If your answer is anything but "we should indeed" then you're saying that a spectrum of technological aids are a good idea. This is one of them.
E.g. growing water-intensive herbs in the Middle East based on nature vs inside a water-recirculating vertical farm.
If it's not obvious, the answer isn't actually nature vs vertical farm, it's flying them in vs vertical farm. Your incredulity at people not just growing things where they're easy to grow should possibly diminish when you remember that we grow them where they're good to grow and then engage a global commercial, legal and freight industry to get them to us. That combination is what vertical farms are competing against.
There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.
The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or some other city-state.
My sense is that it was riding a wave of "local" and "farm to table".
If you're in a city like LA or NY where there's a lack of space AND local demand for a premium priced product that can be delivered year round AND more awareness/marketability for such products (local + sustainable), the economics are different than versus growing a commodity product in Boise, Idaho.
It's like the farmers in Asia that grow super premium fruits (Japan and Taiwan come to mind). It only makes sense in the context of a market that will pay the price premium.
All you’re saving by forcing that is a few hours of driving in a truck. If there’s an emissions concern then most farming regions are also good places for renewables like solar and wind. Electric or other carbon neutral vehicles seem like a more reasonable solution. Just a short trip outside of a city can probably get enough land for a large greenhouse if you want higher density farming with existing ag-tech and shorter transport.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't make the case that it makes _zero_ sense; only that they couldn't prove the use case and find the right products and market. Definitely with a more high-value product that couldn't be sourced reasonably locally or even from the US, there may be a better economic case.
It reminds me of this couple growing yuzu lemon in NJ and selling 5-10x the price to Michelin restaurants in the area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwTc5929U5g
And generally speaking, I don’t want my food grown where it’s the most polluted. From the middle of nowhere with minimal population density, ideally upstream of any big city, is where I want my food coming from.
(Will admit I start a garden at my mom’s in a medium sized city’s suburb, but when I run some containers on my balcony on a busy city street, the layers of dust from ??? concern me)
Maybe this will get better once we don’t have the concentration of ICE vehicles in urban centres, but until then…
There are some extreme exceptions like the United Arab Emirates etc. but they are home to only a fraction of the world population and building a city like Dubai in a desert was probably not a great idea to begin with.
> By this reasoning, why would we need to do anything to grow food? Why not relax and enjoy nature's bounty?
The GP got a couple things wrong (e.g. nature doesn't provide free pest control), but one thing very, very right: plants need lots and lots of sunlight that we can get for free with horizontal farming. Vertical farming throws all that away, and therefore is mostly nonsense. IIRC, all it can manage is low-calories crops like lettuce. You're not getting industrial-scale, vertically-farmed potatoes without a bunch of generators powering tons of floodlights.
You'd need literally megawatts of power to provide the same amount of light. Where are you going to get that from? Solar panels...?
The usual answer is: nuclear power that is too cheap to meter. Still waiting for it…
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC?locat... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0712/top-agricul... [3] https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/foodstuffs
Plants are 1 to 3.5% efficient at turning light into stored energy [1]. Our worst cells clock in an order of magnitude higher [2]. It wasn't ridiculous to ask if we could capture energy on a roof, emit it in a wavelength favorable to photosynthesis, and engineer plants to be more efficient. That would permit one roof's solar energy to power ten floors' crops.
To my knowledge, everyone did the first, some did the second and nobody bothered with the third, rendering the entire enterprise kaput from the get go. (If you're capturing at 25%, emitting with losses into a system that itself has 1% efficiency, you're building a space heater, not a farm.)
[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/photosynthesis/Photosyste...
Yeah, but a natural ecosystem isn't agriculture, and the concept of a "pest" doesn't even make sense in one. Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus. "Pests" are non-human organisms that want to take that unnatural surplus for themselves.
> There are very well established agricultural systems that use that principle and employ it to enable commercial farming without pesticides and herbicides while retaining high productivity. Search for syntropic agriculture and New Forest Farm (Mark Shepard).
That's kind of off topic, but I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques. Either the "high productivity" is quite a bit less that the productivity for traditional farming, or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
If that is the case (and there were no other alternatives) the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.
> I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques
Way to be skeptical without even bothering to do a Google search. Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm. Plenty of other examples around as well.
> […] or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
"Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...
agreed
> Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm.
Yes, I've read about Mark Shepard with a lot of interest. However that's just one farm. It's yet to be seen if his methods will work elsewhere, if his claims for productivity can be substantiated, if his productivity can be duplicated, and so on. In short his work is, currently, at best a prototype.
If you're going to claim that regenerative can be as productive as conventional then you need to point to systems that are widely used and whose productivity figures are reliably gathered.
> "Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
You miss the point. It's not about the availability of labour. It's about the price of labour. It's more economically efficient to reduce labour as much as possible. I'm not claiming this is a good thing. It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
> It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
But farming is not a free-market enterprise in "modern" societies. It is the most subsidized and among the most regulated among all enterprises in industrialized economies. German farmers derive half their income and all their profits from government (mostly EU) subsidies. I don't know the figures for the US, but I'd bet that they are similar. Farming, by who and how farming is practiced is basically entirely defined by political priorities, which at this time are mostly still based on the technological and scientific developments of the 1930s-1970s, which have created some very well established commercial interest groups (chem-ag concerns, farmers unions, etc.).
