The vertical farming bubble is finally popping
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
It boggles my mind - the technology already exists and is profitable in the form of a hydroponic greenhouse. So what you paid for as an investor was a bunch of R&D research on how to replace natural and free sunlight with LEDs. (The fact that there are investor decks out there pitching that energy costs could be offset by investments in solar panels is laughably hilarious.).
Even your average field farmer is no slouch. I was just having a conversation with our neighbor, an orchardist who manages over 200 acres of trees. He currently pays $60k a year in just in SaaS fees to cover all of the technology on his farm. Your average (productive) farm is already a miracle of modern automation.
Some of those already existing greenhouses are using LEDs to augment natural sunlight. [0]
So it doesn't seem too far fetched to me. The gamble wasn't to replace (free) sunlight with (paid) LEDs. The core idea is stacking farms on top each other, hoping the reduced land (area) requirement vs increased energy cost might pay off.
Turns out land isn't that short, transportation not too expensive and energy not that cheap.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/glowing-dutch-greenhou...
What is the cost of real estate in rural upstate New York? It's really not that bad! (About $10k per acre, based on a brief search, for land about 280 miles away from Manhattan. A truck could make a delivery in six hours or so.)
So why spend millions in capital expenditures on fancy stacked farms with high tech intense lighting, in order to cut a few tens of thousands of dollars in real estate costs?
The argument was that logistics costs were high. That's kind of true if you're on the east coast, and your alternative is importing from Mexico or California.
It's not true at all if you can get produce from a conventional hydroponic operation six hours away by truck.
Moreover, it's not like conventional hydroponic operations didn't exist, and this was some sort of tail risk that was unexpected. The conventional hydroponic operations already existed! They've been in business for years. All the founders or investors had to do was drive a few hours to go visit them. Or pick up the phone.
and ongoing maintenace. I'd imagine harvesting crops from flat piece of land is also cheaper than from vertical stack.
The aim for venture capitalists is necessarily to make risky, long-tail bets that have little chance of paying off; and that incumbents find too risky.
Sure, this bubble has popped, but what success in this case might have looked like is grocery stores selling mass-produced microgreen salads (that can't be reasonably transported without bruising) which were grown upstairs.
It's a reasonable criticism that VCs don't understand agriculture well enough to estimate the risk of "moonshot" style initiatives in that area. But criticizing them for "not picking up the phone and talking to existing operations" is kind of missing the point. Of course the existing operators are going to say it won't work.
If the reason is because it takes lots of capital, or because there are network effects (e.g., AirBnB, eBay), or because it's a winner takes all market, or some key piece of technology has to be proven out, then sure, shoot your shot, someone will get the bullseye and win the day and it'll be a cakewalk raising the next fund.
But if it's improbable because nobody wants it, that's not the same thing.
That's why a bet being improbable should not be the reason to invest in something.
A VC may look at a bet and say, "sure, the win condition is unlikely, but lots of people will want this, so if it wins, it's worth billions." And maybe they write a check.
But if another VC looks at a deal and says "it's not likely to work, and also, even in the optimistic case this is worse than existing solutions," then there is no market problem being solved. This second VC will likely be leaning more on their management fee than their carry to pay the mooring fees for their yacht.
And a phone call to that farmer would have told them that while microgreens don't ship well over very long distances, they do fine in climate controlled trucks over a couple hundred miles. Part of a VC's job is to de-risk investment decisions by validating key assumptions.
This is true but irrelevant. The important part is asking them why it won't work and then seeing if that's correct. VCs are supposed to invest in risky things, not futile things.
Of course, as with WeWork, there's a big gap between what VCs are supposed to do in terms of due diligence and what they actually do.
This is one way the little guy can beat the market: you are allowed to sit out the market for obviously flawed things. Beware though, that thinking is also why many little guys didn't get rich on Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the other big names that at one time looked like bad investments.
Physicists and audio engineers said that UBeam wouldn't work. They were also correct.
If existing operators say that something won't work because it's too hard or because customers won't like it then they could be wrong. But if their statements are backed up by hard science and economics calculations then only a moron would disbelieve them.
https://finanse.wp.pl/wielka-luna-nad-wroclawiem-gigantyczne...
https://pposiechnice.pl/?page_id=1002&lang=en#poznaj-nas using artificial light 18hour/day since ~2015.
