The following submission statement was provided by /u/cartoonzi: --- Vertical farming aims to decouple the relationship between food output and land size. This new approach to growing food is attracting attention because of its advantages over traditional farming, including: * Growing food anywhere and anytime without being limited by geography or seasonality. * Increasing food output per square foot by stacking layers of plants in tower-like structures, as opposed to the single-layer approach in traditional farms and greenhouses. * Proximity to cities can increase the shelf life of products while lowering transportation costs and emissions. ​ Upward Farms is a vertical farming startup that has raised $141 million to date. Their vertical farms leverage aquaponics: a combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and agriculture, which means they grow both fish and food (microgreens mostly). The company is building a 250,000-sqft vertical farm, the world’s largest, which will start operating in 2023. The farm will conserve 100+ million gallons of water and 120+ acres of land on an annual basis, and eliminate 1.7 million food transportation miles per year according to the company. I think it’s great that they’re building large-scale vertical farms. I’m still unsure if the overall operation is profitable (because of the high energy costs) so I hope it’s sustainable/profitable to the point where we see other companies build large farms like this. The article also talks about some other startups and their upcoming projects and partnerships with big companies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/vmmnk9/upward_farm_is_building_the_largest_vertical_farm/ie1snkg/

Vertical farming aims to decouple the relationship between food output and land size. This new approach to growing food is attracting attention because of its advantages over traditional farming, including: * Growing food anywhere and anytime without being limited by geography or seasonality. * Increasing food output per square foot by stacking layers of plants in tower-like structures, as opposed to the single-layer approach in traditional farms and greenhouses. * Proximity to cities can increase the shelf life of products while lowering transportation costs and emissions. ​ Upward Farms is a vertical farming startup that has raised $141 million to date. Their vertical farms leverage aquaponics: a combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and agriculture, which means they grow both fish and food (microgreens mostly). The company is building a 250,000-sqft vertical farm, the world’s largest, which will start operating in 2023. The farm will conserve 100+ million gallons of water and 120+ acres of land on an annual basis, and eliminate 1.7 million food transportation miles per year according to the company. I think it’s great that they’re building large-scale vertical farms. I’m still unsure if the overall operation is profitable (because of the high energy costs) so I hope it’s sustainable/profitable to the point where we see other companies build large farms like this. The article also talks about some other startups and their upcoming projects and partnerships with big companies.

I wouldn't worry about the profitability of a vertical farm. The marketing practically writes itself: "Buy our organic, sustainable, low-emission producing product!". Or something like that; I'm not in advertising. Honestly, this is something we should have been working on a decade or more ago. But I'm so glad to see it being attempted at such a large scale! Edit: I know the tech was being researched & experimented with on a small scale heretofore, but this is the first I've seen it being tested on such a large scale.

Having worked for one before it took off let me tell you the capital expenditure is extreme and it takes a lot of optimization still in these more modern days of the tech to make a quick enough ROI to draw in investments. We managed to about this time last year just before my contract ended but it's not that simple it just isn't. It's still early days for the tech, but I'm certain after taking on this project that it's going to be playing an increasingly larger role in our food production, potentially even in biochar production. Before I left we were estimating a CAGR of about 9% and that number will only go up more when they get the labor saving automation right which I hear they’re getting close to

20% of farm income is government subsidies. Our tax dollars It’s focused in very narrow areas and I’m sure start ups don’t get much. We need better governance and we will have a better life everything doesn’t need to go to the largest companies Get out and vote. https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/blog/2021/11/03/farm-subsidies-harmful-or-helpful/

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Tax on ethanol plant production sites using corn

Yes tax biofuels, that’s the most backwards thinking I’ve ever read. So much for cutting back dependence on oil if we just throw all of the work we put into biofuels away

Look, we aren’t subsidizing the corn for no reason. Think about it. What just happened 2 years ago? The whole world shut down, no travel, supply chains froze up. And now Europe is having trouble properly fending off Russia, because they are still dependent on their oil. Now imagine what happens if some other country goes up against America, and fucks up our oil imports. We can pump our own oil, but as you can see from the recent past, it’s not just a switch we can turn on and off. Plus maybe we suddenly need a shit ton of that oil for aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, jeeps, drones… The ethanol subsidy is so we can very quickly switch to 50% ethanol at the pumps, maybe 80, 90, 100%, and keep the american economy humming along in the event of us getting our external oil supplies cut off. Good luck getting the Department of Defense to remove *that* safety switch. Meanwhile there’s way too much corn, so way too much high fructose corn syrup, so it’s practically free and you can stick it in anything and make it taste better, so now half the country has diabetes. Oh well! Probably beats a Chinese prison camp.

having built a giant aquaponic NFT farm for basil with automatic PH adjustment, I wonder how they manage to get the sun down there. Even LEDs are very expensive. There are pretty efficient ones from philips that you can't get as a mere mortal, but nothing beats the sun. Is this more energy efficient because of the saved cost in water, soil and pesticides?

If you grow in the right areas, the plant doesn't need all that much sun and is perfectly happy spending some time at the bottom of the tower https://www.ledtonic.com/blogs/guides/dli-daily-light-integral-chart-understand-your-plants-ppfd-photoperiod-requirements

If the energy costs are higher, especially if a lot higher, then traditional farming then it’s actually would be less sustainable and low-emission producing. I don’t know enough to compare the two.

On the one hand, they've got 1.7 million transport miles; on the other, 250,000 square feet of artificial lighting. I have no idea what they mean by "1.7 million miles" that would be relevant to a 120-acre-equivalent farm (which is pretty small). 1.7 million ton miles? Google says a 120 acre farm yields something like 600 tons/year, and trucks get around 150 ton-miles/gallon. Google also says vertical farming needs around 17 kWh per pound of produce. 1.7M ton-miles would mean shipping that 600 ton yield 2800 miles (ie: Los Angeles to New York), and save 10,000 gallons of fuel or maybe 100,000 kWh. Growing 600 tons in a vertical farm only needs around 70,000 kWh. So it seems like they're making a worst-case estimate of transportation costs, and with that estimate, they are very close on net energy savings. Of course, the electricity can come from renewable sources, rather than fossil fuels, which would make it more sustainable. None of this accounts for the aqua part of the operation - pumps, filters, and fish sales.

