Correlation ≠ causation.
I did some experiments years ago growing food under various conditions. The difference in taste is dominated by two factors: variety and time of harvest.
Most industrial fruit is harvested long before it's ripe and ripens artificially in warehouses.
This is the main factor that determines taste as this is the process in which taste develops. The longer the process, the more time the produce has to collect and store the relevant substances. Artificial ripening only takes a day or two compared to weeks for naturally grown food.
Some tomatoes won’t ever get good. They just don’t produce the compounds necessary, have thick skin, etc.
However growing a decent variety in a vertical farming style would produce better tasting fruits.
Collecting ripe fruits with machines is however difficult.
https://lumigrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/research-opt...
Tomato from Naples (one of the richest soils in the world, due to volcanic activity e.g. Pompeii) ≠ organic tomato you buy in a good supermarket in the US.
yes, but you are spending money and carbon on re-creating sunlight.
> Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs
Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria.
> - Good for the environment to save so much in transport
None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit.
> - Independence from other countries
Actually this is the only real selling point. Theoretically you _could_ grow crops that are difficult to cultivate in your climate.
> - 250x less water
Yes, but I am sceptical. It should use less water than an open field, but the same as a greenhouse. if it truely is 250 less water then great. But I suspect thats clever comparison. There are ofcourse low cost ways to save water, like multch, or constricting water supplies and frequency just after germination.
Look, the problem I have is that a lot of these systems are basically hype machines. They are invented by tech bros who've just discovered that nature exsists. But instead of looking at the vast reams of research they head straight for the vertical/hydro/LED segment.
What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world
Up until that point, your just pissing dollars into the wind and wasting everyone's time inveting solutions to problems that are not actual problems.
Growing up on a farm in Germany, this is just what I would call decent farming and this is not rocket science. The knowledge how to do this is there and imho it does not involve some "tech disruption". Agriculture, at least in Germany, is highly mechanized/technized and in the end it does not matter if you look at conventional/"industrial" or ecological/bio-farming.
You need to take care of nutrients, humus creation, ... . This involves "artificial" fertilizer, regularly taking soil samples, to check what nutrients are there, crop rotation, etc... Sure you can just "raid" the soil and move on after ten years, but good luck finding new area in Germany to farm on ;-) And this is more or less independent of scale of farming.
I grew up going to a museum that had a historical farm every weekend (17th-early 19th century) Spreading liquid cow poop on the field wasn't an option because they didn't have the machinery. So they needed to do animal/crop rotation to keep the costs down (ie not pay for animal food.)
When I wasn't there I was on my parent's allotment. Next to the allotment was a standard arable field. For various reasons It stopped being used and was left to nature.
Two things struck me: 1) it was about 80cm lower than the allotments
2) nothing grew on it. The strip of land that served as a border had to be mown _every week_ to keep it from exploding.
It had basically degraded to sand and stone.
I am not sure if you are referring to specific types of crops, but Netherlands has consistently been the best in Europe if not the best in the world at agriculture. Using nothing but precisely good soil, science and ecosystem. Outpacing yield make in both Canada and even US with GMO. It also has one of the best Bio/Food Tech startup scene.
And they have been doing it for years , before it get reported on by mainstream media [1]. The only thing that is lacking, comparatively speaking is the management, marketing and sales. Where the US companies tends to excel.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
You can buy sponges that have nitrate/nitrite removers in them, but they run out, and have to be replaced. Its far better to grow the bacteria to do that for you.
However its like starting a new tank from scratch, it takes at least a month before you can put even 1/4 the fish in. Its much the same with fields.
Arable land is a resource not available to everyone as well, and we shouldn't assume we can just take it from those who have it. The global economy is more complicated than that.
And lastly, climate change is set to shake things up significantly. Record droughts already cause huge economic damage nearly every year, and it is only just beginning. We are going to need more control and stability over our food sources.
Absolutely there is room for development of more traditional farming but I think it would be naive to imagine that it would all just work out fine in a global market utopia. It is worth developing this technology.
I'm not talking about traditional farming. I'm talking about using "low tech" solutions but monitoring them scientifically.
