The article basically says that if you use solar and wind, with a battery stack it's going to be fine once you're over the capex part of the investment.

But it's wrapped up in the 10x price increase in non-self sourced power and European politics. For the right market, and product it's fine. That market disappeared when discretionary spending shrank in the heartland markets and they made a decision to minimise capex without hedging their power cost inputs. (Or came to the end of the hedge)

So it's a pivot to markets either with cheaper power or with other cost issues in fresh green leafy veg and micro herbs. Ones with less or expensive water, who are also making a pivot to green energy (hint: as they say.. Arabian peninsula) come to mind.

Vertical farms aren't the only industrial sector to come unstuck on assumptions about power input cost. Lots of German industry assumes cheap gas.

As does the fertiliser industry.

Yes! Gas is a primary input feedstock.. something I was amazed to discover.

Gas is the source for the hydrogen to be bonded to nitrogen to make ammonia, just now.

There are efforts to shift to hydrogen electrically extracted ("electrolysed") from water, with the electric power obtained from renewables, but it is very early days. If your electrolysers and ammonia synthesis equipment are not too expensive, you can operate just when sun is out or wind blows, and not need to rely on stored or imported energy, or back-up generation. But high capital cost may favor 24/7 operation even at times when power costs more.

The world today produces ammonia in the millions of tons annually, but will produce many times as much when ammonia becomes a favored liquid fuel. It will be synthesized using solar in the tropics, and wind where that is reliable, and exported for backup generation. Nobody will need to store more energy than a week or two's worth, because when you expect to run low you order in.

This shift is currently happening Nordics and it is rather fast, I think there is already like several billions of worth projects that start producing green hydrogen and ammonia.

Citation?

A first big electrolysis -> ammonia plant is under construction there. Another one of similar magnitude meant to provide fuel for ships is supposed to be done in 2026. We will need hundreds more, almost all of which won't break ground until after these start delivering.

If you had said energy generation capacity right now, you would sell the energy instead of growing lettuce.

I wonder how economics of vertical fawns would change if we priced land being used for anything but being a wildlife reserve as a negative externality.

Well, if enough people starve to death it'll drive down demand.

Not much since peoples housing would also be more expensive, as would energy generation.

What we need is an energy efficient way of producing food with minimal cost and which doesn't turn arable land into a vast monoculture. Alas, we need food more, and experimenting with food supply can be... disruptive...

Almost all the land under cultivation is in places "we" have no such say about.

Another problem with hydroponics is its reliance on industrially-produced fertilizers, chiefly those containing nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. The phosphate and potassium parts of this equation are today mined from finite mineral deposits. Sooner or later these mines will close, and we'll have to close to the loop on phosphate and potassium (and molybdenum, calcium, etc.) production and consumption.

How will hydroponic farmers adapt? Where will they economically obtain the necessary nutrient solution additives? Are there practical techniques to extract these nutrients from traditional sources, like urine or manure? The aspiring Mars colonist or hydroponic homesteader will need to figure this out, or return to traditional "regenerative" farming practices which compost biological waste and return all used-up nutrients and their constituent elements to the soil.

And for someone like a Moon or Mars colonist, even regenerative farming isn't simple. Composting relies on bacteria to convert waste products like nitrogen-containing urea, whose nitrogen isn't bioavailable to plants, back into useful and bioavailable forms like ammonium. Keeping cultures of bacteria alive and healthy indefinitely will be essential to a colony's continued survival. Are there practical chemical processes to replace the function of these microbes, e.g. to convert urea to ammonia without urease enzymes? I don't know. Maybe someone with more knowledge can comment on this.

I hope this problem can be solved. Hydroponics has many benefits, from dramatically lowered water consumption vs. soil-based agriculture, to higher yields driven by precisely-managed nutrient ratios. Spacefaring farmers will appreciate the weight saved by leaving all that excess water and soil on Earth. It'd be a shame to abandon this technology simply because we couldn't pivot away from fossil fertilizers.

> The phosphate and potassium parts of this equation are today mined from finite mineral deposits. Sooner or later these mines will close, and we'll have to close to the loop on phosphate and potassium (and molybdenum, calcium, etc.) production and consumption.

This was honestly the first I've heard about concerns regarding phosphate and potassium supplies. After some quick googling, possible projections are 2030 for peak phosphate, 2057 for peak potassium:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus (TIL a large majority of the world's phosphorus reserves are in Morocco)

* Peak Potash study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Didn't know peak phosphate was nearly upon us! On the bright side, technologies to recover phosphate via industrial-scale composting are already mature. My home state of Wisconsin leads the way on this, at least in the United States:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorganite

>Milorganite is a brand of biosolids fertilizer produced by treating sewage sludge by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. The term is a portmanteau of the term Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen. The sewer system of the District collects municipal wastewater from the Milwaukee metropolitan area. After settling, wastewater is treated with microbes to break down organic matter at the Jones Island sewage treatment plant (also called "Water Reclamation Facility") in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

>The byproduct sewage sludge is produced. This is heat-dried with hot air in the range of 900–1,200 °F (482–649 °C), which heats the sewage sludge to at least 176 °F (80 °C) to kill pathogens. The material is then pelletized and marketed throughout the United States under the name Milorganite. The result is recycling of the nitrogen and phosphorus from the waste-stream as fertilizer.

