Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

https://singularityhub.com/2020/12/11/europes-biggest-vertical-farm-will-be-powered-by-wind-and-planted-by-robots/

by Osiris30 • 6 years ago

278 221 6 years ago

singularityhub.com

bigbubba• 6 years ago

Industrial automation meets hydroponics.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

I'm gonna be honest I do not understand the economics and logic of vertical farming.

You're basically putting plants in expensive, complicated buildings operated by extremely expensive and complicated robots, then you turn energy from the sun into electricity and back into light so you can grow the plants when you can just... farm in sunny places instead? Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into tasty nutrients built in.

Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

rory_isAdonk• 6 years ago

Feels like one of those new industry starting up presuming that carbon will have a dramatic effect on the market and policy.

optimiz3• 6 years ago

Food sovereignty is a thing - an open air farm in Africa has geopolitical and weather risks. Not to mention the shipping carbon footprint and freshness issues.

achow2• 6 years ago

Places like Middle East, Singapore and also USA majority of foods are being imported anyway.

AndrewDucker• 6 years ago

Far less water, and for places that don't have that much good farmland it's a game changer.

simongray• 6 years ago

Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Maybe due to things like increased CO2 contributions, poor quality control, and decreased food security?

Anyway, Taastrup is not prime real estate in Copenhagen. It's one of the poorer Copenhagen suburbs.

ahoka• 6 years ago

Also why bother with all that waste just to produce something that has basically zero nutritional value?

matei88• 6 years ago

thank you

Manheim3• 6 years ago

This is just the start, but as other commenters have pointed out in this thread this is not just about the nutrition you get from Lettuce and Kale in comparison to other farm products. It is about the reduction of the need for farmland, transport, packaging, water and the use of chemicals. All parts of the problematic stress we put on nature and the environment. The use of greens in human food consumtion is enormous, regardless of the nutrition value they have compared to meat. If we can reduce the "environmental footprint" this consumtion have, it is a win, and not a waste of resources. On the contrary, I would argue.

And as I start off with; this is just the beginning of an interesting development. The road to a more sustainable future is paved with innovation and technology. It's amazing how far vertical farming has come already, in my view.

SamBam3• 6 years ago

Because lettuces and other greens are grown regardless. Is your argument that no one should grow those plants at all?

Mashimo• 6 years ago

I don't know if I would call Taastrup prime real estate :D

I'm also sceptical if it will be sustainable. After all, someone needs to produce the solar panels, metals building construction etc. On the other hand taking water from Afrika might not be the best idea.

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

Same, but at the same time, it's preparing for a future where the borders and international shipping may be impossible, where overpopulation means we can no longer use land for farming, and where farmland becomes unusable or at least unpredictable due to climate change. Plus something about colonizing space. It's far future and dystopian, but not improbable.

Anyway, it's not the most efficient way to grow food; I live in a country where they have tons of greenhouses. Also pretty energy intensive, but yields are great and predictable, meaning that despite being one of the smallest countries of the world, we're the second largest agricultural exporter in the world. Basically we do a lot with what we have. Which is also (for me) a bit unexpected given that most of the areas I've lived in and driven through is grass for cattle.

bumbada2• 6 years ago

It is not far future and it is not dystopian.

Anyone that have lived in China or India knows how much people those places have.

There is already a tremendous pressure from the food those countries demand on the world. Chinese fishing fleet just obliterates anywhere they go, and they are destroying the Amazon forest in Brazil and Argentina with soya(proteins for pigs) plantations and equatorial jungles for Palm Oil.

Anything is inefficient at first, including agriculture itself. Wheat and corn grains were super small at first. At first, solar panels did cost hundreds of times more than what it does today.

Technology will improve and the future will be better.

senkora• 6 years ago

I imagine it would work quite nicely in Iceland, with abundant energy and little (any?) arable land. It’s arguably better than mining Bitcoin with that energy.

You can also significantly decrease water use, which matters in places like the Middle East that may want to reduce their dependence on food imports, and that already use desalinization to get water.

Singapore doesn’t have a lot of space but could also want to decrease its dependence on imports.

You can eliminate the risk of crop failures from drought / pests / freezes, and grow crops year round with lots of light, so yields can be quite high.

Local produce can be sold at a premium to high-class consumers, similar to the organic food industry.

And thinking farther out, this is an enabling technology for space colonization, so there’s a lot of growth potential in this technology.

gardarh• 6 years ago

Already exists: https://vaxafarm.is/pages/english . They are growing for the local market only.

ranguna• 6 years ago

Did you even read the article? Water consumption is 250 times less that typical agriculture flat fields.

Also, instead of using 1 meter square to grow 1 meter square of crops, you can use the same space to grow 14x the amount of crops.

andi999• 6 years ago

As far as I understand, water is not a sparse resource in Denmark (but might be an expensive one)

postingawayonhn• 6 years ago

Actually more than 14x. Because you control the environment you can provide them with ideal conditions which should speed up the growth cycle.