And it's not "a piece of software for 60k" but likely "a bunch of specialized pieces of software"
Right but my question still stands, which is that I wonder how much of that total, summed from all the pieces, is rent seeking or profit extraction. AKA what is the markup on this and how much of it is going to pay high returns to VC firms.
I say this because I work in open source farming automation and I am particularly interested in lowering costs through open source.
It was actually impressive - for every tech product he used, he knew exactly how much ROI it gave him. Most recently he was excited about an anti-pest system he had just acquired that would detect certain species of bugs in a field and only spray when needed. $10/mo/acre and he was expecting to save ~$10k on pesticide + ~$30k on labor.
I feel a lot of software/Silicon Valley types do NOT expect that at all, given how hard it is to measure ROI normally.
Running experiments is easy, all farmers do at least a little: it is easy to plant one bag of seed somewhere and then in fall compare that bag to what they plant elsewhere. It only slightly more difficult to do that in a proper controlled scientific way. The only hard part is there are may months between starting the experiment and seeing results.
When something shows good results farmers tell each other. Not always, but they at least tell friends and things spread.
The US midwest is far from arid(except maybe the Dakotas). This is probably a confusion about what "midwest" means, since it is kind of a confusing term when you think about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
The real issue is the cold winters cutting into agriculture time, which is why there's a lot of grains and animal agriculture. Solar-pasture combos could power greenhouses that keep running through winter, but there's so much space that there's not much need for it to be vertical.
The gentleman who rents our family farm owns or operates about 11k acres. He's a medium sized business. He's a family operation.
And he precision farms to the square foot for most row-crop fields. Using thousands of data points from soil condition to weather to historical flood data to local highway traffic patterns. His machinery is (almost) automated. He exists as an emergency off switch, while the tractor and machinery farm to the square foot. They select seed varieties based on the data. Their planter can select any number of up to 20 different varieties based on the outputs of their soil equations, varies the depth, and distance of each individual seed, and plants to the square foot across thousands of acres. Chemical application is dialed in to accuracy within 6" squares. Fertilizer is applied so precisely that the soil generally remains unchanged at the end of the growing season; neither depleted or over fertilized.
Animals - they have a breeding program for their cattle, with genetic testing and selection. The cattle are selected for specific genes. Not for traits. For genes. Actual genetics. They don't just breed that bull with these cows because the bull is taller in the back legs and the cows are heavy and short. They select actual genes to pass between generations, and specifically cultivate the genes they want to see. This blows my mind.
And this is, again, a medium size business. HUGE agribusinesses take precision to a literal entirely new level. Inputs and outputs measured to the ounce over millions of tons produced. Most processes automated, with a human existing as a kill-switch. It's astounding.
The amount of things your average farmer has to understand astounds me - finance, labor management, investing, market conditions, futures, contract negotiation. And then on top of that, mastery of up-to-date farming technology.
Even a modest 100 acre operation can be a multi-million dollar enterprise designed to eke out cents on the dollar.
A 100 acre farm (producing generic commodity crops) won't have be able to afford fully modern equipment described higher in the comment chain. Even with mostly 20th century equipment you'll be surprised at the ratio of total assets to annual profit for a 100 acre farm. The numbers might be $3M-9M of assets for $100k-300k profit.
The economies of scale conspire to push farms to consolidation. The equipment that increases productivity will receive higher usage rates, so capital investments are more efficient. If you have anything between 80-5000 acres you will clearly be better off liquidating everything and playing the markets. It'll be less work, safer, and more profitable. The family farm died in the dust bowl.
The 580 acres we rent was enough for my grandfather to support a family of 10. Today, I could support my family of 3 with that many acres if I ran a show farm near an urban center. But as a working farm it is unfeasible to support a family.
It's sad. 500 acres used to be a decent sized operation. Now, 10k is a starting out size.
Edit: maybe I'm mixing up the meaning of support here. Do you mean support as in financial support through the farm's profit, or sustenance support, i.e. feeding the family from the farm?
Supply has gone up more than demand. Profit margins have gone down.
Those bigger operations can afford to reinvest in technology and evolve to do more with less (people).
I'm assuming in most countries also, subsidies, formal/official cartels, price controls and other policy instruments would make it very hard to compare apples to apples.