>The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District's Jones Island Plant had the largest wastewater treatment capacity of any in the world when constructed in 1925. It was the first plant in the United States to succeed in using the activated sludge treatment process to produce fertilizer.

Potassium is excreted by humans mainly in urine, which is easy to recover. But NPK fertilizer is just one piece of the puzzle. AFAIK, plants require 17 essential micro- and macro-nutrients to grow [0]. I'm just a lay gardener, not a chemist nor research scientist, so I'm not sure how to approach recovering calcium, magnesium, sulfur, or metals like zinc and molybdenum for nutrient solution manufacture. That's the nice thing about composting for soil-based gardening; so long as the right microbes are there to make it bioavailable, all the elements you need are in the used-up biomatter. If it was eaten and not exhaled, sweated out, nor incorporated into the body, it'll be there in the waste stream.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/There-are-17-essential-p...

That's really interesting, thanks.

Fortunately, there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies.

Electric power to run the LEDs, if obtained from renewables, is protected from cost shocks, but such power might be more profitably sold at such times than used to drive LEDs and sell the produce.

> there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies

Bold statement, I'd be impressed if it holds up by mid-century.

I hope you mean in 2072 and not in 2050 because Elon Musk promised to be on Mars by 2018.

Try colonizing Antarctica first, on the dirt underneath the ice. If that turns out fantastically popular, do the sea floor. If that succeeds beyond reasonable expectation, you can try out life in an orbiting donut. If that takes off, a Mars colony might have a chance.

SpaceX cans are woefully inadequate even to maintain a Mars outpost.

Ignoring the fact that multiple colonies already exist on Antarctica and living there is legally restricted to anyone without an army behind them, or that many people live under the ocean for large periods of time?

There are exactly zero colonies on Antarctica. Literally all are 100% dependent on regular deliveries of all supplies, excepting air and maybe water, from overseas, with no plan for that ever to change, and no permanent residents.

The usual term is "outpost", or for a larger operation, "base".

There are no undersea outposts, even. Construction crews sometimes encamp for a few weeks for big hazard pay. There are two (count 'em!) low-orbital outposts that get literally all supplies except energy from the ground.

The ISS is completely self-sufficient for water and air. No country on Earth is fully self-sufficient in what it uses and is dependent on supplies shipped to it from elsewhere.

The word colony in the sense of space exploration and other extreme habitats means permanent occupation and exploitation of the resources there.

Doesn't ISS generate oxygen from water and water is essentially shipped in? Either as water or as food. In the end methane is vented to space. I wouldn't call system needing pretty major inputs a self-sufficient one.

You are correct:

>4. Sabatier reactor

>Inside this machine, a blast of roughly 750°F heat breaks the bonds inside CO₂, forcing it into its constituent elements. The carbon and oxygen combine with hydrogen from the station’s ­oxygen ­generating system to make H₂O and methane (CH₄), the latter of which vents into space.

https://www.popsci.com/how-iss-recycles-air-and-water/

Every last molecule used on ISS is boosted from Earth, and recently. ISS does a bit of recycling to reduce the amount needed. There are exactly zero permanent inhabitants: any would die. They exploit no in-situ resource, except sunshine using frequently-replaced solar panels.

>Fortunately, there will not be Moon or Mars colonists, or colonies.

Even if this pessimistic prediction comes true, the same nutrient-recycling solution could support human life in resource-poor regions on Earth, such as Antarctica or Detroit!

People actually think we might colonize these places. Like, how are we going to send a bulldozer to the moon? How are we going to fuel it?

They were told "we" would colonize, and believe it without thinking.

The bigger question is how the liar benefits from the lie. Pumping stock value is the usual guess: (Tesla stock is only now starting to correct, and that largely because of the Twitter debacle.) The fusion-energy startup business runs this way.

With big fucking rockets!

Do conventional farming methods also rely on NPK fertilizers? How do the fertilizer requirements of hydroponics differ from the fertilizer requirements of conventional?

Yes, they do. Modern industrial farming relies on the exact same fossil fertilizer inputs. When it comes to recycling phosphate etc., the rival to hydroponics and conventional farming is regenerative, soil-based agriculture. The latter relies on composting and manuring to turn organic waste back into nutrient-rich soil. Among other functions, microbes in the soil and compost heaps break waste products like urea down into bioavailable forms like ammonium. Hydroponics generally doesn't involve composting and is by definition soil-free, so the plant's rhizosphere is more or less sterile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere

To farm plants without soil, they must be supplied with a water-based nutrient solution. The solution contains a precise mixture of all chemical substances a particular plant needs to grow. Yield efficiencies can be realized by carefully tailoring this mixture to each plant. The problem is where to source the ingredients once extracting them from mineral deposits turns uneconomical.

Compost- and manure-amended soil theoretically has everything plants need, but that's not very useful for soil-free farming. The precise ratio of nutrients in a given patch of soil is also outside of the farmer's control. Perhaps the individual nutrients can be leached, distilled, or otherwise chemically separated from compost and biological waste products to enable their reuse in finely-mixed solutions? I don't know. Maybe someone with more knowledge can answer.

