Vertical farms grow veggies on site at restaurants and grocery stores
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I don’t know if these farms will replace traditional ones, but I think there’s at the very least a niche for optimizing produce with tons of flavor.
As we see a hugely growing demand for quality in food options by the middle and upper classes, the product offering the best taste will have a large leg up on the cheap mass produced produce.
This demand is not limited to individual consumers, restaurants and chefs, who already seek quality ingredients by sourcing from local trusted growers, will likely put additional demand on these low/no pesticide, and taste optimized produce.
I cant wait to taste the best tomatoes of my life.
Im lucky enough to have traveled to places like Bali and Italy, where the local produce is unconstrained by bean counting hyper optimization. It tastes better and quality of life is better because of it.
A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages.
What actual experience do you have with such models?
This is actually incredibly rare, specifically growing on-site, especially now as COVID has ravaged the culinary Industry irreparably in the US.
I've been a cook, ran kitchens (with in an emphasis in farm to table and agro-tourism), and did/do supply chain and have a focus on food-tech. I can tell you that anything closely resembling the model you described was very short lived at Michelin Star restaurants in the E. Coast, or a few with actual farms in addition to their brick an mortar operation: think French Laundry in NorCal or Blue Hill in NY.
This is actually a very good model for all involved, that may not have had much viability ~10 years ago when I first got really involved, but with COVID making people aware of how weak the food supply chain is this may do well. People are dining out less and lower overall food costs are likely to make this viable, despite not being all encompassing upon deployment.
I really hope last year's shortages were a wake up call, and want to see more of this take off. This entire system is in dire need of repair, now that the disruption has taken its toll.
> A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages.
Could be, but you have to understand most of the Industry, specifically the affluent ones that would even try this in CA or NY let alone middle America that operates on the thinnest of margins, are beyond life support. These places are not coming back.
What you suggest is interesting, and I had a similar idea before which could help curb some of the baked in pershibaility in the food supply but this will just translate to longer times for ROI which as I said is already stretched super thin due to high overhead and operational costs and think margins.
But, its definitely worth exploring if the travel times are less than 30 mins and would have to be limited in scope: greens, herbs and other fast-growing crops. Proper fruit trees, grains etc... are out of the question.
My model was simple: ship in starter plants to unused land in cities that incorporate Ag into the Education system and have them participate in wide scale farm and smaller scale green house operations (this already exists in Denver) and have them supply the restaurants. What ever they don't sell they could help feed the community. Help create secondary and tertiary business models with local entrepreneurs and philanthropists--I thought of someone like Chamath would be super interested to be honest.
I actually wanted to pitch this to my former boss, Kimbal Musk, as an adjunct of an already existing model with Big Green and Squared Roots learning gardens and the container garden models respectively. I had devised a whole system with to-do things after I came back from a stint at SpaceX after having worked at his Flagship in Boulder.
Unfortunately, COVID ruined that, but the plan makes sense none the less and I would gladly make efforts to volunteer even though I'm retired from both Ag and Culinary now.
I know because I tried. Then there is liability, insurance and red tape and legal translations. It’s hideous and exhausting.
I'm familiar with Sonoma's Ag, I helped with a conversion of an organic farm to Biodynmic in Petaluma and you're right this is not going to work in the Bay Area due to the immense population density and scarce vacant land as is, but honestly it doesn't have to; you could just onboard people into a CSA while growing with this practice in Sonoma/Napa counties and use things like Cropmobster and distribute in a major city like say Palo Alto or Mountain View or some where people from even SF can come in and get their food boxes. It's going to exhausting regardless, as we had a team of 5 dedicated people in my apprenticeship handle a 300 client CSA and we worked roughly 14-18 hour days dueing the Spring, Summer and Fall months when I was in S. Germany.
The goal is to get school children involved (middle to HS aged), we tried to do that, but could only get them to come to harvest for a few hours a month and tour the farm: my friend's mother was a member of the ruling Green party in Baden Wuttenberg and we had so much red tape to deal with to ensure the children's safety, thus this needs to be done either on a volunteer basis after school or as a in-school program. But if I'm honest, now with COVID school shut downs in CA I bet parents are just dying to get their kids out of the house and it could get lots of traction.
> I know because I tried. Then there is liability, insurance and red tape and legal translations. It’s hideous and exhausting.