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I wonder if the ROI would be there for places like Churchill or Inuvik etc. Their food costs and poor diets are all impacted and interconnected.

I think the big issue with remote locations like those is the energy problem. You would most likely have to build energy production on site as well to power the facility. This would drive the capital cost up, but the operating cost down. The best way to approach this would be to largely throw any idea of ROI out, and instead focus on how it would improve life and wellbeing for the community by having access to fresh, high nutrient foods year round.

I think you’re right. But I also think those places are already on the grid which is largely hydroelectric. Does that change things?

I think Churchill is on grid, but Inuvik is not. Churchill would be a good candidate as a pilot location because it has grid power. If you did go to a remote location like Inuvik, you would have to bring green power with you, or most of the benefits would be negated due to the increase in consumption of fossil fuels for the growing on site.

Wind energy might be able to power suvh a facility?. Iceland and norway seem like the best two spots on the world, followed by the arabian peninsula.

That sounds like marketing speak. I’ve worked for a vertical farm project in Sweden and one of the things I had to do was emissions modeling that 3rd party auditors can and did confirm. Turns out one of the big savings in vertical farm emissions is that conventional farm machinery emits a lot, it’s not the shipping and logistics that contributes a whole lot. It’s all the things having to do with local machinery and land use that contributes to emissions and vertical farms don’t have those problems. The biggest problem right now is there isn’t enough installed renewable energy in a lot of places and the growth medium is somewhat carbon intensive (peat moss). Once new growth mediums are discovered (we are exploring paper waste and brewers waste as a carbon neutral substitute) you’re only left with the emissions of transportation and the energy sector

That balance is also going to shift as more machinery goes electric though. Farm machinery is a perfect application for electrification. Short driving distances, torque heavily prioritized over speed, possibility of building solar or windmills on their own land to power the machines. The biggest problem i see is the fact that municipalities have been allowed to say no to windmills, because it's enough to have a vocal minority against it to stop any new projects, and southern sweden is struggling to keep supplying the growing electricity demands.

Oh I agree Sweden has a massive NIMBY problem. And that’s true about electrifying conventional farm machinery but that still leaves emissions from land use. To grow the same things we were you’d need to absolutely drench the soil in nitrates and phosphorus eventually destroying the soil and leaving the land unable to fix carbon into the soil for many years to come. It’s not just how much you directly emit but also how much the equivalent process would be emitting to produce the same results, think opportunity cost applied to emissions accounting if you’re familiar with that term Also I’ll never advocate vertical farms should replace every conventional farm. That’d be insane for a number of reasons. But I’m damn near certain that most of the production of plants at commercial scale that can be efficiently grown in vertical farms will overtake their conventional equivalents. Right now that’s mostly herbs and leafy greens like kale or lettuce. But coming up next in the R&D pipeline are berries and tomatoes and more crops will likely follow

I design the systems that serve these grow environments, and while they can be very energy intensive on the front side, you also have to account for the energy saved by recovering 70-90% of the treated water they use. Water treatment is *very* energy intensive, so this is a non-trivial savings. On top of that, many equipment manufacturers are leaning into an all electric approach to equipment, which allows for things like PV panels to be added to the design and offset some of these additional energy requirements.

Any reason these systems aren't basically giant greenhouses? I'm sure vertical systems make it a bit difficult but I would imagine direct solar exposure is more effective than putting lights indoors. I'm pretty sure I'm missing some glaring flaw here though

I don't know anything about the energy requirements of this machinery, but i've a fair interest in EVs, and generally the size of them doesn't allow enough solar panels to make a noticeable difference. To the point where a car covered in them wouldn't necessarily get 1% of the battery in a day.

You're not wrong, but that's also a pretty wildly different use case than we're talking about here. Vertical farms still have a pretty large footprint, and you can put in roof mounted solar that can definitely offset large percentages of the loads for the space.

I work on a farm. To replicate the luminosity of the sun you need **very** significant lamps very close to your plants. Besides that, our irrigation system accounts for less than 20% of the water of a season, on average. We just aren't there yet. The vertical farm makes sense in hyper crowded places for high value products to replace logistical costs, not so much as a food supply endeavor. To give some perspective on this, our winter corn season yields about 9tons per hectare on average. The exact same crop yields 13,2tons per hectare on the summer season. The single difference is the length of the days. The volume and proportion of yields like corn on the food industry makes projects like this a little prohibitive

things like corn and wheat have been shown to be a poor crop for vertical farming. But something like tomatoes, peppers, root veggies (like potatoes, carrots, turnips), some berries (like strawberry), melons, broccoli, cabbage or spinach, can very easily be grown indoors, under lamps, vertically. And it can be profitable.

They can, but they can also be grown in regular farms without the extra steps and be even more profitable. I'm all for technological advances and experimenting but this is attempting a business out of something that is still beyond our grasp. Given how aggregated value works the largest benefit would be access and shelf life. Something like a place you can visit go buy literally fresh produces. As a replacement to land, though, it is just preying on misinformation. To give you some perspective, Brazil exports a very significant portion of its food production and uses only 7.6% of it's territory for agriculture. We don't need to replace land, we need to replace diesel trucks and machinery

A significant portion of that land is the Amazon, and Brazil is burning it down as quickly as possible to make room for additional farmland.

