When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That tech like this will solve for food problems, such as urban blight.
Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.
It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.
What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.
With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.
Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.
You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.
The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that.
The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
I think nothing will work without some kind of change to the way of life. Urban living has taken people away from the land, so there is this illusion that we don’t have to participate in the ecology. Like water infrastructure, people growing up in cities expect food-on-demand … if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.
there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.
we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.
the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
Uh, no. Permaculture produces a fraction of the calories per acre of traditional monoculture agriculture. It is nothing more than an amusement for dilettantes, as is any other system that claims to significantly improve upon the ~12,000 of human experience with field-based agriculture. I'm in the process of converting a 20 acre tract of woods into a "productive" farm via a combination of aquapontics and permaculture, I just don't have any illusions that I'm doing anything other than fucking around for my own amusement.
Does the traditional monoculture acres include the acres for fertilizer, the production of all of the equipment needed, fuel, seed, equipment and fuel for transport to final location, storage, pesticides, insecticides, and water?
I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
I wonder about affordability, but I am very pro-farmbot. Far more than self-driving cars. If anything, farmbots could provide a lot of very helpful groundwork in a lower-stakes environment which the self-driving cars people could use. My only real concern is if farmbots could be cheap enough to absorb a large portion of the -cide market.
Most herbicides, for example, could be replaced by something which plucks. Insecticide money could, partially, go into bots that could pick-and-crush unwanted insects aboveground. We would still have grubs. Fungicide expenditure could be slashed: detect infection on a plant, spray it and its neighbors, maybe a few more downwind. Your bot, named He Who Walks Behind the Rows, trundles along slowly, observing each plant.
Per acre, it would have to travel roughly three and a third miles. At a half-mile-per-hour pace, thirteen hours a day, you could swing two acres a day per bot. Let's say your bot eats your production cost in half, about four hundred dollars per acre. If a bot lasts only a season, well, it has to cost under a grand to be worth it, and I haven't even touched power costs yet. So it will need to survive multiple growing seasons. I can see Overlord stations every few acres, maybe grabbing some solar power or charging up off a grid, storing it so that it can be dispersed to the bots at night. They could serve as data collection points, centimeter-level GPS correction servers, and so on, as well.
I could see the temptation to work irrigation into the bot somehow but water is heavy and I imagine something entirely separate to provide water.
I'm making a lot of assumptions, like "each plant ought to be looked at each day" and the standard thirty-inch rows, etc.
How do harvesting machines work with this mixed planting approach? Do you need to redesign existing machines completely for this novel planting scheme? Won’t it be extremely hard to harvest from one type of plant without damaging other plants that are “occupying different canopy layers”?
It takes new machines and they generally damage something, yes. Despites op's emphasis on low-tech, the people I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper.
"""
It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for.
Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts.
On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.
Keep digging and sooner or later you'll come around to accepting that your previous discoveries (like broad implementation of permaculture) can never be realized under capitalism; that capitalism is in fact the opposition to your vision.
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off investing in ideas that leverage services provided by nature for free than trying to recreate complex systems that we don’t even really understand from scratch.
By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them.
E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm.
If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.
It is not even flying them in vs vertical farm. But vertical farm vs more traditional greenhouse solutions. Where you can do all the circulation control, but also can use natural light and don't need large concrete structures.
There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
>> all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud.
> By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing very, very right: plants need lots and lots of sunlight that we can get for free with horizontal farming. Vertical farming throws all that away, and therefore is mostly nonsense. IIRC, all it can manage is low-calories crops like lettuce. You're not getting industrial-scale, vertically-farmed potatoes without a bunch of generators powering tons of floodlights.
The vast majority of humanity is living in places where basically all food can be grown locally, with some exceptions for luxury (tropical fruits in high latitudes) and seasonality (not alle produce does store well fresh, though practically all can be frozen, dried or canned in some way).
There are some extreme exceptions like the United Arab Emirates etc. but they are home to only a fraction of the world population and building a city like Dubai in a desert was probably not a great idea to begin with.
Nature does not have great pest control, which is why we spray so much chemistry that gets into our food and water.
Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
Nature does have decent pest control, but the way we do farming does basically everything to circumvent it.
If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.
