).

Sure, but how much energy compared to also running grow lights?

Does LEDs work for growing food?

Yes, vertical farms will typically use LED lights.

Same here (Netherlands) but it’s important to realize that greenhouses make a lot of use of natural light and soil and are therefore not entirely the same as indoor/vertical farming.

Nothin wrong with greenhouses at that scale, for obvious reasons more often than not these vegetables are what I eat. You can taste the difference so between greenhouse stuff that never saw true dirt to grow in and things from your own garden or that grew in actual soil I was quite amused when i saw tomatoes and so on grow in soil and small plantations in fron tof a farm house in the Netherlands surrounded by greenhouses.

And still, this industrial style of grwing food is what enables our high living standard. if we now could just figure out how not have too much food in Europe and not enough in other places...

How about cricket farming for use in livestock feed? It's a high protein source that uses fewer resources than traditional feedstock.

Sure, it's a secondary product, but could have large impacts.

From what I understand about chicken and pig feed, soy meal is typically used, and it's from the part of the bean that humans don't use, since the oil is the key ingredient in so many foods consumed by people. Is cricket farming more efficient than soy farming? Seems like the economies of scale for soy are so much greater.

I think we're talking about veggies here, no? I think at some point we'll have to turn to insects for our protein needs though.

We can get all the protein we need from plants if we want to.

Mushrooms are a protein dense food that can be grown indoors with little energy needs.

Though mushrooms contain large amounts of chitin which we can’t really digest, so I’m not sure they would be a good fit as base food.

Plant protein is easier to grow and perfectly adequate for human nutrition. This obsession with animal protein is unscientific.

Yeah, the cricket protein thing is a fad. Anything that can be produced by an animal, can be produced by a (potentially genetically-modified) plant or yeast more efficiently. Animals are above plants trophic-level-wise, and their feed conversion efficiency can't be more than 100%.

That said, insects are way more efficient than mammals at converting plants into human-edible calories thanks in part to their lack of internal temperature control and growth rate.[0] If you had to choose an animal to use as a protein-constructor, crickets would be a great choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Insects

So your saying that I have to decide that all of a sudden I can't wait to eat crickets because they are more efficient?

That just seems to me like a choice that very few humans are actually going to make.

> That just seems to me like a choice that very few humans are actually going to make.

It seems very HN to take the perspective of an aloof farmer-of-humans rather than that of an actual human.

>> So your saying that I have to decide that all of a sudden I can't wait to eat crickets because they are more efficient?

No no, not you. All the poor people. They're the ones who will be fed "efficiently". You and I and most people on HN will retain our privilege to eat what we want.

If your idea of "privilege" is fighting heroin addiction [and currently very much winning that battle, thankfully] and living on the streets of West Palm Beach because due to felony drug possession charges over 15 years ago I can't get hired anywhere, than yes, "you and I" are most definitely that.

I'm happy to hear that you're winning the battle and I hope you continue to do so.

My comment stands. You would be forced to eat crickets and I wouldn't (be forced to eat them). That's the whole idea with feeding people "efficiently". Piss-poor people who can't get a living wage are already fed the most unhealthy food because it's cheap and easy to mass-produce, whereas those who are well-off can eat whatever we want, whatever we think is healthy and nutritious, or just pleasant to eat. And all this talk of efficiency means is that more cheaply produced, low-quality food can keep being sold to those who need to watch their wallet more than they care to watch their waistline.

A heartfelt thanks for your kind words...

Yeah the more I think about it, it's probably just a cultural thing and not a "whole humanity" thing.

As it's been discussed here, in some cultures crickets are sold as a snack on streetcorners and people grow up eating them.

And I think the whole "piss-poor people" thing might just be eating unhealthy garbage because, just maybe, the cheap high-sugar high-carb stuff releases endorphins in most humans, and they are just trying to get a small reprieve in their desperate lives.

Roasted crickets are actually very tasty. I’d compare them to Cheetos. To each their own, sure, and I won’t tease you for refusing, but I can completely see then as something you wouldn’t be surprised to find in a corner deli, as complementary snacks in a bar, or while gaming at a friend’s. I prefer peanuts but many people are allergic. You want alternatives.

They're everywhere here in Thailand. You can buy a bag from a street vendor or find them in many supermarkets along with worms and other things we wouldn't consider eating in the West.

I haven't had the courage to try them myself yet.

I think you're going to have a lot easier time getting people to eat lentils than crickets, but sure, if it has to be cows or crickets then go for the crickets.

I think if you’d eat shrimp or prawns you’d give crickets ago. I’ve had them before as a novelty and they were fine.

I say novelty as they’re not generally available as food where I live.

I live in Thailand and they're everywhere here. So far I haven't been brave enough to try them.

It may be easier to grow and great for humans, but reducing it to just that is like the people who want to subsist only on Soylent; it's missing the bigger picture about food.

Some people like eating things beyond just basic nutritional subsistence. It's why meat is so popular. We've also been eating it since time immemorial. The demand for meat isn't going away no matter how many cricket/insect ads you shove in people's faces. If anything, it just breeds resentment for sustainable food practices, because the rich and powerful will always still have access to meat products.

Making meat into a luxury product like the days of yore will not work. The monkey's out of the bottle on that one. We need to work with this fact, not around it.

Climate change is going to necessitate a lot of uncomfortable changes, including not eating whatever you want whenever you want. Selfishness at that level doesn't work with 8 billion people.

That said I think lab grown meats look pretty promising.

It’s common for chickens and other poultry or even cows to be grown indoors. Animals don’t need direct sunlight, but they still need food grown somewhere.

> Animals don’t need direct sunlight

They do, at least per animal welfare standards.

That's not the definition of "need" that GP was using...

I find this comment utterly harrowing.

> I challenge you to find a technique...where high-calorie foods are grown indoors.

The GP isn't saying this is happening, though. They're saying that selling rich people overpriced kale and strawberries can fund further research and innovation. Maybe the next step is corn. Maybe it's bankruptcy. But it has cash flow to invest in the research to see which one it is, in part from growing and selling the less impactful stuff now.

> The GP isn't saying this is happening, though. They're saying that selling rich people overpriced kale and strawberries can fund further research and innovation. Maybe the next step is corn. Maybe it's bankruptcy. But it has cash flow to invest in the research to see which one it is, in part from growing and selling the less impactful stuff now.

Something about vertical farms for staple foods just doesn't pass the smell test. One big aspect of farming is the conversion of solar energy to edible chemical energy. Assuming natural plants and some efficient way of using natural light, stacking farmland vertically just means less energy per acre. And barring some new kind of clean energy like fusion, using artificial light will just introduce conversion inefficiencies and expense, at best.

Right. Would it go too far to say that the conversion of solar to chemical energy is the biggest aspect of farming?

I’d like to see the accounting for how much of the “100% renewable” energy is actual production and how much is an accounting practice that involves offsets somewhere. Maybe it is, plants don’t need lighting at night so you could use solar. But the efficiency of sun -> cell -> transmission -> LED -> plant is much less than sun -> plant, it’s not a winner there. Are they attached to the grid and push more electricity to it than they draw?

Balancing production costs vs the carbon chain of transport is good to look at. Our springtime apples come from Chile, New Zealand, and other far-flung places. How many joules of energy went into getting that kale to your Boston store from California vs from Worcester in January? If the energy to grow to harvest is less than the energy to transport, and people really really need that fresh-picked kale in January, it’s a niche win. I’m doubtful you can make much of a dent in New England’s produce needs using New England’s available renewable energy during wintertime. But gathering evidence is better than listening to my doubt.

Vertical orchards- I don’t see that happening. So my apples will still be imported from across the globe.

> Assuming natural plants and some efficient way of using natural light

That’s the surprising result of "closed" greenhouses: standard solar panels convert to electricity that convert to LEDs at the right frequency that offer more yield. Plants only absorb very narrow bands of light. Then you have more gains because the plants don’t have to maintain temperature, fight pests, dig deep roots for water; day/night cycle can be optimised. It is leafy greens for now, but there’s no strong reason that other high-energy crops (like sugar cane, carrots, beetroot) wouldn’t work.

Source: Friends working at the Umeå university grow house.

I think a comparison to tesla is a red herring, the analogy doesn't hold up to food.

Where I suspect this kind of growing technique would work is probably the spices aisle of the grocery store, and they have always been pretty high margin.

Cultured/printed meat.

You're convoluting a quantitative argument with a qualitative one. The parent comment pointed out some hard facts about nutrient density and farming logistics, and how the current model for vertical farming won't solve world hunger, on a nutritional level.

You respond with a qualitative argument that you can grow a business and/or industry and maje better technologies if you have profit.

The issue isn't that the technology isn't good enough, it's that there isn't as many nutrients (as in soil) in a city or apartment to grow highly nutritional food. You'd have to truck in bags of soil to do this, which isn't nearly as efficient as leaving the soil where it is and growing it there.

The problem isn't at all soil or nutrients: those are cheap and make up a very small fraction of the final mass of food. Instead, it's energy required to power photosynthesis, turning them into delicious calories.

Not Tesla, but aquaculture. Aquaculture works and reasonably well for a few decades. Here's what we know now.

1. Aquaculture works 2. It's successful with only a handful of species 3. It can't replace marine caught wildlife 4. Flavor-wise it is frequently inferior.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't grow salmon, tipalia, shripm or oysters, we just shouldn't make a claim or claims that aren't reasonable (i.e. aquaculture can feed the world or aquaculture will revolutionize modern food production).

Vertical farming is great for greens, microgreens, strawberries, herbs and that's about it.

Tesla had a direct path to drop the price by using economies of scale. If you just can't grow a crop, it just won't work. This is more akin to saying that battery density is low enough that it only works up to scooters.

Tesla obviously works today as well as do these vertical farms, but only in the niche they are operating in. The point being made is that they both could remain as a very niche product for looooong time.

But isnt that the contrary of what Christensen postulates, starting at non-competitive down-market nieche and work upwards?

I'm rather bearish on Tesla for various reasons. I also believe current stock prices for Tesla and Amazon are mainly driven by general uncertainty and too much liquid cash with nowhere to go.