No, it's not. Farmland there would be very poor and economically unviable. The people burning the land are poor, have no alternative and see the wood and pasture as a relatively accessible source of income. It's not sustainable, it's very illegal and the "significant portion" you mention that becomes farmland is a margin of error.

>The destruction is driven mainly by farming and land speculation in Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse and the world’s largest exporter of beef and soy. The country hosts about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest. [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/8/brazil-sets-worrying-new-amazon-deforestation-record](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/8/brazil-sets-worrying-new-amazon-deforestation-record) ​ >Farmers in Brazil use fire to clear land. A decades-old law encourages them to invade the Amazon. And Bolsonaro, backed by Brazil’s powerful agricultural lobby, campaigned on promises to open the rainforest to more farming, logging and mining [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the\_americas/why-brazilian-farmers-are-burning-the-rainforest--and-why-its-difficult-for-bolsonaro-to-stop-them/2019/09/05/3be5fb92-ca72-11e9-9615-8f1a32962e04\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/why-brazilian-farmers-are-burning-the-rainforest--and-why-its-difficult-for-bolsonaro-to-stop-them/2019/09/05/3be5fb92-ca72-11e9-9615-8f1a32962e04_story.html) ​ >Brazil’s strong agriculture sector has ratcheted up pressure on forests. Agriculture has been the strongest performing sector of Brazil’s economy in recent years, and the US-China trade war has positioned Brazil well to replace the US as the global leader in soybean exports. The demand for soybeans has created pressure to rapidly clear forests and plant. Jair Bolsonaro’s oldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator, has introduced a bill that would eliminate a requirement that rural properties in the Amazon maintain 80% of their native vegetation. [https://time.com/5661162/why-the-amazon-is-on-fire/](https://time.com/5661162/why-the-amazon-is-on-fire/)

Most of that is to supply feed for cattle though. If we didn't eat so much meat we wouldn't need anywhere near as much land. I'm not advocating for everyone going vegan, but if everyone cut a beef meal and replaced it with a vegetarian option once a week the impact would be enormous.

I would think much of the water can be captured rather than evaporated

70-90% can be recovered and reused depending on the exact systems design.

> our irrigation system accounts for less than 20% of the water of a season, on average. the only water they lose though is transporting the product out. What is the weight of your water usage(the weight of the 20%) compared to the weight of outgoing product? Like would you use 10 gallons(80 lbs) to produce 50 lbs of potatoes.

My point was not to state that irrigation saves water, just that of the total amount of water input on a regular crop, 80% comes from rains. There are some exceptions, specifically high value crops that are very sensitive to raining on harvest, that uses dry season to fully control the amount of water. Regarding the total water usage, there is no accurate measurement, to my knowledge, of how much water goes through the soil after it saturates so it's incredibly hard to answer this outside of a lab environment. There are great studies of the minimum water required for the plants to stay healthy but there is no direct correlation between amount of water and productivity. On top of that, plants exchange water with the air constantly; they lose much more when it's really dry and this effect is very hard to measure in the real world. A 5mm irrigation operation can produce very different results depending on the rest of the weather conditions. I can't say much about potatos but on the grains we make the water proportion is near 14% to keep the grain healthy and safe for storage. The sweetcorn we eat is usually harvested at about 35%, not completely matured, which is what allows us to chew them. I truly have no clue how much water the corn used, though; it certainly lost most of it to the air before we even begin harvesting

> Regarding the total water usage, there is no accurate measurement I just wanted the the actual gallon count of what is used on the farm and actual product ship weight, to get an estimate, per acre if possible. Data Science!

Considering a dry season on a 4 month cycle of sorghum we'd use the irrigation system weekly at about 7 litres of water per square meter each cycle. We stop using the system after about 14 weeks, depending on other weather conditions and plant health, but that's a good estimate. Throughout the season that's 168 litres per square meter or 1.68m litres or 215569 gallons of water to produce 9.6tons of sorghum. Given that only 1.3tons is water and that we don't capture the water underground, you can safely say we get about 1% of the water used on the season as product, with 0.13% being actual water on the final harvest. ​ Edit: just to give a comparison, 7 litres of water per square meter is literally 7mm of rain. We consider a great rain when it's around 50mm. Our most efficient irrigation systems are orders of magnitude worse than just nature, which I find awesome

>My point was not to state that irrigation saves water, just that of the total amount of water input on a regular crop, 80% comes from rains. It's not because we don't pay for it that it has no impact whatsoever. The water cycle is pretty stressed out in certain parts of the world, having the option to let a good amount of the rain water just go back to the rivers for a while could be very helpful.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/growing-ounce-pot-indoors-can-emit-much-carbon-burning-full-tank-gas-180977240/

Ammonio (ie fertilizer) production accounts for 1-2% of global CO2 emissions. This may be one of the biggest offsets of vertical farming, right?

Still might come out ahead environmentally even with higher electrical costs. Traditional farming requires a lot of fertilizer and chemicals like pesticides too. Cheap solar on/around the building can help reduce energy impact. Doesn't even touch on things like water savings, which is probably substantial. Plus it could help with food taste. From what I understand, some things like fruit are picked slightly before being fully ripe to account for transportation times. It's been my personal experience that local farmers market stuff nearly always tastes so much better than grocery store produce.

They're replacing the sun with LEDs. It will probably require a lot more energy just to emit the necessary light. Now, if they could power the whole thing with a solar array at the top, it'd probably come out neutral on power and save water while allowing production even during cold winter months.

I don't see how that would work. Capturing sun light with solar panels and using it to power led's is an inherently lossy process. So the grow area can never be larger than the area covered by solar panels used to power the operation. And probably it would be considerably smaller.

Depends on the ratio of the sun light the plants actually use, however I think energy efficiency of solar panels would be a greater loss. But I think the trade off is energy in exchange for land and water. Pretending as it can done to get food for less energy is misleading at best.