If nature wouldn't have great pest control, there wouldn't be any nature. The whole point of evolution is for living things to get better at resisting pests (also avoid being eaten and mate more successfully).
Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from poor to rich countries using cheap fossile fuel powered gigantic ships IS the most profitable way to make most of the food we eat, BUT that doesn't mean it also makes the most sense to do it this way.
There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.
That ship has sailed? The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc. Techno-farming cost more, in fuel and resources.
And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
In the EU, commercial pork production is almost exclusively done in large-scale indoor operations with hundreds to thousands of animals in one facility. These animals represent hundreds of thousands of Euros worth of investment for their owners and there are stringent laws and regulations in place that require everything that enters these facilities to be effectively sterilized. *Still* we get huge outbreaks of some disease or other every few years that can cripple pork production in entire regions. If pork producers can't keep pathogens out of their operations, just assume no one can do so effectively.
I've seen a decent number of agricultural areas where the crops are covered with a vast mesh tent supported by a wood or metal framework. Lets sunlight in, keeps insects out. That seems a lot more economical than building a vertical farm in most countries.
There are edge cases where the technology developed for vertical farms seems very useful: densely-populated, small countries; space stations, and off-world colonies. But for most of Earth? Look at how much of the US is farmland, and then imagine how many expensive towers and associated infrastructure you'd need to replace it.
> Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
There are plenty of great projects and commercial regenerative farms that have demonstrated that exploited and degraded soils can be made productive again in a matter of years with little to no external inputs in terms of fertilizer and water. The Work of Ernst Götschl (syntropic agriculture) comes to mind in tropical climates, or Mark Shepard in mid-west US.
I reckon it's not based on economic sense. Rather it's about aesthetics. It feels good to look at your vertical farm, it's a nice little hobby to maintain I'm sure, and a certain pride to eat your own produce. And so people try to rationalize this and work backwards into an explanation for why it's a logical thing to do, but really it's just about that warm fuzzy feeling of having your own vertical farm.
Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil life that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant, if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture. If fertility isn't free, who the f*ck would something like succession happen, which is the norm in nature and can turn barren land into perennial forests.
EDITED TO ADD: This is the reason why agriculture before the advent of chemical fertilizers (in the 1900s) was even possible. You'd simply rotate your crops so that they'd create a balanced nutrition profile in the soil without the need to add a lot of external fertility. Edge cases like the Nile floodplains excepted.
Cows are usually started outdoors and then finished indoors. There's no reason why farming couldn't follow a similar hybrid approach. That way you could e.g. grow tropical crops in New England, but still not have to pay for the majority of the required resources.
Explain how you create a tropical environment in New England that doesn’t require an incredible amount of resources to mimic the temperature, humidity, soil conditions, required to bear profitable products
High tunnels are very efficient. Greenhouses are very efficient. I've visited https://district.farm/ and it's clearly the future (or the present if you're in Northern Europe). When I went there they were at 1/4 of grow space that they are now.
Ready to expand? You just add more enclosures. You slowly recoup the capital cost of the structure. Might take a few years, but you will. Rinse and repeat.
The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can, and we don't have the capital in enough hands to make basic, boring, but efficient methods like this work at larger scale.
I call BS on their claim they cut resource usage by 95%.
Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive. This article explains why, and describes a common, practical alternative:
(Search for locally grown food to jump to the right figure).
Note that, even if the greenhouse, transport, storage and packaging all used zero resources, the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane) is going to be more than 5% the impact of traditionally grown food.
> Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive.
Uhh, I am not seeing anything in that article that supports that claim, other than the first sentence, which does not cite any sources.
That article appears to be discussing ways to maximize greenhouse performance in winter, on the premise that glass is a poor insulator. But no where does it discuss energy consumption of modern greenhouses. My understanding is that they do not use climate control at all, except maybe some fans for air circulation. So sure, put some walls on your greenhouse for better heat retention. But making something more efficient, that already uses nearly zero energy might not be the best use of resources.
>the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane)
The last time I tried to advocate for replacing landfills with incinerators on HN, someone came along to insist that methane recapture from landfills was possible and preferable (methane is useful, if you can confine it). I haven't had time to study that further, but managing food waste — aside from the actual lack of food it causes — is a solvable problem one way or another, and doesn't have to generate methane.
