Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business
just-food.com
just-food.com
Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.
It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.
What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.
With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.
Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.
You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.
The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
- that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating
- that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design.
We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems built into how we approach the design, so like running away from our shadows, it will come up wherever we go.
And, if we are aware of the bad design, why wouldn’t we just fix it while we’re here on this planet?
When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.
There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
I'm not suggesting putting biological organisms anywhere. I'm suggesting that at some point in the future an AI will be able to rapidly modify its own substrate independent of biology, metabolic inputs, and genetic inheritance. That it won't be subject to information loss due to death or other physical constraints. That it will much more quickly be able to build support systems for itself to harness energy and raw materials wherever it goes.
Unless we kill ourselves in the near future, these systems will likely emerge and will likely proliferate faster than us. They're not going to be stuck on earth with us. There are abundant energy resources and building materials in the solar system and greater galaxy beyond.
HN is quite a bubble, and we often form an echo chamber that strongly agrees with itself.
As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy… one thing that will probably happen is that we too will cease to exist as a whole at some point. I wonder what this does to us as a group, not having that perspective.
There are so many possible outcomes.
It can be true that humanity will peak, yet intelligence will continue to grow and expand beyond humans.
Any outcome where humanity is the utmost pinnacle of intelligence likely means that we do not stray beyond our gravity well. That earth-evolved intelligence will never reach the greater galaxy beyond. It falls far short of earth's potential.
I hope humanity is not the peak. There's so much more that lies beyond us. In a greater developmental timeline, we could be just amoebas. That's exciting to contemplate, even though we can barely fathom it.
So what if it was ? I don’t really understand this ultra-intellectual viewpoint.
A planet is just fine being a planet, we don’t need to out glasses on planets and have them reading Shakespeare to make the universe a special place ? I’m sure they will happen on its own anyway if it’s desirable.
In a similar way, an amoeba doesn’t really need intelligence, it just does what it does until it can’t do it anymore and a new one comes a long. Maybe that’s a fine thing and in some ways, it’s own form of intelligence. Doesn’t need to mess with everything and crate ecology crisis for itself.
The way we’re going, the amoebas will likely outlive us and probably any computer systems we produce. So it’s yet to be proven our intellect is really all that valuable longer term.
The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too.
Some cultures attach a lot of importance on travel, associating it with freedom, or mobility (both in the literal sense, and as a metaphor for class mobility). Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, to explore, to hike the wildernesses or enjoy different urban locale and take full advantage of the transport infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it isn’t an illusion.
Then you're just a pastoralist and likely a Malthusian, not talking about ecological sustainability at all.
Walking around my extremely dense city, I see plenty of people growing their own food in their little yards, probably more than I see back in my semirural hometown.
For a while I subscribed to a vegan food delivery service. The food is grown a few towns away and delivered daily by cyclists. There is nothing like that back in my hometown; I'd have to do HelloFresh or something.
People in rural areas like where I grew up, might be more likely to have a garden, but most don't, and they still get most of their calories from the grocery store. I grew up on a cattle ranch and while that might give me more "connection" to my food, we still bought a lot of our beef at the grocery store because finishing and butchering a cow is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of long term freezer storage. Today's modern rural family is pretty similar to an urban one except they drive a lot farther to do anything.
In the modern world, it also means that cities have lower ecological footprint. Moving people around is much more energy intensive than moving food. Makes more sense to do farming across the country and concentrate the produce onto a small place packed with people.
Not necessarily saying this is a great tradeoff for individuals (who wouldn't want a backyard with an apple tree?) but in a sense, the fact that we're picturing a backyard with an apple tree instead of backbreaking work in the rice paddies throughout summer is a testament to how brutally efficient the modern agriculture is.
Relating to energy, one of the coming issues we will need to solve is fertilizer supply. Modern agriculture heavily depends on natural gas (via Haber-Bosch) to juice yields alongside genetic engineering. This isn't great for long-term soil health either, we just haven't been doing it long enough to see the effects of soil depletion.
