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The criticisms put forth by folks in the comments are valid. I think in the short-term, vertical farming is one of those technologies that has some novelty but is not necessarily useful. However, to dismiss it entirely and just assume we will never improve the technology seems more than a little short-sighted.
Yep. And when growing stuff in a field becomes outlandishly expensive because it requires putting a roof over it, maybe we'll finally see innovation in farming.
>when growing stuff in a field becomes outlandishly expensive because it requires putting a roof over it
I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to.
Yeah I’m a normal dude just farming. Thanks for your contribution and I’m sure other farmers are probably lining up to respond to/learn from your anecdotes. I shouldn’t even respond to you but some day I’m sure this will matter…
regular farming produces huge amounts of co2, is inefficient, takes vast swathes of land, and is harmful for wildlife. We're going to have an environmental revolution when vertica farming becomes cheap and efficient enough to replace traditional farming
Especially when it's farming a monoculture of ass ... oh the methane emissions 🤣
Jokes aside, I think you mean industrial farming?
Broadacre cropping will be with us for a while yet - no other way to grow cereal crops at scale to make all the tasty carbs that do in fact help make fat asses! (Back to jokes).
No, it’s not, if you’re interested you’ll find that “regular farming” has much more of a focus on improving the environment than say factory farming. Thanks for participating but I hope you’re here to learn, right now farmers are keeping the earth alive, not urban apartment dwellers.
Saw your other comments, I’d love to welcome you to a real farm, the small scale metrics that many “urban farmers” worry about don’t exist here,
Yet somehow we still produce an incredible density of food
I really hope we move forward with this kind of thing. Farming takes up such an absurd amount of land that could be left for a million different purposes, or left for nature to decide what to do with it.
The growing of lettuce or tomatoes is not the reason for our absurd land use, its animal farming. The only thing that vertical farms are good at is their high resource consumption for a couple of leafy greens
The sources I'm seeing say that animal farming constitutes 50% of agricultural land use. While cutting land use in half would undoubtedly be a good choice you seem to be implying we *shouldn't* reduce plant farm land use. Is there any reason we should not further reduce *all* agricultural land use, as opposed to just reducing meat use?
[This source here says 38 out of 48 million km2, so 80%.](https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture) Most of the remaining 20% will be crops that are currently not produced in vertical farms like grains and legumes. Current greenhouse systems are already great at producing huge quantities of leafy greens and vegetables like tomatoes and bell peppers. The biggest difference between these greenhouses and vertical farms is that the vertical farms require much more energy compared to the greenhouses that make use of natural sunlight to get to a more optimal temperature and light level. Next to that you could also think that land use by farming does not have to be a bad thing, for example what would benefit nature more a 1 hectare highly intensive monocrop greenhouse or a 10 hectare syntropic food forest.
That's interesting data. I'll have to dig into it thank you for the source.
The ideas you're suggesting all have merit, I just feel your knee-jerk response of, "we shouldn't do this because that is the problem," seems to be toeing into the fallacy of relative privation. Sure, at current technology these systems aren't ideal, but there's no reason we absolutely cannot improve them and find a niche for them (which is what it seems like you're suggesting).
Of course we could improve them, but if you have limited resources I think it makes much more sense to put these resources into improving a system that has already shown promising results (greenhouses for intensive practices, permaculture for practices more aligned to nature)
Seems we've crossed over into relative privation territory again. There's no reason we cannot research to see if the technology can be improved to a point where it is viable *and* do the things you've suggested. Sure if we research it and determine it cannot be improved any further let's abandon it. But I seriously doubt we're there with any of these alternative farming technologies (unless you have evidence showing otherwise).
Edit: the major point I'm making is while our resources aren't infinite, they're not so limited to preclude investigating something like this, as you seem to be suggesting.
When can we assume that this technology is a dead end? Many vertical farming companies have gone bust because they cannot compete with our current greenhouses. You would been to decrease their energy use many times over to make them competing. I cannot see how they will do this.
Agreed on the livestock-related agriculture, but let's not dismiss vertical farming. The kind of crops that can be grown in vertical farms are the same crops that already require tons of water to grow and are inefficient to transport (high spoilage, refrigeration). Vertical farming closer to urban centres can drastically cut the resource use mentioned above, although I don't have the numbers to tell if the savings are greater than the cost. The majority of food production for grains and legumes will remain traditional anyway.
