This is a terrible idea. Growing plants sustainably requires soil and sun. And good tasting produce requires both. Two minutes thought about it from a whole-systems perspective, and maybe a bit of common sense, would have told them that this was a terrible idea.
A few reasons to get things started:
* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.
* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.
* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.
At some point, vertical farming might make sense. But you'd put it in some cheap industrial land, not in a retail mall (unless it's purely a marketing thing - maybe herbs), because of efficiency of scale.
A lot of the issues can go away when you can run clean rooms, cheap real estate, and a specialised workforce (or robots?). If you put it in a retail space, will customers be able to wander in (dragging in bugs), or will it be a room in the back with dedicated technicians (kind of like a commercial kitchen). And since it's not made to order, why not centralise the business end like a lot of butchers do? Sure, some butchers might still do their own work in a retail space, but they have higher margins on their product.
It also heavily depends on the region. The US has a lot of space for farmland. Maybe look at regions with a lot less arable land. Japan springs to mind. But even then, why would you move the factories into shopping malls? If farmland is at a huge premium, it seems unlikely retail space will be cheap.
It's true. As much as we want to use technology to make our lives better, this isn't the way. There are much better ways to innovate that still involve real soil and sun.
> Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
That is true, but look at the current reality when it comes to the produce sold in supermarkets. It seems like most people care about how it looks (hence the wax makeup) and how cheap it is. Our food has been commoditised to such a degree that it's more about brand perception and price, rather than taste.
This is why strawberries taste like fibrous nothing but look really great. Same for cherries. In fact, most fruits don't taste very good anymore. I recently found bought a bunch of 'Heirloom' oranges which actually tasted wonderful. Probably because they haven't been genetically engineered to look good and last a long time.
I mostly agree with what you're saying. Not sure whether vineyards are such a good example though. Isn't wine one of those things where even "experts" can't taste the good from the bad?
That being said, some vegetables need to be kept away from sunlight (flemish endives come to mind). This could probably work quite well for those.
> Isn't wine one of those things where even "experts" can't taste the good from the bad?
Experts can't really reliably tell the good from the mediocre, but bad wine is pretty obvious to anyone, and certainly has a lot to do with soil type and quality.
> Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them.
Weird, I heard the opposite on an informal tour I took of a local hydroponic farm. They guy could have been full of shit, but he said that one of the biggest benefits of growing indoors was that you didn't have to use pesticides.
Well in sterilized vertical farming concepts that is true. Pests are eliminated. Don't even need to supply oxygen the more automated the system is.
But this concept (as I understand it) has the plants growing where there are humans present so it is going to be a dirty environment and pests will undoubtedly be a problem that needs to be addressed in some fashion.
This may work for a few Whole Foods customers who pay $5 for a bottle of herb infused water but I wonder if the cost is going to be reasonable enough for most people. Real estate cost alone may trump every other cost savings. Even if that "farm" can produce 10x more per square foot from vertical farming, the real estate cost of a grocery store in a city is a lot more expensive than a farmland in the middle of no where.
It's for weed. They're all for weed. Every "indoor farming" company is just trying to get capital and build a brand with a cover story for when marijuana is inevitably legalized. The only thing that it really makes positive ROI sense to grow in this kind of way in the United States is for marijuana. Everbody working in the indoor farming industry knows this, the whole "we're saving the world by growing basil" thing is said with a big smirk. (Similarly, big pharma has acres and acres of farmland just waiting to be used for this purpose.)
I get the desire to say "it's for weed". You can say the same thing about "its for porn" (VHS, DVD, Bluray, high speed internet, etc)...
But I don't think it's the same.
There's going to be an inflection point where the cost to transport lettuce from Mexico and California is going to be more than the cost of some vertical farm down the street.
There's also this slow drumbeat of "Save the Planet!" and "Oil is da DEBIL Bobby!". Making stuff local and "sustainable" is marketable - even at a premium. There's a reason people go to local farmers markets.
I can't say you're not wrong that "it's for the weed, man"... but I think you're limiting yourself if you think that's the ONLY reason - or even the biggest reason.
