A Farm Grows in the City

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-farm-grows-in-the-city-1494813900?mod=e2fb

by lxm • 9 years ago

52 65 9 years ago

terravion4• 9 years ago

This is a very interesting article and does the thing that the media often does of missing the point: these are the ultimate factor farms--literally factories that crank out leafy greens--and we're close to an economic transition on perishable, constant demand, high value items like leafy greens. Cannabis passed this point several years ago. This is a really hard transition though for the actual food supply that makes the bulk of our calories. Free water and energy from the sky is really hard to beat.

Osiris30• 9 years ago

Agreed. See this video "Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)"

A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead. correct link https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787)

terravion4• 9 years ago

very cool link

pchristensen• 9 years ago

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw

bpodgursky• 9 years ago

Would cannabis have passed this point if it could be openly, legally transported across state lines and national borders? I'm very skeptical.

The supply chain there is not just weak, it is actively antagonized by various police forces. My guess is that if cannabis was 100% legal, the indoor grow operations would not make economic sense; we'd just have giant farms or greenhouses in mexico or the southwest.

blurbleblurble3• 9 years ago

Have you ever tasted wild herbs? There's just no way this will ever replicate wild herbs.

I recently ate an out of season "heirloom tomato" grown in Mexico and shipped to my local coop in Minnesota. It was "organic", and it looked like an heirloom tomato. But it had no taste. It was clearly grown in depleted soil. I've grown heirloom tomatoes, as well as beefsteak and other more conventional varieties. Food grown in a garden tastes better. There are more nutrients available to them. Plants are chemical-mineral-sun beings. They grow abundantly in diverse ecosystems and offer their fruits with no violence.

Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.

People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old" technologies. Paper. Knots. Gardening. Cooking. Woodworking. Compost. Herbal medicine. Music. Many of these artforms (sciences, really) are miles ahead of the fancy capitalist stuff in terms of their nuance, their simplicity, their integration with human wellbeing.

And they're free.

terravion4• 9 years ago

Actually, they aren't free. That's the point, that's what's cool about indoor farming. It is the ultimate in agricultural intensification, even if marketed as some sort of sustainability. The land required to support a human goes way down as agricultural intensity goes up. It is actually weird, but a hunter gatherer "living in harmony with nature" actually does orders of magnitude more ecological damage per human than industrialized society.

Having a 1 acre garden as a hobby, is huge ecological violence since industrialized agriculture requires far less than half an acre per person and the loss of habitat is the same.

wavefunction• 9 years ago

a hunter gatherer "living in harmony with nature" actually does orders of magnitude more ecological damage per human than industrialized society.

I'm not sure how this is true. Perhaps you can persuade me?

A one acre garden is not a "hobby" in my opinion. The amount of work involved in cultivating an entire acre is immense. As well, a personal garden is unlikely to be a monoculture which is even worse ecologically in my opinion than a loss of efficiency. Plus there's all that Round-up...

m_coder3• 9 years ago

>Having a 1 acre garden as a hobby, is huge ecological violence

Can you explain how this hobby is so violent? I don't think I am following the line of thought.

The typical one acre hobby garden is farmed with far fewer chemicals than the typical commercial farm. There is far more diversity and a better balance of minerals. Compost is often used and waste is effectively recycled.

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

Indoor farming can only be more intense than outdoor if you power it with nuclear or fossil fuels...

Humanity is currently migrating into solar power. There's no way you will gain any area by adding conversions on the way through the plants. You get better reliability, easier pest controls (without additives), and lots of other things, but you can never gain in area use.

sloppycee• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure the reason your fruits and veggies don't taste right is because they have to be shipped unripened to prevent spoilage. It's why fruit from the farmers market tastes better, it was grown until ripe and shipped locally.

Technologies, like the ones mentioned in this article, change the entire supply chain; fruits and vegetables become "in-season" all year round. They will no longer have to be shipped unripened, and should have a better flavour.

arcaster• 9 years ago

I really enjoy keeping a number of honey bee colonies in the summer on my rooftop in Boston. However, you lost me at "herbal medicine".

pc2g4d• 9 years ago

I'm not convinced that's the entire explanation. Don't things keep being discovered about the bacteria living around the roots in the soil interacting with the plant to provide much of their nutrition? A growing plant is a massively complex system. Tweaking how they grow likely has unintended consequences.

blurbleblurble3• 9 years ago

We get plenty of tasty fruits and veggies that are shipped from all over the world. This was something different. These had no nutrients. My hunch is that they were grown in mineral depleted soil.

newhere420• 9 years ago

There's just no way this will ever replicate wild herbs.

