no bro you need AI and robots this leaves out the higher costs and raises the maintenance slightly,and since we are in the beginning of the AGI era,these projects are destined to succeed. also you can search for fruits in hydroponics like grapes,it has been done successfully.
Where I live, Vancouver, we grow a lot of blueberries. The local blueberries are sold in Japan. Meanwhile, the local supermarket sells blueberries from places like Morocco and Peru.
All I want to know is , where are all these financial backers ? and why are they giving funds to people that have zero idea on how this works ?? I mean , , does everyone just want to starve??? Sad.... Just saying, the right person can and will make this work ... Organically! & Cheaply!
I come from the Dutch greenhouse industry. Dutch greenhouses produce about 10X of what is possible on the best open-air farms. Such greenhouses are probably at the pinnacle of cost-effectiveness. Besides, crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, and pumpkins, are already grown vertically in these greenhouses. They grow vertically because it's relatively easy to lead their growth vertically. Lettuces and other leafy greens and herbs can be automated a great deal on a horizontal plane. In low-light conditions, one can add lighting. I think vertical farming is one step too far in automation and complications with humans. Perhaps further automation with AI and humanoid robots could be the path to success. Fun fact: greenhouses grow the most pesticide-free produce. They do this by adding natural predators of pests into the greenhouses. Unfortunately, it's more difficult to control fungal pests, but it can be done.
One problem with greenhouse and vertical farming is the heavy use of plastics in the equipment, and the often much higher level of microplastics in the crops compared to conventional farming. New research is coming out almost monthly on the body-wide negative side effects microplastics have.
Thing is about all this is that they arent the staple crops. These sorts of alternative methods need to be good at growing stuff like wheat and rice otherwise you are just growing salads.
@@2drealms196 nicely said and the source for that is what that dutch or european greenhouses come often with higher level of microplastics ? Remember: In the EU much more is forbidden in the agriculture industry and there the treatment agreement has never been signed . American citizens living in the EU realizse that quite often and quickly cause the water is smelling and tasting different, their skin feels much better cause the recognice that and they check the product for ingredients they see much of american ingredients forbidden in the EU.
I got laid off a vertical farm project last month. I was the lead designer, but even though I was able to save millions of dollars on lighting and other parts of the system, the business side had no idea how to make this project profitable. We would have to sell at exorbitant prices to make it work.
Didn't your close location to the city made an impact on your cost? I always thought vertical farms would win with decreasing prices on the consumer end and outsell the traditional farms until this video.
@@ali-g as said in the video, transportation savings weren't enough to offset additional costs that wouldn't be present in a greenhouse or conventional farming. Electric power for lighting and HVAC costs a lot. Then, you need to hire people who know how to use this equipment, and that's also more expensive. You need to think about how to retrieve produce from the higher layers which is also not obvious. Some simple elevators and manual picking is just not fast enough to process the required volume.
@@waisetsubunsho7934 wow. Thank you for the answer. Do you think these vertical farms will overcome the problems you mentioned? Do you worry that lack of funding act as a kill switch for the industry?
I ran the numbers when we were looking, we had an abandoned big box store and state grants and still couldn't find a way to make it profitable. Urban land/buildings are expensive, living in a big city is expensive. My farm is located in a southern state on super cheap land not in a city, it is still expensive to operate a farm.
that is because, like with a lot of these green initiatives, it isn't about actually producing the goods at comparable prices, it is - skim as much as possible while on the upwards trend, when the investor and grant money is flowing in, and you skim via super expensive equipment, expensive design plans etc, where you can fake high added value, I see 150k$ robot there in that video doing what, servicing 100 plants? and this is not just vertical farming, same exact thing is with wind and other stuff, and the hope behind all of these is that they will grow large enough quickly enough to become "too big to fail" and then will have subsidies from government to stay afloat, because "they can't fail", "too important to fail" and so on, and that then becomes a burden on the tax payers that is the whole scheme, same scheme just different levers is present in higher education, but some recent data falsification and peer review fails are threatening that house of cards also
@@donaldkasper8346I wonder what the cost of doing a shit ton of this if they ever figure out that deep geothermal that really runs deep enough to create steam. Like could we just dig one of those and hook it up to Miles upon square miles worth of area and then make money off excess energy too. Like if that energy cost could come down it would be game changer. Plus I get sense it takes less to manage.
My biggest reason for playing minecraft is to create technological aberrations that aren't feasible in real life due to the sheer amount of cost or ethical violations required for it.
😂😂😂😂 i myself not only used vertical farms but i developed a pretty efficient way to build them in survival 😂😂😂😂 i go at it with an algorithm like a printer lol... i ended up having them banned from most servers i played on lololol
Here in the Netherlands they introduce bees and other insects inside the hydroponic systems to hunt the pests that eat the plants. no insecticides are used.
@@godzillal123321I watched a documentary quite a while ago about it. They use beehives indoors to pollinate the plants, then move them outdoors after they have done their thing after a while. They introduced Ladybugs and Lacewings into the environment that would specifically hunt the mites and other little plant feeders that might infect the plants. Bees can get territorial during their pollination (which is essentially gathering food for the hive) when they come across insects that are closer to their own size and can sting (Not their main function though).
I imagine they use a lot of praying mantises. Ladybugs and some species of wasps are also very good. I had wasps in my garden in NM and could walk around with them flying around me and never got stung.
@@godzillal123321 The process called Nature! And works a lot better than the chemical options since pests don't develop a resistance to being eaten as well as not having to worry about the food being contaminated.
"Here in the Netherlands they introduce bees and other insects inside the hydroponic systems to hunt the pests that eat the plants." Still, it is much more climate friendly to put some cows on a pasture (which is a REAL ecological system and not a fake one you are trying to "create"), manage these in a regenerative manner and eat the healthy red meat!
I know homesteading and small community in the mountains of VA and Oregon and they use vertical farming. They aren't scienctist, they just used the free info on the net and make their food all year round. They mainly feed themselves, and sell some at farmers market. They use renewable energy and collected/recycled water to power equipment etc. Now imagine an America where every neighborhood employed Vertical Farming to feed that neighborhood all year round instead of trying to make MBA's rich. There are food deserts all over urban areas that need leafy greens, mountain community that don't have greens all year unless they pickle it. There's a whole other aspect, the human aspect of vertical farming to address
If you have access to sunlight, you can go with a well managed (recycled) plastic greenhouse with automatic irrigation for a fraction of the cost. No need to overcomplicate
Its a good approach and in some climates, really makes a difference. Big factor is heating and more so electricity. If you can tap cheap resources then you are good. Also competition - so vertical farms would be suited to environments in which hard to grow anything so imports are expensive. Vertical farm growing green all year would do well in Alaska, Iceland....area's with no direct competition and also cheap energy available.
In the city, rooftop gardening makes more sense. You have the building's warmth, less chance of certain insects, and can harvest rooftop water as well. Your market is there, it reduces certain costs whereas vertical farming is just a huge amount of costly conventional farming. Many rooftop projects use polycropping to boost natural fertility and avoid other problems.
That is a great point. This subject should not be about profit. It should be about reducing food costs, healthier food, CO2 offsetting at the problem, and better mental health of being connected to growing. In the urban environment, the focus should be on planning and design that enables more gardening ability. Design in property, building, town layout etc. can focus on more plant growth with little extra effort or cost.
@@PaulGrayUK This, strangely enough, is kind of what I've been thinking of whenever vertical Farms enter the chat; areas with a lack of arable land but have cheap energy.
I knew a rich guy who invested in that. I told him at the time that it was gonna fail because sun is free and LED is not. He told me that the crops were insect free and pesticide free so they could sell for a higher price... It failed.
Expecting for to be spotless, bug and dirt free, and remain fresh for a long time is a fundamental issue with society. How much food goes to waste because it has a couple of bad spots on it. I would rather buy a food that has a couple of spots on it and pay half price than eat a picture perfect vegetable.
I have a friend who worked in one of these places. They specialized in leafy greens and were doing well. The entire place was wiped out with a fungus infestation that they couldn't get rid of. He said that in nature the insects would have kept it in check by eating it but indoors, with no bugs, it just ran wild. The whole building was infected and could no longer be used for farming. I think it's a warehouse now. the other thing he mentioned was that the lighting they used, while great for the plants, wreaked havoc on his moods and mental health. The spectrums used might be nutritious for plants but they can be very bad for people.
Indoor operations tend to be very humid without heavy ventilation, which is a much higher energy and equipment cost than lighting. Dark, buzzing, and humid. Not a great environment for your average human.
One of the reasons why my vertical farming company went out of business was due to a mite infestation that devastated our last crop that could've gotten us out of the water and proven financial viability. But we pretty much lost around 4000 various herbs and leafy greens, and to restart a batch like that (germinating/sprouting) would've taken months, which wasn't an option. It's a really tough industry, and before you are fully able to properly automate things, it's very labor intensive, to a point where our small team was completely burnt out. I'm still hopeful for the industry, but things will have to be improved drastically. Imo, it can be done.
@@sementhrower420 Sounds like vertical farms need sci-fi style decontamination airlocks and donning disposable sterile clothing to cut down the risk of insect and fungal infestation.
What is most surprising to me is the fact that investors didn't see this coming. It's not rocket science to calculate profit. It shows that most rich people and investors are just humans with more money in their pockets.
What gets me is he mentions Neom "the line" Saudi Arabia as if it's a possibility. Vertical farms are still viable in theory with things like labor cost, and energy being resolved you can potentially bring a profitable farm to market. There is no engineer on the planet who thinks Neom is actually a possibility within the next century. It's a dictators pipedream.
I was the lead designer in a vertical farming company in Canada. (once upon a time...) We were focused on Cannabis Exclusively. The only crop with high enough end value to justify the labour and capex expenditure according to our math. We were repeatedly asked to grow vegetables by investors and the like... The math never worked.
but the only reason of high price on cannabis if it is legal, very strict regulations and high taxes. If you won't regulate it price will drop, because cannabis is same plant as onion or tomato.
@@josephmoya5098 tomato, cannabis onions, cucumbers just grow like any other plant you can find on a farm. If cannabis won't be regulated it's price would be very low.
Even cannabis isn't going to be a long term industry. The biggest cost is the equipment cost and labour. As these costs come down overtime which they are. People will just grow it themselves. I have a friend who sells hydroponics equipment to end consumers specifically for growing weed. You can buy a kit and have a small growing operation in your own basement. If the cost comes down for equipment and it's sufficiently automated where you don't need skilled labour. Your typical stay at home mom can buy a kit and just run the automation cutting out the middle man. I'm more excited for this outcome above anything else.
I have a friend who was obsessed with telling me that you can increase your food production by many orders of magnitude, but growing things outside vertically, on structures with multiple levels. I was like 'mate, think about it scientifically, there's only a certain amount of energy per m3 from the sun. Its impossible to amplify that. Wherever you build up in one place, you're casting shade in another.' He still persisted. If he thought it was that great, he should've done it himself.
Plants on 1m³ need between 100 and 200 Wh to grow properly. Peak under optimal conditions is 1 kWh. So let's say it's 600 Wh. Light can be splitted up by using lenses that spread it iver a larger area so the plants only get as much as they need.
It is quite clear that soil bacteria are essential. At a recent talk at the NIH, a plant biologist asked, "How many other species contribute to growing an apple?" The expected answers were like, bees, and other pollinators. The correct answer is, "we don't know how many". The underground ecosystem is large.
This isn't entirely wrong but hydroponics have existed for a long time and are effectively soiless growing methods. Realistically, something like vertical farming would be neccessary if we ever want to produce food supplies outside of earth.
It never sounded like a good idea. It sounded like the BS you see on YoutTube and Ted Talks. Most of that garbage is for the Google generation that is so gullible they believe any gobbledygook they see online while distrusting all the real world experience being lived around them. Replacing soil, sunshine, and fresh air with plastic and fake light is the same as "saving the environment" by cutting down old growth forest to put up barely wind turbines that kill birds by the millions. The hubris of the Google brain-rot thinking they know more about everything bring wave after wave of failure.
Two major problems. The first is tech investors. You want people who are actually knowledgeable about the intricacies of farming. Not a bunch of techies who expect near instant gratification. The second is that you need to grow stuff people actually want to eat. Growing nothing more than cow fodder is going to bore people's taste buds real quick.
Yeah and that's hard even to acquire. Because very few people actually know the answers of what actually contributes in the normal farming, not even farmers do because they just ... farm in the nature and it "just works". I mean, nature is already so complicated. Vertical Farming sounds like you're trying to take something Nature would do for million of years, and instead now you're trying to find out how and what nature has been doing it and evolving to fight or die for million of years. Like the cases with the fungus-building-infections I've been reading in the comments which in the nature would just not be a case, because nature has already "learned"/evolved on how to deal with it with millions of years of trial and error. Vertical Farming will literally be trial and error until we gather at least most of the problems nature has been dealing with already before us, for us. That just doesn't sound like a very "nice" investment for an investor that expects tomorrow or money within a decade. Especially in an ever more and more skeptical tech industry. Which means fewer and fewer money injections into that industry as for now it's supposed to just ... burn money until it gets so good and efficient and with good R&D that it doesn't have to burn money anymore.
Same problem with AI and robots, everyone’s a nerd and has no experience in dance or Somatics or humane sciences. That’s why robots have stiff chests and look and move like robots. I fear for the worst.
@@appletvaccount1364 yeah its as if you almost like taking something nature gives you for free, and you make it ... not free. Like, if nature could grow cars, for free, would we have car manufacturers? Why have .... plant ones?
I am an old farmer who people I knew in the press used to tell me these ultra-expensive high tech operations would put us all out of business! Ha, ha, all they had to do was look at greenhouse operations and see what happens over the years, eventually greenhouses are almost always overwhelmed by plant debris which causes insect pest infestations that can become permanent! Cleaning up the mess the plants leave behind is ultimately what kills the operation by incurring high labor costs from pest control. There is also this weird thing that happens in farming where the top people become convinced fertilizers are magical elixirs resulting in over fertilizing and under watering, so those highest paid most educated agricultural workers often give very BAD advice and or the head managers/owners won’t listen to good advice. Most farms don’t know how to do what is the most basic thing, properly watering 💦 of their plants, and this failure results in plant disease, when this happens farms then respond by spraying insecticides which absolutely shocks the plant killing fruit production! The high cost of these reactions to poor watering eventually puts the farmer out of business and the farmer believes he failed because of plant disease. When plants are under watered they become weak and sickly, they will begin to fruit very early while they are still very small because they are dying, these plants will become diseased as they age. The farm manager sees the disease and responds with insecticides which shocks and ends fruit production early and finally kills the plant. Then next season that manager increases fertilizer in his fields believing it will cure his disease problems. The increased fertilizers in the soils increases salts in the soils and actually reduces productivity in the soils and leaches into the ground water 💦 making the irrigation water more salty. In the summer some years rains will occur only adding small amounts of water 💧 to the growing season, the manager believes this water 💦 is inconsequential but can cause a tremendous bloom of growth in the fields very visibly a couple of weeks later, because rain waters have no salt in them and temporarily leach the salts from the soils increasing production. The farm manager will often credit this bloom to his excessive fertilizing and his fertilizer salesman will do his best to reinforce these mistaken beliefs! Then the farm manager begins to behave like a drug addict constantly adding more and more fertilizer and insecticides believing that is what causes the beautiful blooms he sees some years, but his costs continually rise and his soils become infertile from too much fertilizer salts in the soils, causing the farm to gradually go broke. The solution reduce your field sizes and irrigate frequently, DO NOT FERTILIZE UNTIL THE PLANTS BEGIN TO SHOW NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES IN THEIR LEAVES, likewise do not listen to the fertilizer salesmen. When applying insecticides use only the insecticides that show the least toxicity to the plants, pests are never as bad for well watered plants as toxic pesticides can be. Farm managers should never become obsessed with having fields clean spotless of insects and weeds keeping fields too clean requires applying too many very expensive and toxic pesticides to crops, soils, and farm workers. Farms that supplement their incomes with outside investment will often become obsessed with creating pleasing appearances for investors, these practices should be discouraged, heathy plants naturally attract lots of insects and weeds will grow because there is water and low salts in the soils, this is natural!
wow great analysis, it looks like farmers need the tools to make more decisions based on evidence linking cause and effect. a scientific approach if you will.
I think the problem is in most western countries the farms are funded by loans from banks. and too high taxes on the land, your income, etc. You need a certain minimum yield for it to be even viable.
This problem is not just farms, its in every industry there is. A bad manager can kill any business, and we have way too many bad managers, often assigned through family connections or bribery. I work in IT and from the couple of companies I worked in I found a trend that managers are in 1:6:3 ratio (1 good manager for every 6 average managers for every 3 bad managers).
Another point that should get put in here somewhere is that 1. national exchange with countries with cheaper labor and few safety / health regulations 2. agricultural exemption, which I'm pretty aure could not apply to a building (I had ag exempt land, was required to prove at least 10 acres of land and x number of "animal units" on a chart that's available on usda 3. farming subsidies of several levels. On the largest scale is corn and soybeans getting a check for real money from the government for selling their corn and soy at prices LOWER than the cost of GROWING them. Elsewhere there are special privileges available to farmers (lines of credit, a special grant money for farmers and ranchers that helps pay for or completely pays for fencing, or a greenhouse, among other directly related items). I also had an Ag/Timber card, that allowed me to buy many of my supplies for the farm tax free--animal feed, paint, building materials, etc) Agriculture in the US is very far from a level playing field. Local / sustainable / organic farmers face much the same battle against the very established conventional machine, in that they are frequently too small to qualify for the price reductions or special treatment. Inner-city farms, small family farms, large "gardeners" cannot compete with this in many ways. I think growing in buildings in cities must suffer the same fate.
Those companies failed because the investors wanted a quick ROI which doesn't happen in farming. They did mono-cropping which isn't the answer either. There is greater success with diverse cropping whether it be earth , vertical, or hydroponic growing.
That's not the case in Dutch greenhouse farming usually those greenhouses are mono-culture at any one time per greenhouse - they may have tomatoes in one and cucumbers in another etc; however broad acre yes crop rotation and diverse crops, companion planting etc helps with disease and pest mitigation.
Investors can be narrow minded and not big picture. What a shame. Grow a variety of crops instead of a monoculture and use different fertigation recipes for different plants! Grow more profitable plants too. Lm301b diodes and lm301h diodes are full spectrum and highly recommended for energy efficiency and Photosynthetically available radiation.
I tried a small vertical farm and cost me more than my conventional farm. Keeping the lights on buying the nutrients and water filters add up fast. But i transitioned to a vertical greenhouse farm instead and has worked well so far.
vertical farming is done big time here in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the biggest exporter of flowers. Most flowers don't grow on fields but inside of big greenhouses on multi level platforms that rotate each day so the flowers get enough light. Nothing in this cycle is done by humans, everything is done automatically, even the planting of bulbs is done by robots more and more. the only part where humans are still involved is picking and packing of the flowers after they've grown. Many people talk about pests and funguses etc. It's true these are big things and can bankrupt an entire company. That's why there are many extremely strict hygienic rules. When u enter greenhouses you need special clothing (like those white cloth onesie suits) and there's multiple stages of disinfection of hands, arms and shoes. You CANNOT enter these facilities with food that carries the deceases, for example you can't enter tomato greenhouses with tomatoes/paprikas (even those insta soup packs are forbidden) and some other food that's that might contain deceases. It is also not possible to travel between different greenhouses in one facility. The facilities also use things like doors, high and low pressure areas and vapor screens between parts to make it even more difficult for pests to spread.
@@Loanshark753 Yes to a degree, but a greenhouse is the target of other larger problems like fungal spread, bacteria and disease. Think of rural area vs. extremely urban like NYC. Suddenly risk of contamination has a much larger impact on your entire population because of how quickly it can spread.
I have worked for Kalera since 2018 as the Mechanical Design Engineer and later promoted to Maintenance Director while still having the engineering design responsibilities. The cost he showed for maintenance cost per year is over 10x greater than my budget. I can tell you for a fact, we sell a head of lettuce for way less than $4.50, we are competitive with the $2.50 for traditional ag, and we beat that price by a good margin for some varieties. We do that with our blue collar workers having much higher wages than workers in traditional ag where those companies lobby govt to pay their field workers below minimum wage.
The $2.50 wasn't the cost of production, but ~$2.60 retail (~$.90 cost). For Kalera? At the end of the day, what is the bottomline ROI for Kalera? As an eng., I'd have thought you'd lead with the numerics; not having done so suggests the answer.
@@edhuber3557 Dang, kinda harsh. I mispoke, we sell the lettuce at retail locations for $2-2.50 a head and that includes our hefty margin. We sell to bulk buyers for significantly less/head because there is much less packaging. Only looking at things through ROI is short sighted, but we are on a 3-5 year timeline from my understanding from the finance team. I thought I was leading with numbers after stating my credentials. I didn't include more because I thought the comment was already too long.
My thoughts exactly. This was a borderline scam from the start. I'm sure a bunch of the first generation of CEOs and Bosses, made plenty of money before getting out.
same scam over and over again in the tech "industry": IoT for energy savings, renewables, basically behind every "this changes everything!" youtube video for a new "planet saving" technology/startup
But that's the main goal of any company targeting the "ESG" scam ("environmental, social, governance" metrics rather than profit). Extract subsidies into managment's pockets as long as possible, then fold, create another scam. With friendly support of your government who milks you, the taxpayer.
They just had WAY higher fixed costs than greenhouses while producing not much more than greenhouses. It never made sense for vegetables, maybe for medicinal plants or drugs that are worth a lot more.
