Hammer

You are ignoring nuclear energy, in which case a vertical farm is both space saving and sustainable.

kris de decker

Conference paper that argues along the same lines:

How sustainable is the smart farm?

https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/papers/limits21-streed.pdf

Rob Lee

Wow I didn’t know solar panels were the only way to produce electricity for vertical farming! I sure am stumped at finding out what other methods exist to produce electricity that doesn’t involve on-site power production through solar panels. I hope someone invents something soon.

Zaphod

This oversimplifies the issue a bit, but most of the energy in the solar system is nuclear energy, unless I seriously misunderstand stars.

I’ve never understood the big problem with earth based reactors. Sure nuclear disasters are bad news, but when you put them up against all the other industrial pollutants that get leached into environments from petrochemicals, I’m way more willing to take the risk.

If we had spent the last 30 years using our technological prowess to build safer and better traditional reactors, the world would be a much better place.

Cortop

It looks like a static analysis ignoring the fact that solar power efficiency is increasing every year.

If those companies are already profitable now by innovating, they will be ready to scale when we will need them the most.

Edmond

This criticism relies upon the false dichotomy of power coming from either solar or fossil fuels. Wind, tidal, or even nuclear avoids that issue. Furthermore even if powered with solar panels those panels do not need to be placed on fertile farmland, so there need not be a substitution.

Pertaining to the selection of crops, vertical farming does not need to grow every crop to be valuable. Farmland currently growing tomatoes or cucumbers could be switched to growing grains as those fruits are grown in vertical farms. Vertical farming would allow growing more grains and legumes on cropland currently devoted to cucumbers and peppers, significantly increasing the amount of land available for staple crops even if staple crops cannot currently be grown in vertical farms.

Distance is not the only consideration in transportation. Bulk goods like grains are not as perishable as cucumbers - logistics becomes much simpler when costly refrigeration and rapid transport is no longer a significant concern. If delicate perishables are grown in cities while only shelf-stable bulk goods are shipped in then the savings goes far beyond simple distance.

On a more speculative note, I would not expect staple crops to ever be grown in cities even in vertical farms. If bulk food production needs to be shifted into urban areas it would likely be in the use of large bioreactors for nutrient production while crops in vertical farms will still only be high-value fruits and herbs.

Brian Horakh

Wheat has a horrible photosynthetic utilization rate compared to other crops, it is only comercially viable with free energy. Potatoes can be grown indoors successfully.

tk

People don’t seem te be aware that nuclear energy is much more expensive then fossil and solar.

Benjamin

Once the initial capital costs paid they will be amortized out over thousands of cycles. The costs that mater are the inputs of power and mineral.

Hydroponics excels at leafy greens. I have grown lettuces in a tower using led grow lights, 10 gallon mixing tubs, blue dow insulation, netpots, master blend, CaCO3, and epsom salt, grow plugs and net pots. (If I followed BA Kratky’s method with even less). The output in leafy greens has paid for itself in less than a year when comparing it to Aldi’s lettuce.

The reason why we continue to grow greens this way is because of pest pressure and the limited growing season. It allows us a continual supply of nutrients not calories. Microgreens are also economical to grow this way. I am considering making something akin to the FarmTek fodder system 3.0 (They have an excellent manual.) which only requires water and heat (solar, compost, animal BTU) To convert barley into a more effective feed.

I don’t think that wheat is a good representation of vertical farms. It is an interesting experiment all the same. But the costing and longevity is poorly calculated.

Ginny Newsom

The author does not take into account areas where the growing season is very short, land is not arable and so may be put to better use with solar panels etc. The article is basically a jumping off point to compare net productivity gain with the least energy inputs. Otherwise … what’s really the point?

taco

this is insanely stupid.

Nobody thought that vertical farming would save space INCLUDING the energy infrastructure. But if you want to make a lot of food on the north pole, HOW ELSE DO YOU DO IT.

Meaning, vertical farming is already choosing a tradeoff. You are criticizing the tradeoff without even realizing it, thus coming off as insanely stupid.

Thomas M Idzikowski

What an incredibly stupid “hit"piece. Do more research before embarrassing yourselves.

