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.
