Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?
IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it’s technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.
Agricultural researcher here, working in this field (hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical farming) for approx nine years.
Here is my TLDR:
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The comparison “traditional agriculture vs vertical farming” is misleading. Water saving and many other benefits come from hydroponics and crop protection (CEA - Controlled Environment Agriculture aka greenhouse). So a more accurate comparison has to be “CEA vs vertical farming”.
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Plants consume light. Seven photons for one photosynthesis reaction (one sugar molecule). One Mol photons (or more) for one gram dry biomass. Artificial light is very space inefficient compared to just using natural light for the plants. 23% efficiency for photovoltaic cells, 50% efficiency for LED light and some losses for transformation and transportation of electricity. In total when lighting the growbeds with electricity from photovoltaics for each square meter of growbed, ten square meters of PV-modules is needed somewhere else. I fail to see the space efficiency argument of vertical farming unless we are using nuclear for generating the electricity. Total efficiency losses of artificial lighting are >80% compared to using natural light, leading to a huge carbon contribution. This alone is not sustainable.
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In CEA, and thus in vertical farming also, we are mainly producing leafy greens, herbs and other vegetables. This is known as horticulture. Taking a look at statistics of the products of agriculture it can easily be seen, that the staple crops, grains and tubers, are by far (!) the major products. These can not be replaced by CEA production. And these are actually supplying the calories to feed the people. The amounts of agricultural area dedicated to these crops dwarf the horticultural production.
My takeway: VF is by no means a solution of the challenges we are facing in agriculture. Energy demand of the plants for lighting can not be optimized away, and thus will remain a major cost driver. IMHO the vertical farming industry is creating a hype aiming to harvest and burn venture capital. Recently Aerofarm filed for chapter 11 and also the company Infarm is broke. These were the poster childs of this industry.
Except for very specific niche applications to me VF does not make sense.
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I have gone back and forth on vertical farming. There are scams in the field, but there are also some merits (most of them apply to urban farming in general).
The main issue you have with vertical farming is that there is only so much stacking you can do before you get out of light. A pillar like in the illustration projects a shadow, in which you can’t really put plants.
However right now sunlight is not the limiting factor for plants growth. IIRC depending on the plant it is either water or CO2 so you can do some amount of vertical farming. To me, the interest is not to come as a replacement for regular farming (so growing grains is not the issue, you will have a hard time beating the efficiency of a flat field + tractor), the interests are:
- freshness. Having herbs that you can cut as you need them is really a taste changer.
- air cleaning. Some plants do have the ability to fixate some VOCs.
- less transportation. Having the plants grown in the same building block means that the CO2 footprint will be much lower
- more efficient water usage. Careful with this one, in some places water will be more scarce in city than countryside, but water consumption of such systems is generally lower.
- less refrigeration. If the food has less transportation it also requires less refrigeration
- local fruits all year long. Assuming they are put in a controlled environment like a greenhouse, getting food that normally requires a lot of transportation locally becomes possible.
So to sum up, it is less of a solution to make regular agriculture sustainable and more to make sustainable agriculture more enjoyable. Actually one does not need tasty herbs and exotic fruits, but the ability t have them without poisoning the planet is nice and, well, solarpunk.
That is a very interesting perspective, thank you for making me think of things in a slightly different light. But yes I agree any type of advancement in farming from this point in human history and onwards should be attempting to achieve 2 things:
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Dont poison the planet (we kind of need it)
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Make food preferably with some variety
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Depending on how you generate power, you could use LED grow lights in vertical farms. You also have the luxury of working in an environment that you can tightly control; that means you may not need to use pesticides or herbicide at all. If you aren’t working in large fields, you can get away from using heavy diesel farm equipment.
Fundamentally, we need to use less land for farming, we need to use far fewer pesticides and herbicides, and need to reduce the emissions associated with farming. Vertical farming has the potential to help with all of those.
The pest control is true for the short term, though I find that over time even well kept facilities develop some kind of pest problem.
maybe if they kept chickens in the lobby…
You could, for instance, shut down at the end of a cycle and do a thorough cleaning without using pesticides. Using steam, heat, and high-powered ultraviolet light, you should be able to effectively kill any pests or eggs that pests are leaving. Yes, pesticides are certainly less expensive in the short run, but in terms of long-term health for the entire planet, they’re super-bad.
There’s an organic produce company in Manhattan that uses vertical grow chambers and they get around the lighting problem by illuminating from the center of the cluster and rotating the plant pods occasionally.
They get around energy usage by charging a premium and taking advantage of state agricultural grants.
It’s expensive but you can get city grown butter lettuce year round.
Normally that would be a bit of an heresy, but fun thing: with the good LEDs at the good frequency, you can make a solar panel + LED setup that is actually efficient enough to provide more light to the plant than it would normally receive.
Freshness is such a key thing, the difference is taste is so significant especially with herbs and greens so enabling people to have an easy to manage and small footprint little tower of good food in their garden, balcony, or similar would be really good especially for renters if it could be packed up for transport then resembled in the new location.
An overlooked factor that I have no idea how to quantify is that access to tasty greens may reduce meat consumption.
So I am currently switching careers into vertical farming and have done a lot of work and research on this subject and here is just a bit of my 2 cents.