Jack

Solar panels could be on rooftops, or at sea or lakes/reservoirs.

And where land is used, what kind of land? Solar can be put on barren and desert land, leaving fertile soils to revert to forest/prarie, etc.

Plus of course there’s wind, nuclear, geothermal.

And vertical farming isn’t just about land size, but also efficiency, transport, freshness, and so on.

Yanis

Gaia, since Italy is very densely populated place, it takes more people to adjust to your wishes and at least to me considering other options is only logical. If I need a solution to something, I prefer to do something that gets result and as soon as possible. Taking hostages and making demands or throwing tantrums also is an long lasting option, and it all depends on when you’d rather have those few people around.

As for wheat growing indoors - since wheat price on Mars costs more, than on North Pole, it suddenly makes sense to grow wheat in indoor condition. Vertical/indoor farming is not really limited only to Earth or growing on land - it could be as well applied to grow food on ship or sea platform or even under the sea(sunlight can still reach plants to some depth). If it is something that you don’t want to use and instead want to stick to more traditional ways, it is your choice to do so, but you have no say if someone else will see this technology as an opportunity to them and will use that technology. Simple.

As a dweller of North, I definitely see decent life where I can grow anything - including tropical fruits. It sure will make joy in achieving this goal and fun(and not sustainability) is most important part of life. I also think, that it is better to grow exotic fruits locally, than spend fuel by transporting and keeping those fruits refrigerated from other side of the globe. I sure do want to have naturally grown bananas, that are not soaked in chemicals so they can endure that travel.

My ancestors were so sustainable, that they burned some part of crops after the harvest or drowned 50% of valuables, they plundered. The way I see it - sustainability has nothing to do with nature or past of how those starving farmers lived and it is very modern thing - clearly to force others how to live and even how to think. Traditional ways are most damaging to nature and indoor farming is sure more ecologically friendly than current farming methods that involves use of pesticides.

When you are selling something on market, both buyer and seller are happy about a deal, because each of them are gaining something that is more valuable to them than to other person. There are no trade-offs and both parties are winners. To some pain is something they need - it could have been figure of speech, but I was just slightly curious if that was something that is your preference in trade.

James Simpson

This is a thoughtful and provocative article which has male, pro-capitalist, technophile readers fuming with rage. Obviously, solar is not the only technology which is classed as renewable to supply vertical farming. But every energy source is dirty in different respects and fossil fuels had the huge advantage of being more energy-dense than pretty much all alternatives. Why else did our 19th-century ancestors abandon wind power in favour of coal and then oil?

Solar farms might not take up land currently used for growing humans’ food but it is used for other purposes, including habitats for other forms of life which are largely excluded from it. This technology relies on extractive, polluting industrial systems, if not so much as any fossil fuel, and is not really sustainable.

Gaia Baracetti

Foldi-One, though it makes sense to try and grow some food near sources of natural light in existing buildings, the higher the building, the longer of a shadow it casts. So, whatever you gain in terms of light, you take it from the surroundings; you either reduce the natural light falling on nearby land, damaging agriculture or natural ecosystems, or you reduce the natural light falling on other buildings, so that THEY will then need artificial light for people who live or work in them.

Not to mention that building vertical greenhouses would require enormous amounts of energy, materials and maintenance, whereas agricultural land is already there. There are places that have to import even sand for construction having run out of their own (causing erosion, ecosystem destruction, etc).

There are no miracles, only finite sources going around.

David Bourguignon

Dear Chris, thanks for yet another thought-provoking piece. We need more debate in general, informed by science to move together forward towards a desirable future. And artists can help ask relevant questions.

To me, vertical farms are a bit like electric cars: there is something inherently strange at trying to change the “core engine” without changing also the “form factor” (ie. mass/speed/shape/etc. which is related to energy service/efficiency/etc.)

As pointed out by https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/OCS_Energy_Efficiency_Rest_of_the_Iceberg_2014.pdf current cars are only 1%-energy efficient, therefore producing EVs with the same “form factor”, as heavy and matter/energy intensive as cars, make little sense from a sustainability point of view. This is the first iteration, and this will inevitably change very quickly, given the harsh constraints we will be facing soon.