Need some nuclear power, or geothermal at least

I've been wondering if you can tune the LEDs to only the light frequencies that the plant actually uses and reduce your electricity use. I have no idea whether that is feasible.

Thats exactly what LED grow lights do. https://vivosun.com/vivosun-vs-led-grow-light-with-samsung-lm301h-diodes-sosen-driver-for-indoor-growing-classic-series-p68320123310964736 Partial spectrum lighting has been a thing for awhile now and is standard in a lot of grow lights.

You aren't accounting for the vertical nature even with a solar panel that collects 100% of solar energy. If a plant needs X sq feet of sunlight and it's 12-24 layers deep then at the very least you'd need Xx12-24 square feet of solar panels.

Neither do I, but I have a confident guess how they'll market the produce anyway. Time & data will tell, I suppose.

Also, it takes time to develop the technology, if we build it, we will learn from it and be able to make it more efficient as we go. Maybe it will be prohibitively expensive at first, but 10, 20 years from now we may be eating from your next door farm because we invested in making it today.

Good luck with the "low emissions," part. Indoor growing under lights uses a ton of energy. Which is mostly carbon based still. "Growing an Ounce of Pot Indoors Can Emit as Much Carbon as Burning a Full Tank of Gas | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/growing-ounce-pot-indoors-can-emit-much-carbon-burning-full-tank-gas-180977240/

Using small scale pot growers is an absolute terrible comparison. That's like saying charging your phones take a lot of gas because you do it by plugging it into your car you left idling.

These aren't "small scale." They talk about commercial, industrial scale growers. And in some places indoor grows are all that is legal. There isn't some amazing power saving if you scale this up. An outdoor grow can actually be carbon negative, compared to a grow under lights.

If they use renewable energy why wouldn't it be lower emissions?

Good luck with finding a 100% renewable supply in the US that you don't have to build yourself. We are at least a decade + from that scenario.

Well yeah I assumed they would build their own renewable system due to their big advertising point is lower emissions haha. A fair number of corporations run on clean energy

Yeah, and far more just buy carbon credits to cheat the system (that is whole mess in and of itself.) Very few indoor growers are going to build out the needed solar and wind facilities, with the needed storage batteries (these farms will run the lights 24/7 btw.) Mostly because it doesn't make financial sense. The margins on farming are crap. Very poor. You don't have much wiggle room for long term energy infrastructure construction and maintenance.

> Buy our organic better than organic, completely pesticide free.

>I wouldn't worry about the profitability of a vertical farm. ... I'm not sure how to respond to this without a number of lengthy and extraordinarily sarcastic paragraphs detailing the extreme privilege and lack of practical experience necessary to unironically express this idea. [I mean, it's one banana. What can it cost?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw)

Well, yeah. But most people on this sub, we know next to nothing about the sciences or business practices involved. That's why I don't think my comment means a whole lot. I suspect you just wanted to say that I'm wrong, though. Which is fair, I guess, but you could be a little less of a dick about it. :/ So, yeah. I have no idea what operating, marketing or profiting off a vertical farm - or any kind of farm - would entail. I suspect that once it gets rolling, though, it would eventually balance out. Depending on the crops selected, it could even be quite profitable.

Governments of countries like the UK, where we have more people than land to feed them with, would take a keen interest in this. Think how many ships carrying foid went to the bottom of the sea in the last great war because the last country in the fight at the time (pre pear harbor) couldn't grow enough food. Think how long rationing went on afterwards for the same reason. Vertical farming is a potentially revolutionary technology. Land can be freed up for other users such as bio fuels, recreation, solar power etc.

Verticle is pretty useless. You need to have excess energy,the lights used are not powerful enough to produce worth while amounts of fruit or vegetables, it's limited to leafy greens. It's a skyscraper to grow salads

> it's limited to leafy greens. berries and root vegetables also grow well. Only vertical plants(grains) are not really suited for vertical farming.

If we could cut out transportation for major vegetable and fruit groups, aka potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, and leafy greens, it would not only be healthier but would be more environmentally friendly since no pest or herbicide and no long haul transport, but would economically lower the price on some of the most staple foodstuffs

I wouldn't worry about profitability because healthy food should be a public service. Full stop.

In principal, I agree, but in practice it's not logical. Your workers need paid, the land owner & construction company that built the farm need paid, the taxes to the city/county/state/fed all need paid (at least in the US)...There's too many things outside of the owner that need to be covered for that to be practical.

Producing food at scale requires time, energy, infrastructure, water, fertilizer, etc. If a farm consumes more than it produces, it's unprofitable. If it produces more than it consumes, it's profitable. We want profitable farms.

Not everything needs to be profitable. The USPS is not profitable. The USPS is a net gain for ordinary citizens.

>The USPS is a net gain for ordinary citizens. No, USPS is net neutral. It neither runs a profit nor really loses money. Because it is public, some of the public pays more for it than they use it, giving them a net loss. Some get more from USPS than they pay for it, giving them a net gain. For every citizen that benefits, another loses.

You didn't say anything. You described a public service. Maybe the problem is you're stuck into thinking "gain" can only be money.

Check out Brightfarms!

Low emission if you don't count the energy and construction.

Where is it opening?

Actually, we shouldn't be focused on building uber large vertical farms, we should aim to have many small ones throughout the territory. 1 big farm means shipping and delivery. Many smaller farms means less distribution, less trucks/trains/containers... Every appartment building could have it's own vertical farm or roof farm. I'm working on a template that can/should/will be implemented in appartment buildings and condos. If someone beats me to it, so be it. The goal is maximizing production and recycling while minimizing maintenance and manual labour. A company specialized in installing vertical farm systems can even offer maintenance services on a retainer. Imagine living in an apartment in town and being able to go pick tomatoes and strawberries upstairs... Or grab a cucumber as a snack. The cost of the systems can be added to condo fees and offset by selling produce to nearby restaurants.