ClumsyPilot5• 6 years ago

Water consumtion is like the most frequently gamed statistics ever. People will count all the water that falls on the field of grass and call it 'water consumtion for raising cattle'.

Without a proper breakdown into blue water, grey water and green water this number is not even worth discussing.

Melting_Harps2• 6 years ago

Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Do we really need a repeat of the supply chains breaking down again to answer this question? African farmers were dismayed when their bumper crops were rotting in their fields because they couldn't export the crops or even sell the excess locally [0].

Livestock farmers also saw this as well [1].

It's hard to imagine that people haven't learned the value of having a robust local food supply chain, which is the one thing that I had hoped we had learned after the shortages and panic buying created during the 1st wave of COVID.

I agree that vertical farming has limitations, but it could be a useful adjunct to meet demand the typical soil based farming cannot deliver. Moreover, much like Holland's greenhouse farming the chances are most of it will be exported in exchange for other goods. Also, remember Denmark has a limited growing season that could in theory help them plan for larger scale operations, which they can partner with for Mars colonization as things develop in both sectors.

I imagine it would work quite nicely in Iceland, with abundant energy and little (any?) arable land. It’s arguably better than mining Bitcoin with that energy.

Why not both? The excess heat from the mining could be used to have heated greenhouse/nurseries while still utilizing the excess heat and energy. This was working rather well in Canada [2].

0: https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/04/ghana-fa...

1: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/10/covid-19-has-ruined-pig-...

2: https://inhabitat.com/bitcoin-mining-powers-canadian-mans-in...

rat874• 6 years ago

It's hard to imagine that people haven't learned the value of having a robust local food supply chain, which is the one thing that I had hoped we had learned after the shortages and panic buying created during the 1st wave of COVID.

This seems like a worst case scenario, and it still seems like an overblown issue. I would say its usually much easier to just import produce if your country is not good at it. Use large ships and regulate them to be more energy efficient then they are now.

It seems like we need solutions to panic buying

---

Bitcoin in general doesn't seem very useful, making use of the captured heat is cool and better then wasting it but wouldn't it be easier just to not mine bitcoun

achow2• 6 years ago

Earth: 29% Land, 71% Ocean

Land: 71% Habitable, 29% Not

Agricultural: 2.3% of all habitable land

Livestock: 8% of all habitable land

Looking at the stats, your question is very valid. We can drastically increase food production by marginally decreasing land dedicated for livestock and/or utilizing unused habitable land.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/11/Global-land-use-g...

fnord123• 6 years ago

Those stats also do not indicate how much the agricultural land is being used to grow animal feed. In fact if a crop is grown but inadequate quality for selling for humans, it is sold at a massive discount as animal feed. Reducing the variability in crop yields, as vertical farming should do, should make the 2.3% more efficient.

We need to be careful about how we reduce livestocks globally. Naively interfering in the market such that the price of meat goes up could be disastrous as Brazilian farmers could accelerate the slashing of rain forests to make way for more profitable livestock farming.

pjc503• 6 years ago

Much of the livestock land is steep or rocky. The same obstacles to drawing a plough across it present to building buildings on it. Unless you're prepared to invest a lot of energy flattening it.

tokai• 6 years ago

In Denmark 62% of all land is used for agriculture. That's not only the habitable but all of Denmark's area. Any area that is able to produce is already in use.

https://lbst.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/NaturErhverv/Filer/Lan...

ploika• 6 years ago

Just farming in sunny places is also expensive and complicated. It's also vulnerable to drought, flooding, frost damage, pests, blockades, tailbacks at ports etc.

I'm lucky enough to live in one of the most food secure countries in the world, but not everyone is in the same position. There's value in having a food source near big population centres.

user568439• 6 years ago

- 250x less water

- Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop

- Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs

- Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually almost always the case, to my knowledge

- 365 days a year of efficient production

- Good for the environment to save so much in transport

- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.

To be honest, the only con I see is that this perfectly automated gardens produce much less tasty food because they are given the exact amount of water and minerals needed to generate the product, but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.

Darmody3• 6 years ago

- Price will go down in the future - Similar farms can be built on Mars. - Diversity of crops in places where it would be complicated otherwise

pm902• 6 years ago

but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.

Is this a real thing? Interesting! I wonder if, much like food additives, we could figure out what particular nutrients would be required to impart a specific flavor to produce.

tremon• 6 years ago

On top of that: this style of farming is additive to other uses of the same land area, not exclusive. Having a traditional 100-acre farm demands a loss of 100 acres of land in opportunity cost. Vertical farming allows to use the same land for residential or commercial development, or it allows for 100 acres of food production in only 10 acres of land.

qayxc• 6 years ago

but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor

Correlation ≠ causation.

I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest.

Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses.

This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops. The longer the process, the more time the produce has to collect and store the relevant substances. Artificial ripening only takes a day or two compared to weeks for naturally grown food.

rat874• 6 years ago

- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.