For example, flooding in the UK is becoming a bigger problem, partly because of more rain, partly because people are allowed to live on flood plains. However a significant change is the way farming has modified land drainage. The soil contains less humus (spongey black/brown stuff, not hummus :)) which means it's much more like sand and doesn't absorb water.
This water runs off, taking the fertiliser, and soil with it. This clogs up and kills rivers, and because there is no capacity to hold water in the land, it all disgorges into streams and rivers at once, causing floods.
Improving soil health costs money, more money than fertiliser in the short term. There are no real incentives to change this. Everyone knows that soil health is degrading, but there isn't agreement on how to proceed.
> Record droughts already cause huge economic damage nearly every year
Farming has a massive impact on droughts. it also has a massive impact on heat absorption. hence my statement on mixed tree/arable.
Its less productive, but moderates water loss and heat gain. It also is a boon to wildlife. it can be made almost as productive if there is some form of intense labour. Assuming that we can mechanise it effectively we can remove the barriers to adoption.
> There are no real incentives to change this.
Well, yeah, it's not surprising. UK is not really looking far ahead nowadays.
Depends on location. For example, Iceland has a lot of geothermal heat, but natural climate unsuitable for agriculture.
Unlike farming in Africa and shipping it around the world? Vertical farming allow to farm specifically where it is needed.
What about freezing it to allow to get it all year long?
> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil.
Then go for it, see you in next year YC. If that really what it need then you won't have trouble selling it.
Isn't this exactly what vertical farms solve in a single move? The automated part is extremely hard to do in a field, wind, rain, UV and sheer sq footage all work against you. We pretty much nailed automated warehouses at this point, vertical farms are just a re-implmentation of that technology for agriculture.
Humanity has spent close to 10 millenia at this point improving and optimising agriculture. I think it fair to say that we've made all of the major breakthroughs for farming in a field at this point, and if we want to see a step change in food production efficiency and reliability (which we need if we intend to feed 8-12 billion mouths) then we need to start looking beyond traditional farms.
We know there won't be enough arable land in the world to feed everyone in world 50-100 years from now using any currently known techniques, and climate change is only making that worse by reducing the amount of arable land available. Being able to build high efficiently (both in terms of land and energy) farming systems is incredibly important.
Being able to move to a system where almost all of the energy input is electricity opens up a whole world of new possibilities. Allowing us to build farms almost anywhere without regard for the local climate, and with our electricity production becoming increasingly carbon neutral it'll allow these farms to have little to no environmental impact on the world.
One your other points:
> Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria.
True but we know how to build controlled environments inside of factories. Just look at microprocessor fabrication. This is a completely solved problem already.
> None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit.
Modern building insulation is basically magic. Once you get it hot the first time, the energy to keep it hot is negligible. Additionally you can site these farms near natural geothermal sources etc, you don't need to put them in perfect climates. Same applies for electricity, put them near hydro, wind or even solar farms. Pick a place where the input resources are easily and readily accessible.
> - 250x less water
Most crops are grown with this thing called "rain" and without any supplemental water. Using just rain means they are part of the natural transpiration and precipitation cycle, so their unnatural water usage is 0.
> transport
Bulk transport is incredibly efficient. IIRC, many food products spend more carbon on transport from the grocery store to home than they do getting to the grocery store. I recall another study showing that it was more carbon efficient buying frozen mutton from New Zealand in London than it was buying local fresh mutton.
Funny thing about rain, it comes from these things called "clouds", not the internet variety, but the type that blocks the sun.
Places with the perfect amount of both sunlight, rainfall, humidity and temperature all year round is extremely rare (you may also be familiar with the concept of seasons). Places with year round sun don't tend to have much rain (looking at you California), places with year round rain don't tend to get sun. There are of course exceptions to this, rainforests come to mind, but to farm there you need to remove the forest, which reduces the amount of rainfall (less water is evaporating from trees and foliage) plus all the other issues that come with deforestation.
Additionally farming has negative impact on the local water cycle, farmed land significantly increases surface runoff, contaminating local water sources with fertiliser and suspended dirt.
All in all, even using water falling from the sky isn't "free" from an environmental perspective. We should be focusing on making more food with less environmental impact worldwide, not returning to the Victorian approach of digging up and mechanising land, environmental impact be damned.
