this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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I mean very high energy use is and has been known to be one of the primary costs to indoor and vertical farming from the outset. The other being most plants require far, far more manual labor to produce.
Outside of their current use to provide crops that otherwise couldn’t be grown in a region, the primary argument i’ve heard for such methods is we want the dense land use to rewild some areas, and don’t mind heavy construction, higher energy consumption, and drastic increase in manual labor needed to do so.
There is also the fact that they consume a lot less water. In regions where solar and wind energy are a surplus but fresh water is scarce, indoor farming makes more sense.
Except the energy, carbon, and labor costs massively outweigh the costs of growing food out in the open where there is plentiful and reliable water and just putting it on a train or ship. That also cuts down on the amount of people who need to do labor and therefore live in areas where water is scarce.
I’m not saying that greenhouses are useless of course, just that I would expect them to be found more in water rich areas that just lack the growing season for the relevant crops and don’t think they can ever be a good solution to growing major crops like wheat, corn, rice, etc…
Oh yeah at this time vertical farming is not suitable for staple crops. However because fruits/veggies lose a majority of their nutritional content when being transported growing them indoors closer to population centers makes more sense. Also would like to mention that the energy and carbon cost to an indoor farm are currently high right now however lots of work is being done to reduce those costs. Not saying it will ever be 0 but we can get closer. Like 3D printing hydroponic towers using recovered and repurposed plastic, integrating them into aquaculture systems to do aquaponics to provide a protein and high quality fertilizer source, placing them in skyscrapers with open walls to take better advantage of natural sunlight, etc. The current strategy of using climate control systems and LED lights is not the way forward IMO but hell it’s a start in a field of agriculture that hasn’t been touched in decades.
Indoor/Vertical farming requires powering artificial light unlike traditional farming, but the energy use is a red herring.
Traditional farming typically requires more labor, not less. The key factor is that it is very easy to have most of that labor done by migrant temporary-visa and undocumented workers, for lower wages than would be legal in an industry where exploitation on that scale has not been normalized.
The primary cost, and the reason corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits is their professional labor force. If they could also be run by slaves, most would be competitive with traditional farming.
Except nearly all traditional farming, at least of the staple crops that actually feed people like wheat, corn, and rice have all been near exclusively mechanized for about a century now. We’ve actually gotten to the point where farms have tended to consolidate in no small part because a small team can farm a few dozen square miles and produce enough food to feed a small city.
Migrant, temporary visa, and undocumented workers are a factor in things like fruit tree harvesting, which is obviously absurdly difficult to stack on top of itself, or vegetables which are already often grown indoors so i’m not sure where your getting the idea that greenhouses can’t hire them.
Corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits because it’s very difficult to make an expensive multistory building compete with free unused dirt, trains, and decades of refinement of large scale machinery, and so foucus on trying to automate labor intensive and season unfriendly crops to show a pathway to improvement, generally neglecting that there is very little one can do in a multistory building one can’t do in far cheaper greenhouse. This sort of robotics have also proven a lot more finicky than silicon valley anticipated, which has limited adoption across the board.
In a world where two of the most carbon intensive sectors are electricity generation and construction, replacing direct sunlight and naturally supported dirt with electrical sunlight and concrete and steel is always going to be a big ask, even if we neglect that construction is also a dangerous and hard job heavily reliant on migrant and undocumented workers.
What is your experience with modern industrial farms? How recently have you been involved in the industry?
Also, what does "small team" mean to you?
No direct experience beyond what I learned in farm related classes a decade or so ago about what it takes to run a modern farm and a bit about it advances in robotics due to my internet in industrial automation or what comes up in the local osmosis of living in an area that does some ag research.
Small team means a dozen or so people, but it’s inherently a rather large abstraction since in practice so much is either rented, shared, or owned by large agricorps that cover that can use vast scale to smooth out volatility.
Since you asked, what’s your experience in ag? How recently were you involved in the industry.
Not recent, but I was privy to the latest advancements at the time. Perhaps there were a half-dozen overseers who lived near the fields and did labor management and crop observation, but there was always an army of latinx workers share-cropping less profitable crops during rotation seasons, driving pesticide sprayers, doing firewatch during dry days, maintaining the cesspool, and a number of other tasks that were either too person-intensive or beneath the white owners and their middle-class wage managers. 90% of the people on the industrial farm were people of color, and all the jobs they did were dangerous, underpaid, and essential. That percentage includes the white people working in the machine shop, and the contracted crop-dusting pilots.
Ironically, the automation in development was targeted at reducing the number of middle-class white people needed to run the farm, and would have little effect on the army of cheap labor that was ever-present.
I've seen a small portion of the beast that is large agribusiness, and I'll admit there may be other sides I haven't seen that may contradict my experience. But it is wise to doubt the rosy self-congratulatory picture taught in textbooks when confronted with the experiences of real life. Most of the people who bring you food for the prices you enjoy are invisible, and your education system is complicit in keeping things that way.
What were they actually growing, how often did they do thouse crops, and most importantly, where actually was this? I ask because things like maintaining a firewatch or cesspool don’t sound liek tasks you’d find on a mechanized breadbasket planes or irrigated valley wheat or corn farm that make up the majority of north american food production.
I mean obviously my experience is going to be tailored to the farmland I actually live on, but statistically the US national average somewhere about six to eight farm workers per square mile, and that’s doing things like assuming that companies have multiple times as many completely undocumented workers than they do H-2A visa’s, report on taxes, or who show up in studies on undocumented workers.
Given that’s an average that includes orchards and hand crops which take about an order of magnitude more labor-hours than the heavily mechanized crops we are taking about that’s going to be a significant overestimate.
All of this though is pretty irrelevant to the original question though, which had to do with moving to systems that outside of the rosey picture presented by tech startups looking to make investors horny by promising that all their labor costs can be replaced by stepper motors invariably involve vast increases to the amount of low wage manual labor actually needed to produce a ton of food. Or that such a change to a far more carbon intensive way of producing food is a really bad thing when climate change exists.
I agree that it is worth looking at this in a more distinguished way, but carbon budgets for large farms rarely take into account the carbon emissions produced by organic soil loss, besides the vast negative effects that has otherwise. Indoor farms on the other hand can be pretty carbon neutral after their initial construction, assuming that the electricity they use comes from renewable energy sources.
A vertical farm wouldn't be able to power itself with solar on its own roof. You can't convert from light to electricity to light again and end up with more light. Possibly it could if you're converting to specific wavelengths used by the plants, but given the sheer number of layers in even a single floor vertical farm, it's still unlikely to be able to power itself.
So if solar and wind is the answer, you have to have fields full of those two. But then, why not just grow food in those fields? There might be specific situations that have a good answer to that, like the land isn't suitable for agriculture, but otherwise, we have to look for solutions other than solar and wind.
Alternatively, if water use is a big deal, then we can seek ways to reduce water use in traditional agriculture.