>There's going to be an inflection point where the cost to transport lettuce from Mexico and California is going to be more than the cost of some vertical farm down the street.
How sure are you about that? Buildings are expensive, and you can fuel up trucks with solar arrays.
there was a planet money about getting a t-shirt made, and like... 40% of the cost was for the last couple mile deliveries.
No matter how automated 95% of the journey is, the last mile will require someone to be there and do deliveries. In theory local producers have less coordination problems with their consumers.
Trouble is, food that comes from far away tends to be the type that has been bred to look good and last a long time before spoiling but actually tastes like food shaped nothing.
That's a really pessimistic way to think about it. Not having fresh food is a real problem in America. People overbuy produce, poor people can't afford fruit or vegetables these are real issues.
You might think it is for marijuana but you miss the point. Self suffiency is something we should strive for, we shouldn't be dependent on other places for food or shelter or water, we should produce those things locally.
If you think ahead even more, this is important for space travel and colonizing other worlds or even different parts of the world.
This should be an open standard and shouldn't be something people can't afford. This could change how people get food and drastically adverse the effects of being in a food desert.
Poor people can afford vegetables just fine. The problem is that grocery stores tend not to site in locations convenient to poor people. That's a problem, but it's a not a problem stuff like this solves.
You must be talking out of some disillusioned perspective, do you understand the food stamp allowances? Do you understand how living in American outside the realm of hacker news is not 401k plans and stock options. People are actually having problems surviving. This does fix that problem, the cost of labor and transportation is removed from the equation and is just a matter of making money on water and chemical. This can really fix a problem of affordable and sustainable agriculture in America.
tptacek understands this problem as he is/was in Chicago, which has had issues with "food deserts" where poor regions of the city do not have grocery stores within a reasonable commute. And the grocery stores in those poor areas are often overpriced for exploitive reasons.
So tptacek is correct that a farm inside a grocery store does not solve grocery affordability for the poor, because the problem is due to transportation/access, not the cost of the goods.
The bridge between these two views would maybe be if there was a solution of vertical farming that used little real estate and was able to set up a vertical farm in a poor area and had minimal real estate footprint/low rent costs.
How about we just build grocery stores where low-income people can reach them? Farms produce vegetables more cost-effectively than low-income people or retail outlets. This is a solved problem.
I'm not sure if you shop mostly in Whole Foods or buy individually plastic-wrapped bell peppers at Trader Joes, but go to a Mexican grocery store some time and fill a cart full of green things. Vegetables are very cheap.
Never had anything to do with weed, so maybe someone can help me here - is its freshness key to its end-user, as is the case with salad greens and herbs?
High yield production needs precise control over lighting, needs to have approx 12-12 hour light/dark lighting for blooming, otherwise it'll grow indefinitely unlike most plants which start blossoming at a certain age. Additionally, having good control over irrigation and nutrients with hydroponics can increase yield. And being indoors is good for security against theft, etc.
Freshness has got nothing to do with it, the product has to be dried in a well ventilated area.
It's generally dried before smoked, or for food products the oil is extracted. I would think the oils would eventually evaporate from the dried or the extract but I don't actually know. It's legal here in WA and the packaging I've seen doesn't have any dates on it so take that with a grain of salt with the supply problems we've had (the state limited the amount produced, so for the first year at least there were reported shortage; they heavily misjudged demand :)).
I'd think it's very similar to tobacco. Vape for tobacco doesn't really expire, it's just the niccotine. And cigs keep for a long time. They get brittle over time, as do cigars, so I would think it's very similar. Again I'm not an expert, I just live in a state where it's common.
So city-based vertical farming of marijuana is likely less advantageous as freshness isn't a key driver? If it's more expensive than salad greens, maybe the transportation cost isn't as big a factor either? Crush salad greens and they're going to sell poorly.
I'd guess that security and surrounds might be an issue for growing an in-demand product too? Doubt lettuce farms suffer too many break-ins!