From the wikipedia:
> Scott then asserts that the reason why hunter-gatherer societies transformed into agro-pastoral societies was due to coercion by the state. He cites research on an archaeological site in Mesopotamia named Abu Hureyra. Scott concurs with other scholars in the field that "'[n]o hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.
there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.
we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.
the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamo....
> When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.
If you need robot arms and computer vision, it sounds then like permaculture is impractical at scale necessary for replacing standard agricultural practices.
Gardening is my hobby, and over the years I found a lot of practices that improve my yield tremendously without depending on chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers. However, I would not dare suggesting to the professional farmers that they should follow my steps. These practices work in my garden, but they simply aren’t practical if you need to feed the entire world.
People who are middle aged and raising children don't have the time necessary (or the good physical shape) to participate in permaculture on any meaningful scale beyond maybe growing some veggies for personal consumption.
Whatever powerful entity that determines the laws has no obligation to the environment.
It’s like someone saying “java projects get too messy when there are hundreds of developers on them , this new language I’ve invented will be much better, trust me”
Most herbicides, for example, could be replaced by something which plucks. Insecticide money could, partially, go into bots that could pick-and-crush unwanted insects aboveground. We would still have grubs. Fungicide expenditure could be slashed: detect infection on a plant, spray it and its neighbors, maybe a few more downwind. Your bot, named He Who Walks Behind the Rows, trundles along slowly, observing each plant.
Per acre, it would have to travel roughly three and a third miles. At a half-mile-per-hour pace, thirteen hours a day, you could swing two acres a day per bot. Let's say your bot eats your production cost in half, about four hundred dollars per acre. If a bot lasts only a season, well, it has to cost under a grand to be worth it, and I haven't even touched power costs yet. So it will need to survive multiple growing seasons. I can see Overlord stations every few acres, maybe grabbing some solar power or charging up off a grid, storing it so that it can be dispersed to the bots at night. They could serve as data collection points, centimeter-level GPS correction servers, and so on, as well.
I could see the temptation to work irrigation into the bot somehow but water is heavy and I imagine something entirely separate to provide water.
I'm making a lot of assumptions, like "each plant ought to be looked at each day" and the standard thirty-inch rows, etc.
""" It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for. 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.
... Here is a link: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm
"""
Isn't this common knowledge?
On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.
I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.
Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
Much as I like these approaches, unfortunately mostly they are currently a long long way off the productivity of conventional agriculture by any metric (yield/area, yield/animal etc)
If you've got some specific examples of regenerative systems that out-perform conventional in terms of productivity please post some links.
A concrete example would be New Forest Farm: about 40 hectares in Wisconsin farmed entirely without chemical fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides or external irrigation for more than two decades. The owner is arguably more commercially successful than the neighboring corn farmers and according to his data, he produces similar amounts of calories/ha with a considerably lower energy input and comparable labour requirements. He has written a couple of good books and you can find plenty of youtube videos of him (Mark Shepard).
Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional.
I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.
Again, if you've links to highly productive _widely deployed_ regenerative systems please post them.
As I've said in another comment Mark Shepard's work is very interesting, but it's an isolated case, a prototype. The trick is replicating it widely - it remains to be seen if that can be done.
No it isn't if you are reducing your industrial input and commercial seed expenses.
The only guy on youtube I know who does regenerative agriculture has better soil quality and higher profits. Also even in scenarios where regenerative agriculture is behind, the difference comes from the fact that the soil has been depleted already and you start from less than zero. If you have been doing it for thirty years, you get higher yields than conventional agriculture.
If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them.
E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm.
If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.
There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or some other city-state.
My sense is that it was riding a wave of "local" and "farm to table".
If you're in a city like LA or NY where there's a lack of space AND local demand for a premium priced product that can be delivered year round AND more awareness/marketability for such products (local + sustainable), the economics are different than versus growing a commodity product in Boise, Idaho.
It's like the farmers in Asia that grow super premium fruits (Japan and Taiwan come to mind). It only makes sense in the context of a market that will pay the price premium.