A few days ago there was a post here about water now being traded as a commodity.
In many parts of the world, the water supply is far from guaranteed and must be shared with the local environment, population and other farmers. Using 1/250 of the water otherwise supplied by rain is pretty compelling.
And that's without the arguments about reducing the need for pesticides and fertilisers.
Rain is great, and Earth's water cycle is closed, but plants evaporate water but you won't get it back as rain immediately.
Plus if you install irrigation you are taking water away from somewhere that would likely not evaporate that fast. (Eg from a river.) And if you also happen to have drainage, (eg if you converted a wetland area), then you suddenly discharge too much water from that region, and you won't get it back as rain.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/june/understanding...
I'm not saying everyone has to go all in on vertical farming, but there's value in food safety.
Do you mean 'most of the volume' or 'most of the crop types'? In case of the first I wonder where that's based on? Perhaps you even have a source?
I assume you mean 'rain' in the most direct sense, as water that falls down directly on/near the plants (as opposed to draining from a basin of water that 'used to be rain', which perhaps is true for many H2O molecules).
And would you say we have enough farmland that can be irrigated by rain (with some degree of consistency also in face of climate change) to feed the every growing population?
I wouldn't mind seeing that calculation!
https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam...
NZ-UK Transport does take about 20% of the energy budget, so it's not insignificant, but farming lamb is just a lot less energy intensive in NZ.
2. Given sunlight is ~1 gigawatt per square kilometre, and given the light level plants need, to the extent that this allows winter production of:
(a) staple crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes: this will need implementation of all the improvements to the global power grid that eco-optimists like me call for and which eco-pessimists claim will never be sufficient, and because the energy has to come from elsewhere in winter they will be lacking exactly the same sort of independence they have now with food imports. (I don’t count this as “not independent” because if I did then no city would be, no apartment would be, no non-farmer would be).
(b) high-value non-staple foods such as lettuce, kale, peppers: it doesn’t provide enough calories for food-independence.
While absolutely you could put a small unit the size of a shipping crate in every village and have the local shops stock it’s lettuce output on their shelves, I see this as a fantastic solution to e.g. greening the Sahara [0] and terraforming the Moon/Mars, but mainly only a cash-crop thing in industrialised nations on Earth.
[0] unlike this surprise I found on Google satellite view: https://goo.gl/maps/EjD4CNCkQB3aziR97
If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great.
I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the tropical fruits that are being air-mailed and then largely discarded.
Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food.
I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great.
I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the trozical fruits that are being airmailed and then largely discarded.
Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food.
I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
I don't think it's "greening the Sahara" so much as "trying to keep the last bits of green." This is on the Nile.
If it can replace the 5% of food that is currently handled terribly and has an enormously oversized footprint then that is great.
I am not horrified by the ramifications of my staple rice coming from Asia on a slow boat which I then consume 100% of. I am horrified by all the trozical fruits that are being airmailed and then largely discarded.
Once they are done experimenting, they will want to focus on what pays best and whether they mean to or not, they will be replacing terrible with better, while still not competing on very low cost/resource staple food.
I think there's no reason we can't eventually really beat plants on achieving higher density resource usage given seasons, light spectrum conversation, wind, etc, but it is a mistake to focus on how far off that is as a reason not to begin the process.
Average cost of a cheap warehouse in US (this is being generous as the cost is likely far higher for a vertical farm) $20 square ft [1]
Thus, Land/building cost standard farming method: $3160 per acre[2]
Land/building cost of equivalent vertical farm: $871200 per acre
Which is 275x higher. Once again, using warehouse costs is being generous to vertical farms. It's likely more than $20/sq f to commission a vertical farm.
What ever land use benefits of vertical farming are at the very least partially offset by the fact it requires a building, which has it own set of ecological impacts.
It's very hard for me to imagine any amount of bullet points to make up for 275x+ increased land/build cost. But if there was a market, it's probably in high end organic stuff for well-to-do people, rather than the a case of then technological wizardry feeding the masses.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average... [2] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average...
Note: I used US numbers, but much of the world has a similar ratio, although I'm sure somebody can find an exception if they looked.
I think in the end, you are right - vertical farms will be more expensive. But its going to be nothing like 275x as expensive.
