Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?
IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it’s technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.
I have gone back and forth on vertical farming. There are scams in the field, but there are also some merits (most of them apply to urban farming in general).
The main issue you have with vertical farming is that there is only so much stacking you can do before you get out of light. A pillar like in the illustration projects a shadow, in which you can’t really put plants.
However right now sunlight is not the limiting factor for plants growth. IIRC depending on the plant it is either water or CO2 so you can do some amount of vertical farming. To me, the interest is not to come as a replacement for regular farming (so growing grains is not the issue, you will have a hard time beating the efficiency of a flat field + tractor), the interests are:
- freshness. Having herbs that you can cut as you need them is really a taste changer.
- air cleaning. Some plants do have the ability to fixate some VOCs.
- less transportation. Having the plants grown in the same building block means that the CO2 footprint will be much lower
- more efficient water usage. Careful with this one, in some places water will be more scarce in city than countryside, but water consumption of such systems is generally lower.
- less refrigeration. If the food has less transportation it also requires less refrigeration
- local fruits all year long. Assuming they are put in a controlled environment like a greenhouse, getting food that normally requires a lot of transportation locally becomes possible.
So to sum up, it is less of a solution to make regular agriculture sustainable and more to make sustainable agriculture more enjoyable. Actually one does not need tasty herbs and exotic fruits, but the ability t have them without poisoning the planet is nice and, well, solarpunk.
That is a very interesting perspective, thank you for making me think of things in a slightly different light. But yes I agree any type of advancement in farming from this point in human history and onwards should be attempting to achieve 2 things:
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Dont poison the planet (we kind of need it)
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Make food preferably with some variety
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Depending on how you generate power, you could use LED grow lights in vertical farms. You also have the luxury of working in an environment that you can tightly control; that means you may not need to use pesticides or herbicide at all. If you aren’t working in large fields, you can get away from using heavy diesel farm equipment.
Fundamentally, we need to use less land for farming, we need to use far fewer pesticides and herbicides, and need to reduce the emissions associated with farming. Vertical farming has the potential to help with all of those.
The pest control is true for the short term, though I find that over time even well kept facilities develop some kind of pest problem.
maybe if they kept chickens in the lobby…
You could, for instance, shut down at the end of a cycle and do a thorough cleaning without using pesticides. Using steam, heat, and high-powered ultraviolet light, you should be able to effectively kill any pests or eggs that pests are leaving. Yes, pesticides are certainly less expensive in the short run, but in terms of long-term health for the entire planet, they’re super-bad.
There’s an organic produce company in Manhattan that uses vertical grow chambers and they get around the lighting problem by illuminating from the center of the cluster and rotating the plant pods occasionally.
They get around energy usage by charging a premium and taking advantage of state agricultural grants.
It’s expensive but you can get city grown butter lettuce year round.
Normally that would be a bit of an heresy, but fun thing: with the good LEDs at the good frequency, you can make a solar panel + LED setup that is actually efficient enough to provide more light to the plant than it would normally receive.
Agricultural researcher here, working in this field (hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical farming) for approx nine years.
Here is my TLDR:
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The comparison “traditional agriculture vs vertical farming” is misleading. Water saving and many other benefits come from hydroponics and crop protection (CEA - Controlled Environment Agriculture aka greenhouse). So a more accurate comparison has to be “CEA vs vertical farming”.
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Plants consume light. Seven photons for one photosynthesis reaction (one sugar molecule). One Mol photons (or more) for one gram dry biomass. Artificial light is very space inefficient compared to just using natural light for the plants. 23% efficiency for photovoltaic cells, 50% efficiency for LED light and some losses for transformation and transportation of electricity. In total when lighting the growbeds with electricity from photovoltaics for each square meter of growbed, ten square meters of PV-modules is needed somewhere else. I fail to see the space efficiency argument of vertical farming unless we are using nuclear for generating the electricity. Total efficiency losses of artificial lighting are >80% compared to using natural light, leading to a huge carbon contribution. This alone is not sustainable.
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In CEA, and thus in vertical farming also, we are mainly producing leafy greens, herbs and other vegetables. This is known as horticulture. Taking a look at statistics of the products of agriculture it can easily be seen, that the staple crops, grains and tubers, are by far (!) the major products. These can not be replaced by CEA production. And these are actually supplying the calories to feed the people. The amounts of agricultural area dedicated to these crops dwarf the horticultural production.
My takeway: VF is by no means a solution of the challenges we are facing in agriculture. Energy demand of the plants for lighting can not be optimized away, and thus will remain a major cost driver. IMHO the vertical farming industry is creating a hype aiming to harvest and burn venture capital. Recently Aerofarm filed for chapter 11 and also the company Infarm is broke. These were the poster childs of this industry.
Except for very specific niche applications to me VF does not make sense.
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We’re doing some vertical farming in our backyard. I think it’s a good way of moving food production more locally to urban centers and reducing transport costs (and thereby related emissions). I don’t think they’re the solution for everything, and I do think using our current farmlands more efficiently is critical. In certain ways, I think vertical farming might be able to provide some of the improved green spaces in urban areas that Garden Cities were meant to before it turned out that Garden Cities deepened the divides between classes and races in urban centers.
Overall, I think we need not think of vertical farming as “How do we solve the food crisis” and instead as “How do we provide people without land the opportunity to experience the joys of gardening their own food”
it works pretty well for some kinds of produce - bushes/lettuce, fungus, root vegetables, etc but fails for other things (tree nuts, fruit, corn/grain, etc).
the benefit is that you can use existing infrastructure like high density residential/skyscraper buildings so there’s potentially less distance between farm & table