@@danlorett2184 My thoughts exactly ! The thing is, it was blindingly obvious right from the start that this was a very expensive idea. A normal greenhouse in all normal climates provides almost all of it's light for free, from the Sun (perhaps with some artificial light boosting during certain seasons) and a normal greenhouse provides most of its own heating, free from the Sun (again, with some supplemental heating, depending on the seasons and location). The idea of providing ALL the light for plant growth by using ELECTRIC POWER, even with energy efficient LEDs is clearly a losing idea. Yes in places like Antarctica, there can be a case made for growing some small amount of fresh vegetables and fruits like strawberries, to supplement stored bulk food products, for the staff during the Winter when normal food supplies cannot be transported in. Yep, this was a scam from the start I reckon. Just so the first generation of bosses and CEOs could score some big paydays, and then disappear.
Been around farms and farming my whole life (not the only things I did in life, however). I knew from the very start of the news about vertical farming in the USA, that indoor farming costs too much in capital investment, overhead, and labor, to be profitable. Having an old green house on the farm as a boy and being a biology major at the university, taught me that controlling Pests and disease in a closed system is close to impossible. You would think it to be the other way around but reality is the opposite. Dr, O
I've seen videos on vertical farming. And what always strikes me is the huge up-front costs there must be. And how much produce they'd have to sell to recoup said costs. Maybe there are means to reduce the costs toward profitability. We'll see.
Doesn't have to be expensive. I'm building an aquaponics farm in basement. I'm spending more than I need to bc it's my first attempt and I wanted nice stock tanks to protect my fish. Spent $1200, but could've done it with $700. Even so, I expect my payback to be 5-6 months, once up and running. If if chosen the cheap way, payback would've been 3-4 months.
A head of lettuce in Hawaii is about $4 right now, with some adjustments, one of the remaining startups could actually start selling there at competitive prices and even undercut the competition in a few years
You overlooked a basic problem. By expanding too rapidly as investors chased instant profits, the supply swamped demand. Had the industry started small with few producers, matured best practices and skilled labor, then scaled up it would be more sustainable. Your point about location, arid regions vs wet ones, points this out clearly. A comparable industry is the EV industry, built on excessively exuberant expectations, is nearing collapse as China floods the market with cheap unreliable cars, and people find the five year cost including $0 resale value, this niche market will also collapse then rebuild along much more sustainable practices. There are numerous PhD thesis level topics for anyone interested.
That was my thought exactly. There are people that have taken vertical farming and made good money with it but they started out small. Instead these companies raised a bunch of capital then spent it all on outfitting large warehouses and then paid people top dollar to do a simple job.
China petrol cars were unreliable. EV makers are doing better, but created too much competition. many provinces have now dropped subsidies and exemptions, because more cars on the road costs them money.
The thing is, startups need venture capitals. And they will invite as many venture capitals they can get. That created buzz, and then everybody wanted to take a shot.
Dirt is cheap in rural areas; the sun is free, rain is free, and the only costs are seeds, fertilizer, and planting/picking labor. Hard to compete with that just so you can label it locally grown year round.
You are not a farmer, dirt is cheap? Land is expensive and needs to be fertilized. Sun is free?, not in the winter. Only cost are seeds and feritilizer? thats a big cost. Then there is water usage and insectides that vertical farming addresses reduces. They are throwing money at a problem that needs to evolve. The cost of setup is high, Lets use abandoned buildings and owner operators with profit incentives.
@@jbird6609 Depends from location, land can be quite cheap. Those special nutrient mixtures are why hydroponics/aeroponics aren't widespread - while in nature bacteria, fungi, insects, etc. can extract nutrients from whatever fertilizer you use, such as manure, here you need them in ready to use form. You also need plenty of fungicide to combat diseases - because nutrient solution comes dissolved in water and sprayed on plants, there always will be high humidity, perfect for fungi.
When I was looking into hydroponics, I found mention of 'nutrients' being fed the plants. The nutrients come from a third party source. That destroys the whole concept of hydroponic farming being 'self-sufficient.' And yes, they always talk about growing lettuce.
I grow lettuce in one of those aerogardens for funsies and all I see is that thing loaded up with algae, all of my plants that are starting in my homemade dirt from my worm farm are growing normally and in a few weeks I’ll have them outside in the ground. Natural is better
@@chrisrageNJ LOL....sure. "Natural". Like mega farms using chemicals every month to keep that shit alive is natural. As if mono crops year after year is natural. Ever wonder how the hell they get massive amounts of corn from the same dirt year after year after year?? Here's a hint....it has nothing to do with "natural". and before you start in about how you grow enough for your own family just....don't. Most of us humans live in cities and simply can't do that. Mega farming and chemicals is the only way to get enough food for us all. Natural growing would lead to starvation for MILLIONS.
All plants need the same thing NPK and trace plus you can always use urine if you are so worried but you need a concentrated form otherwise why bother.
I'm considering indoor farming myself. My calculations are based on the price of electricity vs buying food from the store, but even then the profit would come solely from using the waste heat of the lamps to heat the house.
250 sounds reall, really little, especially if you bought and installed solar panels and pumps. Either you spent much personal time repurposing junk other folks threw away and you got for free? Or there is some miscalculation in your claims. One new solar panel alone costs more, let alone mounting and running it. And we have not talked about hoses, pumps, large water containers - of which you need at least two - filters,the planting beds for the leafies, the electronics running the pumps ect. I am a friend of the tech and the movement. But claims such as yours sound deeply suspicious to anybody who ever tried that stuff. I´m guessing you forgot a lot of material investment, many hobbyists do. But that _"those old garden hoses I already had"_ -approach doesnt work in scaled economics. Or you dont really run a closed system at all. But still expose the plants to outside air, ground, biome and natural light, and the only thing "vertical farming" about your setup is the automated watering. That would possibly be doable for 250.
And what nutritional value your lettuce has. Probably you didn't think about it at all. You are wasting your solar energy to produce harmful to your health product.
I remember watching a critical video about one of those "water from thin air devices", it was basically a dehumidifier. The critic pulled up the shipping costs of trucks. You can get an entire pools worth of water shipped to you for around $150 to $400 depending on how rural you are. The shipping of water was cheaper than producing it with electric dehumidification lol. Shipping is so insanely cheap even for super heavy loads.
Well, yeah. When you ignore the negative externalities, like public health and climate change, you can produce anything much cheaper than its true cost.
@@onecalledchuck1664 It's not about externalised costs, though, but about efficiency of transportation. With modern container ships, you still end up with shipping costs including all externalities of roughly 0.008 USD per metric ton per km, which is a shipping container from one end of the world to the other for a low monthly salary of shipping costs.
Maybe this is something you've been told. It's not necessarily true. The cost and value of urban residential water is mainly in treatment and distribution. Water for ag is mainly the cost of building & maintaining gravity-fed ditches. Groundwater is expensive, proportional to the power it takes to pump, farmers would very much rather use surface water when available. Surface water is very expensive to treat for your safe use, on the other hand. I'll also mention that water in March has a much different value than water in September. The former needs merely to be directed when rivers are high, the latter water has been held and stored behind dams.
@@timgerk3262 When groundwater is used in a way that make the surface drop 15-20 feet and the farms really do not have take any cost then cost of water is very low. Permanent damage is done to the land when to much water is used. So much water is used from the Colorado River that the it no longer reach the ocean.
@bknesheim environmental damage is a separate, related point. Regarding the Colorado Delta, it would be good to keep up with current events. I half-expect to read something about saving Mono Lake next.
The author showed amazing incompetence in the area under study. Not only does he confuse the physiological roles of red and blue light in plant ontogenesis, but he also compares fundamentally different markets - the market for vertical farms and greenhouses, growing and thriving in countries with harsh climates, and the market for traditional farming, thriving in countries with temperate climates. Extreme incompetence!
The vertical farming concept is sound. The biggest reasons it has failed in execution so far is the VC mentality of "move fast, break things", and the overblown, unrealistic expectations that generated.
@@PeterSedessemm no? Costs TODAY are at $4 / head. Yes, that's amortizing Capex, but traditional farms do the same. They're not profitable in the first (several) years either. Not sure where you pulled that wild stat out. I do agree that lettuce alone is not the path forward. You really need to invest in high value crops with higher margins, especially if it's hard to deliver them year round somewhere.
@@gregkramer5588 That's the problem. The people doing this are either people looking for a quick cash grab or idealists who have no clue what it really takes to grow a crop successfully.
People get all twisted up about lettuce. Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce. Y'all know the reason you see lettuce so often in material about this is because it grows fast and is therefore a good proof of concept crop to test a system out relatively quickly, right? No one is realistically trying to grow 10 stories of just arugula. Lettuce also is a good QC organism in that it shows signs of issues quicker than other crops, so you can adjust and correct quicker.
I grew HERBS hydroponically under LEDs for 5 years. Full spectrum lights were/are essential to maximize nutrient and flavor. Bugs indoors? Simple to add/spray with Silica which bugs HATE. There's more afoot here than what you are aware of
@@roberthart9886 I see, that's why I was arguing against the insane unscientific Authoritarian lockdowns from day 1. We'll be paying for it for decades. But it was reasonably profitable?
@@Mrbfgray Lockdowns were an 'experiment'... They now have data on what is needed, what happens, what it costs, how people respond etc. China redid it after the West opened up again. We're gonna see more of it (on a smaller scale).
Another reason growing that way doesn’t always pay off, most veggies and fruit grown that way taste like watered down garbage. Tomatoes, berries, peppers, etc. will all have their taste affected by environmental stressors. A tomato’s taste is at it’s peak when it hasn’t been watered for several days and you pick in the middle of a sunny day because that’s when it’s sugars are the most concentrated. Whereas a cucumber will taste best picked before the sun hits it for the day. Soil, sunlight, pests, etc all play a vital role in the taste and quality of your food. It’s frankly impossible to fully mimic nature’s design.
This only show how the technicians and the managers are completely unprepared to manage the VF (or the hydroponic farms) There is no technical reason you can not find the right "recipe" to get maximum taste from the crop. There are, for sure, books and articles written about it and with data to back them and use. The big problem I see in this is "too much, too fast, too early". The proper way to develop the industry is to do how Elon did, rapid prototyping, testing, rapid failing early. Because it is a completely new way to do things. Money don't solve technical problems not already solved. You need brains and time.
Not saying I disagree with your statement about environmental factors playing a part in quality, but imagine someone 100 years ago saying "there's no way we can connect the entire world in a metaphysical network to transmit any kind of information imaginable, that's crazy talk and impossible"
This also says something about how poorly paid fieldhands are for the traditional farming, assuming harvesters aren't used. The harvester definitely was a game changer to the farming industry.
This is exactly what I wanted to say. It really highlights the abuses that field hands endure for pennies. So many of them are migrants, so they have zero recourse. And as soon as someone says anything about illegalities, remember their employers are all too happy to use them for their cheap labor so until that changes, they will always be here. Someone else sort of hit on this point, but in my mind the answer is small scale community gardens, whether they are traditional or indoors.
@@ecoideazventures6417 it worked for weed because it's already very expensive because of it's recreational nature and how banned it is. Try doing the same with growing tobacco plants. People don't grow tobacco plants on their garden for a reason, it's not cost-effective. But people do grow weed because it's just very expensive and you can even resell it later because of its scarcity.
@@Another-Address Its not just recreational maaaan... I swear this shits medicine maaan, you can like eat it and stuff too like the part of the plant that we dont light up... trust me on this broo
@@lambdasun4520 You can improve both using that methods since you control what is in the solution and as stated inoculate the roots or water but it easy to test for nutritional content. So non issue
Look here. It's simply basic maths. A given amount of soil contains a finite amount of nutrients. And no, plants do not only need phosphorus and nitrate fertilizer. To produce the vitamins and micronutrients that we need, plants need to either absorb them or chemically produce them from the soil. Most of the trace elements in soil come from rain, insects and small rodents, from mushrooms and other life thriving and dying. All of this is missing in a sterile greenhouse, so obviously at some point the soil gets depleted of vital micronutrients. You can use genetical engineering and fertilizer all you like, but a fixed amount of soil can only produce a finite amount of vitamins. That's why an orange today has only 1/3 the vitamins than an orange in 1912. You simply cannot trick math. Yes, you can grow larger or more oranges, but they will have less vitamins then.
I started a small scale vertical farm in 2016. I started with the most profitable crops: herbs and microgreens. But there’s only so many herbs and microgreens high end restaurants need that are willing to pay a small premium for more intense taste and special variations that are harder to source from conventional suppliers. Selling b2c is way harder because it’s still more expensive than the grocery store. After doing this for a year, I realized this was not the future and quit. Every vertical farm operator should know that even leafy greens are not profitable when doing simple opex en capex calculations It’s a shame the marketers and operators are dishonest about the profitability of these operations.
In The Netherlands we have like a farm who is very successful. Automated and vertical farming. Export around the world. Growing and make’s. €50.000.000
@@wesstein17what is the company called? I worked closely with the now managing director of Growy. But I know Growy won’t survive without their largest shareholder subsidies (municipality of amsterdam) they’re not doing anything different than other vertical farms except that they have a good relationship with high end restaurants in the netherlands.
@@wesstein17 The major red flag for me is that you do not mention their name. Other commenter as well tried to pitch a company they've even been working for as Design Director, until comments below made the note that the company they're talking about has filled for chapter 11 - bankruptcy. Like, every "successful vertical farming" story i've read in the comments, has had their pitfalls.
My wife and I have a rose nursery. Our newest greenhouse recycles the nutrient solution. The biggest challenge we have found is that the industry lacks experienced people to learn from. If you are lucky you come across some company reps that take on the challenge of finding the answers one needs. Any industry magazines only publish articles that do not offer specifics and many advertisers don't know their own products. University professors lack any useful knowledge depth, which means they turn out graduates lacking skills. I understand why these businesses go under. There are to many nuances that one has to recognize, this takes time, something bean counters don't offer.
I tend too agree with your comment on teachers with text book knowledge teaching students. Often the text books are written by tutors with as much knowledge as the students.
Here's my current grocery store prices: $1.64 - head of Iceberg Lettuce $2.58 - Organic Iceberg Lettuce $1.94 - Romaine Lettuce. No way in the world would I pay 5x that amount
Of course, Americans would never consider paying farm labor an actual living wage. We are so spoiled, not having to pay a greater part of our incomes on the food that keeps us alive. But that is only by exploiting the desperate circumstances of the people that grow the stuff. Only the desperate would work so hard for so little return. Some day we will look back on all of this in shame.
@@argusfleibeit1165 WTF are you talking about? Most food in America is grown by corpos. Where are the slaves being worked to death? The real overworked and underpaid are the Americans you are shaming into paying 5 times for food! Your words and attitude are the opposite of what you claim to want.
@@argusfleibeit1165 So how much do you pay your farmers where ever you live? FYI, there's a lot more people getting paid than the farmer. Furthermore, how in the world are you going to ask the lower wage earners who can barely pay for their rent to pay 3x more for their food?? I sincerely doubt you actually know any farmers because if you did you would know they don't do it for the money. PS. Most of the food we grow here in the US goes over seas to help keep prices down world wide. Maybe instead of bashing us, you ought to say "Thanks!"
Excuse me-- I am not bashing farmers. I am discussing our economy, and how some people have to work really hard, and get barely subsistence wages for that work. We also have a situation where the wealthiest can literally be making millions of dollars a day, and probably don't have to do any work at all to keep it rolling in. SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG. We have been "lucky" (?) that we have a steady stream of desperate migrants, legal or illegal, who are willing to take these back-breaking jobs. We do have artificially low costs for food-- AT THE SAME TIME the majority of workers are in no position to be able to pay more. Everything is very screwed up economically, and we seem to be stuck with a government that has no intention of making things better. Thank you for being a farmer. I couldn't do that job, and I know it. I also couldn't work in the local chicken processing plant, or pick peaches, and have to constantly move to find more work. I'm a low fixed-income disabled retired person. But I still have it better than so many people. I don't complain for myself. I complain for the people who are too stressed out and poor to go on social media and agitate for better conditions. Nobody ever speaks for them. But they matter too.
I think a lettuce is about £2 in london. However, everything from the supermarket is always old, weeks old... There's no point in eating vegetables that are old.... I enjoy eating, not sitting on the toilet. I might as well not eat ballast from the supermarket. How do carrots from the supermarket start rotting literally the next day when I bring them home? When i get a carrot from the garden it literally stays fine on the kitchen countertop for weeks. Any vegetable... eat it in less than 24-48h it was picked........
Put your lettuce in tinfoil. Will last much longer. Did an experiment with Romain 2 in tinfoil 1 just in the bag it came in in the fridge. Month later and the foil lettuce was fresh as the day I got it. The one in the bag was a brown slime
In a major retail outlet, Tesco, in England, one Iceberg lettuce costs 79p. That's less than a dollar. Specialty bagged 'organic' lettuce leaves cost £12 per kg or about $6 per pound, at the same shop, but that's really an extreme case. Lettuce bought at local markets cost less than 79p. Weights are not specified for whole lettuces, but the market-bought ones are significantly larger than those at major retailers.
Yes, I buy a pack of 2 whole Romaine lettuces for about the same price as a little packet of ready chopped vertical farm raised lettuce that would possible garnish 4 sandwiches. Those Romaines, on the other hand, will last 2 weeks in sandwiches every day. Everyone is watching their money here in the UK, much like the rest of the world I dare say, so few people have money to burn on 'supporting' a company that wants to make a quick return on its investment. I don't need to tell you that if you bought a farm, you wouldn't see a return on your investment for quite a while.
Hello, the main problem that got most vertical farms/indoor farms to go out of buisness here in Quebec is that most of the people that start that kind of buisness know literally nothing about plants and don,t even inform themself. My teacher went to a conference about it for fun with some of her specialists friends and she told us that it's actually insane how most of them don't know jack shit and don't even take notes and plant mesurements. The main issue that she saw is that most of them forget to add Co2 in their indoor farms which makes them unable to compete during summer (cold climate) because of their really low yields per plants. Also, to make this profitable, you have to hire professionnals to optimize the light input.
Most people don't know the chemical equation for photosynthesis, and that CO2 really IS plant food, NOT pollution. They think that food comes from supermarkets, not farmers. They read "fear porn" MSM headlines about climate catastrophes and don't bother learning the actual facts that climate is getting MILDER, NOT more extreme. LOW temperatures are increasing, NOT high temperatures or extreme weather. Average temperatures are increasing because of the low-temperature rise.
I have a veggie patch and I take notes*. Maybe if there was an adjacent mushroom production project that can feed the plants CO2(g) while the plants supply O2(g). Throw-in some adjacent aquaculture for water-filtration. Would work better as a cottage/medium scale operations maybe. *frustrated fmr PhD student 😅
@@annak804 nah they just don't understand that the CO2 levels get too low indoor to get high enough yield if you don't add any in your grow room. We usually use liquid CO2, burners or we just make sure that the CO2 from outside can get inside.
Looking at plants like wheat and corn in the industrial world they are grown with barely an energy gain to society. Vegetables are even worse but we need them and apparently it pans out. But overall we live due to other energy inputs and we don't worry too much about the energy return of farming. This lets me think that adding more technological scaffolding to farming may not work out well especially if energy costs rise. Interestingly it was low skilled workers who contributed heavily to cost, in a sense this is one way of finding out that society doesn't work right.
To me, it seems like there is a way to mix traditional and vertical farming, using mirrors to direct natural sunlight and soil with all the microbes contained.
I am frustrated by the idea that this world continues to value things based on how excited investors are about it. No matter how many times it bites them, they still feed the next promising beast, and then suddenly starve it when they get scared that it needs more development to work well. Time and time again, the fact that this happens seems to be a large part of why we struggle with innovation.
Youre backwards. Innovation happens cause investors charge in and risk huge amounts of resources on things that dont have a natural abililty to attract it. This gives so many things the resources to innovate when it wouldnt have been possible before. It drives some things to be successful (there are hundreds of things around each of us that prove this) and fails in other projects.
@@tealshift2090 No he's not wrong, he's complaining about this current system and how investors short-term goals for profit is missing the reality that innovation takes time, dedication, and expertise. Real innovation often takes place in universities with grants, or a passion project/hobby with open collaboration. A billionaire throwing money at a problem might get lucky, but all experts have blind spots. Our current business method of everyone has to work on secret projects for propriety reasons is holding progress back. Also only doing things that will be profitable isn't great either- like there are plenty of safe drugs that are past their patent life , and have potentially other uses that are seen in lab trial, but won't because they still need human trials that cost money, and investors won't see a profit because the patent is over they can be made cheaply by any competitor company.
@@istvanczap3004 while it's not too useful now it will be in the future probably pretty far future because of overpopulation, if you can grow food on less land that means more housing space. It also might be useful for moon/mars bases and space stations/habitats
They should have done vertical farms in places with no fertile land, like deserts, or with little land in general, like remote islands. Where produce is super expensive. It's a great idea, but their biggest mistake is how badly they choose their locations.
The thing there, is that you don't have people with expertise usually, which vertical farms require because of how tech-y they are. or you have them but you must pay x10 more for each one. So .... cost would be around the same.
@@calmbeforethecorryexactly the opposite. The comment says that it should be grown somewhere where agriculture on land doesnt work too well. It didnt say that it should be sold somewhere else. Basically choosing places with weaker competition. Sure it would have some other problems, but not as pointless as doing all this somewhere where local agriculture is already doing great
The thing is that the no fertile land or deserts have very few people living there. The market is simply not big enough to invest in vertical farms. The only suitable place for investors to pour money to build them is only the city. Any other remote place will discourage them from building them.