All you’re saving by forcing that is a few hours of driving in a truck. If there’s an emissions concern then most farming regions are also good places for renewables like solar and wind. Electric or other carbon neutral vehicles seem like a more reasonable solution. Just a short trip outside of a city can probably get enough land for a large greenhouse if you want higher density farming with existing ag-tech and shorter transport.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't make the case that it makes _zero_ sense; only that they couldn't prove the use case and find the right products and market. Definitely with a more high-value product that couldn't be sourced reasonably locally or even from the US, there may be a better economic case.
It reminds me of this couple growing yuzu lemon in NJ and selling 5-10x the price to Michelin restaurants in the area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwTc5929U5g
And generally speaking, I don’t want my food grown where it’s the most polluted. From the middle of nowhere with minimal population density, ideally upstream of any big city, is where I want my food coming from.
(Will admit I start a garden at my mom’s in a medium sized city’s suburb, but when I run some containers on my balcony on a busy city street, the layers of dust from ??? concern me)
Maybe this will get better once we don’t have the concentration of ICE vehicles in urban centres, but until then…
There are some extreme exceptions like the United Arab Emirates etc. but they are home to only a fraction of the world population and building a city like Dubai in a desert was probably not a great idea to begin with.
> By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing very, very right: plants need lots and lots of sunlight that we can get for free with horizontal farming. Vertical farming throws all that away, and therefore is mostly nonsense. IIRC, all it can manage is low-calories crops like lettuce. You're not getting industrial-scale, vertically-farmed potatoes without a bunch of generators powering tons of floodlights.
You'd need literally megawatts of power to provide the same amount of light. Where are you going to get that from? Solar panels...?
The usual answer is: nuclear power that is too cheap to meter. Still waiting for it…
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC?locat... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0712/top-agricul... [3] https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/foodstuffs
Yeah, but a natural ecosystem isn't agriculture, and the concept of a "pest" doesn't even make sense in one. Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus. "Pests" are non-human organisms that want to take advantage that unnatural surplus for themselves.
> There are very well established agricultural systems that use that principle and employ it to enable commercial farming without pesticides and herbicides while retaining high productivity. Search for syntropic agriculture and New Forest Farm (Mark Shepard).
That's kind of off topic, but I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques. Either the "high productivity" is quite a bit less that the productivity for traditional farming, or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
If that is the case (and there were no other alternatives) the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.
> I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques
Way to be skeptical without even bothering to do a Google search. Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm. Plenty of other examples around as well.
> […] or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
"Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...
agreed
> Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm.
Yes, I've read about Mark Shepard with a lot of interest. However that's just one farm. It's yet to be seen if his methods will work elsewhere, if his claims for productivity can be substantiated, if his productivity can be duplicated, and so on. In short his work is, currently, at best a prototype.
If you're going to claim that regenerative can be as productive as conventional then you need to point to systems that are widely used and whose productivity figures are reliably gathered.
> "Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
You miss the point. It's not about the availability of labour. It's about the price of labour. It's more economically efficient to reduce labour as much as possible. I'm not claiming this is a good thing. It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
> It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
But farming is not a free-market enterprise in "modern" societies. It is the most subsidized and among the most regulated among all enterprises in industrialized economies. German farmers derive half their income and all their profits from government (mostly EU) subsidies. I don't know the figures for the US, but I'd bet that they are similar. Farming, by who and how farming is practiced is basically entirely defined by political priorities, which at this time are mostly still based on the technological and scientific developments of the 1930s-1970s, which have created some very well established commercial interest groups (chem-ag concerns, farmers unions, etc.).
Because if it was that good, I'd expect to have been seeing all kind of articles about the massive revolution in agriculture. If there wasn't some kind of catch, why isn't it seeing wider adoption?
As far as what counts as "commercial success." It'd really have to be something that can compete with commodity agriculture to be a solution. If it's a "commercial success" because it's some boutique thing that can charge 10x commodity prices to make up for 5x costs by selling to self-consciously "ethical consumers" and elites by marketing its good local green permaculture vibes, then I don't think it will be anything but niche producers.