In the 35 years since 1988:
- dairy has gotten 20% cheaper in terms of wages
- bakery/cereal products have stayed roughly flat vs wages (cheaper since the 90s but more expensive since the 70s)
- fruit/veg products have gotten 5% cheaper in terms of wages (though the same level as in the late 70s/early 80s)
- rice/pasta/cornmeal has gotten 15% cheaper in terms of wages
Caveat: Over time frames this long, average hourly wages don't mean like for like hourly wages for the same job... the number of low-paid "deliveroo driver/amazon delivery guy" low paid part time jobs has increased, pushing averages down. (I.e. things have gotten more expensive as measured by minimum wages, but things have gotten much cheaper as measured by the wages of a skilled professional.)
These folks were (are?) doing it on 1/10 of an acre - although that number comes with a caveat that I think they're getting a lot of compost and organic inputs from elsewhere. Plus they're in California growing under ideal weather conditions.
[?] guesstimate: https://vegfaqs.com/the-50-highest-calorie-vegan-foods-per-s...
500 fully owned acres of grain production would net you several hundred thousands of dollars around here. If you can't support a family on that kind of income, I dare say you are doing something horribly wrong.
The math changes if you are carrying debt or renting, of course.
For food crops you can still do pretty well on a 100 acre farm. Berries/fruits/vegetables/etc. Especially if you live in a community with access to distribution for said crops.
I live in an area with a lot of food ag and it's not uncommon for farms of just a couple dozen acres to pay the bills.
There are also a lot of small farms that are run by teachers (works well with the summers off).
But I think you would find that anything over 50 acres in an area with distribution options (either close to a packer for that product or urban area) CAN be a full time job if you know what you are doing and are willing to work that hard.
This metric is misleading because of how it's calculated. Since you're weighting each farm equally, a 1M acre farm gets the same amount of weight as a 100 acre farm. Therefore, if in a country you have 100 acres of farmland in total, and the farm sizes are 90, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, you'd end up with an "average" farm size of 10, but in reality most of the farmland is actually part of a megafarm.
While, farm consolidation is a growing concern (pun very much intended), the current reality is that large mega-farms are still the minority. Family owned farms still account for 89% of all agricultural product in the US. 47% of production is coming from farms grossing less than $1 million annually.
Sources: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... https://www.usfarmdata.com/percentage-of-small-medium-and-la...
The neighbor across the street farms 400 acres of crops. The average farm on their street is 134 acres. The first two families don't even consider themselves farmers.
I helped out a guy from church once who had just switched over two acres to pumpkins. He said he netted 10k an acre that year selling them to local pumpkin patches with almost no work.
Next year he had 20 acres.
It's non-stop work. Eventually, it folded and became ... A development.
[0]https://www.canr.msu.edu/foodsystems/uploads/files/Economics...
For example, Wisconsin - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Wisconsin/Publ...
> The number of farms in the United States for 2021 is estimated at 2,012,050, down 6,950 farms from 2020. The number of farms increased in all sales classes except $1,000-$9,999, $100,000-$249,999, and $1,000,000 or more. In 2021, 51.0 percent of all farms had less than $10,000 in sales and 81.5 percent of all farms had less than $100,000 in sales. In 2021, 7.4 percent of all farms had sales of $500,000 or more.
That 51% with less than $10k sales suggests a lot of hobby farms.
Kinda sad how the the government subsidizes farming in a way that basically small farmers don't have place in the market.
> 'Today they’re made in Germany but they still look Lambo-mad,' writes Clarkson, who turned his back on the tractor models recommended to him by other farmers to buy one. 'If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.'
> The result is huge, even by tractor standards, he admits: 'Every single farmer type who’s seen it says the same thing. ‘That,’ they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, ‘is too big.’ But in my mind tractors are like penises. They cannot be too big.'
> His Lambo is so huge, in fact, that Clarkson had to build a new barn to house it in. And a new driveway, because it wouldn’t fit through the gates.
> Operating it requires great care for more reasons than just its proportions, Jeremy has discovered — due to the amount of torque generated by its straight-six turbodiesel engine (775 lb ft), fitting machinery to the back is a risky business.
> 'Not that I can attach anything to its rear end. It’s all heavy engineering back there and I just know that if I tried, you’d be reading about yet another farmer walking for four miles across his fields with his severed arm in a bag.'