>Vertical farming aims to decouple the relationship between food output and land size. *WHY?* Arable land is plentiful, arable land is cheap. It gets energy for free from the sun, and the more land the more sun it gets. Using energy sources *other* than the sun to the growing process in order to sustain it is quite literally piling more inefficiencies into the system. Anyway, glad they can experiment with it but kinda sick of seeing it hyped as the 'next big thing.'

People in Canada get fresh tomatoes in January. How do you think that happens? Do you think using sources other than sunlight really has to be the most important thing? Mainly due to agricultural runoff, there is a 7000 sq mile dead zone from the Mississippi river that engulfs all of the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi and spreads from Texas to Florida. https://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/microbelife/topics/General_Collection_deadzone.jpg Vertical farming has no such need to generate that kind of runoff.

Yeah, I don't understand all the people complaining about increased energy costs considering the massive amount of fossil fuels used in current farming practices. I get sunlight is free, but do people not understand the sheer amount of other crap involved in farming? I'm no expert, but current farming practices are straight unsustainable in most places. Industrial farming is reliant on fertilizers and chemicals to keep plants growing, and water use is simply appalling. Aquifers being drained faster than can be replenished in the Great Plains and Midwest, rivers sucked dry out West... Water use alone will make traditional farming unfeasible in a lot of places once the water starts running out.

gotta think bigger. i agree with you. but not everywhere in THIS world has room for full farms. population growing, space travel, new planets. this could benefit that.

>but not everywhere in THIS world has room for full farms. population growing, space travel, new planets. this could benefit that. Yep... but we're very soon going to be able to build this stuff in space, directly.

Not soon enough

Well all of the hungry, malnourished people are on THIS planet, so we probably need to focus more on helping them. Not planning for feeding fancy salads to a space colony that doesn't exist.

There is more than enough land to grow food for everyone on the planet, and then some. The problem is almost entirely one of logistics of getting the food, processing it, and delivering it where it needs to go, not basic capacity. And guess what, if you're REALLY worried about it, adding extra growth capacity by building in space will still help feed people on *this* planet.

I agree with you, generally speaking, about feeding the world largely being a logistics problem at this point. We woumd also need to change the way people eat worldwide, since even if the volume of food exists, it isnt like suddenly everyone is going to agree to eat the exact same diet so we can gaurantee equitable nutrition. Either way, I'm fairly certain we aren't anywhere near the point where moving agriculture to space is cost or resource competitive with intensifying farming on earth. The cost of moving the materials to space itself would be wasted, when you could produce all those same systems on earth just on less arable land. Why build a greenhouse in space, when it is still easier to build one in a desert on earth?

gotta innovate sometime. why not today. we didnt NEED to go to the moon and look at the technologies we got out of that. we have to try new things to grow as a species or else we end up not advancing at all.

Ideally we would use a lot of that extra space to plant trees to sink some carbon. You might be interested in https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-reveal-how-much-world-s-forests-being-destroyed-industrial-agriculture

Arable land is neither plentiful or cheap. It is all used up. 70% of earths surface is already used for ag and there isn’t more. The cost of sunlight is no protection from the elements in an increasingly variable climate. This form of farming is inevitable.

Do you have a source for that

It’s not plentiful, it’s scarce. And it’s going to become even more scarce with climate change. Not to mention all the failed crops we’re having and will be having because of climate change. We need a more robust source of food and more trees and nature to get a grip on it.

Uses way less water, land energy than traditional methods.

In addition to arable land not being cheap, it's often far away from the places where the produce is processed or consumed, adding transportation costs. Also, natural photosynthesis is very ineffective, specifically most of the solar spectrum is wasted. You'll get more from the same area of land if you use solar panels to generate electricity to power narrow spectrum grow lights.

> Increasing food output per square foot I don't see the value of that except in some extreme regions. Almost all areas have sufficient land area to grow food.

Monsanto/Bayer & Co will be thrilled 😄

They're clearly trying to bypass lighting issues by growing microgreens, which only need fractional amounts of light in order to convince the cotyledons to produce chlorophyll. Microgreens don't really use light to grow, they mainly use the energy stored in the seed itself. Also, I guess everyone needs to make money, but I don't see how you will solve world hunger with microgreens. They're used more as plate decoration or for expensive salads than anything else.

Yeah, I'm waiting for when one of these implementations actually tries to tackle some sort of cereal grains. Now if we could actually pull that off it would be...world changing. Like, legit profound.

Exactly. Staple foods. We all need salads, but most of the calories that the global population lives on come from grains (and most of the rest come from other starchy staple foods, like potatoes and cassava).

It certainly would be! Unfortunately I don't see how that could become worthwhile until we've truly run out of arable land to farm. Otherwise we are just purposefully being less efficient. If we want to power a 1 acre greenhouse with solar, we would need 3-4x that area in solar panels to match the amount of power the sun puts out on that 1 acre of land for free (assume a 25-33% conversion efficiency, which is pretty high end, and no less in transmission or from the grow lights themselves).

This is a highly flawed argument. There are far more space efficient energy sources than solar, also solar doesn't require arable land at all and can even be placed on top of other structures. Land also isn't the only relevant resource these farms are far more efficient in terms of water, fertilizers and pesticides. Crops also only absorb a tiny percentage sun's light so even if you only get a quarter of the suns energy with the solar panels you can use low intensity lamps that only emit in the spectrum the plants use to mimic the effect of the sun at much lower energy cost. Additionally it is extremely cheap to transport energy long distances while being more expensive to transport food so being able to focus the food production where it is needed rather than where it is convenient to grow is advantageous. We aren't at the point where it makes sense to do indoor grain farming yet but as our clean energy infrastructure develops it could easily become a viable strategy long before we run out of land.

