Wow. Indoor farming actually makes sense in the US market.
Edit: yes, I'm from Europe, obviously. And now I'm sad :/
That's why we have people eating mcdonalds everyday.
The only people spending $3 for a head of lettuce are people looking for a way to separate their food from everyone else.
3 for lettuce is ridiculous.
A modular system like in the article could be extended to be aquaponic. If so, they could take advantage of waste food from the host retail store / restaurant as input to the fish. Such a system might do well in China where shoppers are accustomed to selecting live fish.
> This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
Am I missing something, or did you accidentally flip the words "gross" and "net" above?
Early on, I had a lot of trouble getting the flood and drain system to work correctly. Substrate would get caught in the siphon, and prevent it from initiating the drain.
Once the flood and drain system was working, I ran into issues related to my use of heterogeneous substrate. I had both hydroton pellets and perlite in the grow bed. When you mix substrates of multiple densities, both of which are lighter than water, the flood and drain cycle will result in the lightest substrate filtering to the top of the bed. This caused all of my plants to sink into the water.
After solving that problem, it became a simple matter of fish nutrition. I live in Colorado, which has very hot summers. Around 90°F is typical, but in the evenings the temperature gets down quite low. As it would happen, the average daily temperature was between 60 and 70°F. Fish modulate their diet according to the temperature of the water that they're in. And my koi would not eat enough.
In the end, the project was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. But I couldn't justify repeating the effort after all of the fish died in the winter. It didn't seem humane.
A few years ago I was pursuing aquaponics as a hobby over the summer. It was clear then that economies of scale were rapidly driving down the costs of indoor horticulture. My aquaponics project failed, but the basic economics of grocery-attached farms make a lot of sense. I built a business model to determine the economics of running a farm in a shipping container that could be deployed to an underutilized Whole Foods parking lot.
The model accounted for a 81m3 shipping container being filled top-to-bottom with fruiting plants, like tomatoes, but it's easily adjustable to other plants, like lettuces. The model is pretty sensitive to things like the productive life of the plant, lead time to productivity, and sale price.
Selling heads of lettuce for $3 each yields around $6000/yr in gross revenue per container per year.
This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
The model, in case anyone's interested: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DkjOIs7hXyxIiN_iWXK0...