As they used to say about the gold rush: the one who makes the money is the one who sells the shovels. I was looking at this tech for home gardening. If a solar roof can power your house, then why not have your house produce your veg as well? With good planning you could raise enough for your household in the space of a closet.
@@edmondgreen7970 small family. But when you plant vertically in grow tents, you can stagger the planting so that you are always having a continuous harvest of something. With outside ground farming you have to stick to seasonal harvests
@@colleenforrest7936 wouldn't that make you the sucker buying the shovels in the form of all that equipment? Like the companies selling the fancy greenhouse tech did selling to these startups. They're definitely still in business selling to the already profitable greenhouse industry which is the same shit as vertical farming with about half the operating costs.
@@evongunnar pretty much, that's why I tend to cobble my stuff together from more affordable stuff. I may still be buying the trowel, but at least it's less expensive than the shovel :D
@@colleenforrest7936 Build a winter greenhouse instead of a vertical farm. Make that greenhouse a part of your house so you can sit in nature even in winter with snow on the ground.
Is it though? I’m not into that yet, but I do have it in my mind. And in my mind, there will always be people who want to eat. Especially within the next few years, it seems like food or anything around it, will be in high demand by everyone. What is it I’m missing?
I know that here in Montreal there is a company renting big factory rooftops and reinforcing them to install their farms and apparently, it is a great success, and at last count they had 5 huge installations.
It is still in development but it does have its niche potential uses. Arid climate, survival shelters from nuclear where sunlight is not accessible, space exploration/ potential terra forming once we figure out how to create or adjust the atmosphere we will need breathable oxygen. It all comes down to initial investment and cost reduction since money decides what is feasible.
Don't need acres at all. Geothermal providing for heat pump energy, solar and wind providing for other energy needs. Just depends on the scale of buildings. Folks I know used multiple shipping containers
if you don't have access to geothermal energy then what? Yes, vertical farming can be made to work on a small scale for a family or two with a limited diet, but try the system to feed a city of say 5 million. Also they are not effective for tubers or root vegies and more importantly they can't grow Wheat, Chickpeas, Barley, etc = no bread. but you won't get any way because of solar farms. How cost effective are the container crops. If they are doing it for fun fine! When I go fishing it usually cost me twice as much to catch a fish as it does to buy one at the fishmonger, the cost isn't important. @@katanaridingremy
Site it correctly, and you can attach the panels to the roof and walls of the main building, more solar panels as a roof over employees car park, maybe stick a couple of turbines at the edge of the car park. Since some people have already experimented (and succeeded) with making miniature turbines to fit in downpipes from gutters, there's another unexpected source of power that could be tapped. Oh, and that rainwater could be diverted into tanks so it could be used in the plant itself, filtered for watering.
@@katanaridingremyAnd in areas where rain is more plentiful than sunshine, companies or individuals could make better use of hydroelectrics. All around me, there are streams, a river, springs and 2 small waterfalls, and that's a pretty normal state of the land where I live. We simply do not do enough with what we have available to us (we honestly don't need to be on the grid at all in my neighbourhood). It's the fact that we all know that everything is unnecessarily more high tech than it needs to be these days, and that we would all be at the mercy of a nerd with a laptop than a real engineer.
All these are assuming any of these are possible. which for a vast majority of cities. None of them are. Poor air quality and constantly rainy days. There are no rivers or No where to even put any type of hydro electric and If geothermal was even an option there would be a powerplant, which there is not. You and the first guy are assuming perfect condition, which is stupid and only hurts these projects because people then think anyone can do and and no the cant. It only works in very few areas that may not even Have the infrastructure built in the first place.@@Debbie-henri
The simple issue is energy. You cannot grow anything but broadleaf plants in the low energy lighting they are trying to use. You have to use real grow lights, and those use a lot of energy. Hydroponics are incredibly resource cheap, as long as you use the sun. If you replace the sun, the cost skyrockets because of energy prices. I don't believe that price breakout. The Netherlands, Arizona and New Mexico all run large hydroponics setups, with enormous greenhouses. You would need the same labor to do that job as you would in a vertical farm.
Reminds me of growing up in Humboldt County in the 00s where you would see a vertical farming on a small scale. Growers would try and pack as many plants in a room as possible and create elaborate watering and lighting systems to accommodate. Essentially each "farmer" became a construction worker, electrician, and plumber to create their own grow rooms. Economics worked heavily in their favor though because they could sell at $4,000 a pound.
Then when it went legal in Colorado and those 4k house growers went away because they were terrible at all those trades. I worked in the business building commercial grows. House growers had one chance to open thier mouth. 90% of the time they were told to keep quiet or go sit in thier car until thw adults were done. First guy we were doing a HVAC unit for literally dropped his jaw when he realized we were talking in thousands instead of hundreds.
Basicly it boils down to bad implementation/opperation. This technology is fully viable but the ROI is long-term and venture capital insists on a rapid payback. The labor costs definitely indicate it's being done wrong.
I think there's also a bias with "silicon valley" investors to prefer a certain kind of labour force that might not be suitable for commercially competitive farming. Or, put more simply, they think immigrants hurt the "aesthetic" of their precious high-tech brand.
@@SickegalAlien That's a depressing thought. I would hope that the criteria would be that the workers valued the work and where willing and able to do it proficiently.
I did some engineering for a vertical farm about that peak time you’re describing, helping them get airflow across the plant faces long after they built it - I should go see if they’re still around
Don't blame the VCs. They are serving a market. Most of those companies that went bankrupt didn't leave their founders bankrupt. It is very easy to spend other peoples money unwisely.
Really? I think the problem was quite readily shown in the video: capital expenses and labor. These places are being built in urban environments where a square foot of real estate could cost $30+ a month. And then they have to build out all the water handling equipment, electrical equipment, lighting, automation, etc. This takes LOTS of money. Instead of simply testing and augmenting soil that's already there, they have to create and maintain the proper nutrient balance from scratch. Which means you need highly educated employees that know plant science to a level far beyond just taking soil samples and sending them to the local testing facility and then fertilizing as they recommend like your average dirt farmer can do. Those experts demand higher salaries. All that is without even considering someone that loaned money to the project that wants a return on their investment. But I get it, it's en vogue to blame the guy that has the money and is willing to loan it to a startup. These companies are spending 10's of millions on real estate and development in urban areas and expecting to be able to compete with Joe Dirt who got his land for free when his parents or grand parents died. It just doesn't make any sense.
@@matts.8342 Seeing as how we're talking about a bubble that bursted, it's absolutely correct to point the finger at the people responsible for inflating the bubble. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings. Anyway, there's plenty of successful vertical farms all over the world, that have already solved all the issues you and the video mentioned.
I grew up on a small farm where we ate what we raised and grew. In high school I was in the Vo-ag program and was made fun of. I was in FFA and teased for that. The skills I learned from vo-ag and FFA have helped me my entire life.
Interesting, Those who were laughing at you missed something they'll get confused why the cash kept on draining once they're got laid off and overall have less satisfying activities in later year too. I would dedicate a floor in my dream home/office just for growing edible plants & fruits in a larger scale
I remember in my own high school the FFA students were somewhat ridiculed as “hicks” or “rednecks”. Being somewhat of an outcast myself, I’m happy to say I didn’t really participate in that ridicule. In more rural areas it isn’t frowned upon at all. BTW, For those outside the US, FFA = Future Farmers of America.
They are countries that invest heavy in vertical farming. Singapore sees it has a way reduce their dependency on imported food (about 90%), and they remember the food shortages they had in the past due to their limited farm land. That being said, in the documentary I saw on vertical farm in Singapore, they where much more optimized than the own shown in the image (though, I would guess those are old filler image). For example, the plants where on vertical carousels that rotated vertically, making it even denser.
This is so stupid. My god. I've been in horticulture for over 10 years. I've worked in every sector within in it and currently work at a botanical garden. This vertical farming circle jerk was some fantasy of a tech start up with too much money. Its not that vertical is inherently bad or that any of the technology is inherently bad, its just that balancing a system like this is very difficult and very labor intensive, not to mention expensive to light up. The promises always had way too much spin, 'farming of the future' absolute BS rhetoric from people who'd never grown a tomato in their lives. Maybe next time speak to some old timers, or even better go to Holland and talk to the best indoor growers on the planet about your ideas before you go out making wild promises you can't keep.
I learnt the lesson in late 1990s, that trying to mimic farming in a warehouse cannot win against growing the product in its natural area on acreage and then shipping it.
One of the things I noticed quickly with vertical farms is they also have a very restricted amount of produce they can provide. Like, what about root vegetables? Stalk grains like wheat or corn? Vine vegetables and fruits? They've essentially limited themselves to leafy greens and small plants that are, quite frankly, easy to grow in your own back yard
Why on god's green earth (pun kinda intended) would you want to grow wheat in a vertical farm. Are you trying to make it 100x as expensive instead of only 5x as expensive as was the case with a head of lettuce?
you can grow vine vegetables and fruits. you can grow root veg as well. I grow peppers and tomatoes in my garage with no dirt or sun. they choose low worth bullshit like kale because it grows fast as fuck in these systems yet is basically worth nothing on the open market. THAT is their mistake. Thinking people want endless amounts of leafy greens. These people are too stupid to be trying this.
@@vallahdsacretor4839 It certainly is. Just think about the energy. A leaf has very small amounts of embodied energy, and you don't eat it for its calories, you eat it for its texture and vitamins and fiber. But wheat, grain, beans, etc you actually eat for its embodied energy content. That energy HAS to come in through the artificial light.
I could imagine a vertical farms being a public good too. If a place has ample energy but its citizens are having a hard time getting all of their nutrients, this could be worth the cost.
@@raziphaz2219They’d have to figure out profitability. Everything needed to keep these things running requires money. A small one could cost $100,000 to start, and that’s a very contained one, not a huge one, those cost several dozen million dollars.
2:09 There is nothing to be solved, this problem has already been solved, big-agro just don't want the fix to be applied. Permaculture, getting rid of 90% of chemicals... Also, farm land DO lose value as precious nutriments are washed away because of conventional farming practices. It might not be obvious today, it will soon.
Yeh it strikes me that most aqua & hydroponics are done pretty much exclusively manually; whereas ironically, most soil farming is massively mechanised. There needs to be robotised/mechanised aqua-hydroponic vertical farms systems developed for medium to mega sized urban sites; such as abandoned areas of urban dereliction, like Detroit & Chicago.
@@pixelrancher - YEH “pixelrancher” your right to point out the high up-front costs of contemporary ‘big agriculture’ type farmland/equipment but if you add in all the subsidies that western government, finance & banking systems give to the biggest farmers. You just got to conclude that from the 2nd World War onwards farming monocultural crops with the biggest of tractors/harvesters ect has lead to the biggest gains in productivity & surest consistent long-term profits. The largest farmers have also tended to benefit from consistent & guaranteed profitability economically built in; from the subsidies for particular crops (corn-fructose/ethanol & ..bioFeed inputs into biodiesel &petro-carbons/soya-soyaMeal/wheat/ … ect), to the massive finance options for the really big farmers to purchase equipment. Simultaneously often there has often been huge subsidies in a similar vein for; the first batch of big farmers to NOT farm certain types of land, or maybe turn it into (log bearing) managed woodland, develop it into solar/or/wind-farms ect.. There’s always been policy bias that helps & favours the current status quo, where in typical 20th & 21st century farming scenarios - big inputs, results in near guaranteed big outputs. The degree that this is more about the effects of policy or alongside it or outgunned or merely aligned with it; the ongoing galopeing developments of technology; is an intricate point.
Cost of production will be directly related to the processed used for farming. It's not that vertical framing is inherently costly, just the process that these venture capital backed startups utilized was too costly to be competitive. The cost of operating a process should not be a surprise, so seems that costs at some level where improperly researched, or misinformation relied on.
@@wawaweewa9159 Greed and power is a by product of Capitalism. Capitalism has produced greed and power since it's inception. Socialism is the regulation of Capitalism and provides safety nets for its citizens. China who's economic system is a hybrid economic system of socialism and capitalism has a thriving vertical farming industry. A for profit system like the US has it's downsides.
I grew up farming, there's more to growing plants than the raw data we now understand. I have tasted hydroponic and aeroponic strawberries, it is a regrettable experience. Maybe the soil biology (fungus, bacteria, yeast, etc) is more important than we know. Maybe the 'struggle' of nature make things taste better. As people we become stronger and better because of adversity in life, plants need the work of reality to become the best plant. Even if the cost were the same, flavor would go to nature raised.
You are certainly right, and the joy of picking something oneself is also important, whether homegrown in one way or another. Most people in urbania haven't had much of this experience.
10:18 Electricity is not the most of the cost, but it still adds 0.44 $ to the total cost of production. 11:13 Adding 0.44 $ to usual 0.90 $ gives us almost 1.5x increase in cost. In general, vertical greenhouses should be compared with usual non-vertical greenhouses. I can not see any positive differences.
Aight you said the main things I wanted to hear, it's not about vertical farming not being good, just not profitable enough for investors. My main issue i would have with this video is not talking with the actual people on the ground that do use this technique. Just like there are community gardens in NYC and LA that feed a small co-op they are doing the same with vertical farming techniques, but it requires boots on the ground meeting people to find this kind of thing out not just searching online
It requires someone willing to be a vertical farmer too. What you gonna pay him? Salad? This only works if you find some crazy person wanting to this for free.
@@TheBooban every instance I've seen this working is with co-ops, homesteading etc. Just live with any other form of gardening/farming, you don't have to be crazy to do any of these. May not have noticed but many traditional farms have the same issue with profitability. That's why corporations buy up so many farms and work on massive scale. Smaller farms can still be successful, especially if they serve the local communities instead of trying to be global player
To quote Geoffe Lawton (well known Permaculture teacher): In order to be sustainable we need to create a surplus. We create a surplus when we create good soil (and even transform dirt into soil - as they did with the Greening The Desert project in the Dead Sea region of Jordan, that Geoff supports). Another way to create a surplus: managing water with earthworks, like ponds, trenches that soak in heavy rain (swales), irrigation systems that are built to last. Improving / creating soil and managing water are very important in permaculture. And creating food forests. A PC gardener or farmer starts seeing improvements in soil after 2 - 3 years, and after 5 - 10 years it starts becoming really good. (the conditions in Jordan were terrible, it was dirt / sand - but even there after 10 years they have good soil all over the property. One asset is the warm temperatures. If they have enough water and manage it well, soil life can be active year round. Another asset is the sunshine, plants can produce biomass year round (which can be composted to support soil life). A vertical farm would have to start doing large scale maintainance after 5 - 10 years. With good soil no repair is needed. On the contrary. There is yearly input needed (compost, cultivating cover crops, mulching, ... ), especially in the beginning, but that is not lost, nothing deteriorates or is worn out. Plants will need some resources like minerals, the content of the parts of a plant that are harvested and NOT composted again will be taken out of the system. So some minerals and elements must be replenished - at least partially. The art is of course to get as much as possilbe for free from underground, from the air, from wildlife like birds (that leave their droppings). If the food is eaten on the property the human waste can be recycled as well (so not much is lost - only that which builds the human body). Animals turn over biomass fast (into manure). That can be cows - or earth worms. Or small animals like chickens or rabbits. There are other processes (like composting) that return biomass to the soil, but they take longer - even with some effort and daily turning of the compost (so work) the composting lasts 18 days in Jordan (and that is with some help of the chickens). One goat or rabbit will do that for you in 1 - 2 days max. The gut of many animals is like a biorecator. Bacteria upgrade the gut content, they will for instance add nitrogen, carbon, and make some things easily accessible. The resources and their benign impact on soil life COMPOUND. Nothing to write off. Once concept of PC is to cultivate perennial plants, shrubs and trees. Better usage of SPACE, less work with planting. The general idea is to take advantage of natural processes and efficiences to be more efficient AND to manage with not too much manual labour. But monoculture and modern farming methods are not possible with that. Natural efficiencies and resources. Use of Sunlight (using height - for instance in agroforestry). Managing water: good soil stores more water, there are also earth works like ponds, swales and efficient ! irrigation systems. Mulching or growing cover / undercrops reduces evaporation. And it suppresses weeds. Rows of trees or hedges reduce wind pressure and thus evaporation. Trees - if grown right (forcing them to grow deep roots with ploughing so they will not compete with the other crops for water) - bring up water from deep below, the fungi in their root network distribute the water - also to the other crops. Green manure / cover crops bring up minerals. Certain plants can fix nitrogen. Covered soil does not lose as much nitrogen (it reacts with oxygen in the air, and gasses out). So that means no artificial fertilizer is needed (which needs a LOT of energy to produce). And phosphor is a very needed but rare mineral. If it is brought up from plants than one must not plunder the few existing deposits on the globe. Artificial fertilizer (as also used in vertical farming) must be easily solveable in water (or the plants - which are more or less on life suport in industrial farming) would not be nourished. No one helps them to take in naturally occuring minerals, industrial farming is bad for soil life. Soil life (moles, mice .... worms down to funghi and all microbes and critters in between) brings value for free (creating soil, making minerals available to plants, creating long carbon based molecule chains (humus). Humus can even enclose salts, even toxins. The substances do not vanish - but they become inert. Humus gives soil the ability to store water well etc. It is not even a large part of soil, but it transforms dirt to something magical Last but not least: good soil is an excellent carbon storage. Industrial farming reduces the carbon content of soil (it reduces humus, which holds a lot of carbon). Organic farming or less aggressive farming increases carbon / humus content of soil. It is so universal, that the carbon content is the nuber that shows the quality of soil. 4 - 5 % is already good.
What an essay! Next time make a video reply please. Lots of subjects you covered, but organic doesn't mean less aggressive: tilting destroys the _hummus_ you mentioned, since many fungi are wiped. Look into regenerative practices too. All research is important, soil is not convenient when producing in space stations.
What? 5 to 10 years for results? But that goes against everything Silicon Valley talks about for how long it takes to set up an established industry Next thing you will tell me is most non-Silicon Valley industries move at a much slower pace than Silicon Valley, as that pace is kind of required to get meaningful results
I am actually skeptical of whether there is such a thing as sustainable farming. Organic farming is similar to farming prior to 1750, which had problems of its own including depleting soil of nutrients and the need to supply nitrogen with guano. It is possible that the a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the only sustainable way to live, but I certainly do not want to live like one.
@@thetruthstrangerthanfictio954 it took humanity ~55ka to figure out agriculture--with us only having that tech for a small fraction of how long humans have been around (Only 10ka out of the 65ka of homo sapiens existing) This technology was created due to how often humans would eat themselves into near extinction. As back then, humans didn't have anything like XBoxen or Playstations or Nintendos to spent their free time. With it only requiring about 12hr/wk to get enough food to eat. So the only thing to do for the rest of the week was "make art" and "Screw" However, it took ~55ka for humanity to figure out how to successfully accomplish farming People act like agriculture is a really really easy thing to figure out. It is a skill, that needs to be learned, honed and heavily practiced. It merely looks like it could be "straight forward" via a mixture of arrogant dunning-kruger filed hubris and the fact humanity has been working on improving that skill for ~10ka. With a lot of that improvement being accomplished (for European based cultures at least) being done in the last 500a That being said--it is not unwarranted to suggest we might still have another 10ka to get it perfected
The issue that sinks vertical farms is mentioned at the 52 second mark: "over $2Bn was invested" and a bit later "every venture capital firm". Farming is not a silicon valley start up. Vertical farming was never going to eliminate labor costs, because farming has shrunk that a thin as possible.
The movement we need, rather than vertical farms, is a grassroots local organic system, where the costs of distribution and administration are minimalized and done by small farm business. I never understood how anyone planned to make verticle farming more efficient by removing the single biggest expense of free sunlight.
*"I never understood how anyone planned to make verticle farming more efficient by removing the single biggest expense of free sunlight."* Because in a city, sunlight isn't free. Acreage in downtown Manhattan is expensive.
I think that's how these places will succeed, not as huge interests for big investors looking for quick and massive returns, but for the home growers who sells produce to their neighbours, happy to see their returns roll in bit by bit over time. That's the problem with business these days, everyone is in such a rush to be a success, all these high flyers who want to be millionaires by the time they're 25. The fact that these places are closing down just a couple of years after they're even set up shows the lack of patience. Wow, if their owners/investors only got out more and saw how long it takes for Joe Public to build confidence in new concepts like vertical farming.
That is what I am setting up. Planning on growing Lettuce, Cucumbers and strawberries to start. I am tried of buying Lettuce that will just go bad in my fridge or making trips just for veggies for my kids. The shelf life of store bought produce is terrible. Which is not factored in to most equations. I plan to start slow and scale up as I want/need. Next steps will likely be herbs, Sautee veggies and hopefully perennials that are expensive like asparagus as well as carve out some space for mushrooms.
Maybe look at Grove Labs - they had a whole integrated system, using a fishtank as a fertilizer/filter cycle part of a multi-level "fresh herb garden" stack. (They went under in 2017, but more because manufacturing waterproof electronics is hard, actually *doing the gardening* - especially with small-scale hobby-grade hydroponics - has been a thing since at least the 1940s; Grove just had some neat design refinements...)
That is where I also see the solution: sustainable, reliable food production at the point of consumption. To that end I've invented an automated aeroponic smart farming appliance that integrates within food preparation spaces, so the consumers of fresh food will also be the growers. We need to shift toward a decentralized and distribution system of food production, one that is stewarded by communities while circumnavigating the conventional farming systems entirely in order to avoid land use, pesticides, fertilizer run off, processing, preservation, packaging, transportation, and food waste.
