"The people who designed these places, maybe eighty, a hundred years ago, they had the idea they'd make 'em as self-sufficient as possible. Make 'em grow food. Make 'em heat themselves, generate power, whatever. Now this one, you drill far enough down, is sitting on top of a lot of geothermal water. It's real hot down there, but not hot enough to run an engine, so it wasn't gonna give em any power. They made a stab at power, up on the roof, with about a hundred Darrieus rotors, what they call eggbeaters. Had themselves a wind farm, see? Today they get most of their watts off the Fission Authority, like anybody else. But that geothermal water, they pump that up to a heat exchanger. It's too salty to drink, so in the exchanger it just heats up your standard Jersey tap water, which a lot of people figure isn't worth drinking anyway."
Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic fluid.
"Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this place warm. That's what this level was for, to grow 'ponic amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn't figure anybody'd go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a mosque, and they didn't figure a lot of other changes either So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects ... Catfish, too."
There's a well-known vertical farm in Japan which produces 10,000 heads of lettuce a day. But even with LED lighting, they need subsidies on power costs.
There are some special situations where this is a big win. Places with poor growing climates and difficult shipping, such as Alaska, where a big indoor farm is starting up. Indoor farms have been big in Saudi Arabia for decades. But for places within trucking range of good farming land, this probably will be limited to a few high-value crops.
Amusingly, vegetables grown under totally artificial conditions can be labeled as "organic", because they don't need pesticides. Probably "kosher" too.[1] The lettuce plant in Japan runs their employees through a shower and has them wear clean-room bunny suits, so as not to transmit some disease into their high-density farming operation.
Use of clean room equipment at the Japanese farm is not surprising, since that facility was, in fact, a fab[1]. And it is still managed under similar regimen.
Apparently, lack of biological contaminants helps justify a premium price for their produce, since those lettuce can remain fresh on supermarket shelves for a significantly longer duration.
I'd have to believe that 30 years out, indoor farming will be far more cost effective than outdoor farming for certain crops.
Some of California's vast farming industry should move indoors via solar and battery storage. With the way that costs in both of those segments will drastically fall over the coming decades, mixed with California's sun and large local market, it would seem ideal. Not to mention California's desperate need to be as efficient as possible when it comes to water.
There was an article I read a little while ago about urban/vertical farming in Detroit. It was saying that traditionally, like you say the economics of cost of transport vs cost of land has meant that farms are placed further out where land is cheaper. In Detroit, apparently the land in inexpensive enough in the inner city that the economics dont work out that way. I think its interesting to think in a macro scale what a might higher prices of oil will do to those economies.
I wonder how much marijuana is grown indoors in the US? Perhaps there are some parallels not so much with cost of land but cost of transport with that one.
Covering the roof with solar panels would help reduce power costs. Even "vertical" farms usually occupy quite a lot of horizontal space for sunlight to hit.
At first I thought "Why not replace the roof with glass to let sunlight through?" but then I realized that it would get too hot in the Japanese summer. Solar panels are probably better for climate control throughout the year, and they even help reduce cooling costs by blocking sunlight from hitting the roof.
I just finished the book "abundance" by Stephen H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They discuss Vertical Farms at length, and many other future technologies that show immense promise at revolutionizing the world. Great Read. Highly Recommend.
Agreed, it was a really motivating read. I enjoyed the optimistic (and not too preachy) outlook he has regarding technology just on the horizon, especially in medicine/biotech.
Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic fluid.
"Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this place warm. That's what this level was for, to grow 'ponic amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn't figure anybody'd go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a mosque, and they didn't figure a lot of other changes either So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects ... Catfish, too."
-- Count Zero, William Gibson