I like how this whole yield paper and model is based on the results of a 3'x3' trial area...
"With artificial lighting increasing the intensity and duration of light beyond what can be captured from the sun in a field, the short indoor growth cycle produced mean grain yields of 14 ± 0.8 t/ha per harvest at 11% grain moisture based on a 1-m2 edge-protected experimental area"
How tf can you say your yields are going to extrapolate from that tiny space to a hectare scale facility? It's ridiculous. We have a huge problem achieving lab-theoretical yields on working farms, outside of the super optimized and most destructive conventional agriculture methods. They didn't even do a full greenhouse trial. Come on guys, you can say it's promising but to say you can get 1000+t/ha out of a vertical farm because of this is fantasy.
I think this sort of work is important because it gives us data to focus on improving. Like solar power efficiencies, I think there is lots of room to improve on vertical farming output which will be vital for a few reasons.
Reason one, is that I think one lesson we've learned and are still learning is that the original model of the internet that senses damage and routes around it is still a strong model, and I think the same applies to food. To reduce the impact of food shortages, we need to get more people farming again essentially, and a small vertical farm can be had for those people regardless of if they have land or suitable land for traditional growing, and the cost are likely to be similar to solar panels and be one that is subsidized at first or at least given tax breaks.
Reason two is that I think the same work will be of vital importance for future space faring missions. If we can get closed loop ecosystem sustainability heavily improved we might be ready for something like a real Mars trip/settlement etc. Personally I advocate for adding other systems to the closed loop to feed off each other, aka auqoponics, etc to add a meat source (fish) into the loop etc.
So we have a decent study on wheat. Now lets get the yield potentials for everything else under the sun so we can start optimizing better. Probably end up with focus on whatever has the highest calorie output to price to produce ratio.
Food shortages are caused by natural disasters and political problems such as wars, not by lack of places to grow crops. We have plenty of farmland and farmers. If your vertical farm is caught in the middle of a war or flood then it won't be able to operate.
> ...the original model of the internet that senses damage and routes around it is still a strong model...
I wonder if "packetizing" food production in a vertical permaculture food forest form factor is feasible? In other words, instead of vast monoculture swaths, use interdependent crops in interlocking planting patterns, predicated upon the assumption that robot-vision-assisted labor is practical.
Ultimately this is about removing the limitations of agriculture as it stands (1 acre/acre, 1kw/m2, 330ppm CO2) so that we can convert energy and chemicals into food in a scalable, reliable and repeatable way. This has obvious medium-term applications outside of our atmosphere and gravity well, but if we allow energy costs to come down by orders of magnitude by continuing to make advances in nuclear energy, it will inevitably lead to a system that's preferable in terms of land use, both in terms of former agricultural land that can be returned to forests and relatively small high-density power plants that will replace sprawling renewable infrastructure. I don't understand why people keep bringing up the idea of using high-rise buildings in an urban/near-urban environment; surely you'd want to do it in lights-out factories on the cheapest available land, and if energy is cheap enough to make vertical farming profitable, shipping costs would be negligible. A single 1km X 1km X 1km underground vertical farm could be sufficient to feed millions of people while leaving the land above it available for forests/grassland/tundra, or provide district heating to a sizeable population.
> yields for wheat grown in indoor vertical farms under optimized growing conditions would be several hundred times higher than yields in the field due to higher yields, several harvests per year, and vertically stacked layers. Wheat grown indoors would use less land than field-grown wheat, be independent of climate, reuse most water, exclude pests and diseases, and have no nutrient losses to the environment. However, given the high energy costs for artificial lighting and capital costs, it is unlikely to be economically competitive with current market prices
However, the study doesn’t seem to include the costs of transportation. I wish they had looked at the wheat supply chain holistically rather than only cost per hectare.
Building a close to the city, colocated flour, and/or cereal factory under the wheat farm, allowing gravity to help build automations would reduce holistic costs. I wonder if that makes this farming method profitable?
One thing they overlook is reliability and opportunity cost. Australia is prone to periods of droughts so there are years when entire farms lay fallow. These farms still need to be tended to by a labour force who could be off doing other things.