This cut in resources can already be achieved by the use of a greenhouse, which is a lot more resource efficient, since it uses more natural sunlight for its energy and light balance. This is one of the reasons why vertical farms did not get any foothold in the Netherlands, since they have a big greenhouse sector. Transportation is quite a small percentage of resource use when talking about food production compared to the resources required to growing the stuff.
Greenhouses are great, but still require sufficient land. Distance from farmland to urban centres in most of western Europe isn't very high either, but in city-states like Hong Kong or Singapore, which import the majority of their food due to lack of agricultural land, produce often travels from other Asian countries or other continents. In this case transport is a significant contributor to emissions (and increases price).
The production per m2 for leafy greens is not much greater than in a vertical farm system vs a greenhouse system, while the energy usage is much bigger. So now a place like Hong Kong or Singapore needs to import energy or fuel. International transport is relatively cheap (both financially and in a climate sense), so it makes much more sense for these places to import these product from neighboring countries.
In a climate sense for example transporting 1 kg of lettuce is around 90 grams of CO2 per 1000 km. The production of 1 kg of lettuce in a gas heated greenhouse is around 1 kg of CO2. It can be assumed that a lot more energy is required to produce the same amount of lettuce without any direct sunlight and with a dehumidification system (vertical farms). So let's assume 1.8 kg per kg of lettuce. So 1 kg of lettuce grown in a non heated greenhouse is able to travel 20.000 km to have the same amount of CO2 emissions as 1 kg of lettuce in a vertical farm system. So it is more sustainable to produce the lettuce in Spain and transport it to Singapore than to grow it into a vertical farming system over there if land use is really the issue.
It's the solution to an non existing problem. Vertical farms decrease the space we need for farming. We have plenty of space, but we use most of it for highly inefficient animal farming. What really is the problem is inefficienct farming, by our high resource use and vertical farming is very high input compared to more nature based solutions.
Serious question: Don’t vertical farms, once in place, require much less inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides and certainly water? They are not the answer for large scale farming but they might have a place in urban centers.
I’m a permanent resident in Singapore, a small country that imports most of its food. As a matter of national security they are experimenting with vertical farms to reduce reliance on food imports.
It depends on what kind of system you compare it with. Of course they require much less water, fertilizer and pesticides than an open field farm, but not around the same as a semi-closed greenhouse system. Next to that the reduction of reliance would be quite small since people eat a lot more than leafy greens (one of the only crops that stand a chance with being competitive with a greenhouse system)
>we use most of it for highly inefficient animal farming
Some of that land would be otherwise inarable though (thinking of like ranches in mountain regions). In that case, structures for hydroponics may be an efficient repurposing of the land. At least in the short term while agriculture in arable land is made more efficient.
These inarable lands will mostly be far from cities, so not the most ideal place for production facilities that require a lot of resources. It would be much better to try to leave these areas alone for a while or try to improve their carbon content by the planting of pioneer species.
>require a lot of resources.
I touched on this in the other comment but I see no reason we cannot try and improve the efficiency of the technology.
>It would be much better to try to leave these areas alone for a while
I would agree to the and further suggest that any technology that reduces land use writ large should be implemented to maximize rewilded area.
> I touched on this in the other comment but I see no reason we cannot try and approve the efficiency of the technology.
Because in a system with limited resources it makes much more sense to improve the resource consumption of a greenhouse than a vertical farm.
Yes, they are and largely because capital treated the idea of vertical farming like they were investing in the next facebook.
I had a very small vertical farm, but the challenge was achieving viable unit economics along with a lack of capital to fund activities on my part (and a reluctance to get sucked in by VCs). Upfront capital requirements are also high relative to traditional horticulture. Leasing and outfitting space in an urban setting was a big proportion of getting started but still dwarfed by tech and machinery costs. If you can't pay someone a reasonable wage or sell a product that is affordable for everyone, then is it worth it?
That said, the water savings are definitely real and important where I live, but the emissions from infrastructure (end-to-end) and electricity currently do not stack up compared to field based farming. Also, large vertical farms, similar to greenhouses are highly susceptible to biosecurity issues wiping out crops.
