People like to criticize efforts like these, but have you tasted the produce? When I was in the Bay Area, I frequently bought the greens by Plenty, and I thought they tasted fantastic. When family came to visit, they asked where I found such a great tasting mizuna mix.
I don’t know if these farms will replace traditional ones, but I think there’s at the very least a niche for optimizing produce with tons of flavor.
Just watched an interview with someone from Appharvest, a vertical farm company. One of the most interesting advantages of these grow operations is that they can develop seeds for taste and nutrients, rather than for transport or pest resistance. The billions in research that have gone into developing resistant and durable produce can be channeled into developing the best tasting and looking products.
As we see a hugely growing demand for quality in food options by the middle and upper classes, the product offering the best taste will have a large leg up on the cheap mass produced produce.
This demand is not limited to individual consumers, restaurants and chefs, who already seek quality ingredients by sourcing from local trusted growers, will likely put additional demand on these low/no pesticide, and taste optimized produce.
I cant wait to taste the best tomatoes of my life.
Im lucky enough to have traveled to places like Bali and Italy, where the local produce is unconstrained by bean counting hyper optimization. It tastes better and quality of life is better because of it.
It's not just the seeds. I worked in a vertical hydroponic and aquaponic startup and we were able to alter the taste with variations in nutrients, water schedules, and lighting. We would work with chefs from gourmet NYC restaurants and they would tell us the taste they'd want and we would grow to cater for that.
Not breeding for transport could be big. But it's not entirely new at all, certain cooking herbs like basil are often entering the kitchen alive in the pot they are grown in or even cultivated right there on the window sill.
A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages.
> Not breeding for transport could be big. But it's not entirely new at all, certain cooking herbs like basil are often entering the kitchen alive in the pot they are grown in or even cultivated right there on the window sill.
What actual experience do you have with such models?
This is actually incredibly rare, specifically growing on-site, especially now as COVID has ravaged the culinary Industry irreparably in the US.
I've been a cook, ran kitchens (with in an emphasis in farm to table and agro-tourism), and did/do supply chain and have a focus on food-tech. I can tell you that anything closely resembling the model you described was very short lived at Michelin Star restaurants in the E. Coast, or a few with actual farms in addition to their brick an mortar operation: think French Laundry in NorCal or Blue Hill in NY.
This is actually a very good model for all involved, that may not have had much viability ~10 years ago when I first got really involved, but with COVID making people aware of how weak the food supply chain is this may do well. People are dining out less and lower overall food costs are likely to make this viable, despite not being all encompassing upon deployment.
I really hope last year's shortages were a wake up call, and want to see more of this take off. This entire system is in dire need of repair, now that the disruption has taken its toll.
> A more industrial scale might replace refrigerators for certain greens with a vertical farm "life support system" where larger batches from the supplier can be plugged in, delivered once a week or once a month at a spectrum of growth stages.
Could be, but you have to understand most of the Industry, specifically the affluent ones that would even try this in CA or NY let alone middle America that operates on the thinnest of margins, are beyond life support. These places are not coming back.
What you suggest is interesting, and I had a similar idea before which could help curb some of the baked in pershibaility in the food supply but this will just translate to longer times for ROI which as I said is already stretched super thin due to high overhead and operational costs and think margins.
But, its definitely worth exploring if the travel times are less than 30 mins and would have to be limited in scope: greens, herbs and other fast-growing crops. Proper fruit trees, grains etc... are out of the question.
My model was simple: ship in starter plants to unused land in cities that incorporate Ag into the Education system and have them participate in wide scale farm and smaller scale green house operations (this already exists in Denver) and have them supply the restaurants. What ever they don't sell they could help feed the community. Help create secondary and tertiary business models with local entrepreneurs and philanthropists--I thought of someone like Chamath would be super interested to be honest.
I actually wanted to pitch this to my former boss, Kimbal Musk, as an adjunct of an already existing model with Big Green and Squared Roots learning gardens and the container garden models respectively. I had devised a whole system with to-do things after I came back from a stint at SpaceX after having worked at his Flagship in Boulder.
Unfortunately, COVID ruined that, but the plan makes sense none the less and I would gladly make efforts to volunteer even though I'm retired from both Ag and Culinary now.
Feed Sonama does some version of that. The distribution part. But that would work in Sonoma county. Sonoma is an Ag county. It means you can have a cow or pig in your backyard garden and that’s fine.(not exaggerating) Not so much in Bay Area where we have a housing crisis and no such thing as unused lots. Or electricity.
I know because I tried. Then there is liability, insurance and red tape and legal translations. It’s hideous and exhausting.
> Feed Sonama does some version of that. The distribution part. But that would work in Sonoma county. Sonoma is an Ag county. It means you can have a cow or pig in your backyard garden and that’s fine.(not exaggerating) Not so much in Bay Area where we have a housing crisis and no such thing as unused lots. Or electricity.
I'm familiar with Sonoma's Ag, I helped with a conversion of an organic farm to Biodynmic in Petaluma and you're right this is not going to work in the Bay Area due to the immense population density and scarce vacant land as is, but honestly it doesn't have to; you could just onboard people into a CSA while growing with this practice in Sonoma/Napa counties and use things like Cropmobster and distribute in a major city like say Palo Alto or Mountain View or some where people from even SF can come in and get their food boxes. It's going to exhausting regardless, as we had a team of 5 dedicated people in my apprenticeship handle a 300 client CSA and we worked roughly 14-18 hour days dueing the Spring, Summer and Fall months when I was in S. Germany.
The goal is to get school children involved (middle to HS aged), we tried to do that, but could only get them to come to harvest for a few hours a month and tour the farm: my friend's mother was a member of the ruling Green party in Baden Wuttenberg and we had so much red tape to deal with to ensure the children's safety, thus this needs to be done either on a volunteer basis after school or as a in-school program. But if I'm honest, now with COVID school shut downs in CA I bet parents are just dying to get their kids out of the house and it could get lots of traction.
> I know because I tried. Then there is liability, insurance and red tape and legal translations. It’s hideous and exhausting.
Honestly, I don't doubt it, which is why I wouldn't bother following the rules in CA and just resort to things like guerilla gardening and bypass it entirely if I wanted to take the challenge. I remember the riots that happened at UC Berkeley when people tried to use the vacant land for gardening/farming, not sure if it was OWS people but lots of them were sympathetic and got maced just the same. Occupy the Farm covers this [0].