> Therefore, Clarkson has been forced to hire someone to do that for him. All this together means that the Lamborghini has ended up costing a little bit more than the £40,000 he initially paid for it.
https://www.driving.co.uk/news/diversions/clarksons-farm/jer...
I wouldn't know enough about farming to judge the show even if I had watched it, but ultimately his job with the show is to create entertainment, not to accurately document the realities of a British farm, so I find it hard to believe he's managed to do that.
He does go in being The Clarkson, buffooning about and doing things the stupid way. But he does learn and begins to actually enjoy it during the show.
And he has Caleb, 20something a farmer who does call him on his buffoonery repeatedly.
That's astounding. Do they apply fertilizer throughout the lifecycle or just at the beginning? Does the balance hold counting irrigation run-off too?
It isn't your family farm anymore. In fact it's nobody's family farm. It's just farmland.
'our family farm' is a pretty clear indication of the property rights and that gives the OP every right to refer to it as that.
The GP has leased their land to someone else, so it's no longer their "family farm", and it isn't a "family" farm at all because it isn't run by the family that owns it, but by a corporation with 11k acres under cultivation. It's a big-Ag farm.
Threes probably an argument that it increases the amount of food per square acre but my cynical take is it adds more profit margin and to the ever increasing cost of food production per unit of throughput.
https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/newsletters/pestandcrop/wp...
Most of the products he is paying for either a) reduce labor costs (like a cell based system that distributes pesticide) or b) reduces the risk of product loss (cherries being insanely delicate and sensitive to subtle changes in temperature and humidity).
Because he is paying for the products as-a-service, he really doesn't care about being locked in on the equipment so long as they pay for themselves.
Can anyone recommend or link any YouTube videos on this, I thought this sort of thing was still at the R&d phase, I would love to see an hour long video on a real operation at scale.
What I do not understand is why vegetables in the US taste like shit and cost 3x as much as in Eastern Europe (Poland, Bulgaria) where agro-automation is much less.
Water savings are the useful part, not the stacking.
Alaska, Hawaii, Medium/Small island nations would be the target market for these; Where imports are expensive, the local soil grows no crops, and fresh water expensive. (especially if they are cold/dark or too hot for produce)
There is currently a hot war between the two countries with the largest nuclear weapons stockpiles. It is conceivable that the 3rd largest stockpile will get involved too. It is a good idea to be probing at what can be achieved without reliable sunlight.
This is simply not true. No two way about it.
Farms also don't have boards...
here's a neat list: https://companiesmarketcap.com/agriculture/largest-companies...
The era of the family farm ended 100 years ago.
Unfortunately the tomatoes grown in there taste like, pardon my French, shit. Not particularly related to tech or to the article itself, but it deeply saddens me that we seem to have forgotten that food needs to be tasty, too.
Steam engines, electricity, pumps, spreadsheets, solar, big data, drones. You name it.
I think what's needed is a revolution in where food is produced and cheaper ways of bringing food to market.
“There are many reasons why they’re doing it, but one of the reasons is because they know that Silicon Valley investors won’t invest in a farm, but they’ll invest in a tech company,” says Henry Gordon-Smith, founder of Agritecture, a firm that consults on urban farming projects. “In reality, these companies overspend on R&D by crazy amounts, and then say, ‘Oh, shit, that didn’t work.'”
This could have been taken from internal communications almost verbatim. The CEO straight up cited my former employer’s acquisition was significantly motivated to position AppHarvest as a tech company, rather than an ag company, for the purpose of propping up the valuation.
Kinda like biofuels, sounds really cool, but in practice it just creates more waste then the alternatives.
Only time this actually works and makes money is for high end restaurants in massive metroplexes. They are willing to pay high dollar for extremely fresh lettuce. At one point the containers company was turning a decent profit in NYC. I’m assuming it didn’t scale like they were hoping.
I do see them used a fair bit around here for job-site offices though, but that’s again using them roughly for their intended use: put it on an 18-wheeler, work out of it for a few months, and then pick it up and take it to the next place
High-end restaurants 100% are willing to pay for access to better ingredients. Some individual consumers may be as well, but this market isn't huge.
Vertical farming would also need to be able to take on more than just greens.
Two dollar strawberries are the next big step, apparently.
That's the thing. It really can't. Grains are very very cheap, and the price efficiency drops in relation to the water use. (i.e. more water efficient the crop, the less profitable the crop is.) This has been the case with hydroponics for at least 40 years now.
