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So far, everyone growing vertically is growing crops that are almost entirely water because they're the only things that grow fast enough to turn a profit. They

• smitty1e 6y ago
  > Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent Every new tech has its Hype Cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
• nugget 6y ago
  How meaningful is the claim that indoor, vertical farms need/have zero pesticides because it's a totally contained environment? I'm not sure I'd pay 5x for "taste and the feeling of eating local" but if it's differentiated in terms of pesticide exposure then I'd start to take a look.
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Generally these environments need more chemicals, especially to fend off mold.
    • cma 6y ago
      They can't use UV for that?
      • 14 6y ago
        I would think proper humidity control would be most beneficial. Also this set up looks completely modular and you saw the robot arm adding a rack. Each section could be sterilized and put back into production reducing likelihood of mold and if you found mold could remove the effected sections only. With good climate controls and procedures I believe mold could be mitigated.
      • mikro2nd 6y ago
        They can, but it's self-limiting in that all you're really doing is supplying an evolutionary pressure that results in UV-tolerant fungi/pathogens. I once toured a (large) malting works where the soak-tanks are bathed in UV all the time (except when humans need to enter the room) and harsh chemicals are employed constantly to limit fungal and bacterial growth. They are still unable to eradicate those pathogens and suffer constantly from infection problems.
    • MichaelZuo 6y ago
      Are you sure that is the case for hydroponics? It would be surprising to see a startup with some big names behind it advertise bald faced lies. Or would mold inhibiting compounds not be classified as pesticides?
      • cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        Any greenhouse environment, hydroponic or not, tends to require high fungicide and insecticide inputs -- at least eventually -- because it's essentially an all-you-can-buffet for pathogens. You could be fine, even excellent, at first, but with no competition or diversity to head them off, pests can cause extensive damage once they get into the system. It is true with integrated pest management and careful observation you can be a little more calculated and strategic in a closed environment. Until something comes in on your shoe, or blows in through a door left open... (Took greenhouse mgmt courses before, though I've never worked in the horti industry)
• Invictus0 6y ago
  Don't you think vertical could have an impact in rain/fertile land starved areas like the israeli desert?
  • hedora 6y ago
    With infinite energy, Israel could have infinite water. They already have unlimited light and land. This is an energy intensive technology. So, the question is whether it uses less electricity to desalinate and flood irrigate, or pay for the electricity to allow ultra high density, water efficient farms, and then desalinate less. (I’d be shocked if either of these approaches is pareto-optimal.)
    • Ekaros 6y ago
      Or maybe more traditional approach of greenhouses? Which should have relatively similar case of handling evaporative losses... And if conversion losses of Sun->EV->lights aren't too horrible, you could even cover these with solar panels... What is even the efficiency of electricity used by vertical farms?
      • NickNameNick 6y ago
        I'd expect a greenhouse in the desert to need an enormous amount of ventilation to prevent overheating. You could probably recover some of the water from the exhaust air with a dehumidifier. I'm not sure if that would use less power than air-conditioning the whole structure, but at that point you're pretty much back to indoors farming anyway.
        • kortex 6y ago
          Bubble foam insulation is the way to go in deserts. This is where you pump a soap water foam in between gaps of greenhouse plastic. When you want to block light/heat, fill that wall with foam. Drain to allow radiation. Water can be recuperated with an enthalpy wheel.
    • iguy 6y ago
• throwaway9980 6y ago
  This sounds the “why Tesla will never work argument.” Selling rich people what they want as a starting place to pioneer new technology is a good strategy even if it doesn’t feel good to you.
  • hbrundage 6y ago
    Nothing wrong with starting there as long as there is a path to profitability with a mass market product! Do you think there is one for vertically grown potatoes? Or corn? Both are 10-100x less valuable per pound and both take 10-100x longer to grow, 10-100x more water, and 10-100x more energy. I am not sure Tesla was battling the same order of magnitude of order of magnitudes.
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    The market doesn’t really absorb boutique veggies well. How many people at a farmer’s market can sell micro greens before it becomes uneconomical? Meanwhile Tesla has a waiting list for virtually every one of their vehicles and is the only one selling them.
  • akiselev 6y ago
    It's not a question of pioneering, it's a question of base resource inputs. Tesla can promise an electric car but they can't promise one that costs less than the lithium and metals required to manufacture it, let alone the cost of labor. Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible. Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California. It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.
    • deleted 6y ago
• TylerE 6y ago
  There are plenty of cash crops this would be perfect for. They just aren't especially....legal at the current time.
  • edoceo 6y ago
    Indoor/Vert farming Cannabis is very expensive - even with full auto-hydro/aero setups. And, after legalization there is huge downward pressure on PPK of the material (eg: -75-80%)
    • mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
      True, although that cost gives you the ability to control the environment very precisely. This allows for a level of quality that people are willing to pay for, at least when it comes to flower.