I don't know who did the analysis on that, but this is easily fixed: Solar farming on top of the vertical farming. This pays for the electricity needs for the lighting, and any excess power pays off the solar panel prices over about 8 years.
Something I have been thinking about for a few years... How far away are we from being able to grow seeds on a substrate directly and skip growing the plant at all? What I envision is a substrate that is able to provide the nutrients needed for embryo growth, maybe with micro channels or pores. You could "seed" the substrate with embryonic plant cells, then when they are done, you just scrape them off. Is that totally crazy?
I wonder if growing yeast, algae, or the CO2+H2 eating microbes that Solar Foods is working on will be cheaper to use either as an engineered food product or as feedstock for animals.
Some comments have already touched on this, but it is important to realize just how much electricity we are talking about. The tl;dr is that replacing US wheat production alone would use five times the current total US electricity consumption. And that's for wheat, occupying about 10% of US cropland.
See p. 12 of the Supporting Information and you'll find the following: 2026647 kg wheat grown using 798417 MWh electricity means an electricity consumption of 0.4 MWh/kg wheat. In the US, the annual wheat harvest is 150-200 kg/capita/yr, which in this hypothetical system would use more than 60 MWh electricity/capita/yr.
For comparison, the US annually uses around 13 MWh electricity/capita.
That is, this hypothetical wheat production in the US would use about five times the _total_ present day electricity use.
Soybeans and maize together occupy more than three times the wheat area in the US, so that (very roughly speaking) adds another annual electricity consumption of ~200 MWh/capita. With just these three major crops, the US would have to increase its total electricity consumption about 20-fold.
naive question: would it help w/ energy costs to have the vertical farms under ground and to use mirrors to redirect sunlight (I guess it will still not be enough and require additional artificial lighting?)
one argument against vertical farming seems to be the high occupancy costs in larger cities. Why not build them outside of cities and connect them?
Your larger cities are already shaded to hell, and the skyscrapers are fighting each other for the remaining scraps that are left.
Your system of mirrors will occupy the same amount of space (or close to) as your farm would need. But it will be expensive to build and expensive to maintain and to protect against the elements.
Sorry, but growing grains in vertical farms absolutely does not make sense. unless you'd have a very very cheap zero emission energy source. which would have a plethora of other sensible applications.
The single most sane way to change agriculture for the better is to eat much less beef. hands down. simple as that.
I think history have shown us that if you want people to change their behavior you have to come up with something better not just something that you or I or someone else think is easier or more rational. The world doesn't work like that.
It makes perfect sense exactly if you start thinking about energy as something that will eventually become dirt cheap and plentiful. Current market prices for electricity are have been coming down steadily for some time now. Mostly consumer prices are lagging this because we're still paying off obsolete energy infrastructure put in place decades ago. But basically, there hardly is any variable cost with wind or solar (+battery); just fixed cost for putting the infrastructure in place. Economies of scale, improved production processes, innovations in using cheaper materials, improvements in efficiency, etc. are driving prices per kwh down.
So when it comes to vertical farming crops like wheat, it's worth looking at when that price drops to "low enough". Really what we are talking about is the cost of the infrastructure needed to perpetually produce enough energy for the life time of the indoor farm.
And you are right that cheap, plentiful, clean energy will have lots of other interesting applications. IMHO, that's going to be the story of this century. Solving this will produce a new economic boom very much like oil/coal caused last century. We can solve a lot of issues with cheap energy. There are a lot of things bottle-necked on energy cost. Improvements on that front unlock new applications.
> The single most sane way to change agriculture for the better is to eat much less beef. hands down. simple as that.
I think addressing the issue of not having to succumb to the model that ensures 1/3 of all food produced is lost would do FAR more than that, recapturing the losses and creating alternative processes to create more efficient supply chains would ensure we could curtail so many more problems.
I say this as a person who has actually farmed, worked professionally in culinary (including vegetarian and vegan cuisine) and has a background in Logistics/Supply Chain for Auto-Multinational Corps.
