Hi Folks - as many of you have pointed out, I made a mistake when I said that Ultraviolet lights are used in vertical farms. In fact, it is not ultraviolet light - that would burn the plant. It's a mix of red and blue light, which is the part of the light spectrum that the plant absorbs. My apologies for this error.
Can you do a story on how global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% if people stopped consuming animal products? www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth Or how 70% of U.S. grain is feed to livestock? www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/livestock-feed-and-habitat-destruction/
@@jimurrata6785 not exactly. Chlorophyll and related energy converting chemicals absorb certain wavelengths of light but not others. The wavelengths not absorbed are reflected back. The wavelength most visible to humans in this reflected light is green. But of course, there is a spectrum of wavelengths that we can't see. This is why the light emitting diodes used to provide light for these plants do not include the green wavelength. Interestingly enough, I would imagine that the plants then look off black instead of green.
@@VeganSemihCyprus33 People see what they want to see. There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The solution to the concerns you bring up is to be a part of the solution to the concerns you bring up. Being a negative Nancy is a net negative for humanity, thus contributing to the problem, rather than the solution!
My graduate work in green building and sustainable communities brought me to indoor farming. It is an intersection between energy, water and food distribution/quality. My calculation was that this was a fertile area for me to be involved in if I want to maximize my contribution to more sustainable modern economic practices. Exciting space to be involved in...once again a great and timely video. Thank you!
@@demonz9065 yes , I just wonder how successful it can ever be as a long term solution , but I do understand it can have a part to play. Berries can also be grown successfully under lights. I think much more has to be done in the area of encouraging people to eat according to the seasons in their own country.
@@jimbanda not really. If we were to switch to vertical farming method anything you could grow in those vertical farms could be grown anywhere. Vertical farms have complete control over growing conditions that’s part of why they’re more efficient. No weather to screw with yield.
I love the idea of vertical farming, as a vegetarian living in Stockholm, the prospect of reliable tasty fruits & veg year-round would be amazing. Basically every fresh non-root fruit/veg is imported more than half the year, at best from the Netherlands but often from Italy or other continents. Vertical farming is energy intense, but so is shipping fruit from India or NZ.
Always surprised me how Sweden hasn't gone in on this more? I remember visiting your supermarkets, it'd be a profitable business like you said as you all love to eat green all year round even when it's punishingly cold outside and would benefit from something deep fried :P.
I have an aquarium/fish tank in my living room that filters through a grow bed of basil and tomatoes. It's nice to have these things year round, especially a little taste of summer in the middle of winter. I didn't even know tomatoes would keep growing and producing year round until I tried this. 3 Year old tomato plant still going - kinda works as x-mas decoration with the green leaves + red round things :)
Imagine if apartment buildings could produce large amounts of their own food on a couple of floors. Possible to have a market on the ground and energy/rain capture over the building itself. It would bring food so much closer to the population. My dream, at least..
@@PlumSack79 Wo easy tiger... First of it rains a shitload where I am, and I am not assuming the building would collect 100% of the energy & water needs. However it would be somewhat irresponsible to not harvest at least some. And.. this is just an idea. Obviously to become a reality takes a lot more input than than saying "hey wouldn't it be cool if we did X"
Check out the Venus Project started by Jacque Fresco in 1980, some 40 years ago. It's all about vertical farming in cities designed for abundance and sustainability - It IS the Future if we have one! th-cam.com/video/Yb5ivvcTvRQ/w-d-xo.html
@@michaelbartlett6864 Humans will cling on to the bitter end. You are right though. Vertical farming, but also there will be food growing along the sidewalks in the cities. That will take a while though. There is already a lot of community gardens in cities, but the whole cities will be overgrown. It would be interesting to see a future where cities export food to the rural areas instead of the other way around. Then we can have more nature and wildlife, which will be essential for a healthier future. Otherwise we will end up like Idiocracy
For nearly 7 years I have been growing as many herbs and vegetables as I can in my small flat. Inside during the Rocky Mountain winters and on the balcony in the warm months. I too use growing lights. Now that the lights are LEDs it is quite economic. If we all did more or less the same and we can get other foods from these vertical producers..., why not?
I think you bring another interesting point to this: people growing their own food in their homes. Even growing 5% of your food would mean a lot on a global scale!!! My concern is always cost though; if it costs more to grow your food than to buy it, it greatly reduces the interest of this, especially for the less favored people :/
@@DunnickFayuro if you already have a spare area of land, planting a fruit tree gives great shade and lots of fruit for no cost (other than a sapling if cannot find one for free). I really enjoy having 6 different fruits in my garden
There is always the Shanghai Tower type solution, which has a twin wall structure, offices, and a hotel in the inner structure, and the tower's green spaces are between the inner wall, and the outside wall.
being around green growing things is good for us, psychologicall. Obviously it is best if those green growing things are pretty too, but just having walls of vertical farms around us would still be better than walls everywhere.
As with every other aspect of fighting climate change, there's no silver bullet. Combining vertical farming with different sources of renewable energy and sustainable land farming looks like a safer bet, given our population's exponential growth. That's why i'm more optimistic when i see different aproaches being attempted at solving the current issues: they all can be eventually interwoven to create a more stable production network that has less impact on our planet's health and biodiversity.
Thanks for another great video. I run a small commercial aquaponics farm. One of the advantages often overlooked on these growing methods is that pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are not necessary. In fact, in the case of aquaponics, if one were to use these poisonous chemicals, the fish would likely not respond well. A win win for heathier food and a cleaner environment.
You should be justifiably proud to have an international audience. In that light please remember to add "kilometers" and "hectares" to your "miles" and "acres" for those folks in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and all of the former Commonwealth countries like India, Pakistan, etc. and those who have been well taught in English in their home country or have studied abroad and are now back home in their metric countries. Thanks for keeping up that global perspective, mate!
I was obsessed with the idea of vertical farming a few years back. There are some serious benefits ranging from land use, localised production leading to decreased transportation and packaging requirements, the efficiency of water and nutrient consumption, the lack of need for spreading pesticides and herbicides out in the wild effecting all the ecosystems surrounding farming (although i will say that pesticides do still have their place in indoor horticulture sometimes because of the lack of natural predators for things like aphids, white fly, spider mite etc) But the energy use is the real kicker. Hydroponic LED lights use specific wavelengths used for photosynthesis, mostly red and blue, which makes them about as efficient as you could possibly get for the purpose and yet you still need about 300 watts per square metre. Lettuce in a greenhouse can be grown using 250kWh/year/square m but for hydroponics that's more like 2,000kWh/year/square metre just from the lights assuming an 18 hour photoperiod is used (that's part of how you get such high yields with hydroponics) So once you factor in climate control etc it's probably about 10x as power hungry as a greenhouse per square metre and if you used natural gas power for this at 400gCO2eq/kWh then that's 800kgCO2/square metre/year This is why alternative energy is so god damn important but for the time being we already have to electrify transportation, heating, cooling, industry etc etc and we're only about 11% electrified. Adding another huge power hog onto the grid to do a job that the sun was already doing is nuts. All the extra clean energy we can get our hands on is already needed to displace fossil fuels. One day... Maybe... We might have enough nuclear to get that 800kgCO2/square metre/year down to 24kgCO2/square metre and then it might be worth it. But we aint there yet
@@Burnrate to go 100 solar and wind while also electrifying everything would mean covering almost everything and creating a waste stream of monumental proportions. I sincerely hope we don't do that
I have been thinking about this question, vertical farming, for few years already. Just few days ago, a friend of mine asked me to have a look at a farmland. I will make a small system to have some fun soon.
why buy farmland to make a vertical farm? Farmland is usually expensive because it is farmland, the land has been worked and all tree stumps, large stones and things picked from it... Buy an old abandoned lot instead save money and property tax, restore poor land, too
@@voidremoved Thank you for the advice. I am not buying a farmland (at least not yet), my friend just asked me to share a farmland. And because I don't have experience in farming, I may just take a corner to have a leisure farming. Large scale farming is something else, need to think from breakeven to risk analysis ...etc.
Seeing the use of fish with hydroponics reminds me of the use of ‘black soldier fly’ larvae to feed the fish. The larvae are great at reducing food scrap waste, etcetera. An interesting subject in and of itself / and will be one of the multitude of things done differently to backfill this hole we’ve dug for ourselves. I’ve raised black soldier fly larvae for years, and they’re prolific, hardy and odor free (if raised properly).
Also great for feeding other animals like chickens and reptiles,, and adding protein to other feeds for hogs etc. Great tool for composting difficult kitchen wastes.
Greatest advantage to vertical farming is the fact that it is local, which means savings in transport and where growing seasons are short or non-existant.
Remote Arctic communities with access only to very expensive imported greens love the innovation. Cheaper vegetables when none are available in the winter.
Food costs in the arctic are multiple times that in southern latitudes and this tech solves that problem. This is not technology for where food is plentiful, but for where food is expensive and not as easily accessible. th-cam.com/users/results?search_query=food+cost+arctic+
I always find it interesting that all this new, adapting to living in cities stuff, is also the type of thing that we will most likely need for establishing ourselves in outer space and on other planets.
And to not massively fuck up other planets, if we ever get to colonize them. For future space colonies, I'd much rather have a bunch of cities in nice places connected by underground highspeed railway than the massive urban sprawl we have here on Earth...
Exactly, Zatar 123. The technologies to make our world a better place are also the technologies we need to develop to live in space. This extends to other things too, like energy conservation and total recycling.
@@midnight8341 We don't know of any other planets that actually have an atmosphere suitable for habitation or cultivation, so there's that. Or are you talking about Terraforming a planet? We don't really have that kind of tech yet ... not short of applying centuries of automation and brute force to the problem.
@@joelcorley3478 both. And I think other planets and/or terraforming will come faster than we think. Our progress is exponential and humans are very very bad in predicting exponential developments.
we humans are created to live on planet Earth. our body is adapted to live in the conditions on Earth. So if you like to live on Mars, go ahead and take these ideas with you. good luck
Glad to see you're still covering innovative things that give rise to hope, I feel like you've turned a little light on inside of me, so, thank you! Personally I would love to see urban sprawls be adapted into arkologies.
We love the idea of vertical farming, for a variety of reasons, but we have some questions about the nutritional value of plants grown with only the bare essentials of their required nutrients. What about the many trace elements and organic compounds that are typically found in healthy soils and get taken up by growing plants? Also, what about the many complex plant exudates that are excreted by diverse plant communities thru their roots and are made available by water transport to neighboring plants? Will vertical farming create edible crops that look healthy (buffed in fact) but will be lacking in all sorts of micronutrients, plant hormones & trace mineral compounds that might be necessary, in the long-term, for robust human health? (The reason that these questions might be important is because science & technology have been largely co-opted by business & finance, and not telling the whole story of products & services that are for sale has become the norm in sales & marketing. In the 21st century many things high tech are "cool" right up until we find out that they weren't and now there's a class action settlement of some sort. "Round Up Ready" comes to mind almost immediately as a cautionary tale of an FDA-approved high tech farming solution that turned out to cause cancer, remain persistent in animal manures, and, eventually, make their way into living human cells. Being in high tech my whole adult life, I have learned by experience to be cautious & suspicious.)