      • edoceo 6y ago
        Not really (I say this after viewing the books for 100s of pot farms)
  • MikeTheGreat 6y ago
    This is a genuine question - would you mind listing some of those crops? Specifically, there's a number of states in the U.S. that allows people to legally grow marijuana / cannabis. I know it's still illegal at the Federal level, but that hasn't stopped people here in Washington state. Plus, I was never the type of cool that knew a lot about drugs and alcohol. Computers, sure - I was definitely the type of cool that knew a lot about computers, but not so much the recreationally altered states. Which has now come back to haunt me as I'm woefully ignorant of which crops might grow well in this sort of environment :)
• est31 6y ago
  It might only serve a tiny subset of the market, but subsets can still be highly profitable. Consider Apple vs the Android ecosystem. Most phones are Android phones, yet Apple makes most profits from the market thanks to their brand.
• Spooky23 6y ago
  Its a shame we don’t experiment with growing food in former bread baskets like upstate NY, Ohio, etc, and spend money on navel gazing exercises. As it stands today, as a nation, the United States supply of vegetables and many other products is totally dependent on the Colorado river. A variety of problems from climate change to terrorist or other attack could rapidly impact our ability to feed ourselves.
  • cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Been saying this for years. Instead of (or in addition to) growing almonds in the central valley, requiring large irrigation inputs, we could be growing hybrid hazelnuts in the northeast. Just one example. Not saying it would have equivalent profitability, but I have a hard time believing it would be less efficient or profitable than vertical farming with external high energy inputs. There's plenty that can be done in traditional agriculture.
  • howlin 6y ago
    Anywhere near the rustbelt is going to need their soil thoroughly tested for contamination. But maybe that's not too big a deal when you amortize the cost over the entire life of a farm.
    • dismalpedigree 6y ago
      You do realize the rust belt is enormous and only an infinitesimally small area of it was factories, right? Sure. Don’t try to grow food in Detroit. But vast majority of PA, OH, IN, MI have always been rural and are not some polluted hell scape.
      • jhickok 6y ago
        Not to mention the tremendous farmland in Wisconsin and Iowa that could easily be converted to vegetable farms if the demand shifted from animal product.
      • cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        Their main point is wrong... but it is worth pointing out that a lot of the soils in the northest _do_ need to be tested not because of industrial pollution but because of agricultural pollution. Apple orchards in particular up until the 70s often used lead arsenate pesticide sprays. Yes, you read that right; lead and arsenic. Sprayed onto plants. It accumulated in the soil and basically never leaves, and is a serious potential health hazard. There has been insufficient discussion of this, overall, and it's basically "buyer beware" for land.
• youeseh 6y ago
  Cash crops = the type that a farmer can grow and make it rain, yah? Like spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens which bring in revenue year round, can be turned from seed to harvest in a matter of weeks, and have a high dollar value? There are definitely barriers to entry associated with getting into vertical farming, but there are also advantages for the farmer.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    It's sloppy terminology. I am fairly sure that "cash crops" was intended to mean "high caloric density, mass market crops". While millions of people do eat hydroponically grown/growable produce, they do not survive on these kinds of crops. They rely on root vegetables and cereals for that, and those are currently impossible to grow in the way described in TFA.
    • Danieru 6y ago
      > "cash crops" was intended to mean "high caloric density, mass market crops". Tobacco is a cash crop, not caloric dense. Cash crops are the profitable crop a farm might use to generate cash. Since all farms are now commercial this isn't a meaningful distinction but it was when most farms were substance. Wheat and Corn are not traditional cash crops. They are stable cereals. Cereals will be the last crops to ever become viable in vertical farming. Which is fine, the technology can develop leveraging the high value low-calory crops.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        There are different ways of talking about "cash crops". The sane metrics, IMO, take into consideration the inputs required and the toll that growing takes on the soil. From this perspective, garlic is an extraordinarily excellent cash crop: high yields, very low inputs, extremely low impact on soil nutrients. By contrast, potatoes can generate more income for the farmer per unit area per year (mostly because of the caloric density), but they do wear down soils way more than an allium like garlic, and if you take that into account, the long term picture is not so rosy. I've read that if you can get the timing right, the most profitable crop to grow in the USA are the flowers used at high school and college graduations. The window is very narrow, however, and if you miss it you earn basically nothing at all.
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• centimeter 6y ago
  > measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired This is a long way of saying “is completely useless”
• nerdponx 6y ago
  And that is fine by me. Those "mostly water" crops are otherwise grown under heavy irrigation. Happy to see them go indoors and high-density.
  • the__alchemist 6y ago
    It's not clear from the article what the water and energy cost is.
