As usual, actual numbers for water/land/pesticide use (5%/3%/0%), but the only mention of electricity use is the fraction of green power.
Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it.
We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green energy production, not enormous new energy sinks.
"Just use green power" isn't the get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card people think it is.
Food is localized. I'm in Korea now. There's very little arable land here, and vegetables are expensive. It could easily turn into a case of there simply not being available to everyone, simply because there's just not enough. However if the price rises enough to justify the cost of growing it locally in vertical farms, this secures access to greens to everyone. My in-laws are trying to do this at home and even just for their own needs: vegetables are becoming so expensive that it's more affordable to grow them on their balcony. Vertical farming is something they want to do to allow them to improve and maintain their diet at an sustainable cost (that of electricity). And energy is more efficient to import than greens, since it's fungible.
The objections are to vertical farms for grain, not vertical farms in general. Leafy greens are ideal candidates for indoor growing by artificial light, since they need relatively little light and are quickly perishable. The savings in transportation and waste may thus offset the costs of electricity, lights, and other capital equipment. I think even those economics are usually marginal now, and such vertical farms are usually profitable only if they can sell their produce at a premium due to real or perceived better quality (outside unusual locations like the far North). But there's still room for improvement in LED efficiency, automation, etc., so maybe it will cross over.
The economics for grain are much worse--the plants need much more light, and the product is easily dried, stored, and transported. The processing is also highly automated already. Here's an article with some (dismal) numbers:
As an example, if we use solar to generate the electricity to power the indoor farm, the panels will take up roughly 20-40% of the sun's energy, depending on the panel.
So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land.
The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?
It's more complicated than that, since the wavelength distribution matters--we can effectively transform green photons that the plant would have reflected into red or blue photons that it will absorb. (The plant still benefits from some green light, but less than in sunlight.) We can also supply each plant with its exact optimal PPFD and DLI. For example, lettuce may be grown under shade cloth, deliberately wasting much of the incident sunlight, because the extra light won't make it grow faster and will make it taste bitter. In a vertical farm, we can just set the LED current and spacing wherever we want.
I've heard that 1 m^2 of modern solar panels will support >1 m^2 of a low-light crop (like lettuce, unlike grain) under modern LEDs. I haven't done the math myself, and this obviously varies with climate. I think vertical farms (growing entirely by artificial light) are still uneconomic vs. greenhouses almost everywhere, per my other comment here. Supplemental artificial light in a greenhouse is of course highly economic in many climates, and Dutch growers have been using it for decades.
The cost to heat or cool a vertical farm should be lower than for a greenhouse with equivalent growing area, since it's got lower surface-area-to-volume ratio and doesn't need to be transparent. That may be important for stuff like high-end strawberries, where tight control of the day-night temperature swing enables higher sugar content. I again wouldn't expect a useful benefit for grains, though.
This seems like a good point: just building greenhouses, providing full control of water usage and easy mechanical access, delivers all the value without the inefficient trip through solar panels and LEDs.
On the other hand, wind power would not use up cropland, and the solar panels could be on non-crop land, or water. Stacked grow trays might be more efficient to operate on.
The new Frankenstein rice that does CD4 photosynthesis, and also makes carotenes, seems like a good choice to grow in them. Maybe it can be persuaded to make protein, in the bargain.
And don’t forget the energy and materials you need to build something where you can actually grow things indoors.
Total waste of so many things here. We know that we can grow stuff in greenhouses. We know wheat is a cheap commodity too, where it is hard to gain a profit on. What are they trying to accomplish here?
Dunno. In some places agriculture is fried with climate change at the gates so trying things to regain control over culture conditions could worth it. Could be useful also for keeping isolated varieties non contaminated with genetically modified pollen. Just in case something go wrong with that.
If you replace outdoor crops with forests, they'll sequester much more CO2.
In principle you can replace many acres of outdoor crops with one acre of greenhouse crops: with electric illumination you can make plants grow during nighttime, and with controlled temperature you they can also grow during the winter.
Irrigation also needs much less water in a greenhouse (because plants lose a lot of water via transpiration, and in a humid environment they transpire less). Not to mention that you can recycle the water in a greenhouse.
Irrigation is a big component of the energy expenditure of crops, but not the only one. All other components will decrease. Fertilizer, pesticides, tilling: you just don't need huge tractors to go miles and miles to the fields. You can have much smaller machines doing the job on the spot.
I'm not saying greenhouses are the solution to all the world's problems, but they shouldn't just be discarded outright.
The big deal here is the yield; the field outside my window yields 6 tonnes/hectare/year on a good year. The article mentions 117 tonnes/hectare and I assume it's on a yearly basis.
I can't imagine the production being more energy efficient than a regular field, but it sure saves space. I can imagine places like Singapore would benefit greatly since it could produce food locally.
