So far, everyone growing vertically is growing crops that are almost entirely water because they're the only things that grow fast enough to turn a profit. They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local. It's a quality-differentiated product, not a solution to food scarcity or security.
Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent, and it's gonna be really hard when competing with the free rain, free sun, and insane automation available for field agriculture already. Even Plenty with SoftBank's extra 'nutrients' tops out at strawberries. See https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr... for some raw data on unit economics.
One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired, or https://farm.bot/ which encourages hardware hacking and food supply awareness.
This sounds the “why Tesla will never work argument.” Selling rich people what they want as a starting place to pioneer new technology is a good strategy even if it doesn’t feel good to you.
At first glance. I challenge you to find a technique (Being executed commercially, demonstrated in a paper, or clearly described) where high-calorie foods are grown indoors.
I'm not trying to be snarky; I'd love to see something like this, but the comment you reply to is my conclusion as well. I used to be very excited about this stuff, but the only viable crops are leafy greens sold at a high price.
I own a business selling sensors for use in hydroponics. I started because I wanted to make an impact in food availability. I've abandoned that, and continue because hobbyists, and companies like this have a use.
It's a good strategy only if you can take the same technology downmarket eventually. It's not yet clear how downmarket Tesla can be even in the car market, and the car market is very different than food, in that only 18% of people globally, mostly the richest, have cars, but 100% of them need to eat. Another important difference is that cars don't grow out of the ground.
Right now there's a flood of capital available, so it's very hard to tell a priori which ideas have legs and which are just mirages that look good in a slide deck. This could be amazing. But it could be another Juicero or WeWork, where the unit economics just don't make any sense.
It's not a question of pioneering, it's a question of base resource inputs. Tesla can promise an electric car but they can't promise one that costs less than the lithium and metals required to manufacture it, let alone the cost of labor. Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible.
Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California.
It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.
Not Tesla, but aquaculture. Aquaculture works and reasonably well for a few decades. Here's what we know now.
1. Aquaculture works
2. It's successful with only a handful of species
3. It can't replace marine caught wildlife
4. Flavor-wise it is frequently inferior.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't grow salmon, tipalia, shripm or oysters, we just shouldn't make a claim or claims that aren't reasonable (i.e. aquaculture can feed the world or aquaculture will revolutionize modern food production).
Vertical farming is great for greens, microgreens, strawberries, herbs and that's about it.
Nothing wrong with starting there as long as there is a path to profitability with a mass market product! Do you think there is one for vertically grown potatoes? Or corn? Both are 10-100x less valuable per pound and both take 10-100x longer to grow, 10-100x more water, and 10-100x more energy. I am not sure Tesla was battling the same order of magnitude of order of magnitudes.
You're convoluting a quantitative argument with a qualitative one. The parent comment pointed out some hard facts about nutrient density and farming logistics, and how the current model for vertical farming won't solve world hunger, on a nutritional level.
You respond with a qualitative argument that you can grow a business and/or industry and maje better technologies if you have profit.
The issue isn't that the technology isn't good enough, it's that there isn't as many nutrients (as in soil) in a city or apartment to grow highly nutritional food. You'd have to truck in bags of soil to do this, which isn't nearly as efficient as leaving the soil where it is and growing it there.
But isnt that the contrary of what Christensen postulates, starting at non-competitive down-market nieche and work upwards?
I'm rather bearish on Tesla for various reasons. I also believe current stock prices for Tesla and Amazon are mainly driven by general uncertainty and too much liquid cash with nowhere to go.
That being said, vertical farming doesn't realy solve any problems, food nd water are distribution and not availability problems. None of which are solved by vertical farming. Obviously that doesn't prevent people from raising a shit load of VC money. If anything, the wetern world is producing too much food, incl. meat, in hyper industrialized farms already.
Tesla had a direct path to drop the price by using economies of scale. If you just can't grow a crop, it just won't work. This is more akin to saying that battery density is low enough that it only works up to scooters.
Tesla obviously works today as well as do these vertical farms, but only in the niche they are operating in. The point being made is that they both could remain as a very niche product for looooong time.
For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.
Another lovely fact is that more plant mass is eaten by the animals grown for food than humans, so the plant production problem is non-existent. At least when it comes to human consumption.