Honestly, I don't doubt it, which is why I wouldn't bother following the rules in CA and just resort to things like guerilla gardening and bypass it entirely if I wanted to take the challenge. I remember the riots that happened at UC Berkeley when people tried to use the vacant land for gardening/farming, not sure if it was OWS people but lots of them were sympathetic and got maced just the same. Occupy the Farm covers this [0].
It seems like we have much to discuss, I still need to drop you an email. I'll drop you a line before the end of the month, just got a lot going on, but it'd be cool to chat and share resources.
A key part of this, related to the massive opposition of the EU against importing US agricultural products, is how the US treats farm animals.
Chickens have to be washed with chlorine and eggs with water, simply because the conditions in farms are so utterly inhumane and disgusting that without doing this, the products would be an actual danger for the health of the people eating it. The advantage (from a business point of view) is that the production costs are way lower than if European standards (which aren't that great either!) were followed.
To refer to an old meme... choose two of "fast, cheap and high quality".
Also, it isn't trucked in from Salinas Valley CA which is 1,000 miles away.
Assuming I am doing the math right, shipping 1 ton of food 1000 miles (refrigerated) is roughly ~30-40kg of CO2, or about 7g-CO2 per tomato (6oz tomato).
A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic, 40W/sqft), so about 20Wh/g, or about 1.4kg-CO2 per tomato for coal. Maybe more like 1kg-CO2 for the mix in Wyoming.
... depends on what you are trying to optimize, I guess, and how much natural light you can harvest in the vertical greenhouse.
Of course the environmental cost should be factored in. I'm still curious if hydroponics (or geoponics, in this article's case) actually winds up having a better carbon footprint than traditional agriculture.
it says:
German, heated greenhouse outside of season: 9.3 KG of CO2 per KG tomatoes (well, that is unexpectedly high)
Non heated greenhouse: 2.3KG of CO2 per KG tomatoes
open land in spain: 0.6KG of CO2 per KG
open land in Germany in season, conventional: 0.085KG of CO2 per KG
open land in Germany, organic: 0.035KG of CO2 per KG
although it's from 2015, I don't think that much has changed in 5-6 years to make up such a big difference between heated, nonheated, open land and regional. It also factors in transport from Spain to Germany which is why open land in spain has a higher co2/kg than german open land.
edit: of course I can't find anything that compares vertical hydroponic farming to greenhouses, all I can find relates to CO2 dosing in greenhouses :/
E.g. Is a grape vine a vertical farm?
At 23% of usage for electricity generation, it's far from being "on its way out" anytime soon.
Further, the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels is going to be heavily dependent on overall electricity demand. Keeping older less efficient and more expensive power plants operating is very much a response to electricity demand not an inherent lifespan independent of the electrical market.
I could see how you might think that because..Wyoming. But I assume hydro and wind, based on the power around me. I'll ask them to confirm. I don't think I'd support coal powered hydro.
Edit: got curious and spent 2 minutes to do the google. The unvetted answer is aprox. 10%
A semi can run ~1500 mi on 200 gallons @7.5 mi/gallon and a trailer refrigerator uses about 10 gallons/day
Centralizing energy needs the way vertical farms do, incentivizes the company operating the farm to opt for the cheaper option and install solar on nearby land.
Verticalfield, featured in this story, has pictures of tomatoes, and mentions mushrooms and strawberries. But on their website, the FAQ says ""Vertical Field can grow up to 200 varieties of crops, such as leafy greens, herbs, and lettuces". Again, arugula, kale, some herbs, etc.
So there's a profit to be made for urban luxury vegetables, and that's about it.
I think the 'doubt' is around economics, and possibly the nutritional value.
I can see a lot of people putting these things in their basements.
I mean, we call could just put actual gardens in our backyards, but that might not be 'trendy' enough ...
The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech' - or - a very long term vision and investment towards making something like actually practical at some scale, which may or may not ever happen.
And if the nearest one is 400 miles away? Then my produce is STILL optimized for transport and storage over taste and freshness.
> The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech'
I agree. It annoys me when they tout this as "volume" or "scale". However, you can't get VC funding unless you promise that so that's the price of your marketing. Shrug.
Nevertheless, I do hope one of these catches on somehow. Several of my favorite restaurants had their own gardens. However, they are limited by the weather and season to certain crops.
