Vertical farming taking off?

[Brian G Turner]

Vertical farming seems to be developing commercially in Japan - how long before we see green towers here?

Grown from necessity: vertical farming takes off in ageing Japan

The nondescript building on an industrial site near Kyoto gives little hint to the productivity inside: 30,000 heads of lettuce grow here daily, under artificial light and with barely any human intervention.

phys.org

 

[Venusian Broon]

That's interesting. I just read an article from a scientist who has just retired from DEFRA (For those that don't know this is part of the Government here in the UK - the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). Who said we should give up half of our farmland, here in the UK, and repurpose it for carbon and water capture, and the well being of the populationand replace the lost production with vertical farms.

Convert half of UK farmland to nature, urges top scientist

New woodlands and wild places are needed to fight climate crisis and improve people’s health

www.theguardian.com

 

[Overread]

Honestly when you consider the potential for mechanisation and reducing land coverage I'm surprised vertical farming isn't more of a thing. When you then measure it against land use and the desire to conserve that is growing in the west - vertical farming seems the only sane option. Turn one field into the output of 20 or more fields of the same size. Do it enough and you can cut down on farmland needed

 

[Alex The G and T]

How many acres of farmland need to be covered in solar panels to make all of that artificial sun-lighting carbon-neutral?

 

[Overread]

How many acres of farmland need to be covered in solar panels to make all of that artificial sun-lighting carbon-neutral?

Carbon Neutral is a bit of a fad name; you can never be fully neutral. For power generation for the mass use you're still most likely looking at nuclear power which has a much smaller footprint in general. All those solar cells wouldn't just have a huge footprint of resources to produce but also the physical size of the area they'd have to cover.

 

[Alex The G and T]

The point remains: From whence the Juice?

Leafy, cool weather crops, like the featured lettuce, do well in the low intensity, fluorescent lighting pictured.

Any sort of summer crops: grains, corn, beans, tomatoes, squash... require much higher intensity lighting. The required Wattage per unit area skyrockets.

"More nukes" is a tough sell, these days.

 

[RJM Corbet]

The point remains: From whence the Juice?

Leafy, cool weather crops, like the featured lettuce, do well in the low intensity, fluorescent lighting pictured.

Any sort of summer crops: grains, corn, beans, tomatoes, squash... require much higher intensity lighting. The required Wattage per unit area skyrockets.

"More nukes" is a tough sell, these days.

Good point. Growing hydroponic stacked tiers of lettuce is not yet really 'farming'? Farming implies hundreds of thousands of acres of corn and wheat, and rich earthy fields of potatoes, soya beans and onions etc. One can say it's a start but there's still a long way to go? Lettuce is lettuce, lol?

 

[Dave]

I don't want to get political but the fact is that this subject is simply about political decisions; that is all. We have the technology already: green walls, green roofs, permaculture, underground hydroponic farms, agro-forestry, silviculture and mixed farming solutions. The "acres of corn and wheat" (and grass) are largely needed to feed farm animals (or to make biofuel.) If we ate less animals and more corn and wheat then it wouldn't require so much space. Getting people to do that - to eat less meat, or to drive less and to drive electric vehicles - that is the difficulty because people (myself included) won't easily do that by choice. Getting people to see that the industrial scale of modern mono-culture farming (and fertilisers, pesticides and ploughing) is actually a problem at all, or that our limited natural resources cannot survive our unchecked capitalist philosophy of ever increasing economic growth, or to stop countries squabbling over the size of their portion of what is left - those are the real problems. Solutions require people to come and work together, and to share, and to accept limits (both personal and political), and that is unacceptable to a majority of people as it is seen as (and it actually really is) a form of socialism. I personally just don't think it is going to happen. I think we have already missed our chance to prevent serious global warming now, and that all we can do is to ameliorate the damage with engineering solutions. I think we must hope that the human race survives the future wars to come fighting over our depleted natural resources.