We also don't produce food to feed people but instead to generate a profit. Food companies waste massive amounts of food in order to maintain profitable prices. Sure we produce enough food to feed the planet, but it's not profitable to provide food to people who can't afford it.
Its a shame we don’t experiment with growing food in former bread baskets like upstate NY, Ohio, etc, and spend money on navel gazing exercises.
As it stands today, as a nation, the United States supply of vegetables and many other products is totally dependent on the Colorado river. A variety of problems from climate change to terrorist or other attack could rapidly impact our ability to feed ourselves.
Been saying this for years. Instead of (or in addition to) growing almonds in the central valley, requiring large irrigation inputs, we could be growing hybrid hazelnuts in the northeast. Just one example. Not saying it would have equivalent profitability, but I have a hard time believing it would be less efficient or profitable than vertical farming with external high energy inputs.
There's plenty that can be done in traditional agriculture.
Anywhere near the rustbelt is going to need their soil thoroughly tested for contamination. But maybe that's not too big a deal when you amortize the cost over the entire life of a farm.
I think to create calorie rich base food, photosynthesis might be the completely wrong approach. It is extremely inefficient compared to photovoltaics. <1% vs >20%.
A better approach might be to produce hydrogen via photovoltaics and electrolysis, then use hydrogen metabolising bacteria to create more complex carbon hydrates and proteins from that.
The raw output of this might be edible in an emergency, but you would typically further refine it. Either you use fungi and end up with something similar to Quorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn , or you feed it to livestock (fish, chicken).
I think that this might be the base of the food chain for space settlements. On earth, traditional agriculture works just fine to produce an abundance of food, and I don't see more than aesthetic reasons to change it.
Cash crops = the type that a farmer can grow and make it rain, yah? Like spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens which bring in revenue year round, can be turned from seed to harvest in a matter of weeks, and have a high dollar value?
There are definitely barriers to entry associated with getting into vertical farming, but there are also advantages for the farmer.
It's sloppy terminology. I am fairly sure that "cash crops" was intended to mean "high caloric density, mass market crops".
While millions of people do eat hydroponically grown/growable produce, they do not survive on these kinds of crops. They rely on root vegetables and cereals for that, and those are currently impossible to grow in the way described in TFA.
How meaningful is the claim that indoor, vertical farms need/have zero pesticides because it's a totally contained environment? I'm not sure I'd pay 5x for "taste and the feeling of eating local" but if it's differentiated in terms of pesticide exposure then I'd start to take a look.
It's just a guess but I don't believe your calculus holds for countries that can't produce or cheaply import from regions like Canada/USA. The case I have top of mind is Korea, which has very little arable land and can only import via boats from China (quality worries). Japan is probably similar to a lesser scale. I believe the economics of vertical farming in these regions make a lot more sense, and 2020 has created huge price hikes in food in Korea because of too much rain and expensive imports.
Also hi , I've been curious for years what happened with your farming plans. I can guess you walked away from them!
> They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local.
I don't know anything about farming, but this is exactly what the first version of a true innovation usually looks like. First versions of everything, from iron weapons that bent on the battlefield, to computers that took a room, almost always were more expensive and worse than existing alternatives. These first version occupied weird niches, for example where existing alternatives were not available (as trade of tin and copper broke down after bronze age collapse) or were just toys for rich people (like first mobile phones and many, many other things).
But unlike existing alternatives, they only started their cycle of scaling and optimisations.
It’s markets. Vertical farming will do better in singapore or China or maybe even India..possibly MENA region because their diet involves a lot more than lettuce.
Altho with the exception of Middle East and possibly Singapore, other regions will be severely constrained wrt energy requirements, infrastructure.
It is kind of a minor tragedy that due to American poverty of imagination and a lack of culinary heritage, all our indoor vegetables are lettuce and all our vat grown meat resembles burgers. We can’t seem to progress beyond burger meat and lettuce even with cutting edge tech.
Perfect day makes dairy that doesn’t require cows. And what is their first product? Ice cream. It’s all very depressing. In 500 years, when we run out of natural resources and when our food comes from fermentation tanks, veggies from vertical farms and is 3D printed...we will all be eating burgers and salad and ice cream.
