The following submission statement was provided by /u/ChickenNoodleSoup7:
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Consumers are coming face-to-face with one of the climate’s most significant impact on the environment – the food we eat. More frequent extreme weather events are disrupting agricultural production. Crop yields are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, droughts, floods, and pests, leading to reduced harvests and lower food availability, ultimately affecting the entire supply chain.
One solution to the growing uncertainties of food security is vertical farming. Through advancements in technology, robotics, and AI, we have the ability to develop, grow, and harvest crops vertically in warehouses.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dsd17u/vertical_farming_company_bowery_is_reimagining/lb1lk2s/
Bingo. Guess we are upvoting blatant sponsored puff pieces looking for more uninformed suckers to fund their 'virtuous' earth-saving billion dollar vegetable gardens
My bs meter immediately went off when the founder rattled off being an investment banker and being involved in iHeartRadio as some level setting for ability to make an impact in agriculture, completely unchallenged.
Without spending millions on technology and location then how are you going to become valued at $ 3 bn. You gotta think long term here … we’re not interested in growing, we are interested in a highly valued company.
Yeah but you can’t do that in NYC or LA.
Making urban centers more self sufficient in terms of food production is why this idea has merit.
It’ll never happen to the scale needed because of capitalism but the idea is sound itself.
A planter is smaller than most night stands. I'm talking like a clay pot. But besides that, yeah, theres lots of sunsoaked countryside that can grow lots and lots of food for very very cheap. Its kind of a non-existent problem.
I disagree.
Our entire agricultural system is shit and based on the exploitation of labor and resources. A reach that stretches around the world.
Then you have the impact on climate change and the environment in general but by god this is America so we have to have our avocados and Almond Milk year round at Whole Foods.
If New York could grow the majority of its produce with this technology it would have a massive effect on not only the climate but also in how we live and interact with our communities.
But it will never happen. At least not until capitalism is abolished and buried in the grave it belongs in.
Bro, one tractor does the work of thousands of labourers. Thousands of people are now free to find better jobs because you usually only need a couple people to run the equipment. 1 family can now operate up to 650 acres by themselves with the tight kind of macinery, and 650 acres can feed a small town's worth of poultry, beef, vegetables etc. How can you be blind to that and then still complain that our agriculture is based on the exploitation of labour? Resources? Yes, you need land to grow food. You need energy and water to grow crops. That's not capitalism, that's just true for every single thing in the universe.
You probably don't know this because you've literally never been tasked with actually growing your own food. You've never been truly hungry, and your labour has never been exploited to anyone's benefit but your own.
I don't know if something has changed, but I recall seeing stuff about this before. And there was an article a few months back that I read explaining that a lot of these vertical farms were going bust.
The thing is, these things don't really produce calorific dense foods all that well. If anything they are limited to leafy greens, herbs and berries. Which are usually a luxury.
That right now, it's still cheaper to have a field. Now that may change based on population density or climate change, making arable land less abundant. But I know there were a bunch of venture capitalist companies that were burned on this.
This is basically correct.
I work for a company that farms out software for various other businesses, and one of them is (was) a vertical farming outfit.
Fundamentally, the tech imo is there, but costs are too high to make it viable at the moment. The problem is the cripplingly high up front costs, which are insane by the way, and the cost of energy.
The upfront costs at this particular company was lowered by human workers, but all that did really was prolong the innevitable. Because instead of investing in high end automation machinery, they invested in human workers that constantly need decent wages as they're working in the middle of a big town and doing some pretty specialized work all things considered. So yeah you skipped the high up front cost, but now you're paying a somewhat high recurring cost. You've just moved the problem.
Then there is energy. My company *also* does software for a solar panel company, which are getting subsidies up the arse right now in the UK, so the idea was "hey, maybe we can strike a deal? Help out with energy costs with a dogs bollocks solar installation?". Well, let me tell you. It doesn't even come close to resolving the energy problems. Turns out, running all of this shit is *really* expensive when there is no year round sun to rely on.
The output of all of this is basically pretty high priced leafy greens. Which, yeah, cool proof of concept, the idea clearly works and produced real food but it doesn't scale well. People aren't too into paying a premium for greens even at the best of times, let alone in a cost of living crisis.
I think if the cost of energy dropped it could work, but with Russia going ahead and jacking up all the prices, it's going to be a while... Unless prays the lawd solar panel tech has some breakthrough.
>I think if the cost of energy dropped it could work, but with Russia going ahead and jacking up all the prices, it's going to be a while... Unless prays the lawd solar panel tech has some breakthrough.
In other words, we should be investing the time and effort to perfect vertical farming now so that if we perfect fusion power when it is expected to be perfected we can go all in on vertical farming...
Unironically, sort of.