It seems like we have much to discuss, I still need to drop you an email. I'll drop you a line before the end of the month, just got a lot going on, but it'd be cool to chat and share resources.
The quality of accessible food in so much of the US is astoundingly bad. Most meat cheese and vegetables sold by the largest distributors (and therefore what most people eat) are not great - I compare most lunch meat to the meat equivalent of canned green beans. Let alone the added sugar..
A key part of this, related to the massive opposition of the EU against importing US agricultural products, is how the US treats farm animals.
Chickens have to be washed with chlorine and eggs with water, simply because the conditions in farms are so utterly inhumane and disgusting that without doing this, the products would be an actual danger for the health of the people eating it. The advantage (from a business point of view) is that the production costs are way lower than if European standards (which aren't that great either!) were followed.
To refer to an old meme... choose two of "fast, cheap and high quality".
Maybe a little different compared to the Bay area, but I live outside Jackson, Wyoming. It's currently about 16F outside and there is 12" of snow on the ground. We have access to fresh locally grown tomatoes, lettuce, and other things like that year round.
https://verticalharvestfarms.com/
Just as you mention, it is high quality and tastes great!
Also, it isn't trucked in from Salinas Valley CA which is 1,000 miles away.
Of course, grow-lights in Wyoming will be mostly coal powered, whereas a field in Salinas is renewable energy.
Assuming I am doing the math right, shipping 1 ton of food 1000 miles (refrigerated) is roughly ~30-40kg of CO2, or about 7g-CO2 per tomato (6oz tomato).
A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic, 40W/sqft), so about 20Wh/g, or about 1.4kg-CO2 per tomato for coal. Maybe more like 1kg-CO2 for the mix in Wyoming.
... depends on what you are trying to optimize, I guess, and how much natural light you can harvest in the vertical greenhouse.
That's not factoring in that the field in Salinas has to use much more water, use pesticides and fertilizer, and tilling and harvesting, which all require more energy than the local hydroponic garden.
Of course the environmental cost should be factored in. I'm still curious if hydroponics (or geoponics, in this article's case) actually winds up having a better carbon footprint than traditional agriculture.
Couldn't some of the gains of indoor vertical farming be gotten with greenhouses? Namely protection against pesticides and minimal water loss from evaporation.
The whole premise of a 'vertical farm' seems bunk to me for this reason. If you want ultrafresh local food in a climate which doesn't support it, with precise control over the growing conditions.. well that's precisely what greenhouses provide. A 'vertical farm' is what you get when you make a greenhouse worse by removing the windows for no real reason, then try to compensate for that with futuristic vibes. Put a greenhouse 15 minutes outside the city and you'll save money with cheaper land and free solar power (greenhouses may also have supplemental lighting or heating if needed.) You get all the freshness advantages of local production, but cheaper. The only 'downside' of greenhouses relative to vertical farms that I can think of: greenhouses are old technology that won't make yuppies feel like they're living in a sci-fi movie.
IIRC in a documentary about spanish produce vs german greenhouse produce they calculated that german produce is much higher in co2 output than spanish, even when the spanish produce is delivered by a semi all the way from Spain! Simply because in spanish climate there is no need for a greenhouse to grow e.g. bell peppers or tomatoes.
I only found a german source: https://www.umweltdialog.de/de/verbraucher/lebensmittel/2015...
it says:
German, heated greenhouse outside of season: 9.3 KG of CO2 per KG tomatoes (well, that is unexpectedly high)
Non heated greenhouse: 2.3KG of CO2 per KG tomatoes
open land in spain: 0.6KG of CO2 per KG
open land in Germany in season, conventional: 0.085KG of CO2 per KG
open land in Germany, organic: 0.035KG of CO2 per KG
although it's from 2015, I don't think that much has changed in 5-6 years to make up such a big difference between heated, nonheated, open land and regional. It also factors in transport from Spain to Germany which is why open land in spain has a higher co2/kg than german open land.
edit: of course I can't find anything that compares vertical hydroponic farming to greenhouses, all I can find relates to CO2 dosing in greenhouses :/
It's less helpful in already highly agricultural nations like the US, but in countries with scarce arable land or fragile ecosystems, or just very small countries like Singapore/Cambodia, vertical farming is superior to greenhouses simply due to square footage
The economics only make sense for specialty things like fresh greens, micrograms, mushrooms, etc. That can't be farmed at a consistant high quality year round or be stored. It will never be economical for 80% of food.
I believe greenhouses and vertical farming are orthogonal. IOW, you can have a vertical farm inside a greenhouse, or a "horizontal" farm inside warehouse with grow lights.
I disagree based on the trends, especially in the US where few, if any, new coal plants are being built and most existing ones are scheduled to be converted to natural gas or shut down. But let's assume that a significant amount of coal will continue to be burned over the next 20 years. Do you think we should stop innovation in other sectors until we are off coal?
Most innovation doesn’t need massive amounts of electricity. EV’s being the only notable exception, but they are also offsetting significant CO2 emissions.
Further, the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels is going to be heavily dependent on overall electricity demand. Keeping older less efficient and more expensive power plants operating is very much a response to electricity demand not an inherent lifespan independent of the electrical market.
I don't think grow lights in this area are coal powered.
I could see how you might think that because..Wyoming. But I assume hydro and wind, based on the power around me. I'll ask them to confirm. I don't think I'd support coal powered hydro.
I looked it up and Wyoming consumes a lot of coal (according to eia.gov). I don't know about your specific location, but statistically there is going to be a large percentage of coal in that energy mix.
For what it is worth, a tomato truck carries 50,000lbs of tomatoes from the field to a processor. Supply chains are complex, but refrigerated semis can carry a similar load of processed vegetables.
Co-Grow! Use the heat, light and CO² from the power plant directly to power the (growth of) plants, by arranging them around the fire. Use some technomagical glass boiler for that.
Solar + storage is now the cheapest option in the US.
Centralizing energy needs the way vertical farms do, incentivizes the company operating the farm to opt for the cheaper option and install solar on nearby land.
I'm not exactly critical of vertical farming, but I've noticed that the stories always seem to gloss over what works well and what doesn't. Plenty™, for example, does arugula and kale, but their stories say "veggies" in a way that leads you to believe it's working for a much broader set of "veggies".
Verticalfield, featured in this story, has pictures of tomatoes, and mentions mushrooms and strawberries. But on their website, the FAQ says ""Vertical Field can grow up to 200 varieties of crops, such as leafy greens, herbs, and lettuces". Again, arugula, kale, some herbs, etc.