> The phosphate and potassium parts of this equation are today mined from finite mineral deposits.

They don't disappear from the planet when consumed.

Yes, but if they're all dumped in the ocean, burned off as fuel, or buried in landfill then they aren't very useful to humans.

People are going to get around to mining landfills. They're surely rich in all sorts of minerals people want.

Hydroponic systems are dependent on industrial fertiliser. But you can lower the requirements by at least an order of magnitude by creating circular systems, incorporate food waste into the circularity, and more and create highly effective local and regional nutrient loops.

This doesn’t need to stop at the hydroponics system. There are plenty of opportunities to create better nutrient loops in our food production system.

We have been working on this for nearly five years. We currently participate in a project which has two dozen companies participating in closing this nutrient loops and create better and more efficient food production.

Thanks for sharing! Checking out the links from your profile, cool stuff. Relevant to where I live in Wisconsin, far inland from fresh seafood and in a similar climate zone. With YouTube's auto-translation, I can even understand much of what is said in Swedish in the Johannas farm videos.

One question about this video— at 1:46 the speaker says, "fish provide all the nutrients [for] our vegetables, which means we don't have to add anything artificial." Is this accurate? My impression was that aquaponics mitigates but does not completely eliminate the need for industrial fertilizers/nutrient solution additives, in addition to replacing what's removed when fish or vegetables are eaten:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGmJETrqzN4&t=1m46s

Another question— with aquaponics, how do you incorporate food waste into the circularity? Do you feed it to the fish, extract nutrients via an external physical/chemical process, or just dump it in the water reservoir and let it decompose?

With a nutrient recovery system, bioreactors, for the fish sludge, we think that we can get close to not having any supplemental nutrients for the plants. It depends on the content of the fish feed, the groundwater used etc. Exactly how close to zero time will tell, we are seeing great potential. The key is that the nutrients need to exist in the system in the first place and when you harvest something, you take things out. How do you put what is needed back?

We see that a very large portion can be done with circular biological systems. We have been working to incorporate food waste via insects. We take allowed food waste and feed insect larvae. There are several teams in Sweden working on this together, with some government support.

I haven't seen the "fermented plant juice" before, but the principle is the same, let bacteria work on it.

SV and many HN readers have lived in a golden age of entrepeneurship, when people widely believed in optimism, innovation, change, and our ability to improve our world and solve any problem; that it could be done by one person in a garage or anyone in the company; and a belief in merit above all, which requires a belief in truth.

Now the socio-political trend is extremely in the other direction: Disparage, shame, and ridicule any intent to improve the world and any interest or intent in innovation; that competition for survival, rather than improving our world, is the only purpose; that only corporations and wealthy people can accomplish anything; that only 'bosses' have worthwhile ideas; and fetishizing power, corruption, and 'post-truth', and exercising that for profit rather than merit.

We were right the first time - you can see all that was accomplished. Those truths haven't changed. But it's harder going when so many disparage them.

Let's review these accomplishments shall we? Implemented a global digital panopticon, check. Bricked news media as a credible source of information, check. Eliminated affordable housing as a concept in major metro areas around the globe, check. Centralized merchandising to the point that one dude can afford to buy Wyoming while hundreds of millions of would-be shop keepers and artisans are forced to participate in the online equivalent of a protection racket just to maintain solvency, check. Implemented and normalized methods for atomizing society, check. And now we're on the cusp of unrecoverably eliminating the trust metric for all content online permanently thanks to late breaking improvements in AI. All of that is certainly innovative, but where are the improvements?

Availability, ease of acquiring and applying knowledge. Also logistics and availability of products is amazing, we take a lot for granted. I can get almost anything in any midsize town with a few trips during business hours. Almost anything else can be delivered in a few days.

We have definitely hit some snags like the collapse of Google search results, drm, and several other major human hostile monetization strategies but the reality is that we can do a lot more a lot faster as an individual or with your own team than you could in very recent history.

Uh, nope. In its infancy the internet was absolutely revolutionary in making information available, the entirety of the last 30 years of "innovation" in this arena have undermined this basic premise to the point that it has inverted, which is to say the internet is now more effective at producing and disseminating misinformation than anything factual.

As for touting international logistics as innovative, I guess we're ignoring the last couple thousand years of sea trading? The only innovations in this space are new shipbuilding techniques and the dismantling of international trade tarif regimes, neither of which involves the kinds of technology touted here.

As to claimed productivity gains, you can do more of what, exactly?

The problem is, you’re confusing the gold rush with the gold. The last thirty years have just been the monetisation phase. Most of the revolutionary tech that produced those benefits you describe were created by universities and government funded agencies, often with a pure research focus.

It is really bizarre but for reliable (traditional) recipes I nowadays go back to my paper recipe books, because online everyone has their own take to the extent that you have to start averaging recipes and still don't know for sure if it's right.

(Yes, there are many variations to traditional recipes and there often is not one official recipe, but I see that as something else from the many different recipes found online for the same thing)

I think broadly you're right at the moment (the mood seems to have turned very negative for no reason other than moods do that). But vertical farming has always been hugely oversold. It's at best a niche tech for growing tropical crops in cold/temperate climates IF we decide to just stop shipping things around. It has no current economically viable or practical use.