Why not? What environment or characteristic of plants grown in the wild is impossible to recreate in a controlled environment? Arguably, plants can be grown "in-season" all year round with technology like this, and be sold fresh the same day it is picked.

Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.

Maybe growing food within the cities will help us to feed a dense local population, while at the same time minimising the impact on the countryside. Thus leaving the countryside natural for those who want to appreciate it.

Living in Britain, I despair at the eradication of the countryside. Natural environment has been almost exclusively replaced by farm land to grow food for our ever growing population, and we are still quite a long way from being self-sufficient.

Also, work like this will help if we want to colonise space.

People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old" technologies

Are you the arbiter on what everyone else should be appreciating? Although you are free to appreciate and enjoy anything you like, other people such as myself derive deep pleasure from observing the constant onward march of technology and industry.

szoops2• 9 years ago

Have you actually tasted it?

Many of the modern varieties of mass-produced produce have been bred to overcome pests and harsh conditions. not flavor. By moving the plants indoors we overcome both issues and can grow in optimal conditions where we can focus on taste and texture. Plus by growing close to the point of consumption the food is fresher and tastier and can be harvested when ripe and not a week before so as is currently the case. Additionally the nutrient levels in CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) crops is usually above a field grown crop (https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/are-hydroponic-veg...)

m_coder3• 9 years ago

I really wonder what how much food could be produced if all the lawn and empty lots in a city were effectively productive as vegetable plots. I know that it can't be used because people like their lawns and things but often there is unused space in densely populated areas.

terravion4• 9 years ago

It isn't even that they like their lawns. It is the cost of labor to do this. The Salinas and Imperial valleys (where 85% of US veggies are grown) concentrate labor and other inputs in a way that you never could in small plots.

It is the same thing as we could assemble cars in almost any workshop or hangar, but we build cars at scale in only a few places.

hs442• 9 years ago

The trick would be getting people to have and grow their own edible lawns. Then the cost is the same as keeping the lawns of today, but there's a more useful return. It's only a values issue. In Russia for example small gardeners produce 40% of the nations food. http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-dacha.htm

And perhaps the evolution of tools like https://farmbot.io/ An intelligent 'lawmmower' makes your permaculture for you.

flubert• 9 years ago

It is the cost of labor to do this

Robots? Anyone know the state of automation when it comes to small scale gardening? Picking or zapping weeds and pests with a laser or whatever.

bryanlarsen• 9 years ago

"Getting food to people who live far from farms—sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away—is costly and strains natural resources."

For many foods, more gasoline is used getting it from the grocery store home than is used to get it to the grocery store from across the world. Ships and trains and large tractor trailers are quite efficient.

OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge amounts of energy.

cr0sh• 9 years ago

OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge amounts of energy.

I don't know if it's been tried or not for indoor gardening, but why not use heliostats coupled with reflection (mirrors) or refraction (lightpipes) to guide the sunlight indoors?

I know such systems have been used for general lighting and art works...

zimzam2• 9 years ago

Because if you are growing 1 acre of lettuce across 10 floors of a building (1/10th acre per floor) now you need to collect 1 acre of sunlight from a 1/10th acre sized roof. Where do you get the other 9/10th of an acre of sunlight from?

seunosewa2• 9 years ago

Why not use heliostats coupled with reflection ... To guide the sunlight indoors?

You would be better off building a greenhouse right where you would have placed the heliostats.

j-c-hewitt5• 9 years ago

I think these kinds of stories play well to governments, the press, and some groups of people as ideas or as cool photo opportunities, but they don't translate into meaningful agricultural production.

I encourage people to scroll around Google Maps (or better yet, drive) through some of America's most productive agricultural regions. The sheer scale of American farmland dwarfs any possible urban farm development.

I know from personal experience growing seedlings in my basement here that new LED grow lights make it much more cost and energy efficient to run a greenhouse than it used to be. But fertile soil is a massive input cost that you can't really get around for most full sized plants. I spent hundreds of dollars recently on garden soil for a small set of raised beds. I have a tiny flock of six chickens supplementing my compost pile.