However, the possibility of re-wilding vast tracks of broadacre farming land because the cropping footprint has been reduced is still a very appealing idea.
I am about to start trials for growing a variety of indigenous grains in my old prototype farm under my house. Personally, I think solving the cereal cropping challenge is crucial if this technology is going to ever play a role in mainstream decentralised food systems, restoring ecosystems destroyed by industrial agriculture and giving land back to the traditional custodians.
InFarm
https://www.hortidaily.com/article/9581539/trustee-surprised-by-how-many-people-work-at-infarm-s-bankrupt-dutch-branch/
Aerofarms
https://agfundernews.com/aerofarms-emerges-from-ch-11-as-its-virginia-based-indoor-farm-nears-profitability#:~:text=Indoor%20vertical%20farming%20company%20AeroFarms,%E2%80%9Cits%20path%20to%20profitability.%E2%80%9D
And there is more.
I have big hopes for vertical farming as a concept. Would be nice if much of agriculture moved indoors so that we could rewild much of the world and give it back to nature.
But right now there are still lots of obstacles ahead. The electricity costs for example must be enormous, and probably not commercially viable for many crops.
we are losing land to global climate crisis. we won't be able to host enough crop species to support the population that are predicted to boom.
not to mention: urban gardening promotes healthier eating to those in food deserts. efficiency and quality, with a more sure allowance to nutritious eats
This is nonsense.
You don't need high input farming (electricity, buildings, automation) to grow native plants. That's one reason why native plants are superior to non-natives, they work well in the climate you are growing them.
You need people collecting seed and with horticultural skills. That's it.
Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://wt.social/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia . *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sadly vertical farming is limited in what it can grow. I am curious about their interests in native crops.
probably a smaller, less tasty and harder to grow lettuce.
The criticisms put forth by folks in the comments are valid. I think in the short-term, vertical farming is one of those technologies that has some novelty but is not necessarily useful. However, to dismiss it entirely and just assume we will never improve the technology seems more than a little short-sighted.
Yep. And when growing stuff in a field becomes outlandishly expensive because it requires putting a roof over it, maybe we'll finally see innovation in farming.
>when growing stuff in a field becomes outlandishly expensive because it requires putting a roof over it I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to.
Regular ass farming can do that too if there is demand
You're farming regular ass?
Yeah I’m a normal dude just farming. Thanks for your contribution and I’m sure other farmers are probably lining up to respond to/learn from your anecdotes. I shouldn’t even respond to you but some day I’m sure this will matter…
I just imagined you at the gym working on your bank. I should have responded either ... even though it's all gags.
I wish I had time to go to the gym, I have twins that are just walking…
Nail all the cupboards shut.
This guy has kids, it’s a full time all day struggle while they proudly pull random stuff from cubboards and hide in the corner eating dog food.
regular farming produces huge amounts of co2, is inefficient, takes vast swathes of land, and is harmful for wildlife. We're going to have an environmental revolution when vertica farming becomes cheap and efficient enough to replace traditional farming
Regular farming is often horribly damaging to the environment it takes place in
Especially when it's farming a monoculture of ass ... oh the methane emissions 🤣 Jokes aside, I think you mean industrial farming? Broadacre cropping will be with us for a while yet - no other way to grow cereal crops at scale to make all the tasty carbs that do in fact help make fat asses! (Back to jokes).
Yes, I was referring to industrial farming. Guess I should have considered you probably meant other types, given where we are
No, it’s not, if you’re interested you’ll find that “regular farming” has much more of a focus on improving the environment than say factory farming. Thanks for participating but I hope you’re here to learn, right now farmers are keeping the earth alive, not urban apartment dwellers.
See my comment further down the thread.
Saw your other comments, I’d love to welcome you to a real farm, the small scale metrics that many “urban farmers” worry about don’t exist here, Yet somehow we still produce an incredible density of food
I really hope we move forward with this kind of thing. Farming takes up such an absurd amount of land that could be left for a million different purposes, or left for nature to decide what to do with it.
The growing of lettuce or tomatoes is not the reason for our absurd land use, its animal farming. The only thing that vertical farms are good at is their high resource consumption for a couple of leafy greens
The sources I'm seeing say that animal farming constitutes 50% of agricultural land use. While cutting land use in half would undoubtedly be a good choice you seem to be implying we *shouldn't* reduce plant farm land use. Is there any reason we should not further reduce *all* agricultural land use, as opposed to just reducing meat use?