And I have never understood if the shipping of food around is so big deal. If it is done in relatively short distances. 100km for example would already be a huge area for doing farming on the ground.

Shipping not well preserving crops from other side of the world is weird. But that doesn't mean it has to come from across the road. From massive vertical building.

I think people prefer fun sounding solutions and are happy to pretend there is a pressing problem. It's more entertaining that accepting what we actually need is a way to allocate capital 0.1 basis points more efficiently in residential property market etc or if you want to save the environment, make internal combustion engines 0.001% more efficient.

We've had 30 years to review the claims of SV hype mills as well as the actual real-world results of the "innovation" they tout, and almost without exception the actual results bear no relationship to the claims and are frequently socially net-negative and occasionally bordering on dystopian. The only thing mysterious about the ongoing shift in public sentiment is why it's taken this long to occur.

> (the mood seems to have turned very negative for no reason other than moods do that)

I strongly disagree. If you think it's incidental, you make yourself a victim. You can see the campaigns by people like Thiel to promote nationalism and the power of the wealthy, and by groups like the Federalist Society and the very large neo-reactionary movement (my term).

Framing the debate and the 'mood' is the most powerful thing you can do, and many smart people know that and work hard at it. You can look up the research by people like the Heritage think tank, who develops talking points that frame the debates, and that eventually you hear people you know unwittingly repeating. Also, if you read HN you are aware of the grassroots disinformation campaigns by governments. Social media gives them much more power.

I think it was a HN comment (on a different article) that opened my eyes to something alluded to in this article: vertical farming and hydroponics in general basically doesn't grow stuff with (significant quantities of) calories. It grows expensive leafy greens, but for staple foods, you need soil.

This basically made me regard vertical farming as... not fundamentally important to the future of food.

your conclusion may be correct but there could be circumstances that change the calculation. For example, if moving expensive leafy greens to vertical farms frees up soil, water and other resources for staples.

Tomatoes and strawberries have been grown vertically. There's an ultra-premium vegetable and fruit sector, but it's inherently tiny.

High energy prices right now are mostly the result of the Ukraine war. It's painful now, but it is accelerating the conversion from fossil fuels. At least if this doesn't expand into a larger war.

The high energy prices are not because of the war but because of the sanctions regime. The thing is, sanctions basically never end. It's impossible to lift them. We still have sanctions against Cuba since 1962. No one even cares about Cuba anymore. The sanctions against Iran remain in place since 1979, and have only ever gotten stricter. Same for Syria, which we began to sanction in 1986. It's called "the sanctions escalator", because it only ever moves up. New sanctions are now being introduced against China.

There is no reason to think that, after the war is over, the sanctions will be lifted. I mean, why would they be lifted? Europe is not going to return to Russia the assets that were frozen/seized or start wanting to trade with Russia -- or vice versa -- moreover there are already new pipelines and trade agreements made within Eurasia that exclude Europe as a market for energy.

This is a permanent change ushering in a new cold war and a new multipolar world, where it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for commodities to cross bloc boundaries. Russia's commodities are going to be flowing east and south, Saudi Arabia's will be flowing mostly to China, while North American commodities will be staying mostly in North America.

After permanently and irreparably rupturing the previous trade relationships, Europe is going to have to become more energy independent, and I think they realize now that the previous energy dependence they had was a strategic weakness for them. They will need to learn to do with less energy at least until they ramp up domestically produced replacements such as nuclear or renewables + storage.

Sanctions do get lifted. Sanctions against South Africa are an example:

https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/european-community-...

EU sanctions against others may also cease after a regime change. US lifted sanctions against Vietnam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Vietnam_relation...

I mean, if your hope is for regime change, then I'd recommend an energy policy that is based on something a bit more realistic. Imagine telling farmers or businesses in Germany or the UK that "Your bills will remain high until there is regime change in Russia".

They would correctly view that as lack of an energy policy. Europe requires an energy policy for the world that exists, not the world it wishes would exist.

We have not been able to change the regime in Syria, Iran or Cuba despite decades trying. Not sure why you think China or Russia is going to be a more realistic target. FYI, the successor to Putin is Medvedev, who is much more of an anti-western hardliner. If Europe is pinning its hopes for the future on regime change in Russia, then the people of Europe deserve much more competent leadership.

Tell me a region in the world which couldn't do with more competent leadership. :)

I think Europe is unique in terms of denying reality so much that they don't even have a plan.

It's like the prospect of some things are so terrible as to be unthinkable and when something is unthinkable, you don't come up with a plan to deal with it. Instead, you shout down anyone who brings up the unmentionable thing. For Europe, the list of unthinkable things keeps growing:

* What if they can't deploy enough energy storage at scale to make their renewable push actually work? Unthinkable!

* What if there is no regime change in Russia, and the present situation just continues for a few decades. Unthinkable!

* What will they do with millions of Ukrainian refugees that refuse to or are unable to return home? And the many millions more that will be flooding in soon? Unthinkable!

So this deer in the headlights inability to face reality is the leadership problem. And the sad thing is that Europe does have options. There is coal in Poland, Natural gas in Germany, Nuclear in France, Wind in Italy. They can scale up production of domestic sources and deal with the stark reality that they need to become much more energy independent OR they can spend $200 billion subsidizing the purchase of imported natural gas for consumers, just hoping that things "go back to normal after the war".