That being said, vertical farming doesn't realy solve any problems, food nd water are distribution and not availability problems. None of which are solved by vertical farming. Obviously that doesn't prevent people from raising a shit load of VC money. If anything, the wetern world is producing too much food, incl. meat, in hyper industrialized farms already.

Telsa sorta did down-market by jamming an engine into another car in the beginning. The lotus was the first platform they built for

Or as a starting place to make money and then get out. Not everything/everyone has to have an altruistic motive.

There are plenty of cash crops this would be perfect for.

They just aren't especially....legal at the current time.

Indoor/Vert farming Cannabis is very expensive - even with full auto-hydro/aero setups. And, after legalization there is huge downward pressure on PPK of the material (eg: -75-80%)

True, although that cost gives you the ability to control the environment very precisely. This allows for a level of quality that people are willing to pay for, at least when it comes to flower.

Not really (I say this after viewing the books for 100s of pot farms)

This is a genuine question - would you mind listing some of those crops?

Specifically, there's a number of states in the U.S. that allows people to legally grow marijuana / cannabis. I know it's still illegal at the Federal level, but that hasn't stopped people here in Washington state.

Plus, I was never the type of cool that knew a lot about drugs and alcohol. Computers, sure - I was definitely the type of cool that knew a lot about computers, but not so much the recreationally altered states.

Which has now come back to haunt me as I'm woefully ignorant of which crops might grow well in this sort of environment :)

It might only serve a tiny subset of the market, but subsets can still be highly profitable. Consider Apple vs the Android ecosystem. Most phones are Android phones, yet Apple makes most profits from the market thanks to their brand.

How meaningful is the claim that indoor, vertical farms need/have zero pesticides because it's a totally contained environment? I'm not sure I'd pay 5x for "taste and the feeling of eating local" but if it's differentiated in terms of pesticide exposure then I'd start to take a look.

Generally these environments need more chemicals, especially to fend off mold.

They can't use UV for that?

I would think proper humidity control would be most beneficial. Also this set up looks completely modular and you saw the robot arm adding a rack. Each section could be sterilized and put back into production reducing likelihood of mold and if you found mold could remove the effected sections only. With good climate controls and procedures I believe mold could be mitigated.

They can, but it's self-limiting in that all you're really doing is supplying an evolutionary pressure that results in UV-tolerant fungi/pathogens.

I once toured a (large) malting works where the soak-tanks are bathed in UV all the time (except when humans need to enter the room) and harsh chemicals are employed constantly to limit fungal and bacterial growth. They are still unable to eradicate those pathogens and suffer constantly from infection problems.

Are you sure that is the case for hydroponics? It would be surprising to see a startup with some big names behind it advertise bald faced lies. Or would mold inhibiting compounds not be classified as pesticides?

Any greenhouse environment, hydroponic or not, tends to require high fungicide and insecticide inputs -- at least eventually -- because it's essentially an all-you-can-buffet for pathogens. You could be fine, even excellent, at first, but with no competition or diversity to head them off, pests can cause extensive damage once they get into the system.

It is true with integrated pest management and careful observation you can be a little more calculated and strategic in a closed environment. Until something comes in on your shoe, or blows in through a door left open...

(Took greenhouse mgmt courses before, though I've never worked in the horti industry)

Ah I see, so for the claims to be credible in the long term they would have to operate it like a chip fab clean room. That does sound quite expensive, thorough decontamination of all personnel, air filtration, etc... I’d be curious if they could keep truly keep that up and make profits.

When you're serious about growing a cash crop indoors(i.e. marijuana), you basically have an airlock. No unfiltered air exchange. No outside clothes or footwear. You also have control of the environment and can regulate humidity to help control fungus. When something does get inside, you potentially scrap the crop, sterilize, and start over. I don't know anything about these robotic grow ops, but I bet they do something similar.

This isn't like growing in a greenhouse where you use screens to keep out bugs.

Its a shame we don’t experiment with growing food in former bread baskets like upstate NY, Ohio, etc, and spend money on navel gazing exercises.

As it stands today, as a nation, the United States supply of vegetables and many other products is totally dependent on the Colorado river. A variety of problems from climate change to terrorist or other attack could rapidly impact our ability to feed ourselves.

Been saying this for years. Instead of (or in addition to) growing almonds in the central valley, requiring large irrigation inputs, we could be growing hybrid hazelnuts in the northeast. Just one example. Not saying it would have equivalent profitability, but I have a hard time believing it would be less efficient or profitable than vertical farming with external high energy inputs.

There's plenty that can be done in traditional agriculture.

Anywhere near the rustbelt is going to need their soil thoroughly tested for contamination. But maybe that's not too big a deal when you amortize the cost over the entire life of a farm.

You do realize the rust belt is enormous and only an infinitesimally small area of it was factories, right? Sure. Don’t try to grow food in Detroit. But vast majority of PA, OH, IN, MI have always been rural and are not some polluted hell scape.

Not to mention the tremendous farmland in Wisconsin and Iowa that could easily be converted to vegetable farms if the demand shifted from animal product.

Their main point is wrong... but it is worth pointing out that a lot of the soils in the northest _do_ need to be tested not because of industrial pollution but because of agricultural pollution.

Apple orchards in particular up until the 70s often used lead arsenate pesticide sprays. Yes, you read that right; lead and arsenic. Sprayed onto plants. It accumulated in the soil and basically never leaves, and is a serious potential health hazard.

There has been insufficient discussion of this, overall, and it's basically "buyer beware" for land.

What makes you think they don't grow food there now? Hint: they do.

The breadbasket as the name implies, grows mostly cereal crops: wheat, corn, barely and not a cereal but diverse use: soy. There are small operations that do grow more traditional vegetables, but due to their labor intensive harvests and produces short shelf lives, they are not terribly profitable (without underpaid migrant workers located near large populations to consume or process the produce quickly). This in my opinion is why we see things like water intensive almonds, only being harvested in places like water scarce California. Labor cost is something vertical farms often treat as a given, which at least for most of our non-cereal produce production, it is not.

Absolutely cheap labour is a major component of the central valley's success. Also being able to run multiple seasons worth of crops.

That the rich and naturally irrigated soils of the midwest and northeast are basically only used for animal feed agriculture now is a real shame from an economic diversification and health POV but also from an environmental perspective. Giant swathes of topsoil are depleted every year, and fertilizer and pesticide runoff pollutes entire drainage basins of these regions.

Cash crop agriculture like this is highly capital intensive, so squeezes out smaller operators, and does very little to support the surrounding towns.

Cash crops = the type that a farmer can grow and make it rain, yah? Like spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens which bring in revenue year round, can be turned from seed to harvest in a matter of weeks, and have a high dollar value?

There are definitely barriers to entry associated with getting into vertical farming, but there are also advantages for the farmer.

It's sloppy terminology. I am fairly sure that "cash crops" was intended to mean "high caloric density, mass market crops".

While millions of people do eat hydroponically grown/growable produce, they do not survive on these kinds of crops. They rely on root vegetables and cereals for that, and those are currently impossible to grow in the way described in TFA.

> "cash crops" was intended to mean "high caloric density, mass market crops".

Tobacco is a cash crop, not caloric dense. Cash crops are the profitable crop a farm might use to generate cash. Since all farms are now commercial this isn't a meaningful distinction but it was when most farms were substance.

Wheat and Corn are not traditional cash crops. They are stable cereals. Cereals will be the last crops to ever become viable in vertical farming. Which is fine, the technology can develop leveraging the high value low-calory crops.

There are different ways of talking about "cash crops". The sane metrics, IMO, take into consideration the inputs required and the toll that growing takes on the soil.

From this perspective, garlic is an extraordinarily excellent cash crop: high yields, very low inputs, extremely low impact on soil nutrients.

By contrast, potatoes can generate more income for the farmer per unit area per year (mostly because of the caloric density), but they do wear down soils way more than an allium like garlic, and if you take that into account, the long term picture is not so rosy.

I've read that if you can get the timing right, the most profitable crop to grow in the USA are the flowers used at high school and college graduations. The window is very narrow, however, and if you miss it you earn basically nothing at all.

> measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired

This is a long way of saying “is completely useless”

And that is fine by me. Those "mostly water" crops are otherwise grown under heavy irrigation. Happy to see them go indoors and high-density.

It's not clear from the article what the water and energy cost is.

> One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating.

That's something I hadn't considered, the social aspects. Thanks!

The greatest value of urban farms might be in primary-school education.

The amount of arable land in many countries has more or less _already_ peaked. It is certainly not growing fast enough keep up with population. The ability to make lots of good grow in places other than arable farmland is going to be very important in the next 100 years.

Not when you take global warming into consideration. Russia and Canada will have a lot more farm land in the near future.

I’m sure the USA will also unlock some new farming areas.

I knew the top comment would be why this will never work. HN never disappoints.

May be true, but I take these top comments with a grain of salt.

It does seem to be a regular pattern. In this case the criticism seems to be that a system that is designed to grow salad crops can't grow staples so is useless.

It’s markets. Vertical farming will do better in singapore or China or maybe even India..possibly MENA region because their diet involves a lot more than lettuce.

Altho with the exception of Middle East and possibly Singapore, other regions will be severely constrained wrt energy requirements, infrastructure.

It is kind of a minor tragedy that due to American poverty of imagination and a lack of culinary heritage, all our indoor vegetables are lettuce and all our vat grown meat resembles burgers. We can’t seem to progress beyond burger meat and lettuce even with cutting edge tech.

Perfect day makes dairy that doesn’t require cows. And what is their first product? Ice cream. It’s all very depressing. In 500 years, when we run out of natural resources and when our food comes from fermentation tanks, veggies from vertical farms and is 3D printed...we will all be eating burgers and salad and ice cream.