This never made sense to me on so many levels. You have to pay for the building and the lighting and all the nutrients that would have come from the soil. You lose the mutualistic bacteria and fungi that help plants thrive. You also lose the natural pollinators. Growing crops in soil with natural rain and sunlight is just so much simpler. Where indoor gardening makes sense is for high value highly perishable crops. We are talking about fresh herbs and some berries. Growing some of these inside of increasingly empty office spaces in major cities could produce highly desirable fresh product directly to consumers as well as create a desirable indoor greenspace.
As a professional greenhouse gardener, all the principles of vertical farms are sound. But the images you see of those facilities always looked like total overkill for producing salad that would sell for very little. It really should have viable applications. Either to produce plants that are very expensive, or to produce fresh greens in places where delivery would be even more expensive. For antarctic research stations, or even future space stations or moon bases, this really is the way to go. Because those places don't have to sustain themselves with the sales of their food products. But for producing a significant portion of the global food supply, this never looked like it could be feasible.
There was no bet here. This was a stupidly designed business and too many companies trying to get into that business. The cash crops weren't lettuce but other exotic things like micro-greens and herbs. But only so many farm to table restaurants are going to pay top dollar for some fresh micro-greens. If these vertical farms were going to be on Mars there's no way they would have been designed this way. If you fail on Mars.. it's people starving to death, not bankruptcy. The biggest tip off by far is that Vertical Farms weren't disrupting regular farms. This is like WeWork all over again.
Just remember the fundamental laws of thermal dynamics. When you’re changing “something” into another “thing” there will be some “losses”. The biggest problem with indoor vertical farming is the cost of electricity and other resources against profiting from selling the produce.
A few years ago Kirsten Dirksen did a piece on a year round commercial underground greenhouse in Nebraska. They grew citrus among other things. It is heated by thermal mass.
I love hearing the line, "vertical farming needs expensive equipment." Like that's different from normal farming. Most people I know who farm talk about how it's so costly on the front end to get in that it's nearly impossible for someone to start up without being gifted most of what is needed in the first place.
Here’s a kind of vertical farm nobody ever thought to call a vertical farming. On one plot of zucchini that I personally managed and redesigned in an operation that had many fields and multiple farms of zucchini and other squash and cauliflower. We planted to 12 inch spacing instead of the usual 18”. Watering was with drip irrigation and gypsum block sensors indicated proper watering. The field was north facing and very steep, the steepest of all plots on the ranch, with coastal heavy clay soils. Initially I had to water for nearly 5 days continuously to get the sensors to indicate a properly wet soil. The close spacing caused the zucchini to grow straight up like a small papaya tree instead trailing over the ground like a vine, which is normal for zucchini. These plants continually grew straight up over a long summer season and were eventually very uniformly 7+ feet tall, that’s VERTICAL! We had to bring in more bees 🐝 for pollination because the foliage was soo thick! At about 4 feet tall we saw nutrient deficiencies and started fertilizing with a complete combination of nutrients that had been used for years with fruit trees in those soils. I always made sure the zucchini were properly water and never allowed to wilt even slightly. The zucchini fruit grew straight out at the base of the plants and often never touched the ground for their entire life. We picked and packed the fruit into a redesigned box that was much stronger and 40% larger than the standard, because the standard vegetable box we found to be breaking the zucchini and poorly ventilated for cold storage. The production with the larger box on this field was 1200 boxes per acre, a new record for all the fields on the farm even with the much larger box, and would have easily been 2000 if we had brought in more bees earlier in the season. Poorly shaped fruit were not allowed in the pack. That year was the last year of this farm operation because the wealthiest partner in the operation saw this success as a great threat to his management of the operation and his own farm operating separately that had cooler storage and sales for our fruit. He admitted that we were profitable, but claimed problems that were not real, and production would have been so much greater the next year he had to shut us down immediately! This was a great embarrassment for him, the success of my radical growing system was the opposite of all the practices that he used in his farming operations.
That’s really fascinating! It’s a shame you couldn’t continue the operation, it makes me a bit jealous as a horticulture student that you got to experience that haha. Is there more information you have on this?
I plant melons, pumpkins, and cucumbers the same way and get way more produce per foot. It's also mildew-free since the leaves can stay dry. I'm amazed how much weight vines can hold - each vine can easily support several pounds of food with proper vertical bracing - they also adapt well, with climbing vines being much tougher than ground-based cousins. So far I've only done it with smaller varieties that weigh 2-5 lbs, but I'll be scaling up as an experiment. Any fruit on a trailing vine can be grown on a trellis.
Wow! Just wow! I forgot about all this ever since I got my garden going! The only thing I pay with is my time. Ever since I started collecting leaves from nut trees, organic matter from the house and the occasional coffee grounds from the local coffee shop, I’ve not spent a dime on fertilizer as I amend my own soil and have my own seeds!
Always good to remember there are several different measures of "efficiency" in any solution. Cost efficiency is only one of those measures, though it is usually one of the most important ones.
Over 40 years ago, a textbook I bought on small farm and home gardening stated something like "It would be possible to grow Oranges at The North Pole, or Wheat on the seabed floor...but could you do it and still make a profit ?" Not disputing that yes, especially for non commercial purposes, home gardeners can push the boundaries a little bit. I live in Christchurch NZ, 44 degrees South Latitude, Temperate climate but with a mild, usually snow-free Winter. So we can grow many subtropicals like say Oranges here. The trees, well bushes up to 3 metres high, , grow slowly over several years and never give as large a crop or tasty as fruits from warmer areas. But local gardeners appreciate them as "home grown". There is a reason why commercial Orange orchards are located some 800km / 500 miles North of Here (and even their fruits won't be as good as Australian or Californian grown fruits). Curiousities grown in the home garden don't need to make a profit. But commercial growers do.
@KiwiCatherineJemma I think of the insurance industry. Cost reduction sounds great at first because everyone translates that as lower cost to the customer. But in a non-competitive for-profit environment, cost reductions are not always passed on to the customer. So low-cost insurance may still be expensive to the customer unless there is somehow significant variety for competition, or maybe the insurance is government/co-op provided instead. But, many cost reductions are harmful to the customer and the vendor industry supporting them. - If they grind vendors too much, then there are fewer vendors giving poorer quality service paid for by the insurance, and their employees are low pay workers not motivated to provide quality work. - cutting service agents for the insurance policy or cutting pay for these positions means your cheap insurance makes you wait on hold for hours to talk to rude reps who make mistakes on your claim. - Cutting IT costs means low security, maybe losing your data or getting your data hacked. - Cutting costs by raising deductibles has a balance point where it is good for customers, go too far, and defeat the purpose of insurance. - go real far, and insurance companies do whatever they legally can to avoid paying out claims. - they can invest your cash until needed but do too much of that then they may not be liquid for a mass disaster with millions of sudden claims. So cutting costs is not always a benefit to the customer, there are many other measures of efficiency when determining if an insurance solution is valuable for the customer and even a general benefit to society.
I've grown mushrooms and salad for over a decade and have recently taught myself to grow hydroponically. There are many issues embedded into hydroponics that will eventually be addressed as we are witnessing the pioneer stage of what will eventually be the neo modern food system. The biggest issue is that land, food transportation, and synthetic fertilizer are way to cheap to make production of water grown salad mixes to be viable. The next big issue is that you can only really grow baby leaf varieties on hydroponics in order to keep the grow period before harvest as low as possible in order to maintain high returns. the final issue is that since these are usually calcium or salt based synthetics nutrient systems, they lack the biodiversity that will help to moderate the inevitable build up of bio sludge in the systems that ultimately becomes a vector for disease and pests. If you build a system that requires hyper infrastructure in order to reduce contamination, your system will eventually catch an issue. The last issue, and is what caused the downfall of large investment hydroponic projects like Appharvest, is that they lacked the experienced hydroponic managers to keep the food factory alive, but that will change once Ai has been properly integrated. ontop of all the surface level issues, there is the issue of scaling production. As a farmer you have to be able to match your production to the size of your customer basis, so if a single room hydroponic system were built with maximum output in mind, but they take a decade to reach that weight per week, then they are essentially paying people to constantly clean and maintain all of that dead space until it gets utilized. Plus I pretty much lost my farm business in 2021 when the wholesale restaurant industry I was reliant was crumpled from 2020. The age of vertical farming is far from over, it actually hasn't even started. When petrol is unaffordable to ship food around the planet, it will be far more effective to ship dry nutrients which gets assembled by bio engineers into the product of edible food. The future of hydroponics farming is going to be similar to doordash or an amazon warehouse. Eventually a design for shipping container resembling pods that stack and have an app full of workers who show up and check individual pods and get paid, similar to workers cleaning hotel rooms. These individual pods are going to be what keeps large scale disease from spreading and the modular size is going to allow for pack flat disassembly of these greenhouse shipping containers, so they can be bought and sold and moved around. We are at such a point in history's technology that everything built today needs to be able to be recycled, dismantled, and reusable. I assume most of these hydroponic designs do not take this into account. I can build my hydroponic system in 2 hours "after all the parts are pre-made" and earn about $400 a week from 8x5ft of space, that is far more money per foot than any coperate hydroponic company can grow, but I also can only max out my system to the size of my community, but that is perfectly good because my overhead is low and if everyone were doing what I'm doing, we'd be flush in food everywhere in the world.
I think this was a case where perfect became the enemy of the good. Instead of looking at how to improve yield, while maintaining a competitive price, they went full gonzo. Things that cost the same or less thrive (solar & EV's), things that cost more don't. Start with greenhouses that control environment while reducing water consumption. Increase CO2, augment sunlight to improve yield, only add automation and robots when it improves profitability.
As I suspected, vertical farms require a lot of equipment that require skilled labour to use and maintenance costs. This sinks vertical farms in advanced countries with high labour costs, low population and highly mechanised, massive size traditional open field farms. Vertical farms thus require low labour cost, perhaps robust, autonomous humanoid robots capable of multiple tasks are the answer, simple and efficient irrigation and harvesting processes and really cheap energy. It’s a technical problem just waiting for technology to catch up. Check.
Cant beat the scale of broad acre farming using high tech you will burn up your budget too quickly and number of these hoped to make turn key systems they could on sell. This was the case with many spruiking turn key fish farming systems in the 1980s to early 2000s. Just buy our xyz system - minimal labor, reliable, maintenance free and produces 20 ton of fish per week - years later they are bankrupt and in court!
If labor is the greatest downside then the solution is simple: have people pick their own. Think of it like apple orchards, where they rake in huge profits by having people pick their own apples. Since vertical farms can be constructed inside a major city, it won't be hard to find people willing to do this. Many urbanites _love_ the idea of having the freshest food they can possibly get, especially if they don't have to drive somewhere to get it. So, not only would vertical farms reduce their greatest expense, but they could actually _profit_ from labor. I also think it's moronic to produce the cheapest food in such an expensive environment. You can grow lettuce in some of the most inhospitable places, it hardly bruises, and it has a good shelf life - how does it make sense to grow that in a well-regulated environment close to its customers? It would make so much more sense to, for example, grow tropical plants in a country/state they cannot survive in. Again: freshness factor would be a huge selling point. Think of it like EVs: the only reason Tesla succeeded is because they started off making a luxury vehicle. If they started off making an electric economy car, they would have failed, because the battery alone costs more than what an economy car does.
@@onedaya_martian1238 That is a great example. Sure, it's hard to do vertical farming with a tree, but, Alaska has more land than they know what to do with. It wouldn't be hard for them to just create an indoor orchard.
@@Toastmaster_5000 A used reactor from a sub or aircraft carrier would be an excellent "heart" for an indoor orchard. The electricity would be used for the "dark times" plus desalination, if needed. The by-product heat generated from the core, well... Alaska...for the "cold times". Thing is, it is likely shipping in a batch of fruit is still cheaper and easier than all the planning, infrastructure, maintenance etc . I live in Texas and growing my own tomatoes is "fun". But going to a store, year-round to obtain what I want, when I want will always be THE method for feeding myself, as the colossal global infrastructure components for that are just too luxuriously superior to a smaller, local supply. Someday humanity may find itself on another moon or planet and need this technology because of scarcity. But our "eden" on planet earth doesn't (yet?) need it.
You are brilliant. Let's do it I got a great spot and a bit of know how about plants. Dragon fruit would be a great option! The only thing I'm lacking is capital.
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Hugelkultur is a far better way to garden vertically, especially in cold climates.
08:30 didn't they do a double door system ? Cross contamination of outside pathogene in mushroom farming is also a problem, unless you have an faster growing mushroom
My concern with factory farming, indoor or outdoor, plant or animal, is the potential lack of trace elements/minerals/etc that get leeched out of the ground or are not provided by the medium that feeds the plants or animals. And honestly, we need to adjust our views on profitability. If it pays for the infrastructure and labor and maybe a bit extra for maintenance, that'd be good. It's the people who only want to take the money out of it.
There will never be a system that beats using nature, she reins over us all and as smart as we think we are we don’t know everything. I still don’t understand why we aren’t looking at helping further micro farms that are actually doing things as ecologically as possible. No chemicals, equals less overhead, same with the lack of equipment, less water use and need for less infrastructure. It’s a no brainer, but for some reason investing in multiple projects rather than large industrial projects is a blind spot
Nature is the best possible method for living naturally... which humans simply don't do. Ground farming may be the cheapest option for now in almost all cases, but that doesn't mean vertical farming won't be the better choice in the future. The Line, Moon bases, O'Neill Cylinders, and many similar future projects will have a MUCH greater need for space efficiency. Trying to grow food in space will almost certainly require vertical farming, rather than any traditional method. On Earth, they should continue research and advancement to mitigate the inevitable natural disasters we'll eventually face. Because mother nature giveth, but she can also taketh away, without warning or mercy. Being prepared for that is important.
That answer is political. There are right wing lobbyists fighting for less regulation which allows them to continue buying up more land and pushing out small farms through scale. Those they can't beat that way they sure for having their (Monsanto) seeds being on the small farm from wind blowing it in naturally. Another issue is large scale farms using eminent domain to buy land and then charge absurd rates to lease the land to farmers. Nothing unfortunately is as easy and "for the people" as it should be. Don't worry the corporate infrastructure wants us to continue sleeping while they run amok, privatizating profits and subsiding the environmental issues to the citizens and government to deal with.
I have grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and greens all in the same greenhouse. It works I use the sun and leds when it’s not sunny. With a mix of geothermal, solar, wind then you are good. And my harvesting system going from picking straight to the truck using gravity
I would say, vertical farming would only work if the technology was used by the consumer. i.e, they use vertical farming in the home per household, rather than in mass production factories or in competition with natural farming...
I did some work for a vertical farm start-up a couple of years ago. I haven't been back that way so don't know if they are still in business or not. Their crop was mariju...excuse me...cannabis for CBD oil so my guess is they are probably still around. 😁 I remember watching some videos about these vertical farms (the food kind) back when they blew up. I wondered about the cost of the mechanical equipment and the electric bills. It seemed like a good idea but, like most things that you only get the 30,000 foot view of, it's the details that really define it as good or bad.
I'm also of mind that a anything grown in real soil in contact with all kinds of living things that exist underground probably is best for us, that's how we thrived for millennia plus it tastes better too. Albeit easier on the back of the workers the product itself doesn't seem as wholesome and tasty to me.
Not entirely right. Particularly with the limited and shrinking amount of available firtile soil. Also traditional farming is extremely suceptable to climate change impacts which will inherently make traditional farming more difficult.
The quality of the product wasn't EVER in question, so please stick to the subject... It was for purely economic reasons that these farms are going under... Too much Cap-Ex and too much high cost labor which to me isn't the issue since all labor deserves a proper wage, but when you are competing against the rest of the world that pays agriculture labor cents on the dollar, which is EVEN true in the USA, than all bets are off.. You can't compete against what is essentially slave labor prices.. Not to mention everyone fails to talk about CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA that feeds you...
@@stickynorth I'm pretty sure that quality matters. We need more child labor, far better for them then social media, aimless bumming around and failed public schools.
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ROFL $5? gtfo, .79c to $1.59 per pound depending on the type. half that at farmers markets on the weekend. North east ohio here
NUCLEAR POWER
no bro you need AI and robots
this leaves out the higher costs and raises the maintenance slightly,and since we are in the beginning of the AGI era,these projects are destined to succeed.
also you can search for fruits in hydroponics like grapes,it has been done successfully.
Where I live, Vancouver, we grow a lot of blueberries. The local blueberries are sold in Japan. Meanwhile, the local supermarket sells blueberries from places like Morocco and Peru.
All I want to know is , where are all these financial backers ? and why are they giving funds to people that have zero idea on how this works ?? I mean , , does everyone just want to starve??? Sad.... Just saying, the right person can and will make this work ... Organically! & Cheaply!
I come from the Dutch greenhouse industry. Dutch greenhouses produce about 10X of what is possible on the best open-air farms.
Such greenhouses are probably at the pinnacle of cost-effectiveness.
Besides, crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, and pumpkins, are already grown vertically in these greenhouses. They grow vertically because it's relatively easy to lead their growth vertically.
Lettuces and other leafy greens and herbs can be automated a great deal on a horizontal plane. In low-light conditions, one can add lighting.
I think vertical farming is one step too far in automation and complications with humans. Perhaps further automation with AI and humanoid robots could be the path to success.
Fun fact: greenhouses grow the most pesticide-free produce. They do this by adding natural predators of pests into the greenhouses. Unfortunately, it's more difficult to control fungal pests, but it can be done.
One problem with greenhouse and vertical farming is the heavy use of plastics in the equipment, and the often much higher level of microplastics in the crops compared to conventional farming. New research is coming out almost monthly on the body-wide negative side effects microplastics have.
That was an interesting read thanks
Thing is about all this is that they arent the staple crops. These sorts of alternative methods need to be good at growing stuff like wheat and rice otherwise you are just growing salads.
@@2drealms196 nicely said and the source for that is what that dutch or european greenhouses come often with higher level of microplastics ?
Remember: In the EU much more is forbidden in the agriculture industry and there the treatment agreement has never been signed .
American citizens living in the EU realizse that quite often and quickly cause the water is smelling and tasting different, their skin feels much better cause the recognice that and they check the product for ingredients they see much of american ingredients forbidden in the EU.
Accurate. Good synopsis.
I got laid off a vertical farm project last month. I was the lead designer, but even though I was able to save millions of dollars on lighting and other parts of the system, the business side had no idea how to make this project profitable. We would have to sell at exorbitant prices to make it work.
Didn't your close location to the city made an impact on your cost? I always thought vertical farms would win with decreasing prices on the consumer end and outsell the traditional farms until this video.
@@ali-g as said in the video, transportation savings weren't enough to offset additional costs that wouldn't be present in a greenhouse or conventional farming. Electric power for lighting and HVAC costs a lot. Then, you need to hire people who know how to use this equipment, and that's also more expensive. You need to think about how to retrieve produce from the higher layers which is also not obvious. Some simple elevators and manual picking is just not fast enough to process the required volume.
@@waisetsubunsho7934 wow. Thank you for the answer. Do you think these vertical farms will overcome the problems you mentioned? Do you worry that lack of funding act as a kill switch for the industry?
I ran the numbers when we were looking, we had an abandoned big box store and state grants and still couldn't find a way to make it profitable. Urban land/buildings are expensive, living in a big city is expensive. My farm is located in a southern state on super cheap land not in a city, it is still expensive to operate a farm.
that is because, like with a lot of these green initiatives, it isn't about actually producing the goods at comparable prices, it is - skim as much as possible while on the upwards trend, when the investor and grant money is flowing in, and you skim via super expensive equipment, expensive design plans etc, where you can fake high added value, I see 150k$ robot there in that video doing what, servicing 100 plants?
and this is not just vertical farming, same exact thing is with wind and other stuff, and the hope behind all of these is that they will grow large enough quickly enough to become "too big to fail" and then will have subsidies from government to stay afloat, because "they can't fail", "too important to fail" and so on, and that then becomes a burden on the tax payers
that is the whole scheme, same scheme just different levers is present in higher education, but some recent data falsification and peer review fails are threatening that house of cards also
Sounds like the issue is companies relying too heavily on outside investors coupled with piss poor planning at ground level.
Not even close. The companies which went bankrupt just couldn't turn a profit at those locations. Thats the entire point of the video.
The high tech entrepreneurs who start vertical farms are techies not farmers, they are not accustomed to the financial realty of farming.
Sun is free, electricity for lighting is not, so only indoor farming here in Lancaster, CA is approval last week of another indoor pot grow farm.
@@rrmackay the financial reality of this is very different from farming.
@@donaldkasper8346I wonder what the cost of doing a shit ton of this if they ever figure out that deep geothermal that really runs deep enough to create steam. Like could we just dig one of those and hook it up to Miles upon square miles worth of area and then make money off excess energy too. Like if that energy cost could come down it would be game changer. Plus I get sense it takes less to manage.
My D&D group had a recurring gag character who would try and sell you on his vertical farm idea whenever he showed up in a campaign.
Dude, my vertical farms are tested extensively in Minecraft before I ever realize that I won't build them IRL
haha brilliant!
you made me laugh out loud literally
lol, i was going to say that the only place for vertical farms is minecraft - you beat me to it
My biggest reason for playing minecraft is to create technological aberrations that aren't feasible in real life due to the sheer amount of cost or ethical violations required for it.
😂😂😂😂 i myself not only used vertical farms but i developed a pretty efficient way to build them in survival 😂😂😂😂 i go at it with an algorithm like a printer lol... i ended up having them banned from most servers i played on lololol
Here in the Netherlands they introduce bees and other insects inside the hydroponic systems to hunt the pests that eat the plants. no insecticides are used.
wow, im a little curious how that works.
