A basic form of vertical planting has been around for as long as I can remember, 50+ years. My mom had a “strawberry pyramid “ in her garden to save space. Also growing green beans, cucumbers, etc… on trellises saves space by growing upwards instead of outwards on the ground.
While not for farming, a woman who works on concentrated solar power told me that actuation of the mirrors is a huge expense. I hadn’t thought at the time to ask if she’d tried trained rodents.
What I read about it said that it economized greatly on water, but used an enormous amount of power for the LED lights. Makes sense.
We subscribe to a rooftop greenhouse company. It is what it sounds like. They take ordinary commercial buildings, rent the roofs, put up greenhouses and hydroponic tanks. All year round they grow vegetables. We make an order once a week and, three days later someone shows up on our doorstep with a box or two containing the order. They also act as an outlet for other groceries, but that is not their main business. Here is a link to their web site: About Lufa Farms.
Since they are on the rooftops, they make as much use as possible of natural light, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they had to supplement it during the winter. I don’t know what they do about pollination.
Most of their products are superb. One exception: in August we ordered corn one week. More tasteless corn I have not experienced and we ended up throwing most of it out.
A rooftop farm is going to get more or less the same light as a regular ground-level farm - it just makes use of land space that is already occupied by a building. That actually makes a lot of sense.
For vertical farms where artificial light is required, that seems like just another way to consume unnecessary power (even if the power is sustainably generated, using it for unnecessary purposes is not good, at least until such time as all power is sustainably generated)
Based on my experience with hydroponics in the Chicago area where I made as much use as possible of natural light, they probably need to supplement from November though end of February, with more needed around the winter solstice.
It is doable. Even as a hobbyist.
You can do it by hand. It’s just tedious and, of course, human labor costs money.
I note of their selections the following do NOT require pollination to generate food:
garlic, spinach, celery, radishes (12 varieties), mushrooms (16 varieties, heck, don’t even need light for those), chinese cabbage, brussel sprouts, yellow onions, sweet potatoes, potatoes (8 varieties), ginger, jerusalem artichokes, cilantro, rosemary, lettuce (19 varieties), all the greens (24 varieties), onions, dill, chives, peppermint, parsley, cilantro, sage, basil, all the “microgreens” and sprouts (10 varieties), carrots, cabbage (several varieties), leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, parsnips, turnips, celeriac, rutabagas, and fennel. You only need to pollinate those if you want seeds. A relatively few pollinated seed-producing plants will keep a commercial operation going.
But it’s also clear from the website they aren’t strictly greenhouse/vertical farm/hydroponics/etc. I suspect the stuff needing pollination comes from local farms, it’s the non-pollination required green leafy stuff coming from the greenhouses.
With some techniques it also makes use of vastly less water. That will matter in some locations like, say, the American southwest which is having all sorts of water shortfalls and likely will continue to have them for the foreseeable future.
Again, this depends. If the artificial light is used to supplement natural light that’s one thing, if the building is entirely enclosed and all light is artificial that’s another.
I’m not clear why pollination in vertical farms would be significantly more complicated than the current greenhouse systems used for crops like tomatoes- which largely use the same systems, including atmospheric controls and systems that are semi or fully hydroponic, plus lighting. Basically all large UK tomato producers have been doing that for years. The only real difference is that the artificial lighting would be the main or entire lighting source, rather than supplementary.
Honeybees are utterly impractical in a controlled environment like that, for a variety of reasons- in current large commercial setups, Bombus bumblebees are used. The colony size is much smaller- hundreds of bees per box, rather than 60,000, as in a full size honeybee colony at full strength. Much much easier to handle. They’re also actually better at pollinating tomato and similar flowers than honeybees. Even for bumble bees, it’s not an ideal environment though, so they are, unfortunately, treated as disposable. I’ve not heard of any greenhouse systems that allow their pollinators to complete their life cycle; they buy in new colonies when needed (in the UK, they’re all imported, which is a whole new can of bees worms).
Iceland does some pretty interesting stuff with this sort of production, as they basically do have free energy.
Since the “most efficient conventionally farmed foods” take 128 times this, where does your “should” come from?
And in some of those cases not then. Garlic, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, potatoes, ginger, jerusalem artichoke, and sometimes onions are usually grown from various pieces of the plant, not from seed. Lettuce and probably some of the others will set seed without pollinators. But in any case most farmers buy most or all of their seed, which is produced on farms that specialize in seed production.
Some species require pollination to produce a crop, because what’s being eaten is the seed itself or the fruit surrounding it; but not all of those require insect pollination – there are wind pollinated crops; though that would be a different sort of complication for an enclosed setup. Sometimes there are strains that are self-pollinating within the flower – most modern tomatoes don’t need pollination, for instance.
Not a lot of difference, no. And those all tend to be systems requiring a lot of energy and input use.
– In many areas, field agriculture uses water that’s there anyway; and, when properly done, does so in such a fashion that the water is released again clean into the watershed, except for whatever portion is actually in the amount of plant that’s sold outside that watershed. Enclosed agriculture very often involves moving the water in from somewhere else entirely, to which it is not returned. (So, of course, does growing crops in deserts; especially water-intensive crops such as lettuce.)
