This is a terrible idea. Growing plants sustainably requires soil and sun. And good tasting produce requires both. Two minutes thought about it from a whole-systems perspective, and maybe a bit of common sense, would have told them that this was a terrible idea.
A few reasons to get things started:
* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.
* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.
* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.
At some point, vertical farming might make sense. But you'd put it in some cheap industrial land, not in a retail mall (unless it's purely a marketing thing - maybe herbs), because of efficiency of scale.
A lot of the issues can go away when you can run clean rooms, cheap real estate, and a specialised workforce (or robots?). If you put it in a retail space, will customers be able to wander in (dragging in bugs), or will it be a room in the back with dedicated technicians (kind of like a commercial kitchen). And since it's not made to order, why not centralise the business end like a lot of butchers do? Sure, some butchers might still do their own work in a retail space, but they have higher margins on their product.
It also heavily depends on the region. The US has a lot of space for farmland. Maybe look at regions with a lot less arable land. Japan springs to mind. But even then, why would you move the factories into shopping malls? If farmland is at a huge premium, it seems unlikely retail space will be cheap.
It's true. As much as we want to use technology to make our lives better, this isn't the way. There are much better ways to innovate that still involve real soil and sun.
> Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
That is true, but look at the current reality when it comes to the produce sold in supermarkets. It seems like most people care about how it looks (hence the wax makeup) and how cheap it is. Our food has been commoditised to such a degree that it's more about brand perception and price, rather than taste.
I mostly agree with what you're saying. Not sure whether vineyards are such a good example though. Isn't wine one of those things where even "experts" can't taste the good from the bad?
That being said, some vegetables need to be kept away from sunlight (flemish endives come to mind). This could probably work quite well for those.
> Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them.
Weird, I heard the opposite on an informal tour I took of a local hydroponic farm. They guy could have been full of shit, but he said that one of the biggest benefits of growing indoors was that you didn't have to use pesticides.
This may work for a few Whole Foods customers who pay $5 for a bottle of herb infused water but I wonder if the cost is going to be reasonable enough for most people. Real estate cost alone may trump every other cost savings. Even if that "farm" can produce 10x more per square foot from vertical farming, the real estate cost of a grocery store in a city is a lot more expensive than a farmland in the middle of no where.
It's for weed. They're all for weed. Every "indoor farming" company is just trying to get capital and build a brand with a cover story for when marijuana is inevitably legalized. The only thing that it really makes positive ROI sense to grow in this kind of way in the United States is for marijuana. Everbody working in the indoor farming industry knows this, the whole "we're saving the world by growing basil" thing is said with a big smirk. (Similarly, big pharma has acres and acres of farmland just waiting to be used for this purpose.)
Real estate is cheap, power is cheap, personnel are cheap, equipment is cheap.
A few years ago I was pursuing aquaponics as a hobby over the summer. It was clear then that economies of scale were rapidly driving down the costs of indoor horticulture. My aquaponics project failed, but the basic economics of grocery-attached farms make a lot of sense. I built a business model to determine the economics of running a farm in a shipping container that could be deployed to an underutilized Whole Foods parking lot.
The model accounted for a 81m3 shipping container being filled top-to-bottom with fruiting plants, like tomatoes, but it's easily adjustable to other plants, like lettuces. The model is pretty sensitive to things like the productive life of the plant, lead time to productivity, and sale price.
Selling heads of lettuce for $3 each yields around $6000/yr in gross revenue per container per year.
This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
> Real estate cost alone may trump every other cost savings.
In urban environments yes. In suburbia though grocery stores typically can name their own rent for headlining a shopping plaza, as that brings the highly desired foot traffic.
Many grocery stores/supermarkets are typically squat affairs with a lot of allowance to expand vertically. That adds to construction costs but not to the land cost (which is the expensive part in a city). They could design supermarkets with growing space within a second storey. And because they're growing in trays or lightweight aggregate, it wouldn't have a metre-deep layer of damp dirt to account for.
(Obviously the construction costs could still outweigh the savings in transport and spoilage.)
But what if the store could produce its own plants at 1/10th the cost of purchasing them elsewhere (just light and water)? It's not like they don't already have floor space taken up with plants today - they just buy them from elsewhere.
This probably works only for items where there's a huge markup. It's like those little indoor trays of growing grass seen at some hipster sandwich shops. The article suggests they want to grow basil.