Also: sanctions against Yugoslavia were imposed, (mostly) lifted, then imposed again and then finally lifted, all within a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Yugoslavia

> We still have sanctions against Cuba since 1962. No one even cares about Cuba anymore

That's not true. The sanctions against Cuba remain in place because a small but significant number of Cuban exiles care very much and they happen to be mostly concentrated in a swing state

Please tell me this is a joke or a conspiracy theory. Do I read you correctly? Are you saying that the US has been forcefully suppressing an entire nation for decades, just because of a small amount of US citizens that live in a politically inconvenient location, and who are politically inconvenient to move somewhere else?

To make it less abstract, Cuban-Americans are heavily concentrated in Florida and so are an important constituency there. Easing sanctions on Cuba is not something they want, in the aggregate. Politicians that want Florida therefore don't want to do it. Party leadership (for both parties, but most importantly the Republicans) therefore doesn't push for it because it's such a losing issue. Essentially there is imagined to be no upside politically to easing on Cuba, while the downside is very clear (you lose Florida).

I'm not sure how we could move Cuban-Americans somewhere else unless you are suggesting forced relocations to other parts of the U.S.

I don't disagree about your analysis of the politics but I still think the math just doesn't pencil out. On the other side of the issue from all those Cubans who don't want normalized relations is business interests that do.

Levis wants to sell them jeans. Apple wants to sell them phones. GM wants to sell them truck. Raytheon wants to sell them radar systems. There's just so much money to be made when a formerly isolated market become unlocked that I think you could win back Florida and more with all the donations from the big corporations that would stand to benefit from normalized relations with Cuba.

I think the only reason nothing happens is because there's no one sector that really stands to benefit and can make a concentrated lobbying effort whereas the people that don't want it are a unified ethnic group which for the purposes of high level political analysis can roughly be seen as a voting block.

Ditto all this for Iran, but move all the decimals to the right once or twice.

Cuba is a poor, small country. They can't buy very significant quantities of jeans or phones.

(11.3M people, per capita GDP $9,500 or so.)

I also wouldn't discount the power of inertia in public policy. Why spend capital on this relatively minor issue when we can just keep the status quo going indefinitely with no debate?

I think biorach is quite correct, and that is not even as strange as our commitment to Ethanol, which is largely due to the Iowa caucuses. It's very popular in that state-- they grow a lot of corn. It also used to be the first state of the presidential primaries (I believe this is changing). So if you wanted to run for president at some time (and a lot of powerful politicians do) you had to be in favor of Ethanol subsidies.

The assessment is largely correct.

US Presidential politics has been on a knife edge for the past 2+ decades, with multiple popular-vote-minority presidents elected (or appointed, according to some, notably Bush-Gore 2000).

There are a handful of swing states, with Ohio and Florida topping the list via Google Ngram Viewer. The term "swing state of " starts appearing notably around 1995, and has been persistent since the 2000 election.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=swing+state+of...>

(Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New , Illinois, and Virginia make the top six over that period. "New" seems likely to be "New York", though it could be the combined effect of "New York" and "New Jersey".)

And again, Cuban politics and policy is absolutely pivotal in Florida.

The prices went nuts several months before Feb 24 due to russian machinations with supply. So your claim about it only being linked to sanctions is only partially true.

Also russian controlled gas storage in Germany decided to keep fill levels in storage artificially low. This had direct impact on price and also not part of the sanctions, tho still part of the wider war of russian aggression.

It is not accelerating conversion to renewables now. In fact coal is never been used so much in Europe. The idea of transforming into a full renewable energy society is seen way too opportunistic.

Carbon emissions in the EU haven’t been so low for 30 years, according to the latest CREA analysis [1]

It looks to them like a price-driven transition and if you are a market forces kind of person, the investments in renewables are already following the market pricing structure.

1. https://energyandcleanair.org/eu-co2-emissions-reach-a-30-ye...

Europe is using coal to cover a current gap. It is not building new coal to cover future gaps. That's what is being said.

My issues is that they still need energy input. And this takes land, specially for renewables. And that land is close or even more than just laying the same on flat ground.

I think they are, just not a future that's anywhere near. When energy becomes abundant, through nuclear or geothermal, then going vertical farming is going to be excellent for rewilding and enhancing yields.

Investing $600M right now though.. seems a bit excessive, unless they somehow figured there's a completely unserved multi billion dollar luxury demand.

That investment seems reasonable if part of their plan is to lobby government to force more local consumption. Regulatory capture for the win.

Not true for potatoes. Can even do that on your balcony in some sort of barrel, with many holes on the side. No soil necessary. I'd guess that could work very well in vertical farming. It just wouldn't be economical, for now. OTOH why not grow superspecial heritage strains?

You don't really need soil for calories-rich plants, but you need a lot of energy (sunlight). Which you obviouly can't have in a large vertical farm, unless you use a lot of electrical power.

Why not? Build it with a glass front? Put it on a turn-table, and have it follow the sun!1!!

Why not just keep growing it in the soil? We aren't on Mars.