If someone can slap a steel container down and use these technologies to grow out of area/out of season vegetables and fruits I'm all for it. It would also have the side benefit of breaking up some of the gigantic monocultures we currently have in agriculture.
Other articles I have seen that actually included price [1] showed that the vertical farming produce was 3x the price of what you could get at Whole Foods. And that is for organic presumably high quality produce. Cost compared to Walmart was something like 10x as much.
https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr...
From first hand experience though, the electricity is a huge cost plus being in Poland right now, my labour costs would have swallowed up any profits.
These won't replace traditional farms BUT a farm growing fields of lettuce could and should be replaced for other variants of root vegetables etc. Lettuce, leafy greens and herbs IMO should be grown in vertical farms as it's low effort and really it's all about getting maximum taste into each leaf. Lettuce doesn't really provide that much in terms of nutritional benefits, especially when it's been transported for hundreds/thousands of miles so local or as close to the end user it vital.
But on the East Coast, vertical farms can serve a useful economic purpose for some crops which would otherwise be trucked in from the Salinas Valley.
Imported produce is typically aggressively price-competitive with the local stuff.
Here is a small scale example [1] but I can't fault this guy for keeping it small given his advanced age. I hope I have that much energy when I am older.
Shipping isn't that damaging to plants, compared to a 55mph wind.
I call bullshit. It's pretty much universally agreed that frozen fruit is fresher and often tastes better, for example.
Flavor is more about varieties being selected for mass production rather than their growing method and transportation. You can transport heirloom tomatoes. Nothing stopping you.
I challenge you to slice a thawed tomato the way you would a vine fresh one and tell me there isn't a difference. Same goes for most leafy greens and fruits.
Delicate cellular structures of high water content vegetables are completely obliterated when frozen and then thawed or otherwise processed.
But if you’re going to blend it, who cares.
Even if you figured the carbon offset cost, transporting agriculture still beats out all of these alternatives by a lot.
The math is only becomes slightly favorable to the subset of plants with high water content and lower sunlight tolerance. You can grow tomatos at nearly break-even. A diverse set of agriculture that can sustain people with balanced diets? Not a chance.
If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
Initial trials went well, now they're rolling it out to 10 more locations:
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-castle-adds-more-flipp...
As you said, the latter has been around for a long time. That doesn't make the former any less of an achievement. This is robotics directly replacing employees in store.
The robot pizza company in particular was a joke. Viewed with a critical eye, the whole thing was technophiles blinded to obvious reality by their love for high tech gadgetry. Why else would you use a sophisticated robotic arm to transfer a pizza from one machine to another when a simple conveyor belt can do the job faster and need less space to do it?
White Castle is doubtlessly being smarter about it, but I'm pretty sure you could replace their restaurant employees with a microwave oven. BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'. If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense, but if you were to design an automatic kitchen from the ground up, I think it makes little sense.
There are numerous process and operational differences between things made to order and things prepped and shipped. Both are honestly extremely impressive, though the latter is much farther along technologically in part because the scale of impact is greater and factories allow for larger capital expenditure since it's so much lower on a per product basis. That said, what I am talking about doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the end product.
>If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense
That's what they're doing. Sure, if you build all new buildings and kitchens it may make less sense but as a lower capital cost shift it totally fits.
>BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'.
Automating production is new. Automating service is not. Again, huge difference operationally.
So once there's a robot that can cook burger in SF and break even, it works pretty much everywhere else where the minimum wage is greater or equal. Just take a look at Miso robotics.
Can it? The robot in SF may make financial sense because of high utilization. A low-wage worker can do 100+ useful tasks when the restaurant is not busy enough to require constant burger making. Is a burger-making robot flexible enough to match that?
Though I was referring to the small cities in Montana. Nobody will put a robotic burger joint where there are no people. However a town of 5000 has a lot of people who need to eat, more than enough to make it worth running numbers.
It'll just replace some.
These things are small by garden standards, let alone farm standards. How many people could one of these shipping containers keep fed? How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people?
It's unlikely they'll feed a million people all the food they'll need but it's likely they could feed a million people all of the leafy greens they need.
Traditional farms have the clear and overwhelming advantage in all three of these. And they aren't standing still either, they benefit from the advance of technology too.
I don't expect these things to compete with a farm growing potatoes for a long while or even anything which keeps well enough in a fridge.
I guess the aspiration for the people behind this kind of vertical farming companies is to have as many containers out there as possible. It seems like proximity of supply is one of their main purported selling points. It makes sense from their standpoint.