Singapore is different compared to China or India because it has pretty high population density but acute shortage of land that can be used for farming. It is also a country that likes to plan ahead and have contingency measures to reduce dependencies/risk and actually has the political climate, knowledge and willingness to do what is necessary. I think it'll achieve great efficiency in this field.

singapore is my favourite example for ..pretty much everything. they are already doing great with indoor ag. and also shiok..for cell based seafood alternative. https://shiokmeats.com/

the only bad thing about singapore for me is the humidity. i struggle when i am outdoors in singapore. i cant handle it anymore. otherwise..my motto to other wannabe city states: be like singapore!

I think to create calorie rich base food, photosynthesis might be the completely wrong approach. It is extremely inefficient compared to photovoltaics. <1% vs >20%.

A better approach might be to produce hydrogen via photovoltaics and electrolysis, then use hydrogen metabolising bacteria to create more complex carbon hydrates and proteins from that.

The raw output of this might be edible in an emergency, but you would typically further refine it. Either you use fungi and end up with something similar to Quorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn , or you feed it to livestock (fish, chicken).

I think that this might be the base of the food chain for space settlements. On earth, traditional agriculture works just fine to produce an abundance of food, and I don't see more than aesthetic reasons to change it.

I think your comment describes something very similar to what Solar Foods is doing (https://solarfoods.fi).

There was a previous discussion with some more details about what they're doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344636

Nice. Did not know about this. There is another company https://www.calysta.com/ that have a similar product called feedkind.

Basically animal food that is made in a bioreactor from methane. Methane can be easily made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide via the sabatier reaction.

The 1% of photosynthesis is end-to-end efficiency, from the whole solar spectrum IN to the carbohydrates OUT.

The PV efficiency on the other hand only gives you electrons and you need electrolysis and bacterial metabolism on top which have their own losses.

Sure. But electrolysis is >70% efficient, so even if the bacterial metabolism is only 30% efficient the end to end efficiency is a factor of 10 higher.

You are also going straight to complex proteins, whereas photosynthesis produces just basic hydrocarbons.

> They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local.

I don't know anything about farming, but this is exactly what the first version of a true innovation usually looks like. First versions of everything, from iron weapons that bent on the battlefield, to computers that took a room, almost always were more expensive and worse than existing alternatives. These first version occupied weird niches, for example where existing alternatives were not available (as trade of tin and copper broke down after bronze age collapse) or were just toys for rich people (like first mobile phones and many, many other things).

But unlike existing alternatives, they only started their cycle of scaling and optimisations.

What about sweet potatoes? I'm guessing the argument is that it's not necessary because we have the available land. They can however be grown in stacked levels of soil layered with grow lights. You could very easily potentially have a skyscraper filled stacked and growing sweet potatoes.

Of course the capital costs of this are absurd (that's basically what you're saying here), but if it results in tomatoes and strawberries which don't taste like paste, it's worth it to me. Dutch greenhouse farms are considerably more realistic [0], but who knows, this may have some niches in extremely urban areas.

[0] https://tour-pronl.com/en/mice-tourism/tours-for-professiona...

> The total area of the Netherlands is just 41.6 square kilometers, but the country is ranked first in the world by the area of greenhouse farms.

Well, that would be quite something.. but the number is a typo. From Wikipedia:

> With a population of 17.4 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,800 square kilometres (16,100 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 square kilometres (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 12th most densely populated country in the world.

The total amount of greenhouse area is about 10,000 hectares (24710 acres).

10,000 hectares being 100 square kilometers, or 0.3% of land area.

Another application of a vertical farm is ultra-fresh food. As in, cut a minute ago just for you. Most of us eat quite stale salads.

> not a solution to food scarcity or security.

For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.

Another lovely fact is that more plant mass is eaten by the animals grown for food than humans, so the plant production problem is non-existent. At least when it comes to human consumption.

Well plant production for meat includes things like soybeans and corn. While they're non-perishable it's not what those in food-insecure places would want to eat. Grains yes, but I hazard malnutrition is owing to lack of other food sources.

On the local level I think companies lobby against redistributing excess foods for free to keep prices high. Something's got to give, either food waste is drastically diminished or we redistribute all of it.

Redistributing crops for free means creating a catch-22 situation guaranteeing they will never have local farmers.

Why be a subsistence farmer or cash cropper when the local market is flooded with free food?

Those in need aren't "the market". Notwithstanding that, farmers are often subsidized anyway.

Are you saying that here in Texas, the dry, tall grass eaten by the longhorns could be more efficiently processed by poor people?

Are you saying that grass fed beef is a significant portion of the market?

Grass fed livestock is indeed a large portion of the world's meat consumption. Places like Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, England, Texas have a great deal of cows, sheep, and goats walking the land and not fed through a trough. Please account those in your calculations of what it would take to replace a cow with a pile of corn.

Labelled grass fed beef that has not seen a feedlot is under 1% of the US market. It is also a dubious proposition that grass fed beef has any environmental advantages. At best it will find a niche as a luxury product as meat is replaced by plant-based foods.

Much of it is also unpalatable.

Even in Argentina, the amount of beef that is purely grass-fed has dwindled. The popular image of standard Argentinian beef coming from bulls roaming the pampas has been obsolete for at least a decade now. Argentinian beefs are now fed maize etc. on feedlots like in most other developed countries.

93% of a cows diet is grazed grass. Only the finishing faze involves corn

Feedlot cattle more than double in weight in under 200 days. Beef cattle are slaughtered at under 24 months. How could 93% of a feedlot animal's diet be grazed grass?

The numbers are here.

http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-1...

The numbers there show the percentage of potentially human palatable food that is consumed by cattle, namely corn.

As the article points out, byproducts such as alcohol production waste are used in feedlot feed. This very much does not mean that a high percentage of feed is grazed grass.

If you have ever made the mistake of trying to eat feed corn, you know that the real world amount of human palatable food fed to cattle is about zero. But that does not matter.

The reason it does not matter is that the land, fuel, water, and capital equipment that goes into making feed for cattle is still entailed in feeding cattle, for about half the weight of each steer.

Tl;dr: the article is not apropos.

EDIT: I should clarify that I do not mean that feed amounts to half the weight of the steer. It takes 6kg of feed to add 1kg to the weight of a steer. Feedlot cows consume about three times in feed what they weigh on the way to slaughter.

> the plant production problem is non-existent.

1. Not all dirt is equal. Land being able to grow some kind of plant matter does not mean that the land is suitable for growing plants humans will eat.

2. The plants animals eat are easy to process mechanically at huge scale. The plants humans eat, not so much.

It's far from a solved problem. Meat is the historical solution.

> Land being able to grow some kind of plant matter does not mean that the land is suitable for growing plants humans will eat.

I don't agree. Ground that can grow animal food pretty much always can grow a human food. I know of no exception (particularly for high production foods).

About the only exception I can think of is undeveloped grazing land in the mountains. However, that's such a small percentage of the food that goes into feeding livestock that it's hardly worth mentioning. Most of our meats don't come from animals living on mountain ranges, that's too expensive. It takes ~2 acres to pasture a single cow if you don't actively farm that pasture. On the flip side, that same 2 acres if farmed can easily feed about ~2 cows.

In other words, you cut your land requirements in half if you don't pasture your cows.

> The plants animals eat are easy to process mechanically at huge scale. The plants humans eat, not so much.

Humans do require a bit more processing of their foods than animals do, but not much and not enough to introduce any sort of scaling problem. Certainly not more costly than meat processing. Most meat processing requires manual interaction which is super expensive. On the flip side, plant based processing is pretty much completely automated. About the only part that isn't 100% automated is transport (and usually harvesting, though that's changing fast). As with everything, manual processes are the most expensive part of anything because humans cost a lot of money.

Meat is a solution to the energy density problem. Meats are high in protein and energy which makes for a good winter food for farmers (so long as you can keep it cold, it will last a long time).

> Most of our meats don't come from animals living on mountain ranges, that's too expensive.

It's also an ecological mess. Cows aren't native to North American mountain ranges and are tremendously destructive. Also, native predators get hunted to protect the non-native cattle which causes an even bigger environmental mess.

> On the flip side, that same 2 acres if farmed can easily feed about ~2 cows.

Yes? But it's a terrible practice. The cows end up piled atop each other in big barns waste deep in their own shit. Then they end up draining the barns into massive shit ponds which have to be filtered with large RO systems. The densely packed cattle are in such poor health they are over-medicated to prevent disease and that medication ends up in the food chain.

Pasture raised beef is just much better. I'd just as soon we limited how much total beef was raised and did it in pastures rather than corn-fed barn raised beef. Its more humane and while it's not been proven, the large amounts of antibiotics in barn raised beef is almost certain to have effects on humans who eat that beef.

There are alternatives which split the difference between humane and productive. Generally what small time farmers will do is keep cows in pastures that don't have enough food to feed them but do have enough area for them to roam. They'll then use their farming ground to produce enough hay to feed the cattle.

But that said, small time farmers are getting priced out by factory farms. Unfortunately, the dollar is king when it comes to meat production.

The worst part is that there's no real way for a consumer to fix this problem. You can significantly reduce or eliminate your meat consumption and that won't affect factory farms. Remember, they are the cheap meat. So who gets the brunt of reduced consumption? Generally smaller operations as they end up priced out of the market.

The only 2 ways I know of to really hurt factory farmers is for either lab grown meat to be less expensive or for government regulations to outlaw the practice. If the quality of lab grown meat is high enough, however, you are going to see major issues with small time farmers being priced out of the cattle industry completely.

Agree on pretty much all points.

I just can't stand shit farming.

> The worst part is that there's no real way for a consumer to fix this problem.

About all you can do is buy local grass fed or go vegetarian. As you say, it's not a huge thing, but at least I'm not participating.

> Generally smaller operations as they end up priced out of the market.

I would love to see some legislative reform on the large scale use of antibiotics in meat raising. That wouldn't necessarily help smaller farmers, but it might push larger scale farms into somewhat less heinous practices.

we need shit farming. 2 reasons: 1. grazing. grasslands sequester more carbon than even forests. 2. phosporous. if you go to iowa. the farmers feed pig shit to grow corn and then feed the corn to the pigs so they'd shit. it's the only way. Soil P is a non renewable resource. when we run out of P, we cant farm anymore.