Singapore is different compared to China or India because it has pretty high population density but acute shortage of land that can be used for farming. It is also a country that likes to plan ahead and have contingency measures to reduce dependencies/risk and actually has the political climate, knowledge and willingness to do what is necessary. I think it'll achieve great efficiency in this field.
> Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent [...]
I image that countries with very little agriculturally usable land are watching this closely. Reducing dependency on imported food is probably in every nation's interest.
It might only serve a tiny subset of the market, but subsets can still be highly profitable. Consider Apple vs the Android ecosystem. Most phones are Android phones, yet Apple makes most profits from the market thanks to their brand.
I think it's a technology we should continue to develop, because at the moment we have a relatively freely flowing global economy that allows for the exotic fruit and vegetable availability that we are used to. That is unlikely to always be the case, and not every country has vast acres to spare on food production should they lose the ability to compete or participate in the global market.
What about sweet potatoes? I'm guessing the argument is that it's not necessary because we have the available land. They can however be grown in stacked levels of soil layered with grow lights. You could very easily potentially have a skyscraper filled stacked and growing sweet potatoes.
Indoor/Vert farming Cannabis is very expensive - even with full auto-hydro/aero setups. And, after legalization there is huge downward pressure on PPK of the material (eg: -75-80%)
This is a genuine question - would you mind listing some of those crops?
Specifically, there's a number of states in the U.S. that allows people to legally grow marijuana / cannabis. I know it's still illegal at the Federal level, but that hasn't stopped people here in Washington state.
Plus, I was never the type of cool that knew a lot about drugs and alcohol. Computers, sure - I was definitely the type of cool that knew a lot about computers, but not so much the recreationally altered states.
Which has now come back to haunt me as I'm woefully ignorant of which crops might grow well in this sort of environment :)
> One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired
The amount of subsidies poured into this lifestyle must be unbelievable. The whole thing has to be flown-in, including fuel to operate it. Before that what did these communities eat?
The amount of arable land in many countries has more or less _already_ peaked. It is certainly not growing fast enough keep up with population.
The ability to make lots of good grow in places other than arable farmland is going to be very important in the next 100 years.
With infinite energy, Israel could have infinite water. They already have unlimited light and land. This is an energy intensive technology.
So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less.
(I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)
Of course the capital costs of this are absurd (that's basically what you're saying here), but if it results in tomatoes and strawberries which don't taste like paste, it's worth it to me. Dutch greenhouse farms are considerably more realistic [0], but who knows, this may have some niches in extremely urban areas.
> The total area of the Netherlands is just 41.6 square kilometers, but the country is ranked first in the world by the area of greenhouse farms.
Well, that would be quite something.. but the number is a typo. From Wikipedia:
> With a population of 17.4 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,800 square kilometres (16,100 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 square kilometres (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 12th most densely populated country in the world.
The total amount of greenhouse area is about 10,000 hectares (24710 acres).
It does seem to be a regular pattern. In this case the criticism seems to be that a system that is designed to grow salad crops can't grow staples so is useless.
It outproduces salad, but not potatoes, wheat, and most of all humus. Also the need for heavy machinery has a real cost in green house gas emissions (same issue as with electric cars).
There are real ecological services provided by a healthy land and natural agriculture that can't be provided by such food factories.
As @systemvoltage wrote, this is good for a heavily centralized system that's owned by big corporations looking for big profits but that's not a solution to the global environmental and soon to come (and it's already here for a lot of us) food/water crisis.
Surely the reduction in land used must have a significant environmental impact. For the crops in question, you are talking about the ability to have a 2-acre building surrounded by a 718 acre nature reserve to get the same results as a 720 acre monocrop. I find it hard to believe that the long-term environmental impact of installing equipment would actually outweigh preserving 99.7% of the land.
Are you sure you want to trade farming of land for whatever development or use of that land may occur when/if our hypothetical 720 acre farm is retired from ag production? Their seems to be an assumption that the next owner will be a steward of these lands.
Honestly, near-term, you're probably looking at replacing 720 acres of mono-cropped salad with a 2-acre building surrounded by 718 acres of mono-cropped grain.
Who's the "a lot" of us with a food and water crisis? My understanding is that the vast majority of water usage is industrial and I've heard for decades that food scarcity isn't an issue, it's just the distribution that's a problem (i.e. politics). Desalination can be done for fractions of a penny per gallon at scale.
