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[Reelya]

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/8/16611710/vertical-farms

For as long as I can remember, people have been hyping vertical farming — growing crops indoors, using vertical space to intensify production.

Its virtues, relative to conventional agriculture, have long been clear. Indoors, the climate can be controlled year-round. Pests can be minimized, and with them pesticides. Water and nutrients can be applied in precise quantities. By going up rather than out, a vertical farm can produce more food per acre of land. And by siting close to an urban area, it can reduce long distribution chains, getting fresher food to customers’ tables, quicker.

Its drawbacks have become equally clear. They mainly come down to cost. Farming well requires deep know-how and expertise; it has proven extraordinarily difficult to expand vertical farms in a way that holds quality consistent while driving costs down. Optimizing production at a small scale is very different from doing so at a large scale. The landscape is littered with the corpses of vertical-farming startups that thought they could beat the odds (though several are still alive and kicking).

Now a young Silicon Valley startup called Plenty thinks it has cracked the code. It has enormous expansion plans and a bank account full of fresh investor funding, but most excitingly, it is building a 100,000 square foot vertical-farming warehouse in Kent, Washington, just outside of Seattle, your author’s home town. That farm is expected to be open and delivering produce locally by midyear, and is designed to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually. Your author, in keeping with coastal elitist stereotypes, is a fervent lover of greens.
...
Plenty grows plants on 20-foot vertical towers instead of the stacks of horizontal shelves used by most other vertical-farming companies. Plants jut horizontally from the towers, growing out of a substrate made primarily of recycled plastic bottles (there’s no soil involved). Water and nutrients are fed in from the top of the tower and dispersed by gravity (rather than pumps, which saves money). All water, including from condensation, is collected and recycled.
...
Bottom line: Relative to conventional agriculture, Plenty says that it can get as much as 350 times the produce out of a given acre of land, using 1 percent as much water. “It is the most efficient [form of agriculture] in terms of the amount of productive capacity per dollar spent,” Barnard has said. “Period.”

It’s worth reading those claims again, as they are pretty eye-popping. The next grandest claim in the industry is AeroFarms, a Newark, New Jersey company with nine indoor farms, which says it can get to 130 times the amount of produce per acre.

It will be a real game-changer if someone comes up with a viable model for vertically scalable farming of crops.

[redwallzyl]

Ah, scalability. The essence of capitalist ideals. So efficient and alienating.

[Reelya]

From what I've found the key killer to vertical farming startups is that they pick the worst possible locations. The technology might work and be really damn impressive, but if you're setting up your first location in downtown Vancouver, you're going to go bankrupt pretty damn fast. You can't scale if you're spending all of your money on property costs.


Yes, one of the first vertical farming startups built their first vertical farm in downtown Vancouver. They went bankrupt, and in a postmortem blamed it on the fact that they picked downtown Vancouver versus literally anywhere else. The ones that have been starting up in, say, Texas, have been faring much better.

That's pretty silly. This new one is building them outside cities. e.g. exactly what Walmart and other retailers already do.

[wierd]

Part of the allure is that they can be integrated with a city infrastructure; It is one of the reasons for wanting to use vertical farming. (By being inside the city limits, it reduces the amount of transport distance and warehouse times needed for fresh produce at retailers in the city, as well as placating the "We dont want to pay for such niceties as broadband internet, paved roads, landline telephone, and such for rural people, even though the city is where all the money is, and we profit from rural people having those things" itch.

[Reelya]

There's also risk. Even before man-made climate change was a thing, traditional agriculture carries period risk of total failure. Drought, floods etc. A modular controlled environment suffers from none of those things.

You just need a replicatable "factory" type farming method to be a certain % as profitable as what a traditional farm is in the good years, then that model would eventually supersede traditional farming completely. e.g. indoor farming wouldn't be likely to get destroyed by storms or hail at unpredictable intervals. It's the unpredictability of traditional farming which will be it's downfall.

[Kagus]

That, and/or agricultural seed companies get even more draconian after their current regulations don't provide enough income, and they eventually strangle private farmers to death.