>The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can
This is true on multiple levels of the word use. From the practice of monocrops to only keeping the ground fertile through the use of chemicals, I'm amazed that we haven't had more problems.
It’s not always about efficiency. Sometimes, it is about resilience, anti-fragility, and food source locality. And maximizing efficiency tends to lead to trade off in those other areas.
We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup.
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.
> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves.
I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)
> I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ?
My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:
> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.
They've told their investors that everybody else does it wrong, to deliberately divorce their own valuation from reality. They don't want to be valued like a regular greenhouse company, they want to be valued as a cutting edge company with huge unbounded potential. Turning around and using COTS solutions undermines that narrative.
It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.
> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.
Literally just got fired from a company that was just like that. Had a great idea, but wanted to build everything themselves vs just pieces of system that could differentiate us. Add onto that a weak business plan plus trying to compete with others in the greens space and it didn’t go very far. A lot of fun to work on though!
I follow this segment closely because, among other things, we develop technology and software for the industry and have multiple installations. As a result of this, I have spent time working at these farms, some spanning over 20,000 square meters, and have a reasonable understanding of the challenges involved.
My impression has always been that too many of these entities end-up building what I call "monuments to computer science and technology", rather than farms. The last paragraph in the article is, to me, a typical sign of this issue:
“What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”
Right.
Maybe this is just marketing/fund-raising language. I get it. There's stupid money out there that will throw dollars at anything that sounds like it is aligned with trends. Maybe they should have added "GPT" to that paragraph.
I know indoor farms that are doing well. It's challenging, yes, most businesses are. Upward Farms decided to raise fish and plants. Yeah, good luck. That's likely where some of the "infinite challenges" they refer to came from.
Yes, technology is an absolute requirement for indoor farming. The key is to not make it about technology for technology's sake. Don't introduce a backhoe for a job that can be done with a shovel.
The farm business equation isn't, at a basic level, terribly complex. You are no building a data center. If you do, you will eventually be plowed-over when you fail.
Most, if not all, companies involved in the sector are unprofitable in what is still a relatively nascent industry requiring scale and investment to remain viable and compete with traditionally grown crops.
Many countries think food security is national security, so it will continue even if it requires government subsidy.
It's not that they're "forced" too, it's that farmers in those countries want to make money, to invest in the future. And the way to make money is to grow cash crops and sell them on the world market, not grow barely-profitable staples. Their governments can and do provide subsidies to make growing staples profitable, but that's on the individual countries.
It strange how the time of day so drastically effects the votes on these comments. They are positive when it aligns with the global east, but then swings negative once the time of day reaches the global west, like clock work :)
No mentions in this thread of biodiversity loss[1], which I've always considered one of the main reasons for vertical farming. We are (and have been) destroying immense swathes of land to make more room for human activities, killing numerous species to their extinction[2] in the process. This increased human land use includes farming.
Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.
Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.
> By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.
Readit News
Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.
It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.
What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.
With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.
Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.
You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.
The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.
there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.
we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.
the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
Most herbicides, for example, could be replaced by something which plucks. Insecticide money could, partially, go into bots that could pick-and-crush unwanted insects aboveground. We would still have grubs. Fungicide expenditure could be slashed: detect infection on a plant, spray it and its neighbors, maybe a few more downwind. Your bot, named He Who Walks Behind the Rows, trundles along slowly, observing each plant.
Per acre, it would have to travel roughly three and a third miles. At a half-mile-per-hour pace, thirteen hours a day, you could swing two acres a day per bot. Let's say your bot eats your production cost in half, about four hundred dollars per acre. If a bot lasts only a season, well, it has to cost under a grand to be worth it, and I haven't even touched power costs yet. So it will need to survive multiple growing seasons. I can see Overlord stations every few acres, maybe grabbing some solar power or charging up off a grid, storing it so that it can be dispersed to the bots at night. They could serve as data collection points, centimeter-level GPS correction servers, and so on, as well.
I could see the temptation to work irrigation into the bot somehow but water is heavy and I imagine something entirely separate to provide water.
I'm making a lot of assumptions, like "each plant ought to be looked at each day" and the standard thirty-inch rows, etc.
""" It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for. Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts.