This was tried in LA in 2015.[1] Not sure what happened to "Green City Farms", but their last Twitter activity was in 2015 and their web site says "Error establishing a database connection".
I spent a lot of time thinking about and researching vertical farming a few months back, even going as far as to start prototyping out a system, and while I love the vision for the future, I'm wondering how this ends up being profitable for those doing it. As LED prices continue to fall it starts making more sense, but can you really compete with the Sun and industrial agriculture on price? How many of these units would you need to install to meet demand at my grocery store up the street here in Brooklyn? I think we forget that a huge amount of automation already exists in the agricultural supply chain.
I'd love to see it work since you can reduce water and pesticide requirements, which is great for the environment. I'm just skeptical that you can be more than a basil and microgreens service for yuppies.
Don't think about a comparison to organic agriculture. This is not an agricultural technology. This is marketing technology, aimed at separating wealthy people from their paycheck at the grocery store.
As for the future for vertical farming ? i'm more optimistic towards using regular greenhouses, with extra led lights optimized for the right color, and "wavelength shifter"[1] layer, that will transform sunlight to the optimal color for the plants - if that tech becomes cheap enough.
[1]They're made of fluorescent die embedded in a clear plastic layer.
An automated indoor herb garden would be neat, but what does the cost curve look like compared to shipping traditional potted herbs? I was offput by the article mentioning flying basil thousands of miles, but maybe that's my bias since stores in the US usually carry potted basil plants. Taking care of the hydroponic stack might be as simple as changing a cartridge now and then, but how much does that cartridge cost and where does it have to be flown in from?
Clearly stores and investors are buying into this, so I must be missing some information. Or I'm overly skeptical because I dislike the idea. But how much do these store grown herbs cost?
I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.
Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.
The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.
To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.
This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.
This is HUGE. What's much more interesting is not getting this into grocery stories but into homes. Delivery costs and spoilage represent something like 40% or so of produce costs, maybe more. So in theory it would be much more efficient if you could grow your own vegetables and fruits at home. Right now, only a few things like basil can be grown this way, but probably in time, we can via "breeding" have many other fruits and vegetables that can be grown on a smaller scale in the home.
I personally like this because of trust...I don't want pesticides in my food and I don't trust organic farmers markets who probably just bought their produce at a local grocery store then mark it up double for me ;-D. So I'd much rather grow myself if it was easy enough to do.
This makes zero sense. Even if you choose very specific items that can be grown in a constrained environment it's going to cost too much to run.
Grocery stores make next to no margin on their sales - by adopting this they will have to charge more than their competitors. Which means they won't get sales.
---
EDIT On top of this, there is not the physical space to do this at the scale you need. Do you know how often shelves are restocked, especially in the UK where stores are tiny? How are you going to fit your equipment in such a constrained environment.
Its actually pretty neat if somewhat expensive.
1.It saves transporation/labor costs.
2.Allows to monitor/control plants 24/7
3.Immune to all weather conditions/theft/birds
I imagine it would be available to individuals too:
allowing people in cities to grow personal food indoors, without any gardens. The potential of this "digital agriculture" is huge, since it allows to control 'natural environment' variables.
$20 for a spring of basil plant grown in your local grocers, though sounds very expensive, there is probably almost definitely a demographic for that. And it does not go stale, you can keep it there indefinitely. What is likely to happen though is that it gets commercially farmed and then is brought to the store after it has reached a certain size. Totally destroying its purpose but there is a market for this sort of thing.
That is staggeringly expensive. In the UK you can buy a pot of basil for about $2 in most of the big supermarkets. Often it's more economical to buy a large plant than it is to buy a small bag of cut basil...
> internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system
Why? What happens when the network drops out on your basil cabinet? Is there any reason not to just put the logic inside the thing?
Other than that, I can see this functioning pretty well for large suburban grocery joints if it's limited to herbs. In fact, I seem to remember seeing something approximating this at a Canadian grocery store, I don't remember where.
I think these racks were intended to be used indoors, in climate-controlled environments. I'd imagine at least token air quality management wouldn't be too difficult or expensive to add, and that's all you'd need to beat, e.g., an urban backyard garden...
I can see this playing well with the doomsday bunker crowd.
And even before we get to that point, a distributed agricultural system would help lessen our reliance on large-scale industrial farming operations which we are frankly not using at a sustainable (1,000+ years) rate.