That may be the principle but it's obviously flawed inasmuch as every square inch of cultivation needs its square inch of sunlight equivalent to grow. So now you're stuck with the energy cost of cramming (the sun) x (your stack depth) into your grow facility. You can certainly save on other inputs like water, but you lose the only free input available to agriculture, namely sunlight.
Plants don't use the whole light spectrum, at most they use 45% of the natural light. Solar panels can take advantage of the whole spectrum. Then, the indoor lighting will just shine the light that the plants can actually use (all growing lamps advertise that, see [1] for example).
Plants also don't use the light while they are just sprouting. Plants don't use light after you harvest them. And most importantly, plants don't use light where they are not.
If you have vast areas of desert, you can mount lots of solar panels. Lots of places are somewhat between pure Dunes-type desert and Ukrainian-type super fertile chernozem. In a semi-desert place, you might be better off just installing solar panels and building indoor farms. Think of places like Arizona, or Nevada, or, why not, Sudan.
Modern logistics systems are so efficient transportation costs are a rounding error for bulk commodities. How's the energy grid looking in Sudan these days?
Same, I have a green house. I have high tunnels and low tunnels too. They allow my family to grow nearly 100% of our plant needs year round. But I don't grow my grains in a tunnel or a house. I don't grow my pasture in one either. Green houses are a tool and there is a place for every tool. New tools get used for lots of things they aren't good for.
Really? On what grounds? A modern combine can harvest 30 acres of wheat in an hour, and can be trivially reconfigured to handle a variety of bulk grains. Your task is now to match or better that without resorting to a monstrous pool of starvation-wage labor and without raising the price of grain to the level of a luxury good.
Modern combines sit idle when the harvesting period ends. So about 90% of the year. With indoor farming, you are not constrained by the seasons. You can rotate your crops, so you harvest some in January, some others in February, etc. Whatever machines you need for harvesting, spraying, tilling, etc, you can arrange to use each 100% of the time.
I personally think grains will not be economical indoors this decade, or maybe even next, but in some not very distant future, the majority of the agricultural products will be produced indoors, just like chickens are now. Of course, when that time will come, indoor farming will be perceived as bad, horrendous, anti-nature, etc, just like people perceive the industrialized chicken farms now.
Neat thing about idle equipment, it doesn't consume any inputs, so not real sure where you think you're going with that one. And yes, you aren't constrained by seasons. You're constrained by grid electricity rates, market prices for agricultural products, available labor pool, and the supply of dumb money naive enough to capitalize infrastructure projects that are balanced on that house of cards.
That means we would have to build our own fusion reactor on Earth or on Mars. Sure, it would be worth it on Mars since you don't have any other choice but on Earth? Anyone who thinks that is arguing in bad faith.
You don't need to spray because you control the environment, you don't need to transport as far, and planting and harvesting won't use fossil fuels (unless that's your only source of electricity).
1) you still have to use actual soil and thats full of bugs and organisms already
2) if you aren't fertilizing you won't get anywhere near the yield farmers do and you won't be competitive on cost.
Harvesting will still require the use of whatever harvesting technology there is. If we can't competitively build grain harvesters with electricity outdoors its unlikely that you'll be able to do the same indoors. You'll notice no pictures or description of how they harvest - they aren't doing it by hand and they don't say its by electricity, and even if it is do you think the sun provides more energy for free over the life of the crop vs the one time its harvested?.
This doesn't seem very interesting as it stands now.
This article doesn't say, but vertical farms almost always grow hydroponically, using sterilized inert media (like coir) or inherently sterile inert media (like rockwool). The water and fertilizer are delivered together by drip irrigation. Some farms may instead use no medium at all, like in NFT or DWC. With precise control over the plant nutrition, this can achieve higher yields per square foot than soil, making optimal use of the expensive indoor space. (I think grains are particularly unsuitable crops though, per my other comments here.)
In theory it's possible to run completely free of insects, with cleanroom-like precautions, and I think some facilities do. I think it's more common to live with some level of insect pests though, since it's so hard to avoid introductions and so destructive when they occur--with no natural predators, they can multiply far faster than in nature. That implies some level of pesticides, deliberately introduced predatory insects (which are particularly effective indoors, since they can't fly away), etc.
you're still fertilizing then, its just in the liquid you're using. I suppose that helps against nitrogen runoff which is bad for water bodies so thats a plus.
Harvesting won't use what? Are you proposing we, as a species, revert to harvesting the equivalent of a few hundred million acres of cultivated land by hand?
It's indoors, probably on many narrowly spaced floors, so you're hardly going to use a combine harvester! There would be some much smaller electrically-powered robotic system.
So now we're proposing to replace an insanely efficient harvesting system that has been refined and perfected over the course of the last century with what? Rasberry Pi's and some off the shelf stepper motors? Best of luck with your endeavor.
I hope they meant "first indoor wheat grown and sold commercially at competitive prices" or something, because yah certainly research and plant breeding have been done indoors (at least partially) for decades.
I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY
Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.