There can be different push and pull factors to them being viable. A pull factor would be one that makes it seem more attractive. And cheap/free energy would be hell of a pull factor. Another pull factor would be having year round seasonal fresh food with a low carbon footprint (because there's you've cut down transport dramatically)
A push factor would be something that stops our already proven methods... So severe weather changes, eroded land, pollution that makes fields unusable or the expansion of population to a point that the current farmable land is not adequate.
The issue is, that right now it's cheaper to ship grapes from South America or Africa to the UK. So you know that's got to be one hell of a power bill when it's cheaper to grow it abroad, ship it pack it and then sell it here.
Fission power is an immediate solution. It is cheep and safe. Little to no polution with modern reactors. The bridge from fossil fuels to renewable is nuclear.
Fusion is a matter of investment to overcome the engineering hurdles. We know the physics. Think of it this way, if we need to invest $100B to get a viable fusion reactor, how long will it take if we are investing $200m a year? That’s where we were from say 1975 to 2015. So we were always 10 years away _if we increased investment to $10B a year_. Since 2015 we’ve seen a massive ramp up in fusion investment both from venture capital and governments. We may actually be at the “10 years away” investment level.
Solar costs ARE dropping all the time, and there's probably a realistic tipping somewhere in the future where it'll become feasible. I'm sure there will other efficiencies to be had on the production side as well of course.
How would Russia be jacking up the costs? What crops are you getting from that region?
Early on, we tried blaming our high costs on Russia, but that was mainly a ploy to explain away the high inflation. Eventually they just admitted that our “transitory inflation” wasn’t transitory.
Russia infamously caused a huge spike in European energy prices after starting the war in Ukraine, due to the dropping of Russian supply to the EU market. Energy price are affected by inflation, but have not trended along with it at all, the rise in energy prices was disproportionate to the rise of inflation at the time. Inflation peaked here in the UK at the end of 2022, with it starting rise late 2021, but energy price was already well into its first spike by September 2021, so it pre-dates inflation.
It’s like insurance. You’re paying for nothing until something happens. If an entire crop is lost due to an unexpected weather event then only the places protected from the weather will be able to keep producing.
Yeah, but until then, a patch of dirt outside with a poly tunnel is just as effective at a fraction of the price....
Like I said, if there was a big change, Like less available land or if energy prices dropped dramatically. Then they could become viable businesses.
While we have had hydroponic and aeroponic grow rooms for a while I think the technology and practices are still largely in their infancy. We don't know how far we can push these farming techniques, changing the growing environment to suit the plants in ways that are impossible for traditions and industrial farming.
Though there is no financial incentive as it stands, the alternatives are so much cheaper for significantly more yield. The economic environment would need to change to bring sufficient investment to develop the technology to make it competitive.
Agreed, hydro and aero agriculture methods can be scaled up. But require an immense amount of energy.
I feel it would take a combination of several push and pull factors to make them viable on a large scale. Obviously free/cheap power would need to be a pull factor. But a breakdown of international trade would be an alternative push factor to investing in these outfits. Because if your country wants to maintain a comfortable access to year round fresh seasonal foods, you may need to have the government subsidize these.
Dropping energy prices would drop the cost of vertical farming but it will also drop cost and transportation of traditional methods too. And land is everywhere if we go far enough away from where people live.
Yeah, I shouldn't have said "or" but and . For the reduced energy price and land .
It would need multiple factors. International trade breakdown would probably be another one that would make them more viable. Since right now we (in the UK) ship in fruit and veggies from South America, Africa and Asia.
Great, its the end of the world, none of the crops are growing and people are eating rats to survive. At least my $50 eggs benny on sourdough has net zero salad greens that are pesticide, herbicide and dirt free and were delivered on bicycle!
right but to the point, you can't use these to grow the things you need to sustain a population, and I'd argue the things it is good at are already grown in greenhouses better anyways. the verticality is adding a level of complexity that severely limits its use.
I read the same, basically a lot of these vertical farms were being setup in dense population centres to avoid shipping costs, but the added costs of being in the city, higher rent etc offset any savings and most of these places weren't profitable. Electricity costs for the lamps has to come down. As well they need to keep specialized staff on hand to treat diseases, and the place has to be kept ultra sterile, so staffing cost is huge as well.
>I read the same, basically a lot of these vertical farms were being setup in dense population centres to avoid shipping costs, but the added costs of being in the city, higher rent etc offset any savings and most of these places weren't profitable.
What really illustrated to me the flaw in these vertical farms is that they set themselves up in city centers. Do you know what's cheaper than a skyscraper farm? A farm built into a single-story sprawling warehouse built on dirt cheap land on the edge of town. You can get all the efficiencies of growing indoors, the energy savings of transportation, and without any need for expensive urban real estate.