I think leafy greens tend to work best in vertical farming, but wouldn't call them 'luxury vegetables'. Most diets should include some leafy greens for the non-caloric-nutrients and fiber.
I agree in concept. In practice, here in SF a pack of plenty vertically farmed lettuce is $5 and a head of lettuce from the Safeway down the street is $1. On a budget there is really only one option.
It's definitely 'real lettuce' this is not a 'lettuce substitute' so I'm doubtful that the skepticism is around 'taste', and I seriously doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference by tasting anyhow.
I think the 'doubt' is around economics, and possibly the nutritional value.
I can see a lot of people putting these things in their basements.
I mean, we call could just put actual gardens in our backyards, but that might not be 'trendy' enough ...
It’s about practicality, not trendiness. I don’t have a backyard or basement. Even if I did have a backyard, the climate is such that sunlight or predictable weather is not guaranteed. Even if it was, there is no guarantee of safety from wild animals, pests, and soil contamination. The list goes on ...
I think you're going out of your way to portray keeping a garden as some kind of herculean effort when in reality it's not very difficult and it can be done most anywhere except in the densest cores of mega cities.
The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech' - or - a very long term vision and investment towards making something like actually practical at some scale, which may or may not ever happen.
And if the nearest one is 400 miles away? Then my produce is STILL optimized for transport and storage over taste and freshness.
> The entire premise of this is 'hipster tech'
I agree. It annoys me when they tout this as "volume" or "scale". However, you can't get VC funding unless you promise that so that's the price of your marketing. Shrug.
Nevertheless, I do hope one of these catches on somehow. Several of my favorite restaurants had their own gardens. However, they are limited by the weather and season to certain crops.
If someone can slap a steel container down and use these technologies to grow out of area/out of season vegetables and fruits I'm all for it. It would also have the side benefit of breaking up some of the gigantic monocultures we currently have in agriculture.
Other articles I have seen that actually included price [1] showed that the vertical farming produce was 3x the price of what you could get at Whole Foods. And that is for organic presumably high quality produce. Cost compared to Walmart was something like 10x as much.
I set up a garage hydroponics 'farm' (produced about 3-5kg of microgreens) with the intention of going to local restaurants. Honestly, the flavour is out of this world and that's pretty much with everything you grow too with hydro/aeroponics.
From first hand experience though, the electricity is a huge cost plus being in Poland right now, my labour costs would have swallowed up any profits.
These won't replace traditional farms BUT a farm growing fields of lettuce could and should be replaced for other variants of root vegetables etc. Lettuce, leafy greens and herbs IMO should be grown in vertical farms as it's low effort and really it's all about getting maximum taste into each leaf. Lettuce doesn't really provide that much in terms of nutritional benefits, especially when it's been transported for hundreds/thousands of miles so local or as close to the end user it vital.
I realize a ton of the taste of food comes from context, which really does matter and can lead to more enjoyable food, but I'd still like to see a blind taste test in such a situation.
Sounds like a reasonable test to do, but we do know very well we prefer crops developed for transportation over long distances which means not too soft. Not soft and good taste for whatever reason are related.
I'm interested in seeing if there are benefits to nutrient-dense and microbiome-boosting vegetables from these types of grow operations. So much has been sacrificed upon the goal of transport-sturdy vegetables, I have to wonder if taste was not the only factor we lost over the decades.
Fully agree! Locally here in Cincinnati there is a company called 80 Acres farms doing indoor vertical farming. Their greens are by far the most incredible I've ever tasted!
Imagine farm land with these modules placed end to end. Running off solar and abled to produce year round in all weather conditions. Once batteries are perfected.
That trucking process means getting produce optimized for transport, rather than produce optimized for flavor. The costs are not only in dollars, but in quality.
Agreed and this has been proven already in greenhouse farming. There are many greenhouse farmers that grow crops that would otherwise be impossible to grow in their zone. One example is a orange tree grower in a very cold zone that can sell oranges to his local community at a tiny fraction of what it costs to ship oranges from California. He still makes a profit and the produce is fresh.
Here is a small scale example [1] but I can't fault this guy for keeping it small given his advanced age. I hope I have that much energy when I am older.
You're telling me that produce grown in its optimal environmental conditions and flash-frozen at harvest is going to taste worse than something grown in a truck in a parkinglot in Brooklyn?
I call bullshit. It's pretty much universally agreed that frozen fruit is fresher and often tastes better, for example.
Flavor is more about varieties being selected for mass production rather than their growing method and transportation. You can transport heirloom tomatoes. Nothing stopping you.
Unquestionably worse. Recognize that "taste" is some mixture of flavor and texture.
I challenge you to slice a thawed tomato the way you would a vine fresh one and tell me there isn't a difference. Same goes for most leafy greens and fruits.
Delicate cellular structures of high water content vegetables are completely obliterated when frozen and then thawed or otherwise processed.
Hydroponically grown vegetables don't typically taste good either. (Common complaints being: bland, weak, "oily", boring). That's the reason why this operation in the article is using soil in their growbeds. It's the only way to get plants that are worth selling.
I mean like, why not? I think the issue with leafy greens is that they're fairly stable, travel well and grow well/quickly in greenhouses, so it's not worth flash freezing them.
Could that be because we don't yet have a carbon offset cost for transportation? I recognize that the actual cost would be controversial and mostly subjective, but I always wonder about how many things are 'free' or nearly just because there are otherwise hidden costs elsewhere (such as the environment).
Even if you figured the carbon offset cost, transporting agriculture still beats out all of these alternatives by a lot.
The math is only becomes slightly favorable to the subset of plants with high water content and lower sunlight tolerance. You can grow tomatos at nearly break-even. A diverse set of agriculture that can sustain people with balanced diets? Not a chance.
Most of the examples in the articles are grocery stores. The one restaurant mentioned looks like a burger joint, an upscale one, but a burger joint nonetheless. The gap between a whole foods vs a stop n shop is not that large, certainly nothing like the gap between a mcdonalds and a black tie restaurant.
If this reduces our carbon footprint and gives us fresher food as a bonus I'm all for it.
Factory produced white castle burgers have been in supermarket freezers for years (and aren't much worse than the 'fresh' ones, which are themselves firmly in the realm of junk food.) Machines making food is nothing new, but it seems a lot of people are keen on 'inventing' it. Remember the pizza company that wanted to use robots to make delivery pizzas? And the results were worse than frozen Red Baron pizzas that have been around since the 70s.