• tuatoru 6y ago
  > One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. That's something I hadn't considered, the social aspects. Thanks! The greatest value of urban farms might be in primary-school education.
• airza 6y ago
  The amount of arable land in many countries has more or less _already_ peaked. It is certainly not growing fast enough keep up with population. The ability to make lots of good grow in places other than arable farmland is going to be very important in the next 100 years.
  • baskire 6y ago
    Not when you take global warming into consideration. Russia and Canada will have a lot more farm land in the near future. I’m sure the USA will also unlock some new farming areas.
• sixQuarks 6y ago
  I knew the top comment would be why this will never work. HN never disappoints. May be true, but I take these top comments with a grain of salt.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    It does seem to be a regular pattern. In this case the criticism seems to be that a system that is designed to grow salad crops can't grow staples so is useless.
• jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  It’s markets. Vertical farming will do better in singapore or China or maybe even India..possibly MENA region because their diet involves a lot more than lettuce. Altho with the exception of Middle East and possibly Singapore, other regions will be severely constrained wrt energy requirements, infrastructure. It is kind of a minor tragedy that due to American poverty of imagination and a lack of culinary heritage, all our indoor vegetables are lettuce and all our vat grown meat resembles burgers. We can’t seem to progress beyond burger meat and lettuce even with cutting edge tech. Perfect day makes dairy that doesn’t require cows. And what is their first product? Ice cream. It’s all very depressing. In 500 years, when we run out of natural resources and when our food comes from fermentation tanks, veggies from vertical farms and is 3D printed...we will all be eating burgers and salad and ice cream.
  • noisy_boy 6y ago
    Singapore is different compared to China or India because it has pretty high population density but acute shortage of land that can be used for farming. It is also a country that likes to plan ahead and have contingency measures to reduce dependencies/risk and actually has the political climate, knowledge and willingness to do what is necessary. I think it'll achieve great efficiency in this field.
    • jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      singapore is my favourite example for ..pretty much everything. they are already doing great with indoor ag. and also shiok..for cell based seafood alternative. https://shiokmeats.com/ https://shiokmeats.com/ the only bad thing about singapore for me is the humidity. i struggle when i am outdoors in singapore. i cant handle it anymore. otherwise..my motto to other wannabe city states: be like singapore!
• rklaehn 6y ago
  I think to create calorie rich base food, photosynthesis might be the completely wrong approach. It is extremely inefficient compared to photovoltaics. <1% vs >20%. A better approach might be to produce hydrogen via photovoltaics and electrolysis, then use hydrogen metabolising bacteria to create more complex carbon hydrates and proteins from that. The raw output of this might be edible in an emergency, but you would typically further refine it. Either you use fungi and end up with something similar to Quorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn , or you feed it to livestock (fish, chicken). I think that this might be the base of the food chain for space settlements. On earth, traditional agriculture works just fine to produce an abundance of food, and I don't see more than aesthetic reasons to change it.
  • reeddavid 6y ago
    I think your comment describes something very similar to what Solar Foods is doing (https://solarfoods.fi https://solarfoods.fi). There was a previous discussion with some more details about what they're doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344636
    • rklaehn 6y ago
      Nice. Did not know about this. There is another company https://www.calysta.com/ https://www.calysta.com/ that have a similar product called feedkind. Basically animal food that is made in a bioreactor from methane. Methane can be easily made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide via the sabatier reaction.
  • the8472 6y ago
    The 1% of photosynthesis is end-to-end efficiency, from the whole solar spectrum IN to the carbohydrates OUT. The PV efficiency on the other hand only gives you electrons and you need electrolysis and bacterial metabolism on top which have their own losses.
    • rklaehn 6y ago
      Sure. But electrolysis is >70% efficient, so even if the bacterial metabolism is only 30% efficient the end to end efficiency is a factor of 10 higher. You are also going straight to complex proteins, whereas photosynthesis produces just basic hydrocarbons.
• golergka 6y ago
  > They then sell them to rich people who pay 5x for taste and the feeling of eating local. I don't know anything about farming, but this is exactly what the first version of a true innovation usually looks like. First versions of everything, from iron weapons that bent on the battlefield, to computers that took a room, almost always were more expensive and worse than existing alternatives. These first version occupied weird niches, for example where existing alternatives were not available (as trade of tin and copper broke down after bronze age collapse) or were just toys for rich people (like first mobile phones and many, many other things). But unlike existing alternatives, they only started their cycle of scaling and optimisations.
• hattmall 6y ago
  What about sweet potatoes? I'm guessing the argument is that it's not necessary because we have the available land. They can however be grown in stacked levels of soil layered with grow lights. You could very easily potentially have a skyscraper filled stacked and growing sweet potatoes.