IMHO we should see the current attempts at designing vertical farms the same way: they try to keep afloat, in front of a changing climate, the 10,000-year old agriculture/food system, based on cereals and cattle (in many parts of the world), while in fact its “form factor” is no longer right for the time we live in.

According to many authors such as https://www.iucn.org/theme/nature-based-solutions/initiatives/decade-ecosystem-restoration fighting climate change and biodiversity loss will require ecosystem restoration and rewilding on a large scale, that is turning current cropland back to primary biomes (eg. forest, prairies). This will require in return that we start growing new kinds of food from micro-organisms in an entirely new way.

In comparison with the vertical wheat farm your just described, check the environmental impacts of https://solarfoods.fi/impact/ for an example of what could be around the corner.

All the best.

Gaia Baracetti

Yanis, that’s why you should always put human population density into the equation. Of course certain ways of life only work (but work very well) when there aren’t too many people.

I’d rather have fewer people moving herds over a vast landscape than cram people so much that they need to rely on intensive animal farming and problematic (as this article shows) agricultural techniques like we do in most of Europe. I don’t think you can innovate your way out of the overpopulation problem without damaging the environment in some way. Overgrazing or not, with its low population density the area inhabited by the Saapmi is still much better in terms of wilderness than the Netherlands.

I am Italian, I live in the Alps, and would say the same about us both ways, I only mention the Netherlands because you did.

(And no, we don’t need to kill people to reduce the population, low fertility can do that for us much less painfully)

Phill

Vertical and indoor farming will feed cities when people accept surviving on algae and fungi.

Jose Amador Silva

One of the many issues to note here is the lack of multi calculations for the product being grown.

Case in point: Most of the lighting and hence, energy requirements can be eliminated if one used vertical growing for mushroom production in cities. Old, abandoned skyscrapers could be reasonably retrofitted to do this and minimal light needed. This would also reduce the distance to farm for the nutrient stream to return to the farm.

A second case is new construction that takes advantage of natural solar light for growing, and raising the ceilings of each growing floor. Instead of a square building stacked up high, imagine a thinner rectangular structure with a larger base (which might be used as a seed starter for the higher floors). Most of the floor space could get sufficient light to grow and orientation could supply adequate solar heating. Water is recycled in the building, minimizing the need for additional rainwater and minimizing runoff into rivers.

Older buildings, which can’t be retrofitted easily, can be used to create multilevel aquaculture facilities. These do not need much light as well, and floors could be used to grow insects for feeding the fish directly from city waste.

Light well buildings can also be created using a stacked donut method of skyscraper construction. Smaller thinner donuts at the top. Trees lining the bottom layers. Vines for grapes and cucumbers high up on the edges.

Foldi-One

Gaia Baracetti, you are quite correct there are ’no miracles, only finite sources’… Doesn’t mean we can’t be more efficient in how we build and use the sources. The tips of many skyscrapers are thin and under utilised anyway - and being thin and tall can capture sunlight to grow crops while not casting anything else much in shadow - the shadows move rather far in a short time.

Also most of these tall buildings need to pump lots of water to the top anyway for sufficient water pressure so its not new hardware, if you can recycle the grey water from the upper floors for the plants as well -probably not worth pumping it from the bottom floors that high…

Agricultural land is never going to go away with this population level, but again that should be better managed - we don’t need massive mono-cultures of crops over vast areas, or to be pumping the centuries of slow filling groundwater dry watering cattle.