There's a pretty significant difference between robot made to order and robot made to freeze.
As you said, the latter has been around for a long time. That doesn't make the former any less of an achievement. This is robotics directly replacing employees in store.
There really isn't much difference, the quality of a frozen white castle burger is about the same as fresh made by humans, and I doubt fresh made by robots would be much better. All three are going to be pretty crap.
The robot pizza company in particular was a joke. Viewed with a critical eye, the whole thing was technophiles blinded to obvious reality by their love for high tech gadgetry. Why else would you use a sophisticated robotic arm to transfer a pizza from one machine to another when a simple conveyor belt can do the job faster and need less space to do it?
White Castle is doubtlessly being smarter about it, but I'm pretty sure you could replace their restaurant employees with a microwave oven. BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'. If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense, but if you were to design an automatic kitchen from the ground up, I think it makes little sense.
>There really isn't much difference, the quality...
There are numerous process and operational differences between things made to order and things prepped and shipped. Both are honestly extremely impressive, though the latter is much farther along technologically in part because the scale of impact is greater and factories allow for larger capital expenditure since it's so much lower on a per product basis. That said, what I am talking about doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the end product.
>If you're retrofitting a kitchen designed for humans, systems like what White Castle is experimenting with might make sense
That's what they're doing. Sure, if you build all new buildings and kitchens it may make less sense but as a lower capital cost shift it totally fits.
>BTW, automated restaurants are not new; look up 'automat'.
Automating production is new. Automating service is not. Again, huge difference operationally.
The thing is, burgers are the same everywhere. Minimal wage isn't.
So once there's a robot that can cook burger in SF and break even, it works pretty much everywhere else where the minimum wage is greater or equal. Just take a look at Miso robotics.
I find myself patronizing the fast-food locations that offer food prepared from fresh potatoes sliced every morning and grass-fed beef that apparently pay their workers a decent wage while costing about the same as the places that don't. The difference I suppose is that the local chains are not satisfying profit motives of stock speculators.
Once the robot exists you can duplicate it cheaper. Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages. It may eventually not work out in poorer countries.
> Once it works in SF with high wages it works in Montana with low wages.
Can it? The robot in SF may make financial sense because of high utilization. A low-wage worker can do 100+ useful tasks when the restaurant is not busy enough to require constant burger making. Is a burger-making robot flexible enough to match that?
The robot can also sit around doing nothing without complaint and for no extra cost. So the robot need not be used 100% of the time. Even in SF the robot will not be used much at 2am.
Though I was referring to the small cities in Montana. Nobody will put a robotic burger joint where there are no people. However a town of 5000 has a lot of people who need to eat, more than enough to make it worth running numbers.
Why would the price of food from a 'vertical farm' (shipping container in a parking lot) go down relative to the price food from regular farms? Even if it made sense to grow using LEDs instead of direct sunlight, that could be done on rural land instead of urban parking lots. I don't think you'll ever get enough food grown in shipping containers in urban parking lots to be anything other than a curiosity for the wealthy.
These things are small by garden standards, let alone farm standards. How many people could one of these shipping containers keep fed? How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people?
The same way any new tech goes down in price - commoditization, automation and economies of scale.
It's unlikely they'll feed a million people all the food they'll need but it's likely they could feed a million people all of the leafy greens they need.
"commoditization, automation and economies of scale."
Traditional farms have the clear and overwhelming advantage in all three of these. And they aren't standing still either, they benefit from the advance of technology too.
The major advantage this has is that it shrinks the supply chain. Transporting fresh leafy greens is a bit of a nightmare because they go bad so quickly.
I don't expect these things to compete with a farm growing potatoes for a long while or even anything which keeps well enough in a fridge.
>How many shipping containers would you need to feed a city of a million people?
I guess the aspiration for the people behind this kind of vertical farming companies is to have as many containers out there as possible. It seems like proximity of supply is one of their main purported selling points. It makes sense from their standpoint.
In this case it seems directly proportional to the cost of energy, barring a solution where you use passive ways (like mirrors) to redirect light into the building.
These article talk about 'veggies' - but nearly all these vertical farms seem to be growing fairly low calorie/nutrient rich vegetables: leafy greens, herbs and some fruits etc.
There's no root vegetables, grains which make up the cornerstone of our diets.
Grains and root vegetables are generally far easier to store and transport and keep from rotting than leafy greens, herbs, etc.
I'm most interested in tech like this as a tool for minimizing food waste. Your lettuce won't wilt and rot while it is sitting on the shelf if it is still alive.
The energy use of the LEDs for a live lettuce plant and a fridge is about the same (or even lower), so you could keep it fresh for a few weeks more in a small indoors farm I'd say.
I wonder if you could grow lettuce within a refrigerator and drop temperature as a means of preventing bolting and to extend lifetime. Could both be better than sum of either individually?
Grains are staples because they provide a lot of calories.
More calories means more photosynthesis, so more incident light. The marginal energy cost would thus be a lot higher. The cost for lettuce, however, is probably dominated by refrigeration/shipping/logistics. So, from a fundamental cost standpoint (unless you have very low cost energy), that's likely going to be a while.
It's more simple than that even, grains are simply more portable and last longer. Those two properties are the major reasons they are the staples of our diets. There's little sense in growing and processing them on site at food distribution centers. Growing and storing them within a reasonable distance of food distribution facilities is sufficient for sustainable reliance on grains.
I believe rice can be stored safely for years given the right conditions. There are no sustainable conditions under which leafy greens can be stored for as long as rice.
Exactly this. A lettuce grown in California that's shipped to NYC is going to be incredibly low in 'benefits'. IMO vertical farms do have a role in the future and that is to swap out lettuce/leafy greens/herbs grown on a traditional farm to something more calorie efficient, local leafy greens grown in cities and towns.
Leafy greens are the best for these in their current iteration, they can be grown in fairly shallow dirt or even none using aeroponics and grow pretty quickly so operators can get regular harvests.
Looking at it from a value proposition standpoint, it could provide the base for an ultra-fresh salad bar if you have the space for a shipping container and presumably an electrician.
I grew up having to grow pretty much everything we ate (by necessity as you couldn’t buy anything in stores). And whatever we didn’t grow ourselves we helped relatives or neighbors with and shared in harvest.