This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad

dan-robertson• 6 years ago

It’s also good for the environment when land can be left to become wild instead of being actively farmed. The environment in the U.K. was greatly damaged during the Second World War when a lot of land that wouldn’t normally be farmed was farmed intensively, and that intensive farming continued after the war, greatly decreasing the land that was available to wildlife. Birds like nightingales which used to be reasonably known in the countryside now have vastly contracted populations in the U.K.

LoSboccacc2• 6 years ago

all these mechanical parts will cause pollution both in their production and their disposal.

365 days of production will also require some heavy fertilization cycles, so more chemicals to be produced and disposed.

I don't see that talked much and might very well come ahead with the efficiency of scale in having all these thing stacked instead of dispersed over a large tract of land, but these thing are an important aspect and hopefully what will come out of this deployment is some hard data about the impact they have.

KaiserPro6• 6 years ago

- Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop

yes, but you are spending money and carbon on re-creating sunlight.

Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs

Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria.

- Good for the environment to save so much in transport

None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit.

- Independence from other countries

Actually this is the only real selling point. Theoretically you _could_ grow crops that are difficult to cultivate in your climate.

- 250x less water

Yes, but I am sceptical. It should use less water than an open field, but the same as a greenhouse. if it truely is 250 less water then great. But I suspect thats clever comparison. There are ofcourse low cost ways to save water, like multch, or constricting water supplies and frequency just after germination.

Look, the problem I have is that a lot of these systems are basically hype machines. They are invented by tech bros who've just discovered that nature exsists. But instead of looking at the vast reams of research they head straight for the vertical/hydro/LED segment.

What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world

Up until that point, your just pissing dollars into the wind and wasting everyone's time inveting solutions to problems that are not actual problems.

wainstead2• 6 years ago

And it addresses the potential issue of “peak phosphorus”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus

ben_w5• 6 years ago

1. How many of these points can be achieved, and to what relative quality, with greenhouses?

2. Given sunlight is ~1 gigawatt per square kilometre, and given the light level plants need, to the extent that this allows winter production of:

(a) staple crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes: this will need implementation of all the improvements to the global power grid that eco-optimists like me call for and which eco-pessimists claim will never be sufficient, and because the energy has to come from elsewhere in winter they will be lacking exactly the same sort of independence they have now with food imports. (I don’t count this as “not independent” because if I did then no city would be, no apartment would be, no non-farmer would be).

(b) high-value non-staple foods such as lettuce, kale, peppers: it doesn’t provide enough calories for food-independence.

While absolutely you could put a small unit the size of a shipping crate in every village and have the local shops stock it’s lettuce output on their shelves, I see this as a fantastic solution to e.g. greening the Sahara [0] and terraforming the Moon/Mars, but mainly only a cash-crop thing in industrialised nations on Earth.

[0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97

daanlo• 6 years ago

I co-founded a home vertical farm company a few years ago (not in operation any more).

Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons: 1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste. 2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor.

The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark.

The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.

Loic• 6 years ago

The real cost (building, etc.) will results in a way more carbon intensive production as anything else. If you consider that Denmark electricity is 66 to 75% oil/gas/coal produced, the real environmental impact of this farm will be disastrous.

The 250x less water is compared to open field production without water drop control, it will be at the same level of water consumption than all the greenhouses you see, they will not be better. This argument is as such not a good one.

ajmurmann2• 6 years ago

One more point the article makes that's missing from your list: It uses less space.

We currently use enormous amounts of land on agriculture. It would be fantastic if we could give all that land back to nature.

theferalrobot• 6 years ago

250x less water

Compared to what exactly and for what crop? Rain is free and is all that is needed for plenty of crops

bryanlarsen7• 6 years ago

KaiserPro had good rebuttals to some of your points[1] so I won't repeat those, but here are some more:

- 250x less water

Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0.

transport

Bulk transport is incredibly efficient. IIRC, many food products spend more carbon on transport from the grocery store to home than they do getting to the grocery store. I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415773

onetimemanytime• 6 years ago

but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor

I too think that a vegetable and fruit need sun, win and soil to taste the best. Cannot prove it though.

It's also possible that the type of tomato they choose to plant will taste like cardboard even if grown in a regular farm.

adamnemecek• 6 years ago

Also you can stack these infinitely. You can turn 1 acre into 10 acres by stacking 10 on top of each other.

deeviant2• 6 years ago

Average cost of acre of farm land in US: $3160

Average cost of a cheap warehouse in US (this is being generous as the cost is likely far higher for a vertical farm) $20 square ft [1]

Thus, Land/building cost standard farming method: $3160 per acre[2]

Land/building cost of equivalent vertical farm: $871200 per acre

Which is 275x higher. Once again, using warehouse costs is being generous to vertical farms. It's likely more than $20/sq f to commission a vertical farm.

What ever land use benefits of vertical farming are at the very least partially offset by the fact it requires a building, which has it own set of ecological impacts.