As for energy production, there is untapped tidal, wind, hydro-electric and geothermal power. There is plenty of sunlight and space for solar panels in the Sahara, or on the shadow squares we will have in orbit to help cool the Earth. However, all energy use produces heat itself, and in a warmer world, maybe we should try to use less too. Nor do these "green" forms of energy come without their own environmental problems. Aquatic insects think solar panels are open water. Windmill vanes kill birds. Hydrological engineering and tidal barrages alter ecosystems and stop fish spawning. There is much in the newspapers about the environmental consequences of the need for Cobalt required for batteries. Nuclear fission power may be a hard sell politically but it will be required for the foreseeable future. My problem with it (apart from the accidents, the waste, and the pollution) is simply that Uranium is itself, a limited natural resource. We need to look much further ahead into the future than politicians, and the general public, currently do.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I more or less agree with your comments @Dave. 'acres of corn and wheat' strikes me as a rather niave view of farming, like it came out a pre-school book. A lot of farmland in the UK is totally unsuitable for arable crops, a lot is utilised for producing animals such as sheep. (It was mostly this kind of land that the ex-Defra person said we should re-wild, re-forest.)

As you state there are a lot of different approaches, some of which we may have to take up. i.e. arable land has it's own problems, for example soil degradation which is currently being exacerbated by climate changes and commerical farming practices across the globe as well as here in Blighty.

While eating less meat is a solution that would have huge positive environmental benefits, it's a solution that I'm afraid won't work if it was just down to 'people to come together'. (And I include my gym-going, strength focused self, gotta have my protein!) Meat has been and is seen as a premium highly attractive food source that the rich eat, so most of us are going to strive to eat a lot of it. I fear, like yourself, that only some sort of catastrophe will shake the collective understanding that trying to give 7 billion people a US diet of meat is currently totally unsustainable.

As for your power musing, mmm... solar panels, tidal power, wind, hydroelectric and geothermal all just use energy that would have been there in the first place, so fundamentally it's a zero-sum game, they are extracting energy and converting it into another form. Same actually, for the use of Uranium in fission power - if we didn't use it, the ore would just sit in the Earth's crust and release its heat there anyway. Coal and natural gas pockets are clearly different.

As for the problems...give me those problems rather than increasing the amount of greenhouse gases via coal and gas use or the other pollutions that impact all parts of the ecosystem - you'd prefer acid rain and choking clouds of combusted wood or coal waste? I think that impacts the ecosystem far far more than a few birds hitting wind turbines.

Uranium, yes, is limited, but I think we've got a 1000 years of the stuff. If we really have to rely on Uranium a bit, that should give us enough time to change over. Hopefully we don't need to lean too much on it, as I don't think we are the sort of species that can handle trying to keep the increasing pile of dangerous waste safe from this technology for hundreds of thousands of years.

Perhaps - in fifty years - fusion will be working commercially, or perhaps India can get Thorium reactors to work and we can quickly get rid of 20th Century fission as well.

 

[Dave]

As for the problems...give me those problems rather than increasing the amount of greenhouse gases via coal and gas use or the other pollutions that impact all parts of the ecosystem - you'd prefer acid rain and choking clouds of combusted wood or coal waste? I think that impacts the ecosystem far far more than a few birds hitting wind turbines.

I agree with you, but that is rather missing the point. I'm enough of a realist to understand that many people do not agree with us. Members of this Forum reading this right now, do not agree that climate change is a problem. If they don't deny the science completely, they deny the severity, or else that man's actions are responsible, or else think it is all a conspiracy. I don't want to start a political discussion here over this, because they will never be convinced otherwise and such a discussion is therefore fruitless.

All I am saying is that we do have the technology to create green walls, green roofs, permaculture, underground hydroponic farms, agro-forestry, silviculture and mixed farming solutions, and to re-wild farmland. However, even if people did want to make these huge sweeping changes then there are other far bigger implications than simply the construction and replanting. Farmers earn money from their farms. Farmers like to farm. They do not want to have unproductive land and they need to earn money to pay bills just like everyone else. Where do you find the money to compensate them and for how long? Taken a step further, those Amazon rainforest farmers burning forest to grow crops, are just poor men who have nothing but their land. We want them to stay poor and not farm, while we continue to be rich and eat beef, grown on their neighbour's previously rainforest land. We want the people of China and India to continue to eat rice while we enjoy meat. Rice is a particularly protein-poor staple compared to wheat or corn. They only want what we already have, and they will have it, and we are not going to stop them. We can avoid thinking about these problems, we can fight wars over them, but the real solutions will only come from sitting around a table and making compromises.