- Vertical farming can be less water intensive then traditional farming. Combined with an aquaculture system it can have negligible to no water loss which is great for arid climates.
- Hydroponic/Aquaponic systems have a huge upfront cost yet a comparably negligible year over year cost.
- This method has proven perfect for growing certain fruits, vegitables and leafy greens however has shown so far that its not the best for growing things like fruiting trees or staple crops like corn/wheat.
- Financing for vertical farms are virtually non-existant. So generally you have to go to private equity for financing. This is a problem as vertical farms are not the most profitable even after recovering $$ from upfront startup costs.
So it has great potential to seriously change our current food system and allow us to keep producing food in spite of drought. However it has a long way to go as a technology and will need serious federal legislation to create financing programs for this method of agriculture so farmers are not saddled with insane debt and growth projections that they will never be able to meet.
One more advantage: Vertical farming creates it’s own mini ecosystems, thus
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allowing growing of exotic vegetables in your town
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leaving natural ecosystems unoccupied and unaffected by pesticides, if used in the broad.
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This is incredibly insightful as someone who want to get into the business, I agree that as always the governments are like 2 years behind new production methods and I wish that wasn’t the case.
I think even more important than saving space is making the food more local so they don’t need to be shipped so far.
We misuse/underutilize a lot of the farm land we already have. I dont think the issue is lack of space.
I actually did a big project on this and we basically found that for people in flats wanting to grow small plants they’re amazing, but there’s very little point for actual farming
We’re doing some vertical farming in our backyard. I think it’s a good way of moving food production more locally to urban centers and reducing transport costs (and thereby related emissions). I don’t think they’re the solution for everything, and I do think using our current farmlands more efficiently is critical. In certain ways, I think vertical farming might be able to provide some of the improved green spaces in urban areas that Garden Cities were meant to before it turned out that Garden Cities deepened the divides between classes and races in urban centers.
Overall, I think we need not think of vertical farming as “How do we solve the food crisis” and instead as “How do we provide people without land the opportunity to experience the joys of gardening their own food”
it works pretty well for some kinds of produce - bushes/lettuce, fungus, root vegetables, etc but fails for other things (tree nuts, fruit, corn/grain, etc).
the benefit is that you can use existing infrastructure like high density residential/skyscraper buildings so there’s potentially less distance between farm & table
I would vote for more efficient means by removing highly inefficient food “production” - aka meat. That would free up a lot of potential. Vertical farming can probably be used sustainably in some cases but I feel it should not be used on a bigger scale.
A cow can pasture on marginal soils that are not well suited to other crops. While I agree that the vast majority of current meat production and especially feedlots and other Concentrated Animal Feed Operations ard a large waste of resources, there is SOME space for meat production, and it CAN be better to have a small baseline amount of pastured meat than to eat exclusively vegan.
While I totally agree with you, that cows have a slim potential to generate a calorie plus by eating exclusively from otherwise unsuitable land, I would argue that it will be unnecessary in most cases.
From an ethical standpoint, I must disagree with you as there is no justification to exploit animals if there are alternatives.
we already produce enough food to feed the entire planet (industrial food waste seriously hampers that effort) – add in several claims that US could double food production just by breaking up factory farms and converting to family farms
one of the solarpunk short stories (forget which collection) posited a competition set up on separate islands, one group with industrial farming, one group with permaculture, one group with vertical farming – obviously for the story, the permaculture group did best (worked with what was in place and what actually grew there), industrial farming required too much input (importing expensive fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides), and vertical farming required too much technical maintenance
the technical aspect is what I see as the biggest issue – I could see vertical farming being a great solution in a sterile environment (ie. a space station or an arctic greenhouse), but in everyday practice having a stable power supply for water pumps and constant maintenance (clogging from nutrients and fertilizers, filtering hard water to prevent calcium build up, roots binding up emitters) and having to compensate for the lack of soil microbiology would all take its toll
How do you think factory farms and family farms differ?
Most farms are family owned corporations. Anything else is either stupid accounting, or Low productivity (the Amish is the most obvious example of low productivity farms that are generally not corporate)
I think it’s a good way to grow specialty crops (berries etc), and a great idea in space limited countries (Singapore mentioned).
I also think the inputs are pretty big, but you can control things better.
I don’t think it’s the solution to our food issues, but I think it can be used to build robustness into our system and decrease chemical inputs (mostly)
Also it looks cool af which is a point not to be neglected.
it doesn’t scale and it’s limited in what crops it can grow.
Isn’t the entire point that it scales?
Exactly, so that it doesn’t scale is a negative. OP did a good job of listing the type of niche where it can maybe work despite not scaling.
I think space efficiency is not really a big factor. As others have said, every tower casts a shadow, so the sunlight is not being used.
However, it is good for indoor planting, because under a roof, space efficiency is necessary. So, we could have some sort of climate controlled greenhouses, and they would surround a vertical farm. The greenhouse “shadow” would be outside, and it means your plants are safely indoors, protected from heat and cold.
In the picture shown here, do the roots go out of the individual baskets and into a pool of water?
They do! The water splashes on them and they can happily absorb their food. :)
They get greedy though so the roots need to be maintained just like the rest of the plant.