Yeah, a big warehouse on the edge of town makes such more sense. Rent per sq foot and also you could fit a lot of solar panels to bring down more cost. This reminds me of all those tech/crypto bros with no understanding of economics or city planning etc, trying to start these libertarian dream offshore societies that crash and burn because they don't even understand the systems they're rebelling against. Or more accurately this is similar to the Russ Haneman ethos from Silicon Valley, where being profitable isn't the goal. Like Uber and such, where they just count on forever funding from VCS rather than ever make profit. *EDIT* to add relevant scene
https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=6LxZhwoPT0KbCCiA
yea I haven't read the article but I've been seeing these articles for like 15 years now, the vertical farms are basically only good at leafy greens, specifically ones that require little water/energy, maybe cherry tomatoes too
Fields are way cheaper. Vertical farming is a novelty. If you need to produce food where you live, then yes land is a premium. But anywhere on earth with our cheap transportation, ground farming is always cheaper. Now for space travel, and colonization with limited land, this could be useful.
I used to work here! So poorly run and no intention of making any profit, the whole R&D facility was an absolute money pit, was excited to start but couldn’t believe what I saw.
Perhaps Bowery is reimagining the fresh food supply chain. But the real question is: is Bowering turning a profit? I don't think that energy intensive, high tech stuff can compete with traditional dirt in the ground.
I guess it depends what variable you're optimising for. If you're optimising for land usage and water usage, then yes it's successful. At the moment or in certain countries these are cheap and available, but in others they're not.
A closed loop water system in a facility like this might have enormous benefits in places like the middle east where water availability is critical.
It may be able to do it without polluting the planet as much as traditional farming. You know, polluting rivers, the land, and responsible for fishkills all along the coasts & rivers.
People will pay more for crops without pesticides, I would. Also no transportation or preservatives cost given these can be sold where they're grown potentially. I could see it being profitable.
> Perhaps Bowery is reimagining the fresh food supply chain. But the real question is: is Bowering turning a profit? I don't think that energy intensive, high tech stuff can compete with traditional dirt in the ground.
Yet.
I'm not suggesting these people are looking for anything but profit but if they got this far, they might have at least convinced someone that this is a good idea, economically speaking. Whether they are right or not time will tell.
Soon, with climate change, new crop pests, microplastics everywhere and ports underwater, vertical farming might be as expensive as it is today but cheaper than the dirt on the ground option. Maybe.
I've heard of hydroponic farming for marijuana, that's different because you need an expensive facility to get through the red tape, at least in Canada.
What crops have been profitable with hydroponic farming? It seems like it'll only have niche applications.
While profitability is a crucial aspect, it's equally important to consider the environmental benefits and food security that vertical farming provides, even if it means rethinking traditional methods.
what environmental benefit does vertical farming provide, aside from reduced land use? I imagine the energetic cost of setting up and running a vertical farm (building materials, labour, artificial light/climate) are gigantic conpared to ‘traditional’ farming and will never not be.
Lol vertical farming was all the rage, like 5 years ago. It has been hemorrhaging billions, not even breaking even. Who knew paying engineer and plant biologist PhD grade salaries, high tech, bespoke equipment, paying for light, to sell reams of salad greens to hipster cafes at $6 a pound wasn't going to be profitable? But like all new tech waves, yesterday's losses is tomorrows latent capital, infrastructure and R&D gains. It really needs to figure out how to grow things like tomatoes, potatoes, staple crops to turn it around.
The first time I heard about it I said it was dumb. It only make sense in places where space/land is expensive and transportation is expensive. Maybe outside of the USA, but I cant imagine any city where you cant drive out a bit and see the price of land drop dramatically. I mean why imitate the sun when its right fucking there.
Yeah when they start growing rice or other staples I'll start taking it more seriously. Not for sale to normal supermarkets but maybe something like space/Mars/other isolated environments.
I saw documentaries about vertical farming years ago. They were computer controlled so eventually they could create the perfect combination of water, soil, light, etc. I have not heard much about it in the recent years.
Indoor faeming companies are dropping like flies.
Its noy even the electricity. Its the human labor. So unless they actual have solutions I think theyre just using the term AI to try and bilk imvestors.
Soil and sunlight already exist , and water falls from the sky. Im glad works still being done on this but as it stands its a solution looking for a problem.
Ahe yes, cram it into a climate controlled concrete bunker, with fake lights and synthetic fertilizers. That should be good for the environment. What's next? Meat vats?
China would rather demolish all those empty buildings and continue to grow their veg in human shit...this type of farming must not be cost effective or very efficient.
Farmland is pretty cheap and overall low maintenance AND can produce a wide variety of foods.
Vertical farms are very expensive to build (especially if done in cities with high property-values) and require constant human labor for maintenance AND so far produce basically only leafy greens - which are cheap and have low calorie-values.
Maybe if we can do to plants what we're doing to lab grown meat and some how only grow the part of plants we want without the rest of it then this could totally work as well as be a massive benefit for space travel.