My pessimism comes about because I don't see any political will to do this. There are no votes in it enough to win majority governments; people won't vote to be made poorer, more especially if they don't believe in the problem anyway.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Vertical farming is probably going to survive no matter what happens. Where it is economically feasible it will be done, where it isn't economically feasible it won't work. It could be a future indicator of how farming industry is shifting from wildly uncontrolled massive areas of unprotected fields to a more controlled, protected situation which mimics a factory. Vertical food factories could be continually updated to incorporate new technology and eventually move to providing the raw materials on site needed to produce new food products, such as substitutions for meat. It also looks like it represents a decentralization of the farm industry, where localized operations produce food where it normally can't be grown for immediate consumption in the area it is grown. It can be used to return land back to its natural state by using volume instead of surface area. With a vertical food factory in the middle of former large open field farms the reintroduction of natural growth would probably be beneficial to the area around it. For the foreseeable future reproducing plant life itself is probably the most efficient way to convert energy to food, even if one method uses more energy than another method. Vertical farms seem to use less water and are less susceptible to water damage from storms, which might be more important than how energy is supplied to the farming operation. It works where there is too much precipitation or not enough. It is also able to produce food year round, even in winter weather conditions.

If a way could be could developed to utilize water from municipal sewage, that could be a constant source of water in municipal locations. Storm run off in cities could be another source of water that goes untapped now.

Not knowing what the total list of agricultural products, a list of stuff that won't grow in a vertical farm seems to be smaller than what can be grown in one.

What can't:
Squash
Melons
Pumpkins
Cucumbers
Fruit trees
Root vegetables

It seems to be plants that need a lot of plant surface area to produce edible products. Perhaps hybrid vertical farms could use the towers to grow what can be grown and use the fields for what can't be grown. Then we would be back to the big open land farms, but maybe less of them.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I'm not really sure what point you were trying to make then @Dave , if it is to do with the clip you quoted. You listed a number of negatives with green energy - I just loaded up the 'other side' with regards to fossil fuels.

But perhaps you are talking about something else.

Not discussing these issues because you think 'they will never be convinced otherwise' seems just as wrong as being irrationally intransient on any issue. (On whatever view anyone can have, not just climate deniers, say.) Later on you say 'real solutions will only come from sitting around a table and making compromises'. How are we supposed to do that without talking? Yes, even here there are a few troll-like avatars stalking about, but they will likely find other issues to irritate with anyhow. Or are we letting them win and this is another topic that must get thrown into the unmentionables on this forum? We have to start somewhere, even amongst ourselves.

I guess I am crossing lines here. You are looking out to stop flaming and trolling on this forum first of all, the 'compromises around the table' belongs to the global political solution that needs to be in place, for governments are currently the organisations that have the most power to do something.

(But yes either we somehow bumble our way through this mess a bit battered, but more likely the only political will to change will have to come about via some catastrophe that impacts everyone.)

There's a lot of assumptions and points you make that I could discuss in your second paragraph, but I guess you're not keen to keep this discussion going, so I'll leave it there and find other outlets. Cheers.

 

[RJM Corbet]

our unchecked capitalist philosophy of ever increasing economic growth

Yes. Unsustainable.

However, looking at UK farming: smallish fields separated by hedgerows and mostly growing not very much else but grass, upon which a few sheep and cattle are grazing -- it is possible to imagine how without the animals it might be possible to elevate the actual growing areas into vertical farms. But I suspect it's going to be different if we start trying to achieve the same thing in -- Oregon, say -- where wheat/corn grows for thousands of acres to the horizon, and then beyond?