Conservation of mass. In principle, if a plant is somehow storing large quantities of hydrogen, it could require more water than final mass, emitting the balance as O2. But that doesn’t happen. Plants are mostly plain water, and most of the rest (sugars/polysaccharides) is stuff that contains H/O atoms in the same ratio as water. It’s water + carbon (from CO2) + trace elements in, food out. If hydrogen atoms are leaving the system other than by food, then the closed system has a leak. Therefore an ounce of food should require less than an ounce of water.
And as I just posted, if it’s grown outdoors in an area where it’s watered with natural rainfall and/or very locally stored water replenished naturally each year, and said water isn’t rendered toxic by other things applied to the crop, that’s what happens: the only water actually removed is whatever’s in the portion of the crop that’s sold for use in other locations. The rest of it all remains in the environment, remaining locally and/or available to move in the hydrologic cycle that’s supported life on the planet for some billions of years now.
However, to say that it should only be necessary to use an ounce of water (however temporarily) to grow an ounce of food is the equivalent of saying that all the water a human needs to drink in a lifetime is the amount that they’ll have in their body at peak size. In most cases, considerably more plant needs to be grown than will be eaten by humans; and even if you’re talking about microgreens, while the plant is alive, in order to grow and produce that edible portion, or even just to stay alive, it needs to transpire water into the atmosphere in order to support its necessary physical processes; just as humans need to piss and sweat and so on.
Growing plants indoors can reduce the amount of water needed, just as someone who lives their life in air conditioned environments needs less water per day than someone being active outdoors in 90ºF sun. But it’s in no way going to reduce that to anywhere near just the amount that’s in the edible portion when it’s sold. And if the water needs to be hauled in from a significant distance away, and/or gets contaminated with materials used to grow the crop, the water usage may in environmental effect be greater than what’s used by the crop in the field.
I wonder what happens if the farming is piggybacked on wastewater treatment systems. Would it be unhealthy or dangerous to use plants for sewage filtration? What if you used just non-food crops like cotton or flax? Maybe start breeding super-hungry versions that require huge input of waste water nutrients. If it helps reduce the cost of waste-water treatment, then it might be viable for a municipality to look into combining the two ideas.
That’s true, and will need to be achieved for long duration space missions. For the time being, though, it’s easier to put plants into a (nearly) closed system than humans.
Sure, but that plant waste doesn’t need to leave the facility. Well, aside from those few plants where a high proportion of the delivered product is waste (e.g. corn on the cob).
The atmosphere is controlled, too. That’s half the point of growing it indoors. To be fair, I don’t know if any of the current indoor growing companies are capturing that transpired water vapor, but it’s certainly possible. Venting it outside is a waste.
I think that “vertical farming uses less water” might be reversing cause and effect. It’s not that vertical farming is, itself, more water-efficient. Rather, there are techniques that can be used to improve water efficiency, and those techniques are necessary to make vertical farming work, but the same techniques could be applied just as well to horizontal farming.
I’m using vertical farming as a loose synonym for “high density indoor farming”, since that’s how the companies are largely using the term. The vertical part is what enables the high density, but it’s the indoor part that allows the reduction in water use. That sort of reclamation is impossible for outdoor farming.
I am curious about one thing: whether it’s possible to replace one acre of conventional crops with an indoor farm powered by less than an acre of solar panels. Intuition says it might be just achievable: although solar panels are typically only 15-20% efficient, they can cover a higher fraction of the surface area than conventional crops, and the crop illumination doesn’t have to include wavelengths that are unused. Also, it may be that outdoor crops are overilluminated compared to what they need. Presumably, someone has already looked at all these factors in detail.
Indoor farming could act as a load balancer for a renewable grid. If there’s a day when solar/wind production is on the low side, the farms can dim their lights first. Their production will be slowed a tad but more critical power users won’t have to be shut down.
Sure, it’s not like in-dirt crops get maximum/most efficient light everyday anyway.
If plants slow their growth during those periods, though, it’s not going to translate to a savings. Clearly, there’s going to be some upper bound; you can’t get a plant to grow 10x as fast by illuminating it 10x as much. But is the right number higher or lower than typical sunlight? And what about peak efficiency–i.e., amount of plant produced for so many joules of light input?
Actually, some vertical farms use different colors of light - with an LED you can output on those wavelengths the plant actually uses with greater efficiency instead of blasting out full spectrum light which the plant won’t fully utilize. Does that translate to greater power efficiency? Honestly, I don’t know - my knowledge of such things stops short of that. But it’s an interesting notion that greater efficiencies could be achieved in that way.
You’re definitely going to achieve a savings by only including the useful frequencies of light. But I don’t know if that plus the other efficiencies are going to make up for the inefficiency of solar power. It’ll probably get there with ultra-expensive high-efficiency panels, but I’m not so sure about the cheap kind.
My understanding is that photosynthesis is much less efficient than current solar panels. Something like only 1-2% of sunlight is used by plants. A large part of that is that the sun radiates most strongly in the green part of the spectrum, yet chlorophyll mostly reflects that light. So theoretically, the answer is yes.
From what I’ve seen of the lighting setups for certain… indoor “crops”, it is indeed the green that gets cut. I.e., they use red+blue lighting, which comes through as magenta.
Still, you can’t bypass photosynthesis completely, so the worst of the inefficiency remains. Or can we? Maybe it’s possible to synthesize glucose abiotically, using a more efficient process, and then feed that to the plants. That’s getting to be a little more sci-fi, though.