> Ground that can grow animal food pretty much always can grow a human food.

Not necessarily with the productivity to justify the human effort, though, which is the important bit. You can let cattle graze low-yielding grassland with essentially no effort. You're not going to bother with the intense labour requirements of picking the scant vegetable crop you'd get off the same land. Not when you can easily ship vegetables from highly productive ground.

I would also add:

3. We massively overproduce grains in the average year because falling short one year is really, really bad.

Since we're going to have too much grain most years, we might as well feed the excess to livestock and turn it into meat. In bad years we can reduce the amount of livestock to keep the available grain constant.

The same goes for ethanol.

Efficiency is the often the enemy of security, and food security is very, very important.

Having people eat the soy directly instead of feeding it to cattle yields massive efficiency gains by removing an entire trophic level.

But growing soybeans year after year after year doesn't work very well, ecologically speaking[1]. Crop rotation is essential for soil and crop health. For a whole lot of practical reasons, animal feed is more efficient to add to the rotation than, say, a fruit crop. Good or bad, agriculture does not operate in one dimension.

[1] Source: I grow soybeans for the human market. To which I'll add that human grade soybeans themselves are less efficient to grow than animal grade soybeans. They command a pretty sizeable premium to reflect that added cost of production. It's not exactly as simple as shifting your diet to eating animal feed.

an excellent point. the standard last-mile problem, except for food in developing countries.

its been this way for several decades.

We also don't produce food to feed people but instead to generate a profit. Food companies waste massive amounts of food in order to maintain profitable prices. Sure we produce enough food to feed the planet, but it's not profitable to provide food to people who can't afford it.

> Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent [...]

I image that countries with very little agriculturally usable land are watching this closely. Reducing dependency on imported food is probably in every nation's interest.

Are their consumers willing to pay a premium/ subside local vertical farms?

"Reducing dependency on imported" anything seems to be an idea that often isn't a reality when it comes to paying for it.

Making food takes space, light, water* and labor.

The american midwest farming practices have really optimized to minimize the labor cost because space, light and water were in abundance. But if the space cost goes up from higher/re-internalized transport costs, and the cost of light goes down from miscellaneous power production schemes taking hold, the economics for vertical farming changes.

[*] and various nutrients/minerals in the vein of phosphates, nitrates and what have you.

Countries like Taiwan or Israel probably place higher value on reliability of inland food production than most of the world, so we should see most of the development there.

It will be interesting to see.

But I'm skeptical. Even nations that 'should' care about local production often don't, even in the face of obvious consequences and disadvantages. It seems like more often than not the price / market still leans towards cheaper and other concerns are just concerns that aren't addressed.

> One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating.

https://www.urbankisaan.com/ourgreens seems to be doing exactly that, too, in India.

I think it's a technology we should continue to develop, because at the moment we have a relatively freely flowing global economy that allows for the exotic fruit and vegetable availability that we are used to. That is unlikely to always be the case, and not every country has vast acres to spare on food production should they lose the ability to compete or participate in the global market.

It's just a guess but I don't believe your calculus holds for countries that can't produce or cheaply import from regions like Canada/USA. The case I have top of mind is Korea, which has very little arable land and can only import via boats from China (quality worries). Japan is probably similar to a lesser scale. I believe the economics of vertical farming in these regions make a lot more sense, and 2020 has created huge price hikes in food in Korea because of too much rain and expensive imports.

Also hi , I've been curious for years what happened with your farming plans. I can guess you walked away from them!

> One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired

The amount of subsidies poured into this lifestyle must be unbelievable. The whole thing has to be flown-in, including fuel to operate it. Before that what did these communities eat?

It outproduces salad, but not potatoes, wheat, and most of all humus. Also the need for heavy machinery has a real cost in green house gas emissions (same issue as with electric cars).

There are real ecological services provided by a healthy land and natural agriculture that can't be provided by such food factories.

As @systemvoltage wrote, this is good for a heavily centralized system that's owned by big corporations looking for big profits but that's not a solution to the global environmental and soon to come (and it's already here for a lot of us) food/water crisis.

Surely the reduction in land used must have a significant environmental impact. For the crops in question, you are talking about the ability to have a 2-acre building surrounded by a 718 acre nature reserve to get the same results as a 720 acre monocrop. I find it hard to believe that the long-term environmental impact of installing equipment would actually outweigh preserving 99.7% of the land.

Good point. However: You need to account for the environmental impact of the grow lights.

Are you sure you want to trade farming of land for whatever development or use of that land may occur when/if our hypothetical 720 acre farm is retired from ag production? Their seems to be an assumption that the next owner will be a steward of these lands.

We don't really have other uses for the vast amounts of land our food (and energy crop) production currently consumes.

Development would certainly claim at least a fraction of those lands.

Farmland isn't going to be developed for the same reason it's not currently being developed, it's either zoned so development is difficult, or too far from the city to be interesting for development.

Also, unless we figure out how to replace all crops with vertical efficient farms, demand for agriculture is going to remain. It will just shift to different crops which can't be farmed this way.

Actually no. In Japan, where I live, the country side is covered by development projects that destroy rice pads, mostly because there are tax incentives for that. In France, where I come from that's the same.

Perfectly good arable land is not being misused for development projects that don't mean anything when you know for ex. that Japanese population is in decline and creating individual houses far from the center of the city is going totally against what should be done to counter potential food crisis and the real environmental crisis. Etc.

> In Japan, where I live, the country side is covered by development projects that destroy rice pads, mostly because there are tax incentives for that.

Sounds like an existing problem, not something which vertical farming is going to accelerate.

Honestly, near-term, you're probably looking at replacing 720 acres of mono-cropped salad with a 2-acre building surrounded by 718 acres of mono-cropped grain.

That’s still a huge environmental win, because you are producing twice as much food with the same amount of land.

Yeah, rule #1 of whatever plan you formulate for the future of agriculture is "You need to grow enough food for at least 8-10 billion people for the next two centuries." So any chance to grow extra food is a win.

Growing food is not an issue.

Not wasting food is. Not destroying biodiversity is. Not destroying ecological services is.

Exactly none of those problems are solved by salad factories.

Producing locally at a salad factory would seem to solve the waste issue, as most fresh produce is spoiled in transport.

Taking these points in reverse order --

> Exactly none of those problems are solved by salad factories.

Honestly, I'm not particularly invested, financially or emotionally, in salad factories, but if something reduces the footprint of arable land needed to do something that was going to be done anyway -- assuming it doesn't have some large externality, like using untenable quantities of energy or producing some toxic waste product -- isn't that a net good?

> Not destroying biodiversity is. Not destroying ecological services is.

I'm worried that we're approaching this from different ethical perspectives / arguing about different things here. I think I may be working from the perspective that avoiding famines and mass starvation is the primary goal of agricultural planning, and you're worried about the ecological health of the planet as a whole.

The next couple of centuries are probably going to be ... grim for the planet as a whole, as far as the interplay between agriculture and the environment go, until we stop burning fossil fuels and the human population of the earth peaks and at least plateaus, if not declines. The best case scenario I can see on the table is that we are able to produce enough food -- with improvements in both agricultural technology, the composition of food produced, and in the distribution and storage of food -- using the same agricultural footprint, maybe being able to pull back from some of the more agriculturally marginal land and allow it to re-wild (the way New England has gone from being 75% cleared for pasturage to being mostly re-forested). Maybe a few small wildlife corridors, but no substantial decrease in the fraction of prime farmland being farmed.

The more likely and worse case is that climate change makes currently prime agricultural land ... not, and the "replacement" land to the north is substantially inferior to existing farmland (even if it has the same "growing season" of frost-free days because of warming, it will still receive less sunlight than the land in lower latitudes), so we end up using a lot more land to grow hopefully-enough food (worst case is we use a lot more land and still fall short, of course).

Most of the things that could really help here are really outside the scope of agricultural planning -- cutting CO2 emissions completely over the next decade would be great, reducing the human population would certainly ease ecological pressures, creating a perfectly efficient, fair and ethical global system of food distribution would reduce total production needs, but good luck with any of that.

> Growing food is not an issue. Not wasting food is.

So one issue to be careful with here is that the goal isn't just to grow enough food; it's to grow enough food that even in the worst-case scenario, with half the fields flooded, half in drought, and half blighted, the meager production is still sufficient to meet all needs.

Yes, we can move food from a region that is having a bountiful harvest to a region in drought, yes, we can save food from year to year. But we can also have globally bad years, where the decline in production isn't regional, and we can also have years of bad production, where droughts or floods or blights lower production for three-five-ten years at a time; centuries of cyclically good or bad production aren't unheard of in the historical record.

The only way to achieve an acceptable level of food security is to damn efficiency and massively overproduce in the average year.

A healthy chunk of the inefficiencies and waste in food production are leaning into that overproduction. Livestock can consume the extra grain calories in a good year, producing tasty, high-quality calories in return, and in a bad year, we can cull the herds of cattle and pigs, both realizing an immediate gain in calories from the livestock, and freeing up a portion of the food-stream that had previously been fed to the livestock to be redirected back to direct human consumption. Likewise with ethanol -- in a good year, you turn the extra corn into biofuel, in a bad year, the price of gas goes up and you redirect the corn to either livestock or directly to people.

You could eliminate these sorts of things, and cut back on crop production overall, and realize great gains in efficiency -- you could re-wild substantial amounts of prime cropland, even. But you'd be building a food production system that was much less secure, much more fragile -- in a bad year, there would be nothing left to cut, and it would be much easier to fall short enough for widespread famines.

Who's the "a lot" of us with a food and water crisis? My understanding is that the vast majority of water usage is industrial and I've heard for decades that food scarcity isn't an issue, it's just the distribution that's a problem (i.e. politics). Desalination can be done for fractions of a penny per gallon at scale.

Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting, compared to 'traditional' classic modern intensive farm price.

An observation from the article also could be answered: what areal space is required to generate the power?

Neither of these are meant to be thunderclap proof-it-fails critique, they're just interesting.