@@godzillal123321I watched a documentary quite a while ago about it. They use beehives indoors to pollinate the plants, then move them outdoors after they have done their thing after a while. They introduced Ladybugs and Lacewings into the environment that would specifically hunt the mites and other little plant feeders that might infect the plants. Bees can get territorial during their pollination (which is essentially gathering food for the hive) when they come across insects that are closer to their own size and can sting (Not their main function though).
I imagine they use a lot of praying mantises. Ladybugs and some species of wasps are also very good. I had wasps in my garden in NM and could walk around with them flying around me and never got stung.
@@godzillal123321 The process called Nature! And works a lot better than the chemical options since pests don't develop a resistance to being eaten as well as not having to worry about the food being contaminated.
"Here in the Netherlands they introduce bees and other insects inside the hydroponic systems to hunt the pests that eat the plants."
Still, it is much more climate friendly to put some cows on a pasture (which is a REAL ecological system and not a fake one you are trying to "create"), manage these in a regenerative manner and eat the healthy red meat!
I know homesteading and small community in the mountains of VA and Oregon and they use vertical farming. They aren't scienctist, they just used the free info on the net and make their food all year round. They mainly feed themselves, and sell some at farmers market. They use renewable energy and collected/recycled water to power equipment etc.
Now imagine an America where every neighborhood employed Vertical Farming to feed that neighborhood all year round instead of trying to make MBA's rich. There are food deserts all over urban areas that need leafy greens, mountain community that don't have greens all year unless they pickle it. There's a whole other aspect, the human aspect of vertical farming to address
If you have access to sunlight, you can go with a well managed (recycled) plastic greenhouse with automatic irrigation for a fraction of the cost. No need to overcomplicate
Its a good approach and in some climates, really makes a difference. Big factor is heating and more so electricity. If you can tap cheap resources then you are good.
Also competition - so vertical farms would be suited to environments in which hard to grow anything so imports are expensive.
Vertical farm growing green all year would do well in Alaska, Iceland....area's with no direct competition and also cheap energy available.
In the city, rooftop gardening makes more sense. You have the building's warmth, less chance of certain insects, and can harvest rooftop water as well. Your market is there, it reduces certain costs whereas vertical farming is just a huge amount of costly conventional farming.
Many rooftop projects use polycropping to boost natural fertility and avoid other problems.
That is a great point. This subject should not be about profit. It should be about reducing food costs, healthier food, CO2 offsetting at the problem, and better mental health of being connected to growing.
In the urban environment, the focus should be on planning and design that enables more gardening ability. Design in property, building, town layout etc. can focus on more plant growth with little extra effort or cost.
@@PaulGrayUK This, strangely enough, is kind of what I've been thinking of whenever vertical Farms enter the chat; areas with a lack of arable land but have cheap energy.
I knew a rich guy who invested in that. I told him at the time that it was gonna fail because sun is free and LED is not. He told me that the crops were insect free and pesticide free so they could sell for a higher price... It failed.
Expecting for to be spotless, bug and dirt free, and remain fresh for a long time is a fundamental issue with society. How much food goes to waste because it has a couple of bad spots on it. I would rather buy a food that has a couple of spots on it and pay half price than eat a picture perfect vegetable.
I have a friend who worked in one of these places. They specialized in leafy greens and were doing well. The entire place was wiped out with a fungus infestation that they couldn't get rid of. He said that in nature the insects would have kept it in check by eating it but indoors, with no bugs, it just ran wild. The whole building was infected and could no longer be used for farming. I think it's a warehouse now. the other thing he mentioned was that the lighting they used, while great for the plants, wreaked havoc on his moods and mental health. The spectrums used might be nutritious for plants but they can be very bad for people.
Indoor operations tend to be very humid without heavy ventilation, which is a much higher energy and equipment cost than lighting. Dark, buzzing, and humid. Not a great environment for your average human.
I can only imagine. That weird purple was abrasive just coming out of my phone screen.
One of the reasons why my vertical farming company went out of business was due to a mite infestation that devastated our last crop that could've gotten us out of the water and proven financial viability. But we pretty much lost around 4000 various herbs and leafy greens, and to restart a batch like that (germinating/sprouting) would've taken months, which wasn't an option.
It's a really tough industry, and before you are fully able to properly automate things, it's very labor intensive, to a point where our small team was completely burnt out. I'm still hopeful for the industry, but things will have to be improved drastically. Imo, it can be done.
A farm with athlete's foot. How bizarre.
@@sementhrower420 Sounds like vertical farms need sci-fi style decontamination airlocks and donning disposable sterile clothing to cut down the risk of insect and fungal infestation.
What is most surprising to me is the fact that investors didn't see this coming. It's not rocket science to calculate profit. It shows that most rich people and investors are just humans with more money in their pockets.
it's just the standard investment thinking that company will do what it is supposed to do and not being a bonzi scam that just presents itself well
@nogamenolife7940 As soon as he mentioned the tech bros at the beginning I knew where it was going.
They're trying to reinvent the sun. It's literally free. The stupidity of these people.
No it shows that people who support these green initiatives don't have common sense
What gets me is he mentions Neom "the line" Saudi Arabia as if it's a possibility. Vertical farms are still viable in theory with things like labor cost, and energy being resolved you can potentially bring a profitable farm to market. There is no engineer on the planet who thinks Neom is actually a possibility within the next century. It's a dictators pipedream.
I was the lead designer in a vertical farming company in Canada. (once upon a time...)
We were focused on Cannabis Exclusively. The only crop with high enough end value to justify the labour and capex expenditure according to our math.
We were repeatedly asked to grow vegetables by investors and the like... The math never worked.
but the only reason of high price on cannabis if it is legal, very strict regulations and high taxes. If you won't regulate it price will drop, because cannabis is same plant as onion or tomato.
@@Smolandgor Onion and tomato are very different plants. Onion is an alium, tomato is a nightshade.
@@josephmoya5098 tomato, cannabis onions, cucumbers just grow like any other plant you can find on a farm. If cannabis won't be regulated it's price would be very low.
@@Smolandgor It's actually easier than tomato as there are basically no natural parasites that attack hemp.
Even cannabis isn't going to be a long term industry. The biggest cost is the equipment cost and labour.
As these costs come down overtime which they are. People will just grow it themselves.
I have a friend who sells hydroponics equipment to end consumers specifically for growing weed. You can buy a kit and have a small growing operation in your own basement.
If the cost comes down for equipment and it's sufficiently automated where you don't need skilled labour. Your typical stay at home mom can buy a kit and just run the automation cutting out the middle man.
I'm more excited for this outcome above anything else.
I have a friend who was obsessed with telling me that you can increase your food production by many orders of magnitude, but growing things outside vertically, on structures with multiple levels. I was like 'mate, think about it scientifically, there's only a certain amount of energy per m3 from the sun. Its impossible to amplify that. Wherever you build up in one place, you're casting shade in another.' He still persisted. If he thought it was that great, he should've done it himself.
How much energy exist in m3?
@@vaniatorrez Approx 1Kw at noon on the equator of solar energy.
Can't we use both the sun (for the plants) and shade (to cool homes) on the other side?
Plants on 1m³ need between 100 and 200 Wh to grow properly.
Peak under optimal conditions is 1 kWh. So let's say it's 600 Wh.
Light can be splitted up by using lenses that spread it iver a larger area so the plants only get as much as they need.
It is quite clear that soil bacteria are essential. At a recent talk at the NIH, a plant biologist asked, "How many other species contribute to growing an apple?" The expected answers were like, bees, and other pollinators. The correct answer is, "we don't know how many". The underground ecosystem is large.
Just gut flora,,,
Yes, when you try to replace nature with tech, derived from limited, mechanistic consciousness, trouble is bound to ensue....
This isn't entirely wrong but hydroponics have existed for a long time and are effectively soiless growing methods. Realistically, something like vertical farming would be neccessary if we ever want to produce food supplies outside of earth.
Where the fuck are you pulling that from? That has nothing to do with this video!!
It never sounded like a good idea. It sounded like the BS you see on YoutTube and Ted Talks. Most of that garbage is for the Google generation that is so gullible they believe any gobbledygook they see online while distrusting all the real world experience being lived around them. Replacing soil, sunshine, and fresh air with plastic and fake light is the same as "saving the environment" by cutting down old growth forest to put up barely wind turbines that kill birds by the millions. The hubris of the Google brain-rot thinking they know more about everything bring wave after wave of failure.
Two major problems.
The first is tech investors. You want people who are actually knowledgeable about the intricacies of farming. Not a bunch of techies who expect near instant gratification.
The second is that you need to grow stuff people actually want to eat. Growing nothing more than cow fodder is going to bore people's taste buds real quick.
Yeah and that's hard even to acquire.
Because very few people actually know the answers of what actually contributes in the normal farming,
not even farmers do because they just ... farm in the nature and it "just works".
I mean, nature is already so complicated.
Vertical Farming sounds like you're trying to take something Nature would do for million of years,
and instead now you're trying to find out how and what nature has been doing it and evolving to fight or die for million of years.
Like the cases with the fungus-building-infections I've been reading in the comments which in the nature would just not be a case, because nature has already "learned"/evolved on how to deal with it with millions of years of trial and error.
Vertical Farming will literally be trial and error until we gather at least most of the problems nature has been dealing with already before us, for us.
That just doesn't sound like a very "nice" investment for an investor that expects tomorrow or money within a decade. Especially in an ever more and more skeptical tech industry.
Which means fewer and fewer money injections into that industry as for now it's supposed to just ... burn money until it gets so good and efficient and with good R&D that it doesn't have to burn money anymore.
Same problem with AI and robots, everyone’s a nerd and has no experience in dance or Somatics or humane sciences. That’s why robots have stiff chests and look and move like robots. I fear for the worst.
@@appletvaccount1364 yeah its as if you almost like taking something nature gives you for free, and you make it ... not free.
Like, if nature could grow cars, for free, would we have car manufacturers?
Why have .... plant ones?
Dude, that is an awsome cat
@@zero95lucky it looks cheezed
I am an old farmer who people I knew in the press used to tell me these ultra-expensive high tech operations would put us all out of business! Ha, ha, all they had to do was look at greenhouse operations and see what happens over the years, eventually greenhouses are almost always overwhelmed by plant debris which causes insect pest infestations that can become permanent! Cleaning up the mess the plants leave behind is ultimately what kills the operation by incurring high labor costs from pest control. There is also this weird thing that happens in farming where the top people become convinced fertilizers are magical elixirs resulting in over fertilizing and under watering, so those highest paid most educated agricultural workers often give very BAD advice and or the head managers/owners won’t listen to good advice.
Most farms don’t know how to do what is the most basic thing, properly watering 💦 of their plants, and this failure results in plant disease, when this happens farms then respond by spraying insecticides which absolutely shocks the plant killing fruit production! The high cost of these reactions to poor watering eventually puts the farmer out of business and the farmer believes he failed because of plant disease.
When plants are under watered they become weak and sickly, they will begin to fruit very early while they are still very small because they are dying, these plants will become diseased as they age. The farm manager sees the disease and responds with insecticides which shocks and ends fruit production early and finally kills the plant. Then next season that manager increases fertilizer in his fields believing it will cure his disease problems. The increased fertilizers in the soils increases salts in the soils and actually reduces productivity in the soils and leaches into the ground water 💦 making the irrigation water more salty. In the summer some years rains will occur only adding small amounts of water 💧 to the growing season, the manager believes this water 💦 is inconsequential but can cause a tremendous bloom of growth in the fields very visibly a couple of weeks later, because rain waters have no salt in them and temporarily leach the salts from the soils increasing production. The farm manager will often credit this bloom to his excessive fertilizing and his fertilizer salesman will do his best to reinforce these mistaken beliefs! Then the farm manager begins to behave like a drug addict constantly adding more and more fertilizer and insecticides believing that is what causes the beautiful blooms he sees some years, but his costs continually rise and his soils become infertile from too much fertilizer salts in the soils, causing the farm to gradually go broke. The solution reduce your field sizes and irrigate frequently, DO NOT FERTILIZE UNTIL THE PLANTS BEGIN TO SHOW NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES IN THEIR LEAVES, likewise do not listen to the fertilizer salesmen. When applying insecticides use only the insecticides that show the least toxicity to the plants, pests are never as bad for well watered plants as toxic pesticides can be. Farm managers should never become obsessed with having fields clean spotless of insects and weeds keeping fields too clean requires applying too many very expensive and toxic pesticides to crops, soils, and farm workers.
Farms that supplement their incomes with outside investment will often become obsessed with creating pleasing appearances for investors, these practices should be discouraged, heathy plants naturally attract lots of insects and weeds will grow because there is water and low salts in the soils, this is natural!
Wish I could copy this post
wow great analysis, it looks like farmers need the tools to make more decisions based on evidence linking cause and effect. a scientific approach if you will.
I think the problem is in most western countries the farms are funded by loans from banks. and too high taxes on the land, your income, etc. You need a certain minimum yield for it to be even viable.
Thank you very interesting post. "NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES IN THEIR LEAVES" How do I spot these?
This problem is not just farms, its in every industry there is.
A bad manager can kill any business, and we have way too many bad managers, often assigned through family connections or bribery.
I work in IT and from the couple of companies I worked in I found a trend that managers are in 1:6:3 ratio (1 good manager for every 6 average managers for every 3 bad managers).
Another point that should get put in here somewhere is that
1. national exchange with countries with cheaper labor and few safety / health regulations
2. agricultural exemption, which I'm pretty aure could not apply to a building (I had ag exempt land, was required to prove at least 10 acres of land and x number of "animal units" on a chart that's available on usda
3. farming subsidies of several levels. On the largest scale is corn and soybeans getting a check for real money from the government for selling their corn and soy at prices LOWER than the cost of GROWING them. Elsewhere there are special privileges available to farmers (lines of credit, a special grant money for farmers and ranchers that helps pay for or completely pays for fencing, or a greenhouse, among other directly related items). I also had an Ag/Timber card, that allowed me to buy many of my supplies for the farm tax free--animal feed, paint, building materials, etc)
Agriculture in the US is very far from a level playing field. Local / sustainable / organic farmers face much the same battle against the very established conventional machine, in that they are frequently too small to qualify for the price reductions or special treatment. Inner-city farms, small family farms, large "gardeners" cannot compete with this in many ways. I think growing in buildings in cities must suffer the same fate.
Should be the pinned comment. Also the usage of extremely cheap immigrant (and illegal immigrant) labor even within the US
Those companies failed because the investors wanted a quick ROI which doesn't happen in farming. They did mono-cropping which isn't the answer either. There is greater success with diverse cropping whether it be earth , vertical, or hydroponic growing.
That's not the case in Dutch greenhouse farming usually those greenhouses are mono-culture at any one time per greenhouse - they may have tomatoes in one and cucumbers in another etc; however broad acre yes crop rotation and diverse crops, companion planting etc helps with disease and pest mitigation.
Investors can be narrow minded and not big picture. What a shame. Grow a variety of crops instead of a monoculture and use different fertigation recipes for different plants! Grow more profitable plants too. Lm301b diodes and lm301h diodes are full spectrum and highly recommended for energy efficiency and Photosynthetically available radiation.
not true at all
Easy to say until you try to run a large garden!
Word….
I tried a small vertical farm and cost me more than my conventional farm. Keeping the lights on buying the nutrients and water filters add up fast. But i transitioned to a vertical greenhouse farm instead and has worked well so far.
Das Zauberwort heißt Hydroponik, mag ich aber auch nicht😂
vertical farming is done big time here in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the biggest exporter of flowers. Most flowers don't grow on fields but inside of big greenhouses on multi level platforms that rotate each day so the flowers get enough light. Nothing in this cycle is done by humans, everything is done automatically, even the planting of bulbs is done by robots more and more. the only part where humans are still involved is picking and packing of the flowers after they've grown.
Many people talk about pests and funguses etc. It's true these are big things and can bankrupt an entire company. That's why there are many extremely strict hygienic rules. When u enter greenhouses you need special clothing (like those white cloth onesie suits) and there's multiple stages of disinfection of hands, arms and shoes. You CANNOT enter these facilities with food that carries the deceases, for example you can't enter tomato greenhouses with tomatoes/paprikas (even those insta soup packs are forbidden) and some other food that's that might contain deceases. It is also not possible to travel between different greenhouses in one facility.
The facilities also use things like doors, high and low pressure areas and vapor screens between parts to make it even more difficult for pests to spread.
only viable with a high value crop like cut flowers
Do they? I've only ever seen single rows used, simply because that allows each plant to get the maximum amount of light.
Is air purity important?
@@Loanshark753 Yes to a degree, but a greenhouse is the target of other larger problems like fungal spread, bacteria and disease. Think of rural area vs. extremely urban like NYC. Suddenly risk of contamination has a much larger impact on your entire population because of how quickly it can spread.
Silicon Valley is great in creating problems to sell solutions, not so much in creating solutions to solve existing problems.
I have worked for Kalera since 2018 as the Mechanical Design Engineer and later promoted to Maintenance Director while still having the engineering design responsibilities. The cost he showed for maintenance cost per year is over 10x greater than my budget. I can tell you for a fact, we sell a head of lettuce for way less than $4.50, we are competitive with the $2.50 for traditional ag, and we beat that price by a good margin for some varieties. We do that with our blue collar workers having much higher wages than workers in traditional ag where those companies lobby govt to pay their field workers below minimum wage.
that changes the entire basis of this video!
Is your experience representative of costs in the industry? It it were, then I'd wonder why the industry is not doing well.
The $2.50 wasn't the cost of production, but ~$2.60 retail (~$.90 cost). For Kalera? At the end of the day, what is the bottomline ROI for Kalera? As an eng., I'd have thought you'd lead with the numerics; not having done so suggests the answer.
Very interesting info, it would be great to see more numbers please.
@@edhuber3557 Dang, kinda harsh. I mispoke, we sell the lettuce at retail locations for $2-2.50 a head and that includes our hefty margin. We sell to bulk buyers for significantly less/head because there is much less packaging. Only looking at things through ROI is short sighted, but we are on a 3-5 year timeline from my understanding from the finance team. I thought I was leading with numbers after stating my credentials. I didn't include more because I thought the comment was already too long.
The “burn” included millions in salary for the founders.
My thoughts exactly. This was a borderline scam from the start. I'm sure a bunch of the first generation of CEOs and Bosses, made plenty of money before getting out.
same scam over and over again in the tech "industry": IoT for energy savings, renewables, basically behind every "this changes everything!" youtube video for a new "planet saving" technology/startup
But that's the main goal of any company targeting the "ESG" scam ("environmental, social, governance" metrics rather than profit). Extract subsidies into managment's pockets as long as possible, then fold, create another scam. With friendly support of your government who milks you, the taxpayer.
They just had WAY higher fixed costs than greenhouses while producing not much more than greenhouses. It never made sense for vegetables, maybe for medicinal plants or drugs that are worth a lot more.
@@danlorett2184 My thoughts exactly ! The thing is, it was blindingly obvious right from the start that this was a very expensive idea. A normal greenhouse in all normal climates provides almost all of it's light for free, from the Sun (perhaps with some artificial light boosting during certain seasons) and a normal greenhouse provides most of its own heating, free from the Sun (again, with some supplemental heating, depending on the seasons and location). The idea of providing ALL the light for plant growth by using ELECTRIC POWER, even with energy efficient LEDs is clearly a losing idea. Yes in places like Antarctica, there can be a case made for growing some small amount of fresh vegetables and fruits like strawberries, to supplement stored bulk food products, for the staff during the Winter when normal food supplies cannot be transported in. Yep, this was a scam from the start I reckon. Just so the first generation of bosses and CEOs could score some big paydays, and then disappear.
Been around farms and farming my whole life (not the only things I did in life, however). I knew from the very start of the news about vertical farming in the USA, that indoor farming costs too much in capital investment, overhead, and labor, to be profitable.
Having an old green house on the farm as a boy and being a biology major at the university, taught me that controlling Pests and disease in a closed system is close to impossible. You would think it to be the other way around but reality is the opposite.
Dr, O
I've seen videos on vertical farming. And what always strikes me is the huge up-front costs there must be. And how much produce they'd have to sell to recoup said costs. Maybe there are means to reduce the costs toward profitability. We'll see.
Right there you've stated the facts know by anyone that knows how to grow things.
Expected it.......for all the reasons mentioned here.
No predators flying and crawling around to eat the pests inside a vertical farm.
Doesn't have to be expensive. I'm building an aquaponics farm in basement. I'm spending more than I need to bc it's my first attempt and I wanted nice stock tanks to protect my fish. Spent $1200, but could've done it with $700. Even so, I expect my payback to be 5-6 months, once up and running. If if chosen the cheap way, payback would've been 3-4 months.
A head of lettuce in Hawaii is about $4 right now, with some adjustments, one of the remaining startups could actually start selling there at competitive prices and even undercut the competition in a few years
You overlooked a basic problem. By expanding too rapidly as investors chased instant profits, the supply swamped demand. Had the industry started small with few producers, matured best practices and skilled labor, then scaled up it would be more sustainable. Your point about location, arid regions vs wet ones, points this out clearly.
A comparable industry is the EV industry, built on excessively exuberant expectations, is nearing collapse as China floods the market with cheap unreliable cars, and people find the five year cost including $0 resale value, this niche market will also collapse then rebuild along much more sustainable practices.
There are numerous PhD thesis level topics for anyone interested.