 

[Dave]

@RJM Corbet I saw a report on TV a while ago about using robots in fields. They expertly weed without compacting the soil, so no herbicides required, and they can tell exactly when crop plants are ready to be harvested, and then take them out individually at the optimum time. I guess drones could be used to fly up and down walls.

@Venusian Broon I only meant to show that "green" forms of energy have their own inherent problems, but not trying to say they are worse than fossil fuels. Climate change on Twitter is a battlefield of a topic, so best we don't discuss it further here. Vertical farming and hydroponics is certainly a SFF topic though - there can be no further exploration of space unless we can grow food off Earth.

 

[Overread]

If you've a 1000 acre field then you might only need a 100 acre vertical farm and that's assuming it only has 10 layers to it. Granted a factory like that would be more than 100 acres in size when built; however in theory it would be far less than 1000 acres. If you grow crops to have shorter and shorter stems and a higher yield head then you can fit more and more into racks. In theory you could get several layers in a single "floor" (as shown in the cabbage farm above). A 10 floor factory with 4 growing layers per floor at 100 acres per layer and suddenly we are talking about 4000 acres in a building that might be only a couple of hundred acres big. So the numbers start to scale up very quickly into very significant growth potential.

Of course those are all pie in the sky numbers, however I think it shows the potential for large scale farming in a factory style environment. Allowing for a far greater production of food per unit of area. In theory if you can produce food like that you can not only produce more for less land use (leaving land more open for other use, such as ecological preservation); but you also have the potential to disconnect land quality from food production. Now the key elements would be communication networks; access to trade for resource import (nutrients) and geological stability. It could be huge for 3rd world countries where there are still ancient ecosystems in operation which are currently being torn up for farmland; if that process could be halted for vertical farms there's a general net gain for everyone (except logging firms - at least for short term profit).

Also if you contain farming systems you can decrease elements like nutrient leaching and pesticide leaching (though in fairness if its self contained you shouldn't need the latter - so healthier food for us). So you can locally reduce the impact of farming.

 

[RJM Corbet]

as shown in the cabbage farm above ...

Pedant's corner:

Lettuce. Cabbage is a lot more nourishing, and a lot more difficult to grow, lol?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Instead of lettuce, it could simply be bacteria proteins being grown:

Food 'made from air' could compete with soya

Finnish scientists say the food could be grown with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[RJM Corbet]

Instead of lettuce, it could simply be bacteria proteins being grown:

Food 'made from air' could compete with soya

Finnish scientists say the food could be grown with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

www.bbc.co.uk

Yes. Absolutely.

In the last of the 2001 books by Arthur C. Clarke most foods are made from yeast and there's a part where someone is talking to a yeast scientist who tells him: those strawberries and cream you had for dessert -- were made from a yeast formula I personally desiged.

I think it's the book where he invents space tower cities, tethered on the Earth and maintained by space elevators?

 

[Dave]

I wondered about the sub-headline on that article. Surely, growing any plant takes in CO2 and exchanges O2? Did it mean CO2 from farm tractors and rock mining, mined for chemical fertilisers? No, it is simply saying that the soil bacteria fed on hydrogen split from water by electricity, could use electricity from solar and wind power.

I think more normal farming could be made much more carbon neutral if it went down the vertical farming route. Here are the weeding drones that I mentioned earlier as an alternative to tractors, herbicides and sparying:

This weed-killing AI robot uses 20 times less herbicide and may disrupt a $26 billion market

Smart weed-killing robots are here and could soon reduce the need for herbicides and genetically modified crops. Swiss company EcoRobotix has a solar-powered robot that can work for up to 12 hours detecting and destroying weeds. Ecorobotix says the robot uses 20 times less herbicide than...

www.cnbc.com

 

[Dave]

More on hi-tech urban farming ideas:

How 16 initiatives are changing urban agriculture through tech and innovation | Trellis

From high-tech indoor farms in France and Singapore to mobile apps connecting urban growers and eaters in India and the United States, here are more than a dozen initiatives using tech, entrepreneurship, and social innovation to change urban agriculture.

www.greenbiz.com

Though I have to agree with @RJM Corbet that growing salad vegetables in these ways is a different prospect to grain and Brassica.