There's no root vegetables, grains which make up the cornerstone of our diets.
I'm most interested in tech like this as a tool for minimizing food waste. Your lettuce won't wilt and rot while it is sitting on the shelf if it is still alive.
In fact, it probably lasts for longer in a fridge than in fertile ground with sunlight.
Not sure how live lettuce reacts to low temperature, it might go into faster growth and would actually start rotting sooner.
Many plants do that in sudden weather changes.
More calories means more photosynthesis, so more incident light. The marginal energy cost would thus be a lot higher. The cost for lettuce, however, is probably dominated by refrigeration/shipping/logistics. So, from a fundamental cost standpoint (unless you have very low cost energy), that's likely going to be a while.
I believe rice can be stored safely for years given the right conditions. There are no sustainable conditions under which leafy greens can be stored for as long as rice.
Yup. Any article about this type of thing needs to include calorie math. How many calories can you grow per installation / sqft / acre / etc.
I personally don’t understand the appeal of going back to that. I’m so glad I can just buy whatever I want at the grocery store these days and don’t need to spend all my free time on harvesting calories.
Step two is to put in ~12 hours a day, 7 days a week of work into homesteading.
Step three is to dip on your savings to buy farming equipment, consumable inputs, and groceries for the remaining half of your food that you won't be able to grow yourself.
If you'd like to try before you buy, my parents' homestead up in Canada could always use another pair of hands. Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. You'll have to share the room with ~15-30 baby chicks, though. You'll quickly get used to the smell.
I understand that this won't give you a vertical garden, but unlike a vertical garden, it will go most of the way to meeting your daily caloric and nutritional needs.
See here for yield estimates https://farm.bot/pages/yield With 18m^2 you can only get 175 calories/day which should be less than 10% of your diet.
Just covering that area with a 22 gauge corrugated steel roof, without any supporting structure, would be about 1.35 billion tons of steel [1], or about 75% of the entire world's steel production for a year.
There are definitely products that would make sense to grow in vertical farms (eg. high value crops like tomatoes or bell peppers, which are already grown in hothouses in certain areas of the country), but staple crops tend to preserve for a long time, and wouldn't see as much of a benefit from vertical farming.
[0] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/tech...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=36000000+acres+*+(9.28...
I set up a small experimental indoors farm myself, and I used cheap LED lamps you can get anywhere, three different temperatures, interspersed on a custom frame above the plants.
I realized I know nothing about soil, because it turns out there's more to it than just dumping it in a pot. Soil composition and density are really important, moreso than the pH (that a lot of people focus on) in my experience. I would've definitely fucked up with a hydroponic setup that I first considered. Soil is much better and we really don't appreciate it as much as we should. It's literally the source of life.
These plants needed more root aeration, the first batch was terribly small, but still pretty good. Second batch was much better thanks to a custom soil/pebbles setup (soil in the center, pebbles around the fabric pot), then I realized the lumen output needed to be much higher for perfect results. I wanted to try some COB LEDs, which output more lumen, but I could not find any (and importing would take too long and cost way too much), plus I really wanted to see what simple SMD LEDs could do.
So I trashed the whole thing in favor of custom Tipi style tents for individual plants with the LED lamps spread all around and above. Not the most efficient use of space, but it turned out to be the best for growth.
~2 months from seed to harvest, electricity cost was laughably low (~$20 total per plant) and heat generation was practically non-existent. I also had plants outdoors, tbh the sun-grown tomatoes tasted better, but the other greens were just as good grown indoors.
Still not sure if LED production is environmentally friendly or sustainable, but it sure is revolutionary.
Do you have any resources to share about it?
When putting it in the fabric pots (really good stuff, forget anything else) I mixed it with a small amount of pebbles and twigs to prevent it from compacting (which severely impacts growth, as roots can't push through it); I had nothing else and that seemed to do the trick.
But the thing is I used a makeshift metal cylinder to fill the pot with soil in the center and a layer of pebbles all around and at the bottom. The idea was that the plant would grow and get nutrients from the soil, then as the roots grow out into the pebbles they'd get more oxygen and water.
It's actually sort of a soil/hydroponic hybrid setup if I think about it. Seems to have worked great.
I also used simple NPK fertilizer, the plants react if you use too much (leaves turn yellower, tips start burning), so you know when to stop.