In food miles, freshness and lack of need for water, fertiliser and pesticides its winning hands down for feeding its urban population surrounding it. Repurposed brownfield site, existing buildings would also reduce impact.

I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Supporting towns. Jobs are empowering, even crap ag. jobs but a reality here is that farming is overwhelmingly industrialised and jobs are either kept in the family or massively exploitative piece rate so this isn't a killer argument against either, but I do worry the rural area depopulation is a continuing trend.

Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well. The only concern I have is soil, nutrient supplementation quality - profit focus would dictate trying to include bare minimum nutrients which doesn't necessarily yield the best food but "good enough" being produced.

Yep, we already see this in many cultivars today - they are less nutritious than many heirloom varieties because they prioritize production (paid by the pound).

I suspect these target a market intensely focussed on nutritional value, as well as price. Good food commands a premium. Yes, naked competition would force costs down and if nutritional value was costly that would drop, but this technology is early phase, may well still be more expensive than bulk commercial agriculture and succeed because of the variance of price and value and the huge amount of price elasticity inherent in food choices.

I think you're arguing too strongly from reductionist economic theories. I already am willing to pay significantly higher prices for brie over US cheese blocks, and I pay over the odds for tomatoes I like.

In Food economics, competition is not solely driven by price basically.

That may be true for people who are well off, but there is a large segment of the population who are food insecure and many others that do not have that level of disposable income. Then you have the segments of the population that don't see any benefit to more nutritious foods and thing they are all the same.

For example, why is organic farming not the predominant method?

>Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well.

The first comment on the articles page was addressing some of that impact.

Does it feed insects and birds and support biodiversity? Does it sequester carbon in the soil, making below-ground life healthy, increasing access of plants to nutrients, and hence produce healthier food? Does it help water infiltrate into the ground, this replenishing ground water and aquifers? Does convert sunlight into latent heat via plant transpiration, and thus support the Small Water Cycles that cool the surface of the earth and convey water (via rain) downwind to drier land? Does it engage the senses with beautiful sights and smells? Does it engage humans in an honest day's work, making them proud contributors to society?

It doesn’t do any of that. Vertical farms and other indoor Ag works in places that already have a handicap. Like in deserts(Middle East), lack of arable land(Japan), harsh winters(New England/Canada).

To maximize the efficiency for indoor farming, you have to install these systems in the most arid or hostile locations where nothing has been grown before. For example, California or pacific north west doesn’t need this.

We can do better with crop rotation and crop diversity in most parts of the world where we grow food and it can be done in an environmentally friendly way.

Use of nuclear could preclude the power issue.

So I know nuclear is supposed to be able to handle current power needs of humanity for quite a while, but if we fill earth with super intensive vertical farms powered by artificial light...

Anyone ran the numbers on how long uranium would last running sun-less agriculture for a few billion people?

I'd imagine the few billion number is high. The cost would likely prevent this from being deployed in the majority of the world.

What they say in their interview is scaling this to make it economically is possible if they just have the scale. Personally I’m extremely skeptical of their success...

I imagine that's only in first world countries.

Why? Everything to run one of these would be cheaper in India (for example)...

And what is the price for the produce in those areas? Less as well. In these areas, it's highly unlikely this system would be feasible if land costs are relatively low and energy prices are a relatively higher expense compared to incomes in higher earning countries (as a percentage of income).

For conventional fuel resources estimates vary from 670 years, to 160,000 years, and higher. For other reactors/elements, five billion years. Yes I know that number sounds insane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Conventional_fue...

When fusion arrives in the next 40 years: "Lithium from sea water would last 60 million years, however, and a more complicated fusion process using only deuterium would have fuel for 150 billion years." [calculated at 1995 global power output]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Energy_source

That is certainly an exaggeration on the low end. By some estimates we don't have more than about 100 years of nuclear power. It's not really beneficial to give these wildly overoptimistic estimates of recoverable resources.

Why will fusion arrive in the next 40 years? I feel like that's what was stated 40 years ago too. Are there 0 barriers at this point and it's just a matter of obtaining funding and starting to build plants and by then there will be a big enough track record for widespread deployment?

Despite this attitude being memed, multiple efforts to refine fusion reactors to the point they are useful for energy purposes have made fairly constant (albeit slow and incremental) progress over the years. Furthermore, all the science and engineering concepts are sound based on the physics models.

One thing people don't get is we only need a tiny fraction of net positive output due to the insanely large amount of fuel available to us. 2-3% positive output is all we're talking about and it'll be able to economically replace most other energy sources (though it will take time to ramp up of course.)

Basically it's just a matter of time and continued advances in material sciences. Purity of materials and perfection of manufacturing are the primary barriers. Operational consistency a secondary one (and continued improvement in microcontroller tech and data analysis/AI/etc. will help here.)

One example, in focus fusion, the current progress has definitely been incremental but basically every step of the way the progress has been hindered by exactly the same problem: the materials and apparatus have to be nearly perfect to increase plasma duration sufficiently; to avoid contamination of the self-sustaining plasmoid. And indeed, the progress on that end has been continuous. Once it's proven it will be a matter of perfecting the manufacturing process and automations/etc. to ensure that degree of material quality and device engineering and voila we'll have cheap scalable power.

Based on what I've been watching for the last 15 years, I think within 40 years is quite reasonable. In fact, I think it would not be a surprised to see consistent 0.5% net positive or better in the next 5-10 years, whether it is focus fusion or tokamak or whatever.

TL;DR: Fusion is a 100% sound energy generation avenue that is simply waiting for its "welding" moment. By which I refer to the point where gas production became suddenly economically viable due to the invention of welding (which was motivated at least partly by the desire to improve gasoline production.)

I'm honestly not sure it's that bad.

Right now human civilization is running off something like 18TW of energy.

If you add in 2000 kilocalories per day for 7.8 billion people, you add another 750 GW; if you add in a factor of 10 for biological & technological inefficiencies on actually turning electricity into edible calories, you're up to 7.5TW.

As long as you don't throw another factor of 10 on top of that -- imagine growing all food indoors, and then feeding it to cows, before subsisting entirely on beef -- you're probably looking at an amount of energy comparable to that used by humans currently.

Obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to just switch over to indoor agriculture when there's free sunlight outside, but if we were to do so, the energy demands are probably on a scale comparable to what we're working with already.

So you're probably only halving or so the runway of available uranium.

Nuclear is the, or at least one of the, most expensive power sources we have.

Isn't that only due to the insanely strict safety regulations nuclear plants need to adhere to? After the Fukushima disaster, France, Germany, and China stopped nuclear operations or added more regulation that increased the cost of operating their power plants (despite, of course, nuclear being on average safer than fossil fuel plants, and even hydroelectric having a bigger death toll).

Does the reason really matter all that much if we have cheaper alternatives available that are just as useful for farming?

Yes? The high cost being the result of overregulation and overzealous safety standards points to a trivial (in terms of engineering difficulty, not political difficulty) solution to reduce those costs, and nuclear power is region-agnostic, unlike solar, wind or hydroelectric. It can be utilized, along with vertical indoor farming, in areas of otherwise marginal utility.

I doubt you'll be able to muster the political will to deregulate nuclear and design and build a sufficient number of cheap nuclear plants before renewables will have made the whole thing obsolete.

I agree with the first part of your comment, though not the second. From 2000-2013, the share of global energy produced by renewables has only grown by 0.8%[0]. (Fun fact; when Germany started their nuclear phase out in 2011, they replaced the mothballed nuclear plants with new coal power plants, not renewables). There's frankly not enough time to rely on the growth of renewables; it looks like we're stuck with fossil fuels until the bitter end.

Edit: Got the dates wrong.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Linear expolation is hopefully not the right model for the growth of renewables. The price has come down a lot lately.

I think the point of the verticle farm is almost moot if you are replacing fields of crops with fields of solar panels.

Solar panels are ~20% efficient, photosynthesis is around 2% efficient. You can also put solar panels on land that is not suitable for agriculture.

That's not an accurate comparison. You are then using that 20% to power grow lights for photosynthesis. How efficient is photosynthesis using grow lights? Even if it's twice as efficient, you're then looking at 4% of 20% which is 0.8%.

Sure, this can be used used land not suitable for agriculture. I only see this really being helpful in cities that have old industrial buildings that are sitting vacant (reuse existing infrastructure and reduce transportation).

Nuclear is definitely the most fresh-water intensive power source. Waste heat water ruins downstream ecologies.

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

Compared with coal and oil, and ignoring waste. Nuclear costs more than wind and solar though.

Not true about waste: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

What about recycling for wind/solar?

Only because externalization of costs of storage as well as start up and shut down of more consistent power sources that supplement their variable electricity generation.

Traditional farms aren't going to be upset by this approach. It more of an answer to how we are going to feed 14 billion people than it is a threat to our current way of growing things to eat.

Also, by not growing these products on other farmland, other crops, which aren’t suitable for vertical solutions, can be grown on that land. There is a shortage of farmable land, so this is another piece in the puzzle.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...

Too late for that. My family are big baseball fans, and we go to the baseball hall of fame for tournaments or indications every few years.

That drive from Albany to Cooperstown is progressively more depressing first as small dairy was destroyed by deregulation and later as agricultural policy put everyone out of business unless you grow corn or flowers or farm tourism.

> Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting

They didn't mention it because it's impractically high right now. As an experiment this is interesting but it's nowhere near cost effective yet.

> I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag.

Your fear is a century late. Really, all of civilized history late. The very clear trend of civilization is loss of agricultural jobs.

I just don’t believe these numbers. I’d like to see an independent study by a non-financially-involved university before I believe that some techies have figured out a way to boost yields more than two orders of magnitude over modern agriculture. Either there is some gimmick - a specific plant or strain or whatever - or the energy costs are 3 or more orders of magnitude over normal agriculture - or the numbers are cooked in some other way. I’d be as excited as anyone if someone could pull off a 360x or 400x yield in a useful food crop, but these guys would be trillionaires if they had actually done so.