Unit costs of goods sold would be interesting, compared to 'traditional' classic modern intensive farm price.
An observation from the article also could be answered: what areal space is required to generate the power?
Neither of these are meant to be thunderclap proof-it-fails critique, they're just interesting.
In food miles, freshness and lack of need for water, fertiliser and pesticides its winning hands down for feeding its urban population surrounding it. Repurposed brownfield site, existing buildings would also reduce impact.
I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Supporting towns. Jobs are empowering, even crap ag. jobs but a reality here is that farming is overwhelmingly industrialised and jobs are either kept in the family or massively exploitative piece rate so this isn't a killer argument against either, but I do worry the rural area depopulation is a continuing trend.
Too late for that. My family are big baseball fans, and we go to the baseball hall of fame for tournaments or indications every few years.
That drive from Albany to Cooperstown is progressively more depressing first as small dairy was destroyed by deregulation and later as agricultural policy put everyone out of business unless you grow corn or flowers or farm tourism.
Traditional farms aren't going to be upset by this approach. It more of an answer to how we are going to feed 14 billion people than it is a threat to our current way of growing things to eat.
Also, by not growing these products on other farmland, other crops, which aren’t suitable for vertical solutions, can be grown on that land. There is a shortage of farmable land, so this is another piece in the puzzle.
So I know nuclear is supposed to be able to handle current power needs of humanity for quite a while, but if we fill earth with super intensive vertical farms powered by artificial light...
Anyone ran the numbers on how long uranium would last running sun-less agriculture for a few billion people?
Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well. The only concern I have is soil, nutrient supplementation quality - profit focus would dictate trying to include bare minimum nutrients which doesn't necessarily yield the best food but "good enough" being produced.
Yep, we already see this in many cultivars today - they are less nutritious than many heirloom varieties because they prioritize production (paid by the pound).
>Environmental impact needs to be calculated as well.
The first comment on the articles page was addressing some of that impact.
Does it feed insects and birds and support biodiversity? Does it sequester carbon in the soil, making below-ground life healthy, increasing access of plants to nutrients, and hence produce healthier food? Does it help water infiltrate into the ground, this replenishing ground water and aquifers? Does convert sunlight into latent heat via plant transpiration, and thus support the Small Water Cycles that cool the surface of the earth and convey water (via rain) downwind to drier land? Does it engage the senses with beautiful sights and smells? Does it engage humans in an honest day's work, making them proud contributors to society?
I just don’t believe these numbers. I’d like to see an independent study by a non-financially-involved university before I believe that some techies have figured out a way to boost yields more than two orders of magnitude over modern agriculture. Either there is some gimmick - a specific plant or strain or whatever - or the energy costs are 3 or more orders of magnitude over normal agriculture - or the numbers are cooked in some other way. I’d be as excited as anyone if someone could pull off a 360x or 400x yield in a useful food crop, but these guys would be trillionaires if they had actually done so.
They could have at least told us how much electricity and human labor it uses per pound of produce - it doesn't instill confidence that the article only talks about space usage, when the important question is "at what cost?".
Yeah, this article was lacking those and other details. Most every claim was made in a generic way that seemed to imply most any crop could be grown this way when in truth they are pretty much growing salad greens only.
It doesn’t look like the produce produced by this farm (from the pictures) provides much nutritional value. Creating overpriced herbs, salads and micro greens in little plastic pots maybe commercially viable but we need vegetables like legumes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and brocolli (and in the US maize) to feed the world.
The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.
This author must have a truly low opinion of me to think I'd fall for that horseshit. Before you can tell what effect the conditions have on yield you have to compare the grow area. Each vertical pane contributes to the grow area. What is the grow area of the vertical farm? It's not even in the damn article at all. What's the cost per kilogram of plant matter? Per kg of dry yield?
Plenty’s farms grow non-GMO crops and don’t use herbicides or pesticides.
Ah, there it is. This isn't a project to save the world; it's a project to lure investors and then lose money for ten years before getting bought out and shut down.
Readit News
Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent, and it's gonna be really hard when competing with the free rain, free sun, and insane automation available for field agriculture already. Even Plenty with SoftBank's extra 'nutrients' tops out at strawberries. See https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agr... for some raw data on unit economics.