Hmm, I had issues with the verticality, but hydroponics can save a lot of water (regular greenhouses too, by capturing evaporated water; you can also use pots). Indoor heating, temperature control, and protection from hail also mean year-round production, or at least protection against random weather events. Greenhouses can achieve most of these already, with more efficiency gains if water cannot escape underground.

Verticality (including regular shelves on a single floor) is good for density (may be cheaper to build), but has energy density issues for some crops.

Even on planet Earth many places are not arable:

https://www.mapsofworld.com/thematic-maps/arable-land-map.ht...

True but you're better of combating waste, land degradation, land access/commoditization, etc than inventing some overall lack of arable land. Bigger actual benefits tend to stem from the controlled environment. Sure there are places where these things make sense if you want to limit transport (Water retention in the arab peninsula or the like) but honestly we see it hyped more often in places where it does not.

It's the same nonsensical reasoning behind putting solar panels in places where they don't make sense. I remember france putting money in a solar panel road that was both ridiculously overpriced and ridiculously ineffective for reasons completely predictable. Of course places where solar panels made sense were in essence still barely utilised. Someone just made a lot of money off of the invented scarcity.

I agree with the notion that technology should be used appropriately, but the issue seems to be corruption and that people buy into hypes and misallocate technology, not that the technology itself is useless. I am sure that some corrupt officials manage to overpay for sand in Sahara.

There are, broadly speaking, two groups of people who are very interested in vertical farming.

1) People who wanna grow mind altering plants and fungi.

2) People who are worried about destabilized food supply chains and would rather have $10 lettuce than no lettuce.

Both groups have priorities that come before riding the razor's edge of economic efficiency.

And people who want to eat local foods

Where true, I think that counts as "missing the point".

Local foods are, as I understand it, supposed to be some combination of more eco-friendly and supporting local farmers.

Growing a potato in your kitchen cupboard using hydroponics and PV+LED is very local, but you'd have to grow a lot of them before you saved more on transport and processing emissions than created by the equipment; and you certainly aren't helping local farmers by doing it yourself.

Local is purely about quality for me. I can get food that’s riper fresher and tastier if it doesn’t have to travel.

You're probably in group 2.

Why do you support local farmers? Like on a deep level? Deeper than "well they're my neighbors" Why do you support your neighbor over some guy in Nebraska? Probably because his culture an interests align with yours whereas the same is not necessarily true about the guy thousands of miles away and all the parties between you and him. You'd rather be slightly less dependent on the long supply chain than the short one.

Local foods are necessarily more ripe and fresher than remotely grown foods. There are more reasons than supporting your neighbors or stable food chains - quality is almost universally higher at a farmers market than at a big box store. That’s not because local farmers are superior, it’s because they harvest closer to optimal ripeness and sell it fast before it spoils. Food grown on the other side of the planet and shipped in storage containers is necessarily harvested very early and is non optimally ripened, or never ripens.

3) People interested in self-sustaining artificial islands/seasteading where space+water efficiency is paramount.

Because certain plants don’t transit well to urban areas and you can reduce waste and expense by growing them adjacent or in urban areas, providing fresher food for the same cost. That’s why they tend to grow delicate leafy greens.

Even in such circumstances, lower-intensity ag methods such as greenhouse farming (enclosures to accommodate for inclement weather), but still relying on incident sunlight, are far more resource-effective. The land-use requirements are still large enough that the technologically- and energy-intensive vertical farming methods simply won't compete.

I'd also like to know what these magical nontransportable crops you have in mind are.

How is that different from a glass house or normal agriculture? A normal piece of farmland or glass house captures all sunlight falling on its surface for the produce that grows on the same surface, ratio 1:1. If you were to use sunlight falling on the vertical farm with 5 floors, it would have to divide the sunlight over more surface, ratio 1:5, so there is less sunlight per surface.

Solar panels + lights together are a system for redirecting energy, and the efficiency “loss” is inconsequential. You can simply cover an adjacent area 10x the size to provide the extra sunlight.

But then why not cover the adjacent area with crops and sod the vertical farm, solar panels, grow lamps, wiring, and all the costs, construction time, maintenance work, etc. and just have a farm?

Because good land itself might just be more expensive to purchase and maintain than all of those systems in a highly dense footprint?

Instead of an adjacent area, the panels could be in an arid desert. Meanwhile, the vertical farm is in a population center and using less water

That is equivalent to saying "vertical farming is cost-effective where energy is free and land is scarce and expensive".

Oddly enough, precisely the opposite circumstance describes most farming.

The fact that vertical farms popularized the concept of "leafy greens" should raise an eyebrow alone because that is an oddly specific type of plant that excludes almost every vegetable that I eat.

Leafy greens have been part of human diets for forever. If they weren't popular in your part of the world, vertical farming should receive thanks for having made them so.

Eating raw leafy greens is a hyper modern addition to human diets. If you want a $20 kale salad, go for it, but let’s not pretend eating uncooked nutritionally devoid foods is somehow necessary or historical.

What is your definition of hyper modern?

Greeks and Romans ate pretty literal salads, and I'm pretty sure people historically knew what natural plants were edible and ate them some of the time.