They could have at least told us how much electricity and human labor it uses per pound of produce - it doesn't instill confidence that the article only talks about space usage, when the important question is "at what cost?".

Yeah, this article was lacking those and other details. Most every claim was made in a generic way that seemed to imply most any crop could be grown this way when in truth they are pretty much growing salad greens only.

It doesn’t look like the produce produced by this farm (from the pictures) provides much nutritional value. Creating overpriced herbs, salads and micro greens in little plastic pots maybe commercially viable but we need vegetables like legumes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and brocolli (and in the US maize) to feed the world.

The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.

This author must have a truly low opinion of me to think I'd fall for that horseshit. Before you can tell what effect the conditions have on yield you have to compare the grow area. Each vertical pane contributes to the grow area. What is the grow area of the vertical farm? It's not even in the damn article at all. What's the cost per kilogram of plant matter? Per kg of dry yield?

Plenty’s farms grow non-GMO crops and don’t use herbicides or pesticides.

Ah, there it is. This isn't a project to save the world; it's a project to lure investors and then lose money for ten years before getting bought out and shut down.

Some of you may find this interesting - tomatoes from a solar furnace and uses seawater, totally sustainable and running afaik.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-...

https://www.sundropfarms.com

Here's a skeptical take on vertical farming: https://globalecoguy.org/no-vertical-farms-wont-feed-the-wor...

Johathan Foley is usually well informed on these topics.

Big difference in growing baby greens which are harvested early in a plants life vs growing for the fruit or seeds.

> all the packaging is 100% recyclable, made of recycled plastic

eeek. It's my understanding right now plastic recycling... well, isn't. I wish they would eliminate the material completely.

There are package-free / fully reusable packaging grocery stores popping up. I really think its something that could become the norm with pretty little pain for people. Worth looking to see if there is one in your area to push the death of single-use plastics along.

Can someone explain to me why “vertical” farms need to be vertical? Why not just use greenhouses, along with all of the AI/other technologies? Where are most of the productivity gains coming from?

It’s actually an elegant idea. But there are some design flaws.

CEA includes many ways to control environment for Ag...glasshouse, hoophouses, polyvtunnels, hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics..

Installing vertical farms at this scale is hubris. Even though it’s a good idea. This will never scale. VC logic fail.

Also: no productivity gains. You heard it here first: no vertical farm is making a profit. And they never will.

Interesting discussion here far outclasses the article itself, which looks like a thinly-disguised press release on a horribly spammy website. I wonder if there are better sources available.

Wow, those purple suited AI-driven Robots sure do look human! Impressive.

I'm really curious as to why we have not started to build stacked fields.

How deep go root crops ? Could we do, say, 10 stories building and have one story every two filled with soil ? What would be the challenges ? It could be a way to do intensive yet biological agriculture.

> I'm really curious as to why we have not started to build stacked fields.

How do you propose to light it? They need energy to grow, and it needs to be done in such a way that your overall cost is cheaper that sunlight (which on a bright day provides roughly 1kW per square meter in energy).

I don't know, hence my questions :-) Could a good mirroring system could do the trick ? Or like it is already done in a lot a closed system ? At which density does that start to be economically viable ?

But my main question really is, is it even being investigated or already considered unfeasible ?

> Could a good mirroring system could do the trick ?

To get the same amount of energy, the total area of the mirrors would have to be about the size of the equivalent field.

I like this. Not because it's a good idea (it may be, but IMO is not), but because its exactly the kind of high level, open ended, open minded approach that is needed.

I think that a lot of folks approach this problem thinking that land, fertilizer and water are the main issues. It makes sense, they are indeed the main inputs to plants. They are not however the main costs and inputs for large scale agriculture. For large scale ag the main costs from a societal standpoint are energy, labor and waste. Land where you farm is cheap and plentiful. Same with water and fertilizer (relatively). Labor needs to be imported, along with energy and managing storage and waste, including the food/grain market fluctuations are the main challenges. These are not solved by vertical farming. These are solved by automating tractors and harvesting equipment, making the path to market from the farm more straightforward and efficient, and figuring our our labor issues and not just ignoring them or hand waving saying robots will do it.

To everyone arguing about lettuce: lettuce is for practice. Weed & shrooms will be legal soon.

Then they need to stop toting this as a food solution for inner cities, food deserts, and a way to decrease miles on your food.

Last I checked, weed and shrooms don't make a balanced diet

Mushrooms already grow in basements with no light whatsoever.

This is really cool stuff! If the claimed numbers square up this would be a pretty big deal for the urban areas of Canada & US which have lots of medium priced/quality land too expensive for farms or cheap warehouses but too cheap/contaminated/poorly zoned/etc. for housing and offices.

Vertical farms would be last thing I would allow on contaminated land... If we can't build regular buildings to standard that keep contaminations out, why would we allow another vector there?

Well of course the vertical farm will be built to a clean room standard, far greater than standard construction. Or at least that seems to be the only possible way for their product to have ‘zero pesticides’.

The article is a bit light on details. Where are the scientific papers on this?

Until we get the details, the headline is kind of meaningless. I’m pretty sure I could produce the same amount of macronutrients as a 2 acre vertical farm in an even smaller factory if I had $400 million dollars in inputs to play with.

> 2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm

Can someone show me on a map where this 2+ acre building is, just so I know it's real?

It would have to be epic, tall and densely packed. Lots of infrastructure around it to do 320 times normal output. To do consistently and at this 2 acres they claim to have done at scale seems unlikely.

This claims SF is only 50,000 sq ft https://www.bdcnetwork.com/farming-ready-grow with no pictures to show they are using all the space.

Just the same cut away videos and low shot images to make things look big.

The way that the article is phrased as food/area hints at where/why vertical farming could be a benefit. It seems unlikely that in the near future vertical farming will overtake traditional farming methods where land is plentiful. Indeed, the costs of the food being grown are still 5x higher. But where land/transportation costs are the most prohibitive for food this could potentially be viable.

Growing staples is the main failing of all these vertical farms, and they are just boutique-ish without that capability.

But if energy were free could we not grow staples vertically? We ARE on the cusp of that. And there is a lot of emphasis here.

Virtually free energy could come now, with present technology, anywhere on earth with Geothermal... if it was just invested in. (Requires upfront costs).

It's interesting this stuff works ok so if we want to grow food on Mars or some mucked up future earth we can. Though at the moment I'm happy with my plants getting out in the sun. Environment wise I think artificial meat may be the big future positive change.

There is a LOT of fluff in this poorly written article. 70% of it is saying, "It's horrible. It's so dangerous. They're covering it up", without damn well just stating the facts. So tedious to read through.... uuurrgghh...

All the lighting used so the plants can photosynthesize is not free... I also doubt power carbon neutral. So how much area of renewable energy sources would it take to run this farm? A traditional farm does not need powered light sources...

For all things done too purely and cleanly, is there a hidden harm/cost in being too pure and clean? Do we miss out something useful which could have otherwise been a part of it in only a natural environment?

When can we start using CRISPR to bioengineer crops that can be economically grown?

Say I want to grow an apple. I would like it to sprout its fruit from a small unit, like a branch, that’s hooked up to the nutrient bath.

Then this small unit can be mechanically organized and sorted by the robotic farm operating system.

The whole system would work in orchestration, where seedlings are germinated into saplings. Then put into a grow box, to collect its nutrients. And then put into an assembly line for it to grow, and be harvested. Then when it is ripe, it gets harvested by a robotic arm picker.

All fully automated, organically grown, no pesticides or very limited usage. Then automatically washed and hermetically packaged for sale at your local grocery store. Or delivered to you by Amazon Grocery Services.

If you haven't seen Bert Hubert's breakdown of the Covid vaccine source code, worth a look: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

Think he describes a reality where we know a lot today and yet still have ways to go in order to do something that intentional to an apple. His presentation on DNA computing in general (linked at bottom) goes into some depth there.

What caught my eye is that a common apple has a DNA size roughly as large and complex as the human genome itself, with a disclaimer that the DNA size doesn't translate to complexity. But meanwhile, we don't even know how many genes a human being has (estimate changed in 20 years from 100k down to ~20k), but a level beneath that complexity we don't even know "how our own cells know where a gene begins" (quoted from his presentation).

Maybe SpaceX would be interested in it for the Mars mission. This kind of agriculture/botany is really similar to one of those Expanse episodes...

I'm pretty sure this 2-acre farm will produce two to three orders of magnitude less calories than 720 acres of wheat. or rice.

Anyone know where I can find a breakdown of a vertical farm's expenditures by category?

Wow! I haven’t read such an impressive set of claims from a startup since Theranos.

That one photo in the article looks like a screenshot out of The Expanse ^_^

That's nice. But honestly, what are average people supposed to do anymore? If we keep making everything more difficult and more difficult to compete with, then how can average people survive? I would like to retire and have a small farm, but this basically says it's not possible to compete.

I guess people downvote just because they don't agree. But it's true. The number of people on assistance continues to grow and the easier jobs are outsourced to lower cost countries.

Edit: looks like some others have upvoted.

We've already got sort of a dystopia in software engineering. Get into FAANG and you're good for life. Combined FAANG (say 10 biggest tech companies) is over 5 trillion dollars, more than a lot of countries' GDPs with sovereignty.

I suspect in year 2100, we will have no small businesses but giant monolith corporations that will drive everything from content censorship to citizen governance through proxies, everyone's savings are going to be in their stocks which keep increasing at an ever increasing pace. Traditional currencies have been devalued and replaced by corporate-owned coins. Neuralink will ensure utter dominance of a few. Abstract things we consider today are commodicized and traded.

Future kind of sucks to be honest. We're past golden prime years. I just want to run a small tea shop and hang out with the locals.

Small businesses haven’t been wiped out by FAANG though. It’s not a zero sum game.

I wonder how many small businesses and shops have been wiped out by Amazon.

Yes, on average its not a zero sum game. Ask your corner bookstore if its not a zero sum game. Local effects are real.

Just in another thread I was greeted by how much of a bargian GSuite is. For $5/month, you get world class in the cloud office/productivity tools + gazillion other services and email, SSO. No other SaaS can compete with this.