So Porsche e-fuels are gonna be a scam?
And, well, so far there isn't really a non-fuel-based solution to powering planes so any less problematic fuel than oil-based ones is a plus, even if it isn't "green" but maybe just "neutral" or "much less negative".
This movement will resprout when society is relegated to caves and submarines. Maybe fiber optic light instead of solar panels, or maybe a panel that captures the full spectrum of light and converting it to a subspectrum, thereby multiplying the available energy.
These kinds of trials would imho be better suited as large scale research projects ala Manhattan/Nasa type stuff than pure venture capital, 'recoup your investment in a decade' funded.
Indoor hydroponic farms also tend to focus on non-staple foods. If this was about surviving we'd be studying legumes and grains not cruciferous vegetables. It's just easier to overcharge for a cabbage than a bean.
The idea we're going to run out of water is a James Bond movie, not reality.
Look at how productive China is compared to the US in growing calories. Then consider how little of China's land is fertile (12.6% arable vs 17.2% in the US).
China produces nearly 5x as many calories on 66% the arable land - nearly 6.7x more productive.
Then consider that India is FAR better suited for agriculture than the US, but is not considerably more productive.
We're not running out of food or water or solar radiation in our lifetimes.
And Soil (at least top soil) is not abundant.
Even currently used land is decreased with the warn in Ukraine.
What we do have is cheap electricity (dams, wind, and solar). I'm still not sure the economics work out, but large swaths of our land doesn't work for farming either.
It’s definitely often a scam to continue fossil fuel dependence, though.
That made me laugh
In a sane world, if vertical farming got even close to traditional farming without taxing in soil destruction, water table destruction, pesticide impacts, and habitat removal from nature, we'd transition rapidly to vertical farming.
Politics is not reality. Neither is economics.
Vertical farms are another solution looking for a problem (unless you’re truly land constrained, like the Maldives)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...
But this is an argument for quality, of which people would have to be willing to pay a premium for. I could see high-end restaurants and others wiling to pay for this.
Greenhouses already extend the growing season. This would ideally be able to do that further.
At this point we'll need active carbon capture not for neutrality, which is its own political boondoggle, but for actual active mitigation of some of the damage.
Dont worry, nothing like this will come to pass. Pollute away.
Oh wait, we aren't going to stay at current population levels. Still at least have, what, another 4-5 billion people to crank out before we allegedly plateau?
Wind power doesn't take up a lot of space, especially offshore. Solar? There's this thing called a desert.
People, we are in the midst of a mass extinction. We NEED that land for biodiversity. Mass extinctions occurred over long periods of time that enabled evolutionary adapatation to some degree. We're doing ours over the span of a thousand years. Most mass extinctions at least get to "experiment" will all Earth's land surface to find new adapted animals. We've taken a huge portion of the world's biodiverse and fertile lands and industrialized them.
Otherwise, yeah, we'll have vertical farms... in space, because we won't be on earth.
I guess you think solutions to traditional farming, which is unsustainable, will come out of THIN AIR.
Hydroponic farms have been studied for decades, they are super optimized but they have their limits as well - see the 10 GBP bell peppers in supermarkets today. I would really like to know how the numbers look like when comparing traditional hydroponic with these hyper-local vertical farms.
Is this just a normal bubble popping, where out of 20 companies trying, 18 go out of business but the final 2 succeed and take over the market and will produce a bunch of profit over the next couple of decades? And if so, do we have an idea which companies?
Or is the very premise economically flawed, where it turns out it can't be profitable ever, at least not with current energy and produce prices? And if so, how did these startups get their models so wrong -- what did we learn that couldn't be foreseen?
Does it scale? Profitably, no, because transportation of oranges from California and Florida to Nebraska is currently quick and cheap.
But, if you are not on Earth, then it becomes more interesting.
Research grants wouldn't rise to the crazy VC valuations though. Maybe that's why they don't bother.
There are at least a half-dozen AppHarvest-esque greenhouse companies, and they almost all have positive farm economics (positive EBITDA). Same is true for many of the greenhouse-based fruit & veg outfits.
Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts.
However if in the future the price of electricity becomes almost free then it may be possible. I grew up in the sixties when the nuclear power industry promised power, 'too cheap to meter'. We may see it from either geothermal or fusion in the next twenty five years and it will be a true game changer.
