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Comment by jagtstronaut | Hacker News Reader

I majored in Ag for my bachelors and can confirm that all the research at the time was pointing to that this is not a good idea. It is many times more energy inefficient that just growing things in soil.

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.

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Any project that "reuses" shipping containers is a big red flag for me. Used shipping containers are not actually particularly cheap and already have plenty of demand. And for the purpose of building or construction projects they provide next to no value.

Yeah. I got fascinated with tiny houses and vertical farms because I liked the potential modularity and transportability, but when you actually look into, you don't really need containerization (let alone actually reused shipping containers) at all. The houses, farms, whatever, are rarely transported anywhere. Instead you're left with 12 metal posts, and an aesthetic.

Yeah, I did the math at one point on using seacans for a few different projects and at least around here they weren’t at all competitive against stick-built structures. They’re easy to transport multi-modal. That’s what they’ve got going for them. If they didn’t need to be lifted by cranes and stacked, they could be cheaper (structurally weaker), but then they’d be useless for their intended use.

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

When I was doing consulting, we did an innovation project with {{HUGE_RETAILER}} and {{MAJOR_RESEARCH_UNIVERSITY}}, researching the retailer's desire to do micro-vertical farming, which the university had put a bunch of research into and had a bunch of IP around. Only took a couple of weeks of reading the relevant dissertations and papers to figure out that the economics didn't, wouldn't, and couldn't make sense, even if the retailer could get a premium price on "just picked" produce (high-end mushrooms were the only place that cost, output, and price-per-pound made any sense). Absolutely shocked, not at all surprised that a bunch of VCs put funding into the concept.

Vertical farming or any kind of farming aimed at making the growing season much longer is going to largely be a play for high-end quality, of which I am not sure the market is nearly big enough to get Silicon Valley involved.

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.

> more than just greens

Two dollar strawberries are the next big step, apparently.

> Vertical farming would also need to be able to take on more than just greens.

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.

Re your last point: The article focuses on lettuce, but I'd associated these vertical farms with microgreens. I've never eaten one, but my understanding was the intent is to sell microgreens to high end restaurants at a high price, as you said. Otherwise, the lighting costs (compared to the sun) would make these unviable.

Some biofuels can be efficient to produce, especially oils for diesel engines. Some paths for producing ethanol for petrol engines can be efficient too, but that’s a bit harder.

It’s definitely often a scam to continue fossil fuel dependence, though.

> Kinda like biofuels, sounds really cool, but in practice it just creates more waste then the alternatives.

So Porsche e-fuels are gonna be a scam?

Nope, just product for people rich enough to not care about fuel price to run their sportscars. Which is, well, a bit snobbish, but essentially no impact

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".

It seems short sighted? Sure soil is abundant and water plentiful at the moment. Isn't part of the allure of perfecting indoor farming to be resilient to a future world hostile to agriculture. I would think of any big discoveries or inventions being worth it as a long term risk investment.

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.

We have a ton of easier to pick fruit between here and indoor hydroponic farming.

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.

We're close to peak population.

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.

Sure we won't run out of water, the challenge is gonna come when weather patterns shift in a way that cause droughts on crop-bearing land or abnormal temperatures in key parts of the growing season. Some parts of the world may be in for some considerable pain in those scenarios.

Others are likely in for considerable gain.

We're not going to run out of water as in "there doesn't exist enough water on the planet to sustain the total population", but we're already running out of water in the sense of "there are places where the ground water is not replenished as quickly as it is being depleted by local industrial and consumer usage, and reservoirs are critically low". That there's plenty of water 5,000 miles away is only so helpful.

But Water is not plentiful; the U.S. 2nd largest reservoir is at its lowest level.

And Soil (at least top soil) is not abundant.

Even currently used land is decreased with the warn in Ukraine.

Ideal soil and water locations may move. Running out at current farms is different from running out on earth.

Where I live it isn't. I live in a high mountain desert. We have rivers, but they have to be dammed. We have land, but not much soil -- it was washed away 12,000 years ago, then covered by volcanos (check out Craters of the Moon). Anyway, welcome to southern Idaho, our best crop is cows and milk.

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.

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