I would recommend you searching for experts and scientists in the field of this new tech and ask them these questions. People who are involved with VF might be biased, but good scientists aren't. Maybe you can even ask some who are for it and others who see it critical to get both views on your stated issues.
Presumably high end clients will come to understand that there is more to vegetables than how they look and they can perhaps afford a higher end product that is grown with a wide range of micro nutrients and the like. Additionally we can take into account that vegetables/plants produce sometimes hundreds of chemicals to ward off various predators/plant diseases so in theory we could start to breed them out of them and reduce those risks to our health.
You lost me at Roundup "turned out to cause cancer". This was a conclusion reached by a jury of non-scientists, in a courtroom, having been advised by "expert witnesses" paid by legal teams who had 289 million reasons for bias. It is not a conclusion supported by actual science. sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-on-glyphosate/
Your dead right Alan, So many of these 'wonder' plant solutions even look anemic. I'm building a commercial hydroponics system to the highest nutrition produce aims in Winford nr Bristol oz99osborne@gmail.com
Hi Buddy, Ag-Scientist here with experience in the urban farming sector. Let me tell you two things!! 1..Vertical farming and urban farming is here to stay, and will proliferate in the coming years! 2..We don't fully know how profitable these vertical, LED farming systems are!! Aero-farms only turned over 4 million US last year! Seasonal urban farming i certainly profitable!! just check out Curtis stone in, Kelowna BC. I appreciate the video. Thanks :)
I think that focusing on fruit, vegetables and greens, as well as herbs, spices and medicinal plants for urban farming is a better priority. Grain is a concentrated dry seed grown on a big stalk, so most of the plant isn't edible, growing wheat in a city means figuring out what to do with all the hulls and straw, whereas lettuce, carrots, radishes, apples, you just pluck them off a plant and walk them to the shelf at the farmer's market, minimal processing and waste. Grain is the most shippable food in the world, it's dry, keeps well at room temperature and you can handle it with a shovel and not damage it. Since it's dry, you aren't effectively shipping tons of clean drinking water from the place where it's grown to the city either. If you have water reclamation as part of your city's sewage system, the water used to grow an urban strawberry can stay in circulation within that city instead of being shipped half a continent away. TLDR, grain is already the most efficient food to transport so it should be a low priority for reducing that shipping distance, there's more benefit to be had changing the way we get more perishable and delicate crops. Besides, the reason grain accounts for so much of our diet is a consequence of it being so portable and storable, who's to say that grain's share of the demand wouldn't drop off a lot if we could get access to better calories year-round close to home.
"growing wheat in a city means figuring out what to do with all the hulls and straw" construction, insulation, fuel, mulching, composting, packaging...... etc it would end up as a sideline business of waste exporting. just as he explained using aquapanics side by side with fish farming, it would be the same with grain and rice. multi - grow models would initially be less effiencent, but would eventually work out better as it would serve mulitple uses..
I remember a Popular science article about a greenhouse/fish farm back in the 70's or early 80's. To help feed the fish, there were screens above the tanks upon which table scraps were placed. Insects would lay eggs in the rotting food scraps, but the larva would tend to fall betwwen the screen's mesh into the water as fish food. The fish water would be taken from the bottom of the tank, circulated to the plant roots and also to a ping pong ball filled clear chamber in which algae would grow on the balls surfaces (not sure which got the water first, the plants or the algae, the algae was to remove any excess ammonia), last step was a spray of water onto a plastic wall, down pebbles. Counting you dining table, it was meant as a near closed loop system.
The transport of food was the very thing I thought of as the video started. . . It’s Sunday. . . while some people go to church, some of us “just have a think”
@@JustHaveaThink have a look at the closed loop food system I designed. In addition to aquaponics, it incorporates poultry, as well as humanure and food waste recycling using the black soldier fly. Join us at CLIMATE RESISTANT FOOD Facebook group
I heard of this sometime in the past. It is intriguing. I live in a town of 2000. I'll bet that a 10 story 1 square block vertical farming facility would produce a great deal of the required produce for our town and some of the surrounding area. The questions that immediately come to mind are: 1) What is the initial cost of setting this up? 2) How long would it take to get all 10 square blocks producing? 3) What is the production cost per crop? 4) How many crops can be produced? 5) Is the cost, once production is fully established, comparable to field produced crops?
Vertical farming has been in use for many years in Dutch greenhouses. The reason America does not use it, because of non-existing environmental rules. Therefore grabbing land and using pesticides is just cheaper.
3 dimension aquaculture in a shipping container based greenhouse is particularly intreging to me. This is mainly because your growing more than one valuable resource locally. You also get a climate controlled year round environment growing and it's a technologically supported organic ecosystem.
@@markplott4820 I know, that's the idea! You can maneuver aquaculture based hydroponics to work in a shipping container. It's a shipping container and a veg garden.
This feels like a multitude of different solutions for growing crops in different urban situations. Scotland has cheap wind power and redundant spaces.... offices, factories etc. London has access to cheap solar and after the pandemic there should be a lot of empty offices....
You know, Dave, one day, one of your videos will be only 99.9999% excellent, well documented and presented, and some of your viewers who are now used to this regular level of perfection might get a tad disappointed for a nanosecond... ;-) Lots of interest from the comments about these vertical farms, a great subject matter. Whether we like them or not, they are bound to stay, so as well embrace them and work together to solve all the issues they might raise. The technical aspects seem relatively easy to address, my biggest concern is vegetable farmers for which these greens are cash crops that help offset less profitable basic crops that we also need, such as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, etc. If salads and radishes are grown in vertical farms, those grown on open soil or green houses by real farmers will become less and less relevant.
That's an extremely kind thing to say. Thank you :-) I agree with you about job displacement. In fact I believe it is one of the most serious challenges we face in our struggle against climate change. All governments need to ensure working families are supported and people are retrained into the multiple new areas of gainful employment in a sustainable economy.
When Epcot Center (Disney World) opened in 1982 I made a visit. One of the displays they had was a system of growing tomatoes where the plants were suspended in air and their roots were periodically sprayed with nutrient rich water. The yields were very high. They were growing in a greenhouse so they were using natural light. But artificial light would do the job as well. Plus temperatures can be controlled to maximize flavor. Tomatoes seem to need some heat to encourage the chemical reaction that boosts their flavor but if the temperature gets too hot the plant ceases forming fruit. You've probably had first hand experience with the "too cool" lack of flavor from tomatoes grown in greenhouses in the winter.
Although vertical farming may be technologically efficient the end product is food made without soil, but also soul. Humans developed in equilibrium with soil, bacteria, fungi, viruses etc. Regenerative farming has shown the way to produce food with maximized nutrient density; which is said to be essential to produce healthy human beings. Having said this may I applaud you for producing such interesting and well presented videos.
Those lights aren't usually UV, they're mostly red leds with some blue. Plants don't require much green light. That's why many plant leaves reflect green light.
At 1:21 the concerns about high cost and energy intensive nature of vertical farming was covered by a sweeping statement about advanced technology and cost reductions. It’s good if a table showing the costs for vertical farms compared with traditional flat farming could be shared with an explanation of how the vertical farming costs are comparable or perhaps lower.
Great, informative video again. Wheat, soya, palm oil and rice need to be grown this way to save the rain forests. Imagine if you could have a vertical farm in a desert using recycled water, natural light carried by fibre optic cables, and solar panels for the electricity - it would almost be self sufficient.
What? You mean a ‘skylight’? I have this brilliant idea that will reduce power consumption wasted on lighting. A series of expensive fibre optics that transfer light from rooftops to vertical surfaces. Oh wait a minute. They are called windows
@@StuTubed Yes, like windows, they already exist. We call them (brand name) skylights. I have two in my house to light a room that lacks natural light. But, they use a reflective film in a tube, not expensive fibre optics.
Indeed, I know they exist. I mentioned them since they're a good way of getting natural light into places where it's not feasible to install a conventional window or skylight.
We can keep coming up with clever new ideas for feeding an ever increasing population ...but in the end if nothing stops population GROWTH we will have no ideas left. It will be literally impossible. There will be no science or technical solution for feeding everyone. The best Idea I have seen for a sustainable society is the non monetary RBE system idea and yet even that would not be sustainable and could not succeed if there is no stopping population GROWTH. This is a finite planet with finite resources. Infinite population growth and sustainability is an impossibility .
What is your solution, Thanos? I think we all know the problems or at least the most glaring ones, but how to do anything meaningful about it in a timely manner seems to elude us all.
@@beepstar899 They say an average of a 2.5 birth-rate would produce a stable non growing population but as to how to get people to stop producing even more children than that I don't have a clue...seems to me that it should be more than enough kids for anyone but it isn't. You just get people angry if you even talk about it.
@@mightyjoestone Yes ..that does seem to be a proven fact ..and that is the hope I have in that if we changed to a non monetary RBE system then a reduction in birth rates would come almost naturally simply because it would end poverty and increase education. We will never end poverty or infinite growth with a capitalist system. Capitalism actually requires an infinitely growing population in order to 'work'
We could expand into space :) But I agree population control is better. And that is simple to do. Statisticians (our world in data) have shown that birthrate and early child death are directly related. Poor people depend on their children when they are old. Therefore even if the are still poor, but their children are in good health, they will have less of them. So simply put, want to bring population down? Make sure every child survives.
Another great thing with today's tech is we can run rapid experimentation with plants to find their optimal light frequencies, CO2 levels, nutrients, temperature and for some "day & night" cycle. Machine Learning greatly assists this process too. I am confident they will have wheat solved by the end of the decade.
As someone who has a small scale commercial vertical farming operation in California, I firmly believe the future isn't in these massive farms... Because you still have to ship the massive production somewhere using trucks. They produce too much for one city. The future is in small scale urban agriculture. Either on a personal level for your own food by growing at home, or commercial operations on residential zoning. Check out curtis stone. He is grossing huge profits on 1/4th an acre market gardening. We need to move away from this centralized model of massive corporations and factories making all the food and we need to get back to decentralizing food production in urban centers through having many urban farmers in one city.