Anyone can grow bad produce indoors. I think the real problem (having lived in urban, rural, and suburban areas) they're trying to address is the transportation cost of bringing quality produce to the city. Right now many cities are not really set up for affordable freight transportation. Cities like NYC are almost designed to make it pointlessly expensive and complicated to bring freight in from the country to the store. Commercial truck traffic gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns and cities.

So if you are trying to deploy technology to make quality food more available to American cities the solution is probably not just hanging up some grow lights and growing weak plants in trays. It is to attack the largest sources of the added costs. The 'local' label has salience to high end grocery shoppers because they believe that it indicates quality. If 'local' comes to be associated with tray farms using poor inputs, it will stop being associated with quality in the minds of Whole Foods shoppers.

It'd be great if America had the sort of urban freight network that was state of the art in Japan in 1980 instead of trying to come up with pretend-technology patches to much larger cost of living problems.

mceoin• 9 years ago

Cities have two things in abundance due to human input/output: fertilizer and water. They lack sunlight but with cheap energy LEDs fill that gap.

High density city-"farming" makes economic sense in certain contexts: - high density living environments - inefficient or expensive transport costs - lack of available farming land relative to population (expect net-food-importers like Singapore to lead here) - northern hemisphere (full-year growing cycle increases appeal and cost efficiency) - cities not located in close proximity to farmland (e.g. Abu Dhabi, Dubai)

They don't replace organic, and subvert the "local" farm-to-table movement and I'll be surprised if they can match the taste of produce grown in a robust/diverse ecosystem. But they do provide a market need for controlled environments and consistent output that dials into local demand.

Pros and cons, but inevitable part of our agricultural future.

On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag. While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price-competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.

galdosdi5• 9 years ago

You missed an even bigger input: labor! Cities have tons of people, with a wide variety of skills. The boonies have few, and there's a chicken/egg problem (thinner market) that makes it harder to change jobs since there's fewer employers and harder to fill jobs because there's fewer employees.

j-c-hewitt5• 9 years ago

Farm-to-table is a mark of quality for gourmets because the food tastes better and has more nutrition when it has more expensive inputs. Feed a pig nothing but acorns and he's gonna taste great, but he's gonna be really expensive. Feed a pig nothing but hyperprocessed nutrient foam or whatever and he's gonna taste bad but he's gonna be cheaper.

On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag. While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price-competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.

Why? When people can afford it, they tend to want to upgrade what kinds of food that they eat. The quality issue is not something that is easy to sidestep just because of the law of conservation. Output can't exceed input. It is a huge operation to move soil and fertilizer around. It is expensive even in rural areas. Hydroponics have certain fertility, plant type, and plant quality limitations and cost more money to set up. Not to mention the issue of devoting expensive urban real estate to agricultural production.

galdosdi5• 9 years ago

I call bullshit. How much dollar (retail) value of goods do you think the average heavy truck rolling around NYC carries? And how much cost do you think is added due to the current freight network versus your ideal world?

Commercial truck traffic gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns and cities.

Let's do a little estimating: A crate of milk at $4 per gallon is $24 and is about 1x1x2 feet. If you pack an 8x16x8 box truck, which is way smaller than the maximum size limits, that's 512 crates, so about $13,000 back there. That's also about 26000 lbs, which is within the MGW of some trucks that size.

You're lucky I didn't use bacon as an example because a 1x1x2 crate filled with up to 48 pounds of bacon can be sold for much more than a 1x1x2 crate filled with 48 pounds (6 gallons) of milk.

Now consider how long it takes a truck, even denied access to parkways (in NYC, trucks DO have access to interstates, such as the BQE, Van Wyck, Verazzano, Triboro, GWB, I-95, etc etc etc) to get around. Maybe a couple hours. How much better could you make it? How much driver pay and extra gas and such is being spent in the extra hour or so? Let's be generous and say $500. So we're talking no more than a 5% change in the price of the goods in there. Stop and go traffic with that kind of weight is not great for fuel, but it's a lot better when deliveries are done off hours. Off hours, it's easy to catch a "green wave" on the wonderful one-way avenues in Manhattan and never have to stop again till you need to make your turn.

You're alleging a 400% increase, not a 5% increase. My numbers are off, this is an estimate, but this is probably the order of magnitude of this effect. You are going to need sources to make such a shocking statement.