I also used 20 per sq foot which is an gross underestimation for actual cost per square foot of a vertical farm to compensate for this. I wouldn't be surprised if each "layer" itself has a per square foot cost that is a significant fraction of the equivalent cost of a farmland sq foot.
> Also, vertical farms can produce 365 days a year, which conventional farms can not.
Vegetables are grown in California 7-8 months a year. So there is room here for an advantage to vertical farms, but is it really a significant advantage? Most CA growers own or lease land in AZ and CA and flip flop between the two as the season dictates, so there is there no real advantage here in terms of availability and as I already outlined the cost is far below a vertical farm so if you can't give vertical farm a price or available advantage what advantage do they have?
And to answer my own previous question, for all the "shop local" trends out there, transportation costs are minimal, which is why you can buy produce from even another country at cut-rate prices, so these are probably not a big factor. I would guess the most significant promise of vertical is probably less inputs. Inputs traditionally cost more than land in farming (I actually do know about this as I work for an AG company and have been in the precision Ag industry for 10 years). However, inputs don't cost (200x/150x/100x/50x/whatever number you want to go with for vertical farm land cost multiplier) more than land cost. I guess the argument can be made that I just put everything in cost terms and not in some sort of ecological benefit terms but that is just the world we live in, solar didn't blow up because people started to care, it blew up because it became economically viable.
Plants grown closer to the person eating the food are way tastier. There are two main reasons: 1) as soon as you harvest, the plant is basically dead and starts losing nutrients and flavors. So avg. time from harvest to eating makes a huge difference for taste. 2) Since the transport is long, plants are often harvested when they aren't ripe yet. Again this leads to less nutrients and hence less flavor.
The unromantic truth is that plant growth is physics. They need water, nutrients and light and all of these can be administered in a "factory". The plant doesn't care whether the photons it receives come from the sun or a grow light, as long as the spectrum is the same. With modern grow lights you can mimic the environment you have in other parts of the world. E.g. you can have sun like in Sicily in Denmark.
The flavor will actually be better (as in MUCH better) and less transport means growers don't need to optimize for varieties that can survive a long transport.
Most of the time is taken by other things, not shipping. So the negatives of local (higher energy usage, less efficient use of resources) are not really worth it.
Local means growing food either in a greenhouse or in a place not ideally suited for it. It also means smaller less efficient operations.
I'm an Elon fanboi but please let's start with desertified populated regions first so we have time to build a Mars colony without having to deal with civil wars
Compared to what exactly and for what crop? Rain is free and is all that is needed for plenty of crops
Indoor farming needs to irritate 100% of their needs so they can actually need more irrigation than farms in other areas.
PS: Hawaii is really interesting as it varies so much. With some areas seeing over 25 feet of rain per year. http://rainfall.geography.hawaii.edu/rainfall.html
But you're right, hydroponics solve this issue.
(Slightly more energetic than I thought: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/world/middleeast/western-...)
We currently use enormous amounts of land on agriculture. It would be fantastic if we could give all that land back to nature.
The 250x less water is compared to open field production without water drop control, it will be at the same level of water consumption than all the greenhouses you see, they will not be better. This argument is as such not a good one.
Is this a real thing? Interesting! I wonder if, much like food additives, we could figure out what particular nutrients would be required to impart a specific flavor to produce.
The problem is more that if you optimize plant growth for weight per time (because weight is what you are payed for) and leave flavor out of the equation, you'll end up with fruit that has a lot of weight with little flavor. If you switch to a growth regimen that gives the plants a bit more time, you will generally get a better flavor, even under hydroponic settings.
Given that you can sense a lot of compounds that make up a fruit non-destructively, I'm pretty optimistic that you could optimize for flavor too in a robotic/vertical farming setting.
Moreover, our taste is only loosely related to the plant optimum. Some prefer sweetness, acidity, softness, juicyness ...
The soil, undersoil and climate have great impact on naturally grown plants. See wine.
As for the wine argument, I really can't tell the difference between two buck chuck and a $250 bottle of wine and I'd venture a guess that neither can most people (ok, maybe two buck chuck is a little too low on the quality pole). As for molecular content, I'm sure the grapes that go into a choice pinot noir would sustain life just as efficiently as the red grapes in my grocery store.