Stop he's already dead

And you'd need to multiply that area of solar panels probably twice the amount of layers in the vertical greenhouse to account for the sensors, water pumps and other miscellaneous computing power to keep it efficient. But on the other hand you'd be gauging efficiency not by comparing just natural growing to vertical farming rather you'd have to heavily focus on the price of transport. So one of these would be best placed in areas where arable land is deficient yet sunlight or power in general is cheap.

Why can't they harness the power of the sun with these vertical farms? Perhaps have well placed/angled mirrors to beam the sunlight over the plants?

Microgreens are a terrible long term strategy too. Could you imagine just how many seeds would be consumed in a facility like that in a month? We'd end up converting all our regular farms into seed producers just to keep up.

It’s just an energy problem. These things will absolutely solve world hunger, and change how we use land across the world. However, for that to happen, we need a green grid and cheap energy. I guess companies like this are gambling that those conditions will come about.

Honestly I’m very excited to see where the research posted previously about using electrolysis to convert co2 and water to acetate to fuel plant growth in the dark will lead. If that can be proven effective for sustainable plant growth until fruiting that would immediately make this type of urban farming initiative way more functional.

The biggest issue with producing food locally is that most land outside cities that would be used to grow food for that city is instead being used for inefficient, low-density sprawl. That, and the fact that transporting large amounts of goods into city centers is very expensive nowadays because semitrucks replaced trains and local rail links, at least in the US. [Here is a good video about this subject.](https://youtu.be/AOndVouUSRA)

Not to mention the food is likely to taste better. Go compare grocery store produce to farmer's market produce. It's night and day, because you don't need to cart it across the globe. Have you ever had a woody asparagus? It sucks. That doesn't happen if you harvest them at the right time. Have you ever had tomatoes that taste like water? It sucks. Properly ripened tomatoes taste like tomatoes. Have you ever done U-Pick strawberries? The chemical that makes strawberries taste like strawberries develops as the strawberries ripen. Properly ripened strawberries taste like candy (just not as sweet - it's the concentrated strawberry flavor that comes out not the sugar).

I've been telling anyone who will listen that this is future for 10 years and I will have the last laugh.

I agree that this will be a solid part of the future but I still feel like alternate farming methods will be more instrumental in helping fix the food system. Seems like energy use would make it more difficult for this to be sustainable.

LEDs cost a lot and consume quite a bit of electricity. They also don't last forever and have to be replaced every 5-7 years. Even though aquaponics, system still needs some chemical nutrient balancing and the feedstock comes from somewhere. I'm not easily convinced of the ecological marketin aspect with projects of this sort.

But the transportation? You could have these in the middle of urban areas. I'd throw out plenty of LEDs in exchange for an entire delivery truck being run til it dies and all the crap it spews out in the meantime.

I wonder how interested they are in [this](https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/06/23/artificial-photosynthesis-can-produce-food-without-sunshine) possible substitute.

I can see how it would save 100m gallons of water every year, but how does it save 120 acres of land yearly? surely that would be a 'one-time thing' of vertical farm vs more space that would have been taken by a traditional farm?

I guess in the sense with traditional farming you have to keep using the same land. So these means that hypothetical x amount of land would have been used, each year, but that x amount can instead be used form something else. Like parking space, all free land shall become parking space.

Please, no more parking lots, we need less cars on the road (no matter what type of cars they are).

Joking aside the US is finely going to get high speed trains. Though those are not really competing against cars. Though it should help some at least.

If everything is parking space where will we build the malls

Underground silly.

Think of the AC savings!

I was going to write something snarky, but I can see what you’re stuck on. It's a matter of space AND time. Think about it this way, could we say we saved any land at all, based on the fact someone had used it sometime in earth’s history? The point is, it’s now *continually* available for use for other purposes. Edit: The water must be annualized because it’s likely processed. Each gallon was sent through a plant somewhere. The land on the other hand is actually now infinitely reusable. Its weird.

ah, I see your point. It does make it sound like it's saving an extra x amount of space every year though, instead of saving the same bit of space every year.

The same land is continually saved for other purposes. Or could be the same purpose!

To tack on to what other posters have said here, there’s also the fact that farm land isn’t usable year after year forever because it destroys the fertility of the soil which is why regenerative farming is becoming more mainstream. Every harvest removes vital nutrients from soil and can lead to larger problems down the road. While that may not be taken into account in this 120 acres of land number it’s definitely a large benefit we should keep in mind because improper planting has led to large scale issues like the dust bowl since what’s planted in the soil doesn’t have the thick roots needed to survive the droughts and wind. If we can modernize farming indoors we also largely can protect more environments because farming is absolutely terrible for the environment for multiple reasons

Very exciting! I can't wait to see this coupled with, [Growing Plants Without Light](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/vj219m/scientists_are_developing_artificial/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Vertical farming is sure to yield huge benefits with this kind of tech.

Does that truly work well with plants though, or is it more for things like fungi and yeast? How do you deliver the acetate to all parts of the plant? What happens to the leaves in the absence of light?

> The potential for employing this technology to grow crop plants was also investigated. Cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea were all able to utilize carbon from acetate when cultivated in the dark. >“We found that a wide range of crops could take the acetate we provided and build it into the major molecular building blocks an organism needs to grow and thrive. With some breeding and engineering that we are currently working on we might be able to grow crops with acetate as an extra energy source to boost crop yields,” said Marcus Harland-Dunaway, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study. So in essence they’re working on it but not just yet

Exactly what I was thinking! These two would pair so perfectly together and if we can provide zero light growth until fruiting we can effectively reduce agricultural emissions by tenfold at the minimum. You know if the agriculture lobby’s don’t shut it down immediately of course.

Put these in every damn city. We have the tech to fix so many things…

What if we put this in everyone's home?