8:15 Excellent idea. On an earlier topic, I was thinking that similar synergies could be used in the renewable energy space by building molten salt thermal solar plants next to liquid air plants and utilising some of the heat for recondensing the steam for expanding liquid air and driving the turbines. Once the steam has been produced by the turbine from the molten salt and driven the turbine, the steam could then be recondensed by passing it through a heat exchanger in the liquid air plant, in turn driving the liquid air expansion process. Once the superheated steam was cooled back to close to below 100C, the water would flow back to the solar thermal plant turbine, ready to be re-heated by the molten salt at 500+C. This would be an ongoing mutually symbiotic process, since the inefficiencies of both molten salt and liquid air both arise from the recooling for molten salt and reheating for liquid air processes. In the event that more than enough renewable energy (from local wind or local solar PV) was being produced, this could be stored in both liquid air form and/or heat capacitors for molten salt, again acting as a battery or energy storage device. The two would be balanced constantly by an algorithm, so that there was always enough heat to regas the liquid air and drive the steam turbine, and always enough liquid air stored ready to condense the steam turbine's steam back into water. So you would always have additional molten salt capacitors and liquid air vessels, which would fill and empty depending on demand. If there was low demand, then solar PV and/or wind would continue to make liquified air and store it, and thermal solar would continue to heat molten salt in heat capacitors and store that in storage tanks. In the event that energy was demanded, then stored molten salt would be brought into play at driving turbines and heating liquid air. During the day, solar PV would drive liquid air collection and solar PV would drive molten salt collection in heat capacitors (as well as generating any electricity needed during the day.) At night, when both solar PV and solar thermal closed down, molten salt from the capacitors would be released into the system to continue to drive steam turbines and heat liquid air to drive liquid air turbines. This means 24/7 production of electricity. Probably best suited for sunny climates that supports solar thermal, although you could do the same with wind, but less efficiently since you'd need to use the wind energy to heat the salt electrically (similarly to how liquid metal batteries are heated I would guess.)
It has been there for decades: www.meteorsystems.nl/en/growing-systems. There is not need for the density shown, just a need for more environmental regulation to force countries other than the Netherlands to actually invest in it. We export more food that America does on a fraction of the size and with a fraction of the resources.
Oh, vertical farming! This is one of my favorite subjects, because it's a necessity if humans are ever going to live in space. And it's also a natural extension of the idea of agriculture. Thousands of years ago the first proto-farmers discovered they could get more edible plants if they took control of seeding and watering them, instead of letting nature do all the work. Vertical farming today is taking control of everything else and removing all the randomness of nature from agriculture. It's an extremely human thing to do. But there are problems, and you pointed them out really well in the video. The biggest problem is trying to replace the sun with artificial light. The sun shines for free, so it's always going to be difficult to beat that with electrical power. Of course the idea is to maximize the advantages of vertical farming (water and land conservation, no diseases, pests or destructive weather and the ability to push agriculture to its theoretical maximum of production) to the point where it becomes cost competitive with growing plants outside. We're not quite there yet, but as you said the engineers are finding greater mechanical and electrical efficiencies all the time, particularly with the technology of LEDs, so it's possible that point might be reached in the near future, _especially_ when teamed up with renewable energy sources. But right now the biggest problem with vertical farming is what they're actually growing in those food factories, and you pointed this out as well. The vast majority of real world agriculture is devoted to cereal crops, with leafy greens just a subset of the subset of vegetables. To truly change the world and eliminate food security, we'd need to invest in vertical farming the same way we invest in computers or automobiles today, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building the infrastructure and then devoting it to crops that aren't that profitable. In my own country I can tell you that (pre-pandemic) wheat wasn't that profitable. Farmers were already turning away from it in favor of other crops like barley and canola. It's really hard to imagine how a vertical farming industry could make a profit if they had to compete with that. But the future is bright when it comes to vegetables and fruit. Fruit in particular is vulnerable to weather damage, so it could be a potential area of expansion for vertical farming if they can figure out the challenges of growing bushes and trees in a vertical environment. At the moment vegetables are the easy target for expansion, and that's probably what the researchers will focus on next. Anyway, thanks for the video! (Sorry, I should have said that first.) This is a fascinating topic that I think will become more and more important as the years go by.
You completely missed the bigger point against the need of vertical farming. The problem in most of the world is the "quality" of the farming done. I come from the Netherlands. We export more foodstuff than America does on a fraction of its size. We can do this, because for more than half a century we have already been using hydroponics in green houses. We already have vertical farming in widespread use. (www.meteorsystems.nl/en/growing-systems). Though not as high density as your examples as there is no need for that. Our water management even on "normal" farms is second to none. When looking at other countries. You get the situation that the water used for 1 crop of Egyptian tomato's can do a year of many crops in our greenhouses. Even most American farms are old fashioned by our standards. When Americans want more crops, like many out there, they just take more land, use more water. Simply because it's easy. We are a small country and had to feed our selves. So we needed advanced farming solutions that use little water and no pesticides and other bad things. Now we feed the world. If everyone farmed as the Dutch do now. The problem of feeding the world is gone. We would have severe overproduction and no need for vertical farms. That said, there could be some use to them in city area's to keep distribution lines short. Flying food all over the world also has an environmental impact. And with climate change reducing the water and pesticide use even further down is a good thing. But as I said, the technique is not a problem, we have been able to do this for years. The problem is getting countries and their farmers to accept this new model of growing food. If governments don't incentivize moving to new techniques by making strict environmental rules, its not going to happen. Simple rules like banning pesticides. Subsidizing greenhouses over traditional farming. Increase water cost for industrial use. (if your Spain, ban illegal water wells and make an effort to police that).
Dank u. Encouraging to use these techniques it would be Brexit her, a no-deal one in the first place. Whence no more Danish and Dutch food comes in here,,UK would be in the need of raw food. A market drive, not a fiscal one. And down this line, Scotland is a bit overpopulated to its traditional food-production, but the Durch way can be their way to remain in the EU. Malta is again a flat desert, but full with money, EU law background. A new terrain for Dutch expension?
Vertical farms can use LED lighting to augment daylighting in some futuristic designs. Comprehensively planned platform greenhouses can unite many important functions that increase the overall value of well engineered urban vertical farms. Renewable energy, water purification., food dehydration, bio labs research, and skyline enhancement are some of the mutually supporting functions vertical farms will use in the future. The local nature of a given vertical farm will depend on climate, geography, demographics, and economic demands. Thanks for your excellent presentations on a variety topics.
you joke but if I had a bunch of money to start a company to do something like this I would definitely be contacting weed growers in my area first as consultants.
@@Africanhorror Only in the sense that dutch companies like meteor systems. (www.meteorsystems.nl/en/growing-systems) supply growing systems for it. They are used big time in Canadian greenhouses as it became legalized there. But the canabis industry itself had nothing to teach. They only took techniques
Imagine, here in America in any case, all those vast malls that are now in the midst of going bankrupt. Huge infrastructures with water, sewer, power, access and egress points already in place. Economists and the like have been freaking out over retail commercial spaces like this suddenly being unnecessary and going bankrupt. Well, to my mind here's a PERFECT reuse of those malls and such. Typically speaking they are also fairly close to major urban centers. Do I sense a win-win in converting them to vertical farms and the like? John~ American Net'Zen
I was thinking along the same lines, only about office towers. With COVID accelerating work from home and the apparent demise of many middle class jobs due to AI, I'm thinking that office towers in downtown cores may be in need of new purposes. Some may be converted to housing, but I'd like to think that they'd be able to integrate an automated greenhouse of sorts into a significant portion of the sun ward facing windows.
Greens are already a high profit market, small producers abound in my area. They're fast growing but low in calories. Crops that take longer to grow (and aren't tiny) won't approach the levels of efficiency or production in the operations shown. You can't feed the world on leaves.
Vertical farming certainly has a place for salad greens in cities. One concern I have about soil less systems is how sustainable are the inputs. With aquaponics a consideration is how and where to sustainably produce the fish food. It is an intensive system.
Don't grow the Netherlands their greens in indoor farms for decades now? And aren't they bashed for it by everybody because it is energy consuming and "unnatural"? Besides, humans don't live on greens, they live on proteins, fats and carbs. These don't grow on shelves (yet).
Yes, but that's still natural light and thus single-layer. It's much lower carbon to grow in Spain and transport than grow in a Dutch heated greenhouse (unless it's using waste powerstation heat). The difference here is the multilayer/24hr aspect which increases yield so much and reduces heating-per-plant energy requirement by factor of 20 odd, but obviously also adds large lighting energy. I've not seen how the numbers compare but the main critisism is the same: energy intensiveness.
Yes, the Netherlands is an absolute agricultural power house and it's not just because they use greenhouses as they export a ton of food which means it's actually competitively priced. The future of food production is almost certaintly indoors as eletricity cost moves towards zero.
This is what I thought they might do to repurpose disused city centre office blocks in light of the pandemic. Sadly, only considerations of "how to get back to normal" appear to have been on the table. Missed opportunity for govts to get a bunch of pilots going at least
@@paprikaahmedTruthAddict Every crop humans eat is a GMO, it's just that when the genetic modification is a product of selective breeding, we don't call it a GMO. Corn may not be a healthy food source (I don't know) but if so, it's not because it's genetically modified.
One way to lower the electrical consumption could be the use of daylight harvesting/solar harvesting in a hybrid set up. Whereby natural daylight is brought in through a series of mirrors or fibre optic cables. Used next to the growth lights so they don't have to be fully turned on all the time (only night time/ rainy days). I reckon the cost of the system might not make it worthwhile to grow the crops but the technology has been there for a while. Perhaps when prices of such systems drop till a level which makes it possible for growers to still make their profit we may see such hybrid systems in place
Steel is not an issue. We can extract iron ore and turn it into steel with only renewable energy. Concrete can likely be formulated to be a CO2 sink. Use crushed olivine rock for the aggregate and the concrete should start absorbing carbon. Plastic. We need to move to recyclable plastics. Best if the material is plant sourced. (And not those plants which were buried thousands of years ago.) I suspect we may keep producing grains in soil/fields. Planting and harvesting is efficient. Grains store and ship well, unlike fresh produce. And grain crops are not what is getting blasted with insecticides and other ag chemicals.
As with everything, a single solution to our problems is shortsighted and isn't going to work by itself. Vertical farming can be a very important component of a wide variety of solutions that make up the complete picture.
There is a huge issue with vertical farming that makes it a non viable option. You have to look at calorie production. These farms are being used to produce very calorie-empty foods (leafy greens), at the cost of a huge amount of energy going into the system. Growing fruits and vegetables is what they need to be doing to have any hopes of this being an actual solution and not just an elitist jerk-off fest where people see how much money they can spend to 'save the world'. The further you get from nature, the harder and more wasteful things get.
Except you can grow any plant. The only reason they are growing leafy greens is economics, they grow fast and can be sold at a high price. But as the technology improves and the environmental damage of traditional farming gets priced in, the economics will change and more crops become viable. The price of energy will go way down too, as we gradually replace fossil fuels.
@@andrasbiro3007 Uh, I'm sure you meant to say the environmental damage from "factory-scale farming", because traditional farming is sustainable. We did it for thousands of years. Factory scale vertical farming is even more damaging to the environment, the effects are just not as clearly visible.
@@bial12345 That traditional farming could only feed like 1 billion people. We are long past that. I meant the kind of farming we are doing now. That's not exactly sustainable. Vertical farming, on the other hand, is. It's practically a closed system, at worst it needs water, because otherwise you have to condense evaporated water, which requires a lot of power. But even that is like 90% less water than what we currently use. Other than that the only thing it requires is a whole lot of power. Now if that comes from fossil fuels, than yes, it's going to be dirty. But fossil fuels are done, they are going away fast. If we just want to be clean and efficient, renewable energy is fine, but if we also want to minimize land use, than nuclear power is the way.