There is no one ‘fix’ that does everything, but properly done many little tweaks to our lifestyles can make a massive overall change. And vertical farming is certainly a better use of energy and water than the Burj Khalifa’s very impressive water fountains in the middle of a damn dessert…

Paul Sansonetti

https://www.treehugger.com/midwestern-geothermal-greenhouse-provides-local-citrus-year-round-4857938

Matt

It’s incredible seeing everyone up in arms over the simple fact that we will never be more efficient than what nature provides. Any attempt to bypass this is going to create a gap somewhere. How many people in these comments are farmers or gardeners? Or actively work in nature? Do you know anything about the reality of how things functions or just an abstract ideal that you’re pulling from? I can spend a couple hours prepping a space, plant some seeds, and with that, I have a secure source of food for months. Because I choose the right plants, I do not water, fertilize, or provide anything other than occasional pest management with my hands. If I were to grow mustard greens in my house, the amount of energy I would put into it versus getting out, I would always run a deficit. You cannot avoid that. If it’s not a deficit in energy to power lights, it will a deficit in energy from gather materials to pot it, to water it, to provide amendments, etc. Not to mention, you cannot pull out a chunk of soil and expect to provide nutrients for ever. The earth builds fertility, when disconnected, it atrophies. Simply put, you cannot ‘beat the system’. So when you ask stupid questions like “How do we feed a large number of people in the North Pole?” Maybe a better question is, why are we inhabiting spaces that require us to attempt to bend nature to our will, just waiting for it to snap back and destroy the fragile supply chains society relies upon. The amount of people upset over this article just goes to show how entrenched we are as a world where we have to continue living how we have been within the last century and deviation of that spells the end of mankind.

Sigunas

It’s said, that there were 2,577 kWh per year used.

2577 kWh / 365 d / 24 h = 0.294 kW = 294 W of constant power.

That seems a lot for 1 sq meter. Even if you use not the best technology, should be about half of that. But even cutting power in half or even 4 times does not change the main idea, that such endeavour is hardly sustainable. This explains why locally grown cucumber costs three times more than imported from warmer climate.

Michał Kolbusz

Most commentators focus on the technical side of vertical farms, completely ignoring the economic side. For a technology to catch on, it is not enough that it is technically possible, it must also be economically viable. If it is not, it will most likely be out compete by a cheaper alternative. The Farm’s calculations show that even if electricity and water were free, one loaf of bread would cost around 120 euros - 100 more than from traditional farming.

This happened with many technologies that were to change the face of the world, and due to their high cost, they only inhabit modest niches: 3D printers, cargo drones, ultrasonic passenger planes, flying cars, nuclear energy, corn ethanol, bio diesel, are all mature technologies with decades long research put into them. They have been try many times to scale up but stopped at some point due to high cost. This is true with nuclear energy which stopped growing few years after Chernobyl and in “stasis” since then (www.worldofnuclearreport.org). High cost of nuclear power plants makes them affordable only for rich countries.

Same thing applies to much simpler and more common technologies. Lets take for example asphalt roads. When price of oil hit historic high between 2008-2016 (above 100 dollars) many counties in USA started to turn asphalt roads into gravel roads because they couldn’t affords oil derived asphalt - few hundreds of thousand miles where turn into gravel. High oil prices didn’t make bitumen roads technologically impossible, just made them economically nonviable.

Same thing is true with vertical farming. It can’t compete with traditional farming (organic, primitive, high-tech) which is why we still eat bread that comes from the “countryside”.

In this article Kris points at very crucial problem with indoor farming, shared with most today “sustainable” technologies. If the technology is dependent on non-renewable resources it will continue to exist until they are exhausted. Because they eventually will be exhausted, technology has limited shelf life. This is true with most high-tech technologies and even ten coats of green paint will not hide it.

Johny

LOL @ all the tech-bro types getting all offended at this article.

Let’s do some simple math:

• Crop land covers 15 million km^2 on Earth.

• Sunlight, averaged throughout the day & night, contains 200 watts per square meter. (peak = 1000 watts per square meter)

Therefore, to recreate that much light in vertical farms, we need at least 3 million gigawatts.

That’s over 1000 times the world’s electricity consumption!

You really think you have a way to generate that much power in the near future? Nice try.

“But thats a strawman bro! I never said we have to replace ALL farming with vertical farms!”

Ok fine, try replacing 0.1% of farming with vertical farms - you’ll STILL need the entire world’s power grid.

Nik

What about windows combined with solar panels ?

Emily Rasmussen

Most vertical indoor farming concentrates on short growth time, fresh to market produce.

While wheat is not practical for this technology, other produce can be.