The systems I have highlighted have demonstrated commercial-grade calorie surpluses over decades. Kindly da a tiny bit of research before simply claiming the opposite.
Regenerative agriculture has also demonstrated that it can bring degraded and marginal land back into production and it uses less irrigation etc. by design, so it would be possible to expand arable land.
The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
A lovely example of this is the germination rooms/tanks of malting plants where Barley gets germinated over a few days (2-3) before being dried/kilned to make brewing malt: they all have an on-going battle against fungi and algae, much of which battle takes the form of fungicides/algacides, chlorine washes, strong acids, etc. and they never "win" a permanent victory.
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...
Same for fungi: it’s usually brought, or becomes endemic, in with the soil.
Things are a bit cleaner in vertical plant farms as long as they dont use animal biproducts in their process.
And again: why bother? Market gardens are highly space efficient and can feed hundreds of people from the space normally occupied by a suburban house plot. Locating a market garden outside an agglomeration and transporting the produce an hour or so into the city is also very practical. And of course actual staple crops are shelf stable and can thus be transported anywhere at leisure. This fancy "vertical farming" stuff makes sense on a space station and desert cities flush with petro dollars but that's about it.
There are edge cases where the technology developed for vertical farms seems very useful: densely-populated, small countries; space stations, and off-world colonies. But for most of Earth? Look at how much of the US is farmland, and then imagine how many expensive towers and associated infrastructure you'd need to replace it.
There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.
And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress.
A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education.
Far from being dependent on either the profit motive or global trade, they are largely public goods, have overwhelmingly been provided outside of private enterprise, and do not in the main depend on goods being transported globally.
Are these healthcare advancements closely related to either private enterprise or modern globalized logistics? Clearly not, as in many cases they took place without either, due to local conditions. For around half the world these advances took place before shipping containers.
Health education, hygiene and birth control generally rely on the transmission of information and ideas but not of goods. The other three have been successful, in at least some cases, as public goods, advanced outside of the private sector. In many other cases they have happened because of, not despite, local rather than globalized manufacturing and distribution.
Its of course impossible to argue with neoliberals about this, but my entire point is that sometimes we have to step back and look at the overall picture and consider if what we are doing really makes sense. The ecological destruction in land, fresh water, the depletion of finite resources vs. renewable, the sustained poverty in developing countries for the last century combined with subsidized farming in the western world combined with a globalized liberal food market, etc.
> And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
Is it really so impossible to imagine any other measure of cost than what has been determined by the liberal market? Finite resources, the cost of the destruction of biospheres, the human toll this all has, none of this is calculated into your holy all knowing invisible hand of the market. Meanwhile people are suffering, poverty increasing, air and water become scarce resources and children starve to death all over. Whatever you imagine works so great, doesn't really for a LOT of people you never see or think about.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
(Incidentally, most tropical soil is notoriously poor, so getting the soil right is one of the easier parts.)
Spot on! Plants without solar lights are for labs, not for food.
EDITED TO ADD: This is the reason why agriculture before the advent of chemical fertilizers (in the 1900s) was even possible. You'd simply rotate your crops so that they'd create a balanced nutrition profile in the soil without the need to add a lot of external fertility. Edge cases like the Nile floodplains excepted.
> Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil live that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant,
That's inaccurate and simplistic.
_Some_ plants generate _some_ nutrients in the soil. The most common example being legumes (in symbiosis with bacteria) fixing atmospheric nitrogen into a form essential for plant life.
However all plants have complex nutrient needs. So even those that contribute something to the soil will remove other nutrients.
In the example of legumes, to simplify, if the whole plant is harvested, they will have made a net contribution of nitrogen, but the soil will still be depleted of e.g. Phosphorous and Potassium.
> if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture.
It's not a dumb approach, it can make sense. And it does not "destroy" the soil. Yes it _can_ cause leeching, soil erosion and depletion of some nutrients, but all these ill effects can be dramatically lessened by good practice.
In Europe we have soils that have been tilled intermittently for millenia and are still productive.