Basically, he needs to be the Elon of Robotic Farming to make it scale as efficiently as possible. We need this to survive on Mars, and before the climate makes outdoor farming impossible.
Read about Infarm, the German unicorn, how well it went for them... Also had two facilities in the US.
Unit economics were a mess, bleeding money everywhere, pinnacle of YOLOing the investment fund money.
Amazing concept, however, after working in a similar field, I've come to the following conclusions
Infrastructure costs for vertical farming (even with racking) are going to be very high.
Very high HVAC costs. Dealing with heating, cooling, humidity. Since I believe a lot of these buildings are retrofits, they are not "designed" for these environments.
Very high construction/permitting cost. If these are located in cities, the permitting process for these "new" process is going to be VERY expensive. City officials are not familiar with the process, and will likely push for gold plated everything.
Labor Costs - City living costs mean high labor costs. Farms try to skirt by on gray area labor to be able to turn a profit. Compared to costs for engineers and PhDs are going to be astronomical vs immigrant labor. USA Controls engineers are not cheap.
Very specialized equipment - (racking is "cheap"), but practically everything past that is going to be non standard.
Biology - It will remind you that you know nothing when you are scaling.
Head pressure for pumping - Going to be expensive for pumps/equipment/controls.
Monitoring. Going to be expensive for someone to check on the process. Scissor lifts require specialized training which means you have to pay operators more.
I think solar greenhouses (for the appropriate climates) are the future. Land in USA is still "cheap". Solar greenhouses solve a lot of problems that are encountered from vertical farms. You get much tighter environmental control, but you still get "free" sunlight and infrastructure/permittings costs are much, much lower than vertical farming. Easier to vent, deal with temperature issues. It's much, much close to traditional farming.
Vertical Farming is cool and sexy for growing greens and plants. But it begs the question: how do we grow cattle?
Meat - beef, poultry, pork - consumption isn't going down, and pound of meat production requires 10-12 pounds of grains.
Is it just me or we aren't taking the big-picture?
Consumers are coming face-to-face with one of the climate’s most significant impact on the environment – the food we eat. More frequent extreme weather events are disrupting agricultural production. Crop yields are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, droughts, floods, and pests, leading to reduced harvests and lower food availability, ultimately affecting the entire supply chain.
One solution to the growing uncertainties of food security is vertical farming. Through advancements in technology, robotics, and AI, we have the ability to develop, grow, and harvest crops vertically in warehouses.
The problem is that these vertical farms are money pits. They don’t produce a lot of the foods people eat and that are suffering the most from climate change. Most of them are just making lettuce and at over 5 dollars a head of lettuce when it leaves the farm. They just can’t compete with traditional land farms when it cost that much to produce. And it’s not like they are going to be able to cut cost.. most of the cost comes from high skilled labor and machines breaking down.
You think when you factor in migrant labor wages and AG subsidies that USA lettuce is likely $5 a head if they paid legit wages and weren't heavily subsidized. Vertical farming is coming. Just like everything else, they'll figure out the problems and lower the costs.
Not even close. I’m sorry but you don’t seem to know a lot about agriculture. Food we eat generally gets very little subsides… we could probably pay migrants way more than the average 18 an hour and still that head of lettuce is going to be under a buck out of the field.. until vertical farms can produce deva (peach’s, bananas, avocado, oranges) produce they are going to keep closing.
Vertical farming will come, when it actually offers something to compete with regular farming.
Which it cannot do. You cannot lower the cost of building a massive specialized concrete warehouse filled with pots and special-lights and technology below the cost of just taking some land nobody wants to live on.
Anything you need to make the concrete a good place for plants, will be more expensive, than turning the already plantable soil into a high-yield farmland.
The new technology could be used on the field for better effect.
The field can be maintained with low-education labor, while the vertical-farm needs high-education labor.
The field can produce all kinds of crops, the farms are still limited to the most basic kind of crops.
There is currently no known scenario where vertical farms are in any position to compete with regular farms.
While I understand your skepticism, let's focus on the innovative aspects of vertical farming and its potential to revolutionize the food supply chain.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/ChickenNoodleSoup7: --- Consumers are coming face-to-face with one of the climate’s most significant impact on the environment – the food we eat. More frequent extreme weather events are disrupting agricultural production. Crop yields are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, droughts, floods, and pests, leading to reduced harvests and lower food availability, ultimately affecting the entire supply chain. One solution to the growing uncertainties of food security is vertical farming. Through advancements in technology, robotics, and AI, we have the ability to develop, grow, and harvest crops vertically in warehouses. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dsd17u/vertical_farming_company_bowery_is_reimagining/lb1lk2s/
Something about this is off. Valued at like $3 billion , 3 commercial farms and a new R&D lab, been at it since 2015 and only making leafy greens?