That was my thought exactly. There are people that have taken vertical farming and made good money with it but they started out small. Instead these companies raised a bunch of capital then spent it all on outfitting large warehouses and then paid people top dollar to do a simple job.
So bascally it grow unnaturally and in a boom an bust cycle went to where this market should be more at naturally.
China petrol cars were unreliable. EV makers are doing better, but created too much competition. many provinces have now dropped subsidies and exemptions, because more cars on the road costs them money.
The thing is, startups need venture capitals. And they will invite as many venture capitals they can get. That created buzz, and then everybody wanted to take a shot.
Greed changes everything. Insane. It's a total win. So I'm gonna do it anyway. Run it off Arduino.
Dirt is cheap in rural areas; the sun is free, rain is free, and the only costs are seeds, fertilizer, and planting/picking labor. Hard to compete with that just so you can label it locally grown year round.
pest control also.
Especially in Europe, where "rural" means "a 20-minute drive from the next city".
And transport is expensive, it would be ideal to grow where many people live to have day-fresh produce that need very little logistic.
You are not a farmer, dirt is cheap? Land is expensive and needs to be fertilized.
Sun is free?, not in the winter. Only cost are seeds and feritilizer? thats a big cost. Then there is water usage and insectides that vertical farming addresses reduces. They are throwing money at a problem that needs to evolve. The cost of setup is high, Lets use abandoned buildings and owner operators with profit incentives.
@@jbird6609 Depends from location, land can be quite cheap. Those special nutrient mixtures are why hydroponics/aeroponics aren't widespread - while in nature bacteria, fungi, insects, etc. can extract nutrients from whatever fertilizer you use, such as manure, here you need them in ready to use form. You also need plenty of fungicide to combat diseases - because nutrient solution comes dissolved in water and sprayed on plants, there always will be high humidity, perfect for fungi.
When I was looking into hydroponics, I found mention of 'nutrients' being fed the plants. The nutrients come from a third party source. That destroys the whole concept of hydroponic farming being 'self-sufficient.'
And yes, they always talk about growing lettuce.
I grow lettuce in one of those aerogardens for funsies and all I see is that thing loaded up with algae, all of my plants that are starting in my homemade dirt from my worm farm are growing normally and in a few weeks I’ll have them outside in the ground. Natural is better
I wonderhow they get those nutrient bottles
no large scale farming is self-sufficient, you always use outside ressources
@@chrisrageNJ LOL....sure. "Natural". Like mega farms using chemicals every month to keep that shit alive is natural. As if mono crops year after year is natural. Ever wonder how the hell they get massive amounts of corn from the same dirt year after year after year?? Here's a hint....it has nothing to do with "natural". and before you start in about how you grow enough for your own family just....don't. Most of us humans live in cities and simply can't do that. Mega farming and chemicals is the only way to get enough food for us all. Natural growing would lead to starvation for MILLIONS.
All plants need the same thing NPK and trace plus you can always use urine if you are so worried but you need a concentrated form otherwise why bother.
I'm considering indoor farming myself. My calculations are based on the price of electricity vs buying food from the store, but even then the profit would come solely from using the waste heat of the lamps to heat the house.
let us know how it goes, and good luck :)
@@gie51917 Back in my day, we used the waste heat from our indoor pot farm to heat the house
I grow my lettuce hydroponically in my house, upfront cost was 250$ but now i don't pay anything, solar covers the lights and water pump.
250 sounds reall, really little, especially if you bought and installed solar panels and pumps.
Either you spent much personal time repurposing junk other folks threw away and you got for free?
Or there is some miscalculation in your claims.
One new solar panel alone costs more, let alone mounting and running it.
And we have not talked about hoses, pumps, large water containers - of which you need at least two - filters,the planting beds for the leafies, the electronics running the pumps ect.
I am a friend of the tech and the movement.
But claims such as yours sound deeply suspicious to anybody who ever tried that stuff.
I´m guessing you forgot a lot of material investment, many hobbyists do.
But that _"those old garden hoses I already had"_ -approach doesnt work in scaled economics.
Or you dont really run a closed system at all. But still expose the plants to outside air, ground, biome and natural light, and the only thing "vertical farming" about your setup is the automated watering.
That would possibly be doable for 250.
@@user-un8tv1pp8mAlso that's like a couple thousand kilocalories tops.
And what nutritional value your lettuce has. Probably you didn't think about it at all. You are wasting your solar energy to produce harmful to your health product.
@@user-un8tv1pp8m , a 12v flo-jet pump run by a solar panel and sun for plants is still solar, and under $250.
@@user-un8tv1pp8m how much lettuce do you think this guy eats?
I remember watching a critical video about one of those "water from thin air devices", it was basically a dehumidifier. The critic pulled up the shipping costs of trucks. You can get an entire pools worth of water shipped to you for around $150 to $400 depending on how rural you are. The shipping of water was cheaper than producing it with electric dehumidification lol. Shipping is so insanely cheap even for super heavy loads.
Well, yeah. When you ignore the negative externalities, like public health and climate change, you can produce anything much cheaper than its true cost.
@@onecalledchuck1664 It's not about externalised costs, though, but about efficiency of transportation. With modern container ships, you still end up with shipping costs including all externalities of roughly 0.008 USD per metric ton per km, which is a shipping container from one end of the world to the other for a low monthly salary of shipping costs.
A major problem is that many places, like California, the open land farms do not pay anywhere close to the real cost on the water they use.
Truth! Labor costs are also probably not on par with minimum wage and regulations found in other types of businesses.
Maybe this is something you've been told. It's not necessarily true. The cost and value of urban residential water is mainly in treatment and distribution. Water for ag is mainly the cost of building & maintaining gravity-fed ditches.
Groundwater is expensive, proportional to the power it takes to pump, farmers would very much rather use surface water when available. Surface water is very expensive to treat for your safe use, on the other hand.
I'll also mention that water in March has a much different value than water in September. The former needs merely to be directed when rivers are high, the latter water has been held and stored behind dams.
@@timgerk3262 some one who understands! Thank you. Most urban people don’t understand the systems that keep them alive!
@@timgerk3262 When groundwater is used in a way that make the surface drop 15-20 feet and the farms really do not have take any cost then cost of water is very low.
Permanent damage is done to the land when to much water is used.
So much water is used from the Colorado River that the it no longer reach the ocean.
@bknesheim environmental damage is a separate, related point. Regarding the Colorado Delta, it would be good to keep up with current events. I half-expect to read something about saving Mono Lake next.
The author showed amazing incompetence in the area under study. Not only does he confuse the physiological roles of red and blue light in plant ontogenesis, but he also compares fundamentally different markets - the market for vertical farms and greenhouses, growing and thriving in countries with harsh climates, and the market for traditional farming, thriving in countries with temperate climates. Extreme incompetence!
OK soylent vegan. 😂😂😂
The vertical farming concept is sound. The biggest reasons it has failed in execution so far is the VC mentality of "move fast, break things", and the overblown, unrealistic expectations that generated.
When actual farmers start using them it will be ok. Not when the clueless think it is an investment.
The concept is not sound. There is no way they will ever pay back the upfront costs unless lettuce goes to $50 per pound.
@@PeterSedessemm no? Costs TODAY are at $4 / head. Yes, that's amortizing Capex, but traditional farms do the same. They're not profitable in the first (several) years either. Not sure where you pulled that wild stat out.
I do agree that lettuce alone is not the path forward. You really need to invest in high value crops with higher margins, especially if it's hard to deliver them year round somewhere.
@@gregkramer5588 That's the problem. The people doing this are either people looking for a quick cash grab or idealists who have no clue what it really takes to grow a crop successfully.
People get all twisted up about lettuce. Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce. Y'all know the reason you see lettuce so often in material about this is because it grows fast and is therefore a good proof of concept crop to test a system out relatively quickly, right? No one is realistically trying to grow 10 stories of just arugula. Lettuce also is a good QC organism in that it shows signs of issues quicker than other crops, so you can adjust and correct quicker.
I used to work in a supermarket and one day the boss told me "This is your lucky day, I'm giving you a promotion to Head of Lettuce"
Lettuce be thankful for humorous bosses!
@@thesilversnailslol
"Someday you'll become Cabbage Head!"
Lettuce celebrate!
Good One :-)
I grew HERBS hydroponically under LEDs for 5 years. Full spectrum lights were/are essential to maximize nutrient and flavor. Bugs indoors? Simple to add/spray with Silica which bugs HATE. There's more afoot here than what you are aware of
Why did you stop?
@@MrbfgrayLost contact with customers thanks to lockdowns
@@roberthart9886 I see, that's why I was arguing against the insane unscientific Authoritarian lockdowns from day 1. We'll be paying for it for decades.
But it was reasonably profitable?
@@Mrbfgray Lockdowns were an 'experiment'... They now have data on what is needed, what happens, what it costs, how people respond etc. China redid it after the West opened up again. We're gonna see more of it (on a smaller scale).
@@MrbfgrayIt was a nice extra 3-500 per month
Another reason growing that way doesn’t always pay off, most veggies and fruit grown that way taste like watered down garbage. Tomatoes, berries, peppers, etc. will all have their taste affected by environmental stressors. A tomato’s taste is at it’s peak when it hasn’t been watered for several days and you pick in the middle of a sunny day because that’s when it’s sugars are the most concentrated. Whereas a cucumber will taste best picked before the sun hits it for the day. Soil, sunlight, pests, etc all play a vital role in the taste and quality of your food. It’s frankly impossible to fully mimic nature’s design.
This only show how the technicians and the managers are completely unprepared to manage the VF (or the hydroponic farms)
There is no technical reason you can not find the right "recipe" to get maximum taste from the crop.
There are, for sure, books and articles written about it and with data to back them and use.
The big problem I see in this is "too much, too fast, too early".
The proper way to develop the industry is to do how Elon did, rapid prototyping, testing, rapid failing early. Because it is a completely new way to do things.
Money don't solve technical problems not already solved. You need brains and time.
honesty my hydroponic leafy greens blows every grocery store available green out of the water its not even close
Not saying I disagree with your statement about environmental factors playing a part in quality, but imagine someone 100 years ago saying "there's no way we can connect the entire world in a metaphysical network to transmit any kind of information imaginable, that's crazy talk and impossible"
@@zildjiandrummer1 Meanwhile, people trying to solve nature problems with overuse of technology ignore simple natural solutions lol
This also says something about how poorly paid fieldhands are for the traditional farming, assuming harvesters aren't used. The harvester definitely was a game changer to the farming industry.
We all say this but then enjoy the low prices at the store
This is exactly what I wanted to say. It really highlights the abuses that field hands endure for pennies. So many of them are migrants, so they have zero recourse. And as soon as someone says anything about illegalities, remember their employers are all too happy to use them for their cheap labor so until that changes, they will always be here. Someone else sort of hit on this point, but in my mind the answer is small scale community gardens, whether they are traditional or indoors.
This would work for a high yield green leaf plant that will ultimately end up being burnt for recreational purposes in states where it’s deemed legal.
Yes exactly, it really worked for growing weed, but trying to push the same logic on other low value vegetable is foolish!
@@ecoideazventures6417 it worked for weed because it's already very expensive because of it's recreational nature and how banned it is. Try doing the same with growing tobacco plants. People don't grow tobacco plants on their garden for a reason, it's not cost-effective. But people do grow weed because it's just very expensive and you can even resell it later because of its scarcity.
@@Another-Address Its not just recreational maaaan... I swear this shits medicine maaan, you can like eat it and stuff too like the part of the plant that we dont light up... trust me on this broo
Nothing can beat the natural mycelium-root symbiosis that happens in the ground.
Yes, after a few years I finally have mushrooms on my balcony, and the quality of fruits has gone up tremendously
We already beat it in aeroponic by making fruits which contains more vitamins. Pretentious loser.
The yields proved otherwise it was mainly labor cost beside you could easily inoculate the roots not a new concept.
@@southcoastinventors6583 yields are irrelevant, I'm talking about nutritional quality.
@@lambdasun4520 You can improve both using that methods since you control what is in the solution and as stated inoculate the roots or water but it easy to test for nutritional content. So non issue
Look here. It's simply basic maths. A given amount of soil contains a finite amount of nutrients. And no, plants do not only need phosphorus and nitrate fertilizer. To produce the vitamins and micronutrients that we need, plants need to either absorb them or chemically produce them from the soil.
Most of the trace elements in soil come from rain, insects and small rodents, from mushrooms and other life thriving and dying.
All of this is missing in a sterile greenhouse, so obviously at some point the soil gets depleted of vital micronutrients.
You can use genetical engineering and fertilizer all you like, but a fixed amount of soil can only produce a finite amount of vitamins. That's why an orange today has only 1/3 the vitamins than an orange in 1912. You simply cannot trick math. Yes, you can grow larger or more oranges, but they will have less vitamins then.
I started a small scale vertical farm in 2016. I started with the most profitable crops: herbs and microgreens. But there’s only so many herbs and microgreens high end restaurants need that are willing to pay a small premium for more intense taste and special variations that are harder to source from conventional suppliers. Selling b2c is way harder because it’s still more expensive than the grocery store.
After doing this for a year, I realized this was not the future and quit.
Every vertical farm operator should know that even leafy greens are not profitable when doing simple opex en capex calculations
It’s a shame the marketers and operators are dishonest about the profitability of these operations.
In The Netherlands we have like a farm who is very successful. Automated and vertical farming. Export around the world. Growing and make’s. €50.000.000
In Europe I guess subsidizes of the transport and agricultural sectors play in
@@wesstein17what is the company called? I worked closely with the now managing director of Growy. But I know Growy won’t survive without their largest shareholder subsidies (municipality of amsterdam) they’re not doing anything different than other vertical farms except that they have a good relationship with high end restaurants in the netherlands.
@@wesstein17 The major red flag for me is that you do not mention their name.
Other commenter as well tried to pitch a company they've even been working for as Design Director,
until comments below made the note that the company they're talking about has filled for chapter 11 - bankruptcy.
Like, every "successful vertical farming" story i've read in the comments, has had their pitfalls.
My wife and I have a rose nursery. Our newest greenhouse recycles the nutrient solution. The biggest challenge we have found is that the industry lacks experienced people to learn from. If you are lucky you come across some company reps that take on the challenge of finding the answers one needs. Any industry magazines only publish articles that do not offer specifics and many advertisers don't know their own products. University professors lack any useful knowledge depth, which means they turn out graduates lacking skills. I understand why these businesses go under. There are to many nuances that one has to recognize, this takes time, something bean counters don't offer.
I tend too agree with your comment on teachers with text book knowledge teaching students. Often the text books are written by tutors with as much knowledge as the students.
Probably need to look overseas for decent ag science programs. Some countries consider it more important.
Here's my current grocery store prices:
$1.64 - head of Iceberg Lettuce
$2.58 - Organic Iceberg Lettuce
$1.94 - Romaine Lettuce.
No way in the world would I pay 5x that amount
Well, yeah, of course, because you wouldn't have to pay 5 times more, only 3 to 4 times...
Of course, Americans would never consider paying farm labor an actual living wage. We are so spoiled, not having to pay a greater part of our incomes on the food that keeps us alive. But that is only by exploiting the desperate circumstances of the people that grow the stuff. Only the desperate would work so hard for so little return. Some day we will look back on all of this in shame.
@@argusfleibeit1165 WTF are you talking about? Most food in America is grown by corpos. Where are the slaves being worked to death?
The real overworked and underpaid are the Americans you are shaming into paying 5 times for food! Your words and attitude are the opposite of what you claim to want.
@@argusfleibeit1165 So how much do you pay your farmers where ever you live? FYI, there's a lot more people getting paid than the farmer.
Furthermore, how in the world are you going to ask the lower wage earners who can barely pay for their rent to pay 3x more for their food??
I sincerely doubt you actually know any farmers because if you did you would know they don't do it for the money.
PS. Most of the food we grow here in the US goes over seas to help keep prices down world wide. Maybe instead of bashing us, you ought to say "Thanks!"
Excuse me-- I am not bashing farmers. I am discussing our economy, and how some people have to work really hard, and get barely subsistence wages for that work. We also have a situation where the wealthiest can literally be making millions of dollars a day, and probably don't have to do any work at all to keep it rolling in. SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG. We have been "lucky" (?) that we have a steady stream of desperate migrants, legal or illegal, who are willing to take these back-breaking jobs. We do have artificially low costs for food-- AT THE SAME TIME the majority of workers are in no position to be able to pay more. Everything is very screwed up economically, and we seem to be stuck with a government that has no intention of making things better. Thank you for being a farmer. I couldn't do that job, and I know it. I also couldn't work in the local chicken processing plant, or pick peaches, and have to constantly move to find more work. I'm a low fixed-income disabled retired person. But I still have it better than so many people. I don't complain for myself. I complain for the people who are too stressed out and poor to go on social media and agitate for better conditions. Nobody ever speaks for them. But they matter too.
I think a lettuce is about £2 in london. However, everything from the supermarket is always old, weeks old... There's no point in eating vegetables that are old.... I enjoy eating, not sitting on the toilet. I might as well not eat ballast from the supermarket. How do carrots from the supermarket start rotting literally the next day when I bring them home? When i get a carrot from the garden it literally stays fine on the kitchen countertop for weeks. Any vegetable... eat it in less than 24-48h it was picked........
Put your lettuce in tinfoil. Will last much longer. Did an experiment with Romain 2 in tinfoil 1 just in the bag it came in in the fridge. Month later and the foil lettuce was fresh as the day I got it. The one in the bag was a brown slime
In a major retail outlet, Tesco, in England, one Iceberg lettuce costs 79p. That's less than a dollar.
Specialty bagged 'organic' lettuce leaves cost £12 per kg or about $6 per pound, at the same shop, but that's really an extreme case. Lettuce bought at local markets cost less than 79p. Weights are not specified for whole lettuces, but the market-bought ones are significantly larger than those at major retailers.
Yes, I buy a pack of 2 whole Romaine lettuces for about the same price as a little packet of ready chopped vertical farm raised lettuce that would possible garnish 4 sandwiches. Those Romaines, on the other hand, will last 2 weeks in sandwiches every day.
Everyone is watching their money here in the UK, much like the rest of the world I dare say, so few people have money to burn on 'supporting' a company that wants to make a quick return on its investment. I don't need to tell you that if you bought a farm, you wouldn't see a return on your investment for quite a while.
Who needs lettuce.....??....just go out side and grab some dandelion leaves for free!...
@@Jonny_The_OrganismDeduct the labour cost, your time is not free.
@@benlewis4241 I agree...and at only certain times of the year..
Hello, the main problem that got most vertical farms/indoor farms to go out of buisness here in Quebec is that most of the people that start that kind of buisness know literally nothing about plants and don,t even inform themself. My teacher went to a conference about it for fun with some of her specialists friends and she told us that it's actually insane how most of them don't know jack shit and don't even take notes and plant mesurements. The main issue that she saw is that most of them forget to add Co2 in their indoor farms which makes them unable to compete during summer (cold climate) because of their really low yields per plants. Also, to make this profitable, you have to hire professionnals to optimize the light input.
Most people don't know the chemical equation for photosynthesis, and that CO2 really IS plant food, NOT pollution. They think that food comes from supermarkets, not farmers. They read "fear porn" MSM headlines about climate catastrophes and don't bother learning the actual facts that climate is getting MILDER, NOT more extreme. LOW temperatures are increasing, NOT high temperatures or extreme weather. Average temperatures are increasing because of the low-temperature rise.
I have a veggie patch and I take notes*.
Maybe if there was an adjacent mushroom production project that can feed the plants CO2(g) while the plants supply O2(g).
Throw-in some adjacent aquaculture for water-filtration.
Would work better as a cottage/medium scale operations maybe.
*frustrated fmr PhD student 😅
68th 👍
So many people don't understand that plants need CO²
@@annak804 nah they just don't understand that the CO2 levels get too low indoor to get high enough yield if you don't add any in your grow room. We usually use liquid CO2, burners or we just make sure that the CO2 from outside can get inside.
Who would have thought that growing food in the dirt with real sunlight was easer??
it isn't. you don't grow food. you raise your food!
Brawndo has the electrolytes plants crave
Its the vertical aspect which has not done well, indoors greenhouse style farming is going very strong
Looking at plants like wheat and corn in the industrial world they are grown with barely an energy gain to society. Vegetables are even worse but we need them and apparently it pans out. But overall we live due to other energy inputs and we don't worry too much about the energy return of farming. This lets me think that adding more technological scaffolding to farming may not work out well especially if energy costs rise. Interestingly it was low skilled workers who contributed heavily to cost, in a sense this is one way of finding out that society doesn't work right.
@@kti5682 "Vegetables are even worse but we need them"
What for? To poison yourself with that shit?
To me, it seems like there is a way to mix traditional and vertical farming, using mirrors to direct natural sunlight and soil with all the microbes contained.
I am frustrated by the idea that this world continues to value things based on how excited investors are about it. No matter how many times it bites them, they still feed the next promising beast, and then suddenly starve it when they get scared that it needs more development to work well.
Time and time again, the fact that this happens seems to be a large part of why we struggle with innovation.
Youre backwards. Innovation happens cause investors charge in and risk huge amounts of resources on things that dont have a natural abililty to attract it. This gives so many things the resources to innovate when it wouldnt have been possible before. It drives some things to be successful (there are hundreds of things around each of us that prove this) and fails in other projects.
@@tealshift2090 No he's not wrong, he's complaining about this current system and how investors short-term goals for profit is missing the reality that innovation takes time, dedication, and expertise. Real innovation often takes place in universities with grants, or a passion project/hobby with open collaboration.