There's a lot of information out there, but honestly I learned more with hands-on experience than from reading dozens of articles and forum threads. I thought it would be rather simple, but it's definitely not just "plant it and forget it". I appreciate plant life more now, it's quite fascinating when you get into it haha.
Growing in warehouses or vertically forces you to substitute the sun with artificial lights: even if those are powered by the sun, there's a huge loss of energy in the system, hence increased cost.
This, to me, sounds like vertical farms in the grand scheme could be more efficient.
In your opinion, what's the main bottleneck wrt to resources?
I'm leaning towards productions suited for my region for this example, it would require tailoring to each regions climates/capacities if you were to do this everywhere. On the broad acre you essentially would do native grasses/root vegetables/shrub crops and runs of more traditional mono crops in dispersed amongst heavily Wooded paddocks. like 30-40% tree cover,30-40% perennial natives, 20-30% rotated mono-crop runs. You need to not stress the land too much where I am, and work with the droughts that come through (Australia). The whole goal of the broad acre is to produce a little food buffer but mostly material for nutrient creation.
So maybe you harvest/cut your native grasses a few times a year, bail it, inoculate it with fungi to eat it and convert it to a higher nutrient product for fertilizer if your running soil greenhouses. Or you could use mulched grasses to run a snail farm, that in turn feeds a aquaculture setup which you can strip the fish shit out of for nutes to supply your high density vert farm. Having the broad acre allows you to do other things too like maintain bee hives which can be brought into the greenhouse for pollinating.
Huge amounts of resources/capital required to set closed loops like this up...but on the plus side...once their setup, if you do things right like use high grade materials(e.g stainless for all your greenhouse piping/water setup) it can last for near infinite time with correct maintenance. Just good luck getting a investor who gets profit @ 10-20 year mark rather than 6-12 months. Market doesn't seem to like long games these days even if it is whats probably best for environment/long term sustainable high density farming.
Oh and also we need a robot that can pick fruit/veg and do maintenance that requires dexterity (think unscrewing a nozzle or pipe fitting). Bad. Labor is a killer for broad acre tree crops and stuff that requires a bit of dexterity for harvest (see Australia's current farm labor shortage).
It also seems to require much more water than watering the plants in ground, I assume because they are getting maximum rate from roots and almost infinitely growing them .
For bugs in a greenhouse the least chemical method i've found is dumping c02. Can only use it in closed/controlled spaces tho. Blanket room in c02 for 12 hrs...literally just chokes any bugs. Plants are fine.
The article linked presented the the efficiency of vertical farming in terms of produce/area. But as was pointed out in some of the comments on that article the cost of the greens grown on vertical farms was in the range of $15/pound [1]. Which is about 3x the price of organic greens at Whole Foods, or 10x the price of what you would find at Walmart.
[1] https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr...
But there are also energy and cost savings because you can remove most of the transport, which at the moment involves ICE vehicles, and the energy does not have to come from solar sources (just within renewables there are other options).
Longer term we can also imagine artificial lights powered by fusion power, which would probably be the best option in term of space saving and environmental impact.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Biology/ligabs.ht...
Edit: note the reason that most plants are green is because their growth is not limited by the amount of sunlight converted, so they can afford to throw away some efficiency e.g. they might be limited by water or mineral availability. Quote from same site: “Some plants and plantlike organisms have developed other pigments to compensate for low light or poor use of light. Cyanobacteria and red algae have phycocyanin and allophycocyanin as accessory pigments to absorbe orange light. They also have a red pigment called phycoerythrin that absorbs green light and extends the range of photosynthesis. The red pigment lycopene is found in vegetables. Some red algae are in fact nearly black, so that increases their photosynthetic efficiency. Brown algae have the pigment fucoxanthin in addition to chlorophyll to widen their absorption range. These red and brown algae grow to depths around 270 meters where the light is less than 1% of surface light.”
Edit 2: plant photosynthetic efficiency in capturing CO2 as sugars: “the theoretical efficiency is 114/381 or 30%. Remarkably, Moore, et al. report that 25% has been achieved under laboratory conditions. The top efficiency they reported under natural growing conditions was the winter-evening primrose growing in Death Valley at 8%”
That's a big 'if', though, considering that you'd need to offset both the land taken up by the solar panels and the losses of the electricity transmission.