@@barbarasmith6005 Sure thought anyone who tells you that they can exactly predict what those climate feedback loops will do or how the climate will actually be practically changed isn't being honest. Our media does elevate the doomsday scenarios the same way it elevated the global cooling or that the planet would run out food by 1980 or the world out of oil by 2007. We should do all practical things to conserve our enviroment but unless we mean to radically reduce the living standards ( energy consumption) of the top 10% ( europeans/Americans) all that remains is scientific/engineering( and unfortunately probably capitalistic) solutions to the climate change problem.
@@pietersteenkamp5241 My dad was involved with a British climate change science team way back when I was a schoolkid (over 40 years ago). His job was to create computer programs to measure scientific data, thus allowing the 'experts' to make the necessary predictions. Although climate change science wasn't his particular field, he was interested in what these scientists were doing and asked them if there really was something to be concerned about. The answer was yes. They then gave him a list of expected effects and roughly when they would occur. Once this contract was completed and he returned home, he told me what these scientists had said would happen over the decades - and they have proved right in every single instance. The problem with the media is they are always after ratings first - truth second. If that means getting their story from a less reliable source or quoting people out of context, they are quite prepared to do so (I know only too well what it's like to be quoted out of context in a national paper, it nearly cost me very, very dearly. The reporter just wanted a story and thought nothing of the morality of what she was doing. *I will not go into details). That means media sources will happily consider apparent 'new and unsubstantiated evidence' from some little tin-pot team in the back of beyond with poor funding, or who has a crack-pot team leader that invents some contradictory belief, or a team being 'paid handsomely' by an unscrupulous oil or coal company or denialist government to lie through its teeth and contradict 'the vast majority' of truly concerned scientists whose specialist job IS to study the climate. I would sooner trust the 'majority opinion' of actual scientists, actual experts in the relevant field, than trust the two-bit comment section of a media outlet (whether that be TV, newspaper) or someone's dentist (who falsely presents himself as 'a 'scientist' just because he has the letters Dr in front of his name). You should find out the real scientists, the real climate change studies and departments. Do not think it's all right to place your trust in a few scattered, unreviewed papers written by a small minority of paid-off individuals/teams biased by oil company sponsorship or lauded by national leaders of dubious mental capacity.
What a way to start the year! This is some fresh crop indeed. I think that one possible solution to the energy costs of the Vertical Farming industry could be to synergize the procedure, in a way kinda like what aquafarming does with the relationship between the fish and the water and the fish waste. If there were some piece of urban facility that generates waste energy (as a loss or surplus) that could be recovered and/or redirected to the farms; it could reduce the cost, even if only a little. Also, I seem to recall a sci-fi novel where they mention how the hydroponic farms produce oxygen inside a space station by converting the waste CO2 from the residing population. If only there were a way to capture the CO2 from the atmosphere, or at least redirect it from the sources (like factories) and pump it directly into the farms, so a minimal amount goes into the environment and the rest go into the farms, with the farms pumping out oxygen back out as waste product instead. That method could also help bring down the CO2 imprint of a city. Let's have a think about that.
10:13 That's bollocks! These "entrepreneurs" must be subsidized by the tax payers or else they wont take the risk. THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE PROFIT NOT FEED PEOPLE.
@Just Have a Think I really appreciate the intelligence of your channel and the obvious hard work you put into it, and I was seriously loving this until you got to 8:12 'Aquaponics and fish farming'. For some reason I had you down as already sufficiently awake, intelligent and unselfish, morally consistent, and compassionate and caring for yourself and others, to not pay for or promote the unnecessary killing of sentient animals. And let's skim over the lead, mercury, PCB's and DDT in the fish bodies too which may or may not transfer in some way to the related plants. My bad. My mistake. Disappointed beyond words.
Take a look at the closed loop food system I designed which incorporates poultry, humanure and black soldier fly. Join the Facebook group CLIMATE RESISTANT FOOD
@@lexiecrewther7038 So you're a bullying animal abuser telling me that the way forward is to continue abusing and killing sentient animals? And I should listen to you why?
I am sorry to hear you are disappointed. I am a vegan and I have been for three years. I would dearly love every human to stop killing and eating sentient beings. But I am also a pragmastist and I accept that we will not convince the entirety of an evolutionary omniverous species to abstain from eating animal protein within the next thirty years. If however, we can at least offer alternatives that stop them eating industrially processed red meat and poultry then that would be a good start.
My friend has an aquaponics farm in Toledo, Ohio. He grows excellent produce and plenty of it. The fish are mostly consumers and producers of waste. The bacteria converting that waste to plant food are the real heavy lifters. Pumps, aeration, and lighting are very efficient. And the food is very healthy as the system is kept in balance. The laws and regulations need to be reset to move away from the Big Ag lobby and control structure. Decentralized food is the best way forward.
Thank you for including Aquaponics, I think it has a lot of potential. Their are lots of people doing DIY projects of this. And also students in the US. When we are on the topic of local production, maybe check out the old: Sahara Forest Project
What would be great is a replacement model for active farmers to adopt PROVEN vertical farm techniques that earn them enough profit to allow them to rewild their farm spaces, and turn in their farm equipment for vertical equipment. Governments could assist with reinvestment strategies, since most (in North America at least) already have funds for payouts when the seasons and weather are bad. GREAT TOPIC.
We could also have floating multistories high griw houses on the sea, using sunlight to condensate, as well as other types of desalination using wave power
Great episode. Also - there's the issue with cattle feed. An earlier author on this topic brought up oat grass as a low-growing alternative to feeding pigs, chickens, etc. grain, which brings it back into the optimal height zone and potentially frees up land that was going to growing food for livestock.
Some numbers for energy use compared with conventional farming and heated greenhouses would be good. One interesting thing is that presumably these facilities are in a good position to help load-balance as the plants don't care if you turn off/down the lights for a while at irregular times
Great video, Dave. Been hearing a lot about this lately, nice to see a good overview of the subject. I'm especially excited to hear about the developments with regards to wheat. That's been my main concern about this sort of thing, is it's that's all for leafy greens but no staples. Looks like that might be being dealt with. Someone below mentioned potatoes, also beans would be a good option. Possibly a complete plant based or plant heavy diet could be produced with these kinds of systems. Thanks!
All fantastic. Its just time and experience that will help these places grow a greater variety of crops. I see this work as very useful for Mars colonies too.
I have grown vegetables hydroponically for over 50 years. It works, but it's not all a bed of roses. There are several problems as there are with soil farming, just not the same ones. For anybody starting out, the simplest and most productive system is the Kratky system developed by dr. Bernard Kratky of the University of Hawaii.
Hi Folks - as many of you have pointed out, I made a mistake when I said that Ultraviolet lights are used in vertical farms. In fact, it is not ultraviolet light - that would burn the plant. It's a mix of red and blue light, which is the part of the light spectrum that the plant absorbs. My apologies for this error.
Are you a vegan?
Can you do a story on how global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% if people stopped consuming animal products? www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
Or how 70% of U.S. grain is feed to livestock?
www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/livestock-feed-and-habitat-destruction/
@@brianrcVids Or how about one on regenerative farming?
Green is in the middle of the spectrum of (humans) visible light.
There's a reason chlorophyll and chloroplasts appear green (to us)
@@jimurrata6785 not exactly. Chlorophyll and related energy converting chemicals absorb certain wavelengths of light but not others. The wavelengths not absorbed are reflected back. The wavelength most visible to humans in this reflected light is green. But of course, there is a spectrum of wavelengths that we can't see. This is why the light emitting diodes used to provide light for these plants do not include the green wavelength. Interestingly enough, I would imagine that the plants then look off black instead of green.
Looks like things are looking up for vertical farming!
Ha ha ha
@@VeganSemihCyprus33 People see what they want to see. There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The solution to the concerns you bring up is to be a part of the solution to the concerns you bring up. Being a negative Nancy is a net negative for humanity, thus contributing to the problem, rather than the solution!
My graduate work in green building and sustainable communities brought me to indoor farming. It is an intersection between energy, water and food distribution/quality. My calculation was that this was a fertile area for me to be involved in if I want to maximize my contribution to more sustainable modern economic practices. Exciting space to be involved in...once again a great and timely video. Thank you!
Especially given the pace of advancements in fusion research, MIT and their spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems being particularly exciting.
How would you recommend an out of work software engineer go about getting into this industry?
@@TXK1020 I would first look into the indoor ag industry in general. Trade events like this might help as well: indoor.ag/ All the best.
I've been following vertical farming all year it's incredibly cool
Its interesting for sure, but seems only salads are suitable. interesting to see how they develop systems for larger vegetables.
@@VeganSemihCyprus33 yeah there’s a number of reasons why that whole statement is dumb as fuck. So what’re you selling exactly?
@@jimbanda salads are easiest. other vegetables can already be grown like this and some hobbyists do it in their own home (I’ve looked into it)
@@demonz9065 yes , I just wonder how successful it can ever be as a long term solution , but I do understand it can have a part to play.
Berries can also be grown successfully under lights.
I think much more has to be done in the area of encouraging people to eat according to the seasons in their own country.
@@jimbanda not really. If we were to switch to vertical farming method anything you could grow in those vertical farms could be grown anywhere. Vertical farms have complete control over growing conditions that’s part of why they’re more efficient. No weather to screw with yield.
I love the idea of vertical farming, as a vegetarian living in Stockholm, the prospect of reliable tasty fruits & veg year-round would be amazing. Basically every fresh non-root fruit/veg is imported more than half the year, at best from the Netherlands but often from Italy or other continents. Vertical farming is energy intense, but so is shipping fruit from India or NZ.
You have plenty of cheap and clean hydro and nuclear power, so I'm surprised it's not happening already.
@@andrasbiro3007 bigger heating costs though up here.
@@magnusdagbro8226
With that much artificial lighting heating is not something you have to worry about. Cooling is more likely to be an issue.
Always surprised me how Sweden hasn't gone in on this more? I remember visiting your supermarkets, it'd be a profitable business like you said as you all love to eat green all year round even when it's punishingly cold outside and would benefit from something deep fried :P.
Well said. We here in NZ love sending you our fruit but it's a hell of a lot of food miles.
This channel has over the last 6 months has given me more hope for the furture than anything else for the last 10 years.
Thank you.
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I have an aquarium/fish tank in my living room that filters through a grow bed of basil and tomatoes. It's nice to have these things year round, especially a little taste of summer in the middle of winter. I didn't even know tomatoes would keep growing and producing year round until I tried this. 3 Year old tomato plant still going - kinda works as x-mas decoration with the green leaves + red round things :)
Imagine if apartment buildings could produce large amounts of their own food on a couple of floors. Possible to have a market on the ground and energy/rain capture over the building itself. It would bring food so much closer to the population.
My dream, at least..