It's my understanding that empty warehouse space is hard to come by in colorado because it provides year round controlled growing conditions so there is a price floor on the spaces.
I think they're hoping for a "sweet spot" of legalization, where the product is legal to produce and sell, but regulations prevent outdoor farming (or mandate additional security in such a way that makes indoor farming an appealing alternative).
Because of the plants' sensivity to lighting (need about 12-12 hours of light/dark) and the requirement for female plants only, around the year production is not feasible in all parts of the world. Indoor production can also have higher yield and quality and lower labor requirements.
It's also a good protection against theft and vandalism as well as preventing spreading in to the wild. There might also be legal requirements that prevent outdoors production.
Not trying to discredit you, but do you have any sources on this? What are some publicly traded companies with acres of farmland allocated for marijuana?
Real estate is cheap, power is cheap, personnel are cheap, equipment is cheap.
A few years ago I was pursuing aquaponics as a hobby over the summer. It was clear then that economies of scale were rapidly driving down the costs of indoor horticulture. My aquaponics project failed, but the basic economics of grocery-attached farms make a lot of sense. I built a business model to determine the economics of running a farm in a shipping container that could be deployed to an underutilized Whole Foods parking lot.
The model accounted for a 81m3 shipping container being filled top-to-bottom with fruiting plants, like tomatoes, but it's easily adjustable to other plants, like lettuces. The model is pretty sensitive to things like the productive life of the plant, lead time to productivity, and sale price.
Selling heads of lettuce for $3 each yields around $6000/yr in gross revenue per container per year.
This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
In America we are not locally self sufficient. California is a large producer of fruit and vegetables for most of the year. We used to be focused on small towns that could be self sufficient now we just accept getting packaged garbage and the price we pay for it.
That's why we have people eating mcdonalds everyday.
Produce is dirt cheap in the states. I picked up two heads of iceberg and a cabbage for $2 at the local farmer's market last Friday, and nabbed a six-avocados-for-a-dollar deal while I was there.
The only people spending $3 for a head of lettuce are people looking for a way to separate their food from everyone else.
Just a nitpick, but yours was not an aquaponic system as it apparently was not integrated with growing fish with the plants.
A modular system like in the article could be extended to be aquaponic. If so, they could take advantage of waste food from the host retail store / restaurant as input to the fish. Such a system might do well in China where shoppers are accustomed to selecting live fish.
> Selling heads of lettuce for $3 each yields around $6000/yr in gross revenue per container per year.
> This was $17k net less $720 in labor, $6k in equipment, $3k in real estate and $1k in electricity. Lots of room for optimizations that could push this business over the $1B mark.
Am I missing something, or did you accidentally flip the words "gross" and "net" above?
Early on, I had a lot of trouble getting the flood and drain system to work correctly. Substrate would get caught in the siphon, and prevent it from initiating the drain.
Once the flood and drain system was working, I ran into issues related to my use of heterogeneous substrate. I had both hydroton pellets and perlite in the grow bed. When you mix substrates of multiple densities, both of which are lighter than water, the flood and drain cycle will result in the lightest substrate filtering to the top of the bed. This caused all of my plants to sink into the water.
After solving that problem, it became a simple matter of fish nutrition. I live in Colorado, which has very hot summers. Around 90°F is typical, but in the evenings the temperature gets down quite low. As it would happen, the average daily temperature was between 60 and 70°F. Fish modulate their diet according to the temperature of the water that they're in. And my koi would not eat enough.
In the end, the project was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. But I couldn't justify repeating the effort after all of the fish died in the winter. It didn't seem humane.
> Real estate cost alone may trump every other cost savings.
In urban environments yes. In suburbia though grocery stores typically can name their own rent for headlining a shopping plaza, as that brings the highly desired foot traffic.
Many grocery stores/supermarkets are typically squat affairs with a lot of allowance to expand vertically. That adds to construction costs but not to the land cost (which is the expensive part in a city). They could design supermarkets with growing space within a second storey. And because they're growing in trays or lightweight aggregate, it wouldn't have a metre-deep layer of damp dirt to account for.