Regarding wine, I guess culture plays an important role. Differences between wine grapes grains and table grape grains, is mostly selection and cultural practices. Table grape is grown for volume and freshness, wine grape is grown to be concentrated in sugar and other compounds, with lower yields, higher maturity, etc. Both use lots of pesticides nowadays unfortunately.
As for their capability of sustaining life, I don’t know. Grape was used for fasting and purging traditionally :)
I too think that a vegetable and fruit need sun, win and soil to taste the best. Cannot prove it though.
It's also possible that the type of tomato they choose to plant will taste like cardboard even if grown in a regular farm.
365 days of production will also require some heavy fertilization cycles, so more chemicals to be produced and disposed.
I don't see that talked much and might very well come ahead with the efficiency of scale in having all these thing stacked instead of dispersed over a large tract of land, but these thing are an important aspect and hopefully what will come out of this deployment is some hard data about the impact they have.
I wish we could just remove the word 'chemicals' from the English language. Most of the time it's used, it doesn't mean anything at all.
What is actually used? Fertiliser, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, not some scary poisons and 'chemicals'.
Do they need to be disposed of? Not really, plants use them up. If you are disposing of them, you are disposing of your money, because you paid for them.
The whole point of these greenhouse or vertial systems is that they are closed off, so you don't have runoff like you do in the open field, and you don't need pesticides because pests don't get in.
There are 99 problems with this 'tech bro' solution, but chemicals is not one of them.
I dunno, DHMO is pretty scary, but not as scary as the naturally occurring pesticide 1,3,7-Trimethylxanthine [0], which has become the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug despite side effects of anxiety, nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations.
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2C3%2C7-Trimethylxant...
and I wish people would read the full sentences before entering a debate, because it was completely clear this wasn't about the specific fertilizers usage in situ, but pollutant released during production ( one of many examples https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.h... you can find, about every precursor can and is leaked in the environment ) and after usage (even assuming it's closed off, which it isn't, you need to scrub waste and put it somewhere or reprocess it at some cost)
is it so bad to be curious about these cost in hyper intensive production, especially since they aren't available in this press release?
This does not seem like an important thing, it seems like an unimportant thing that can politicians can try to make a thing out of. It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad
Quite the contrary: at least in Norway politicians have been busily pushing your side of the story for decades and only stopped pushing it earlier this year.
> It seems like it would be much cheaper and easier to just buy crops from abroad
If you said this last year many would have agreed.
This spring showed that even Norway - as rich and well connected as we are - cannot get hold of a simple thing like face masks if there is an emergency.
It grew in political importance as the national-romanticism movement grew, and then blew up massively in political importance after World War II demonstrated just how little it took to disrupt external supplies.
One might reasonably argue it's the reason Norway isn't in the EU - Norwegian agriculture and fishery policy is based very strongly on a view on self-sufficiency that includes high subsidies not originally for the sake of farmers, but for the sake of national security. It's also behind a lot of the push for retaining rural settlements.
It's first in relatively recent time (last 30 years or so) that this has receded in importance.
That's what I mean by decades :-)
I'm 40 now, so this means at least since I was 10.
As much as I tend to prefer text I'll still admit there are times when it is harder to understand the intent.
Also -> distributed cultivation. You don’t have a single point of failure.
- Sun/heat/light maybe needs to be converted but it's always used in the right amount for each crop
- Controlled environments protected from plagues, floods, fires... Crops are not lost due to uncontrollable events and a lot of savings in chemicals to protect them from bugs
- Saving the cost of SCM (transport and intermediaries) which is sometimes much bigger than producing. In farming is actually almost always the case, to my knowledge
- 365 days a year of efficient production
- Good for the environment to save so much in transport
- Independence from other countries. Very important for small ones like Denmark that wouldn't have alternative to planting on their own soil.
To be honest, the only con I see is that this perfectly automated gardens produce much less tasty food because they are given the exact amount of water and minerals needed to generate the product, but the real soil somehow must add a lot of flavor, even if it's not relevant to produce the fruit, because I really feel a big difference of taste between hydroponic food and classic farming.