I personally don’t understand the appeal of going back to that. I’m so glad I can just buy whatever I want at the grocery store these days and don’t need to spend all my free time on harvesting calories.
Reminds me of my reaction to that one Robert Heinlein quote about how "Specialization is for insects." Sounds romantic but also exhausting, unnecessarily so.
Robert Heinlein's life and career was made possible by those incredibly focused 'insects'. It's a nice platitude, but in its strong form, it seems quite myopic, and more than a tad out-of-touch.
Step two is to put in ~12 hours a day, 7 days a week of work into homesteading.
Step three is to dip on your savings to buy farming equipment, consumable inputs, and groceries for the remaining half of your food that you won't be able to grow yourself.
If you'd like to try before you buy, my parents' homestead up in Canada could always use another pair of hands. Money's a bit tight, but they can pay you with food and a couch to sleep on. You'll have to share the room with ~15-30 baby chicks, though. You'll quickly get used to the smell.
I understand that this won't give you a vertical garden, but unlike a vertical garden, it will go most of the way to meeting your daily caloric and nutritional needs.
It will never cover your whole diet, but it is a good way of growing some of it yourself. And that's not as time intensive as the other commenter says. If you use soil, have the lights on a timer and use auto-irrigation, it's pretty much hands free. A few weekends to set up, then months of marveling at how plant life works heh.
I'd be quite the opposite, honestly. Cropland area in the US covers 367 million acres in the US [0]. Even assuming that vertical farming is 10x more land efficient, the amount of resources (steel, power, plastics, etc.) needed to convert 36 million acres of land into vertical farms would have a staggering ecological impact.
Just covering that area with a 22 gauge corrugated steel roof, without any supporting structure, would be about 1.35 billion tons of steel [1], or about 75% of the entire world's steel production for a year.
There are definitely products that would make sense to grow in vertical farms (eg. high value crops like tomatoes or bell peppers, which are already grown in hothouses in certain areas of the country), but staple crops tend to preserve for a long time, and wouldn't see as much of a benefit from vertical farming.
Yeah, tbf I'm not seeing this as viable for industrial level production. But it does seem like a good fit for individual farms, even in a personal backyard.
The advances in LED lighting over the past 10 years is nothing short of amazing. Used to be you needed heavy, big and hot multi-killowat HPS lamp installations for the best indoor farming, but not anymore!
I set up a small experimental indoors farm myself, and I used cheap LED lamps you can get anywhere, three different temperatures, interspersed on a custom frame above the plants.
I realized I know nothing about soil, because it turns out there's more to it than just dumping it in a pot. Soil composition and density are really important, moreso than the pH (that a lot of people focus on) in my experience. I would've definitely fucked up with a hydroponic setup that I first considered. Soil is much better and we really don't appreciate it as much as we should. It's literally the source of life.
These plants needed more root aeration, the first batch was terribly small, but still pretty good. Second batch was much better thanks to a custom soil/pebbles setup (soil in the center, pebbles around the fabric pot), then I realized the lumen output needed to be much higher for perfect results. I wanted to try some COB LEDs, which output more lumen, but I could not find any (and importing would take too long and cost way too much), plus I really wanted to see what simple SMD LEDs could do.
So I trashed the whole thing in favor of custom Tipi style tents for individual plants with the LED lamps spread all around and above. Not the most efficient use of space, but it turned out to be the best for growth.
~2 months from seed to harvest, electricity cost was laughably low (~$20 total per plant) and heat generation was practically non-existent. I also had plants outdoors, tbh the sun-grown tomatoes tasted better, but the other greens were just as good grown indoors.
Still not sure if LED production is environmentally friendly or sustainable, but it sure is revolutionary.
Thanks for sharing your experiment. I’m curious about soil composition and density as you pointed out its importance. I definitely feel like my lack of success is mainly with my soil.
I've read some stuff online, but everyone's using soil from shops it seems. I picked it from a farm nearby, crushed it as fine as I could, mixed it with my own compost (various vegetables and leaves), after a while outdoors all of it just gets processed by bacteria, it quite literally disappears, all of it becomes soil.
When putting it in the fabric pots (really good stuff, forget anything else) I mixed it with a small amount of pebbles and twigs to prevent it from compacting (which severely impacts growth, as roots can't push through it); I had nothing else and that seemed to do the trick.
But the thing is I used a makeshift metal cylinder to fill the pot with soil in the center and a layer of pebbles all around and at the bottom. The idea was that the plant would grow and get nutrients from the soil, then as the roots grow out into the pebbles they'd get more oxygen and water.
It's actually sort of a soil/hydroponic hybrid setup if I think about it. Seems to have worked great.
I also used simple NPK fertilizer, the plants react if you use too much (leaves turn yellower, tips start burning), so you know when to stop.
There's a lot of information out there, but honestly I learned more with hands-on experience than from reading dozens of articles and forum threads. I thought it would be rather simple, but it's definitely not just "plant it and forget it". I appreciate plant life more now, it's quite fascinating when you get into it haha.
A model of farming is capturing the sun's energy in the grown produce.
This is why farming takes so much land: to get more of the sun.
Growing in warehouses or vertically forces you to substitute the sun with artificial lights: even if those are powered by the sun, there's a huge loss of energy in the system, hence increased cost.
Are you sure? Growing produce remotely has additional inherent costs that don't exist in vertical farms, such as wasted water, the need for very heavy machinery, the issue of transporting and transporting within certain timeframes. The last 2 problems include the cost of oil/gasoline, and the maintenance of a whole array of systems, from oil extraction pipelines to road maintenance.
This, to me, sounds like vertical farms in the grand scheme could be more efficient.
Go set up a artificial growth environment and try run it for a cycle longer than a month. It takes huge amounts of resources to maintain that environment. And no it's not chemical free. Also yes water is used and wasted. If you ain't doing bulk washing your applying huge amounts of product to keep algae blooms out of your systems. Try run that environment for a year. I give it 2-3 month before your first insect/pest bloom. Less if your unlucky. An I'd be blown away if you fix your first pest bloom the first try. Vertical farms are sick on paper...that ignores masses of requirements to actually get the task done.
Thanks for going in detail as to why it is severely impractical and inefficient, all the items you listed are overlooked or outright ignored in the discussions I have read, as you probably guessed I am way out of my field.
In your opinion, what's the main bottleneck wrt to resources?
