It is not even flying them in vs vertical farm. But vertical farm vs more traditional greenhouse solutions. Where you can do all the circulation control, but also can use natural light and don't need large concrete structures.

There is very few countries in the world that don't have enough land so that they need vertical farms.

I've always thought it a bit odd that they picked up steam first in the U.S. for this reason.

The economic case is vastly more sensible in Singapore or some other city-state.

> a bit odd that they picked up steam first in the U.S. for this reason

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.

I’m all for farm to table but both NY and LA don’t need farms within city limits.

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.

For NYC, it's not even "few", it's a couple hours drive at most. Hell, you're still within the commuter rail radius and closer to the city than its main reservoir.

If it made sense, they would still be in business and thriving. I'm only offering one conjecture.

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

The odd thing is I haven't heard a single one of these startups target the luxury market. What you say makes a lot of sense.

> NY and LA don’t need farms within city limits.

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…

This is a misinterpretation of the parent comment. He states a lot of these services are free outdoors.

The vast majority of humanity is living in places where basically all food can be grown locally, with some exceptions for luxury (tropical fruits in high latitudes) and seasonality (not alle produce does store well fresh, though practically all can be frozen, dried or canned in some way).

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.

>> all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud.

> 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.

All over Scotland - which is kind of centred around 55°N, way further north than these guys with their vertical farms - potatoes grow like crazy. Some types do well in Ayrshire, some do well up here in Angus (yes, like Aberdeen-Angus cattle). Different types of soil work well for different plants.

You'd need literally megawatts of power to provide the same amount of light. Where are you going to get that from? Solar panels...?

In Norway, Potatoes are grown as far north as the Northernmost region of Finnmark, around 70°N, and Norway is able to produce more potatoes than are eaten by people (Norway still imports potatoes because the growing season is short).

> 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…

It's mostly non-sense in North America. In places like Japan, Korea, it makes a ton of sense. High population density, with relatively little arable land.

Japan has about half the arable land per person as the Netherlands [1] but the Netherlands is the worlds #2 food exporter [2]. Japan could probably be more or less self-sustainable in terms of food production, if they made it a political priority, even without any fancy vertical farming. In fact, they already import less foodstuffs than German, at about 1.5 times the population [3] (to be fair, Germanys central position in the EU's free trade area makes importing food a cheap thing to do).

[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 need lots and lots of sunlight

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...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency

Functioning ecosystems do provide pest control, otherwise there would not be ecosystems at all, because some pest would just destroy the entire thing. 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).

> Functioning ecosystems do provide pest control, otherwise there would not be ecosystems at all, because some pest would just destroy the entire thing.

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.

> Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus.

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...

> 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.

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.

Mark Shepard's system has been reproduced/used as inspiration in many other places, I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of them commercially successful (tough I admittedly do not have calorie production figures for those and am not sure if they exist). But I'm not sure why the example of his farm warrants so much skepticism. He isn't in a special location, on the contrary: his soils were a corn farm previously, degraded and according to the generally accepted advice at the time unusable for Walnuts, one of his main crops. He didn't use any special technology, etc.

> 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.).

> I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of them commercially successful (tough I admittedly do not have calorie production figures for those and am not sure if they exist). But I'm not sure why the example of his farm warrants so much skepticism.

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.

Those systems never seem to produce very many calories per acre. They're interesting as biology labs, and would probably be fine for subsistence agriculture for a small number of humans. However, we're trying to feed 8 billion people and we need the raw calorie to arable land ratio to work.

Actually we are trying to feed 8 billion people, 21 billion chicken, 1.4 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, etc: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/livestock-counts

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.

This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think. You’re still talking about significant inputs of land and human labor for lower calorie outputs.