I think about this sometimes. If you could eventually throw a fusion reactor somewhere and build some crazy huge vertical farms around it, regulate their temperature with geothermal energy, maybe even produce your own nitrogen since the energy is so cheap and you're going to use a heap of the stuff, etc... You could probably make it cheaper, faster, and more efficient in the long term than regular farming. Outputs could be so fast, reliable, and high quality that over say, 25 years you'd never skip a beat due to environmental conditions (barring serious disasters), your automation investments would pay off like crazy, and your outputs would scale so much better than traditional farms that you'd outsell them significantly.
But that's an insane requirement. At this point it's like saying "Imagine if we had magic, and we could use it to make a business that's physically impossible at the moment". Cool, but... Why?
Current LEDs are around 40-50% efficient. So 45% efficient LED * 25% efficient solar = about 12% total efficiency.
[1] A. De Vos & H. Pauwels (1981). "On the Thermodynamic Limit of Photovoltaic Energy Conversion". Appl. Phys. 25 (2): 119–125. Bibcode:1981ApPhy..25..119D. doi:10.1007/BF00901283. S2CID 119693148.
Not sure how to calculate that...
If you were designing a set of LED's purely for plant growth, and making them in sufficient quantities that you can design your own dopant concentrations etc, then you probably wouldn't end up with full spectrum LED's.
[0]https://www.samsung.com/led/lighting/applications/horticultu...
The first step in the photosynthesis is the light absorption. The loss there is due to the limited light absorption (range 400 - 700nm). So maybe this step could be improved by using LED lighting dialled in to the range of the plant. The rest of the loss chain would remain mostly the same.
Doing the math with the wikipedia numbers
Plant growing in open field
===========================
0.53*0.7*0.76*0.32*0.6 = 0.05413632
==> 5.4%
Plant growing with LED lighting
===============================
Considering 100 % LED light absorption by the plant (which is an exaggerated hypothesis) and the 12% LED lighting efficiency
0.12*1.0*0.7*0.76*0.32*0.6 = 0.01225728
==> 1.2% efficiency
So take your 12% delivered Solar PV -> LED light to the plant ... and then apply 5% photosynthetic efficiency to that.
The efficiency of naturally-delivered sunlight to plants is of course 100%.
(I believe that's what you're actually calculating here, though your "As a comparison..." statement confuses the message.)
But, from the article, it seems like the biggest bill to be cut is the 7-figure executive salaries. They are obviously not worth it.
Strawberries are another good one, you can only double your production in beds with a 6 month growing cycle, (granted, you can stagger your growing cycles in an artificial environment).
An awful lot of small scale farming is about turning over the resources you have as fast as possible to put product on the market and that is the same for flat land farming and vertical farming.
It's not unlike other kinds of startups where you aim for an mvp maybe even a profitable mvp before you move on to the complex stuff for the big customers.
Lettuces is a small farming MVP regardless of the tech used for farming (vertical, greenhost, flatland).
Another important factor: lettuce grows uniformly, and the whole plant is harvested at once. There is no pollination required, no trellis-training for production vines, or fruiting bodies that must be plucked when ripe.
Lettuce is about as straightforward as you can get in terms of mass production.
It will be interesting to see which of the countless tech-related bubbles of the last decade will grow roots. Vertical farming is not the worst offender, hopefully something has been learned in the process.
Realistically though I think this will not see bigger use until we actually get fusion power working and/or it becomes more useful on places like the Moon or in environments where there is far less natural sunlight (like very northern latitudes)
I don't think that's true for the VC-funded startups. I actually expect to hear that from the farmers I have known in my life. With the margins I saw, they were not in it for money. They would pride themselves in being self-sufficient, living off the land, and co-living with the nature. ABF -- Always Be Farming -- they say.
I have yet to see an actual environmental lifecycle analysis of these "disruptive" vertical farms. That amount of steel, precious metal, and plastic that goes into making a facility has high upfront Embodied Carbon. Can that really have a pay back compared to when you use the sun and the land? How many acres of land can you really replace with a farm on top of an abandoned parking lot?
What they say about vertical farms is way too rosy. They must compare their methods with borderline medieval farming techniques to calculate some 99% efficiency improvement. Farmers today care as much about biodiversity, ecology, and sustainability as anybody else, if not more.