So, if you think Conventional (chemical) Ag Grain/Vegetable monocrops (which is what most people eat) are really that much better for the Environment/Humans than a sustainable (ideally Biodynamic) Livestock raising model is better, you really have no idea what you're talking about--I've worked on both, too. Although I agree the US' consumes way too much meat in general, but there are much bigger problems to solve and changing a culture's palette is typically generational barring a massive catastrophe (think: War). I think many Millennial and Gen Z diets are moving toward plant-based more than their Boomer counter-parts, which I have some reservations about: the image of a 'vegan' toddler at the Farmer's Market I worked at during my apprenticeship comes to mind and I thought he was undergoing chemo-therapy he looked so unhealthy.
Also, I like the fact that these things are being explored, obviously for terrestrial applications the use-cases are limited, but experimentation for long-term Mars colonization will require in-situ crop cultivation if it is to be sustainable, and what applies to Vertical farming could help design the new container garden model. Vertical farms are essentially playthings for hobbyists on Earth, even a Community garden with a moderate size greenhouse for off-season grows will yield (in every sense of the word) way more per/sqft with the exception of perhaps the now defunct business models: selling micro-greens to fine-dining restaurants in a post COVID World.
Detroit showed how the solution to Food deserts isn't Container Gardens/Vertical farming, though its not entirely against it either, but its a reversion to Agrarian practices which include re-purposing large plots of land to Urban Farming, which created a Renaissance of sorts in the last decade. I guerilla gardened as an activist before farming, and while vertical farming should be encouraged; if nothing else as a form of Community building and as small step in CO2 sequestration as well as an improvement aesthetically speaking.
Personally speaking: As a person who grew up in CA the Valley has to be the ugliest part of CA to me because of how modular and cookie-cutter everything looks, it looks like an 'Industrial Model' to Civilization.
A few creeping grape/pea vines and spontaneous gardens won't solve the massive Homeless issue that ones associates with the vista of the Valley but it could really help improve the overall feeling of the place: I seriously had to flee to Sonoma every chance I got to keep from going crazy when I was there as it looked and felt so alien to me.
A picture of these vertical farms would have gone a long way towards helping me understand what all would be required to deploy these things. Yet they decide to use white-space to tell me what the population of the world is and estimates of it in the future and why farming is important.
These studies are really interesting to think about for space settlements.
Terrestrially, you're never going to get more efficient use of an acre of sunlight (~4 MW at noon) than you will with photovoltaics (~75% loss ~= 1 MW at noon) and conversion to artificial light.
But it could totally work on some future Trantor with flying cars and fusion engines.
* edit: another poster has dug into the appendix and concluded that you might be able to do about as good w/r/t land use with photovoltaics, presumably due to other factors affecting plant growth.
The problem with vertical farming is where does the energy come from? An acre of solar panels is not capable of supplying enough energy to grow an acre of crops, even with the efficiency gains we've had in photovoltaics and lighting with wavelengths tuned to crop growth. What's the point in having fields of solar panels when we could have smaller greenhouses filled with crops?
If only nuclear energy was politically viable in the west we could have vertical farming and so much more.
I'm curious if this would be a good use of land in places like the Saharan desert, semi vertical greenhouses would optimize for water loss and light usage, and there is plenty of sand for production of the glass walls and growing medium.
Someone needs to invent the elevator combine -- existing combines are super efficient. Not sure how you harvest wheat in a vertical frame efficiently though. Maybe the frame rotates and you guillotine it all off?
Would love to peak forward 100 years and see the amazing amount of vertical farms near city centers and all the converted agricultural land in the U.S. given back to nature reserves.
What about growing genetically-engineered 'nutrient algae' in giant pools, and processing the resultant biomatter into bars for consumption? A layer of glass could even be put over the pool to control conditions.
If we're pursuing maximum nutrient and calorie output for minimum fertilizer and energy input, why look at traditional plants at all?
[+] [-] terramars|5 years ago|reply
"With artificial lighting increasing the intensity and duration of light beyond what can be captured from the sun in a field, the short indoor growth cycle produced mean grain yields of 14 ± 0.8 t/ha per harvest at 11% grain moisture based on a 1-m2 edge-protected experimental area"
How tf can you say your yields are going to extrapolate from that tiny space to a hectare scale facility? It's ridiculous. We have a huge problem achieving lab-theoretical yields on working farms, outside of the super optimized and most destructive conventional agriculture methods. They didn't even do a full greenhouse trial. Come on guys, you can say it's promising but to say you can get 1000+t/ha out of a vertical farm because of this is fantasy.