It's a very good idea and can work today. It needs proper design and construction and local land use laws/zoning to carry out on a wide scale.
@@PlumSack79 Wo easy tiger... First of it rains a shitload where I am, and I am not assuming the building would collect 100% of the energy & water needs. However it would be somewhat irresponsible to not harvest at least some.
And.. this is just an idea. Obviously to become a reality takes a lot more input than than saying "hey wouldn't it be cool if we did X"
@Han Boetes you are absolutely right. It's amazing how captivating a troll can be
Check out the Venus Project started by Jacque Fresco in 1980, some 40 years ago. It's all about vertical farming in cities designed for abundance and sustainability - It IS the Future if we have one! th-cam.com/video/Yb5ivvcTvRQ/w-d-xo.html
@@michaelbartlett6864 Humans will cling on to the bitter end. You are right though. Vertical farming, but also there will be food growing along the sidewalks in the cities. That will take a while though. There is already a lot of community gardens in cities, but the whole cities will be overgrown. It would be interesting to see a future where cities export food to the rural areas instead of the other way around. Then we can have more nature and wildlife, which will be essential for a healthier future. Otherwise we will end up like Idiocracy
For nearly 7 years I have been growing as many herbs and vegetables as I can in my small flat. Inside during the Rocky Mountain winters and on the balcony in the warm months. I too use growing lights. Now that the lights are LEDs it is quite economic. If we all did more or less the same and we can get other foods from these vertical producers..., why not?
I think you bring another interesting point to this: people growing their own food in their homes. Even growing 5% of your food would mean a lot on a global scale!!! My concern is always cost though; if it costs more to grow your food than to buy it, it greatly reduces the interest of this, especially for the less favored people :/
That is true. But in many countries supermarket vegetables are full of pesticides. I would definitely grow my own given the option.
@@DunnickFayuro if you already have a spare area of land, planting a fruit tree gives great shade and lots of fruit for no cost (other than a sapling if cannot find one for free). I really enjoy having 6 different fruits in my garden
@@srpenguinbr If you already have a spare area of land, you belong to the favored ones :/
Just need to start eating rats/cats for meat more and we have all we need on the plate from home. :D
There is always the Shanghai Tower type solution, which has a twin wall structure, offices, and a hotel in the inner structure, and the tower's green spaces are between the inner wall, and the outside wall.
being around green growing things is good for us, psychologicall. Obviously it is best if those green growing things are pretty too, but just having walls of vertical farms around us would still be better than walls everywhere.
As with every other aspect of fighting climate change, there's no silver bullet. Combining vertical farming with different sources of renewable energy and sustainable land farming looks like a safer bet, given our population's exponential growth. That's why i'm more optimistic when i see different aproaches being attempted at solving the current issues: they all can be eventually interwoven to create a more stable production network that has less impact on our planet's health and biodiversity.
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Thanks for another great video. I run a small commercial aquaponics farm. One of the advantages often overlooked on these growing methods is that pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are not necessary. In fact, in the case of aquaponics, if one were to use these poisonous chemicals, the fish would likely not respond well. A win win for heathier food and a cleaner environment.
I love the constructive nature of your channel!
You should be justifiably proud to have an international audience. In that light please remember to add "kilometers" and "hectares" to your "miles" and "acres" for those folks in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and all of the former Commonwealth countries like India, Pakistan, etc. and those who have been well taught in English in their home country or have studied abroad and are now back home in their metric countries. Thanks for keeping up that global perspective, mate!
1.6km/mile, easy. 0.4 hectares/acre. Quick mental conversion.
@@youbigtubership Best if the presenter includes it directly (as many others do).
@@ezrasteinberg2016 I found it better if I can have a rough idea and listen with that. Imperial/metric are only differences in scale, not language.
21st century = Metric
I was obsessed with the idea of vertical farming a few years back. There are some serious benefits ranging from land use, localised production leading to decreased transportation and packaging requirements, the efficiency of water and nutrient consumption, the lack of need for spreading pesticides and herbicides out in the wild effecting all the ecosystems surrounding farming (although i will say that pesticides do still have their place in indoor horticulture sometimes because of the lack of natural predators for things like aphids, white fly, spider mite etc)
But the energy use is the real kicker. Hydroponic LED lights use specific wavelengths used for photosynthesis, mostly red and blue, which makes them about as efficient as you could possibly get for the purpose and yet you still need about 300 watts per square metre.
Lettuce in a greenhouse can be grown using 250kWh/year/square m but for hydroponics that's more like 2,000kWh/year/square metre just from the lights assuming an 18 hour photoperiod is used (that's part of how you get such high yields with hydroponics)
So once you factor in climate control etc it's probably about 10x as power hungry as a greenhouse per square metre and if you used natural gas power for this at 400gCO2eq/kWh then that's 800kgCO2/square metre/year
This is why alternative energy is so god damn important but for the time being we already have to electrify transportation, heating, cooling, industry etc etc and we're only about 11% electrified. Adding another huge power hog onto the grid to do a job that the sun was already doing is nuts. All the extra clean energy we can get our hands on is already needed to displace fossil fuels.
One day... Maybe... We might have enough nuclear to get that 800kgCO2/square metre/year down to 24kgCO2/square metre and then it might be worth it. But we aint there yet
Hopefully they will use solar and wind power and no more nuclear will be built. Nuclear just isn't necessary anymore.
@@Burnrate to go 100 solar and wind while also electrifying everything would mean covering almost everything and creating a waste stream of monumental proportions. I sincerely hope we don't do that
I have been thinking about this question, vertical farming, for few years already. Just few days ago, a friend of mine asked me to have a look at a farmland. I will make a small system to have some fun soon.
why buy farmland to make a vertical farm? Farmland is usually expensive because it is farmland, the land has been worked and all tree stumps, large stones and things picked from it... Buy an old abandoned lot instead save money and property tax, restore poor land, too
@@voidremoved Thank you for the advice. I am not buying a farmland (at least not yet), my friend just asked me to share a farmland. And because I don't have experience in farming, I may just take a corner to have a leisure farming.
Large scale farming is something else, need to think from breakeven to risk analysis ...etc.
Thank you for this video and channel.
Seeing the use of fish with hydroponics reminds me of the use of ‘black soldier fly’ larvae to feed the fish. The larvae are great at reducing food scrap waste, etcetera. An interesting subject in and of itself / and will be one of the multitude of things done differently to backfill this hole we’ve dug for ourselves.
I’ve raised black soldier fly larvae for years, and they’re prolific, hardy and odor free (if raised properly).
Also great for feeding other animals like chickens and reptiles,, and adding protein to other feeds for hogs etc. Great tool for composting difficult kitchen wastes.
Greatest advantage to vertical farming is the fact that it is local, which means savings in transport and where growing seasons are short or non-existant.
And I suspect these nay-sayer criticisms have failed to take that into account.
Remote Arctic communities with access only to very expensive imported greens love the innovation. Cheaper vegetables when none are available in the winter.
Food costs in the arctic are multiple times that in southern latitudes and this tech solves that problem. This is not technology for where food is plentiful, but for where food is expensive and not as easily accessible.
th-cam.com/users/results?search_query=food+cost+arctic+
I love the symbiosis between farming fish, and growing veg in the water. 👍
Japanese Rice paddy have small fish, Incests and Aquatic Animals.
its called SATOYAMA.
@@markplott4820 I hope you mean 'insects'.....
@@yodab.at1746 - yes, insects ......dang autocorrect.
I always find it interesting that all this new, adapting to living in cities stuff, is also the type of thing that we will most likely need for establishing ourselves in outer space and on other planets.
And to not massively fuck up other planets, if we ever get to colonize them.
For future space colonies, I'd much rather have a bunch of cities in nice places connected by underground highspeed railway than the massive urban sprawl we have here on Earth...
Exactly, Zatar 123. The technologies to make our world a better place are also the technologies we need to develop to live in space. This extends to other things too, like energy conservation and total recycling.
@@midnight8341 We don't know of any other planets that actually have an atmosphere suitable for habitation or cultivation, so there's that. Or are you talking about Terraforming a planet? We don't really have that kind of tech yet ... not short of applying centuries of automation and brute force to the problem.
@@joelcorley3478 both. And I think other planets and/or terraforming will come faster than we think. Our progress is exponential and humans are very very bad in predicting exponential developments.
we humans are created to live on planet Earth. our body is adapted to live in the conditions on Earth. So if you like to live on Mars, go ahead and take these ideas with you. good luck
Glad to see you're still covering innovative things that give rise to hope, I feel like you've turned a little light on inside of me, so, thank you!
Personally I would love to see urban sprawls be adapted into arkologies.
We love the idea of vertical farming, for a variety of reasons, but we have some questions about the nutritional value of plants grown with only the bare essentials of their required nutrients.
What about the many trace elements and organic compounds that are typically found in healthy soils and get taken up by growing plants? Also, what about the many complex plant exudates that are excreted by diverse plant communities thru their roots and are made available by water transport to neighboring plants?
Will vertical farming create edible crops that look healthy (buffed in fact) but will be lacking in all sorts of micronutrients, plant hormones & trace mineral compounds that might be necessary, in the long-term, for robust human health?
(The reason that these questions might be important is because science & technology have been largely co-opted by business & finance, and not telling the whole story of products & services that are for sale has become the norm in sales & marketing. In the 21st century many things high tech are "cool" right up until we find out that they weren't and now there's a class action settlement of some sort. "Round Up Ready" comes to mind almost immediately as a cautionary tale of an FDA-approved high tech farming solution that turned out to cause cancer, remain persistent in animal manures, and, eventually, make their way into living human cells. Being in high tech my whole adult life, I have learned by experience to be cautious & suspicious.)
I would recommend you searching for experts and scientists in the field of this new tech and ask them these questions.
People who are involved with VF might be biased, but good scientists aren't. Maybe you can even ask some who are for it and others who see it critical to get both views on your stated issues.
Presumably high end clients will come to understand that there is more to vegetables than how they look and they can perhaps afford a higher end product that is grown with a wide range of micro nutrients and the like. Additionally we can take into account that vegetables/plants produce sometimes hundreds of chemicals to ward off various predators/plant diseases so in theory we could start to breed them out of them and reduce those risks to our health.
You lost me at Roundup "turned out to cause cancer". This was a conclusion reached by a jury of non-scientists, in a courtroom, having been advised by "expert witnesses" paid by legal teams who had 289 million reasons for bias. It is not a conclusion supported by actual science.
sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-on-glyphosate/
Your dead right Alan, So many of these 'wonder' plant solutions even look anemic. I'm building a commercial hydroponics system to the highest nutrition produce aims in Winford nr Bristol oz99osborne@gmail.com
Why couldn't those nutrients be added to the irrigation?
Hi Buddy,
Ag-Scientist here with experience in the urban farming sector. Let me tell you two things!!
1..Vertical farming and urban farming is here to stay, and will proliferate in the coming years!
2..We don't fully know how profitable these vertical, LED farming systems are!! Aero-farms only turned over 4 million US last year! Seasonal urban farming i certainly profitable!! just check out Curtis stone in, Kelowna BC.