Farming wheat uses large machines. It does not seem that the cost of these was calculated.

It is cheaper to transport electricity for long distances than farmers produce.

Large hydro power plant would be more economical than solar cell farm.

Since vertical farming is indoors, it would be fairer to compare it to greenhouses.

There is less damage to produce during shipping if distances are shorter. Meaning less waste.

EOR

Nik

What about windows combined with solar panels ?

Kris De Decker

Conference paper that argues along the same lines:

How sustainable is the smart farm? https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/papers/limits21-streed.pdf

Michał Kolbusz

Most commentators focus on the technical side of vertical farms, completely ignoring the economic side. For a technology to catch on, it is not enough that it is technically possible, it must also be economically viable. If it is not, it will most likely be out compete by a cheaper alternative. The Farm’s calculations show that even if electricity and water were free, one loaf of bread would cost around 120 euros - 100 more than from traditional farming.

This happened with many technologies that were to change the face of the world, and due to their high cost, they only inhabit modest niches: 3D printers, cargo drones, ultrasonic passenger planes, flying cars, nuclear energy, corn ethanol, bio diesel, are all mature technologies with decades long research put into them. They have been try many times to scale up but stopped at some point due to high cost. This is true with nuclear energy which stopped growing few years after Chernobyl and in “stasis” since then (www.worldofnuclearreport.org). High cost of nuclear power plants makes them affordable only for rich countries.

Same thing applies to much simpler and more common technologies. Lets take for example asphalt roads. When price of oil hit historic high between 2008-2016 (above 100 dollars) many counties in USA started to turn asphalt roads into gravel roads because they couldn’t affords oil derived asphalt - few hundreds of thousand miles where turn into gravel. High oil prices didn’t make bitumen roads technologically impossible, just made them economically nonviable.

Same thing is true with vertical farming. It can’t compete with traditional farming (organic, primitive, high-tech) which is why we still eat bread that comes from the “countryside”.

In this article Kris points at very crucial problem with indoor farming, shared with most today “sustainable” technologies. If the technology is dependent on non-renewable resources it will continue to exist until they are exhausted. Because they eventually will be exhausted, technology has limited shelf life. This is true with most high-tech technologies and even ten coats of green paint will not hide it.

Johny

LOL @ all the tech-bro types getting all offended at this article.

Let’s do some simple math:

• Crop land covers 15 million km^2 on Earth.
• Sunlight, averaged throughout the day & night, contains 200 watts per square meter. (peak = 1000 watts per square meter)

Therefore, to recreate that much light in vertical farms, we need at least 3 million gigawatts.

That’s over 1000 times the world’s electricity consumption!

You really think you have a way to generate that much power in the near future? Nice try.

“But thats a strawman bro! I never said we have to replace ALL farming with vertical farms!”

Ok fine, try replacing 0.1% of farming with vertical farms - you’ll STILL need the entire world’s power grid.

Caleb Crawford

Wow, a lot of negativity in the comments. I love your work, and for the trolls out there, get a life. I have my suspicions of vertical farming for many reasons, including the embodied carbon, displaced emissions, and the hubristic reductionist thinking that thinks that the complexity of plant growth can be imitated with a few nutrients suspended in water and specific wavelengths of light. I will echo, but hopefully in a more constructive manner, some of the critiques: usually your pieces are much more thorough in the math and research to support your point, and this was far short of that. However, it did alert us to a fascinating exhibit and a topic the boosters are all over.

James Simpson

So much of the writing on this site reminds me of the Simpsons episode in which Springfield was being run disastrously by eggheads. Ideas that look wonderful on paper are often completely impracticable and are the wrong category of solution anyway. Climate change is not anthropogenic; it is capitalogenic, so ideas to mitigate its now-inevitably catastrophic effects will have to be far more political than technological. The most urgent and important change humanity needs to make is to end capitalism. Achieving that will lead to much of the other changes in technology that are so important.

Perhaps most eggheads are inexperienced and naive about politics which makes them far more comfortable dealing in technology, as if it is a neutral thing.

Not Me

By putting the vertical farms underground and using nuclear power, you can save even more space.