Couldn't one construct pylons outdoors for planting? I don't see why it wouldn't work if you constructed it narrower at each successive plant height.
Some indoor vertical farming I've seen rotates the entire vertical structure, necessitating only one light facing a section of the column. I would expect this kind of rotation might help outdoors as well.
The best argument for this method of food production is by looking at criticism of existing food production.
https://www.consumerreports.org/pesticides-in-food/stop-eati...
Reading stuff like this is truly, deeply, depressing. In our modern lives, we are supposed to eat lots of vegetables (which we don't), but we're also supposed be picky about which ones we get. Just the thought of that is exhausting.
Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer.
Vertical farms offer consumers several things which are almost impossible to come by otherwise. This is extraordinarily good to have for market entry.
Higher energy use is a strike, but you have to consider the whole picture. I definitely think there's a place for this, the benefits that offset higher energy intensity are very substantive.
Spoiler: field workers who don't get bathroom breaks.
I think a lot of people don't understand that farming is messy work. After highschool I worked at a bean processing plant where my job was to pick dead small animals (usually rodents, snakes, and frogs) out of the beans as they sped by on a conveyor belt. The machines needed to harvest the massive quantities of food our civilization requires do not discriminate between beans and the animals living in bean fields. But here is the thing; almost nobody gets sick from this. Wash your produce. Raccoons do it, and so should you. If you do, you'll almost certainly be fine just like nearly everybody else. It's gross, but it's not really a problem.
Lettuce has to be hydro cooled right after harvest..45 minutes after harvest. In Salinas etc, it’s done right on the field. It never gets out of refrigeration until customer buys it from store. There is enormous food wastage. Almost 40% of harvest is wasted even with top notch cold supply chain systems.
When the public doesn’t trust the food they are playing dice with every mouthful of food. That’s just not acceptable.
The risk from the farmers side is entirely different from how you consider food risks.
The public do trust lettuce. The current systems work well and billions of people trust their lives to it, with good results. Exceptionally few people are afraid of eating regular store bought lettuce.
Nobody is talking about "playing games" so I have no idea what you're on about there. I never suggested that food production be deregulated, that would be insanity.
I agree, when a recall happens the store should pull them from the shelves, and consumers shouldn't have to worry about it. Not everyone feels this way.
I'm only making a point about perception. There is a feedback loop with media, Facebook, whatever. The public CAN lose trust in lettuce, and it is not something to take for granted.
The wastage is enormous...and unconscionable.
As for waste, do you really think some shipping containers in the parking lot will provide an elastic supply? Even if you can install more containers on short notice, it would still take weeks at least for those units to start producing. The extant systems can and do respond to changes in demand in days, not weeks. If these were relied on for anything but luxury produce, you'd often have too much or too little. To provide a buffer, you have to start storing the produce, which negates the ultra-fresh appeal.
hmm..no, its not. we are stuck at the point where you continue to insist that its a 'fact' that people 'can and do trust produce'..
people trust their food sellers and vendors and outlets. they trust the farmer market seller, whole foods or safeway or costco.
the farmer most times doesnt even come in direct contact with 'the people'. the people are not our buyers. wholesalers, distributers and brokers are who we deal with.
i dont think you have any clue how farming or food supply chain or distribution works. i have no interest in continuing this discussion.
It’s very simple. Wash your vegetables. Wash your hands while cooking. Cook your greens and vegetables.
It’s not rocket science.
A large portion of the produce is optimised for bulk. A smaller portion of the produce is optimised for taste.
You get what you pay for.
And suppose we find the nute program that makes them taste good. Then its a good thing they taste the same as everybody else - they taste good! That's the goal, not just some exclusive hipster cachet.
I crunched the numbers and Walmart is the ONLY one that can pull it off profitably.
Amazon warehouses are far behind, but it’s possible.
At Walmart store no:8, they engaged me for 3-4 emails and then ghosted me entirely.
But even if someone there were to reconsider my proposal and take it off on their own, I think it still holds promise.
Anyone can grow locally and minimize their foot print. Only Walmart can generate profits. I said it two something years ago and I still stand behind my analysis even though in the time in between Amazon has expanded, bought Whole Foods and now have warehouses.
Amazon will get there someday..but if I were a betting person, I’d bet on Walmart. Despite the scorn they invite, they have the best supply chain experts and logistics solutions.