Yes, with modern tilling machinery there are now alternatives available in some situations (min-till, disc only etc) which can avoid some of the potential ill effects of tilling.
The US also also have a number of places where the soil has given way because of poor farming practices.
Also, the dust bowl.
Ready to expand? You just add more enclosures. You slowly recoup the capital cost of the structure. Might take a few years, but you will. Rinse and repeat.
The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can, and we don't have the capital in enough hands to make basic, boring, but efficient methods like this work at larger scale.
Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive. This article explains why, and describes a common, practical alternative:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-gree...
Also, people ridiculously overestimate the percentage of food’s carbon footprint that comes food transportation:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
(Search for locally grown food to jump to the right figure).
Note that, even if the greenhouse, transport, storage and packaging all used zero resources, the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane) is going to be more than 5% the impact of traditionally grown food.
The last time I tried to advocate for replacing landfills with incinerators on HN, someone came along to insist that methane recapture from landfills was possible and preferable (methane is useful, if you can confine it). I haven't had time to study that further, but managing food waste — aside from the actual lack of food it causes — is a solvable problem one way or another, and doesn't have to generate methane.
Now, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizers...
There is a lot of waste going on here because:
- Consumers turn their noses on perfectly edible food that looks ugly. (There are volunteer organizations that intercepts such food at the landfill sites, and as food prices goes up, they have become more popular)
- Consumers living in the city typically don’t have chickens, pigs, goats, or rabbits, that will happily eat any of leftovers that haven’t rotted
- Consumers typically don’t have vermicomposting, black soldier fly composting, or even just regular composting, so unless the municipality has an industrial composting site, it goes into the landfill.
I think people get too obsessed over carbon dioxide and methane metrics, and become narrow minded about such solutions … because atmospheric carbon dioxide is an easy metric to carry a call for action. It’s like that comfortable illusion I used to have that, if I put in the effort to recycle, I am doing my part. That’s all wishful thinking.
Take landfills. The problem with putting food waste into landfills is not an increase in methane (and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification). Landfills trap the methanes produced by decomposing food waste. They need some kind of vent or capture, or the landfill will eventually explode from the accumulated methane.
But more importantly, the biggest issue is that the trapped methane in landfills is no longer bioavailable, and participating in the ecologies in the carbon cycle.
This mentions a lot of different causes of food waste, and appearance ranks as a small factor. It certainly doesn't support your assertion that the appearance of produce is a primary cause of food waste.
In Europe, it's not the stores, and it's not the public either, it's EU regulations. I still remember the small, irregular, tasty fruit and veg from before - and how it disappeared almost overnight after joining the EU.
This fundamentally misunderstands what the carbon cycle is. The amount of carbon in the carbon cycle has dramatically increased since the Industrial Revolution, and the quantity of carbon locked into landfills is not significant compared to the absorption of carbon by rock weathering. The carbon cycle per se is certainly not under threat from present human activities, although the Earth will slowly absorb carbon dioxide over the next billion years until it becomes uninhabitable, according to current projections.
Furthermore, methane, an inert gas with low solubility, is not trapped in landfills. The capture scheme I described would eventually convert it to carbon dioxide and possibly store that carbon dioxide, but regardless, it's a very small amount of carbon compared to other emissions sources.
>and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification
None of these problems are seriously related to food waste management. You might as well insist that methane emissions are not as important as nuclear war.
Uhh, I am not seeing anything in that article that supports that claim, other than the first sentence, which does not cite any sources.
That article appears to be discussing ways to maximize greenhouse performance in winter, on the premise that glass is a poor insulator. But no where does it discuss energy consumption of modern greenhouses. My understanding is that they do not use climate control at all, except maybe some fans for air circulation. So sure, put some walls on your greenhouse for better heat retention. But making something more efficient, that already uses nearly zero energy might not be the best use of resources.
The energy usage and output of greenhouses varies significantly by seasons and region. You really need to do direct comparisons for individual bits of land instead of broad statements. It's probably worth the light and heat costs if a country cannot grow enough vegetables for it's population without it. The US doesn't have that issue, because we have lots of growing space with long growing seasons.