Eh the problem with resources is not using systems that are a closed loop for the whole cycle. e.g. Currently most vert farms or greenhouses buy in all their seed and nutrient and alot of the time grow medium too. Its wasteful just in the nature of it, you can't recycle those parts, your not producing them so you drain them from somewhere else. What I would love to see is hybrid broad acre/high density greenhouse farms.
I'm leaning towards productions suited for my region for this example, it would require tailoring to each regions climates/capacities if you were to do this everywhere. On the broad acre you essentially would do native grasses/root vegetables/shrub crops and runs of more traditional mono crops in dispersed amongst heavily Wooded paddocks. like 30-40% tree cover,30-40% perennial natives, 20-30% rotated mono-crop runs. You need to not stress the land too much where I am, and work with the droughts that come through (Australia). The whole goal of the broad acre is to produce a little food buffer but mostly material for nutrient creation.
So maybe you harvest/cut your native grasses a few times a year, bail it, inoculate it with fungi to eat it and convert it to a higher nutrient product for fertilizer if your running soil greenhouses. Or you could use mulched grasses to run a snail farm, that in turn feeds a aquaculture setup which you can strip the fish shit out of for nutes to supply your high density vert farm. Having the broad acre allows you to do other things too like maintain bee hives which can be brought into the greenhouse for pollinating.
Huge amounts of resources/capital required to set closed loops like this up...but on the plus side...once their setup, if you do things right like use high grade materials(e.g stainless for all your greenhouse piping/water setup) it can last for near infinite time with correct maintenance. Just good luck getting a investor who gets profit @ 10-20 year mark rather than 6-12 months. Market doesn't seem to like long games these days even if it is whats probably best for environment/long term sustainable high density farming.
Oh and also we need a robot that can pick fruit/veg and do maintenance that requires dexterity (think unscrewing a nozzle or pipe fitting). Bad. Labor is a killer for broad acre tree crops and stuff that requires a bit of dexterity for harvest (see Australia's current farm labor shortage).
Very true. I have an aerogarden setup and best way to use it is to swap the plants into real ground and do a fresh clean after they've grown for a few months, otherwise gnats / fungus will take over.
It also seems to require much more water than watering the plants in ground, I assume because they are getting maximum rate from roots and almost infinitely growing them .
I had the same experience. The biggest thing for me was keeping it clean was a gigantic pain. The plants would get massive with tons of leaves that would fall down inside plant and start breaking down on top of the plastic. In soil, that just breaks down and becomes more dirt.
Geez into High Pressure Aeroponics if the water efficiency thing interests you. Its also somewhat easier to keep clean as you only feed the plants the water they can consume (literally a single droplet of condensation in your root chambers DTW outlet means your feeding too much). On the downside the setup is hard as it gets, 145+psi water system, impinge nozzles with .4mm diameter outlets (means your nutes gotta be particulate free). But the efficiency of it is the ultimate in closed environment growth.
For bugs in a greenhouse the least chemical method i've found is dumping c02. Can only use it in closed/controlled spaces tho. Blanket room in c02 for 12 hrs...literally just chokes any bugs. Plants are fine.
The article linked presented the the efficiency of vertical farming in terms of produce/area. But as was pointed out in some of the comments on that article the cost of the greens grown on vertical farms was in the range of $15/pound [1]. Which is about 3x the price of organic greens at Whole Foods, or 10x the price of what you would find at Walmart.
Converting a field into a solar farm so that you can power artificial lights to grow plants is indeed not exactly ideal...
But there are also energy and cost savings because you can remove most of the transport, which at the moment involves ICE vehicles, and the energy does not have to come from solar sources (just within renewables there are other options).
Longer term we can also imagine artificial lights powered by fusion power, which would probably be the best option in term of space saving and environmental impact.
In theory a solar cell could also absorb wavelengths that plants can’t/don’t use (infrared, green, ultraviolet) and emit the ideal spectrum for chlorophyll a/b to absorb. If the efficiency could be [radically] improved then more could be grown per unit area of solar cells than could be under the sun when naturally farmed.
Edit: note the reason that most plants are green is because their growth is not limited by the amount of sunlight converted, so they can afford to throw away some efficiency e.g. they might be limited by water or mineral availability. Quote from same site: “Some plants and plantlike organisms have developed other pigments to compensate for low light or poor use of light. Cyanobacteria and red algae have phycocyanin and allophycocyanin as accessory pigments to absorbe orange light. They also have a red pigment called phycoerythrin that absorbs green light and extends the range of photosynthesis. The red pigment lycopene is found in vegetables. Some red algae are in fact nearly black, so that increases their photosynthetic efficiency. Brown algae have the pigment fucoxanthin in addition to chlorophyll to widen their absorption range. These red and brown algae grow to depths around 270 meters where the light is less than 1% of surface light.”
Edit 2: plant photosynthetic efficiency in capturing CO2 as sugars: “the theoretical efficiency is 114/381 or 30%. Remarkably, Moore, et al. report that 25% has been achieved under laboratory conditions. The top efficiency they reported under natural growing conditions was the winter-evening primrose growing in Death Valley at 8%”
> If the efficiency could be [radically] improved then more could be grown per unit area of solar cells than could be under the sun when naturally farmed.
That's a big 'if', though, considering that you'd need to offset both the land taken up by the solar panels and the losses of the electricity transmission.
Plants reflect and diffuse most sunlight, and we can make lamps that only emit wavelengths that are suitable for photosynthesis. Doesn't this complicate the model a bit?
>Growing in warehouses or vertically forces you to substitute the sun with artificial lights
Couldn't one construct pylons outdoors for planting? I don't see why it wouldn't work if you constructed it narrower at each successive plant height.
Some indoor vertical farming I've seen rotates the entire vertical structure, necessitating only one light facing a section of the column. I would expect this kind of rotation might help outdoors as well.
One constraint to keep in mind is how quickly and efficiently the field can be harvested. If you're talking about a crop that is harvested by hand then this isn't really a factor. But if you're trying to grow a crop that is usually mechanically harvested, you have to compete with that efficiency with machines of your own that are compatible with the structure of your farm (or content yourself with selling luxury produce priced for the wealthy.)
I'm very excited about this. This isn't going to replace farms anytime soon, but there's a pretty solid economic niche for it within the food choices that customer preference justifies today.
The best argument for this method of food production is by looking at criticism of existing food production.
Reading stuff like this is truly, deeply, depressing. In our modern lives, we are supposed to eat lots of vegetables (which we don't), but we're also supposed be picky about which ones we get. Just the thought of that is exhausting.
Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer.