It's very hard for me to imagine any amount of bullet points to make up for 275x+ increased land/build cost. But if there was a market, it's probably in high end organic stuff for well-to-do people, rather than the a case of then technological wizardry feeding the masses.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average... [2] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average...

Note: I used US numbers, but much of the world has a similar ratio, although I'm sure somebody can find an exception if they looked.

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

The controlled environment probably makes pest control a heck of a lot easier as well.

jacquesm6• 6 years ago

Ground is a super expensive component of farming in Western Europe.

Investing in Africa adds transportation costs and with perishables a lot of tariffs and restrictions will apply that are much easier to solve on shorter distances.

Finally, there are non-economic reasons such as independence for food production, water efficiency, energy efficiency (including transportation) and quality control.

Personally I think that food should be grown as close to the point of consumption as feasible, if that's Africa for Europe then so be it but if it can be done closer then that's better.

perfunctory2• 6 years ago

why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Climate change will make most of Africa uninhabitable?

perfunctory2• 6 years ago

"If greenhouse gas emissions are not significantly reduced, part of the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region risks becoming uninhabitable before the year 2100."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Middle_E...

bumbada2• 6 years ago

The answer is very simple: Food is what is called strategic interest for a given country.

Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food.

E.g It is said that "Arab's spring" was about "people wanting freedom". It was really about food being ultra expensive in the north of Africa and speculators hoarding most of the rice and cereal in the world so they could benefit from the situation.

We have seen recently what happens when countries ignore strategic interests. US companies that made face mask and ventilators like 3M sent manufacturing overseas to places like China. When the Covid emergency broke, China did this:

1. China has higher priority to any other country. 2. If your country criticizes China(and the communist party CCP) in any way, you must censor them or there is no face mask for the people in your country. No censorship, no masks. 3. If necessary, China will nationalize factories. 4. The surplus will be sold to the highest bidder. China will send already paid cargo for higher bidders. 5. You praise China, even when the virus came from it. You demand no investigation.

That was self inflicted damage done by the West ignoring strategy 101.

You can not let other countries control your basic food supplies or anything strategic. Europe can not send most of their food by sea because the US has the biggest navy in the world. So if you do something they don't like, they just can block your supply chain and make food prices skyrocket and change governments so they become puppy States.

In fact, one of the secrets of US' success was that it could expand from the East Coast to the West by land with no European interference.

rat874• 6 years ago

Food is essential for live, you have no food, you die. If you or your children starve you will pay anything for food. Society's stability depend of the supply and price of food.

That doesn't mean your country has to grow it. A much better solution for individual food security is food stamps.

If your country has problems with a temporary lack of food one of the easiest things to do is to import more and if nesacery subsidize it. Famines tend to come from broken economic and political systems like imperial UK in Ireland and communist USSR, they both refused to import more food during a famine and in fact exported a lot food

Shivetya• 6 years ago

My question is, we know they expect to be profitable by a set date, but what will their prices be per pound? Does part of their plan include asking for a premium ?

Renewable energy will certainly spread to the shipping industry and that alone will increase the number of markets served. The key is opening these markets so farmers in Africa have more destinations for their goods as the pandemic has shown what happens when your existing market slows greatly.

pm902• 6 years ago

Food is absolutely the most important, foundational aspect of any nation. It is so fundamental, that countries will rather create stockpiles and let it rot rather than risk running even the remote chance that they will run out of food. When you run out of food... everything breaks down, quite literally. It is thus in every nations interest to be as self-sufficient in their food production as possible.

This is a very welcome development. Currently, only countries blessed with large sizes and specifically large arable lands are even capable of being self sufficient in their food production. This kind of hyper localized food production might just be the answer for nations of the future that don't want their population or geo-political influence to be limited by their size.

Additionally, climate change has the possibility of severely disrupting both the production and supply chains for food. Being able to grow food anywhere, without worrying about soil fertility, is incredible.

ed_balls• 6 years ago

For places like, say, UAE it could be national security issue (you are 9 meals away from a revolution). It's a great back up in case of natural disasters.

cromwellian• 6 years ago

I don’t think LED lights are the ultimate solution. They could use light pipes during the day when it’s sunny to route sunlight from outside and distribute it inside possible using fiber optics.

Eg https://youtu.be/DN8GXTmR6RI

This is a passive system and would require little to no power.

lovemenot2• 6 years ago

Consider the ratio of growth area to exposed surface area. 14x in this case. It's a vertical farm to maximise this ratio.

Light pipes may be slightly more efficient than PV in energy conversion during daylight hours, but they do not scale horizontally as the farm scales vertically.

For this project in Denmark, the energy comes from abundant wind, not weak and intermittent sun.

4gotunameagain• 6 years ago

Another argument is that produce has to be packed unripe in a truck to come all the way to copenhagen from spain without spoiling, which results in a usually bland product.

xondono2• 6 years ago

Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

I think you are not fully grasping the logistics of your plan. Most of Africa is pretty much landlocked, meaning shipping needs to happen by road (that do not exist today). This alone makes your plan more expensive than vertical farms.

