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Comment by uxcolumbo | Hacker News Reader

Why is it failing?

Poor management or not viable?

Vertical farming seems key for our future.

Vertical farming is a solution in search of a problem. It's not viable and it doesn't solve any meaningful issues in agriculture. In cities, land is more productive when used for other purposes (residential, commercial, retail, etc.), and out in the country where crops are typically grown, space simply isn't an issue to the point that you need to go up. Indeed, way more food is currently produced than is actually needed for human consumption (most cropland in the US is used to feed livestock or turned into bioethanol).

I always assumed the key word here was “indoor,” and not “vertical.” Indoors is a place where it is much, much, easier to automate and control growing conditions. Both could add up to faster better cheaper. Given how amazingly huge; dense; and performant logistics has gotten, I can’t imagine the real estate angle is moving the needle very much.

Indoors is much more expensive though. You've got to build the buildings and all the infrastructure. Outdoors in big simple fields has a lot of pluses. And it's time-tested. There's no particular reason to think that the majority of food will ever be grown indoors, or even a small but significant fraction of it. Not on Earth anyway.

> Vertical farming seems key for our future.

This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?

They have only ever managed to grow lettuce with vertical farming. Produce out of farm gate is at the bottom of the supply chain. It will never be profitable unless people are willing to be 4-5x what they pay for lettuce now.

CA field grown lettuce gets the farmer less than half a dollar per head. Meanwhile: https://www.montereyherald.com/2022/12/16/11-for-a-head-of-l...

Expect price increases and food shortages this year because of rains in CA. We are not allowed to plant for 45-60 days after last rains so field can dry out.

The truth is that we do have a real food shortage situation now. The vertical farms won’t make a dent in making up the gap. Not even close.

Theoretically the advantages are light sources focused where the plant needs when they need it resulting in faster growth. Just turns out that for most crops, that (and lower land use) isn't enough to cover the disadvantages of the extra infrastructure needed. Plus you can install lights in a greenhouse...

We still aren’t fully utilising horizontal farming which is significantly cheaper

My uncle is in that business. Even with organic (so no chemicals) techniques the amount of optimization that can be done is staggering. Companies do keep their knowledge very secret, so you won’t know as an average farmer, it’s definitely not an open source spirit in the farming industry.

Setting the topic of weed aside, are there pharmaceutical crops that would make sense economically to grow in a controlled environment ?

It has never been and has no path to being economically viable.

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