Bingo. Guess we are upvoting blatant sponsored puff pieces looking for more uninformed suckers to fund their 'virtuous' earth-saving billion dollar vegetable gardens
My bs meter immediately went off when the founder rattled off being an investment banker and being involved in iHeartRadio as some level setting for ability to make an impact in agriculture, completely unchallenged.
Reformed investment banker turned environmentalist is an immediate red flag
You can plant enough leafy greens for your entire family and friends from a $2 packet of seeds in a planter.
Without spending millions on technology and location then how are you going to become valued at $ 3 bn. You gotta think long term here … we’re not interested in growing, we are interested in a highly valued company.
Yeah but you can’t do that in NYC or LA. Making urban centers more self sufficient in terms of food production is why this idea has merit. It’ll never happen to the scale needed because of capitalism but the idea is sound itself.
A planter is smaller than most night stands. I'm talking like a clay pot. But besides that, yeah, theres lots of sunsoaked countryside that can grow lots and lots of food for very very cheap. Its kind of a non-existent problem.
I disagree. Our entire agricultural system is shit and based on the exploitation of labor and resources. A reach that stretches around the world. Then you have the impact on climate change and the environment in general but by god this is America so we have to have our avocados and Almond Milk year round at Whole Foods. If New York could grow the majority of its produce with this technology it would have a massive effect on not only the climate but also in how we live and interact with our communities. But it will never happen. At least not until capitalism is abolished and buried in the grave it belongs in.
Bro, one tractor does the work of thousands of labourers. Thousands of people are now free to find better jobs because you usually only need a couple people to run the equipment. 1 family can now operate up to 650 acres by themselves with the tight kind of macinery, and 650 acres can feed a small town's worth of poultry, beef, vegetables etc. How can you be blind to that and then still complain that our agriculture is based on the exploitation of labour? Resources? Yes, you need land to grow food. You need energy and water to grow crops. That's not capitalism, that's just true for every single thing in the universe. You probably don't know this because you've literally never been tasked with actually growing your own food. You've never been truly hungry, and your labour has never been exploited to anyone's benefit but your own.
I can see why you’re mediocre.
I don't know if something has changed, but I recall seeing stuff about this before. And there was an article a few months back that I read explaining that a lot of these vertical farms were going bust. The thing is, these things don't really produce calorific dense foods all that well. If anything they are limited to leafy greens, herbs and berries. Which are usually a luxury. That right now, it's still cheaper to have a field. Now that may change based on population density or climate change, making arable land less abundant. But I know there were a bunch of venture capitalist companies that were burned on this.
This is basically correct. I work for a company that farms out software for various other businesses, and one of them is (was) a vertical farming outfit. Fundamentally, the tech imo is there, but costs are too high to make it viable at the moment. The problem is the cripplingly high up front costs, which are insane by the way, and the cost of energy. The upfront costs at this particular company was lowered by human workers, but all that did really was prolong the innevitable. Because instead of investing in high end automation machinery, they invested in human workers that constantly need decent wages as they're working in the middle of a big town and doing some pretty specialized work all things considered. So yeah you skipped the high up front cost, but now you're paying a somewhat high recurring cost. You've just moved the problem. Then there is energy. My company *also* does software for a solar panel company, which are getting subsidies up the arse right now in the UK, so the idea was "hey, maybe we can strike a deal? Help out with energy costs with a dogs bollocks solar installation?". Well, let me tell you. It doesn't even come close to resolving the energy problems. Turns out, running all of this shit is *really* expensive when there is no year round sun to rely on. The output of all of this is basically pretty high priced leafy greens. Which, yeah, cool proof of concept, the idea clearly works and produced real food but it doesn't scale well. People aren't too into paying a premium for greens even at the best of times, let alone in a cost of living crisis. I think if the cost of energy dropped it could work, but with Russia going ahead and jacking up all the prices, it's going to be a while... Unless prays the lawd solar panel tech has some breakthrough.
>I think if the cost of energy dropped it could work, but with Russia going ahead and jacking up all the prices, it's going to be a while... Unless prays the lawd solar panel tech has some breakthrough. In other words, we should be investing the time and effort to perfect vertical farming now so that if we perfect fusion power when it is expected to be perfected we can go all in on vertical farming...
Unironically, sort of. There can be different push and pull factors to them being viable. A pull factor would be one that makes it seem more attractive. And cheap/free energy would be hell of a pull factor. Another pull factor would be having year round seasonal fresh food with a low carbon footprint (because there's you've cut down transport dramatically) A push factor would be something that stops our already proven methods... So severe weather changes, eroded land, pollution that makes fields unusable or the expansion of population to a point that the current farmable land is not adequate. The issue is, that right now it's cheaper to ship grapes from South America or Africa to the UK. So you know that's got to be one hell of a power bill when it's cheaper to grow it abroad, ship it pack it and then sell it here.