Logistics in the food industry is a very complicated mess, with timelines so tight that we need to hack the riping process by picking fruits early and have them ripe on route, which negatively affects the quality of the produce (and with that the price that the average consumer is willing to pay).

coldcode• 6 years ago

Transport of perishables costs way more than growing them in the first place; so doing it locally is cheaper, less polluting and much fresher. Saying you could do it remotely is about as convincing as making ice in your house as opposed to shipping it from a cold winter halfway around the world.

HALtheWise• 6 years ago

Counterintuitively, I have previously been told that you can actually grow more than one square meter of plants with one square meter of solar panels. The reason for this is that LED lighting can be designed to produce exactly the frequencies plants actually absorb, and distributed optimally through the day. Current solar technology isn't sufficient to make that cheaper than regular farming for staple crops, but I can certainly imagine it getting there for anything that's grown in a greenhouse today.

snovv_crash2• 6 years ago

Regular solar panels are about 6x more efficient than the photosynthesis of all plants except sugar cane. LEDs reduce some of this headroom by not being 100% efficient, but if the system needs some heat anyways that isn't an issue.

SamBam3• 6 years ago

Exactly. One square meter of solar panels can provide enough energy for several meters of plants.

dontTango• 6 years ago

This is the criticism of farmers.

I know a guy who made a fool of himself for becoming an enthusiast, starting a company promoting vertical farming, only to find out the Economics don't work.

On a similar note I recommend engineers get Engineering jobs, not business jobs. The money is tempting, but you will never learn about specifications and quality metrics otherwise. (Note I'm not including programmers as engineers)

swiley• 6 years ago

Plants use two (they're probably fine with just one) specific wavelenghts of light, so if you're solar power is broadband you can be saving energy this way.

jasonjayr• 6 years ago

Doing vertical farming on earth, lets us practice here, so we can do this on space colonies reliably later.

brohee• 6 years ago

It's a luxury product and I'm pretty sure their market is restaurants. Since freshly harvested just tastes better, now good restaurant must source produce locally so are limited by seasons.

This opens the possibility of "farm" to plate under a few hours for what is out of season.

saargrin• 6 years ago

and how are you gonna ship fertilizers and ship out highly time sensitive produce from africa where theres no political stability and no roads,no qualified manpower and no law infrastructure?

also ,do you think it makes much sense flying cabbage to Holland from africa?

rsynnott• 6 years ago

Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

That's where some of Europe's fruit and veg comes from now, more every year. However, in the long run I would question how sustainable a trade that effectively amounts to transferring water from Africa to Europe is, especially as African domestic markets grow.

NoOneNew• 6 years ago

I agree with you for the most part, but also do disagree. It's complicated. Like water consumption is absolutely far more efficient 10 to 100 times less water used per plant depending on the setup between outdoor to indoor hydroponics. The climate control factor is also a big plus. Sudden heat waves or cold snaps are not as big of a concern with indoor farming. Some places, protection from hail is a huge factor. Even just smoothing out the edges of harsh weather is a huge benefit. These are the tried, true, real world benefits that are both proven and economically efficient already in some small scale vertical farms along with large scale traditional farming plus with hydroponic farming. This doesn't even mention the year round, local supply of certain foods.

However, the electricity issue is the obvious problem along with the artificial light itself. The lights themselves to properly grow plants are not cheap and I saw a study that on an industrial scale, they're also not that reliable (lots of replacements). I have my doubts about the long term nutritional factor of using artificial light. We are evolutionary developed for plants that process the sun for their different forms of photosynthesis. I'd trust plants raised on the light of a fusion reactor more (tongue in cheek, chill). I did read something where researchers are trying to breed certain crops to respond better to artificial light, but I don't know at what stage they're at with it.

Wind energy is still not 100% reliable for obvious reasons and there's only a ~20% efficiency of solar right now on the commercial market (unless something has happened I don't know about). If you're aware of the conversation of energy, I doubt I need to really go into more of that. However, it's a good extra step forward for further market investment in renewables with essentially an extra market to purchase said products (still a win-win).

Without being a party pooper, I still see vertical farming as having potential. All crops? Probably not, to be honest and serious. 25% at least of produce that's available in your average market? Absolutely. We're just not there yet to achieve that, but you have to start someone to work out the "at-scale" and commercial viability issues. This is all good steps forward as long as you see it as such. If you think it more than that, then you're going to get disappointed and miss the lessons that can be learned.

Beating that dead horse, there are plenty of problems that need to be addressed. Plantagon comes to mind as to their failures, but that was a bit more money related due to not realizing the infrastructure requirements (plus, from the articles I read, I smell a bit of... corruption? con-artist? bullshit?). Respecting the problems at hand and trying to fix them is far better than just going, "We need to change everything to vertical farming now! You're a piece of shit if you think otherwise!" Which is kind of where a lot of these conversations and articles go. None of which is beneficial for anyone.