Keep in mind it doesn't get rid of the centralized petroleum-based fertilization, so you're still dependent on large-scale industrial petrochem for fertilizer production.
What is it about current agricultural practices that makes them unsustainable? I know there is a reliance on fossil fuels, but that seems like it could be overcome in the long term (1000 years) without needing to move to a decentralized system.
I've seen supermarkets sell live basil plants for the past 20 years (probably even earlier but I wasn't paying attention) in multiple countries. Maybe they just picked the wrong example to start the article?
The next decade of incremental farming improvements is mostly going to be built on the back of grow-op technologies and techniques going mainstream. Some of them will be more successful than others.
The minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres. This comes out to a land area of a little more than 2 square miles per grocery store. Your average grocery store is 46,000 square feet. So if you did stacked farming on the area of the grocery store, you'd only need a about 1400 levels. Give 2 foot per stack, and your grocery store is only about a half mile high.
This is missing the point. Fresh herbs in particular are delicate and easily damaged, and degrade quickly.
It's like going to a seafood restaurant that has live lobsters, vs a seafood restaurant that uses already dead lobsters. Sure both are lobsters, but one is better than the other.
I don't disagree that something about the equation has to change. I think that "thing" is the 0.17 acres. According to this webpage[1], the productivity of a vertical farm is 11x greater than a horizontal farm.
But, that said, I don't think a complete replacement is necessary for this to be significantly beneficial even on a subset of grown plants.
They are not trying to supplement 100% of a veg diet. Far more interesting would be to understand what the hurdle rate is for a given grocer (ie the sell-through per week per square foot of retail space that they require to keep an item in stock). If this device can produce good basil for 30% less than that hurdle rate, grocers will very likely be interested.
[+] [-] sapote|8 years ago|reply
A few reasons to get things started:
* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.
* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.
* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.
[+] [-] wisty|8 years ago|reply
A lot of the issues can go away when you can run clean rooms, cheap real estate, and a specialised workforce (or robots?). If you put it in a retail space, will customers be able to wander in (dragging in bugs), or will it be a room in the back with dedicated technicians (kind of like a commercial kitchen). And since it's not made to order, why not centralise the business end like a lot of butchers do? Sure, some butchers might still do their own work in a retail space, but they have higher margins on their product.
It also heavily depends on the region. The US has a lot of space for farmland. Maybe look at regions with a lot less arable land. Japan springs to mind. But even then, why would you move the factories into shopping malls? If farmland is at a huge premium, it seems unlikely retail space will be cheap.
[+] [-] spraak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|8 years ago|reply
That is true, but look at the current reality when it comes to the produce sold in supermarkets. It seems like most people care about how it looks (hence the wax makeup) and how cheap it is. Our food has been commoditised to such a degree that it's more about brand perception and price, rather than taste.
[+] [-] Tharkun|8 years ago|reply
That being said, some vegetables need to be kept away from sunlight (flemish endives come to mind). This could probably work quite well for those.
[+] [-] thescriptkiddie|8 years ago|reply
Weird, I heard the opposite on an informal tour I took of a local hydroponic farm. They guy could have been full of shit, but he said that one of the biggest benefits of growing indoors was that you didn't have to use pesticides.
[+] [-] peterjlee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mizza|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] condiment|8 years ago|reply
A few years ago I was pursuing aquaponics as a hobby over the summer. It was clear then that economies of scale were rapidly driving down the costs of indoor horticulture. My aquaponics project failed, but the basic economics of grocery-attached farms make a lot of sense. I built a business model to determine the economics of running a farm in a shipping container that could be deployed to an underutilized Whole Foods parking lot.
The model accounted for a 81m3 shipping container being filled top-to-bottom with fruiting plants, like tomatoes, but it's easily adjustable to other plants, like lettuces. The model is pretty sensitive to things like the productive life of the plant, lead time to productivity, and sale price.
Selling heads of lettuce for $3 each yields around $6000/yr in gross revenue per container per year.
This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
The model, in case anyone's interested: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DkjOIs7hXyxIiN_iWXK0...
[+] [-] prostoalex|8 years ago|reply
In urban environments yes. In suburbia though grocery stores typically can name their own rent for headlining a shopping plaza, as that brings the highly desired foot traffic.
[+] [-] prawn|8 years ago|reply
(Obviously the construction costs could still outweigh the savings in transport and spoilage.)