Github with free private repos, why would anyone choose another competitor? It has all the things and more.

> For $5/month, you get world class in the cloud office/productivity tools + gazillion other services and email, SSO.

And if they ever decide to lock you out, you lose everything. That cheap price comes with a cost.

GSuite can't just "lock you out" if you're paying, that's why there is a contractual relationship. There are all sorts of third party business relationships (e.g. banks, HR systems, counterparties, other SaaS products, etc.) that all companies depend on running smoothly, I don't see why GSuite is any different.

The people who really got wiped out were Borders and Barnes & Noble. If you’re a small bookstore you actually have an niche now.

You can’t compete with Amazon’s virtually infinite selection and they can’t compete with your local presence and the physical experience and customer service you offer to your patrons. If you’re incapable of doing a good job with any of those then you’re toast, but then again maybe you shouldn’t have been running a small bookstore anyways.

I asked the guy at the corner bookstore if it was zero sum, and he said no. Then he offered to sell me an Econ 101 textbook, but I got it on Amazon for 1/2 the price.

We both wonder how many shops have been wiped out. I also wonder how many online businesses have been created. I work with many online vendors who sell on Amazon that would not have been viable if they had to open a brick and mortar retail location.

I suspect the reason you're downvoted is because so many small businesses HAVE been wiped out by FAANGs, and other megacorps. I mean, just look at the effects of the pandemic. Many independent retail stores in my city have closed up shop but Amazon is booming like never before. Even local restaurants that have switched to delivery, it's like they're barely scraping by (if they haven't already closed) but DoorDash etc. are raking it in.

Were they wiped out by the pandemic, or Amazon?

That's what William Gibson was saying in the early 80s about 2020.

To be honest, 80’s were the prime time. Things went downhill from then. Sure there is progress in medicine and productivity and what not. Just the general state of the world today is worse off than if we were to go back to 80’s with some hindsight on how to run the next 40 years.

This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve read in a couple weeks. The world is better by nearly any measure than it was 40 years ago.

Suicide rates are generally higher now, signaling a general dissatisfaction and hopelessness in life.

Sure living standard is higher (but with more inequality), most fields are more advanced now, but what's the true purpose if people feel more depressed and inclined to kill themselves?

That’s an important metric for sure, but should we ignore the massive decreases in infant mortality or deaths from hunger, disease, or war?

How did you determine it was generally higher because it appears to be lower in much of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa?

This is a pretty first world-centric perspective. There are slightly higher rates of dissatisfaction and hopelessness but quality of life is drastically improving in the second and third world. More efficient production results in better and more stuff even if the stuff isn't distributed perfectly.

I just keep thinking how terrifying the pandemic would be without the Internet for information, entertainment and connection with friends. We are insanely lucky and we do not take time to appreciate it.

#shitHNsays

Lol, glad I could entertain. Take it with a grain of salt and lighten up all.

For white, affluent, straight Americans, the 80s were probably just fine. For a large number of people who aren't those things, the 80s were hell, though.

The "general state of the world today" is likely to be much better for billions of people than it was in the 80s, however. It's worth keeping that perspective in mind, IMO.

Edit: I've linked one slide deck I think will describe what I'm talking about a bit, but there are certainly more and better sources for this kind of information.

Maybe we can share some sources here as a way to better educate ourselves on this topic?

https://slides.ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-food-provision/...

I see what you’re saying. I’m noticing general trends towards authoritarianism, corruption of public discourse, death of journalism, polarization of politics, rise of conspiracy theories, climate is worse, etc.

If you’re an average Chinese citizen, your life has probably improved dramatically. The auto mechanic down the street is struggling though since newer cars are basically unrepairable.

Totally fair, I just don't want to forget how much we've raised the floor in the last 40 years -- from 44% of all humanity in "absolute poverty" to 9.6% is a huge accomplishment.

There are certainly some concerning trends, but you believe things were better in general during the Cold War before the fall of the Soviet Union? When substantially more people globally lived in poverty? When the US was just coming off the civil rights movements of the 60-70s? When AIDS was rampant, but there was no treatment? When global warming was happening, but it wasn’t widely known or acknowledged?

The majority of brand new cars that the average American is buying is still an ICE-powered automobile that’s nearly as serviceable as the old ones, sometimes requiring more advanced diagnostics tools, but far safer and more reliable.

Worldwide, life is better for billions of people.

Life in the United States was better for most Americans in the 80's than it is now. That was the beginning of the decoupling of productivity from pay, and it has been ongoing ever since.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

It's ok to both acknowledge the developmental progress of the rest of the world and lament the backsliding of the US.

I am happy for the the fact that lot of people have been lifted from poverty.

What I am not happy about is all of us, all 8 billion of us, being able to afford everything we can and hoard useless electronics and plastic doo-dads, waste a ton of resources and live an excessive life. But, "We in the west have it so they should also" is a controversial take on this.

We as Americans waste a lot of resources. That shouldn't be the role model for others.

That's not the same thing as "basic ability to survive".

When billions of people couldn't buy food and don't have clean water to drink, cries of, "But I'm not maximally benefitting from my own productivity increases!" come across as relatively unimportant.

The phrase that caught my eye was, "the general state of the world today is worse off." I don't think that meshes with observed reality over the past 40 years for the humans living on this planet, if you're not white, affluent, straight and American.

Funny story, what is Fortune 1? Still not a tech company (not for long).

A 5 trillion GDP is bigger than every country beside the US and China. Japan is 4.9. Germany is 3.9.

But comparing market cap (wealth) to gdp (production) doesn't really make sense.

It would make more sense to compare revenues maybe?? Top 5 tech revenues would combine to about $1T - which still makes them bigger than all but 16 countries...

Comparing revenue with added value makes no sense, either. Makes more sense to look at profits.

After all, a company buying A for $100 and selling A for $100 will boost revenue, but will not see profit rise. A country in which companies buy A for $100 and sell A for $100 will not see GDP rise.

> Combined FAANG (say 10 biggest tech companies) is over 5 trillion dollars, more than a lot of countries' GDPs with sovereignty.

That's apples and oranges. More apt is the comparison of FAANG revenue to GDP.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves---GDP is a rate! The units are often quoted as dollars [or equivalent] but they're actually dollars/year. Or, put another way, they're the rate, but integrated over a definite time period (1 year) from which you can only extract an average rate.

It may not necessarily be a bad thing, small firms can be very exploitative of employees and fail to provide many of the safeguards and systems that large employers provide. More large employers are subject to more intense regulatory scrutiny, so, I don't really think that small businesses will be some kind of utopia for workers.

The flip side of that is that large firms have no incentive to provide better pay or benefits since they are less connected to the community. This is especially true for lower income individuals since the supply of lower skill workers is not constrained.

Except that, generally speaking, larger companies do indeed provide better pay and benefits than smaller firms in the same line of business.

From experience, the small (but not sole proprietor type) firms are owned by people whose community is other small firm owners. They're almost a landed gentry of store and factory owners in rural America.

why does it need to be a competition in the first place?

If we have automated manufacturing and food production why does the average person really need to do anything?

Because the current paradigm requires one to work to have a decent life.

It's always a competion. That's just life. Darwin has laid that out before pretty clearly.

That is not 'just life'; that's the puritanical work ethic that you're describing. Life absent of a need for labor-intensive work to produce basic goods and services is better than the system we have now. The issue is not automation; the issue is who benefits from making manual human labor obsolete, and in our capitalist system I doubt it will be the workers it displaces.

Maslow put "employment" in his hierarchy of needs. As a trust fund kid I've never had to worry about living in the streets but found that without the purpose of work I felt pretty worthless. If you live in the first world you basically have food water and shelter taken care of for you if you're resourceful. The rest seems to be climbing status hierarchies and opulence.

That's not the point though. Your self worth and employment are not directly correlated.

Furthermore as our society evolves the hierarchy of needs can and should shift to demphasize employment.

What you are describing is the result of industrialized societies needing workers, soon that will not be the case.

Our society is not darwinian, if it was we would just let the sick and disabled die.

People need purpose, not necessarily a ‘job’, but something to occupy their time.

Kinda like Pompeii back in the day?

I think many could find purpose with hobbies, charity, and children. The main issue I have is how does one pay for that and support themself? I would gladly quit my job if I had the means.

Society is always going to be unequal – some people will have more than others.

So long as there is work, the people who have a smaller share always have the opportunity of improving their lot by working harder and smarter than others.

A society with no work is basically one in which everyone lives off their assets, in which wealth primarily comes through inheritance. A society with even more inequality than today, but with far less social mobility.

If there is no way to work, there must be no way to provide value to others. Correct? If there is no way to provide value to another then there is no inequity.

People provide non transactional value to each other all the time.

I hope that isn't your worldview, it sounds lonely.

I think you are conflating livelihood with purpose.

Because the inputs to those processes (raw materials, energy, maintenance, and a bit of labor) all cost money/are limited?

Their selection of crops seems fairly limited.[1] I don't know that corn or soybeans, for example, would do well vertically.

[1] https://www.plenty.ag/our-produce/

Totally possible to compete on quality, especially if you are more in it for the lifestyle or the community aspect. You can sell at a farmer's market for 5x what the local grocery store charges and you get 100% of the margin!

Better yet, if you harvest at the right time your product will taste way better because it wasn't shipped across the continent!

Lots of people are still getting into farming these days, you can make a full time salary on as low as 1 acre, especially if you do microgreens. See this fellow's content for far more detail than you might ever want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHwAfHQA9M

Most small farmers I know have modest incomes or less. Many also need to work another job.

> Most small farmers I know have modest incomes or less.

I guess that depends on your perspective. As a small farmer, the per-hour income is incredible, putting my earning potential as a developer to shame. But it doesn't require many hours of my time.

> Many also need to work another job.

Since it doesn't require many hours of my time, it seems reasonable to spend that time doing something else. Sitting around watching TV all day would get old pretty fast.

> You can sell at a farmer's market for 5x what the local grocery store charges and you get 100% of the margin!