• scottlocklin 6y ago
  Of course the capital costs of this are absurd (that's basically what you're saying here), but if it results in tomatoes and strawberries which don't taste like paste, it's worth it to me. Dutch greenhouse farms are considerably more realistic [0], but who knows, this may have some niches in extremely urban areas. [0] https://tour-pronl.com/en/mice-tourism/tours-for-professional-training-in-the-netherlands/greenhouse-farms/ https://tour-pronl.com/en/mice-tourism/tours-for-professiona...
  • rapnie 6y ago
    > The total area of the Netherlands is just 41.6 square kilometers, but the country is ranked first in the world by the area of greenhouse farms. Well, that would be quite something.. but the number is a typo. From Wikipedia: > With a population of 17.4 million people, all living within a total area of roughly 41,800 square kilometres (16,100 sq mi)—of which the land area is 33,500 square kilometres (12,900 sq mi)—the Netherlands is the 12th most densely populated country in the world. The total amount of greenhouse area is about 10,000 hectares (24710 acres).
    • tromp 6y ago
      10,000 hectares being 100 square kilometers, or 0.3% of land area.
• bufferoverflow 6y ago
  Another application of a vertical farm is ultra-fresh food. As in, cut a minute ago just for you. Most of us eat quite stale salads.
• mapcars 6y ago
  > not a solution to food scarcity or security. For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.
  • knuthsat 6y ago
    Another lovely fact is that more plant mass is eaten by the animals grown for food than humans, so the plant production problem is non-existent. At least when it comes to human consumption.
    • slothtrop 6y ago
      Well plant production for meat includes things like soybeans and corn. While they're non-perishable it's not what those in food-insecure places would want to eat. Grains yes, but I hazard malnutrition is owing to lack of other food sources. On the local level I think companies lobby against redistributing excess foods for free to keep prices high. Something's got to give, either food waste is drastically diminished or we redistribute all of it.
      • zdragnar 6y ago
        Redistributing crops for free means creating a catch-22 situation guaranteeing they will never have local farmers. Why be a subsistence farmer or cash cropper when the local market is flooded with free food?
        • slothtrop 6y ago
          Those in need aren't "the market". Notwithstanding that, farmers are often subsidized anyway.
    • yostrovs 6y ago
      Are you saying that here in Texas, the dry, tall grass eaten by the longhorns could be more efficiently processed by poor people?
• jlg23 6y ago
  > Until someone can grow cash crops, vertical isn't gonna make a dent [...] I image that countries with very little agriculturally usable land are watching this closely. Reducing dependency on imported food is probably in every nation's interest.
  • duxup 6y ago
    Are their consumers willing to pay a premium/ subside local vertical farms? "Reducing dependency on imported" anything seems to be an idea that often isn't a reality when it comes to paying for it.
    • wolfram74 6y ago
      Making food takes space, light, water* and labor. The american midwest farming practices have really optimized to minimize the labor cost because space, light and water were in abundance. But if the space cost goes up from higher/re-internalized transport costs, and the cost of light goes down from miscellaneous power production schemes taking hold, the economics for vertical farming changes. [*] and various nutrients/minerals in the vein of phosphates, nitrates and what have you.
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      Countries like Taiwan or Israel probably place higher value on reliability of inland food production than most of the world, so we should see most of the development there.
      • duxup 6y ago
        It will be interesting to see. But I'm skeptical. Even nations that 'should' care about local production often don't, even in the face of obvious consequences and disadvantages. It seems like more often than not the price / market still leans towards cheaper and other concerns are just concerns that aren't addressed.
• ignoramous 6y ago
  > One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. https://www.urbankisaan.com/ourgreens https://www.urbankisaan.com/ourgreens seems to be doing exactly that, too, in India.
• ehnto 6y ago
  I think it's a technology we should continue to develop, because at the moment we have a relatively freely flowing global economy that allows for the exotic fruit and vegetable availability that we are used to. That is unlikely to always be the case, and not every country has vast acres to spare on food production should they lose the ability to compete or participate in the global market.
• AYBABTME 6y ago
  It's just a guess but I don't believe your calculus holds for countries that can't produce or cheaply import from regions like Canada/USA. The case I have top of mind is Korea, which has very little arable land and can only import via boats from China (quality worries). Japan is probably similar to a lesser scale. I believe the economics of vertical farming in these regions make a lot more sense, and 2020 has created huge price hikes in food in Korea because of too much rain and expensive imports. Also hi , I've been curious for years what happened with your farming plans. I can guess you walked away from them!
• 908B64B197 6y ago
  > One application of vertical that does make sense to me is as a community hub or a public health initiative around healthy eating. See https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ https://www.thegrowcer.ca/ who makes container farms for isolated communities in northern Canada and measures success by community outcomes and entrepreneurs inspired The amount of subsidies poured into this lifestyle must be unbelievable. The whole thing has to be flown-in, including fuel to operate it. Before that what did these communities eat?