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheIronYuppie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
This was tried in LA in 2015.[1] Not sure what happened to "Green City Farms", but their last Twitter activity was in 2015 and their web site says "Error establishing a database connection".
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3044958/this-hollywood-restauran...
[+] [-] mtalantikite|8 years ago|reply
I'd love to see it work since you can reduce water and pesticide requirements, which is great for the environment. I'm just skeptical that you can be more than a basil and microgreens service for yuppies.
[+] [-] petra|8 years ago|reply
As for the future for vertical farming ? i'm more optimistic towards using regular greenhouses, with extra led lights optimized for the right color, and "wavelength shifter"[1] layer, that will transform sunlight to the optimal color for the plants - if that tech becomes cheap enough.
[1]They're made of fluorescent die embedded in a clear plastic layer.
[+] [-] kingbirdy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syphilis2|8 years ago|reply
Clearly stores and investors are buying into this, so I must be missing some information. Or I'm overly skeptical because I dislike the idea. But how much do these store grown herbs cost?
[+] [-] kefka|8 years ago|reply
I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.
Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.
The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.
To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.
This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.
[+] [-] bsder|8 years ago|reply
I suspect this is the actual reasoning and target product.
Unfortunately, you can't get funding for that legally in most jurisdictions.
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|8 years ago|reply
I think for this type of thing to really change things, they need to concentrate on calories and nutrition. Things like peanuts and potatoes.
I also think there is some room for permaculture. Such as replacing ornamental city landscaping with productive food forests.
[+] [-] mrspin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
They need to make stuff that grows fast and has a relatively high price. Potatoes and peanuts don't particularly match either of those criteria.
[+] [-] theprop|8 years ago|reply
I personally like this because of trust...I don't want pesticides in my food and I don't trust organic farmers markets who probably just bought their produce at a local grocery store then mark it up double for me ;-D. So I'd much rather grow myself if it was easy enough to do.
[+] [-] brad0|8 years ago|reply
Grocery stores make next to no margin on their sales - by adopting this they will have to charge more than their competitors. Which means they won't get sales.
---
EDIT On top of this, there is not the physical space to do this at the scale you need. Do you know how often shelves are restocked, especially in the UK where stores are tiny? How are you going to fit your equipment in such a constrained environment.
[+] [-] FrozenVoid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devoply|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mobilefriendly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshvm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|8 years ago|reply
Why? What happens when the network drops out on your basil cabinet? Is there any reason not to just put the logic inside the thing?
Other than that, I can see this functioning pretty well for large suburban grocery joints if it's limited to herbs. In fact, I seem to remember seeing something approximating this at a Canadian grocery store, I don't remember where.
[+] [-] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
Energy generation
Cellphones
Social media
As farming can now be done in 3D, this may become a good idea. My main concern is city pollutants getting caught in the plants.
[+] [-] rosser|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|8 years ago|reply
And even before we get to that point, a distributed agricultural system would help lessen our reliance on large-scale industrial farming operations which we are frankly not using at a sustainable (1,000+ years) rate.
[+] [-] jfim|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_t|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlob|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] web007|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|8 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...
The minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres. This comes out to a land area of a little more than 2 square miles per grocery store. Your average grocery store is 46,000 square feet. So if you did stacked farming on the area of the grocery store, you'd only need a about 1400 levels. Give 2 foot per stack, and your grocery store is only about a half mile high.
[+] [-] panarky|8 years ago|reply
Why assume a vegetarian diet? And why assume that 100% of farming would be done at the grocery store?
Do you really need the vertical farm in the grocery store to grow the wheat to bake your bread or the silage to feed cattle?
The vast majority of farmland is dedicated to grains and animal feed, and that can remain.
But the vertical farm in the grocery store can take care of the fresh stuff, like herbs, lettuce and some veggies.
[+] [-] resf|8 years ago|reply
It's like going to a seafood restaurant that has live lobsters, vs a seafood restaurant that uses already dead lobsters. Sure both are lobsters, but one is better than the other.
[+] [-] TheIronYuppie|8 years ago|reply
But, that said, I don't think a complete replacement is necessary for this to be significantly beneficial even on a subset of grown plants.
[1] http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/
[+] [-] inetknght|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlaramburu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rojobuffalo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rojobuffalo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ratsz|8 years ago|reply