(Obviously the construction costs could still outweigh the savings in transport and spoilage.)
But what if the store could produce its own plants at 1/10th the cost of purchasing them elsewhere (just light and water)? It's not like they don't already have floor space taken up with plants today - they just buy them from elsewhere.
The plants taking up space in the grocery store have a pretty fast turnaround time while these basils will take few weeks to grow. Though I guess they could have these "farms" in some cheap warehouse then move it to the grocery store only when they're ready. Ok, this seems a bit more viable now.
These are hydroponic systems, so it'll be distilled water, power for high-intensity grow lights (where stuff grown outdoors, at least in-season, gets this from the sun), nutrient solution (in an outdoor context, some of this would be "free"-ish, from soil, and some would be from fertilizer), plus lifetime-amortized costs of the grow setup: pumps, filters, etc. And all of that besides the water you'd have to ship anyway from wherever it's manufactured. Granted, if we're talking lettuce, it's like 95% water by weight anyway, and a decent percentage of what's left is carbon that's fixed from the air, so there's probably a shipping savings, but I still don't think this whole setup would be particularly cheap.
This probably works only for items where there's a huge markup. It's like those little indoor trays of growing grass seen at some hipster sandwich shops. The article suggests they want to grow basil.
This was tried in LA in 2015.[1] Not sure what happened to "Green City Farms", but their last Twitter activity was in 2015 and their web site says "Error establishing a database connection".
I spent a lot of time thinking about and researching vertical farming a few months back, even going as far as to start prototyping out a system, and while I love the vision for the future, I'm wondering how this ends up being profitable for those doing it. As LED prices continue to fall it starts making more sense, but can you really compete with the Sun and industrial agriculture on price? How many of these units would you need to install to meet demand at my grocery store up the street here in Brooklyn? I think we forget that a huge amount of automation already exists in the agricultural supply chain.
I'd love to see it work since you can reduce water and pesticide requirements, which is great for the environment. I'm just skeptical that you can be more than a basil and microgreens service for yuppies.
Don't think about a comparison to organic agriculture. This is not an agricultural technology. This is marketing technology, aimed at separating wealthy people from their paycheck at the grocery store.
As for the future for vertical farming ? i'm more optimistic towards using regular greenhouses, with extra led lights optimized for the right color, and "wavelength shifter"[1] layer, that will transform sunlight to the optimal color for the plants - if that tech becomes cheap enough.
[1]They're made of fluorescent die embedded in a clear plastic layer.
A few grocery stores here in Atlanta make sure you know when they locally source vegetables so I would assume this happens across the country as a whole. Throw in that all of the goods in the produce isle are labeled with country of origin.
so this technology in the article is in the realm of, sounds cool but not really workable. put too much thought into and it falls apart. plus how do we keep the man power needs of the store down as that is one area many are trying to affect
This is actually a huge reason that food costs as much as it does. The seeds are free, water's cheap, Sun's free, fertilizer is plentiful (and overused), and machines do all the heavy lifting. You don't need a lot of manpower, and farmers don't make a ton of money. All that money that we pay for food is going into three things:
1. Transportation costs: when everything grows in Ohio (and/or South America), it's going to cost a lot more to get it in front of consumers in Seattle or New York. To make matters worse, there's a built in timer on the goods.
2. Waste: something like 12% of America's food supply goes bad in transit. Then after that, some more rots on the shelf. That which doesn't is brought home, or to a restaurant and is wasted there. There's not much we can do about the last part of the equation, but having the food fresh in the store is a big step for the first two prongs.
3. Aesthetics: This one I don't fully understand, but apparently people turn down perfectly good produce because it doesn't look normal, despite being perfectly healthy and nutritious. I've always had a taste for mutant carrots, myself. It's possible (not guaranteed) that selling this produce at reduced costs and directly from the dirt where it was grown might help that.
It'll all come down to whether or not grocers sign on - my guess is that the price point on something like this will ultimately be pretty good, but it might take 10 years for the technology to develop enough to be useful out in the wild.
