Las Vegas vertical farm aims to produce over a million pounds of produce a year

https://www.businessinsider.com/las-vegas-vertical-farm-bringing-opportunity-to-the-strip-2018-8?r=US&IR=T&utm_source=reddit.com

by anandaverma18 • 8 years ago

61 52 8 years ago

businessinsider.com

senectus1• 8 years ago

I've always loved this idea.

Would love to setup a vertical city farm... I reckon it'd be an awesome job and business.

anandaverma182• 8 years ago

I certainly agree with you. The idea is indeed great but one has to be very sure about its economies of scale when setting up a vertical farm. I have a small setup in my apartment and it needs a lot of upfront setup cost and recurring monitoring, electricity cost etc.

Vertical farms, if designed in a sustainable way, can be profitable in a long run. Since it can be automated one should automate it completely saving on man power.

Also, understanding of what crop to grow, how to grow and most important how to sell it will make any vertical farm profitable.

iancmceachern• 8 years ago

If you want to take your indoor farm to the next level check out both www.growcomputer.io and www.openagriculturesupply.com!

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

Vertical farms, if designed in a sustainable way, can be profitable in a long run

This comes down to the cost of urban real estate versus the cost of transportation. As that ratio shifts, the optimal distance from city centre, for an urban farm, moves.

raxxorrax• 8 years ago

How do you solve the general problem with the lack of sunlight? Isn't using artificial light extremely inefficient?

avip2• 8 years ago

An awesome job and a terrible business.

pvaldes2• 8 years ago

Maybe not so terrible. Of course "some" crops are more valuable than other, but I bet than growing vegetables is only half of the business here.

The dirty secret of the agriculture is that this green creatures love manure, and need it to growth well.

I happens than Las Vegas Hotels generate large amounts of animal waste each day and need to pay for getting rid of all this stuff asap by road or pipeline... Connect the dots.

fsloth• 8 years ago

"Would love to setup a vertical city farm... I reckon it'd be an awesome job and business."

What's wrong with a traditional horizontal farm in a greenhouse? As people collect in urban centers there certainly won't be shortage of land.

Urban space is expensive, rural is not.

pvaldes2• 8 years ago

"aims to produce" is not the same thing as "produces"

eggie3• 8 years ago

This is another in a long, long series of breathlessly promoted "urban"/"vertical" farming concepts. In virtually every case the description is projection. The economies rarely work out except for leafy greens in extremely dense urban regions without reliable access to countryside or greenhouse options.

api2• 8 years ago

... or locally grown organic super-fresh superfood greens for a major tourist economy like Las Vegas?

It could work for niche stuff, but energy costs is always what kills these ideas for the mainstream market. Sunlight is free. If we had Mr. Fusion maybe it could work.

Edit: I suppose it could work in the Middle East too where energy may be cheap enough (solar, cheap gas) vs. the cost of shipping it from Europe or further away.

avip2• 8 years ago

And "pound of produce" is an almost meaningless metric.

Cthulhu_• 8 years ago

Yup; in additiona it needs e.g. calories per m2 and cost. In the article I see a lot of leaves (very low caloric count) with a lot of employees around it in lab coats - that just can't be profitable. It can't compete with thousands of acres of high-calorie products like corn or potatoes harvested by just one guy in a combine. At the moment (According to a quora post, https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-can-be-fed-year-round-...), right now we use 0.5 acres of farmland per person; I'm sure that can be optimized a bit so let's say 0.25 acres per person, or ~1000 m2. That's an area of 30x30 meters. The Empire State Building, to name a random example, is ~130x57 meters, or about 7500m2 (very rough calculation). Therefore, you can feed about 7.5 people per floor. Give or take, very rough back of the napkin calculation.

7.5 people per floor isn't a lot and it's very expensive. Maybe useful for colonizing Mars where money isn't that big of a deal, but definitely not feed-the-world level scaling.

cheez• 8 years ago

Does anyone else think the stringent controls create fragility?

backspace_• 8 years ago

This title is misleading. As pointed out, the article describes the companies plans to reach 1 million pounds grown.

londons_explore• 8 years ago

A million pounds works out to about 20 trucks of produce.

That's still pretty small by farming standards.

LeonM• 8 years ago

It's called 'vanity metrics', it's basically how clickbait was done before the web. Journalists love using them, as it lures unknowing readers.

YokoZar• 8 years ago

A vanity metric is a metric that doesn't mean anything but sounds impressive. "Number of free trial downloads" is a vanity metric when what matters to the business is paying customers.

"Pounds of produce produced by a produce company" is a real metric, not a vanity one -- it's just not that impressive of a number in this case.

jaggederest• 8 years ago

Just for reference, total consumption of leaf lettuce in the US is in the neighborhood of 3 billion pounds annually. Leaf lettuce is the most valuable vegetable crop, it runs about $0.45 per pound. So they're spending $30m on a facility that can produce wholesale product worth $450,000 a year, gross revenue... I'm not sure the math on that works out.

m1573rp34130dy8• 8 years ago

around southern ontario, hydroponic leaf lettuce is close to $3.00 a head... a head will mature in 3 weeks from transplant from starter trays... that means 21 heads of lettuce in some state of growth between leafling and finished product if you do a continuous production culture... 8 inches is adequate linear spacing for fancy leaf lettuce thus 168 linear inches per batch repetition thats 14 feet or 2 units of 7 feet... almost everyone has the spatial capacity to produce thier own continuous supply of leaf lettuce at home, if they dont mind tending them as they would a common house plant...