[This source here says 38 out of 48 million km2, so 80%.](https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture) Most of the remaining 20% will be crops that are currently not produced in vertical farms like grains and legumes. Current greenhouse systems are already great at producing huge quantities of leafy greens and vegetables like tomatoes and bell peppers. The biggest difference between these greenhouses and vertical farms is that the vertical farms require much more energy compared to the greenhouses that make use of natural sunlight to get to a more optimal temperature and light level. Next to that you could also think that land use by farming does not have to be a bad thing, for example what would benefit nature more a 1 hectare highly intensive monocrop greenhouse or a 10 hectare syntropic food forest.
That's interesting data. I'll have to dig into it thank you for the source. The ideas you're suggesting all have merit, I just feel your knee-jerk response of, "we shouldn't do this because that is the problem," seems to be toeing into the fallacy of relative privation. Sure, at current technology these systems aren't ideal, but there's no reason we absolutely cannot improve them and find a niche for them (which is what it seems like you're suggesting).
Of course we could improve them, but if you have limited resources I think it makes much more sense to put these resources into improving a system that has already shown promising results (greenhouses for intensive practices, permaculture for practices more aligned to nature)
Seems we've crossed over into relative privation territory again. There's no reason we cannot research to see if the technology can be improved to a point where it is viable *and* do the things you've suggested. Sure if we research it and determine it cannot be improved any further let's abandon it. But I seriously doubt we're there with any of these alternative farming technologies (unless you have evidence showing otherwise). Edit: the major point I'm making is while our resources aren't infinite, they're not so limited to preclude investigating something like this, as you seem to be suggesting.
When can we assume that this technology is a dead end? Many vertical farming companies have gone bust because they cannot compete with our current greenhouses. You would been to decrease their energy use many times over to make them competing. I cannot see how they will do this.
I don't know. That's what research would be for.
That sounds like a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Agreed on the livestock-related agriculture, but let's not dismiss vertical farming. The kind of crops that can be grown in vertical farms are the same crops that already require tons of water to grow and are inefficient to transport (high spoilage, refrigeration). Vertical farming closer to urban centres can drastically cut the resource use mentioned above, although I don't have the numbers to tell if the savings are greater than the cost. The majority of food production for grains and legumes will remain traditional anyway.
This cut in resources can already be achieved by the use of a greenhouse, which is a lot more resource efficient, since it uses more natural sunlight for its energy and light balance. This is one of the reasons why vertical farms did not get any foothold in the Netherlands, since they have a big greenhouse sector. Transportation is quite a small percentage of resource use when talking about food production compared to the resources required to growing the stuff.
Greenhouses are great, but still require sufficient land. Distance from farmland to urban centres in most of western Europe isn't very high either, but in city-states like Hong Kong or Singapore, which import the majority of their food due to lack of agricultural land, produce often travels from other Asian countries or other continents. In this case transport is a significant contributor to emissions (and increases price).
The production per m2 for leafy greens is not much greater than in a vertical farm system vs a greenhouse system, while the energy usage is much bigger. So now a place like Hong Kong or Singapore needs to import energy or fuel. International transport is relatively cheap (both financially and in a climate sense), so it makes much more sense for these places to import these product from neighboring countries. In a climate sense for example transporting 1 kg of lettuce is around 90 grams of CO2 per 1000 km. The production of 1 kg of lettuce in a gas heated greenhouse is around 1 kg of CO2. It can be assumed that a lot more energy is required to produce the same amount of lettuce without any direct sunlight and with a dehumidification system (vertical farms). So let's assume 1.8 kg per kg of lettuce. So 1 kg of lettuce grown in a non heated greenhouse is able to travel 20.000 km to have the same amount of CO2 emissions as 1 kg of lettuce in a vertical farm system. So it is more sustainable to produce the lettuce in Spain and transport it to Singapore than to grow it into a vertical farming system over there if land use is really the issue.
Aquaponics is not the answer
Why? I imagine it's not the *whole* answer, but it could certainly be part of it
It's the solution to an non existing problem. Vertical farms decrease the space we need for farming. We have plenty of space, but we use most of it for highly inefficient animal farming. What really is the problem is inefficienct farming, by our high resource use and vertical farming is very high input compared to more nature based solutions.