Ever tried selling 50 tons of wheat at the farmer's market? Its a minor side-income at best

> "you can make a full time salary on as low as 1 acre,"

Thats total wishfull thinking. - you can only do that in specific niches, with significant capital outlay, near a city. You are not going ti make any money off an average 1-acre field in the countryside

Don't compete on commodity crops to start.

That's 99% of farm produce, so you are basically supporting the statement above - only the largest farms are profitable, and family farm is dead outside tiny niches.

You'd be surprised how few people it currently takes to farm 720 acres.

Maybe a few for lettuce, but for cereal grains... we're talking guy on a combine (part of) 3 days a year.

I'd venture that you're looking at hundreds of people at harvest time for 720 acres of lettuce. I suppose the spikey nature of the labor demand is another reason why automation could be a better approach.

The only question then, is what does that unskilled labor do as an alternative?

As a side note, the labor is generally migratory so they move the the next crop that needs harvesting.

If you're retiring with a small farm, why are you concerned about the market prices of what you're producing? You're just eating it yourself / giving it to neighbors, right?

If you intend to sell it, well the differences of economy of scale of a small farm versus a large farm and the resulting cost difference alone should have been obvious. You wouldn't have been competing well in that market either, right?

No way. You need income just to pay the ever increasing property taxes, the equiptment costs, etc.

The idea is to produce higher margin products, such as organics, honey, ir niche products.

You can grow 100% of what you need / want beside grains on less than 5 acres (really 1 acre can suffice depending on what you want to grow). Growing your own grains is quite frankly ridiculous. It will likely cost you close to 100x what you could buy them for (if you include your time), and importantly the quality in taste is minimal.

You don't need a ton of equipment to feed yourself. You might WANT some to make life easier, but even then, I'm pretty sure you don't need to pay yearly tax on a tractor in most states...

You probably aren't paying tax on the tractor, but you are paying thousands in tax on your land and house. Then you do have equipment costs of the tractor, capital expenditures, etc. So you also need to produce enough to sell to cover some costs.

Also, you can't grow more than an acre of wheat for self-use legally in the US anyways.

An acre of wheat is almost 2k pounds! What could you possibly do for personal use with more than 2k pounds of wheat?!

You're really looling at about 1000 lbs of flour per acre. I think I was mistaken about 1 acre. I think its actually 1/4 acre, which is about 250 pounds, which should be enough for most families. But still, you need to produce excess yo pay for costs and provide an income.

>Also, you can't grow more than an acre of wheat for self-use legally in the US anyways.

I find this very surprising, especially considering this should vary by state (although I know this might be the kind of thing the Commerce Clause could get up into).

I can't find any information that there's a cap on wheat production in the US. Got a source?

> You need income just to pay the ever increasing property taxes, the equiptment costs, etc.

The whole concept of retiring is that you've factored those things into your savings. If you can't afford to pay property taxes for the rest of your life you can't retire.

Farmers aren't 'average people'. A commercial-scale farm requires millions in investment. It runs on small margins, and is run like a factory. A modern 1000-acre farm can be operated by one or two people. That's been the trend for 200 years. America for instance has gone from 50% farmers to under 2%. Arguably the reason we were the superpower we were - so much more manpower for other things.

And to create a fancy mechanical robotic wall-farm to produce commodity products like lettuce seems folly. I'm sure they chose that because it comes to maturity in a score days, not weeks or months. And the 'floor space' per plant has to be enormous for that farm-of-the-future.

The article belabors the 'less land used' argument throughout. Perhaps because that's the only place they win (not on price; not on investment cost; not on variety or flexibility?) While that's important, the issue is not running out of farmland. The American farmer has gotten so efficient, doubling output per acre repeatedly for a century now. Iowa could feed two United States. The US could feed the world. With old-fashioned land-intensive agriculture.

That all depends on the crops. The labor needs or ability to use vertical farms is vastly different between tomatoes, citrus, and corn (for example).

There are still small farms, although they are continuing to die off. But even if farmers are not average, then what work do average people have?

It's pretty dystopian to see a page comprised of technocrats writing about these topics.

Median estimation for AGI is around 2060 so its not just "average" people.

Why is it dystopian to talk about agricultural related topics?

Is that AGI of 2060 a mistake?

The people who are on this forum are cogs in a machine that, over the next 40 years, will displace millions of American workers. It seems where we are headed into a bifurcated society part overeducated technocrats part gig economy task rabbits.

Seeing the former group beginning to consider the effects of their work is dystopian.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mistake."

Where did you get your number for AGI? An adjusted gross income of $2060 seems extremely low (very far below average).

It's not dystopian to consider the possible effects of one's work. If you don't consider them, then how can you make adjustments/improvements? It would be dystopian to maximize the negative impacts. We are doing the opposite - questioning what the best course of action might be.

By AGI I meant Artificial General Intelligence. There is no stopping or meaningful slowing of the machine.

They also estimated we would have flying cars 20 years ago. These sort of estimates are highly inaccurate. Even then, do we just ignore the average people for the next 40 (your median) years?

"They also estimated we would have flying cars 20 years ago." My number comes from a collection of AI researchers from the future of life institute so I can't imagine a better "they" to defer to. That said, we are bad at predicting the future so who knows?

I never said we should forget about the average people or normal people as Yang calls them in his book "The War on Normal People."

Even if we don't have AGI we will have narrow AI such as self driving/factory stuff/textiles which will displace millions. I'm all for UBI or some sort of equivalent social safety net (I'm not an economist so I don't want to be prescriptive here as I have heard some drawbacks to UBI).

The technocrats have already created platforms that are tearing our social fabric apart by promulgating conspiracies and radicalizing our youth while reducing long-form literacy an increasing anxiety and depression.

What we need is some sort of social revolution that in my opinion could only be obtained by an authoritarian government that protects people from themselves and the exploitive tech corporations. Ban facebook to reduce conspiracy promulgation. Ban tiktok and ever increasingly addictive video games to prevent our youth from becoming dopamine junkees. Ban drugs so the listless and ever-growing welfare class remain mostly docile.

None of these changes are feasible in a country whose identity revolves around personal freedom/choice.

"obtained by an authoritarian government that protects people from themselves"

Why fight nature? Government shouldn't protect citizens from themselves. Let it take its course. The stupid people should reduce through natural attrition. It's controversial, but it's the way the natural world works.

We can definitely make systemic changes that help people make better "decisions." I don't believe in free will and you clearly do so we're kinda approaching this problem from fundamentally different frameworks. Stupid people shouldn't be culled but rather shepherded. Governments are artificial constructs so asking them to act "naturally" doesn't make sense to me as they have no natural state.

Also reducing human suffering seems to be a pretty good thing to do and your natural system doesn't seem to do that.

I never said they should be culled. I'm saying let the problem take care of itself.

The actions you were proposing weren't things to help people make better decisions (if they were, it would still be free will). They were to make laws to outlaw activities. If you don't believe in free will, why do you propose helping people make better decisions? Do you really think imposing someone else's will over others is more benign? The government imposes its will through force or threat thereof (causing human suffering).

Government and politics is not really artificial. They form naturally whenever there are groups of people - similar leadership and power dynamics exist in the natural world too (look at bees, ants, wolves, etc).

The government imposes its will all the time. It prevents you from shooting me or overthrowing the government. Surely this imposition is just? Surely this is more benign then letting you shoot me or letting you overthrow the government.

Why? Because it reduces human suffering.

Also surely with better technology we will be able to transform prisons into rehabilitation centers and thus reduce our countries prison populations and thus become a FREER country, albeit one with less rights?

I think comparing our government to a beehive or a pack of wolves is ridiculous I guess you can call governments "natural." Even if we consider this government natural, surely it doesn't have a natural state. What is the "natural state" of a government of 350 million people?

You're being very presumptuous and not using linear premises in your logic. You assume that government reduces human suffering and that people would be running wild without one. There's a lot more to society than government.

For example, why would I shoot you? I have no motive to do that regardless of what the laws may be. There is nothing the government has done to make it impossible for someone to shoot you. It's just that if some one does and gets caught, they go to prison.

On the subject of dissolving the government, you are completely wrong. There is nothing stopping me from non-violently overthrowing the government. The Constitution even states that if the people want to dissolve the government, they can. So I could try to convince people to elect myself and others who would change or even dissolve it.

"Also surely with better technology we will be able to transform prisons into rehabilitation centers and thus reduce our countries prison populations and thus become a FREER country, albeit one with less rights?"

This is completely nonsensical. Technology isn't holding back prison reform - social and political powers are the main drivers. Why would the number of rights be reduced? You've laid out no premise to connect nor support that statement.

What work? Not sure what's the question. Its retail sales, service industry, delivery, stuff like that.

So automated stuff? Retail has been dying off due to online sales. Delivery services are looking automate with drones. Not to mention that places like Amazon start their own service and pay their drivers less than the major places (worse jobs). Service industry is reeling from the pandemic. Many of those jobs are automatable too.

The general trend has been to eliminate onshore jobs that are low skill and outsource those tasks to lower cost countries. As it has also been towards jobs requiring higher education. So what opportunities are there? After all, we are seeing increased dependence on support programs and wage stagnation.

Worse than that. China is America's number one consumer of automation equipment. They're just a decade or two behind us. Soon their working class will be out of things to do as well.

Most of your points are solid. However, Variety could be a huge win. With the full-auto farm there is room to try out different types and experiment in small batch with tight monitoring and control which can also give predictable yield.

As long as the crop is fast-maturing. Else the expensive 'pot' makes experimentation cost prohibitive?

Stop hacking my vertical scroll-farming! This inertia thing when scrolling is unbrearable.

For a website called 'intellgent living' you'd think there would be more intelligence involved. Crap website from start to finish.

TL;DR: out-produces by acre (and acre-foot), not by dollar.

I'm pretty sure we've already known for decades that there are few non-economic limits to intensification, but it's nice to have the (practical?) example.

Wait a few years when various molds take hold and the only solution is to replace everything, when you're already in the red and operating at thin margins. Tale as old as time.

This is incredible!

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