A billionaire throwing money at a problem might get lucky, but all experts have blind spots. Our current business method of everyone has to work on secret projects for propriety reasons is holding progress back. Also only doing things that will be profitable isn't great either- like there are plenty of safe drugs that are past their patent life , and have potentially other uses that are seen in lab trial, but won't because they still need human trials that cost money, and investors won't see a profit because the patent is over they can be made cheaply by any competitor company.
Vertical farms are a niche market. Why should we sink more money in it, when in the end no consumer will pay more for it.
@@istvanczap3004 while it's not too useful now it will be in the future probably pretty far future because of overpopulation, if you can grow food on less land that means more housing space. It also might be useful for moon/mars bases and space stations/habitats
Investment does not work if you lose money.
They should have done vertical farms in places with no fertile land, like deserts, or with little land in general, like remote islands. Where produce is super expensive. It's a great idea, but their biggest mistake is how badly they choose their locations.
The thing there, is that you don't have people with expertise usually, which vertical farms require because of how tech-y they are.
or you have them but you must pay x10 more for each one.
So .... cost would be around the same.
Yeah let me just get all those white collar workers to live in a shack in the middle of the desert or a remote island. No biggy.
You'd need to transport the product then, which would be a significant cost. Urban area makes the most sense for these facilities to be in.
@@calmbeforethecorryexactly the opposite. The comment says that it should be grown somewhere where agriculture on land doesnt work too well. It didnt say that it should be sold somewhere else.
Basically choosing places with weaker competition. Sure it would have some other problems, but not as pointless as doing all this somewhere where local agriculture is already doing great
The thing is that the no fertile land or deserts have very few people living there. The market is simply not big enough to invest in vertical farms. The only suitable place for investors to pour money to build them is only the city. Any other remote place will discourage them from building them.
As they used to say about the gold rush: the one who makes the money is the one who sells the shovels.
I was looking at this tech for home gardening. If a solar roof can power your house, then why not have your house produce your veg as well? With good planning you could raise enough for your household in the space of a closet.
you must have a very large closet or a very small family.
@@edmondgreen7970 small family.
But when you plant vertically in grow tents, you can stagger the planting so that you are always having a continuous harvest of something. With outside ground farming you have to stick to seasonal harvests
@@colleenforrest7936 wouldn't that make you the sucker buying the shovels in the form of all that equipment? Like the companies selling the fancy greenhouse tech did selling to these startups. They're definitely still in business selling to the already profitable greenhouse industry which is the same shit as vertical farming with about half the operating costs.
@@evongunnar pretty much, that's why I tend to cobble my stuff together from more affordable stuff. I may still be buying the trowel, but at least it's less expensive than the shovel :D
@@colleenforrest7936 Build a winter greenhouse instead of a vertical farm. Make that greenhouse a part of your house so you can sit in nature even in winter with snow on the ground.
A lesson in how overthinking an issue makes it too hard to actually solve
When it comes 2 selling food, competition is ferocious. Coming from someone whos family sells honey and olive oil in farmers markets and small shops.
lol not really
Is it though? I’m not into that yet, but I do have it in my mind. And in my mind, there will always be people who want to eat. Especially within the next few years, it seems like food or anything around it, will be in high demand by everyone. What is it I’m missing?
I know that here in Montreal there is a company renting big factory rooftops and reinforcing them to install their farms and apparently, it is a great success, and at last count they had 5 huge installations.
See if they are there in 5 years
A success would mean they produce enough vegetables and can sell it to justify that huge infrastructure cost. They won't.
It is still in development but it does have its niche potential uses. Arid climate, survival shelters from nuclear where sunlight is not accessible, space exploration/ potential terra forming once we figure out how to create or adjust the atmosphere we will need breathable oxygen. It all comes down to initial investment and cost reduction since money decides what is feasible.
How much of our tax dollars have paid for this success?
I’m surprised they went for outdoor rooftops that far north.
How many acres of solar panels are needed for each acre of vertical farm?
Don't need acres at all. Geothermal providing for heat pump energy, solar and wind providing for other energy needs. Just depends on the scale of buildings. Folks I know used multiple shipping containers
if you don't have access to geothermal energy then what? Yes, vertical farming can be made to work on a small scale for a family or two with a limited diet, but try the system to feed a city of say 5 million. Also they are not effective for tubers or root vegies and more importantly they can't grow Wheat, Chickpeas, Barley, etc = no bread. but you won't get any way because of solar farms.
How cost effective are the container crops. If they are doing it for fun fine! When I go fishing it usually cost me twice as much to catch a fish as it does to buy one at the fishmonger, the cost isn't important.
@@katanaridingremy
Site it correctly, and you can attach the panels to the roof and walls of the main building, more solar panels as a roof over employees car park, maybe stick a couple of turbines at the edge of the car park.
Since some people have already experimented (and succeeded) with making miniature turbines to fit in downpipes from gutters, there's another unexpected source of power that could be tapped.
Oh, and that rainwater could be diverted into tanks so it could be used in the plant itself, filtered for watering.
@@katanaridingremyAnd in areas where rain is more plentiful than sunshine, companies or individuals could make better use of hydroelectrics.
All around me, there are streams, a river, springs and 2 small waterfalls, and that's a pretty normal state of the land where I live.
We simply do not do enough with what we have available to us (we honestly don't need to be on the grid at all in my neighbourhood). It's the fact that we all know that everything is unnecessarily more high tech than it needs to be these days, and that we would all be at the mercy of a nerd with a laptop than a real engineer.
All these are assuming any of these are possible. which for a vast majority of cities. None of them are. Poor air quality and constantly rainy days. There are no rivers or No where to even put any type of hydro electric and If geothermal was even an option there would be a powerplant, which there is not. You and the first guy are assuming perfect condition, which is stupid and only hurts these projects because people then think anyone can do and and no the cant. It only works in very few areas that may not even Have the infrastructure built in the first place.@@Debbie-henri
The simple issue is energy. You cannot grow anything but broadleaf plants in the low energy lighting they are trying to use. You have to use real grow lights, and those use a lot of energy.
Hydroponics are incredibly resource cheap, as long as you use the sun. If you replace the sun, the cost skyrockets because of energy prices.
I don't believe that price breakout. The Netherlands, Arizona and New Mexico all run large hydroponics setups, with enormous greenhouses. You would need the same labor to do that job as you would in a vertical farm.
It's always interesting when you find a TH-camr that makes two times speed sound normal
Reminds me of growing up in Humboldt County in the 00s where you would see a vertical farming on a small scale. Growers would try and pack as many plants in a room as possible and create elaborate watering and lighting systems to accommodate. Essentially each "farmer" became a construction worker, electrician, and plumber to create their own grow rooms. Economics worked heavily in their favor though because they could sell at $4,000 a pound.
Then when it went legal in Colorado and those 4k house growers went away because they were terrible at all those trades.
I worked in the business building commercial grows. House growers had one chance to open thier mouth. 90% of the time they were told to keep quiet or go sit in thier car until thw adults were done.
First guy we were doing a HVAC unit for literally dropped his jaw when he realized we were talking in thousands instead of hundreds.
The good old days
And now that $4000 is $400
Basicly it boils down to bad implementation/opperation.
This technology is fully viable but the ROI is long-term and venture capital insists on a rapid payback.
The labor costs definitely indicate it's being done wrong.
I think there's also a bias with "silicon valley" investors to prefer a certain kind of labour force that might not be suitable for commercially competitive farming.
Or, put more simply, they think immigrants hurt the "aesthetic" of their precious high-tech brand.
@@SickegalAlien That's a depressing thought.
I would hope that the criteria would be that the workers valued the work and where willing and able to do it proficiently.
I did some engineering for a vertical farm about that peak time you’re describing, helping them get airflow across the plant faces long after they built it - I should go see if they’re still around
The problem isn't the vertical farming. The problem is all these insatiably greedy VC leeches.
Don't blame the VCs. They are serving a market. Most of those companies that went bankrupt didn't leave their founders bankrupt. It is very easy to spend other peoples money unwisely.
Really? I think the problem was quite readily shown in the video: capital expenses and labor. These places are being built in urban environments where a square foot of real estate could cost $30+ a month. And then they have to build out all the water handling equipment, electrical equipment, lighting, automation, etc. This takes LOTS of money. Instead of simply testing and augmenting soil that's already there, they have to create and maintain the proper nutrient balance from scratch. Which means you need highly educated employees that know plant science to a level far beyond just taking soil samples and sending them to the local testing facility and then fertilizing as they recommend like your average dirt farmer can do. Those experts demand higher salaries.
All that is without even considering someone that loaned money to the project that wants a return on their investment. But I get it, it's en vogue to blame the guy that has the money and is willing to loan it to a startup.
These companies are spending 10's of millions on real estate and development in urban areas and expecting to be able to compete with Joe Dirt who got his land for free when his parents or grand parents died. It just doesn't make any sense.
@@matts.8342 Seeing as how we're talking about a bubble that bursted, it's absolutely correct to point the finger at the people responsible for inflating the bubble. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings. Anyway, there's plenty of successful vertical farms all over the world, that have already solved all the issues you and the video mentioned.
I think you've hit a bullseye on that... greed is never satisfied. It Can work if not for insatiable greed
So they should just lose money because you think it's the right thing to do?
I grew up on a small farm where we ate what we raised and grew. In high school I was in the Vo-ag program and was made fun of. I was in FFA and teased for that. The skills I learned from vo-ag and FFA have helped me my entire life.
Ag is the MOST IMPORTANT job. No food, no people. Modern society has their ideas twisted.
like feeding dead cow to cows ... all the bad habits and produce was blessed by the ag schools ...
Interesting, Those who were laughing at you missed something they'll get confused why the cash kept on draining once they're got laid off and overall have less satisfying activities in later year too. I would dedicate a floor in my dream home/office just for growing edible plants & fruits in a larger scale
I remember in my own high school the FFA students were somewhat ridiculed as “hicks” or “rednecks”. Being somewhat of an outcast myself, I’m happy to say I didn’t really participate in that ridicule. In more rural areas it isn’t frowned upon at all.
BTW, For those outside the US, FFA = Future Farmers of America.
Unfortunately, too many people think that food comes from supermarkets, not farmers, and despise all those "deplorables" in "flyover country".
They are countries that invest heavy in vertical farming.
Singapore sees it has a way reduce their dependency on imported food (about 90%), and they remember the food shortages they had in the past due to their limited farm land.
That being said, in the documentary I saw on vertical farm in Singapore, they where much more optimized than the own shown in the image (though, I would guess those are old filler image). For example, the plants where on vertical carousels that rotated vertically, making it even denser.
This is so stupid. My god. I've been in horticulture for over 10 years. I've worked in every sector within in it and currently work at a botanical garden. This vertical farming circle jerk was some fantasy of a tech start up with too much money. Its not that vertical is inherently bad or that any of the technology is inherently bad, its just that balancing a system like this is very difficult and very labor intensive, not to mention expensive to light up. The promises always had way too much spin, 'farming of the future' absolute BS rhetoric from people who'd never grown a tomato in their lives.
Maybe next time speak to some old timers, or even better go to Holland and talk to the best indoor growers on the planet about your ideas before you go out making wild promises you can't keep.
I learnt the lesson in late 1990s, that trying to mimic farming in a warehouse cannot win against growing the product in its natural area on acreage and then shipping it.
One of the things I noticed quickly with vertical farms is they also have a very restricted amount of produce they can provide. Like, what about root vegetables? Stalk grains like wheat or corn? Vine vegetables and fruits? They've essentially limited themselves to leafy greens and small plants that are, quite frankly, easy to grow in your own back yard
Why on god's green earth (pun kinda intended) would you want to grow wheat in a vertical farm. Are you trying to make it 100x as expensive instead of only 5x as expensive as was the case with a head of lettuce?
@@rongeurtsvankessel1908 Well, grain is a staple for society. If they can't grow it in a reasonable amount, then that's a problem
you can grow vine vegetables and fruits. you can grow root veg as well. I grow peppers and tomatoes in my garage with no dirt or sun. they choose low worth bullshit like kale because it grows fast as fuck in these systems yet is basically worth nothing on the open market. THAT is their mistake. Thinking people want endless amounts of leafy greens. These people are too stupid to be trying this.
@@vallahdsacretor4839 It certainly is.
Just think about the energy. A leaf has very small amounts of embodied energy, and you don't eat it for its calories, you eat it for its texture and vitamins and fiber. But wheat, grain, beans, etc you actually eat for its embodied energy content. That energy HAS to come in through the artificial light.
We needed that experience, we may need those farms in future, like growing crops on Moon or Mars colony or closed environments like bunkers…
I could imagine a vertical farms being a public good too. If a place has ample energy but its citizens are having a hard time getting all of their nutrients, this could be worth the cost.
@@raziphaz2219They’d have to figure out profitability. Everything needed to keep these things running requires money. A small one could cost $100,000 to start, and that’s a very contained one, not a huge one, those cost several dozen million dollars.
2:09 There is nothing to be solved, this problem has already been solved, big-agro just don't want the fix to be applied. Permaculture, getting rid of 90% of chemicals...
Also, farm land DO lose value as precious nutriments are washed away because of conventional farming practices. It might not be obvious today, it will soon.
is already obvious here in south america in soy plantations, the ground did already loose a ton of value and nutrients
The total cost of production of vertical farms is just much higher than conventional farming, simple as that.
Yeh it strikes me that most aqua & hydroponics are done pretty much exclusively manually; whereas ironically, most soil farming is massively mechanised. There needs to be robotised/mechanised aqua-hydroponic vertical farms systems developed for medium to mega sized urban sites; such as abandoned areas of urban dereliction, like Detroit & Chicago.
Have you priced good quality farmland and machinery lately? It's crazy expensive.
That and the majority of the people trying to do this aren't farmers but idealists
@@pixelrancher - YEH “pixelrancher” your right to point out the high up-front costs of contemporary ‘big agriculture’ type farmland/equipment but if you add in all the subsidies that western government, finance & banking systems give to the biggest farmers.
You just got to conclude that from the 2nd World War onwards farming monocultural crops with the biggest of tractors/harvesters ect has lead to the biggest gains in productivity & surest consistent long-term profits.
The largest farmers have also tended to benefit from consistent & guaranteed profitability economically built in; from the subsidies for particular crops (corn-fructose/ethanol & ..bioFeed inputs into biodiesel &petro-carbons/soya-soyaMeal/wheat/ … ect), to the massive finance options for the really big farmers to purchase equipment.
Simultaneously often there has often been huge subsidies in a similar vein for; the first batch of big farmers to NOT farm certain types of land, or maybe turn it into (log bearing) managed woodland, develop it into solar/or/wind-farms ect..
There’s always been policy bias that helps & favours the current status quo, where in typical 20th & 21st century farming scenarios - big inputs, results in near guaranteed big outputs. The degree that this is more about the effects of policy or alongside it or outgunned or merely aligned with it; the ongoing galopeing developments of technology; is an intricate point.
Cost of production will be directly related to the processed used for farming.
It's not that vertical framing is inherently costly, just the process that these venture capital backed startups utilized was too costly to be competitive. The cost of operating a process should not be a surprise, so seems that costs at some level where improperly researched, or misinformation relied on.
The problem is that we have to much food not getting to enough people this is a distribution issue not a production issue
💯 but the world is run on greed and power
@@wawaweewa9159 Greed and power is a by product of Capitalism. Capitalism has produced greed and power since it's inception. Socialism is the regulation of Capitalism and provides safety nets for its citizens. China who's economic system is a hybrid economic system of socialism and capitalism has a thriving vertical farming industry. A for profit system like the US has it's downsides.
I grew up farming, there's more to growing plants than the raw data we now understand. I have tasted hydroponic and aeroponic strawberries, it is a regrettable experience. Maybe the soil biology (fungus, bacteria, yeast, etc) is more important than we know. Maybe the 'struggle' of nature make things taste better. As people we become stronger and better because of adversity in life, plants need the work of reality to become the best plant. Even if the cost were the same, flavor would go to nature raised.
I think most people aren't as picky, but there may be some truth to what you say here.
You are certainly right, and the joy of picking something oneself is also important, whether homegrown in one way or another. Most people in urbania haven't had much of this experience.
10:18 Electricity is not the most of the cost, but it still adds 0.44 $ to the total cost of production.
11:13 Adding 0.44 $ to usual 0.90 $ gives us almost 1.5x increase in cost.
In general, vertical greenhouses should be compared with usual non-vertical greenhouses. I can not see any positive differences.
Aight you said the main things I wanted to hear, it's not about vertical farming not being good, just not profitable enough for investors. My main issue i would have with this video is not talking with the actual people on the ground that do use this technique. Just like there are community gardens in NYC and LA that feed a small co-op they are doing the same with vertical farming techniques, but it requires boots on the ground meeting people to find this kind of thing out not just searching online
It requires someone willing to be a vertical farmer too. What you gonna pay him? Salad? This only works if you find some crazy person wanting to this for free.
@@TheBooban every instance I've seen this working is with co-ops, homesteading etc. Just live with any other form of gardening/farming, you don't have to be crazy to do any of these. May not have noticed but many traditional farms have the same issue with profitability. That's why corporations buy up so many farms and work on massive scale. Smaller farms can still be successful, especially if they serve the local communities instead of trying to be global player
To quote Geoffe Lawton (well known Permaculture teacher): In order to be sustainable we need to create a surplus. We create a surplus when we create good soil (and even transform dirt into soil - as they did with the Greening The Desert project in the Dead Sea region of Jordan, that Geoff supports). Another way to create a surplus: managing water with earthworks, like ponds, trenches that soak in heavy rain (swales), irrigation systems that are built to last.
Improving / creating soil and managing water are very important in permaculture. And creating food forests.
A PC gardener or farmer starts seeing improvements in soil after 2 - 3 years, and after 5 - 10 years it starts becoming really good. (the conditions in Jordan were terrible, it was dirt / sand - but even there after 10 years they have good soil all over the property. One asset is the warm temperatures. If they have enough water and manage it well, soil life can be active year round. Another asset is the sunshine, plants can produce biomass year round (which can be composted to support soil life).
A vertical farm would have to start doing large scale maintainance after 5 - 10 years. With good soil no repair is needed. On the contrary.
There is yearly input needed (compost, cultivating cover crops, mulching, ... ), especially in the beginning, but that is not lost, nothing deteriorates or is worn out.
Plants will need some resources like minerals, the content of the parts of a plant that are harvested and NOT composted again will be taken out of the system. So some minerals and elements must be replenished - at least partially. The art is of course to get as much as possilbe for free from underground, from the air, from wildlife like birds (that leave their droppings).
If the food is eaten on the property the human waste can be recycled as well (so not much is lost - only that which builds the human body).
Animals turn over biomass fast (into manure). That can be cows - or earth worms. Or small animals like chickens or rabbits.
There are other processes (like composting) that return biomass to the soil, but they take longer - even with some effort and daily turning of the compost (so work) the composting lasts 18 days in Jordan (and that is with some help of the chickens). One goat or rabbit will do that for you in 1 - 2 days max. The gut of many animals is like a biorecator. Bacteria upgrade the gut content, they will for instance add nitrogen, carbon, and make some things easily accessible.
The resources and their benign impact on soil life COMPOUND. Nothing to write off.
Once concept of PC is to cultivate perennial plants, shrubs and trees. Better usage of SPACE, less work with planting.
The general idea is to take advantage of natural processes and efficiences to be more efficient AND to manage with not too much manual labour. But monoculture and modern farming methods are not possible with that.
Natural efficiencies and resources.
Use of Sunlight (using height - for instance in agroforestry).
Managing water: good soil stores more water, there are also earth works like ponds, swales and efficient ! irrigation systems.
Mulching or growing cover / undercrops reduces evaporation. And it suppresses weeds.
Rows of trees or hedges reduce wind pressure and thus evaporation. Trees - if grown right (forcing them to grow deep roots with ploughing so they will not compete with the other crops for water) - bring up water from deep below, the fungi in their root network distribute the water - also to the other crops.
Green manure / cover crops bring up minerals. Certain plants can fix nitrogen. Covered soil does not lose as much nitrogen (it reacts with oxygen in the air, and gasses out). So that means no artificial fertilizer is needed (which needs a LOT of energy to produce). And phosphor is a very needed but rare mineral. If it is brought up from plants than one must not plunder the few existing deposits on the globe. Artificial fertilizer (as also used in vertical farming) must be easily solveable in water (or the plants - which are more or less on life suport in industrial farming) would not be nourished. No one helps them to take in naturally occuring minerals, industrial farming is bad for soil life.
Soil life (moles, mice .... worms down to funghi and all microbes and critters in between) brings value for free (creating soil, making minerals available to plants, creating long carbon based molecule chains (humus). Humus can even enclose salts, even toxins. The substances do not vanish - but they become inert.
Humus gives soil the ability to store water well etc. It is not even a large part of soil, but it transforms dirt to something magical
Last but not least: good soil is an excellent carbon storage. Industrial farming reduces the carbon content of soil (it reduces humus, which holds a lot of carbon). Organic farming or less aggressive farming increases carbon / humus content of soil. It is so universal, that the carbon content is the nuber that shows the quality of soil. 4 - 5 % is already good.
What an essay! Next time make a video reply please. Lots of subjects you covered, but organic doesn't mean less aggressive: tilting destroys the _hummus_ you mentioned, since many fungi are wiped. Look into regenerative practices too. All research is important, soil is not convenient when producing in space stations.
