[pi-err]

I've always been a fan of those projects but it's clear they've now mostly turned to greenporn.

For this specific project: nothing makes sense. The farm is operated by "Nordic Harvest", with claims that it can produce 200 tons of products in 2021 on a 7000 sqm footprint. The products would be fresh herbs and salads (the website only displays fresh herbs). So the total output of herbs on year 1 would be more than the equivalent surface of beetroot, one of the heaviest products. The site says the farm uses "no fertilizer" then comes to explain than they only use "natural fertilizer". The entire thing looks like a byproduct of the windmill industry, which is crumbling because of intermittent surplus of cheap electricity. All details on https://www.nordicharvest.com/

This reminds me of for urban farming in Paris a couple years ago, where I witnessed most "startup farms" from inception to failure: it's a perfect PR choreography. Some company builds a "farm" on its roof (with bee hives), advertises it as a totem of some vacant post-carbon strategy, collects fiscal incentives, then the farm never gets to see its 3rd year because it's so impossibly hard to even dream of reaching profitability or large-scale production. In Paris, the "largest farm in the world" is twice the size of this dutch "world largest" and actually operated by Unibail Westfield (and produces barely anything): https://www.urw.com/en/press-room/press-news/world-largest-u...

There are exceptions in urban farming (Lufa in Montreal, some sites in Singapore) but the PR pressure and laziness of journalist coverage is ruining it from the inside.