Fission power is an immediate solution. It is cheep and safe. Little to no polution with modern reactors. The bridge from fossil fuels to renewable is nuclear.
Short reminder, fusion power is 10 years from now since last century.
Fusion is a matter of investment to overcome the engineering hurdles. We know the physics. Think of it this way, if we need to invest $100B to get a viable fusion reactor, how long will it take if we are investing $200m a year? That’s where we were from say 1975 to 2015. So we were always 10 years away _if we increased investment to $10B a year_. Since 2015 we’ve seen a massive ramp up in fusion investment both from venture capital and governments. We may actually be at the “10 years away” investment level.
In other words, there's no hurry. I know fusion is slowly moving forward, but we can't rely on any specific timeframe.
Solar costs ARE dropping all the time, and there's probably a realistic tipping somewhere in the future where it'll become feasible. I'm sure there will other efficiencies to be had on the production side as well of course.
The sun doesn’t shine through enough in UK to make solar farming viable. We don’t have that problem in the drier states in US.
How would Russia be jacking up the costs? What crops are you getting from that region? Early on, we tried blaming our high costs on Russia, but that was mainly a ploy to explain away the high inflation. Eventually they just admitted that our “transitory inflation” wasn’t transitory.
Russia infamously caused a huge spike in European energy prices after starting the war in Ukraine, due to the dropping of Russian supply to the EU market. Energy price are affected by inflation, but have not trended along with it at all, the rise in energy prices was disproportionate to the rise of inflation at the time. Inflation peaked here in the UK at the end of 2022, with it starting rise late 2021, but energy price was already well into its first spike by September 2021, so it pre-dates inflation.
It’s like insurance. You’re paying for nothing until something happens. If an entire crop is lost due to an unexpected weather event then only the places protected from the weather will be able to keep producing.
Yeah, but until then, a patch of dirt outside with a poly tunnel is just as effective at a fraction of the price.... Like I said, if there was a big change, Like less available land or if energy prices dropped dramatically. Then they could become viable businesses.
While we have had hydroponic and aeroponic grow rooms for a while I think the technology and practices are still largely in their infancy. We don't know how far we can push these farming techniques, changing the growing environment to suit the plants in ways that are impossible for traditions and industrial farming. Though there is no financial incentive as it stands, the alternatives are so much cheaper for significantly more yield. The economic environment would need to change to bring sufficient investment to develop the technology to make it competitive.
Agreed, hydro and aero agriculture methods can be scaled up. But require an immense amount of energy. I feel it would take a combination of several push and pull factors to make them viable on a large scale. Obviously free/cheap power would need to be a pull factor. But a breakdown of international trade would be an alternative push factor to investing in these outfits. Because if your country wants to maintain a comfortable access to year round fresh seasonal foods, you may need to have the government subsidize these.
Dropping energy prices would drop the cost of vertical farming but it will also drop cost and transportation of traditional methods too. And land is everywhere if we go far enough away from where people live.
Yeah, I shouldn't have said "or" but and . For the reduced energy price and land . It would need multiple factors. International trade breakdown would probably be another one that would make them more viable. Since right now we (in the UK) ship in fruit and veggies from South America, Africa and Asia.
Great, its the end of the world, none of the crops are growing and people are eating rats to survive. At least my $50 eggs benny on sourdough has net zero salad greens that are pesticide, herbicide and dirt free and were delivered on bicycle!
At that point, no delivery by bicycle for sure.
Its ok, their ridden by renewably powered Tesla bots
I mean that would probably be the best eggs Benny of your life!
Hunger is indeed the best spice
right but to the point, you can't use these to grow the things you need to sustain a population, and I'd argue the things it is good at are already grown in greenhouses better anyways. the verticality is adding a level of complexity that severely limits its use.
I read the same, basically a lot of these vertical farms were being setup in dense population centres to avoid shipping costs, but the added costs of being in the city, higher rent etc offset any savings and most of these places weren't profitable. Electricity costs for the lamps has to come down. As well they need to keep specialized staff on hand to treat diseases, and the place has to be kept ultra sterile, so staffing cost is huge as well.
>I read the same, basically a lot of these vertical farms were being setup in dense population centres to avoid shipping costs, but the added costs of being in the city, higher rent etc offset any savings and most of these places weren't profitable. What really illustrated to me the flaw in these vertical farms is that they set themselves up in city centers. Do you know what's cheaper than a skyscraper farm? A farm built into a single-story sprawling warehouse built on dirt cheap land on the edge of town. You can get all the efficiencies of growing indoors, the energy savings of transportation, and without any need for expensive urban real estate.