TLDR
What? 5 to 10 years for results? But that goes against everything Silicon Valley talks about for how long it takes to set up an established industry
Next thing you will tell me is most non-Silicon Valley industries move at a much slower pace than Silicon Valley, as that pace is kind of required to get meaningful results
I am actually skeptical of whether there is such a thing as sustainable farming. Organic farming is similar to farming prior to 1750, which had problems of its own including depleting soil of nutrients and the need to supply nitrogen with guano. It is possible that the a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the only sustainable way to live, but I certainly do not want to live like one.
@@thetruthstrangerthanfictio954 it took humanity ~55ka to figure out agriculture--with us only having that tech for a small fraction of how long humans have been around (Only 10ka out of the 65ka of homo sapiens existing)
This technology was created due to how often humans would eat themselves into near extinction. As back then, humans didn't have anything like XBoxen or Playstations or Nintendos to spent their free time. With it only requiring about 12hr/wk to get enough food to eat. So the only thing to do for the rest of the week was "make art" and "Screw"
However, it took ~55ka for humanity to figure out how to successfully accomplish farming
People act like agriculture is a really really easy thing to figure out. It is a skill, that needs to be learned, honed and heavily practiced. It merely looks like it could be "straight forward" via a mixture of arrogant dunning-kruger filed hubris and the fact humanity has been working on improving that skill for ~10ka. With a lot of that improvement being accomplished (for European based cultures at least) being done in the last 500a
That being said--it is not unwarranted to suggest we might still have another 10ka to get it perfected
So glad that he identified the cost, technology and energy it takes to produce "lettuce" and little other produce.
growing more profitable crops would be a solution. after all, growing oregano indoors is a long established very profitable cottage industry
It at least gives you some baseline figures and cost elements to start with.
The issue that sinks vertical farms is mentioned at the 52 second mark: "over $2Bn was invested" and a bit later "every venture capital firm". Farming is not a silicon valley start up. Vertical farming was never going to eliminate labor costs, because farming has shrunk that a thin as possible.
The movement we need, rather than vertical farms, is a grassroots local organic system, where the costs of distribution and administration are minimalized and done by small farm business.
I never understood how anyone planned to make verticle farming more efficient by removing the single biggest expense of free sunlight.
*"I never understood how anyone planned to make verticle farming more efficient by removing the single biggest expense of free sunlight."*
Because in a city, sunlight isn't free. Acreage in downtown Manhattan is expensive.
@@williambarnes5023 It still wouldnt make sense to grow vertically in manhattan. First, no free sunlight. Second too much rent. Grow on rooftops.
Did you not watch the video? The electricity is one of the lowest costs lol
@@gamer2021 Well I saw the claim but add the lights themselves. Other than this its all the same costs between the 2 systems, potentially.
Home based vertical scaled for a family might be the sweet spot, especially factoring in near zero waste and fun to use it
I think that's how these places will succeed, not as huge interests for big investors looking for quick and massive returns, but for the home growers who sells produce to their neighbours, happy to see their returns roll in bit by bit over time.
That's the problem with business these days, everyone is in such a rush to be a success, all these high flyers who want to be millionaires by the time they're 25.
The fact that these places are closing down just a couple of years after they're even set up shows the lack of patience. Wow, if their owners/investors only got out more and saw how long it takes for Joe Public to build confidence in new concepts like vertical farming.
Horrible controls and way higher failure rate. Grow lettuce yes and that gets very pricey for lettuce.
That is what I am setting up. Planning on growing Lettuce, Cucumbers and strawberries to start. I am tried of buying Lettuce that will just go bad in my fridge or making trips just for veggies for my kids. The shelf life of store bought produce is terrible. Which is not factored in to most equations. I plan to start slow and scale up as I want/need. Next steps will likely be herbs, Sautee veggies and hopefully perennials that are expensive like asparagus as well as carve out some space for mushrooms.
Maybe look at Grove Labs - they had a whole integrated system, using a fishtank as a fertilizer/filter cycle part of a multi-level "fresh herb garden" stack. (They went under in 2017, but more because manufacturing waterproof electronics is hard, actually *doing the gardening* - especially with small-scale hobby-grade hydroponics - has been a thing since at least the 1940s; Grove just had some neat design refinements...)
That is where I also see the solution: sustainable, reliable food production at the point of consumption. To that end I've invented an automated aeroponic smart farming appliance that integrates within food preparation spaces, so the consumers of fresh food will also be the growers. We need to shift toward a decentralized and distribution system of food production, one that is stewarded by communities while circumnavigating the conventional farming systems entirely in order to avoid land use, pesticides, fertilizer run off, processing, preservation, packaging, transportation, and food waste.
This never made sense to me on so many levels. You have to pay for the building and the lighting and all the nutrients that would have come from the soil. You lose the mutualistic bacteria and fungi that help plants thrive. You also lose the natural pollinators. Growing crops in soil with natural rain and sunlight is just so much simpler. Where indoor gardening makes sense is for high value highly perishable crops. We are talking about fresh herbs and some berries. Growing some of these inside of increasingly empty office spaces in major cities could produce highly desirable fresh product directly to consumers as well as create a desirable indoor greenspace.
As a professional greenhouse gardener, all the principles of vertical farms are sound. But the images you see of those facilities always looked like total overkill for producing salad that would sell for very little. It really should have viable applications. Either to produce plants that are very expensive, or to produce fresh greens in places where delivery would be even more expensive. For antarctic research stations, or even future space stations or moon bases, this really is the way to go. Because those places don't have to sustain themselves with the sales of their food products.
But for producing a significant portion of the global food supply, this never looked like it could be feasible.
There was no bet here. This was a stupidly designed business and too many companies trying to get into that business. The cash crops weren't lettuce but other exotic things like micro-greens and herbs. But only so many farm to table restaurants are going to pay top dollar for some fresh micro-greens. If these vertical farms were going to be on Mars there's no way they would have been designed this way. If you fail on Mars.. it's people starving to death, not bankruptcy. The biggest tip off by far is that Vertical Farms weren't disrupting regular farms. This is like WeWork all over again.
Just remember the fundamental laws of thermal dynamics. When you’re changing “something” into another “thing” there will be some “losses”. The biggest problem with indoor vertical farming is the cost of electricity and other resources against profiting from selling the produce.
It's thermodynamics, not thermal dynamics
@@texanplayer7651 go ahead and relay that to my autocorrect when you get the chance please.
The cost breakdown in the video actually has energy as not the biggest cost and thus not the biggest problem that doomed these businesses.
@@yoface938 there is a thing called edit
@@Chris-sm2uj make me
A few years ago Kirsten Dirksen did a piece on a year round commercial underground greenhouse in Nebraska. They grew citrus among other things. It is heated by thermal mass.
Pit greenhouses. They are doing those in Siberia. Fascinating concept.
i saw that piece, super cool, oranges in snow
I love hearing the line, "vertical farming needs expensive equipment." Like that's different from normal farming. Most people I know who farm talk about how it's so costly on the front end to get in that it's nearly impossible for someone to start up without being gifted most of what is needed in the first place.
Here’s a kind of vertical farm nobody ever thought to call a vertical farming. On one plot of zucchini that I personally managed and redesigned in an operation that had many fields and multiple farms of zucchini and other squash and cauliflower. We planted to 12 inch spacing instead of the usual 18”. Watering was with drip irrigation and gypsum block sensors indicated proper watering. The field was north facing and very steep, the steepest of all plots on the ranch, with coastal heavy clay soils. Initially I had to water for nearly 5 days continuously to get the sensors to indicate a properly wet soil. The close spacing caused the zucchini to grow straight up like a small papaya tree instead trailing over the ground like a vine, which is normal for zucchini. These plants continually grew straight up over a long summer season and were eventually very uniformly 7+ feet tall, that’s VERTICAL! We had to bring in more bees 🐝 for pollination because the foliage was soo thick! At about 4 feet tall we saw nutrient deficiencies and started fertilizing with a complete combination of nutrients that had been used for years with fruit trees in those soils. I always made sure the zucchini were properly water and never allowed to wilt even slightly. The zucchini fruit grew straight out at the base of the plants and often never touched the ground for their entire life.
We picked and packed the fruit into a redesigned box that was much stronger and 40% larger than the standard, because the standard vegetable box we found to be breaking the zucchini and poorly ventilated for cold storage. The production with the larger box on this field was 1200 boxes per acre, a new record for all the fields on the farm even with the much larger box, and would have easily been 2000 if we had brought in more bees earlier in the season. Poorly shaped fruit were not allowed in the pack.
That year was the last year of this farm operation because the wealthiest partner in the operation saw this success as a great threat to his management of the operation and his own farm operating separately that had cooler storage and sales for our fruit. He admitted that we were profitable, but claimed problems that were not real, and production would have been so much greater the next year he had to shut us down immediately! This was a great embarrassment for him, the success of my radical growing system was the opposite of all the practices that he used in his farming operations.
Plants are amazing things. I have seen watermelons weighing 10lbs growing on a fence 3' off the ground.
That’s really fascinating! It’s a shame you couldn’t continue the operation, it makes me a bit jealous as a horticulture student that you got to experience that haha. Is there more information you have on this?
I plant melons, pumpkins, and cucumbers the same way and get way more produce per foot. It's also mildew-free since the leaves can stay dry. I'm amazed how much weight vines can hold - each vine can easily support several pounds of food with proper vertical bracing - they also adapt well, with climbing vines being much tougher than ground-based cousins. So far I've only done it with smaller varieties that weigh 2-5 lbs, but I'll be scaling up as an experiment. Any fruit on a trailing vine can be grown on a trellis.
@@shionyr My zucchini plants 7+ feet tall had ZERO trellis! GOOD LUCK 👍🏻🍀
Wow! Just wow! I forgot about all this ever since I got my garden going! The only thing I pay with is my time. Ever since I started collecting leaves from nut trees, organic matter from the house and the occasional coffee grounds from the local coffee shop, I’ve not spent a dime on fertilizer as I amend my own soil and have my own seeds!
Always good to remember there are several different measures of "efficiency" in any solution.
Cost efficiency is only one of those measures, though it is usually one of the most important ones.
Over 40 years ago, a textbook I bought on small farm and home gardening stated something like "It would be possible to grow Oranges at The North Pole, or Wheat on the seabed floor...but could you do it and still make a profit ?" Not disputing that yes, especially for non commercial purposes, home gardeners can push the boundaries a little bit. I live in Christchurch NZ, 44 degrees South Latitude, Temperate climate but with a mild, usually snow-free Winter. So we can grow many subtropicals like say Oranges here. The trees, well bushes up to 3 metres high, , grow slowly over several years and never give as large a crop or tasty as fruits from warmer areas. But local gardeners appreciate them as "home grown". There is a reason why commercial Orange orchards are located some 800km / 500 miles North of Here (and even their fruits won't be as good as Australian or Californian grown fruits). Curiousities grown in the home garden don't need to make a profit. But commercial growers do.
@KiwiCatherineJemma I think of the insurance industry.
Cost reduction sounds great at first because everyone translates that as lower cost to the customer.
But in a non-competitive for-profit environment, cost reductions are not always passed on to the customer. So low-cost insurance may still be expensive to the customer unless there is somehow significant variety for competition, or maybe the insurance is government/co-op provided instead.
But, many cost reductions are harmful to the customer and the vendor industry supporting them.
- If they grind vendors too much, then there are fewer vendors giving poorer quality service paid for by the insurance, and their employees are low pay workers not motivated to provide quality work.
- cutting service agents for the insurance policy or cutting pay for these positions means your cheap insurance makes you wait on hold for hours to talk to rude reps who make mistakes on your claim.
- Cutting IT costs means low security, maybe losing your data or getting your data hacked.
- Cutting costs by raising deductibles has a balance point where it is good for customers, go too far, and defeat the purpose of insurance.
- go real far, and insurance companies do whatever they legally can to avoid paying out claims.
- they can invest your cash until needed but do too much of that then they may not be liquid for a mass disaster with millions of sudden claims.
So cutting costs is not always a benefit to the customer, there are many other measures of efficiency when determining if an insurance solution is valuable for the customer and even a general benefit to society.
I've grown mushrooms and salad for over a decade and have recently taught myself to grow hydroponically. There are many issues embedded into hydroponics that will eventually be addressed as we are witnessing the pioneer stage of what will eventually be the neo modern food system.
The biggest issue is that land, food transportation, and synthetic fertilizer are way to cheap to make production of water grown salad mixes to be viable. The next big issue is that you can only really grow baby leaf varieties on hydroponics in order to keep the grow period before harvest as low as possible in order to maintain high returns. the final issue is that since these are usually calcium or salt based synthetics nutrient systems, they lack the biodiversity that will help to moderate the inevitable build up of bio sludge in the systems that ultimately becomes a vector for disease and pests. If you build a system that requires hyper infrastructure in order to reduce contamination, your system will eventually catch an issue. The last issue, and is what caused the downfall of large investment hydroponic projects like Appharvest, is that they lacked the experienced hydroponic managers to keep the food factory alive, but that will change once Ai has been properly integrated. ontop of all the surface level issues, there is the issue of scaling production. As a farmer you have to be able to match your production to the size of your customer basis, so if a single room hydroponic system were built with maximum output in mind, but they take a decade to reach that weight per week, then they are essentially paying people to constantly clean and maintain all of that dead space until it gets utilized. Plus I pretty much lost my farm business in 2021 when the wholesale restaurant industry I was reliant was crumpled from 2020.
The age of vertical farming is far from over, it actually hasn't even started. When petrol is unaffordable to ship food around the planet, it will be far more effective to ship dry nutrients which gets assembled by bio engineers into the product of edible food.
The future of hydroponics farming is going to be similar to doordash or an amazon warehouse. Eventually a design for shipping container resembling pods that stack and have an app full of workers who show up and check individual pods and get paid, similar to workers cleaning hotel rooms. These individual pods are going to be what keeps large scale disease from spreading and the modular size is going to allow for pack flat disassembly of these greenhouse shipping containers, so they can be bought and sold and moved around. We are at such a point in history's technology that everything built today needs to be able to be recycled, dismantled, and reusable. I assume most of these hydroponic designs do not take this into account. I can build my hydroponic system in 2 hours "after all the parts are pre-made" and earn about $400 a week from 8x5ft of space, that is far more money per foot than any coperate hydroponic company can grow, but I also can only max out my system to the size of my community, but that is perfectly good because my overhead is low and if everyone were doing what I'm doing, we'd be flush in food everywhere in the world.
I think this was a case where perfect became the enemy of the good. Instead of looking at how to improve yield, while maintaining a competitive price, they went full gonzo.
Things that cost the same or less thrive (solar & EV's), things that cost more don't.
Start with greenhouses that control environment while reducing water consumption. Increase CO2, augment sunlight to improve yield, only add automation and robots when it improves profitability.
Full gonzo? More like full gizmo.
@@beachcrow Every bell and whistle they can think of, no matter how it effects profitability.
As I suspected, vertical farms require a lot of equipment that require skilled labour to use and maintenance costs. This sinks vertical farms in advanced countries with high labour costs, low population and highly mechanised, massive size traditional open field farms. Vertical farms thus require low labour cost, perhaps robust, autonomous humanoid robots capable of multiple tasks are the answer, simple and efficient irrigation and harvesting processes and really cheap energy. It’s a technical problem just waiting for technology to catch up. Check.
Cant beat the scale of broad acre farming using high tech you will burn up your budget too quickly and number of these hoped to make turn key systems they could on sell. This was the case with many spruiking turn key fish farming systems in the 1980s to early 2000s. Just buy our xyz system - minimal labor, reliable, maintenance free and produces 20 ton of fish per week - years later they are bankrupt and in court!
Farming is WORK, no matter how you cut it, and NOBODY wants to work, even high tech farming.
If labor is the greatest downside then the solution is simple: have people pick their own. Think of it like apple orchards, where they rake in huge profits by having people pick their own apples. Since vertical farms can be constructed inside a major city, it won't be hard to find people willing to do this. Many urbanites _love_ the idea of having the freshest food they can possibly get, especially if they don't have to drive somewhere to get it.
So, not only would vertical farms reduce their greatest expense, but they could actually _profit_ from labor.
I also think it's moronic to produce the cheapest food in such an expensive environment. You can grow lettuce in some of the most inhospitable places, it hardly bruises, and it has a good shelf life - how does it make sense to grow that in a well-regulated environment close to its customers? It would make so much more sense to, for example, grow tropical plants in a country/state they cannot survive in. Again: freshness factor would be a huge selling point.
Think of it like EVs: the only reason Tesla succeeded is because they started off making a luxury vehicle. If they started off making an electric economy car, they would have failed, because the battery alone costs more than what an economy car does.
Interesting point. An example ? An orange orchard in Alaska. :)
@@onedaya_martian1238 That is a great example. Sure, it's hard to do vertical farming with a tree, but, Alaska has more land than they know what to do with. It wouldn't be hard for them to just create an indoor orchard.
@@Toastmaster_5000 A used reactor from a sub or aircraft carrier would be an excellent "heart" for an indoor orchard. The electricity would be used for the "dark times" plus desalination, if needed. The by-product heat generated from the core, well... Alaska...for the "cold times".
Thing is, it is likely shipping in a batch of fruit is still cheaper and easier than all the planning, infrastructure, maintenance etc . I live in Texas and growing my own tomatoes is "fun". But going to a store, year-round to obtain what I want, when I want will always be THE method for feeding myself, as the colossal global infrastructure components for that are just too luxuriously superior to a smaller, local supply.
Someday humanity may find itself on another moon or planet and need this technology because of scarcity. But our "eden" on planet earth doesn't (yet?) need it.
You are brilliant. Let's do it I got a great spot and a bit of know how about plants. Dragon fruit would be a great option! The only thing I'm lacking is capital.
Hugelkultur is a far better way to garden vertically, especially in cold climates.
08:30 didn't they do a double door system ? Cross contamination of outside pathogene in mushroom farming is also a problem, unless you have an faster growing mushroom
My concern with factory farming, indoor or outdoor, plant or animal, is the potential lack of trace elements/minerals/etc that get leeched out of the ground or are not provided by the medium that feeds the plants or animals. And honestly, we need to adjust our views on profitability. If it pays for the infrastructure and labor and maybe a bit extra for maintenance, that'd be good. It's the people who only want to take the money out of it.
There will never be a system that beats using nature, she reins over us all and as smart as we think we are we don’t know everything. I still don’t understand why we aren’t looking at helping further micro farms that are actually doing things as ecologically as possible. No chemicals, equals less overhead, same with the lack of equipment, less water use and need for less infrastructure. It’s a no brainer, but for some reason investing in multiple projects rather than large industrial projects is a blind spot
Yes, many places are going back to past techniques when we worked with the land ams weather rather than trying to control it.
You can't scale up microfarms without adding chemicals, the productivity of such system is rather low . Even organics farming use tons of pesticides.
Nature is the best possible method for living naturally... which humans simply don't do. Ground farming may be the cheapest option for now in almost all cases, but that doesn't mean vertical farming won't be the better choice in the future. The Line, Moon bases, O'Neill Cylinders, and many similar future projects will have a MUCH greater need for space efficiency. Trying to grow food in space will almost certainly require vertical farming, rather than any traditional method. On Earth, they should continue research and advancement to mitigate the inevitable natural disasters we'll eventually face. Because mother nature giveth, but she can also taketh away, without warning or mercy. Being prepared for that is important.
That answer is political. There are right wing lobbyists fighting for less regulation which allows them to continue buying up more land and pushing out small farms through scale. Those they can't beat that way they sure for having their (Monsanto) seeds being on the small farm from wind blowing it in naturally. Another issue is large scale farms using eminent domain to buy land and then charge absurd rates to lease the land to farmers. Nothing unfortunately is as easy and "for the people" as it should be. Don't worry the corporate infrastructure wants us to continue sleeping while they run amok, privatizating profits and subsiding the environmental issues to the citizens and government to deal with.
I have grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and greens all in the same greenhouse. It works I use the sun and leds when it’s not sunny. With a mix of geothermal, solar, wind then you are good. And my harvesting system going from picking straight to the truck using gravity
I would say, vertical farming would only work if the technology was used by the consumer. i.e, they use vertical farming in the home per household, rather than in mass production factories or in competition with natural farming...
I did some work for a vertical farm start-up a couple of years ago. I haven't been back that way so don't know if they are still in business or not. Their crop was mariju...excuse me...cannabis for CBD oil so my guess is they are probably still around. 😁
I remember watching some videos about these vertical farms (the food kind) back when they blew up. I wondered about the cost of the mechanical equipment and the electric bills. It seemed like a good idea but, like most things that you only get the 30,000 foot view of, it's the details that really define it as good or bad.
Good healthy Soil grows better greens than any hydroponic setup.
I'm also of mind that a anything grown in real soil in contact with all kinds of living things that exist underground probably is best for us, that's how we thrived for millennia plus it tastes better too. Albeit easier on the back of the workers the product itself doesn't seem as wholesome and tasty to me.
Not entirely right. Particularly with the limited and shrinking amount of available firtile soil. Also traditional farming is extremely suceptable to climate change impacts which will inherently make traditional farming more difficult.
That's not what this is about you self-righteous maroon!
The quality of the product wasn't EVER in question, so please stick to the subject... It was for purely economic reasons that these farms are going under... Too much Cap-Ex and too much high cost labor which to me isn't the issue since all labor deserves a proper wage, but when you are competing against the rest of the world that pays agriculture labor cents on the dollar, which is EVEN true in the USA, than all bets are off.. You can't compete against what is essentially slave labor prices.. Not to mention everyone fails to talk about CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA that feeds you...
@@stickynorth I'm pretty sure that quality matters. We need more child labor, far better for them then social media, aimless bumming around and failed public schools.