They was pushed for a reason: we need to be able to detach from nature for space exploration, we might need to detach from nature to keep living in changed climate where some places are simply too hot, cold etc to live well and so on.

Being able to be self-reliant meant being resilient and so being able to evolve more.

Of course it's a failure because we are decades behind the needed level of tech and cheap energy to makes such approach feasible and probably they will never scale anyway. But for many aspects they are tempting for many people. Robotic industries like them, service industries like them, some long-term sociopolitical planners like them and so on.

While no wheat or potatoes, 200 varieties, including eggplant and squashes, in aeroponic grow towers under the sun:

https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs

Comparison of five cheap methods to grow potatoes hydroponically:

https://youtu.be/l-gwc8ogevo

Because, on a global scale, we already have over production of basically everything due to highly industrialized agriculture. Our problem is distributing this production, and produce in more sustainable ways, for both us humans and the environment. No amount of "vertical farming" is going to solve any if those two problems, other than creating a bunch if start ups spending VC money on the ideas.

Vertical farms can help solve part of the distribution problem by allowing these farms to be started just about anywhere. A closed system probably will be more sustainable as well, in terms of water and nutrient consumption.

Not only that. Apparently almost 50% of the grown perfectly eatable food gets thrown out because it is oddly shaped or not the right size for grocery stores. What a waste.

Source?

The usual figure I see is that food wastage is about 30--40%.[1] That figure's been remarkably stable over most of the past 100 years, though when the wastage happens has shifted dramatically toward the end-consumption phase, that is after a tremendous amount of additional energy has been applied in the form of transportation, processing, and cold-storage. It's much better to toss unusable food in its raw state on the farm rather than as leftovers from your fridge (harvested, transported, refrigerated or processed, merchandised, bought, driven home, cooked, refrigerated again).

There's some wastage of imperfect fruit and vegetables, yes, though you'd be amazed at how much of that actually is incorporated into processed foods (dishes, smoothies, beverages, etc.) or used in animal feed earlier in the supply-chain.

________________________________

Notes:

1. E.g., US FDA: "In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply." <https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste>. An arbitrarily-selected 1977 citation of the 1974 growing year suggests about 30% food wastage at the time as well ("the combined [food] loss ... could have fed an estimated 49 million people"): <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Food_Waste_an_Opportuni...> Food Waste - an Opportunity to Improve Resource Use Department of Agriculture : Report to the Congress, US GAO (1977). I've seen similar figures in works on resource utilization / limits dating to the 1950s.

And having some wastage is much better than not having enough food

True.

Slack is highly underrated.

This also turns out to be a serious problem in advocating for efficiency vs. growth.

Efficiency maximises at 0% wastage. Growth is (in theory, though very rarely in practice) open-ended. At least in the short term, growth compounds, whilst efficiency tends to asymptotically approach some minimum.

I'd had this realisation years ago in various efficiency drives (energy, water usage, etc.). The region that started in a more efficient and lower-usage state often faced a greater challenge than one which was profligate, as the latter would (usually) have an easier time cutting usage.

That's not always the case --- a region might become wholly dependent on profligate wastage, say, in the form of air conditioning or heating, in ways that are difficult to substitute for or curtail, especially given infrastructure which makes limiting such activities difficult. But as a general rule, having more fat to cut should actually increase options, all else equal.

You might be thinking of this comment here [1]?

The problem isn't the medium used to grow the calories per se, it's the overall cost per calorie which is mostly energy either in the form of fertilizer (which everyone pays, vertical or not) and in the form of photosynthetic input (which most non-vertical farms receive for free at the cost of reliability). The cost of scaling vertically (literally) is significantly more expensive in operating costs than scaling horizontally is in capital costs as long as the latter receives free energy in the form of sunlight.

For example, green houses which are half way between bare fields and vertical farms in capital cost are economically competitive all over the world because they get free sunlight and extra trapped heat.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33790631

I think the sun provides around 5.000-10.000 lux (lm/m²) illuminance in temperate climates on an average day. Modern LEDs produce around 200 lm/W, so I think you need around 10-15 W/m² to grow stuff inside that would normally grow outside, e.g. corn (of course you can optimize the spectrum to save some energy, I'll disregard that here for the sake of simplicity). That's around 0.25 kWh/m²/day of vertical farm, or 7.5 kWh/m²/month. So, for one hectare of food you'd need 75.000 kWh/month of electricity, only for the lighting. Given these numbers I don't know how vertical farming could replace outdoor farming for most staple crops. Maybe if a miracle in energy production occurs, but even then many other challenges remain.

Solar energy is only one factor in the equation. Another one is water. Indoor farming lets you get your energy and water from different places. This is potentially a breakthrough because of the relative difficulty of moving large quantities of water around (not to mention food destined for market) compared to electricity.

But in this scenario you just want a greenhouse that recirculates water but you still don't want to stack your plants to take advantage of natural light.

Whenever you harvest the fruits and veggies you take water out of the system. You also lose water due to evaporation and people coming/going from the greenhouse. So while you may be a lot more water efficient in a greenhouse you're still a consumer of water.

Furthermore, I am thinking of places like Canada (where I live) that get very little sunlight in the winter, despite having incredible abundance of fresh water. We could grow a lot of vegetables in the winter and power the artificial lighting using wind, hydroelectricity, or nuclear. This would allow us to avoid importing so many vegetables from California or Mexico.