I appreciate the video. Thanks :)
I was born in 1969
my inner 15-year-old kid: "nice..."
As unlikely as it sounds, I myself was *conceived* during '69.
I think that focusing on fruit, vegetables and greens, as well as herbs, spices and medicinal plants for urban farming is a better priority. Grain is a concentrated dry seed grown on a big stalk, so most of the plant isn't edible, growing wheat in a city means figuring out what to do with all the hulls and straw, whereas lettuce, carrots, radishes, apples, you just pluck them off a plant and walk them to the shelf at the farmer's market, minimal processing and waste. Grain is the most shippable food in the world, it's dry, keeps well at room temperature and you can handle it with a shovel and not damage it. Since it's dry, you aren't effectively shipping tons of clean drinking water from the place where it's grown to the city either. If you have water reclamation as part of your city's sewage system, the water used to grow an urban strawberry can stay in circulation within that city instead of being shipped half a continent away.
TLDR, grain is already the most efficient food to transport so it should be a low priority for reducing that shipping distance, there's more benefit to be had changing the way we get more perishable and delicate crops. Besides, the reason grain accounts for so much of our diet is a consequence of it being so portable and storable, who's to say that grain's share of the demand wouldn't drop off a lot if we could get access to better calories year-round close to home.
"growing wheat in a city means figuring out what to do with all the hulls and straw"
construction, insulation, fuel, mulching, composting, packaging...... etc
it would end up as a sideline business of waste exporting.
just as he explained using aquapanics side by side with fish farming, it would be the same with grain and rice. multi - grow models would initially be less effiencent, but would eventually work out better as it would serve mulitple uses..
What a wonderful way to use abandoned, urban buildings.
Or grow fresh greens all year long in areas where it was previously impossible. Like Alaska.
I remember a Popular science article about a greenhouse/fish farm back in the 70's or early 80's. To help feed the fish, there were screens above the tanks upon which table scraps were placed. Insects would lay eggs in the rotting food scraps, but the larva would tend to fall betwwen the screen's mesh into the water as fish food. The fish water would be taken from the bottom of the tank, circulated to the plant roots and also to a ping pong ball filled clear chamber in which algae would grow on the balls surfaces (not sure which got the water first, the plants or the algae, the algae was to remove any excess ammonia), last step was a spray of water onto a plastic wall, down pebbles. Counting you dining table, it was meant as a near closed loop system.
The transport of food was the very thing I thought of as the video started. . .
It’s Sunday. . . while some people go to church, some of us “just have a think”
I would pinch that last sentence as my channel's strapline Bram, but I suspect there would be unrest if I did! ;-)
@@JustHaveaThink have a look at the closed loop food system I designed. In addition to aquaponics, it incorporates poultry, as well as humanure and food waste recycling using the black soldier fly. Join us at CLIMATE RESISTANT FOOD Facebook group
I heard of this sometime in the past. It is intriguing. I live in a town of 2000. I'll bet that a 10 story 1 square block vertical farming facility would produce a great deal of the required produce for our town and some of the surrounding area. The questions that immediately come to mind are: 1) What is the initial cost of setting this up? 2) How long would it take to get all 10 square blocks producing? 3) What is the production cost per crop? 4) How many crops can be produced? 5) Is the cost, once production is fully established, comparable to field produced crops?
I support vertical farming.
I stand for vertical farming.
Vertical farming has been in use for many years in Dutch greenhouses. The reason America does not use it, because of non-existing environmental rules. Therefore grabbing land and using pesticides is just cheaper.
3 dimension aquaculture in a shipping container based greenhouse is particularly intreging to me. This is mainly because your growing more than one valuable resource locally. You also get a climate controlled year round environment growing and it's a technologically supported organic ecosystem.
you can get 100x yield in a shipping container than a VEG Garden.
@@markplott4820 I know, that's the idea! You can maneuver aquaculture based hydroponics to work in a shipping container. It's a shipping container and a veg garden.
This feels like a multitude of different solutions for growing crops in different urban situations. Scotland has cheap wind power and redundant spaces.... offices, factories etc. London has access to cheap solar and after the pandemic there should be a lot of empty offices....
You know, Dave, one day, one of your videos will be only 99.9999% excellent, well documented and presented, and some of your viewers who are now used to this regular level of perfection might get a tad disappointed for a nanosecond... ;-)
Lots of interest from the comments about these vertical farms, a great subject matter. Whether we like them or not, they are bound to stay, so as well embrace them and work together to solve all the issues they might raise. The technical aspects seem relatively easy to address, my biggest concern is vegetable farmers for which these greens are cash crops that help offset less profitable basic crops that we also need, such as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, etc. If salads and radishes are grown in vertical farms, those grown on open soil or green houses by real farmers will become less and less relevant.
That's an extremely kind thing to say. Thank you :-) I agree with you about job displacement. In fact I believe it is one of the most serious challenges we face in our struggle against climate change. All governments need to ensure working families are supported and people are retrained into the multiple new areas of gainful employment in a sustainable economy.
'These new, city-based, fresh-food factories'...
Lovely bit of poetry, skips off the tongue.
Thank you :-)
It's a good alliteration :D
I just want to say thank you very much
Now I know where will I apply my skill if I ever get graduated in Environmental Engineering or Chemical Engineering.
You might first wanna check out the syllabus, chemical engineering has more to do with distillation ,piping and transport of fluid
@@BronzeAgeMan1350 yup. that is my stuff since I have a degree in Laboratory Analysis.
Good luck to you!!!
Your videos are Great!! The HOPIUM is very comforting!
I would be VERY excited once they figure out how to grow and harvest: Corn, Wheat, beans, tomatoes, rice.
I'm growing green beans. It is winter here but the plants seem happy enough with LED sun spectrum grow lights.
They are growing tomatoes already. Beans and wheats could be next.
They know how to grow them its just that they are not economically viable.
buy, Shipping Container , and convert it to Hydroponic Produce , 100x yield compared to Vegatable Garden , best of all NO PESTS or weeds.
When Epcot Center (Disney World) opened in 1982 I made a visit. One of the displays they had was a system of growing tomatoes where the plants were suspended in air and their roots were periodically sprayed with nutrient rich water. The yields were very high.
They were growing in a greenhouse so they were using natural light. But artificial light would do the job as well. Plus temperatures can be controlled to maximize flavor.
Tomatoes seem to need some heat to encourage the chemical reaction that boosts their flavor but if the temperature gets too hot the plant ceases forming fruit. You've probably had first hand experience with the "too cool" lack of flavor from tomatoes grown in greenhouses in the winter.
Although vertical farming may be technologically efficient the end product is food made without soil, but also soul. Humans developed in equilibrium with soil, bacteria, fungi, viruses etc. Regenerative farming has shown the way to produce food with maximized nutrient density; which is said to be essential to produce healthy human beings. Having said this may I applaud you for producing such interesting and well presented videos.
Those lights aren't usually UV, they're mostly red leds with some blue. Plants don't require much green light. That's why many plant leaves reflect green light.
Yes, you are right., I got that bit wrong - I've just put an Errata note in the description section.
At 1:21 the concerns about high cost and energy intensive nature of vertical farming was covered by a sweeping statement about advanced technology and cost reductions. It’s good if a table showing the costs for vertical farms compared with traditional flat farming could be shared with an explanation of how the vertical farming costs are comparable or perhaps lower.
My former housemate did aquaponics in the basement. Granted he grew weed LOL but it was still really cool 😎
I heard you can cook amazing foods with weed ;P
@@DunnickFayuro a Chinese neighbour of mine uses this and grows alsorts on nice veg in his garden.
Great, informative video again. Wheat, soya, palm oil and rice need to be grown this way to save the rain forests. Imagine if you could have a vertical farm in a desert using recycled water, natural light carried by fibre optic cables, and solar panels for the electricity - it would almost be self sufficient.
This would drastically help with water shortages.
Why fiber optic cables? Just use a transparent roof. You could call it a house for green things. A green house, if you will.
Sunlight travelling through fiberoptics. How about fiber optic "trees" on the roof tops collecting light
What? You mean a ‘skylight’? I have this brilliant idea that will reduce power consumption wasted on lighting. A series of expensive fibre optics that transfer light from rooftops to vertical surfaces. Oh wait a minute. They are called windows
@@davidsteer8142 Light pipes are a possibility.
@@StuTubed Yes, like windows, they already exist. We call them (brand name) skylights. I have two in my house to light a room that lacks natural light. But, they use a reflective film in a tube, not expensive fibre optics.
Indeed, I know they exist. I mentioned them since they're a good way of getting natural light into places where it's not feasible to install a conventional window or skylight.
Woo hoo! I have an aquponic garden in my house!! I love aquaponicss😄
Omg! I agree! Aquaponics is the future!! Healthy meat AND healthy vegetables all in one!
Love the puns, keep it up! It's like a treasure hunt to find them in almost every other sentence :-)
Glad you like them! :-)
'vertical farms are 'cropping up' everywhere...' very subtle.
Best on TH-cam as usual. Thank you for your efforts.
Wow, thank you!
We can keep coming up with clever new ideas for feeding an ever increasing population ...but in the end if nothing stops population GROWTH we will have no ideas left. It will be literally impossible. There will be no science or technical solution for feeding everyone. The best Idea I have seen for a sustainable society is the non monetary RBE system idea and yet even that would not be sustainable and could not succeed if there is no stopping population GROWTH. This is a finite planet with finite resources. Infinite population growth and sustainability is an impossibility .
What is your solution, Thanos? I think we all know the problems or at least the most glaring ones, but how to do anything meaningful about it in a timely manner seems to elude us all.
@@beepstar899 They say an average of a 2.5 birth-rate would produce a stable non growing population but as to how to get people to stop producing even more children than that I don't have a clue...seems to me that it should be more than enough kids for anyone but it isn't. You just get people angry if you even talk about it.
I read a study somewhere that said decreasing relative poverty and increasing education standards could lead to slowing down population growth.
@@mightyjoestone Yes ..that does seem to be a proven fact ..and that is the hope I have in that if we changed to a non monetary RBE system then a reduction in birth rates would come almost naturally simply because it would end poverty and increase education. We will never end poverty or infinite growth with a capitalist system. Capitalism actually requires an infinitely growing population in order to 'work'
We could expand into space :) But I agree population control is better. And that is simple to do. Statisticians (our world in data) have shown that birthrate and early child death are directly related. Poor people depend on their children when they are old. Therefore even if the are still poor, but their children are in good health, they will have less of them. So simply put, want to bring population down? Make sure every child survives.
Another great thing with today's tech is we can run rapid experimentation with plants to find their optimal light frequencies, CO2 levels, nutrients, temperature and for some "day & night" cycle.
Machine Learning greatly assists this process too. I am confident they will have wheat solved by the end of the decade.
As someone who has a small scale commercial vertical farming operation in California, I firmly believe the future isn't in these massive farms... Because you still have to ship the massive production somewhere using trucks. They produce too much for one city.