Part of the reason your food costs so much is you're shopping at the wrong damn stores. Go to Key Foods or something. A real normal cheap grocery store, not like, Gristedes or some such. Most foods costs about the same as NJ or Arkansas.

Also, most food goes through the Hunts Point distribution centers, which are conveniently located off of I-95 which permits heavy trucks including full 18 wheelers. No idea where you're getting your info. From there they can take the BQE all over inner Brooklyn/Queens with access to Manhattan via any of the major east river bridges except the Brooklyn (some smaller trucks may even meet the restrictions for the tunnels)

Making our "Freight infrastructure" any better with roads is a waste of money that at best, may, at the cost of billions, reduce food prices 5-10%. It'd be much better to use a fraction of that money to subsidize food stamp programs or something, with much more effect.

The only real problem with all the trucks on our local streets, is it's annoying and dangerous to pedestrians. A good start here would be just enforcing (and educating regarding) the existing mandatory truck route system better. Trucks have an extensive map of permitted routes in NYC, and it's really not that hard to deal with, but you do regularly see trucks violating the same.

j-c-hewitt5• 9 years ago

I dunno, I grew up shopping at Key Food in Brooklyn. Key Food sucks. Gristedes is indeed worse. Even the revamped Key Food sucks. It's way more expensive than grocery stores in other lower cost of living states that I have lived in since. Even the high end NYC grocery stores are basically just bad and expensive compared to a lot of other places in the country.

Sure, transportation isn't all of it. Most of it is probably labor and real estate. But how awful it is to drive a truck in NYC versus how easy it is to make commercial deliveries in just about any other city or town in America has a lot to do with it, especially because the article babbles an awful lot about the challenge of delivering stuff to cities from rural areas. It's way more complicated to deliver goods to Manhattan (an island) than in most American places which just involve pulling off an interstate exit and making a delivery.

If the question is whether or not it makes sense to focus on

a( Heavy public investment into fake-tech urban farms

b( Identifying the really big sources of the costs and working to bring those down

I think b( is the better way to go. I think we could probably agree on that. I don't really know the specifics because I'm shooting off the hip about another lame urban farming article. Come to think of it real estate prices are probably what make up the bulk of the added cost on top of what the consumer pays in other markets and not delivery costs. But the purported problem that these farms are supposed to fix are the cost of bringing food from rural areas to cities.

Personally I doubt that even if the magical infrastructure fairy gave the mayor a quintillion dollar grant to spend on infrastructure improvements that anything positive would happen (it would probably get much worse somehow). But again, the problem that this is supposed to fix is the cost of bringing food in from rural areas.

galdosdi5• 9 years ago

But fertile soil is a massive input cost that you can't really get around for most full sized plants.

If you had read the article, you'd know this is a hydroponic system. No soil. Yields are substantially higher and less water is consumed. Hydroponics are pretty interesting technology.

Anyone can grow bad produce indoors.

Yeah, if they just stick some dirt under a random LED light. That's not what they're doing here. A different article I recently read about the same farm in Newark mentioned some gourmet chef next door raving about the quality of the greens.

j-c-hewitt5• 9 years ago

I said 'full sized plants' because hydroponics can only be used for some kinds of plants. For other things you need soil. Hydroponics are also much finickier and require more labor and energy -- not to mention climate control, drainage, and dehumidifying.

awkwardtortoise• 9 years ago

I think these kinds of stories play well to governments, the press, and some groups of people as ideas or as cool photo opportunities, but they don't translate into meaningful agricultural production.

As with almost all of these type of stories, it's "filler" material for journalists who need to write something to justify their paychecks and it's free advertisement for the companies. Nothing more, nothing less. Companies contact WSJ|NYTimes|etc to do pieces on them all the time. It's free publicity and journalists need to write something and of course the media has to sell ads. It's a form of busybody work.

At least this is a break from the relentless "solar savior elon musk" craze on social and traditional media.

dionidium• 9 years ago

Anyone who thinks the U.S. is crowded should book a window seat on a daytime cross-country flight and see if they still think that when they land.

thatcat4• 9 years ago

Small farms (below 350,000 / yr gross income) account for 25% of production value and 90% of total number of farms [0] and if you look at the crops being produced by large farms they're often not for direct human consumption.