How much of the Sun's emissions spectrum is actually used by plants for photosynthesis? Are there efficiency gains to be realized by converting non-"bioavailable" solar radiation first into electric power, and then into LED output that plants can use for photosynthesis? Some quick Googling suggests "yes", , but it's been years since I took an EM physics course.

If that were possible then all these vertical farms deserve to fail because they didn't take such a basic strategy into account.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What I'm driving at is the ratio of m² used to grow plants the old fashioned way / m² used for solar panels + vertical hydroponics to grow an equivalent yield. It's unclear to me what this ratio is with current photovoltaic (PV) and LED efficiencies. Vertical farm owners may not know or care unless they're also involved in power generation.

Photosynthesis only uses a subset of the visible spectrum. PV panels make power using a different (larger? certainly non-identical) subset of the visible spectrum, albeit at a maximum of maybe 30% efficiency in practice. At first glance, if solar panels convert enough unused parts of the spectrum into LED output that can drive photosynthesis, there might be a net gain on crop yield per m² versus traditional farming. I'm sure someone's run this experiment by now. If so, I'd be curious to see the results.

Incidentally, PV panels discard IR light which makes up 55% of all received solar energy. Concentrated solar power systems seem theoretically more efficient per m² since they capture all light as heat, but I imagine maintenance, energy storage, and heat engine/dynamo inefficiencies combine to bring their total efficiency down.

In short, back of the napkin calculations for this stuff are harder than they may seem! I'd love to see the results of some real-world experiments.

Red and blue mostly I think, hence purple lights, and why plants look green and not black.

As I understand the variation in green light and it’s intensity mucks up photosynthesis, now if photosynthesis could be tuned to use green light too that would be handy, it’s just that evolution has a head start of billions of years.

Of course though eukaryotic cells run on mitochondria, if energy could be sourced to the cell to replace the chloroplasts directly that could be one way around. But denaturing food like that could have unforeseen consequences.

There was a Tommorow’s World item about making food from petrochemicals, I’m still aghast.

> There was a Tommorow’s World item about making food from petrochemicals, I’m still aghast.

You make that sound so bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein

Imagine the potential... ;->

You can save some energy by choosing specific spectrum LEDs but you can't go overboard as that is tricky, since in addition to photosynthesis a bunch of other processes in plants are activated by light, and if you just put in one frequency then you may get weird results as some processes in the plant "think" that it's nighttime and screw up its growth.

I can think of one plant that will never flower under fluorescent bulbs, because they lack enough red wavelengths to trigger the hormones that shift its biochemistry from vegetative to reproductive growth.

So you are saying that of the ~1kW of energy that ends up on a m2 from sun only 10-15W is light that is useful for plants? And that is after the power conversion losses?

So my solar panel that gets ~200W/m2 could feed 10x the area of plants than the sun directly?

Something does not add up here.

Edit: 10k/200 is 50 so I don’t see how you ended up with 10-15

There is another thing that comes to mind. Wind. Many plants grow thin and weak without it. One can maybe compensate that with blowers, but that's just more energy needed. Or shaking them somehow. I don't know exactly how relevant that would be for small stuff growing fast to be consumed ASAP, but maybe the lack of it could also influence taste/texture?

Vertical farms don't make sense, and never will, except as a curiosity/novelty/luxury product. There's only so many calories you can grow with the incident sun on a piece of ground.

> Vertical farms don't make sense, and never will, except as a curiosity/novelty/luxury product.

If you rely on cheap energy, then yes. If you grow under the sun, vertical systems and hydro-/aeroponics still make a lot of sense, IMO.

Check what these guys are growing under the sun in grow towers:

https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs

I think this would be impossible to reproduce with traditional horizontal farming.

They make all sense given cheap energy. For example, Iceland grows most of its tomato consumption locally around the year despite a lack of sun in seasons like this one (currently 4-ish hours of not-that-strong daylight), doing that under artificial light in greenhouses, getting both heat and electricity from cheap geothermal power sources.

So when at some point in future we manage to get cheap renewable replacements to fossil fuels, all of this becomes very relevant.

It is fundamentally a very questionable proposition: Use Free Sun vs block out free sun with a roof and then spend money on electricity to generate light.

Sunlight isn't the only factor.

Agreed. Energy cost is an important factor though & farming is a dicey financial proposition as is without powering a warehouse full of LEDs

Why these vertical farm can not use a sunlight daily and a LEDlight nightly?

I'm not sure why the article mentions AppHarvest, who isn't doing a vertical farm; AppHarvest makes massive greenhouses. From their balance sheet it looks like they are selling their products at a massive discount and won't be in business much longer if they don't get some funding soon.

> Management believes there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. [1]

[1] https://investors.appharvest.com/node/8546/html

This feels like a cyclic process that both drives efficiency and improves as energy access and utilization efficiency improves.

Years ago I did the math on installing a small vertical farm in my home to provide me with all the green vegetables I eat. I quickly realised that it would cost more in electricity, equipment etc. than just buying it from the local grocery store. However using a greenhouse would make it a lot cheaper because of the free sun energy. But too much hassle for my liking.