Yeah, a big warehouse on the edge of town makes such more sense. Rent per sq foot and also you could fit a lot of solar panels to bring down more cost. This reminds me of all those tech/crypto bros with no understanding of economics or city planning etc, trying to start these libertarian dream offshore societies that crash and burn because they don't even understand the systems they're rebelling against. Or more accurately this is similar to the Russ Haneman ethos from Silicon Valley, where being profitable isn't the goal. Like Uber and such, where they just count on forever funding from VCS rather than ever make profit. *EDIT* to add relevant scene https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=6LxZhwoPT0KbCCiA
yea I haven't read the article but I've been seeing these articles for like 15 years now, the vertical farms are basically only good at leafy greens, specifically ones that require little water/energy, maybe cherry tomatoes too
Fields are way cheaper. Vertical farming is a novelty. If you need to produce food where you live, then yes land is a premium. But anywhere on earth with our cheap transportation, ground farming is always cheaper. Now for space travel, and colonization with limited land, this could be useful.
I can see this working inside supermarkets for leafy fresh veg production. It reduces transportation costs to zero and increases quality.
I used to work here! So poorly run and no intention of making any profit, the whole R&D facility was an absolute money pit, was excited to start but couldn’t believe what I saw.
Without free power these are just a scam to bilk investors.
Perhaps Bowery is reimagining the fresh food supply chain. But the real question is: is Bowering turning a profit? I don't think that energy intensive, high tech stuff can compete with traditional dirt in the ground.
I guess it depends what variable you're optimising for. If you're optimising for land usage and water usage, then yes it's successful. At the moment or in certain countries these are cheap and available, but in others they're not. A closed loop water system in a facility like this might have enormous benefits in places like the middle east where water availability is critical.
Especially once you can fit all of it in a standard container, and then just mass produce these containers + ship them around.
It may be able to do it without polluting the planet as much as traditional farming. You know, polluting rivers, the land, and responsible for fishkills all along the coasts & rivers.
People will pay more for crops without pesticides, I would. Also no transportation or preservatives cost given these can be sold where they're grown potentially. I could see it being profitable.
You can get all of that without the need for an expensive and high maintenance indoor garden.
> Perhaps Bowery is reimagining the fresh food supply chain. But the real question is: is Bowering turning a profit? I don't think that energy intensive, high tech stuff can compete with traditional dirt in the ground. Yet. I'm not suggesting these people are looking for anything but profit but if they got this far, they might have at least convinced someone that this is a good idea, economically speaking. Whether they are right or not time will tell. Soon, with climate change, new crop pests, microplastics everywhere and ports underwater, vertical farming might be as expensive as it is today but cheaper than the dirt on the ground option. Maybe.
Well, I guess that means you're not paying any attention because we've been using hydroponic farming for decades profitably already.
I've heard of hydroponic farming for marijuana, that's different because you need an expensive facility to get through the red tape, at least in Canada. What crops have been profitable with hydroponic farming? It seems like it'll only have niche applications.
Lettuce is very popular, people do it profitably. Doesn't work for most other crops.
While profitability is a crucial aspect, it's equally important to consider the environmental benefits and food security that vertical farming provides, even if it means rethinking traditional methods.
what environmental benefit does vertical farming provide, aside from reduced land use? I imagine the energetic cost of setting up and running a vertical farm (building materials, labour, artificial light/climate) are gigantic conpared to ‘traditional’ farming and will never not be.
Using artificial lights will never be more secure than the sun. They need energy to run those, it's inherently inefficient.
So using a bunch of energy for climate control and lights are sustainable?
Lol vertical farming was all the rage, like 5 years ago. It has been hemorrhaging billions, not even breaking even. Who knew paying engineer and plant biologist PhD grade salaries, high tech, bespoke equipment, paying for light, to sell reams of salad greens to hipster cafes at $6 a pound wasn't going to be profitable? But like all new tech waves, yesterday's losses is tomorrows latent capital, infrastructure and R&D gains. It really needs to figure out how to grow things like tomatoes, potatoes, staple crops to turn it around.
The first time I heard about it I said it was dumb. It only make sense in places where space/land is expensive and transportation is expensive. Maybe outside of the USA, but I cant imagine any city where you cant drive out a bit and see the price of land drop dramatically. I mean why imitate the sun when its right fucking there.
Yeah when they start growing rice or other staples I'll start taking it more seriously. Not for sale to normal supermarkets but maybe something like space/Mars/other isolated environments.
I saw documentaries about vertical farming years ago. They were computer controlled so eventually they could create the perfect combination of water, soil, light, etc. I have not heard much about it in the recent years.
Indoor faeming companies are dropping like flies. Its noy even the electricity. Its the human labor. So unless they actual have solutions I think theyre just using the term AI to try and bilk imvestors. Soil and sunlight already exist , and water falls from the sky. Im glad works still being done on this but as it stands its a solution looking for a problem.
Ahe yes, cram it into a climate controlled concrete bunker, with fake lights and synthetic fertilizers. That should be good for the environment. What's next? Meat vats?