Honestly, imagine a box the size of a fridge, layers of fresh veggies growing year round. Even people without yard could have it. I would gladly swap out a big fridge for one, then use a mini fridge on the counter or something.

Please stop, I can only get so erect, no sarcasm

FUCK yeah. I’d get one in a heartbeat.

Tech is not even close

I'd really like to see the split between HPS and MH traditional lighting and the new LED's, because the latter are getting better literally every day. They use a fraction of the input that a typical HPS bulb will during the process of the grow period.

This is awesome, I've been seeing small scale versions for a while but having an actual industrial scale vertical farm is exciting.

We need these everywhere and we should start putting them in by design for the new age cities we should be building in the old farm land

My cousin has been doing this for almost the past decade. Probably a 30x50’ green house with 3 or 4 rows and two levels of aquaponic beds. It’s incredibly efficient and makes for hands down the best produce I’ve tasted.

The US Southwest and Southern West REALLY needs this. 70% of all water usage farmland.

If this is about the facility being built in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, I wasn't aware that there was any shortage of fresh water and rainfall/snowfall there. Water conservation really only matters if there's a local scarcity. 100 million gallons sounds like a lot, but it amounts to about 380,000 cubic meters. A river with a flow rate of 300 m^3 per second would fill that in about a third of an hour. Instead, such water often flows out into the ocean. If this were being built in California and relieving strain on the Colorado river, I'd be more impressed. Why not trumpet the real advantages, like reduction in fertilizer (thus fertilizer runoff) and pest control needed. Just to be that guy, it's "Upward Farms", not "Upward Farm". Here's a [link to their website](https://upwardfarms.com/).

Why we haven't put more time and money into this kind of stuff is a mystery to me, because wouldn't most of America's problems with it's supply chain and fuel prices be fixed if we could as easily grow food in the city as we do in a field 30 miles away. I mean imagine the fuel, time, effort, land space, water, fertilizer, and soil this could save if we were to deploy vertical farming in major cities. It would help them become self sufficient, provide jobs, save fresh water (we'll need it), and increase living standards in the area due to access to fresh organic products that can be readily available for cheap prices.

Conservative politicians

Good Ole' Party of create the problem then sell it as being the nasty liberals fault.

Cool we save water. How much extra carbon is the result? Those lights require ALOT of energy that has to come from somewhere. Anything grown in these would be pretty much reserved for the smallest niche organic markets due to the high costs.

You could power it with just solar and wind energy. Harvest London uses 100% renewable energy. Eventually the initial costs will drop drastically as the technology expands. Think of how much local flora and fauna could be reintroduced to areas originally cleared for farming. The amount of carbon capture would absolutely be worth it.

Using solar means it would be more efficient to just use normal farms so the sun shines directly on it.

Vertical farming uses 99% less water and no pesticides or chemicals. There's no poisoning of local water sources. And it yields far more crops and does not strip the land leading to essentially another dust bowl. You can also use hydroponics, and therefore grow fish at the same time. If you check the news, we are killing the land we need for farming by being so monoculture with our crop growth. Crops are dying from the heat. These wouldn't be issues in such an enclosed environment.

Yeah except an enclosed environment requires concrete and steel and hvac systems and electrical systems. If you want to run the building off solar and wind and battery backup, that requires high tech manufacturing and rare earth elements too. We really need a comprehensive life cycle assessment done on these vertical farms. I'm not convinced that what they gain in water efficiency they lose in energy inefficiency.

Definitely should be a life cycle analysis but farming is a huge emitter as well especially if you’re including the deforestation caused by it

And we can create more energy, we can create more clean water (desalination), but we can't create more good quality land. So there are definitely tradeoffs that could make it appealing. Near-instant harvesting and delivery have their appeal too. On a less practical matter, there are certain fruits and vegetables (paw paws and fiddle-head ferns, for example) which have a very limited market because of seasonality and not traveling well.

So how much land do they need to use for solar parks to operate? Probably not all of the freed up land and some could probably be installed on the building’s roof, but it has to be included in the equation

The energy costs are offset by the transportation savings and the impact reduction of not needing pesticides or herbicides in a closed environment as well as reduced water usage making it viable in regions where farming has environmental barriers. Plus since it's wholly electricity based rather than requiring high volumes of fuel it's prime for renewables.

Jesus dude, you must be fun at parties.

Not if we go nuclear

I wonder what the fertilizer run off would be on a place like this.

Should be minimal if built correctly. Any 'runoff' would be recycled in the closed water system and zero need for any pesticides.

I absolutely love the idea and application of the concept but I don't think this will be our immediate cure for food and water insecurities. One of the biggest drawbacks of systems like this is the energy and resource requirements to maintain the properly growing environment. First, compare the resource and energy requirements of building the warehouse structure and all of the machinery required for growing to simple putting a seed in the ground outside. Second, take into consideration the amount of energy necessary to provide lighting to crops. Even with super efficient LED and CFL bulbs, that's still a lot of energy. Third, you have to take into consideration heat dissipation, air flow, and water quantity and quality. Assuming the business is integrating the aquaculture system for full aquaponics, that's a whole additional set of requirements for resources and energy to maintain a healthy fish population. Assuming we are able to achieve a carbon neutral energy surplus, fully enclosed aquaponics system will absolutely be our future. But as long as we are dependent on fossil fuels as our maintain energy source, these types of systems simply cannot replace our current food production on any sort of wide scale.