[+] [-] arminiusreturns|5 years ago|reply
Reason one, is that I think one lesson we've learned and are still learning is that the original model of the internet that senses damage and routes around it is still a strong model, and I think the same applies to food. To reduce the impact of food shortages, we need to get more people farming again essentially, and a small vertical farm can be had for those people regardless of if they have land or suitable land for traditional growing, and the cost are likely to be similar to solar panels and be one that is subsidized at first or at least given tax breaks.
Reason two is that I think the same work will be of vital importance for future space faring missions. If we can get closed loop ecosystem sustainability heavily improved we might be ready for something like a real Mars trip/settlement etc. Personally I advocate for adding other systems to the closed loop to feed off each other, aka auqoponics, etc to add a meat source (fish) into the loop etc.
So we have a decent study on wheat. Now lets get the yield potentials for everything else under the sun so we can start optimizing better. Probably end up with focus on whatever has the highest calorie output to price to produce ratio.
[+] [-] nradov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cagenut|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaufB5F8dk
That presentation is by one of the same scientists referenced in the linked paper, Dr. Bruce Bugbee, the one who grew wheat on the ISS.
He has a whole youtube channel that goes into more detail than you can imagine: https://www.youtube.com/c/Apogeeinstrumentsincorporated/vide...
[+] [-] yourapostasy|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if "packetizing" food production in a vertical permaculture food forest form factor is feasible? In other words, instead of vast monoculture swaths, use interdependent crops in interlocking planting patterns, predicated upon the assumption that robot-vision-assisted labor is practical.
[+] [-] brippalcharrid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuatoru|5 years ago|reply
I can see perhaps one order of magnitude from scaled-up manufacturing, but where do the others come from?
[+] [-] haram_masala|5 years ago|reply
I’m pretty sure that will always be the ratio, and there’s nothing anyone can do to improve it.
[+] [-] tosh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yazaddaruvala|5 years ago|reply
Building a close to the city, colocated flour, and/or cereal factory under the wheat farm, allowing gravity to help build automations would reduce holistic costs. I wonder if that makes this farming method profitable?
[+] [-] wrycoder|5 years ago|reply
To grow 1000 pounds would require an area 26 ft by 26 ft.
For a product worth less than $1000.
Counting space, heat, light, equipment - doesn’t sound like a paying proposition.
[+] [-] Johnjonjoan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoopertrooper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VMG|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coding123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiferteric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NortySpock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2odragon|5 years ago|reply
like that?
[+] [-] TheAdamAndChe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drran|5 years ago|reply
2) Seed will be contaminated. It will taste as leaf or straw.
[+] [-] rasmusei|5 years ago|reply
See p. 12 of the Supporting Information and you'll find the following: 2026647 kg wheat grown using 798417 MWh electricity means an electricity consumption of 0.4 MWh/kg wheat. In the US, the annual wheat harvest is 150-200 kg/capita/yr, which in this hypothetical system would use more than 60 MWh electricity/capita/yr.
For comparison, the US annually uses around 13 MWh electricity/capita.
That is, this hypothetical wheat production in the US would use about five times the _total_ present day electricity use.
Soybeans and maize together occupy more than three times the wheat area in the US, so that (very roughly speaking) adds another annual electricity consumption of ~200 MWh/capita. With just these three major crops, the US would have to increase its total electricity consumption about 20-fold.
[+] [-] the8472|5 years ago|reply
https://xkcd.com/1123/
[+] [-] kickout|5 years ago|reply
Just say no to vertical farming for row crops. Can’t beat the sun (and scale)!
[+] [-] tosh|5 years ago|reply
one argument against vertical farming seems to be the high occupancy costs in larger cities. Why not build them outside of cities and connect them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming#Problems
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|5 years ago|reply
Your system of mirrors will occupy the same amount of space (or close to) as your farm would need. But it will be expensive to build and expensive to maintain and to protect against the elements.