You're idea of investing in Africa is generally the tried and true commercial agricultural method of expanding food supplies. Nothing wrong with it, as long as you don't go Belgium's King Leopold II about it. But I'm not 100% against diversifying food supplies at some sacrifice to efficiency both short and long range in time and distance. I think the pandemic shows how important it is to never have "one source" of anything. The logistics dangers never show up in the good times, but they can make the bad times really bad. I like the vertical farm idea due to the decentralized concept.

There's pros and cons to the vertical farming movement. I don't believe we're at a point where a major portion of the food supply can come from it. I really think a decent portion (20%-30%) can come from it within the end of the 2020s with better economic efficiency than traditional farming. Beyond that, no one can really predict it without their personal biases playing a factor. Once we can shut up the fanboys and wannabe environmentalists who have bullshit degrees in nothing actually useful from spouting stupidity and diverting investments to con-artists, real progress can be made and some benefits can be seen relatively quickly. I want to double down on that statement, the over hype and fanboys do nothing good for any technology. Their rhetoric diverts investments from those who make real progress in a field to con-artist ponzi scheming assholes. The more emotionally charged something is, the more this happens.

commonturtle• 6 years ago

It takes time to make the economics favorable by incrementally improving the technology. Once indoor vertical farming does become favorable, it will have huge benefits over outsourcing food production to Africa or elsewhere.

National security for one; it times of war no one can starve your population into submission by cutting off shipments of food into your country. Your crops are also more resilient to pestilence and disease if grown in a controlled indoor environment.

All this makes it a worthwhile line of exploration, no?

zarkov99• 6 years ago

Instead of growing cabbage in prime real estate in Copenhagen, why don't we invest in Africa, give them some huge machines and then buy their produce?

Perhaps because the Danes rather be self-sufficient with respect to food, than depend on the development and continued cooperation of a country in Africa?

I personally have a deep love for the idea of mechanizing agriculture in a fully sustainable way to the point you could drop a few pods anywhere and provide healthy, nutritious and free food for any population, for free, forever. What a gift for our children that would be.

industriousthou• 6 years ago

I think this kind of thing is really only economical for niche products like micro greens and fancy lettuce with high markups. It can be grown under perfect conditions, then transported and used the same day it's harvested.

So, pretty cool from a technical and culinary perspective, but it's never going to produce staple crops economically. It seems kind of silly to portray it as being particularly eco-friendly or as addressing concerns like food security.

Phenomenit• 6 years ago

Why is it only possible to grow leafy greens with hydroponics? Is it a because of the size of the actual plant?

vkou• 6 years ago

Two reasons. Leafy greens are easy to grow hydroponically because they grow quickly. The problem with them is that they have nearly zero calories.

People invest money into growing them hydroponically because they don't keep, or transport well, which makes them incredibly expensive out-of-season. The high margins make it economical. Nobody's going to be growing rice hydroponically, for instance, because rice retails for 75 cents a pound.

flukus• 6 years ago

Size is the main thing, plants like corn haven't had much in the way of vertical constraints so until we adapt new shorter breeds of them you can only grow so much per cubic meter and the economics doesn't work out compared to an open field. There's also the economics of how much goes into the non edible parts of the plant, this is much lower in leafy greens. Aside from that they just don't keep as well as more robust crops, so they have to be a lot fresher.

ttn2• 6 years ago

The main issue is providing enough lighting/energy rather than growth medium.

Everything is possible to grow with hydroponics although it is a little tricky.

sgeisler• 6 years ago

I wonder if this will eventually lead to even more efficiency (less people involved in per output). Vertical farms lend themselves much more to standardization than conventional ones imo (many small machines instead of few big ones). If all the often-failing parts could be built in a way that they can be replaced automatically I can imagine a giant farm being run by a single guy who's main task is receiving replacement parts and sometimes untangling messes the bots don't know how to manage.

The other big benefit of being independent from environmental factors might also come in handy in space or as a cheaper alternative to fighting climate change.

foxhop• 6 years ago

over engineered.

KaiserPro6• 6 years ago

Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else.

all They grow are great salad crops. Thats about it. If you're going holistic, you can farm fish at the same time. But that introduces a load of complications.

Look, if you want to make the world a better place you need to:

1) come up with a simple system that can create good quality soil (think Terra preta, but different blends for different regions of the world)

2) make a multch that is cheap, safe and sustainable, so normal farmers can reduce water loss

3) create a cheap fast robot that can remove weeds

4) same again but for pests.

5) make a system of payments that allows both mixed crops (ie fruit/lumber/nuts) as well as livestock and arable.

Out of all of them 5 is the hardest. Its also the one that will have the biggest impact on climate (mixed land holds the most water, regulates heat and captures the most carbon, it also can have the lowest yield.)

rplnt2• 6 years ago

6) reduce waste, stop feeding meat instead of people

roebk• 6 years ago

Ain't this the truth. It's an incredibly inefficient way to feed the human race. And to boot, there's fewer starving livestock then there are starving humans.