This is true on multiple levels of the word use. From the practice of monocrops to only keeping the ground fertile through the use of chemicals, I'm amazed that we haven't had more problems.
Hmmm, really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.
What exactly do you offer / sell / solve?
How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
It’s unclear from your message.
It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.
> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.
Not to Shill, but are you planning on hiring anytime soon?
I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)
My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:
> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.
My impression has always been that too many of these entities end-up building what I call "monuments to computer science and technology", rather than farms. The last paragraph in the article is, to me, a typical sign of this issue:
“What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”
Right.
Maybe this is just marketing/fund-raising language. I get it. There's stupid money out there that will throw dollars at anything that sounds like it is aligned with trends. Maybe they should have added "GPT" to that paragraph.
I know indoor farms that are doing well. It's challenging, yes, most businesses are. Upward Farms decided to raise fish and plants. Yeah, good luck. That's likely where some of the "infinite challenges" they refer to came from.
Yes, technology is an absolute requirement for indoor farming. The key is to not make it about technology for technology's sake. Don't introduce a backhoe for a job that can be done with a shovel.
The farm business equation isn't, at a basic level, terribly complex. You are no building a data center. If you do, you will eventually be plowed-over when you fail.
Many countries think food security is national security, so it will continue even if it requires government subsidy.
There is plenty of arable land it's just devouted to non staple production. And so they're stuck buying food with dollars they have no control over.
Oh they absolutely can and did that as a result of the obligations that came with accepting IMF emergency loans.
"Why are they doing this?" Tom asked.
"They're destroying the groves to keep prices high," Pa said. "They don't care about the trees or the people who work here. All they care about is money."
--The Grapes of Wrath
edit: this is the quote I was looking for at first
"...Did you ever hear of the Farmers’ Association?”
“Why, sure.”
“Well, I belong to it. We had a meeting last night. Now, do you know who runs the Farmers’ Association? I’ll tell you. The Bank of the West. That bank owns most of this valley, and it’s got paper on everything it don’t own. So last night the member from the bank told me, he said, ‘You’re paying thirty cents an hour. You’d better cut it down to twenty-five.’ I said, ‘I’ve got good men. They’re worth thirty.’ And he says, ‘It isn’t that,’ he says. ‘The wage is twenty-five now. If you pay thirty, it’ll only cause unrest. And by the way,’ he says, ‘you going to need the usual amount for a crop loan next year?’ ” Thomas stopped. His breath was panting through his lips. “You see? The rate is twenty-five cents— and like it.”
“We done good work,” Timothy said helplessly.
“Ain’t you got it yet? Mr. Bank hires two thousand men an’ I hire three. I’ve got paper to meet. Now if you can figure some way out, by Christ, I’ll take it! They got me.
Surely in many cases neither farmers producing cash crops nor the countries they are based in are able to 'invest in the future', but rather are trapped by past debts and limited options.
Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.
Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.
I think this is MBA for they farmed animals
It's not like 1 is a goal: we can't eat fossil fuels (or solar energy), and we know that eating either plants or animals is never going to yield all the energy they absorbed during their lives.
And even pre-industrial agriculture had specific elements which had a yield of less than 1 by this metric, in order to make specific things that humans wanted to eat. Since most humans don't like a diet of grass and oats, the huge excess calorie yield from those crops could subsidize low-yield farming of vegetables, meat and other delicacies.
Vertical farming (defined as the inefficient use of indoor farming, versus greenhouses which are an efficient use of indoor farming) is not a good replacement for most sorts of food production. It's a potentially competitive way of producing the most delicate and high-value items as close to the customer as possible.
It could make it possible to sell some foods, like apricots, in the city which are otherwise impossible to ship because they have to be picked soft.
Often though, there is roof space available where high-value crops could currently be grown efficiently in greenhouses and it's not being looked at because of the VC focus on tech and growth.
As it stands the title reads a little as though Upward Farms was the OG progenitor of vertical farms, whereas, from the article:
> The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms.
