The other is to add much needed nutrients that deficient people need. Here is an anecdote from our adventure. We were able to artifically add enough Vitamin B12 to Spinach that non-vegetarians can benefit from. Vitamin B12 is not available in vegetarian diet.
The other audacious goal we tried. What if that same Spinash is loaded with enough nutrients for pregnant women that the malnourished women in rural India can get their fair share of nutrients during their terms for a healthy mother and a healthy baby!
These specialized way of farming can only be managed by a well managed indoor farm. For instance, in a country like India with enough sunlight, besides leveraging solar energy, we can also make the plants have enough sunlight while still inside the farms. So, combine a mix of hydro + the likes of Dutch Bucket Method can make way for lot cheaper way of indoor farming.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron
Edit: Sorry for feeding the wrong nutrient. Vitamin B12 and not K12.
I can grow saffron in my garden in London. The problem isn't growing it, but harvesting the filaments...
“that cannot be grown in most climates except for a very few select regions”
Anyways, it is not a competition. Indoor farming is a supplement where the output is supposedly multiplied with every floor-rise of plantation. The same surface area but go up -- single homes vs high-rise flats/apartments.
I’d pay twice as much if I could get in Portland, ME the same kind of guac I get in LA.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-fa...
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-gree...
Especially if one thinks water may be more limited as we move forward. Water conserving techniques might be what makes or breaks some farming areas.
I wonder if it actually doesn't work or if it just doesn't work for VC because it won't produce a multi-billion dollar rent machine with a high moat and low operating costs.
Obviously if you factor in land prices where this would make sense it stops making sense
Also, it's not possible to ship some produce and maintain quality. Think sweet corn which (also avocados), yes, is still sweet when you get it in a grocery story but is far from as sweet when picked. There are also studies about loss of some nutrition just days after being harvested: https://fruitandvegetable.ucdavis.edu/files/197179.pdf
And, you can make the case from other sides too. There's some initial interest in looking at how climate change, and rising CO2 levels, are affecting plant growth. Due to higher CO2 it seems like some plants are growing larger but less nutrient dense: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9003137/
There are other factors which could make something like this make sense (if you solved some major tech challenges, got the land and materials for free, and only focus on social / ecological impact). For example, some fun reading can be found around the CO2 impact of fertilizer farming and tilling practices which could be removed by growing nitrogen fixing crops like beans/beats or growing in aquaponics systems so you can also sell fish and make algea.
Urban utility rates also tend to be much higher than a bit further ou - likewise with labor costs owing to cost of living, esp housing.
Yes, I fully agree. From my comment: "something like this make sense if [...] got the land and materials for free"
> Urban utility rates also tend to be much higher than a bit further ou
If you could centrally plan this kind of project and had complete freedom to do anything you wanted you could:
1. Use light tubes to funnel sunlight into the building for the plants. You could also pretty cheaply collect more light than the sqft-age of the roof by putting reflectors on multiple roofs to reflect light towards a central point on your farm building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr....
2. You can make the entire building a greenhouse. NYC loves steel, glass, and concrete so you could probably make the entire envelope of the structure glass. Many buildings already do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdy-bOTYlDs. This would let even more light in.
3. You could use this building as part of your waste treatment process. Human waste has a lot of nutrients needed for plant growth (nitrogen, phosphorus, etc). Rather than ship fertilizer, mined and processed across the globe, we could just extract most plant nutrients from waste. We're (the USA) currently not entirely managing this side responsibly: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/treated-sewage-algae-bloo...
4. We could use far less water which, in climates which do most of our growing, would be pretty important. Since the building would essentially be a greenhouse you would retain a lot more moisture.
There are a lot of synergies where if we had control over the growing environment we could improve things. For example: we could collect light in light tubes, use crystals to split out only the light segments which the plants need, and use the remaining light segments for solar energy (panels, desalination, dehydration of products, etc). There are endless mini optimizations that we can't do right now.
Obviously, though, this is entirely hypothetical because the construction costs are not currently yet outweighed by the existing farming industry production pipeline. Once more externalities are accounted for that may change things (ex: we lose the ability to mine fertalizer due to war or supply). Then moving food production closer to consumers might make sense.
Also, once you solve the last-mile problem, a new one arises: the last-foot problem...
This depends entirely upon a bunch of various factors, but the major draws are that you can control the environment, and with specialized hydroponics techniques you can drastically reduce the usage of fertilizers and water to obtain an equal-quality crop. You can also drastically reduce the footprint required - in certain hydroponics systems, what would normally take 1 full acre of land (say, alfalfa) could be done in 1/8 of an acre. Depending on the crop, you can even get away without using light at all (most grass crops work with this) reaping even more savings on energy usage.
Many of these farms are failing because they've got a bad mix of factors that they did not thoroughly think through before implementing. All of the farms I've set up in Australia, UK, and the Middle East are still working just fine, a decade later.
Sorry, do you mean that just sunlight that comes in through whatever windows there are is sufficient? Surely you don't mean that grasses are viable in pitch black?
2. Riding a trend with keywords like eco-friendly, sustainable, high-tech, etc.
Don't ask me how yuppie's came to associate eco-friendly and sustainable with indoor-farming, but that's what the target prospect associates it with anyway. Think about the economics of it for just ten seconds and you'll come to the conclusion that it's anything but sustainable, efficient, etc.
Ultimately, it's selling status and fashion. Trendy urban restaurants can cite "local indoor-farmed mache" on their menus and yuppie's will salivate.
This is literally what many of these "operations" have done.
That was the moment they could have realized that none of this is actually going to work in any way that could be described as "an improvement."
Eg. I bet you've never had a Thimbleberry.
The price is close to $100/ounce, which would put it somewhere between 3$ and 4$ per gram, with adjustments for quality.
At this price, energy and fertilizer inputs become substantial enough to eat into margins.
You can certainly get $100/ounce, or even $45/ounce products here as well. These are typically lower quality /outdoor/ grown products.
The point being, you can optionally grow marijuana indoors because this margin exists, probably in a way that it would never for lettuce.