... Here is a link: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm
"""
Isn't this common knowledge?
On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.
If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them.
E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm.
If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.
There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
> By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing very, very right: plants need lots and lots of sunlight that we can get for free with horizontal farming. Vertical farming throws all that away, and therefore is mostly nonsense. IIRC, all it can manage is low-calories crops like lettuce. You're not getting industrial-scale, vertically-farmed potatoes without a bunch of generators powering tons of floodlights.
There are some extreme exceptions like the United Arab Emirates etc. but they are home to only a fraction of the world population and building a city like Dubai in a desert was probably not a great idea to begin with.
Dead Comment
Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.
Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.
And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
There are edge cases where the technology developed for vertical farms seems very useful: densely-populated, small countries; space stations, and off-world colonies. But for most of Earth? Look at how much of the US is farmland, and then imagine how many expensive towers and associated infrastructure you'd need to replace it.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
Spot on! Plants without solar lights are for labs, not for food.
EDITED TO ADD: This is the reason why agriculture before the advent of chemical fertilizers (in the 1900s) was even possible. You'd simply rotate your crops so that they'd create a balanced nutrition profile in the soil without the need to add a lot of external fertility. Edge cases like the Nile floodplains excepted.
The US also also have a number of places where the soil has given way because of poor farming practices.
Also, the dust bowl.
Ready to expand? You just add more enclosures. You slowly recoup the capital cost of the structure. Might take a few years, but you will. Rinse and repeat.
The US is not hurting for land, we just don't use it as best we can, and we don't have the capital in enough hands to make basic, boring, but efficient methods like this work at larger scale.
Traditional greenhouses (which the one at that landing site appears to be) are extremely energy intensive. This article explains why, and describes a common, practical alternative:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-gree...
Also, people ridiculously overestimate the percentage of food’s carbon footprint that comes food transportation:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
(Search for locally grown food to jump to the right figure).
Note that, even if the greenhouse, transport, storage and packaging all used zero resources, the percentage of food they produce that is thrown into landfills (and turns to methane) is going to be more than 5% the impact of traditionally grown food.
Uhh, I am not seeing anything in that article that supports that claim, other than the first sentence, which does not cite any sources.
That article appears to be discussing ways to maximize greenhouse performance in winter, on the premise that glass is a poor insulator. But no where does it discuss energy consumption of modern greenhouses. My understanding is that they do not use climate control at all, except maybe some fans for air circulation. So sure, put some walls on your greenhouse for better heat retention. But making something more efficient, that already uses nearly zero energy might not be the best use of resources.
The last time I tried to advocate for replacing landfills with incinerators on HN, someone came along to insist that methane recapture from landfills was possible and preferable (methane is useful, if you can confine it). I haven't had time to study that further, but managing food waste — aside from the actual lack of food it causes — is a solvable problem one way or another, and doesn't have to generate methane.
Now, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizers...
This is true on multiple levels of the word use. From the practice of monocrops to only keeping the ground fertile through the use of chemicals, I'm amazed that we haven't had more problems.
Hmmm, really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.
I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)
My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:
> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.
What exactly do you offer / sell / solve?
How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
It’s unclear from your message.
It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.
> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?
Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.
My impression has always been that too many of these entities end-up building what I call "monuments to computer science and technology", rather than farms. The last paragraph in the article is, to me, a typical sign of this issue:
“What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”
Right.
Maybe this is just marketing/fund-raising language. I get it. There's stupid money out there that will throw dollars at anything that sounds like it is aligned with trends. Maybe they should have added "GPT" to that paragraph.
I know indoor farms that are doing well. It's challenging, yes, most businesses are. Upward Farms decided to raise fish and plants. Yeah, good luck. That's likely where some of the "infinite challenges" they refer to came from.
Yes, technology is an absolute requirement for indoor farming. The key is to not make it about technology for technology's sake. Don't introduce a backhoe for a job that can be done with a shovel.
The farm business equation isn't, at a basic level, terribly complex. You are no building a data center. If you do, you will eventually be plowed-over when you fail.
Many countries think food security is national security, so it will continue even if it requires government subsidy.
There is plenty of arable land it's just devouted to non staple production. And so they're stuck buying food with dollars they have no control over.
Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.
Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
I think this is MBA for they farmed animals