KaiserPro6• 6 years ago

Sorry, yes I should have put these two points in.

Waste is a big fucker, as is the over supply of meat.

However where I diverge is that I still think livestock have a strong role to play in established and subsistence agriculture. I mean this in the way that fish can be put in the loop for hydroponic, chickens to reduce pests, or pigs/sheep used to rotivate fields. Not in the way that we devote vast amounts of land to pasture. (although there are questions to answer about how to manage rich grasslands that are carbon sinks.)

jacquesm6• 6 years ago

Vertical farms start with salads ('crunchy water') because they are easy crops to start such a process with. Once established and verified they will for sure move away from just leafy greens. The typical plan for a startup in this domain runs in the decades, not just a few years, and they're pretty capital intensive compared to software start-ups. Think of the salad producing vertical farm as you would of an MVP for a SaaS company and it makes more sense.

0xFluegel• 6 years ago

Can you give me a reference? I am somewhat interested and my current information is that they are generally trying to work around the disadvantage of giving up scale compared to traditional farms.

roel_v2• 6 years ago

Other crops are not just scaled up versions of salads. Bulk foods (wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, cassava, rice) cannot be grown efficiently in such vertical farms, at any scale, with current technology. Having lots of multi-story greenhouses does not contribute to developing the sort of radical innovative tech that would be required for staple foods.

ClumsyPilot5• 6 years ago

Salads are economic to produce because they have no calories.

Calories = Light (energy) + Fertiliser.

Efficiency of an LED is like 40%, and Photosynthesis efficiency is like 2%.

In other words calories are expensive and ineffieicent to produce through artificial lighting, no amount of 'startuping' will change that.

Also nothing here is new, we've had greenhouses, artificial lighting, hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics and even vertical farms like 50 years.

johnchristopher• 6 years ago

5) make a system of payments that allows both mixed crops (ie fruit/lumber/nuts) as well as livestock and arable.

I don't understand that statement. Is that a tech/internet software payment solution ? Or do you mean that a farmer/breeder should be able to use his fields/pastures for either livestock and agriculture ?

pjc503• 6 years ago

It's a political kind of payment: the shape of farming in the "first world" is determined by what gets subsidised.

Manheim3• 6 years ago

Let us not make the best an enemy of the good. The overall benefits from vertical farming are good when implemented correctly. Sure it isn't a perfect solution that solves everything, but it is on the road to better solutions. And in my opinion a part of our future farming solutions.

akudha• 6 years ago

6) Eat less meat.

Shit ton of land, water and other resources are used to grow grains just for the meat industry. If a portion of those resources are used to grow food for humans instead of animals, it would reduce a ton of waste and pollution.

Kosirich• 6 years ago

If they are able to produce a Rucola/Rocket, Baby Spinat or Lacusta salad cleaned and packaged for less than 200 kr/kg (27 euros), they will be making significant amount of money. (or anyone else who does it for that matter)

seddin• 6 years ago

It is still more expensive than exploiting illegal immigrants in southern Spain.

ttn2• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I've grown tomatoes, strawberries and weed indoors with artificial lighting.

As long as there is no shocking event like global drought or famine I do not think vertical farming or indoor farming will be a norm anytime soon as it takes massive, massive amount of energy/capital.

That being said, the moment we figure out using fusion energy, conventional farming will most probably vanish.

Also R&D on agriculture robots is a nice side perk, there is only so much to automate in agriculture & horticulture.

konschubert2• 6 years ago

Yep, it's all about cost of energy. The solar farm that powers a vertical farm will always take up more space than the vertical farm saves.

We have a nice podcast episode about this, maybe this interests you: https://www.predictions-podcast.com/2020/03/29/vertical-farm...

SamBam3• 6 years ago

I can't listen to your podcast right now, but solar panels are more efficient than photosynthesis, and you can produce the wavelength of light needed for plants by LEDs using a fraction of that power, so what makes you say that the solar farm that powers a vertical farm will always take up more space than the vertical farm saves?

wil421• 6 years ago

Someone claimed a while back most of these vertical farms would switch to growing weed once it became legal in the state(s) they have farms.

I’m not sure if any other crop beside weed would turn a significant profit. You might be able to get a government contract to grow some other controlled substance and turn a small profit.

The only other way it would work would be if it was a co-op owned by residents or subsidized by the local government.

dumbfoundded2• 6 years ago

The only pressure to grow weed inside is quality but premium flower is losing market share quickly. Every extracted product (vapes, edibles, drinks, topicals) is created from biomass which is best grown outdoors for the cheapest price.