Seeds are not free and are becoming more and more expensive.
Fertilizer is overused for sure but the alternative to not using so much is fallow land or at least permaculture which certainly won't be adopted tomorrow.
You also forget pesticides, crop insurance, storage, etc
Of GP's three categories, storage would best fit "in transit", and potatoes store well, but you are definitely getting some spoilage when sold in the spring.
That's certainly true, but then you have to add back in the cost for LEDs, land space, and labor for harvesting. A retailer is going to be required by local laws to pay at least minimum wage, which is often higher in urban centers than out near farms. Also, unfortunately quite a lot of farm labor is exploited and only paid per pound harvested and not even paid minimum wage. There are lots of horrifying stories about the treatment of migrant laborers, which we all should be more aware of and demand more protections for.
I totally support the vision and want to see this work, but I'm really not convinced it makes economic sense (I'd be happy to be proven wrong though).
It seems like the harvesting is done mostly by customers, or at the least by existing grocery employees, and land space would just replace the existing produce section - light and water and licensing the tech seem to be the main costs
An automated indoor herb garden would be neat, but what does the cost curve look like compared to shipping traditional potted herbs? I was offput by the article mentioning flying basil thousands of miles, but maybe that's my bias since stores in the US usually carry potted basil plants. Taking care of the hydroponic stack might be as simple as changing a cartridge now and then, but how much does that cartridge cost and where does it have to be flown in from?
Clearly stores and investors are buying into this, so I must be missing some information. Or I'm overly skeptical because I dislike the idea. But how much do these store grown herbs cost?
I could see a path forward, but it would be quite a bit of CNC like automation. Primarily, I can see a hydroponics setup being used with a Farmbot.io style automation. With this, a bot would zip up and down powered rails, and use Wifi to communicate with the base station. Buckets would be provided for the toolhead to pull plants done growing.
Ideally, this could be used to grow herbs, lettuces, and the like on huge racks. Of course, in the jurisdictions that allow it, could be modified for cannabis as well.
The long and short, is that machine vision can be utilized to determine the fitness of a plant and its finished growing season. Add tilapia to this and you have a near closed-loop biological system. And then you can also sell fresh live tilapia.
To give an example, 25 sq ft of this system provides enough food for a human indefinitely.
This also localizes food production thus strengthening national food security. And this one is what wins a lot of conservative types who want to see a gain rather than "feed the fuzzies" kind of reasoning.
Well, yeah. Shrooms and Weed are the two I could think of that would easily support hydroponic grow systems. Ideally, I could see them taking off in the Southwest, given intensity of the sun and win power. The only thing that would really cost is water, and that should be closed-loop as much as possible. I'd wonder if some of the new metal-organo-frameworks could efficiently get water from the air as they were reported to do.
But republicans are still moralizing christians that wish to force their ideals upon others. Because if anything's been shown, cannabis is one hell of a tax generator and mucho underutilized commerce. But aside this illegal usage in most jurisdictions, this could suffice growing in bad environments or to people with way too much money to spend.
There could be a different segment; people who want guaranteed food supply. And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee. I could also see this as a non-profit as well, with low income and homeless getting free access.
And locally, this could make food safety a guarantee.
No it doesn't.
If a farm has a bad harvest, there are other farms a store can buy from. If the store has a bad harvest. They're competing with their own customers to buy food from the next store over.
You've got DHT11's pictured in you product photos. Don't use DHT11's for, well, anything.
I deployed ~ 100. After 8 months, only 35 still work. Even when they worked, the data was so variable they were constant trouble. Of the 35 that still work, about half are now giving useless humidity readings.
A little background. I made essentially exactly what he's selling as a garden monitor to place in a few dozen machine cabinets and motor compartments in a newspaper printing plant. Printing presses are hot, wet things and you can predict failure if things get too hot, or too humid.
So bare ESP8266 modules, OSH Park boards, and the sensors. After my DHT's started kicking the bucket two things helped:
1) Switching my software to only power my sensors for the time I needed to take measurements. (Once per 10 minutes). It does take some seconds to stabilize before taking the reading but the sensors spend most of their time off. I had to cut traces and add a little transistor to the boards to make this happen. That sucked.