As prior art in the vertical farm game though, consider verticalfarms.com.au [1] in Queensland Australia that started out back in 2009.
Also Australian based stackedfarm.com [2] is building out and expanding in size ATM with future plans so there's still life left in the domain.
[1] https://verticalfarms.com.au/about-us
But that's not really needed unless the city is on the moon, and even then, you have lots of space if you just build a bit of transportation.
The two links I provided above are eating their own dogfood to be sure but they are less in the business of growing food and more in the R&D business of designing, building, and onselling | leasing proven solutions.
Both (to the best of my knowledge) are already embedded within large conventional farming areas | businesses - these are growth innovation sub business ventures.
Maybe the Egyptians did it, maybe not. (https://www.ehow.com/facts_7391989_mirror-egyptian-lighting-...) But I always wondered why stuff that literally grows on trees isn't cheap and abundant.
And then I met a man, on my smoke break on the Johns Hopkins University Campus who said: "If there is something being given away for free, there is a man in line waiting to sell it to you"
American grocery stores sell bananas grown outside on trees for literal pennies each. Dirt cheap tropical fruit, arguably the CIA's finest contribution to American society..
Anyway, mirrors. Mirrors don't multiply light, they only bounce it. 1 square meter of mirror can only bounce a square meter of sunlight. If you have a 5 level parking garage, each level 1000 square meters, then you need 5000 square meters of mirror. What did any of this accomplish, vs simply building a single layer regular old greenhouse? Remember that most surface areas of most countries is not urban so in most cases there's no reason to grow food in urban areas.
It is!
Around here it's apples. Everyone with a few apple trees has far more fruit than they can eat in the fall and they're begging to give them away. I'm lucky in that most of ours are in horse pasture and the horses just eat them when they fall (cue horses drunk on naturally fermented cider!).
I'm told it's a similar situation with lemons in LA: they just rot on the ground. Again, I imagine similar happening in Georgia with peaches. Lather, rinse, repeat for whatever fruit is common anywhere else in the country.
Extend this to stores. Local fruit "that literally grows on trees" is usually the cheapest fruit you can find. Other than the bananas at $0.54/lb. The economics of those just blow my mind. Cheaper than potatoes but travelled 5x as far.
The amount of actual sunlight that drives the typical tree is more than the amount you can estimate via just a math calculation of the surface volume of the leaves. How does natural sunlight and leaf combination allow this to happen and not non-natural light?
Or in short words the non-natural light the vertical growers were using has more than one problem...
I wonder what if we use more effective wave guides(tubes) to capture the wanted wavelengths:
I'll see myself out...
Sure, it's a little impractical right now chiefly because it's hard to match the free energy of the sun. But someday, we will solve it. It's one of those ideas which will be inevitable once energy becomes cheap and abundant
I don't know much about it but it's intrigued me for a while. Apparently the only commercial product ("Quorn") is made in a fermentation vat with glucose syrup and Fusarium venenatum spores.
But the nutrition content is interesting: 42% protein by mass yet still has fiber and other nutrients. It's also supposed to be highly satiating.
Unfortunately, Quorn is shipped from the UK and they don't let me buy just one $10 box of it where I live.
Honestly Quorn is not a great meat replacement for anything other than mince, or maybe foods that are so processed all you can taste are the additives.
No farmers. At least the marketing dude sold food before.
"How hard can it be?"
We take so many things for granted, like air and sunlight. I think the Biosphere 2 project was the only one that tried to figure out just what we need to support life in a closed system. It was horribly expensive and it looks to be horribly inefficient - 8 people to make the food and oxygen, and 3.14 acres of land. What we do currently for the space station is to ship them 1000 pounds of stuff every month per person.
Horizontal space is not something we lack, even in most marginal areas.
It breaks the laws of physics, which a smart child can work out.
Sure you can make food for the rich, but do the rich care enough to pay for the vertical-farming surcharge. Is it the type of signaling they pay for?
The 26 story Chinese pig farm however works because they haven't filled their universities with imposters who can't do science and fatting animals vertically using energy harvested from horizontal farms is not insane.