One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired, or https://farm.bot/ which encourages hardware hacking and food supply awareness.
I'm not trying to be snarky; I'd love to see something like this, but the comment you reply to is my conclusion as well. I used to be very excited about this stuff, but the only viable crops are leafy greens sold at a high price.
I own a business selling sensors for use in hydroponics. I started because I wanted to make an impact in food availability. I've abandoned that, and continue because hobbyists, and companies like this have a use.
Right now there's a flood of capital available, so it's very hard to tell a priori which ideas have legs and which are just mirages that look good in a slide deck. This could be amazing. But it could be another Juicero or WeWork, where the unit economics just don't make any sense.
Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California.
It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.
1. Aquaculture works 2. It's successful with only a handful of species 3. It can't replace marine caught wildlife 4. Flavor-wise it is frequently inferior.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't grow salmon, tipalia, shripm or oysters, we just shouldn't make a claim or claims that aren't reasonable (i.e. aquaculture can feed the world or aquaculture will revolutionize modern food production).
Vertical farming is great for greens, microgreens, strawberries, herbs and that's about it.
You respond with a qualitative argument that you can grow a business and/or industry and maje better technologies if you have profit.
The issue isn't that the technology isn't good enough, it's that there isn't as many nutrients (as in soil) in a city or apartment to grow highly nutritional food. You'd have to truck in bags of soil to do this, which isn't nearly as efficient as leaving the soil where it is and growing it there.
Meanwhile Tesla has a waiting list for virtually every one of their vehicles and is the only one selling them.
I'm rather bearish on Tesla for various reasons. I also believe current stock prices for Tesla and Amazon are mainly driven by general uncertainty and too much liquid cash with nowhere to go.
That being said, vertical farming doesn't realy solve any problems, food nd water are distribution and not availability problems. None of which are solved by vertical farming. Obviously that doesn't prevent people from raising a shit load of VC money. If anything, the wetern world is producing too much food, incl. meat, in hyper industrialized farms already.
For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.
its been this way for several decades.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
As it stands today, as a nation, the United States supply of vegetables and many other products is totally dependent on the Colorado river. A variety of problems from climate change to terrorist or other attack could rapidly impact our ability to feed ourselves.
There's plenty that can be done in traditional agriculture.
A better approach might be to produce hydrogen via photovoltaics and electrolysis, then use hydrogen metabolising bacteria to create more complex carbon hydrates and proteins from that.
The raw output of this might be edible in an emergency, but you would typically further refine it. Either you use fungi and end up with something similar to Quorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn , or you feed it to livestock (fish, chicken).
I think that this might be the base of the food chain for space settlements. On earth, traditional agriculture works just fine to produce an abundance of food, and I don't see more than aesthetic reasons to change it.
There was a previous discussion with some more details about what they're doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344636
The PV efficiency on the other hand only gives you electrons and you need electrolysis and bacterial metabolism on top which have their own losses.
There are definitely barriers to entry associated with getting into vertical farming, but there are also advantages for the farmer.
While millions of people do eat hydroponically grown/growable produce, they do not survive on these kinds of crops. They rely on root vegetables and cereals for that, and those are currently impossible to grow in the way described in TFA.
That's something I hadn't considered, the social aspects. Thanks!
The greatest value of urban farms might be in primary-school education.
Also hi , I've been curious for years what happened with your farming plans. I can guess you walked away from them!
I don't know anything about farming, but this is exactly what the first version of a true innovation usually looks like. First versions of everything, from iron weapons that bent on the battlefield, to computers that took a room, almost always were more expensive and worse than existing alternatives. These first version occupied weird niches, for example where existing alternatives were not available (as trade of tin and copper broke down after bronze age collapse) or were just toys for rich people (like first mobile phones and many, many other things).
But unlike existing alternatives, they only started their cycle of scaling and optimisations.
Altho with the exception of Middle East and possibly Singapore, other regions will be severely constrained wrt energy requirements, infrastructure.
It is kind of a minor tragedy that due to American poverty of imagination and a lack of culinary heritage, all our indoor vegetables are lettuce and all our vat grown meat resembles burgers. We can’t seem to progress beyond burger meat and lettuce even with cutting edge tech.