2)I picked up some SHT71's and was able to bodge them onto the failed boards in place of the dead DHT's. All it took was a firmware update for my ESP8266. This was easy. I have not lost one since. I don't know how much 1) has to do with that.
As an added benefit, I've got my esp's deep sleeping during the off times (had to add one jumper wire to make this work... easy) and can now power them for weeks at a time with a pair of alkaline batteries.
For Sensor Comparisons, check out this site. Someone from a previous post on Hackaday turned me to it a few months back. Very comprehensive and is what led me to go with the BME280:
Right, and also stuff that doesn't keep well anyway. Seasonality or needing to ship quickly to avoid spoilage aren't problems for potatoes either; if well-climate-controlled they keep for months.
This is HUGE. What's much more interesting is not getting this into grocery stories but into homes. Delivery costs and spoilage represent something like 40% or so of produce costs, maybe more. So in theory it would be much more efficient if you could grow your own vegetables and fruits at home. Right now, only a few things like basil can be grown this way, but probably in time, we can via "breeding" have many other fruits and vegetables that can be grown on a smaller scale in the home.
I personally like this because of trust...I don't want pesticides in my food and I don't trust organic farmers markets who probably just bought their produce at a local grocery store then mark it up double for me ;-D. So I'd much rather grow myself if it was easy enough to do.
This makes zero sense. Even if you choose very specific items that can be grown in a constrained environment it's going to cost too much to run.
Grocery stores make next to no margin on their sales - by adopting this they will have to charge more than their competitors. Which means they won't get sales.
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EDIT On top of this, there is not the physical space to do this at the scale you need. Do you know how often shelves are restocked, especially in the UK where stores are tiny? How are you going to fit your equipment in such a constrained environment.
Its actually pretty neat if somewhat expensive.
1.It saves transporation/labor costs.
2.Allows to monitor/control plants 24/7
3.Immune to all weather conditions/theft/birds
I imagine it would be available to individuals too:
allowing people in cities to grow personal food indoors, without any gardens. The potential of this "digital agriculture" is huge, since it allows to control 'natural environment' variables.
$20 for a spring of basil plant grown in your local grocers, though sounds very expensive, there is probably almost definitely a demographic for that. And it does not go stale, you can keep it there indefinitely. What is likely to happen though is that it gets commercially farmed and then is brought to the store after it has reached a certain size. Totally destroying its purpose but there is a market for this sort of thing.
That is staggeringly expensive. In the UK you can buy a pot of basil for about $2 in most of the big supermarkets. Often it's more economical to buy a large plant than it is to buy a small bag of cut basil...
> internet-controlled irrigation and nutrition system
Why? What happens when the network drops out on your basil cabinet? Is there any reason not to just put the logic inside the thing?
Other than that, I can see this functioning pretty well for large suburban grocery joints if it's limited to herbs. In fact, I seem to remember seeing something approximating this at a Canadian grocery store, I don't remember where.
I think these racks were intended to be used indoors, in climate-controlled environments. I'd imagine at least token air quality management wouldn't be too difficult or expensive to add, and that's all you'd need to beat, e.g., an urban backyard garden...
I can see this playing well with the doomsday bunker crowd.
And even before we get to that point, a distributed agricultural system would help lessen our reliance on large-scale industrial farming operations which we are frankly not using at a sustainable (1,000+ years) rate.
Keep in mind it doesn't get rid of the centralized petroleum-based fertilization, so you're still dependent on large-scale industrial petrochem for fertilizer production.
What is it about current agricultural practices that makes them unsustainable? I know there is a reliance on fossil fuels, but that seems like it could be overcome in the long term (1000 years) without needing to move to a decentralized system.
This happens with decentralized farms, too. The problem is not in the kind of farm, but with the techniques used. Tractor tillage increases yields, but is hell on topsoil.