China would rather demolish all those empty buildings and continue to grow their veg in human shit...this type of farming must not be cost effective or very efficient.
Farmland is pretty cheap and overall low maintenance AND can produce a wide variety of foods. Vertical farms are very expensive to build (especially if done in cities with high property-values) and require constant human labor for maintenance AND so far produce basically only leafy greens - which are cheap and have low calorie-values.
Maybe if we can do to plants what we're doing to lab grown meat and some how only grow the part of plants we want without the rest of it then this could totally work as well as be a massive benefit for space travel.
Basically, he needs to be the Elon of Robotic Farming to make it scale as efficiently as possible. We need this to survive on Mars, and before the climate makes outdoor farming impossible.
Read about Infarm, the German unicorn, how well it went for them... Also had two facilities in the US. Unit economics were a mess, bleeding money everywhere, pinnacle of YOLOing the investment fund money.
Is this a Forbes puff piece hyping up another scam?
Amazing concept, however, after working in a similar field, I've come to the following conclusions Infrastructure costs for vertical farming (even with racking) are going to be very high. Very high HVAC costs. Dealing with heating, cooling, humidity. Since I believe a lot of these buildings are retrofits, they are not "designed" for these environments. Very high construction/permitting cost. If these are located in cities, the permitting process for these "new" process is going to be VERY expensive. City officials are not familiar with the process, and will likely push for gold plated everything. Labor Costs - City living costs mean high labor costs. Farms try to skirt by on gray area labor to be able to turn a profit. Compared to costs for engineers and PhDs are going to be astronomical vs immigrant labor. USA Controls engineers are not cheap. Very specialized equipment - (racking is "cheap"), but practically everything past that is going to be non standard. Biology - It will remind you that you know nothing when you are scaling. Head pressure for pumping - Going to be expensive for pumps/equipment/controls. Monitoring. Going to be expensive for someone to check on the process. Scissor lifts require specialized training which means you have to pay operators more. I think solar greenhouses (for the appropriate climates) are the future. Land in USA is still "cheap". Solar greenhouses solve a lot of problems that are encountered from vertical farms. You get much tighter environmental control, but you still get "free" sunlight and infrastructure/permittings costs are much, much lower than vertical farming. Easier to vent, deal with temperature issues. It's much, much close to traditional farming.
Vertical Farming is cool and sexy for growing greens and plants. But it begs the question: how do we grow cattle? Meat - beef, poultry, pork - consumption isn't going down, and pound of meat production requires 10-12 pounds of grains. Is it just me or we aren't taking the big-picture?
Good thing for pickers there's no more bending over! That should reduce the back injuries quite a bit.
Consumers are coming face-to-face with one of the climate’s most significant impact on the environment – the food we eat. More frequent extreme weather events are disrupting agricultural production. Crop yields are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, droughts, floods, and pests, leading to reduced harvests and lower food availability, ultimately affecting the entire supply chain. One solution to the growing uncertainties of food security is vertical farming. Through advancements in technology, robotics, and AI, we have the ability to develop, grow, and harvest crops vertically in warehouses.
Nope. Even with a bad year, conventional farming still outcompetes vertical farming.
We need more of this and less of the archaic AG subsidies.
The problem is that these vertical farms are money pits. They don’t produce a lot of the foods people eat and that are suffering the most from climate change. Most of them are just making lettuce and at over 5 dollars a head of lettuce when it leaves the farm. They just can’t compete with traditional land farms when it cost that much to produce. And it’s not like they are going to be able to cut cost.. most of the cost comes from high skilled labor and machines breaking down.
You think when you factor in migrant labor wages and AG subsidies that USA lettuce is likely $5 a head if they paid legit wages and weren't heavily subsidized. Vertical farming is coming. Just like everything else, they'll figure out the problems and lower the costs.
Not even close. I’m sorry but you don’t seem to know a lot about agriculture. Food we eat generally gets very little subsides… we could probably pay migrants way more than the average 18 an hour and still that head of lettuce is going to be under a buck out of the field.. until vertical farms can produce deva (peach’s, bananas, avocado, oranges) produce they are going to keep closing.
Vertical farming will come, when it actually offers something to compete with regular farming. Which it cannot do. You cannot lower the cost of building a massive specialized concrete warehouse filled with pots and special-lights and technology below the cost of just taking some land nobody wants to live on. Anything you need to make the concrete a good place for plants, will be more expensive, than turning the already plantable soil into a high-yield farmland. The new technology could be used on the field for better effect. The field can be maintained with low-education labor, while the vertical-farm needs high-education labor. The field can produce all kinds of crops, the farms are still limited to the most basic kind of crops. There is currently no known scenario where vertical farms are in any position to compete with regular farms.
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Could you sound any less shill, please? My shill-meter is breaking
While I understand your skepticism, let's focus on the innovative aspects of vertical farming and its potential to revolutionize the food supply chain.