Perfect day makes dairy that doesn’t require cows. And what is their first product? Ice cream. It’s all very depressing. In 500 years, when we run out of natural resources and when our food comes from fermentation tanks, veggies from vertical farms and is 3D printed...we will all be eating burgers and salad and ice cream.
https://www.urbankisaan.com/ourgreens seems to be doing exactly that, too, in India.
I image that countries with very little agriculturally usable land are watching this closely. Reducing dependency on imported food is probably in every nation's interest.
"Reducing dependency on imported" anything seems to be an idea that often isn't a reality when it comes to paying for it.
They just aren't especially....legal at the current time.
Specifically, there's a number of states in the U.S. that allows people to legally grow marijuana / cannabis. I know it's still illegal at the Federal level, but that hasn't stopped people here in Washington state.
Plus, I was never the type of cool that knew a lot about drugs and alcohol. Computers, sure - I was definitely the type of cool that knew a lot about computers, but not so much the recreationally altered states.
Which has now come back to haunt me as I'm woefully ignorant of which crops might grow well in this sort of environment :)
The amount of subsidies poured into this lifestyle must be unbelievable. The whole thing has to be flown-in, including fuel to operate it. Before that what did these communities eat?
Deleted Comment
I’m sure the USA will also unlock some new farming areas.
So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less.
(I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)
This is a long way of saying “is completely useless”
[0] https://tour-pronl.com/en/mice-tourism/tours-for-professiona...
Well, that would be quite something.. but the number is a typo. From Wikipedia:
> With a population of 17.4 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,800 square kilometres (16,100 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 square kilometres (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 12th most densely populated country in the world.
The total amount of greenhouse area is about 10,000 hectares (24710 acres).
May be true, but I take these top comments with a grain of salt.
Every new tech has its Hype Cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
There are real ecological services provided by a healthy land and natural agriculture that can't be provided by such food factories.
As @systemvoltage wrote, this is good for a heavily centralized system that's owned by big corporations looking for big profits but that's not a solution to the global environmental and soon to come (and it's already here for a lot of us) food/water crisis.
An observation from the article also could be answered: what areal space is required to generate the power?
Neither of these are meant to be thunderclap proof-it-fails critique, they're just interesting.
In food miles, freshness and lack of need for water, fertiliser and pesticides its winning hands down for feeding its urban population surrounding it. Repurposed brownfield site, existing buildings would also reduce impact.
I fear a loss of jobs and richness in ag. Supporting towns. Jobs are empowering, even crap ag. jobs but a reality here is that farming is overwhelmingly industrialised and jobs are either kept in the family or massively exploitative piece rate so this isn't a killer argument against either, but I do worry the rural area depopulation is a continuing trend.
That drive from Albany to Cooperstown is progressively more depressing first as small dairy was destroyed by deregulation and later as agricultural policy put everyone out of business unless you grow corn or flowers or farm tourism.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...
They didn't mention it because it's impractically high right now. As an experiment this is interesting but it's nowhere near cost effective yet.
Anyone ran the numbers on how long uranium would last running sun-less agriculture for a few billion people?
The first comment on the articles page was addressing some of that impact.
Does it feed insects and birds and support biodiversity? Does it sequester carbon in the soil, making below-ground life healthy, increasing access of plants to nutrients, and hence produce healthier food? Does it help water infiltrate into the ground, this replenishing ground water and aquifers? Does convert sunlight into latent heat via plant transpiration, and thus support the Small Water Cycles that cool the surface of the earth and convey water (via rain) downwind to drier land? Does it engage the senses with beautiful sights and smells? Does it engage humans in an honest day's work, making them proud contributors to society?
Your fear is a century late. Really, all of civilized history late. The very clear trend of civilization is loss of agricultural jobs.
This author must have a truly low opinion of me to think I'd fall for that horseshit. Before you can tell what effect the conditions have on yield you have to compare the grow area. Each vertical pane contributes to the grow area. What is the grow area of the vertical farm? It's not even in the damn article at all. What's the cost per kilogram of plant matter? Per kg of dry yield?
Plenty’s farms grow non-GMO crops and don’t use herbicides or pesticides.
Ah, there it is. This isn't a project to save the world; it's a project to lure investors and then lose money for ten years before getting bought out and shut down.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-first-solar-tower-powered-...
https://www.sundropfarms.com