[+] [-] rtx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsilence|5 years ago|reply
The single most sane way to change agriculture for the better is to eat much less beef. hands down. simple as that.
[+] [-] ThomPete|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|5 years ago|reply
So when it comes to vertical farming crops like wheat, it's worth looking at when that price drops to "low enough". Really what we are talking about is the cost of the infrastructure needed to perpetually produce enough energy for the life time of the indoor farm.
And you are right that cheap, plentiful, clean energy will have lots of other interesting applications. IMHO, that's going to be the story of this century. Solving this will produce a new economic boom very much like oil/coal caused last century. We can solve a lot of issues with cheap energy. There are a lot of things bottle-necked on energy cost. Improvements on that front unlock new applications.
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
Like nuclear?
[+] [-] javert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Melting_Harps|5 years ago|reply
I think addressing the issue of not having to succumb to the model that ensures 1/3 of all food produced is lost would do FAR more than that, recapturing the losses and creating alternative processes to create more efficient supply chains would ensure we could curtail so many more problems.
I say this as a person who has actually farmed, worked professionally in culinary (including vegetarian and vegan cuisine) and has a background in Logistics/Supply Chain for Auto-Multinational Corps.
So, if you think Conventional (chemical) Ag Grain/Vegetable monocrops (which is what most people eat) are really that much better for the Environment/Humans than a sustainable (ideally Biodynamic) Livestock raising model is better, you really have no idea what you're talking about--I've worked on both, too. Although I agree the US' consumes way too much meat in general, but there are much bigger problems to solve and changing a culture's palette is typically generational barring a massive catastrophe (think: War). I think many Millennial and Gen Z diets are moving toward plant-based more than their Boomer counter-parts, which I have some reservations about: the image of a 'vegan' toddler at the Farmer's Market I worked at during my apprenticeship comes to mind and I thought he was undergoing chemo-therapy he looked so unhealthy.
Also, I like the fact that these things are being explored, obviously for terrestrial applications the use-cases are limited, but experimentation for long-term Mars colonization will require in-situ crop cultivation if it is to be sustainable, and what applies to Vertical farming could help design the new container garden model. Vertical farms are essentially playthings for hobbyists on Earth, even a Community garden with a moderate size greenhouse for off-season grows will yield (in every sense of the word) way more per/sqft with the exception of perhaps the now defunct business models: selling micro-greens to fine-dining restaurants in a post COVID World.
Detroit showed how the solution to Food deserts isn't Container Gardens/Vertical farming, though its not entirely against it either, but its a reversion to Agrarian practices which include re-purposing large plots of land to Urban Farming, which created a Renaissance of sorts in the last decade. I guerilla gardened as an activist before farming, and while vertical farming should be encouraged; if nothing else as a form of Community building and as small step in CO2 sequestration as well as an improvement aesthetically speaking.
Personally speaking: As a person who grew up in CA the Valley has to be the ugliest part of CA to me because of how modular and cookie-cutter everything looks, it looks like an 'Industrial Model' to Civilization.
A few creeping grape/pea vines and spontaneous gardens won't solve the massive Homeless issue that ones associates with the vista of the Valley but it could really help improve the overall feeling of the place: I seriously had to flee to Sonoma every chance I got to keep from going crazy when I was there as it looked and felt so alien to me.
[+] [-] khawkins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unchocked|5 years ago|reply
Terrestrially, you're never going to get more efficient use of an acre of sunlight (~4 MW at noon) than you will with photovoltaics (~75% loss ~= 1 MW at noon) and conversion to artificial light.
But it could totally work on some future Trantor with flying cars and fusion engines.
* edit: another poster has dug into the appendix and concluded that you might be able to do about as good w/r/t land use with photovoltaics, presumably due to other factors affecting plant growth.
[+] [-] eadan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawsmik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanomonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbronner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|5 years ago|reply
Eg I’ll pay a premium for pesticide free, fresh salad from a Urban vertical farm. Wheat less so
[+] [-] ArkVark|5 years ago|reply
If we're pursuing maximum nutrient and calorie output for minimum fertilizer and energy input, why look at traditional plants at all?
[+] [-] poma88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmkd|5 years ago|reply