Vertical farms offer consumers several things which are almost impossible to come by otherwise. This is extraordinarily good to have for market entry.
Higher energy use is a strike, but you have to consider the whole picture. I definitely think there's a place for this, the benefits that offset higher energy intensity are very substantive.
> Also lookup salmonella outbreaks. How, you might ask, does salmonella get into lettuce? You will probably be grossed out to hear the answer.
Spoiler: field workers who don't get bathroom breaks.
I think a lot of people don't understand that farming is messy work. After highschool I worked at a bean processing plant where my job was to pick dead small animals (usually rodents, snakes, and frogs) out of the beans as they sped by on a conveyor belt. The machines needed to harvest the massive quantities of food our civilization requires do not discriminate between beans and the animals living in bean fields. But here is the thing; almost nobody gets sick from this. Wash your produce. Raccoons do it, and so should you. If you do, you'll almost certainly be fine just like nearly everybody else. It's gross, but it's not really a problem.
Either way, you're not exactly dicing with death when you eat some lettuce. Sometimes there are outbreaks, but the CDC says about 420 die per year from salmonella, with 26k hospitalizations. That's virtually nothing when you consider how many people eat lettuce every day.
That’s not how food security regulations work. We don’t play games with people’s lives.
Lettuce has to be hydro cooled right after harvest..45 minutes after harvest. In Salinas etc, it’s done right on the field. It never gets out of refrigeration until customer buys it from store. There is enormous food wastage. Almost 40% of harvest is wasted even with top notch cold supply chain systems.
When the public doesn’t trust the food they are playing dice with every mouthful of food. That’s just not acceptable.
The risk from the farmers side is entirely different from how you consider food risks.
> When the public doesn’t trust the food they are playing dice with every mouthful of food. That’s just not acceptable.
The public do trust lettuce. The current systems work well and billions of people trust their lives to it, with good results. Exceptionally few people are afraid of eating regular store bought lettuce.
Nobody is talking about "playing games" so I have no idea what you're on about there. I never suggested that food production be deregulated, that would be insanity.
There are people who will stop buying kinds of lettuce after seeing news stories about these recalls. I mean stop for months.
I agree, when a recall happens the store should pull them from the shelves, and consumers shouldn't have to worry about it. Not everyone feels this way.
I'm only making a point about perception. There is a feedback loop with media, Facebook, whatever. The public CAN lose trust in lettuce, and it is not something to take for granted.
They are able to trust it only because the last rung of the supply chain..the grocery store..discards and wastes so much produce to put out only the best and prettiest looking produce on the shelves.
This conversation is jumping around all over the place isn't it? The fact remains people can and do trust produce; the extant food systems we have are working. The extant systems, regulations and all, provide the reliable, safe and cheap supply of food our civilization requires, and it do so pretty damn well.
As for waste, do you really think some shipping containers in the parking lot will provide an elastic supply? Even if you can install more containers on short notice, it would still take weeks at least for those units to start producing. The extant systems can and do respond to changes in demand in days, not weeks. If these were relied on for anything but luxury produce, you'd often have too much or too little. To provide a buffer, you have to start storing the produce, which negates the ultra-fresh appeal.
>This conversation is jumping around all over the place isn't it? The fact remains people can and do trust produce;
hmm..no, its not. we are stuck at the point where you continue to insist that its a 'fact' that people 'can and do trust produce'..
people trust their food sellers and vendors and outlets. they trust the farmer market seller, whole foods or safeway or costco.
the farmer most times doesnt even come in direct contact with 'the people'. the people are not our buyers. wholesalers, distributers and brokers are who we deal with.
i dont think you have any clue how farming or food supply chain or distribution works. i have no interest in continuing this discussion.
There has only been one instance when spinach was contaminated with e.coli. Two things: Americans like to eat their greens raw. Which is weird to most of the rest of the world. At least 3 billion people think that it’s nuts. 2. In that particular instance, it was traced back to a pig that got lost and likely contaminated due to some animal that died during mechanical harvest. Greens get contaminated because of contaminated water too.
It’s very simple. Wash your vegetables. Wash your hands while cooking. Cook your greens and vegetables.
Since it’s missing all the nutrients in the soil and only has those purposefully put in, in the long run I suspect it will be optimized for profit and we’ll get very poor food as a baseline, worse than the one grown in soil on average.
This is where e-farming can own its niche. Cut out all the agricultural overhead, grow what you need on demand at the site of the demand, perhaps at a premium quality for a premium product. You can't get more 'local' than that!
Yeah your premium product in a greenhouse is missing the thing that makes veggies premium...which is terroir. Trust me you can grow great food, it'll just have the same terroir/character as anybody else on the same nute regime as you. Premium comes from the ground and it's also cheaper and easier to produce.
Premium can come from the variety. Most varieties are not available at any price - just the commodities?
And suppose we find the nute program that makes them taste good. Then its a good thing they taste the same as everybody else - they taste good! That's the goal, not just some exclusive hipster cachet.
That's close enough. Fresh local lettuce in winter in most northern climates becomes possible, if you can predict demand a score of days into the future.
I once tried to convince the folks at store no:8 ...Walmart’s incubator and start up division to do this for all their stores.
I crunched the numbers and Walmart is the ONLY one that can pull it off profitably.
Amazon warehouses are far behind, but it’s possible.
At Walmart store no:8, they engaged me for 3-4 emails and then ghosted me entirely.
But even if someone there were to reconsider my proposal and take it off on their own, I think it still holds promise.
Anyone can grow locally and minimize their foot print. Only Walmart can generate profits. I said it two something years ago and I still stand behind my analysis even though in the time in between Amazon has expanded, bought Whole Foods and now have warehouses.
Amazon will get there someday..but if I were a betting person, I’d bet on Walmart. Despite the scorn they invite, they have the best supply chain experts and logistics solutions.
I'm interested in this sort of thing because I recently saw a Prop 65 warning on organic spinach purchased from Whole Foods. Apparently there are high levels of cadmium in soil that gets picked up by spinach. [1]
I have no idea how bad cadmium is, or how much of it is in spinach. But it's a real bummer to learn that a food that I thought of as very, very healthy (organic spinach) has a downside like this. Growing it in containers would be one way to get around soil issues like these, which are unfortunately becoming more common (see arsenic in rice).
Yeah the problem with me for prop 65 things: "Is the level detected actually harmful?" and "Is where it's detected actually likely to lead to me being exposed?"