There also isn't really that much weed needed as people think. Outdoors you can get roughly ~1,500lbs per acre of dried flower. In Colorado 2017, roughly 20,000lbs of cannabis was consumed per month. If you project based on population, the whole USA only needs about 7,000 acres harvested, annually. Maybe they'll be some loss so let's say 15,000 acres would safely cover it. In the USA, there's over 90,000,000 acres of corn grown a year. Cannabis is actually a very small market from the farming side and the indoor grows will very much be a niche market.

As for the general economics, vertical farming will never make sense until either the underlying economics of farming change (maybe from climate change) or energy becomes free.

throwaway201103• 6 years ago

Presumably the demand for weed is already being met (legally or not). Is there evidence that legalization prompts a large increase in demand? Just thinking about myself, I did not use weed when it was illegal, and legalization has not changed that.

tdelmas• 6 years ago

Are we in the matrix yet ?

markus_zhang• 6 years ago

Is this going to be true then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ

TruthHurts44• 6 years ago

Good. Having the cities being food independent will be huge in putting the farmers in their place.

dumbfoundded2• 6 years ago

Not really. 91M acres of corn is grown in the US annually. I don't see that being put indoors. It would be best to grow high calorie and protein rich food in indoor farms. I could imagine cell cultured meat or insect farms really disrupt farming. From a cost standpoint, vertical plant farms will have enormous difficulty competing with any outdoor farms.

dsego• 6 years ago

After the success of vacuum trains, underground superhighways, solar roadways and rocket travel, I guess this is the next logical step? At least you have something to sink our money into, rinse and repeat. Maybe even involve some EU green & eco funds.

tpmx2• 6 years ago

In this case the money seems to come from e.g. the danish government VC fund Vækstfonden.

There was a very similar play in Sweden that went bankrupt last year after consuming a lot of tax money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantagon

tpmx2• 6 years ago

Amount of money raised by Plantagon is reported to be: 120 million SEK, or $14M. Most of this likely tax money in some form.

Denmark: Please watch out.

pi-err• 6 years ago

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.

bryanlarsen7• 6 years ago

Vertical farming techniques make a lot of sense ... on Mars.

Maybe after one or two of these players go bankrupt, Elon Musk will acquihire the technology.

carapace• 6 years ago

What happens to the soil (or growth medium) over time? Soil is a living system, pretty much an organism unto itself. You farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.

napier• 6 years ago

Converted multi-storey car parking structures and disused post-Covid office towers are the farms of the future.

dblock• 6 years ago

Anyone doing this in New York? I walk past the empty Hudson Yards every day.

Osiris30• 6 years ago

Also see previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (2017) - (1) and (2).

As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens (mainly water but but not much other nutrients or carbon), but much harder for other plants.

See this video [3] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: 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[4]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809841 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw [4] https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787

deegles• 6 years ago

What are some high-calorie/nutritional value plants that work well in vertical farming? Maybe if those were grown cheaply enough people would adapt their recipes to incorporate them.

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

For all the anti-vertical farmers out there with a highly USA-centric view, consider that the Netherlands (the world leader in indoor agriculture aka 2nd largest exporter of vegetables in the world [1]) is investing in vertical farming and research into it. "This won't work in the US therefore it won't work anywhere in the world" is a very limited view. New York, Japan, Singapore and other regions and countries have very good reasons to invest in it [2]. Not every country has the space or disregard for greenhouse gases.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/could-high-tech-netherlands-style-farm...

[2] https://www.climateaction.org/news/netherlands-begins-constr...

unearth3d• 6 years ago

Totally agree with Barrin92; the dollars don't stack up. Ballpark estimate here, I've tried this with several crops and its similar Hard comparing field farming and tower-farming but here in NZ good level farmland is ~NZ$40000 Hectare Ha (2.47 acres), most farms >300 Ha. Equipment, fences and buildings are NZ$2M+, so that makes it nearly $47k Ha, round up to $50k Ha to be safer. So you could say their infrastructure cost is $10000/Ha.

But farms don't have to purchase light! Lighting costs for farming $0, for 100% artificial light NZ$1.90 per harvested Kg.

Current production costs for e.g. wheat $2500 Ha (seed, tillage, weed-control, harvest). Wheat NZ has world record of ~17t Ha, but all of this is a lot easier (cheaper) when you can move large machines freely. Wind is also an advantage in strengthening plant stems.

A farming tower needs greater strength than a residential building as there are live loads like harvesting equipment and a lot of 'soil' media and/or water if fully hydroponic. So I'll use costs for a concrete multilevel parking building which is going to be at least $2200 m² (plus lighting, HVAC and fitout - not in calc).

So, say your tower floorplate is 1000m², and taller than residential for extra HVAC and machine space. Assume you buy farmland at $45k Ha and build 10 floors (1000m²/floor), and prob. end with ~700m² growing space per floor, means you need another three floors to get you up to a 1 Ha growing area,

: so 13 1000m² floors at $2200m² = $28.6M / $50k = 570 times.

Plus lighting at $1.90 per kg of harvestable product - which for wheat at 17t/Ha would be $32000 per crop cycle.

Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

Related Stories