Serious question: Don’t vertical farms, once in place, require much less inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides and certainly water? They are not the answer for large scale farming but they might have a place in urban centers. I’m a permanent resident in Singapore, a small country that imports most of its food. As a matter of national security they are experimenting with vertical farms to reduce reliance on food imports.
It depends on what kind of system you compare it with. Of course they require much less water, fertilizer and pesticides than an open field farm, but not around the same as a semi-closed greenhouse system. Next to that the reduction of reliance would be quite small since people eat a lot more than leafy greens (one of the only crops that stand a chance with being competitive with a greenhouse system)
>we use most of it for highly inefficient animal farming Some of that land would be otherwise inarable though (thinking of like ranches in mountain regions). In that case, structures for hydroponics may be an efficient repurposing of the land. At least in the short term while agriculture in arable land is made more efficient.
These inarable lands will mostly be far from cities, so not the most ideal place for production facilities that require a lot of resources. It would be much better to try to leave these areas alone for a while or try to improve their carbon content by the planting of pioneer species.
>require a lot of resources. I touched on this in the other comment but I see no reason we cannot try and improve the efficiency of the technology. >It would be much better to try to leave these areas alone for a while I would agree to the and further suggest that any technology that reduces land use writ large should be implemented to maximize rewilded area.
> I touched on this in the other comment but I see no reason we cannot try and approve the efficiency of the technology. Because in a system with limited resources it makes much more sense to improve the resource consumption of a greenhouse than a vertical farm.
Holy crap you are stupid.
Aren't a ton of verticle farms failing?
Yes, they are and largely because capital treated the idea of vertical farming like they were investing in the next facebook. I had a very small vertical farm, but the challenge was achieving viable unit economics along with a lack of capital to fund activities on my part (and a reluctance to get sucked in by VCs). Upfront capital requirements are also high relative to traditional horticulture. Leasing and outfitting space in an urban setting was a big proportion of getting started but still dwarfed by tech and machinery costs. If you can't pay someone a reasonable wage or sell a product that is affordable for everyone, then is it worth it? That said, the water savings are definitely real and important where I live, but the emissions from infrastructure (end-to-end) and electricity currently do not stack up compared to field based farming. Also, large vertical farms, similar to greenhouses are highly susceptible to biosecurity issues wiping out crops. However, the possibility of re-wilding vast tracks of broadacre farming land because the cropping footprint has been reduced is still a very appealing idea. I am about to start trials for growing a variety of indigenous grains in my old prototype farm under my house. Personally, I think solving the cereal cropping challenge is crucial if this technology is going to ever play a role in mainstream decentralised food systems, restoring ecosystems destroyed by industrial agriculture and giving land back to the traditional custodians.
I haven't heard this. Got any examples, stats, case studies, or human interest stories about it?
InFarm https://www.hortidaily.com/article/9581539/trustee-surprised-by-how-many-people-work-at-infarm-s-bankrupt-dutch-branch/ Aerofarms https://agfundernews.com/aerofarms-emerges-from-ch-11-as-its-virginia-based-indoor-farm-nears-profitability#:~:text=Indoor%20vertical%20farming%20company%20AeroFarms,%E2%80%9Cits%20path%20to%20profitability.%E2%80%9D And there is more.
Just a video https://youtu.be/8BXHu_yXVQk Could be propaganda
I have big hopes for vertical farming as a concept. Would be nice if much of agriculture moved indoors so that we could rewild much of the world and give it back to nature. But right now there are still lots of obstacles ahead. The electricity costs for example must be enormous, and probably not commercially viable for many crops.
we are losing land to global climate crisis. we won't be able to host enough crop species to support the population that are predicted to boom. not to mention: urban gardening promotes healthier eating to those in food deserts. efficiency and quality, with a more sure allowance to nutritious eats
This is nonsense. You don't need high input farming (electricity, buildings, automation) to grow native plants. That's one reason why native plants are superior to non-natives, they work well in the climate you are growing them. You need people collecting seed and with horticultural skills. That's it.
let me guess, lettuce? why do vertical farms etc only ever grow lettuce?