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.
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.
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.
E.g. Is a grape vine a vertical farm?
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if you’re going to blend it, who cares.
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.
Shipping isn't that damaging to plants, compared to a 55mph wind.
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.
If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
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.