I have no idea how bad cadmium is, or how much of it is in spinach. But it's a real bummer to learn that a food that I thought of as very, very healthy (organic spinach) has a downside like this. Growing it in containers would be one way to get around soil issues like these, which are unfortunately becoming more common (see arsenic in rice).
1: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/proposition-65-notices-of-...
I suspect for most things the answer is no.
If you want a whole meal then you'll need to do what de kas did in holland: https://restaurantdekas.com/
And its totally tasty.
As hydroponics and roof top gardens and vertical farms and warehouse farms and shipping container farms become the norm in places where they have winter and have now hacked it with no need for California produce...California itself have to rethink its Ag policies. And work towards growing our own and sustainably. And locally. Automating and mechanizing a lot of it because Ag labour is going to dry up soon. Not to mention water.
What would it do to the capital expense vs. productivity to use solar + battery storage for 24 hour growing? Or do plants need a 'rest' and a night? Maybe solar on the roof and a basement farm to minimize heating?
I love the idea and had not considered the aspect of breeding seeds for taste & nutrients (thx scsilver). Or the fact that they can provide year-round fresh fruits. Though don't underestimate the cost of maintaining the temperature in the Rockies in the winter (per deedub)...
I simply cut these veggies in small and balance the salad out on sweet, sour, salty and calories. After a few months of doing this I started to crave these salads.
Most of the veggies come from the greenhouse area, but not all. You can tell most of them, since they are quite clean already and do not have any dirt/soil on it.
Taste of these veggies is mostly different, not necessarily bad, although I would not describe it typically as being richer in taste. Redish is less sharp, carrots are much more crispy and less fibery, letuces are much fresher (they come with clod, so dont degrade a bit, even after two weeks in the refrigerator), tomatos are more watery but also much, much more varied (small, ultra sweet super juicy ones; bigger fleshy with delicious sour pits; characterfull flavory ones; many more), chickory which is sweeter, bell pepper which are more varied and edible as fruits, sweeter, juicier, cucumbers as small, medium and large where the small ones are really tender, many herbs such as mint, coriander, sellery, rosemary, parsley come as plants which I consume over about two weeks.
More efficient than flying it in maybe, but not more efficient than growing it in the garden using sunlight
Hydroponic vertical growing is more water and ground-space efficient though, isn't it?
Another example may be that hydroponic growing is typically faster than in soil, for example leafy lettuce such as bibb can be ready nearly twice as fast when grown with hydroponics.
There is simply no beating the energy output of the sun for agriculture purposes.
These systems are certainly worth study, but as a commercial operation it's basically snake oil.
But for a premium produce for a premium product, it can pay. You may not even be able to get from a grocery store, what you can grow for your own needs.
It's just that most big farms want the most cost-effective use of their land.
There's an argument that this process facilitates some market for people to pay a premium for produce grown inefficiently, but people also pay a premium for their local farmers markets to grow exotic stuff too. Traditional agriculture still wins, all things being equal.
I dabbled in Aquaponics for 10+ years.
The flexibility of e-ag may yet have a place. Weather, season, rain don't have to matter.
What's the energy/kg to produce on site versus the energy/kg to grow a thousand miles away, transport and store, transport and store, transport to final destination?
If I can buy a banana at my grocery store for 18 cents then the amount of oil/energy it took to produce that has to be less than 18 cents. Any fruit/veggie can be shipped at great distances at very marginal price cost/energy costs
We're trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, not moral judgments.
Deforestation for farmland has major implications here.
If you want to make and apples-to-apples comparison, you have to consider what turning a thousand square miles of forest into farmland does versus stacking these containers up.
This solution also claims to use 10X less water, so we can start to factor in energy use related to water production as well.
If you want to every manufacturing side-cost (metal/copper wire tractor turbine) and amount of CO2 you'll end up with an impossibly difficult calculation, at least for these comment sections.
I don't care to aim so high. I'm happy to compare $ cost farm costs & transport versus $ vertical-farm cost & electricity bill.
> energy use related to water production
Isn't that highly location dependant? Do these farm not run off the public water supply? If so, I'd assume the energy cost was higher for drinkable water.
Meanwhile, thousands of people can live in just a few acres in the city. Far more people per kg of asphalt and concrete!
Which is the kind of efficiencies you expect with economies of scale.
You'd be surprised how much asphalt and concrete we use to give every 500 person village roads and infrastructure!
Literally just looking at the economics here, I'll say again.