The future is in small scale urban agriculture. Either on a personal level for your own food by growing at home, or commercial operations on residential zoning. Check out curtis stone. He is grossing huge profits on 1/4th an acre market gardening.
We need to move away from this centralized model of massive corporations and factories making all the food and we need to get back to decentralizing food production in urban centers through having many urban farmers in one city.
This the first video I've seen here, and I like it here. I'll be back...
Imagine vertical farming in a boring tunnel with geothermal power, food security for the rest of humanities future
Sounds ‘boring’. 😂
8:15 Excellent idea. On an earlier topic, I was thinking that similar synergies could be used in the renewable energy space by building molten salt thermal solar plants next to liquid air plants and utilising some of the heat for recondensing the steam for expanding liquid air and driving the turbines. Once the steam has been produced by the turbine from the molten salt and driven the turbine, the steam could then be recondensed by passing it through a heat exchanger in the liquid air plant, in turn driving the liquid air expansion process. Once the superheated steam was cooled back to close to below 100C, the water would flow back to the solar thermal plant turbine, ready to be re-heated by the molten salt at 500+C.
This would be an ongoing mutually symbiotic process, since the inefficiencies of both molten salt and liquid air both arise from the recooling for molten salt and reheating for liquid air processes.
In the event that more than enough renewable energy (from local wind or local solar PV) was being produced, this could be stored in both liquid air form and/or heat capacitors for molten salt, again acting as a battery or energy storage device. The two would be balanced constantly by an algorithm, so that there was always enough heat to regas the liquid air and drive the steam turbine, and always enough liquid air stored ready to condense the steam turbine's steam back into water. So you would always have additional molten salt capacitors and liquid air vessels, which would fill and empty depending on demand. If there was low demand, then solar PV and/or wind would continue to make liquified air and store it, and thermal solar would continue to heat molten salt in heat capacitors and store that in storage tanks. In the event that energy was demanded, then stored molten salt would be brought into play at driving turbines and heating liquid air.
During the day, solar PV would drive liquid air collection and solar PV would drive molten salt collection in heat capacitors (as well as generating any electricity needed during the day.) At night, when both solar PV and solar thermal closed down, molten salt from the capacitors would be released into the system to continue to drive steam turbines and heat liquid air to drive liquid air turbines. This means 24/7 production of electricity.
Probably best suited for sunny climates that supports solar thermal, although you could do the same with wind, but less efficiently since you'd need to use the wind energy to heat the salt electrically (similarly to how liquid metal batteries are heated I would guess.)
UV lights? But photosynthesis requires primarily red and blue wavelengths...?
Yes. I seem to have got that bit wrong.
I hope this technology takes off!
It has been there for decades: www.meteorsystems.nl/en/growing-systems. There is not need for the density shown, just a need for more environmental regulation to force countries other than the Netherlands to actually invest in it. We export more food that America does on a fraction of the size and with a fraction of the resources.
Oh, vertical farming! This is one of my favorite subjects, because it's a necessity if humans are ever going to live in space. And it's also a natural extension of the idea of agriculture. Thousands of years ago the first proto-farmers discovered they could get more edible plants if they took control of seeding and watering them, instead of letting nature do all the work. Vertical farming today is taking control of everything else and removing all the randomness of nature from agriculture. It's an extremely human thing to do.
But there are problems, and you pointed them out really well in the video. The biggest problem is trying to replace the sun with artificial light. The sun shines for free, so it's always going to be difficult to beat that with electrical power. Of course the idea is to maximize the advantages of vertical farming (water and land conservation, no diseases, pests or destructive weather and the ability to push agriculture to its theoretical maximum of production) to the point where it becomes cost competitive with growing plants outside. We're not quite there yet, but as you said the engineers are finding greater mechanical and electrical efficiencies all the time, particularly with the technology of LEDs, so it's possible that point might be reached in the near future, _especially_ when teamed up with renewable energy sources.
But right now the biggest problem with vertical farming is what they're actually growing in those food factories, and you pointed this out as well. The vast majority of real world agriculture is devoted to cereal crops, with leafy greens just a subset of the subset of vegetables. To truly change the world and eliminate food security, we'd need to invest in vertical farming the same way we invest in computers or automobiles today, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building the infrastructure and then devoting it to crops that aren't that profitable. In my own country I can tell you that (pre-pandemic) wheat wasn't that profitable. Farmers were already turning away from it in favor of other crops like barley and canola. It's really hard to imagine how a vertical farming industry could make a profit if they had to compete with that.
But the future is bright when it comes to vegetables and fruit. Fruit in particular is vulnerable to weather damage, so it could be a potential area of expansion for vertical farming if they can figure out the challenges of growing bushes and trees in a vertical environment. At the moment vegetables are the easy target for expansion, and that's probably what the researchers will focus on next.
Anyway, thanks for the video! (Sorry, I should have said that first.) This is a fascinating topic that I think will become more and more important as the years go by.
Always enjoy your videos, good job!
You completely missed the bigger point against the need of vertical farming. The problem in most of the world is the "quality" of the farming done. I come from the Netherlands. We export more foodstuff than America does on a fraction of its size. We can do this, because for more than half a century we have already been using hydroponics in green houses. We already have vertical farming in widespread use. (www.meteorsystems.nl/en/growing-systems). Though not as high density as your examples as there is no need for that. Our water management even on "normal" farms is second to none. When looking at other countries. You get the situation that the water used for 1 crop of Egyptian tomato's can do a year of many crops in our greenhouses. Even most American farms are old fashioned by our standards. When Americans want more crops, like many out there, they just take more land, use more water. Simply because it's easy. We are a small country and had to feed our selves. So we needed advanced farming solutions that use little water and no pesticides and other bad things. Now we feed the world. If everyone farmed as the Dutch do now. The problem of feeding the world is gone. We would have severe overproduction and no need for vertical farms.
That said, there could be some use to them in city area's to keep distribution lines short. Flying food all over the world also has an environmental impact. And with climate change reducing the water and pesticide use even further down is a good thing.
But as I said, the technique is not a problem, we have been able to do this for years. The problem is getting countries and their farmers to accept this new model of growing food. If governments don't incentivize moving to new techniques by making strict environmental rules, its not going to happen. Simple rules like banning pesticides. Subsidizing greenhouses over traditional farming. Increase water cost for industrial use. (if your Spain, ban illegal water wells and make an effort to police that).
such a pity that those tomatos taste like shit :-(
Dank u.
Encouraging to use these techniques it would be Brexit her, a no-deal one in the first place. Whence no more Danish and Dutch food comes in here,,UK would be in the need of raw food. A market drive, not a fiscal one. And down this line, Scotland is a bit overpopulated to its traditional food-production, but the Durch way can be their way to remain in the EU. Malta is again a flat desert, but full with money, EU law background.
A new terrain for Dutch expension?
Do we grow our potatoes in those greenhouses? No, we don't.
Excellent video again!
Plants use blue and red light spectrum...not UV. Just to clarify.
Vertical farms can use LED lighting to augment daylighting in some futuristic designs.
Comprehensively planned platform greenhouses can unite many important functions that increase the overall value of well engineered urban vertical farms. Renewable energy, water purification., food dehydration, bio labs research, and skyline enhancement are some of the mutually supporting functions vertical farms will use in the future.
The local nature of a given vertical farm will depend on climate, geography, demographics, and economic demands.
Thanks for your excellent presentations on a variety topics.
"they" should team up with the marijuana industry. They have alot of these technologies down pat, hydro and aeroponics.
you joke but if I had a bunch of money to start a company to do something like this I would definitely be contacting weed growers in my area first as consultants.
That industry "stole" or took all of i'st techniques from dutch greenhouses. So no need to team up with that industry
they already have
@@Africanhorror Only in the sense that dutch companies like meteor systems. (www.meteorsystems.nl/en/growing-systems) supply growing systems for it. They are used big time in Canadian greenhouses as it became legalized there. But the canabis industry itself had nothing to teach. They only took techniques
yes we do...
Imagine, here in America in any case, all those vast malls that are now in the midst of going bankrupt. Huge infrastructures with water, sewer, power, access and egress points already in place. Economists and the like have been freaking out over retail commercial spaces like this suddenly being unnecessary and going bankrupt.
Well, to my mind here's a PERFECT reuse of those malls and such. Typically speaking they are also fairly close to major urban centers. Do I sense a win-win in converting them to vertical farms and the like?
John~
American Net'Zen
I was thinking along the same lines, only about office towers. With COVID accelerating work from home and the apparent demise of many middle class jobs due to AI, I'm thinking that office towers in downtown cores may be in need of new purposes. Some may be converted to housing, but I'd like to think that they'd be able to integrate an automated greenhouse of sorts into a significant portion of the sun ward facing windows.
Greens are already a high profit market, small producers abound in my area. They're fast growing but low in calories. Crops that take longer to grow (and aren't tiny) won't approach the levels of efficiency or production in the operations shown. You can't feed the world on leaves.
Vertical farming certainly has a place for salad greens in cities. One concern I have about soil less systems is how sustainable are the inputs. With aquaponics a consideration is how and where to sustainably produce the fish food. It is an intensive system.
Don't grow the Netherlands their greens in indoor farms for decades now? And aren't they bashed for it by everybody because it is energy consuming and "unnatural"? Besides, humans don't live on greens, they live on proteins, fats and carbs. These don't grow on shelves (yet).
Yes, but that's still natural light and thus single-layer. It's much lower carbon to grow in Spain and transport than grow in a Dutch heated greenhouse (unless it's using waste powerstation heat). The difference here is the multilayer/24hr aspect which increases yield so much and reduces heating-per-plant energy requirement by factor of 20 odd, but obviously also adds large lighting energy. I've not seen how the numbers compare but the main critisism is the same: energy intensiveness.
Yes, the Netherlands is an absolute agricultural power house and it's not just because they use greenhouses as they export a ton of food which means it's actually competitively priced. The future of food production is almost certaintly indoors as eletricity cost moves towards zero.
A very good presentation of the various forms of alternative agriculture. I look forward to entrepreneurs attracting investors for such projects.
This is what I thought they might do to repurpose disused city centre office blocks in light of the pandemic. Sadly, only considerations of "how to get back to normal" appear to have been on the table. Missed opportunity for govts to get a bunch of pilots going at least
And building factories to reduce our dependence on China
thanks for covering Nordic Harvest, one of our investments
Neat
Idea, stop wasting half of the corn that is turned into biofuel.
I really think their needs to be a better way to produce biofuel that doesn't involve farm land.
Corn is mostly GMO, not healthy food source option
@@paprikaahmedTruthAddict Every crop humans eat is a GMO, it's just that when the genetic modification is a product of selective breeding, we don't call it a GMO. Corn may not be a healthy food source (I don't know) but if so, it's not because it's genetically modified.
And stop wasting half of the food, thrown into the bin.