[Trekkin]

There's also risk. Even before man-made climate change was a thing, traditional agriculture carries period risk of total failure. Drought, floods etc. A modular controlled environment suffers from none of those things.

You just need a replicatable "factory" type farming method to be a certain % as profitable as what a traditional farm is in the good years, then that model would eventually supersede traditional farming completely. e.g. indoor farming wouldn't be likely to get destroyed by storms or hail at unpredictable intervals. It's the unpredictability of traditional farming which will be it's downfall.

A sealable environment also allows more freedom in using GMOs; people generally have loud opinions about engineered plants, but an indoor farm could make great use of genetically optimized substrate microbiota.

[wierd]

Microbiota are hard to keep contained.  You would need very aggressive clean-room style entrance and exit protocols, which would drive up operating costs, and would not look pretty to (morons, er...) "Skeptics" who are afraid of such things.

[Reelya]

There are ways to contain it without that. One method is to engineer microbes who lack the ability to synthesize some needed nutrient, but which you add to the contained environment. If you're GMOing anyway, then turning off some chemical pathway would be relatively easy.

[Jopax]

Water and nutrients are fed in from the top of the tower and dispersed by gravity (rather than pumps, which saves money).

But what gets them to the top of the tower? Is there a dude with a ladder and pails of nutrient rich water who refills them on a regular basis or what?

[Reelya]

Not "tower" as in the whole building, if you read the quoted section again, the "towers" are 20 foot tall sections on which plants grow. The point is that the nutrients are added at the top and they have a structure that allows gravity to deliver precise amounts to where it's needed throughout the structure. The alternative is a pressurized pump system throughout the individual tower structure which spreads the nutrients. Just not having to pressurize the substance would save some energy and money.

The claim is only that it "saves money" not that it "saves all the money". Saving some money is enough for the claim to be true.

[Jopax]

Sure, I got that bit, but you still need a way to put said stuff at a 20 foot height before gravity can do its thing. Simply saying they cut out pumps is misleading, there has to be pumps of some sort for the thing to work, otherwise you need the bucket guy, and that just ain't efficent.

[Reelya]

That's just being pedantic now and not really proving anything. e.g. perhaps there's 80% less pump pressure needed this way, which would be in line with the claim. e.g. there wasn't any claim that the entire company was "pump free" was there? Just that the way that each tower disperse the nutrients is by gravity, with removes the need for pumps.

[wierd]

There are ways to contain it without that. One method is to engineer microbes who lack the ability to synthesize some needed nutrient, but which you add to the contained environment. If you're GMOing anyway, then turning off some chemical pathway would be relatively easy.

The problem is that microbiota are the poster children for lateral gene transfer.  Without those protocols, wild-types enter the building, and bring their healthy genomes with them. Those then swap plasmids with the GMO species, and you have hardy(ish) second generation hybrids that can escape easily.

When approaching a problem like this, you cant just think "Oh. that's super easy." No, you have to actually address all the potential methods of genetic contamination both in the system, and out.

[Kagus]

While I'm not sure about going full-on microbiotic environment control, the contained structure does help reduce the risk of the modified plants themselves escaping into the local ecosystem and becoming invasive species. Which itself is a concern, especially in more fragile/susceptible areas.

That's just being pedantic now and not really proving anything. e.g. perhaps there's 80% less pump pressure needed this way, which would be in line with the claim. e.g. there wasn't any claim that the entire company was "pump free" was there? Just that the way that each tower disperse the nutrients is by gravity, with removes the need for pumps.

I kinda feel like this is needlessly aggressive... The wording is a bit ambiguous and could easily be interpreted to mean "no pumps at all", and as with all "groundbreaking" startups, it's healthy to have a fair dose of skepticism before they've actually broken any ground. Hell, Kickstarter should be a great example of this... "Our system is unique in that it completely solves and avoids these common problems met by our competitors", and then slightly later "turns out we actually ran into the same problems, because we couldn't figure out a solution like we thought we'd be able to by now".

Then again, it's Vox, so I wouldn't necessarily place the blame for miscommunication on the actual startup.