... or windows. We could call the building housing these green things "greenhouses."
What would be even cleverer is to just plant the crops where the sun falls in the first place, and just do one layer of crops directly in the soil already present in that location. This would obviate the need for the multi-story tower, mirrors, soil transportation, etc. A "non-vertical farm," if you will. I think it could be a real money spinner!
To solve the year round garden problem, it would be better to grow them in enhanced greenhouses. Then could use sunlight when available and LEDs the rest of the time for decrease in costs and increase in efficiency. There would be no improvement in land usage but even big cities have empty land nearby. I sort of think current vertical farming pivoted when original idea didn't work, but there is better way to do the pivot.
These typically increase the growing season and permit crops to be started (e.g., seeding rooms or houses) or harvested before or after what would otherwise be a killing frost. With apparent increases in weather variability these might have increased applicability.
Low-Tech Magazine's Agriculture section includes numerous traditional such technologies.
It is not. It is grow pot!
The reason they are folding is that it is taking too long to pass the legislation allowing it on both state and federal level. They were just too early.
Build the exact same building in East Palestine, Ohio and it'll sit empty for decades.
As an Ontario farmer located several hours from Toronto, I have had a seemingly endless line of people wanting to buy a small plot from my farmland on which to build themselves a home. The demand is there[1], but there is far too much red tape to make it happen. Furthermore, the price of food has been strong for the last decade or so which has sent the price of farmland sky high (up ~500% over the last 15 years), making housing on those lands more expensive. I would suggest that the price of housing in the cities has gone up exactly because it has become considerably more expensive to build out into the farmlands compared to earlier decades. When sprawl is too costly, that puts more pressure on existing city boundaries.
[1] Or at least was there. It is not clear if there is much lingering housing demand in Ontario as of the past few months. All reports I read indicate that people don't want to own homes anymore.
In the 90s, a 100 acre farm here would have sold for around $100,000. Today, the same farm would sell for around $3 million. That is a substantial increase to acquiring the land and a cost that is burdened even if you choose to put a home on the land. This means that there isn't a cheap option outside of town to provide as an alternative like their historically was. And, thus, that puts more pressure on prices within the city.
If we did that, on a HUGE scale, we might use 0.1% of the farm land in question...
Often these bubbles are depicted as hype cycles, where you have inflated expectations of a particular technology, which show disappointing real world performance leading to a dip in confidence where ultimately a long term productive solution emerges.
Another way to think about this process is to take an evolutionary approach to technolgy development. Initially there's a lot variation of various firms trying to solve a particular problem, each with their own solution based on more or less novel technology. The issue is the selection phase where the technolgy competes in the real world and compete not only against other technological solutions but in a sociotechnical system including e.g. regional institutions such as local culture, regulations, politics, markets that are often aligned with the existing industry. Ultimately one or a few solutions are retained and integrated into our collective infrastructure and provide a consistant solution to the original problem, and in a capitalistic model - profitable returns.
2. Establish lunar colony
3. Import fresh moon lettuce
4. Charge restaurants $$$$ per leaf
There seems to be a big gap between step 1 and 2.
What may make sense is enabling farming of locally out of season crops from "annuals". This already happens but it's not as cost competitive as importing from far-away (hemisphere away). Working on that makes more sense than trying to farm on multi-floor indoor facilities.
For bulk agricultural commodities, that is, staple grains, time-sensitivity is measured in months to years, and shipping is virtually a non-issue.
For anything that can survive freezing, once a cold-chain is established, there's similarly little issue. This includes a great deal of meat, including much of what's served as "fresh" or uncooked, such as restaurant sushi (salmon sushi is in fact flash-frozen then thawed, in large part to kill parasites). Some fish and shellfish is best consumed fresh, though much is not and may be frozen or otherwise preserved (e.g., canned or pickled fish).
Many non-frozen commodities can be refrigerated, notably apples and bananas, though there may be some cosmetic defects which occur, or mealiness for apples stored from the end of one harvest season to the beginning of the next.
Transport is most critical in fresh fruits and some vegetables, though there are frequently alternatives (with some slight decrease in texture, though usually not in nutrition which may in fact be superior to unfrozen alternatives). These are generally not staples, and most households or food-service organisations can make do with substitutes.