Anonymous and late to the comments

Several key factors are not included in this analysis, though it is certainly a conversation worth having and you raise many salient points. Overall I think these are silly gimmicky nonsense operations and vertical farming will not be the future for humans who life on Earth - now in space…that’s a different story for people who live in huge space stations, if that ever happens. While Mars is a delusions dream as the low gravity will deform and kill everyone who tries to live there long term.

Positive points stated or implied or ones I’m adding:

• This is FRAGILE and relies on huge amounts of unnecessary infrastructure. It is also unnecessary and leans into needless AI, robotics, and drones we don’t need to invent or build.

• Land usage matters and despite the pro-nuclear crowd who like to pretend it makes cheap or safe energy, one might ask the Ukrainians who live near nuclear plants where bombs and shells rain down. Not to mention the other concerns they love to bring up even though their ideas are fake in terms of no one anywhere building any new commercial nuclear plants.

Which require huge amounts of technical resources and highly trained staff, mining, security, insurance, etc. Nuclear simply isn’t real and a focus on solar makes the most sense. Leave the nuclear-bros whose ideas and talking points are funded by the fossil fuel…such fools repeat propaganda to delay, deny, and diverge conversations away from productive tools available today.

• What is the need again? Why bother having it? If the problem is transportation and location…again we need better city planning with Portland style Greenbelts to support cities feeding themselves. We can have electric trucks on automation delivering such food with robots to unload it, etc.

This is a tech-bro fantasy to make everyone more reliant on them and is based on a handful of urban locations in wealthy imperialistic western nations. A handful of people in such nations might use such vertical farms as a gimmick, but what about across Africa, South America, SE Asia and India? This techno-dream future will NOT be happening there, certainly not for decades and decades after such things happen in the wealthy western and other developed nations in niche applications.

Cons:

• Location, location location…it is silly to be concerned about solar taking up a lot of space on land which would not otherwise be used for agriculture or for any other purpose. Northern Africa may well be flowing huge amounts of power through energy grids of solar panels in the Sahara into European markets. The US similarly has many unused regions. I don’t mention other places, because these are a high cost needless tech bro idea which will never be implemented anywhere else this century.

• Innovation is driving down costs in solar and it is already cheaper today and has been for a few years to build new solar compared to new coal.

So any cost estimate used based off a small art installation is simply not meaningful or accurate. Go ahead…find some large power company building a new coal plant without a government handout, it doesn’t exist outside of a handful of developing nations.

You will never see new coal or nuclear powering a vertical farm in Chicago or Frankfurt or Rome. A nuclear is a pipe dream which remains decades away from anyone building anything, but hey you can pretend and point out bill gates’ new ventures if you want, but it will take decades we don’t have to build them. We must stop burning fossil fuels much sooner than that and solar is the answer. Who cares what the answer is, the emotional attachment of nuclear and fossil fuel bros is very dumb and they exist to derail the conversation.

That’s their real purpose and goal to delay and distract. Every day we do nothing, the fossil fuel industry profits, so they have every reason to pump out garbage information and lies, just like the tobacco industry which spent decades delaying public health information…which applies to coal burning and mining as well if you look at respiratory disease and asthma which kills a lot of people through pollution and causes cancer.

Look at trends, investment, etc. and at the recent prospectus from every power company you can find, they are all looking at a 20 year horizon and solar is the biggest part of their plans.

People who are ignorant armchair ’experts’ have zero idea what they are talking about. You can go straight to the horse’s mouth to see what the most vile, greedy, and ignorant power companies are doing, spending, and planning in terms of their money and you’ll see a wall of solar plans and roadmaps. There is no reason to listen to or look anywhere else to rely on arguments filled with false and out of date information from the 1990s about solar prices.

The economics of it are perhaps much more attractive for vertical farms…also that electricity can be used in any number of other ways when not needed to grow crops - though I’m not sure why we wouldn’t need to grow crops as people need to eat.

But the fundamental idea of making our food supply MORE fragile is the biggest problem. We’re not running out of land and new/old farming methods which do not rely on fossil fuels can actually expand our food supply and improve the soil.