Because if it was that good, I'd expect to have been seeing all kind of articles about the massive revolution in agriculture. If there wasn't some kind of catch, why isn't it seeing wider adoption?
As far as what counts as "commercial success." It'd really have to be something that can compete with commodity agriculture to be a solution. If it's a "commercial success" because it's some boutique thing that can charge 10x commodity prices to make up for 5x costs by selling to self-consciously "ethical consumers" and elites by marketing its good local green permaculture vibes, then I don't think it will be anything but niche producers.
The systems I have highlighted have demonstrated commercial-grade calorie surpluses over decades. Kindly da a tiny bit of research before simply claiming the opposite.
Regenerative agriculture has also demonstrated that it can bring degraded and marginal land back into production and it uses less irrigation etc. by design, so it would be possible to expand arable land.
Whether removal of wildlife areas and the trace chemistry in our bodies is a worse outcome than expensive vertical farming is unknown and it might be unknowable.
If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.
Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").
Much as I like these approaches, unfortunately mostly they are currently a long long way off the productivity of conventional agriculture by any metric (yield/area, yield/animal etc)
If you've got some specific examples of regenerative systems that out-perform conventional in terms of productivity please post some links.
A concrete example would be New Forest Farm: about 40 hectares in Wisconsin farmed entirely without chemical fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides or external irrigation for more than two decades. The owner is arguably more commercially successful than the neighboring corn farmers and according to his data, he produces similar amounts of calories/ha with a considerably lower energy input and comparable labour requirements. He has written a couple of good books and you can find plenty of youtube videos of him (Mark Shepard).
Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional.
I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.
Again, if you've links to highly productive _widely deployed_ regenerative systems please post them.
As I've said in another comment Mark Shepard's work is very interesting, but it's an isolated case, a prototype. The trick is replicating it widely - it remains to be seen if that can be done.
No it isn't if you are reducing your industrial input and commercial seed expenses.
The only guy on youtube I know who does regenerative agriculture has better soil quality and higher profits. Also even in scenarios where regenerative agriculture is behind, the difference comes from the fact that the soil has been depleted already and you start from less than zero. If you have been doing it for thirty years, you get higher yields than conventional agriculture.
The biggest advantage of indoor farming is that you no longer need to use chemical pesticides and herbicides.
A lovely example of this is the germination rooms/tanks of malting plants where Barley gets germinated over a few days (2-3) before being dried/kilned to make brewing malt: they all have an on-going battle against fungi and algae, much of which battle takes the form of fungicides/algacides, chlorine washes, strong acids, etc. and they never "win" a permanent victory.
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...
Same for fungi: it’s usually brought, or becomes endemic, in with the soil.
Things are a bit cleaner in vertical plant farms as long as they dont use animal biproducts in their process.
And again: why bother? Market gardens are highly space efficient and can feed hundreds of people from the space normally occupied by a suburban house plot. Locating a market garden outside an agglomeration and transporting the produce an hour or so into the city is also very practical. And of course actual staple crops are shelf stable and can thus be transported anywhere at leisure. This fancy "vertical farming" stuff makes sense on a space station and desert cities flush with petro dollars but that's about it.
There are edge cases where the technology developed for vertical farms seems very useful: densely-populated, small countries; space stations, and off-world colonies. But for most of Earth? Look at how much of the US is farmland, and then imagine how many expensive towers and associated infrastructure you'd need to replace it.
There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.
And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.
It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'
This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress.
A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education.
Far from being dependent on either the profit motive or global trade, they are largely public goods, have overwhelmingly been provided outside of private enterprise, and do not in the main depend on goods being transported globally.
Are these healthcare advancements closely related to either private enterprise or modern globalized logistics? Clearly not, as in many cases they took place without either, due to local conditions. For around half the world these advances took place before shipping containers.
Health education, hygiene and birth control generally rely on the transmission of information and ideas but not of goods. The other three have been successful, in at least some cases, as public goods, advanced outside of the private sector. In many other cases they have happened because of, not despite, local rather than globalized manufacturing and distribution.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
Spot on! Plants without solar lights are for labs, not for food.
> Simply not true. Many plants accumulate surplus nutrients in their root systems or provide the required support for the soil live that sequesters nutrients in the soil. All of that remains in the soil when you harvest the plant,
That's inaccurate and simplistic.
_Some_ plants generate _some_ nutrients in the soil. The most common example being legumes (in symbiosis with bacteria) fixing atmospheric nitrogen into a form essential for plant life.
However all plants have complex nutrient needs. So even those that contribute something to the soil will remove other nutrients.
In the example of legumes, to simplify, if the whole plant is harvested, they will have made a net contribution of nitrogen, but the soil will still be depleted of e.g. Phosphorous and Potassium.
> if you are not dump enough to destroy the soil live by tilling, which sadly is currently the norm in industrialized agriculture.
It's not a dumb approach, it can make sense. And it does not "destroy" the soil. Yes it _can_ cause leeching, soil erosion and depletion of some nutrients, but all these ill effects can be dramatically lessened by good practice.
In Europe we have soils that have been tilled intermittently for millenia and are still productive.
Yes, with modern tilling machinery there are now alternatives available in some situations (min-till, disc only etc) which can avoid some of the potential ill effects of tilling.
The US also also have a number of places where the soil has given way because of poor farming practices.
Also, the dust bowl.