Local food that cuts transport end storage costs is the future. Vertical farms will replace most of what we grow in large fields. Almost all of large factory sized farms ..at least in Ca..goes to feed the rest of the country.
As hydroponics and roof top gardens and vertical farms and warehouse farms and shipping container farms become the norm in places where they have winter and have now hacked it with no need for California produce...California itself have to rethink its Ag policies. And work towards growing our own and sustainably. And locally. Automating and mechanizing a lot of it because Ag labour is going to dry up soon. Not to mention water.
Seems like vining fruits would do well this way? Raspberries, grapes, kiwi, tomatoes, ...
What would it do to the capital expense vs. productivity to use solar + battery storage for 24 hour growing? Or do plants need a 'rest' and a night? Maybe solar on the roof and a basement farm to minimize heating?
I love the idea and had not considered the aspect of breeding seeds for taste & nutrients (thx scsilver). Or the fact that they can provide year-round fresh fruits. Though don't underestimate the cost of maintaining the temperature in the Rockies in the winter (per deedub)...
Has anyone looked into the viability of something like this from the restaurants perspective (costs aside)? I would image a busy restaurant would need more than 90kg/200lbs of produce each month?
I live next to the biggest greenhouse area in the world. Since the pandemic in March last year, I exclusively eat lunches of about 600grams with around 20 types of veggies. It feels amazing after doing so, I never have an after-lunch dip any more. Some performance sports I do got 5-10% directly measurable improvements (cycling and bouldering) after switching to these lunches. Not completely sure it is the cause, but all signs direct to it.
I simply cut these veggies in small and balance the salad out on sweet, sour, salty and calories. After a few months of doing this I started to crave these salads.
Most of the veggies come from the greenhouse area, but not all. You can tell most of them, since they are quite clean already and do not have any dirt/soil on it.
Taste of these veggies is mostly different, not necessarily bad, although I would not describe it typically as being richer in taste. Redish is less sharp, carrots are much more crispy and less fibery, letuces are much fresher (they come with clod, so dont degrade a bit, even after two weeks in the refrigerator), tomatos are more watery but also much, much more varied (small, ultra sweet super juicy ones; bigger fleshy with delicious sour pits; characterfull flavory ones; many more), chickory which is sweeter, bell pepper which are more varied and edible as fruits, sweeter, juicier, cucumbers as small, medium and large where the small ones are really tender, many herbs such as mint, coriander, sellery, rosemary, parsley come as plants which I consume over about two weeks.
Glad there are a lot of people questioning the economic fundamentals of this stuff. The real problem is the agricultural policy which is doubling down unhealthy things. These technical gimmicks which are dubious as to whether they deliver real value to not help with that.
Are there any startups that offer containers like that which allow people to drop it in their backyard and do some uban farming for themselves? I've been interested in permaculture and hope to start gardening once I get a house.
Another example may be that hydroponic growing is typically faster than in soil, for example leafy lettuce such as bibb can be ready nearly twice as fast when grown with hydroponics.
Certainly for commodities at scale, no beating the agricultural infrastructure.
But for a premium produce for a premium product, it can pay. You may not even be able to get from a grocery store, what you can grow for your own needs.
Yes, but you can also grow that premium produce with traditional agriculture at a lower cost than these alternatives.
It's just that most big farms want the most cost-effective use of their land.
There's an argument that this process facilitates some market for people to pay a premium for produce grown inefficiently, but people also pay a premium for their local farmers markets to grow exotic stuff too. Traditional agriculture still wins, all things being equal.
Most restaurants don't have a farm. And land costs are quite high right now - out here in Iowa it averages $7500 per acre. Most of it not for sale anyway. Planting/harvesting machines can be half a million.
The flexibility of e-ag may yet have a place. Weather, season, rain don't have to matter.
Companies are already selling LED growing units for inside the home for food (like aero-garden). The interest is there, what's missing is for it to make significant inroads into the grocery/restaurant food chain.
I don't see anything about temperature regulation, wouldn't that be a big energy consuming part? Especially if I picture a container out under the roasting sun or in biting cold.
There are so many greens to grow other than letttce. Vertical farms are only good for greens and soft herbs. And it’s possible to pack it with nutrient dense herbs.
What's the energy/kg to produce on site versus the energy/kg to grow a thousand miles away, transport and store, transport and store, transport to final destination?
If I can buy a banana at my grocery store for 18 cents then the amount of oil/energy it took to produce that has to be less than 18 cents. Any fruit/veggie can be shipped at great distances at very marginal price cost/energy costs
A cost worth paying, because the only alternative is billions of people starving. Whereas if vertical farms disappeared, yuppies would suffer from eating slightly less fresh lettuce but life would otherwise go on.
Farmland is good for more than one crop. If the lettuce is all grown vertically, most of the farmland won't go back to "nature", it'll be used for slightly less profitable crops.
Un-used land serves a purpose for biodiversity and maintaining ecosystems and plays a role in the climate.
Deforestation for farmland has major implications here.
If you want to make and apples-to-apples comparison, you have to consider what turning a thousand square miles of forest into farmland does versus stacking these containers up.
This solution also claims to use 10X less water, so we can start to factor in energy use related to water production as well.
Aren't you tilting the scale by assuming every m^2 farmland displaces m^2 forest?
If you want to every manufacturing side-cost (metal/copper wire tractor turbine) and amount of CO2 you'll end up with an impossibly difficult calculation, at least for these comment sections.
I don't care to aim so high. I'm happy to compare $ cost farm costs & transport versus $ vertical-farm cost & electricity bill.
> energy use related to water production
Isn't that highly location dependant? Do these farm not run off the public water supply? If so, I'd assume the energy cost was higher for drinkable water.
A fine argument to counter with, however when we look at population density, you'll see that the vast majority of concrete, steel and asphalt goes to support a tiny fraction of the number of people. Thousands of miles of roads... to connect just thousands of rural people.
Meanwhile, thousands of people can live in just a few acres in the city. Far more people per kg of asphalt and concrete!
Which is the kind of efficiencies you expect with economies of scale.
You'd be surprised how much asphalt and concrete we use to give every 500 person village roads and infrastructure!
Of course that has an impact too; I hope you do realize the exploitation of and the health of the environment is actually very closely intertwined with the economy. There is fundamentally no way to "literally just look[] at the economics." All land use has an impact.
I don’t know if these farms will replace traditional ones, but I think there’s at the very least a niche for optimizing produce with tons of flavor.