Great comprehensive video. Big thanks!! You save me research time :)
Youngster, I was born in 68
:-)
One way to lower the electrical consumption could be the use of daylight harvesting/solar harvesting in a hybrid set up. Whereby natural daylight is brought in through a series of mirrors or fibre optic cables. Used next to the growth lights so they don't have to be fully turned on all the time (only night time/ rainy days). I reckon the cost of the system might not make it worthwhile to grow the crops but the technology has been there for a while. Perhaps when prices of such systems drop till a level which makes it possible for growers to still make their profit we may see such hybrid systems in place
Elon could dig some tunnels, fill them with plants, power it with solar and deliver it with Cyber Trucks.....on MARS!
As long as it increased shareholder value he would.
He's welcome to go.
his Brother KIMBALL MUSK already has a Vertical Farm Company using Shipping Containers.
He hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. Why go to Mars?
@@jimmyrichardson67 war
Amazing informative video. Fantastic job
The direct energy inputs could be renewable but so much more steel, concrete and plastic? Got me thinking, but we need to talk more about top soil!
Renewable how?
@@felixfungle-bung4688 the sources of power for heating, lighting in the systems discussed.
@@matthewbrooker what about Water, Nutrients, pesticides, fungicide, CO2,
Simple solution, use what Resources you already have , like RAIL CARS and Shipping Containers , and make use of RENEWABLE Energy and Battery Storage.
Steel is not an issue. We can extract iron ore and turn it into steel with only renewable energy.
Concrete can likely be formulated to be a CO2 sink. Use crushed olivine rock for the aggregate and the concrete should start absorbing carbon.
Plastic. We need to move to recyclable plastics. Best if the material is plant sourced. (And not those plants which were buried thousands of years ago.)
I suspect we may keep producing grains in soil/fields. Planting and harvesting is efficient. Grains store and ship well, unlike fresh produce. And grain crops are not what is getting blasted with insecticides and other ag chemicals.
As with everything, a single solution to our problems is shortsighted and isn't going to work by itself. Vertical farming can be a very important component of a wide variety of solutions that make up the complete picture.
There is a huge issue with vertical farming that makes it a non viable option. You have to look at calorie production. These farms are being used to produce very calorie-empty foods (leafy greens), at the cost of a huge amount of energy going into the system. Growing fruits and vegetables is what they need to be doing to have any hopes of this being an actual solution and not just an elitist jerk-off fest where people see how much money they can spend to 'save the world'. The further you get from nature, the harder and more wasteful things get.
... but wouldn't you like to see wheat fields replaced by solar panels and buildings? No.
Except you can grow any plant. The only reason they are growing leafy greens is economics, they grow fast and can be sold at a high price. But as the technology improves and the environmental damage of traditional farming gets priced in, the economics will change and more crops become viable. The price of energy will go way down too, as we gradually replace fossil fuels.
@@andrasbiro3007 Uh, I'm sure you meant to say the environmental damage from "factory-scale farming", because traditional farming is sustainable. We did it for thousands of years.
Factory scale vertical farming is even more damaging to the environment, the effects are just not as clearly visible.
@@bial12345
That traditional farming could only feed like 1 billion people. We are long past that. I meant the kind of farming we are doing now. That's not exactly sustainable. Vertical farming, on the other hand, is. It's practically a closed system, at worst it needs water, because otherwise you have to condense evaporated water, which requires a lot of power. But even that is like 90% less water than what we currently use. Other than that the only thing it requires is a whole lot of power. Now if that comes from fossil fuels, than yes, it's going to be dirty. But fossil fuels are done, they are going away fast. If we just want to be clean and efficient, renewable energy is fine, but if we also want to minimize land use, than nuclear power is the way.
This is a very important technology moving forward and can gain significant efficiency with good research.
Why am I still hearing terms like: ‘By 2050 we’ll’.............
They should say, "by 2030, we'll be....". There's just a decade left to cut our emissions to keep the climate feedbacks from taking over.
@@barbarasmith6005 Sure thought anyone who tells you that they can exactly predict what those climate feedback loops will do or how the climate will actually be practically changed isn't being honest. Our media does elevate the doomsday scenarios the same way it elevated the global cooling or that the planet would run out food by 1980 or the world out of oil by 2007. We should do all practical things to conserve our enviroment but unless we mean to radically reduce the living standards ( energy consumption) of the top 10% ( europeans/Americans) all that remains is scientific/engineering( and unfortunately probably capitalistic) solutions to the climate change problem.
@@pietersteenkamp5241 My dad was involved with a British climate change science team way back when I was a schoolkid (over 40 years ago). His job was to create computer programs to measure scientific data, thus allowing the 'experts' to make the necessary predictions.
Although climate change science wasn't his particular field, he was interested in what these scientists were doing and asked them if there really was something to be concerned about. The answer was yes. They then gave him a list of expected effects and roughly when they would occur. Once this contract was completed and he returned home, he told me what these scientists had said would happen over the decades - and they have proved right in every single instance.
The problem with the media is they are always after ratings first - truth second. If that means getting their story from a less reliable source or quoting people out of context, they are quite prepared to do so (I know only too well what it's like to be quoted out of context in a national paper, it nearly cost me very, very dearly. The reporter just wanted a story and thought nothing of the morality of what she was doing. *I will not go into details).
That means media sources will happily consider apparent 'new and unsubstantiated evidence' from some little tin-pot team in the back of beyond with poor funding, or who has a crack-pot team leader that invents some contradictory belief, or a team being 'paid handsomely' by an unscrupulous oil or coal company or denialist government to lie through its teeth and contradict 'the vast majority' of truly concerned scientists whose specialist job IS to study the climate.
I would sooner trust the 'majority opinion' of actual scientists, actual experts in the relevant field, than trust the two-bit comment section of a media outlet (whether that be TV, newspaper) or someone's dentist (who falsely presents himself as 'a 'scientist' just because he has the letters Dr in front of his name).
You should find out the real scientists, the real climate change studies and departments. Do not think it's all right to place your trust in a few scattered, unreviewed papers written by a small minority of paid-off individuals/teams biased by oil company sponsorship or lauded by national leaders of dubious mental capacity.
What a way to start the year! This is some fresh crop indeed.
I think that one possible solution to the energy costs of the Vertical Farming industry could be to synergize the procedure, in a way kinda like what aquafarming does with the relationship between the fish and the water and the fish waste. If there were some piece of urban facility that generates waste energy (as a loss or surplus) that could be recovered and/or redirected to the farms; it could reduce the cost, even if only a little.
Also, I seem to recall a sci-fi novel where they mention how the hydroponic farms produce oxygen inside a space station by converting the waste CO2 from the residing population. If only there were a way to capture the CO2 from the atmosphere, or at least redirect it from the sources (like factories) and pump it directly into the farms, so a minimal amount goes into the environment and the rest go into the farms, with the farms pumping out oxygen back out as waste product instead. That method could also help bring down the CO2 imprint of a city.
Let's have a think about that.
10:13 That's bollocks! These "entrepreneurs" must be subsidized by the tax payers or else they wont take the risk. THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE PROFIT NOT FEED PEOPLE.
Great content
@Just Have a Think I really appreciate the intelligence of your channel and the obvious hard work you put into it, and I was seriously loving this until you got to 8:12 'Aquaponics and fish farming'. For some reason I had you down as already sufficiently awake, intelligent and unselfish, morally consistent, and compassionate and caring for yourself and others, to not pay for or promote the unnecessary killing of sentient animals. And let's skim over the lead, mercury, PCB's and DDT in the fish bodies too which may or may not transfer in some way to the related plants. My bad. My mistake. Disappointed beyond words.
It's a closed loop. There is no DDT, lead or mercury involved. Get a clue before whining
Take a look at the closed loop food system I designed which incorporates poultry, humanure and black soldier fly. Join the Facebook group CLIMATE RESISTANT FOOD
@@lexiecrewther7038 So you're a bullying animal abuser telling me that the way forward is to continue abusing and killing sentient animals? And I should listen to you why?
@@EarthPoets why are you vegans always so illogical and angry? Seems like your diet is deficient. Eat some meat so we can have a rational conversation
I am sorry to hear you are disappointed. I am a vegan and I have been for three years. I would dearly love every human to stop killing and eating sentient beings. But I am also a pragmastist and I accept that we will not convince the entirety of an evolutionary omniverous species to abstain from eating animal protein within the next thirty years. If however, we can at least offer alternatives that stop them eating industrially processed red meat and poultry then that would be a good start.
My friend has an aquaponics farm in Toledo, Ohio. He grows excellent produce and plenty of it. The fish are mostly consumers and producers of waste. The bacteria converting that waste to plant food are the real heavy lifters. Pumps, aeration, and lighting are very efficient. And the food is very healthy as the system is kept in balance.
The laws and regulations need to be reset to move away from the Big Ag lobby and control structure. Decentralized food is the best way forward.
Thank you .
Thank you for including Aquaponics, I think it has a lot of potential. Their are lots of people doing DIY projects of this. And also students in the US.
When we are on the topic of local production, maybe check out the old: Sahara Forest Project
What would be great is a replacement model for active farmers to adopt PROVEN vertical farm techniques that earn them enough profit to allow them to rewild their farm spaces, and turn in their farm equipment for vertical equipment. Governments could assist with reinvestment strategies, since most (in North America at least) already have funds for payouts when the seasons and weather are bad. GREAT TOPIC.
We could also have floating multistories high griw houses on the sea, using sunlight to condensate, as well as other types of desalination using wave power
That sounds colossally expensive.
Yet another highly informative video from JHAT
amazing video...the best on this subject...thank you !
Great episode. Also - there's the issue with cattle feed. An earlier author on this topic brought up oat grass as a low-growing alternative to feeding pigs, chickens, etc. grain, which brings it back into the optimal height zone and potentially frees up land that was going to growing food for livestock.
It's remarkable how much information you pack into your presentations? You must do a lot of reading. Thank you.
Some numbers for energy use compared with conventional farming and heated greenhouses would be good.
One interesting thing is that presumably these facilities are in a good position to help load-balance as the plants don't care if you turn off/down the lights for a while at irregular times
Thanks. Wow, when you were being born, I was begging my dad to take me to Woodstock.
Excellent!! I hope he took you??!!?
Great video, Dave. Been hearing a lot about this lately, nice to see a good overview of the subject. I'm especially excited to hear about the developments with regards to wheat. That's been my main concern about this sort of thing, is it's that's all for leafy greens but no staples. Looks like that might be being dealt with. Someone below mentioned potatoes, also beans would be a good option. Possibly a complete plant based or plant heavy diet could be produced with these kinds of systems.
Thanks!
I don't think wind power is the answer those windmills have a high failure rate. Geothermal seems more practical
All fantastic. Its just time and experience that will help these places grow a greater variety of crops. I see this work as very useful for Mars colonies too.
Thank you!
I have grown vegetables hydroponically for over 50 years. It works, but it's not all a bed of roses. There are several problems as there are with soil farming, just not the same ones. For anybody starting out, the simplest and most productive system is the Kratky system developed by dr. Bernard Kratky of the University of Hawaii.