Urban farm development is high density farming which doesn't require the same available area and often produces crops with higher nutrient density. It seems technically feasible for medium density urban areas to produce a large percentage of edible food locally in the near future; though that doesn't guarantee a viable business model will exist.

[0]https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

stinkytaco• 9 years ago

I disagree that intensive indoor agriculture can't work. It has worked pretty well. High value, low space plants like tomatoes and marijuana will translate well to a system like this. Lower value crops like grain, where you need lots of it and it doesn't cost much, will not.

jakewins4• 9 years ago

Entirely agreed. I feel like I'm utterly missing something with these indoor and urban farming setups - someone is clearly investing millions into them and is presumably doing due diligence..

The CO2 output of these farms is higher than modern industrial agriculture, even if you assume all the traditional produce is shipped across the entire continental US. Cornell has some good lectures on this subject: https://youtu.be/VrpyUA1pQqE?t=1842

So, urban farms are worse for the environment - is the selling point cost then? I did a back-of-the-envolope trying to guesstimate this a while back on a similar post about container farms. Granted, a larger factory-style farm will have higher efficiency, but the basic problem of entirely replacing sunlight with artificial light, vs a green house that simply augments, remains.

Indoor farm

Freight farms has a cost estimate page(1) that gives us, for lettuce, something like:

    50-100lb/week, lets say 75lb, so 3,900lb of lettuce a year
    $17,600/year operating cost

    $17,600/3,900lb = ~$4.51/lb of lettuce

However, it's worth noting that Freight Farms doesn't include labor or capital costs(!) in their estimate.

But fine - lets pretend the container farm itself is free, and that somehow plug setting, harvesting, packaging, and equipment maintenance is happily done by people working for nothing: $4.51/lb of lettuce it is.

Traditional farm

The university extension system provides great estimates of production costs for tons of crops. For lettuce, using traditional soil and machinery, production including labor, packaging and chilling UC Davis estimates(2):

    $7,754 total overhead per acre
    9.38tons of lettuce per acre, 18,760lb a year

    $7,754/18,769lb = ~$0.41/lb of lettuce

BUT, that estimate only includes shipping to the local chilling facility. To then ship the lettuce from CA to NY, you need to hire a trailer. This week, the spot price for chilled lettuce trailers going from CA to NY is $6,000(3). Each trailer carries 40,000lbs of lettuce:

    $6,000/40,000lbs = ~ $0.15/lb of lettuce to transport

For a total cost then, of:

    $0.41 + $0.15 = $0.56/lb

In summary

Assuming labor is free for the container farm, you're gifted all the capital assets of it, and that the traditional farm is shipping its' produce across the continental US, the production cost is $4.51/lb for container farm, $0.56/lb for regular soil.

    (1) https://www.freightfarms.com/blog/data-from-our-growers-operating-the-lgm-as-a-business
    (2) https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/7d/96/7d96db67-49ca-442f-9543-4482187c9cd1/lettuceleaforganiccc09.pdf
    (3) https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/wa_fv190.txt

oppositelock• 9 years ago

Marijuana costs a lot more than $4.51/lb. They're just getting their process debugged and will switch instantly when it's legalized.

beamatronic• 9 years ago

> Cities like NYC are almost designed to make it pointlessly expensive and complicated to bring freight in from the country to the store.

Didn't I just read an article on here last week about high quality cheap produce in NYC Chinatown?

contingencies• 9 years ago

Where do I find up to date hard yield and input data on fully artificially lit hydroponic or aeroponic systems for various crops?

kator• 9 years ago

I keep thinking all of these are designed as pre-emptive investments before marijuana is legalized. They figure out the problems of mass production and management and the second the laws pass they flip the switch as the biggest supplier with right down the street access.

sxates• 9 years ago

What occurred to me reading this is that one of the biggest costs to urban farming is the real estate. But with self-driving car-shares on the horizon and potentially much lower needs for parking structures, perhaps this might be a good way to repurpose some old parking garages. Lots of sq.ft., structural support for heavy inventory, open to air and sun, etc. Might work.

grizzles• 9 years ago

To me, the distributed version of this idea is the really exciting development here. With a decade it will be commonplace to have a totally automated bookshelf looking appliance that you do nothing more than put in your backyard, give soil+seeds+water to, and use as your own personal Grocery Store. And when it happens, we'll have companies like Farmbot.io and the other 3d printer folks like Adrian Bowyer to thank for it.

A Farm Grows in the City

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