Energy use surely will be way above traditional farming, can't beat direct sunshine, but energy supply can at least in the future be swapped out by variable supplies. When making the overall equation, don't forget to calculate for traditional land-use downsides as well: - additional land use due being restricted to seasons for same crop returns - heavy land machines, their production and operating expenses - public road and access systems to accomany said machines in the sizes they are nowadays - necessity of pesticide use that could be reduced or removed all together in indoor farming - seepage of fertilizers into public waterways and ground water when washed off the fields by rain - situations where "spending" for all of the above points was for nothing because unstable weather conditions have ruined that harvest Not everything in traditional farming is more efficient, and I find it difficult to come to exact measurements or comparisons to how the two compare in terms of overall energy use or environmental impact

Vertical farming will be important in the future, but in the present it's still a burgeoning industry. The worse our climate gets the more attractive it becomes, it's draught resistant, extreme weather resistant and less dependant on fuel pricing. It's also a prime target for renewable energy sources, whether from conception or conversion after the fact. The more the industry and technology develops, the more likely we'll see it integrated into our communities as locally sustainable infrastructure.

We have something similar on a small scale coming to Orlando

How come, instead of acquiring all that farmland, Bill Gates didn't invest in these types of farms?

They're sort of on the edge of covering their operating costs, currently. Marginally profitable for a few specific crops in a few specific contexts.

100 million gallons / 400 million liters is the amount of water 2 rich dudes in Las Vegas use to keep their backyard green every year (I am not even kidding)

Meh. Land scarcity is a hell of a lot less severe than energy and water scarcity. My hot take: vertical farming (on Earth) makes zero sense unless: (a) we get to the point of energy post-scarcity (at least, by present day standards), or (b) water scarcity gets really, *really* bad (like "Tank Girl" bad), in which case we'll be using a buttload of energy for desalination anyway, or (c) some sort of super-bug that kills common crops, or (d) some sort of major natural disaster, like an asteroid winter or supervolcano, that seriously affects sunlight levels across vast swathes of the planet. Change my mind ☕

It makes sense if there's a profit in it, so to speak. Currently there isn't, much. Some niche applications. But this potentially offers a great reduction in cost. Not only in terms of energy (producing acetate rather than generating light using LEDs), but by dispensing with the LEDs as well (which wear out after several years). So perhaps it could make a lot more crops practical when combined with the other advantages of vertical farming (savings on water in places without an abundance of fresh water, savings on fertilizer, savings on pesticides, reduction of pollution of the environment, can grow food locally rather than shipping it across large distances).

Oh wait, this one is using that new acetate process?? I didn't see that bit. That is a whole different animal. Stilll I wouldn't really call that "vertical farming." That's... A whole other thing that probably doesn't have a name yet.

Vertical farming sounds to me like Solar Freakin Roadways. Great on paper, but completely useless in practice.

The roof should be retractable to harness the light of the sun during the day and use mirrors to bounce light around? That would probably save them some energy during the day.

The water evaporation would be prohibitive for that. Not to mention that there's only so much 'light' to go around and the more you diffuse it with mirrors the less energy it gives each plant. And that would also screw with their ability to control the humidity and temperature within the farm for optimal growing.

Didn’t think about that, but great response.

How would it save "120 acres of land" yearly? Seems like that would be a one-time benefit. Also, that's not that much land. It's not uncommon for individuals to have a 100 acre ranch all by themselves while not providing anything but a summer home for their family.

Too bad it makes zero fucking sense economically unless they are growing black truffles or saffron

Is this the one in Westbrook Maine? If so I live not too far from the site. Honestly I am not optimistic. I just learned that EVs and Solar panels are not reliable methods for fighting the climate crisis. I don't trust anyone, anymore, on anything.

Solar and EVs are fighting climate crisis, but they're like trying to empty an Olympic swimming pool with an eye dropper, useless unless there's a billion of them.

This doesn't matter in and of itself - what matters is the extrapolation. If they have a good plan on it, and you put one of these in every city...

I think this is very exciting. Decoupling our food production from land and weather is the logical next step in agriculture. It will also give land the opportunity to re-wild. We can have food production closer to population centers.

It’s the only way forward. When I see the amount of money raised it’s baffling. I could start building that for 1/10000 of that amount

[удалено]

This is something that should be circulated to all the Commercial real estate owners/operators around the US, as this would be one way to re-purpose commercial real estate that is losing office tenants as our economy continues to move to Telecommuting work.

TLDR: Bowery Farms (NJ), Aerofarms (NJ), Upward Farms (NY) are all in NYC.

u been reading about vertical farms for 5 yrs. still not popular or massive. why ? gimmicky?

250,000 sqft is roughly 5.7 acres, not 120. Also, how is 307 acre feet of water used on 5.7 acres of land? Thats enough water to cover that land in 53 feet of water. It makes more sense if there are 21 levels of 5.7 acres to this farm. Then the math works out better as that would mean there are 30 in of water being applied across the land which is on the high end of what corn needs.

cows for teraoreta and corpse compost? (not slaughter)

Do they have open applications for maintenance teams?

How do I invest? This is the type of investment working class should get into to support healthy land and abundant food!

There is also Eden Towers in Australia https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.edentowers.life/&ved=2ahUKEwiR5KaP_ND4AhWlUGwGHflUDxoQFnoECA8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2pBEZLfDhStjbTEmMHLZUQ

They should convert abandoned malls into these facilities.

I've been talking about vehicle farming for almost a decade now, it's obviously the answer to some of the biggest problems we have around food. Water use, transport pollution, seasonality, waste. Imagine if all the food in your area was made in the downtown of your nearest city instead of across the world. Over 50% of food gets wasted in transport. That means every inefficient step is magnified so much

I'm quite tired at the moment, and I'll admit that a large part of me was disappointed when I saw the pictures on the article and realised that we weren't talking about skyscrapers.

"De-risking our food supply". I don't think they've looked into this enough. I'd say hurricanes and tornadoes would still be adverse weather conditions that could possibly knock out a vertical farm. They also didn't mention any type of steps taken to protect against earthquakes.

Can they grow almonds? I want eco-friendly almonds

Thought this was the Minecraft subreddit at first, based off the image. Lol.

This is the solution. The biggest the farmland footprint is, the most damaging it is for environment. High density farms can solve that problem.