Much greater concerns for food generally are overall affordability, access, "food deserts" in which traditional grocery stores don't exist --- a problem previously largely applicable to blighted urban areas but not increasingly experienced in rural regions and some suburbs. This has also long been an issue with native communities such as reservations in the US and elsewhere. General nutritional balance is another issue, as is access to either food storage and preparation (particularly as housing becomes an increasingly fraught issue in more developed countries) or foodservice (commercial and noncommercial meal and food preparation).
Vertical farming is ... very much a solution in search of a problem. The challenges are interesting, I'll grant, but not especially relevant.
And largely, transportation pales relative to distribution, particularly in conjunction with other inequality factors.
As for meal prep, it's interesting to reflect that the concept of equipping every single residence with full food storage and preparation facilities is a recent development (20th century, often surprisingly late) even in much of the developed world, and is compounded by the tendency to both "nuclear family" and small household (1--2 members) residences. In the late 19th century, individual apartments would have lacked food-preparation with residents eating shared meals in rooming houses, restaurants, pubs, or at work, and many households were both multi-generational and included (and fed) a significant service class. There were exceptions, but the modern 1--4 person household in which multiple meals had to be prepped and served daily is quite modern.
Vertical farms probably indeed don't work out in the current day where we have sunlight, enough land to use it, and transport. Probably most careful analysis would have shown that, but, for things where the analysis has wide-enough error bars, when money is cheap enough, "the market" shows things don't work by incinerating gobs of investor cash and falling over. In the cheap-money era we just had, it was apparently a worthwhile gamble for some.
And if you're worth billions and get suckered by a chancer with a flashy pitch deck to invest in something that could have trivially been shown to be economically doomed by some random internet-commenter grousing, then honestly you deserved to lose the money.
Given the actual consistent result, it's still probably on the investors for being credulous marks with a case of techno-FOMO and high on their own supply, but I don't think it's always been necessarily so simple on the face of it to be debunked by a bunch of grouchy Internet contrarians in 31 seconds (though probably, again based on the result, was always debunkable by decent independent due-diligence).
After all, it's not hard to imagine a world where SpaceX is a smoking crater in 2015 and we're all going "well obviously you couldn't have landed a rocket, what did they think would happen?!". Another example: the jury's still out on if Uber's long bet on a pivot into self driving taxis can pay off before they bleed out, and you can find plenty of "obviously..." analyses saying they'd be dead or that they'd be the only transport in town by 2020. Neither of those could start in a niche, they were all-or-nothing. And those greenhouses that did start in a niche would have had huge attrition too, again, at the time, each probably seemed like a good plan to invest the family savings into.
It's not unthinkable, to me at least from the outside, that vertical farming had a chance of being a capital-intensive, high-barrier, high-payoff industry. In that I'd be surprised by it about as much as I was by SpaceX's technical payoff about 7 years ago: "huh, so that does work, crazy".
And all that said, if you're an investor who would rather gamble the money than spend a fraction of the promised returns on due diligence, then thanks for the trickle-down, I suppose. And probably just as well farming isn't about to end up in the hands of Farming Uber even faster than it already is becoming.
However, instead of trying for vertical though could have worked on improving how to grow things in greenhouses at higher latitudes more economically efficiently and maybe expanding the available crops through specialization.
IMHO, vertical farming is a part of the next wave of industrialisation together with real AI, space travel for the masses, etc. But this requires that we fix an energy sourcing problem and does it without externalities.
Uhhh, is there any energy cheaper than what we get from the sun?
Or 12 months per year...until you run out of gullible VC's.
that's just part of it. Closer to the poles, away from the equator, there isn't enough sun to have a winter growing season. The energy, expense of transporting produce to those areas is another factor. Along with the flavor and quality benefits of harvesting when ripe instead of optimizing for transportation durability and presentation.
Historically the solution was canning the in-season produce and consuming that during winter months.
But sunlight is so cheap in general that those are really niche situations.
Still cool on micro-scale I guess, if you don't have much space in your back yard some kind of vertical farming greenhouse could be cool.
While there are cases where that's the case, they're so marginal it's hard to square the size of the niche with
> vertical farming is a part of the next wave of industrialisation.
Sure, we can grow better food for Finns and Icelanders, it's hard to see a case for the constraints of those places starting to apply more broadly...
That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I think its up to it.