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Comment by PartiallyTyped | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure? Growing produce remotely has additional inherent costs that don't exist in vertical farms, such as wasted water, the need for very heavy machinery, the issue of transporting and transporting within certain timeframes. The last 2 problems include the cost of oil/gasoline, and the maintenance of a whole array of systems, from oil extraction pipelines to road maintenance.

This, to me, sounds like vertical farms in the grand scheme could be more efficient.

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Go set up a artificial growth environment and try run it for a cycle longer than a month. It takes huge amounts of resources to maintain that environment. And no it's not chemical free. Also yes water is used and wasted. If you ain't doing bulk washing your applying huge amounts of product to keep algae blooms out of your systems. Try run that environment for a year. I give it 2-3 month before your first insect/pest bloom. Less if your unlucky. An I'd be blown away if you fix your first pest bloom the first try. Vertical farms are sick on paper...that ignores masses of requirements to actually get the task done.

Very true. I have an aerogarden setup and best way to use it is to swap the plants into real ground and do a fresh clean after they've grown for a few months, otherwise gnats / fungus will take over.

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 .

Geez into High Pressure Aeroponics if the water efficiency thing interests you. Its also somewhat easier to keep clean as you only feed the plants the water they can consume (literally a single droplet of condensation in your root chambers DTW outlet means your feeding too much). On the downside the setup is hard as it gets, 145+psi water system, impinge nozzles with .4mm diameter outlets (means your nutes gotta be particulate free). But the efficiency of it is the ultimate in closed environment growth.

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.

I had the same experience. The biggest thing for me was keeping it clean was a gigantic pain. The plants would get massive with tons of leaves that would fall down inside plant and start breaking down on top of the plastic. In soil, that just breaks down and becomes more dirt.

Thanks for going in detail as to why it is severely impractical and inefficient, all the items you listed are overlooked or outright ignored in the discussions I have read, as you probably guessed I am way out of my field.

In your opinion, what's the main bottleneck wrt to resources?

Eh the problem with resources is not using systems that are a closed loop for the whole cycle. e.g. Currently most vert farms or greenhouses buy in all their seed and nutrient and alot of the time grow medium too. Its wasteful just in the nature of it, you can't recycle those parts, your not producing them so you drain them from somewhere else. What I would love to see is hybrid broad acre/high density greenhouse farms.

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).

A relevant previous submission to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25554941

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...

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