Interesting, thank you. Aquifer depletion seems like a modest problem on a 1k year scale, there's plenty of water around generally. But I hadn't heard of topsoil depletion before; I wonder how difficult it will be to produce it artifically? It sounds like something that will soon be in demand.
There's plenty of water, but aquifers are tend to be tapped in areas with insufficient rainfall/access to rivers.
If you're drawing on the aquifer faster then it replenishes, it'll eventually run out. Sure, it'll replenish itself - eventually - but the land you were cultivating will be unusable for decades. In the meantime, all of your nice topsoil will turn to dust, and blow away.
>I wonder how difficult it will be to produce it artifically?
It's easier to conserve the soil that's already there than to make new soil. That said, there are techniques to increase the production rate of soil. Sheet mulching can create 4 inches of topsoil out of waste organic matter in 2-5 years (compared to thousands of years for natural processes).
Generally it's better to make soil "in place" because moving it breaks up important soil structures, leading to oxidization and nutrient loss.
Maybe I lack imagination, but I have a hard time visualizing a doomsday prepper walking down an isle at Trader Joe's, looking for a pot of fresh organic basil.
"Damn nuclear apocalypse, it's been weeks since I had fresh basil! How can I feed my militia if I can't even bake a pizza?"
I've seen supermarkets sell live basil plants for the past 20 years (probably even earlier but I wasn't paying attention) in multiple countries. Maybe they just picked the wrong example to start the article?
The next decade of incremental farming improvements is mostly going to be built on the back of grow-op technologies and techniques going mainstream. Some of them will be more successful than others.
The minimum amount of farmland per person assuming a vegetarian diet is about 0.17 acres. This comes out to a land area of a little more than 2 square miles per grocery store. Your average grocery store is 46,000 square feet. So if you did stacked farming on the area of the grocery store, you'd only need a about 1400 levels. Give 2 foot per stack, and your grocery store is only about a half mile high.
It's the most efficient in terms of land use (also water, etc.). I think the person you are responding to is trying to make the best possible case for the approach, in order to be as fair as possible.
(And yes, it is not necessary to grow 100% of food in stores, as you point out, for this startup to have a viable business model; but it's still interesting to see how far it could go, that's what I took that comment to be doing.)
This is missing the point. Fresh herbs in particular are delicate and easily damaged, and degrade quickly.
It's like going to a seafood restaurant that has live lobsters, vs a seafood restaurant that uses already dead lobsters. Sure both are lobsters, but one is better than the other.
I don't disagree that something about the equation has to change. I think that "thing" is the 0.17 acres. According to this webpage[1], the productivity of a vertical farm is 11x greater than a horizontal farm.
But, that said, I don't think a complete replacement is necessary for this to be significantly beneficial even on a subset of grown plants.
At that point let's just get some symbiotic bacteria under our skin that feeds us proteins, fats, and simple carbohydrates. That would solve lots of problems.
Really more farming than biotech (but basically the same thing). I want to build a franchise based on atomic gardening and finding profitable new mutants of plants, mushrooms, and micro organisms (flukes and flatworms) to the effect of synergy. There'll be papers and licencing and outreach, of course.
They are not trying to supplement 100% of a veg diet. Far more interesting would be to understand what the hurdle rate is for a given grocer (ie the sell-through per week per square foot of retail space that they require to keep an item in stock). If this device can produce good basil for 30% less than that hurdle rate, grocers will very likely be interested.
A few reasons to get things started:
* Pests go nuts in indoor farming operations like this. You have to spray to stay on top of them. There's no natural ecosystem present, so natural predators don't take care of your pest problems. Also, plant metabolism changes to adapt to pest problems, and such systems are typically "precision" agriculture oriented, where the plants' needs are reduced to a small set of easy to distribute soluble elements.
* Soil composition and biology influences produce flavor. There's a reason vineyards care a lot about soil.
* Energy efficiency of such an operation is far below that of an outdoor farm -- just think about the number of energy conversions and the infrastructure needs (and its embodied energy) of this sort of operation.
* The most local basil is one that you put in a flowerbed next to your kitchen window.