Oh BTW ...how much does one pay for a nice ceaser salad nowadays?

thinkcontext2• 8 years ago

They are not looking to grow iceberg lettuce that bounces around on a truck for a week. They are going to grow premium greens, the article mentions chervil and mizuna, that are going to be eaten the same day it is harvested.

m1573rp34130dy8• 8 years ago

Hydroponic technique by any other name still smells as a liquified nutrient extract solution... the method is millenia old, as in ancient greek and babylonian... most people practice a form of modified slop culture on thier windowsill... those who understand how far they can push a plant to yield more , make out like gangbusters... nothing new in las vegas to see here citizen, now move along...

neals• 8 years ago

The key to successful hydrophonic farming is, surprisingly, marketing.

I've visited a couple of these in Europe. There's a lot of manual labor and electricity involved and it's very expensive. The only way to make it work is to sell your lettuce as '100% environmentally friendly, zero pesticides' and ask 10x the price of 'regular' lettuce.

But honestly, I've never really tased the difference and I wonder if the environmentally-friendly stuff holds true if you really look into it.

m1573rp34130dy8• 8 years ago

the taste depends on the nutrient solution used in culture... some people enjoy the "clean" taste of defined hydroponic medium, however there are complex sugars esters and volatile organics that are responsible for the flavour of the product... bioponic medium consists of organic substances humic and fulvic acids that provide a product far superior to a bland hothouse tomato taste... as far as environmentally friendly, there is considerable plastics waste resulting from greenhouse operations that have a wastefull process... hydroponic methods use, and reuse nutrient solutions and water as well as minimal solid medium...couple this with a caring attitude and a hydroponic operation can be very environmentally friendly if the factory farm mentality is avoided...

geomark3• 8 years ago

About half a kilometer from my house in a rural area is a leafy greens farm that has two sections, hydroponics and soil grown. Both are covered by nets and are pesticide-free. They claim demand is for the soil grown is higher because people prefer the taste. I don't really notice much difference.

imtringued2• 8 years ago

Is this sustainable at all? Good solar panels have 20% efficiency so this will result in at least 5x more land use. Heck this doesn't work out even with 100% efficiency. The same amount of farmland would still have to be covered in solar panels. This may make sense on mars or on the moon but definitively not on earth.

robbiep• 8 years ago

Photosynthesis is about 1% efficient so when you combine optimal watering and nutrition with 20-hr light cycles (last I looked at it, some darkness was useful), you still have a highly efficient system

rosege• 8 years ago

Emirates is also building one in Dubai with the company Crop One Holdings http://croponeholdings.com/ Given that droughts are becoming more common I see these initiatives as quite interesting. https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/emirates-is-building-a-ma...

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

Read between the lines. This isn't about growing free range soy and cruelty free tomatoes. The goal here is to have a proven method for growing stuff indoors so that by the time they can use it for pot the kinks have already been worked out and they can just scale right away and dominate a regional market before the competition gets off the ground.

If they can sell to grocers in order to make the business equivalent of sleep(untilpotbecomeslecal()) sustainable then good for them but that's not really the primary goal here. Indoor vertical farming just doesn't work out except in niche cases of very high margins or legal requirements that require things be farmed indoors. City land is just too expensive to grow stuff on unless you're growing a really lucrative crop. Other than pot that's not much that meets one/both of those requirements.

edit: This isn't a condemnation, I'm just calling it like I see it.

koverda• 8 years ago

There are already state licensed cannabis growers in Las Vegas.

robertnealan• 8 years ago

Seems environmentally unfriendly to rely 100% on electricity in one of the sunnier places in the country — you'd think there'd be a way to pipe in daylight via fiber optic cords during the day, and transition to LEDs as the sun begins to set and during the night.

That said I'm really excited to see vertical farming grow as a market, ideally in denser cities like SF or NYC where proximity to the nearest farms can be a few hours away depending on what you want to buy.

dccoolgai• 8 years ago

Interesting. I've been watching a lot of Curtis Stone on Youtube lately. Would highly recommend to anyone interested in this type of thing.

jokoon• 8 years ago

While this is quite a cool project, it's only interesting if it can beat the transporting cost of such produce.

InclinedPlane• 8 years ago

To put that into perspective, that's enough to feed about 700 people.

m1573rp34130dy8• 8 years ago

"Oasis Biotech" ... if we find the c.v. for thier technicians we may see something interesting[speculation] a biotech facility may use plants as the carrier for novel genes in order to produce biochemical or pharmaceutical products, even an oral vaccine bearing plant product...a classical "plantized" operation in a lab and industrial compound is expensive to design construct and operate... genetic engineering of plants can be cheap and forgiving in the event of failures, thus not financially catastrophic... these sorts of startups may be a good stock pick

Las Vegas vertical farm aims to produce over a million pounds of produce a year

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