People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
Note that this product site touts how much lettuce the system can grow.
More radical claims about how vertical farms will reduce CO2 emissions or feed a growing world population are aspirational to the point of delusion. Vertical farming isn't going to replace the calories that people get from potatoes and beans grown in big plots of dirt outdoors. If you ate potatoes grown in a nearby vertical farm instead of ones grown in Idaho and shipped across the country, you'd actually be increasing your carbon footprint.
It takes only a little energy to move a potato a thousand miles cross-country. It takes a lot of energy to grow a potato under artificial light. Even though renewable energy is ~20x better in life cycle emissions than fossil energy, it takes more than 20x as much energy to grow potatoes under artificial light. From a CO2 life cycle perspective you're better off eating potatoes that had ordinary diesel powered tractors, trains, and trucks involved in their production and delivery than to eat potatoes that were grown in a wind-powered vertical farm next door to you.
AFAIK traditional artificial light sources do indeed dissipate much more energy for the same amount of 'useful light', and also produce so much heat that they cannot be placed near the plant.
Is artificial light mandatory in urban farming? Aren't some (non fiber-optics-based) "light tubes" able to transmit light along with the necessary UV?
Cities can be plenty dense while still having enough space for people to grow potatoes for themselves and their neighbors.
And that's sort of the problem. The normal centralised supply chain optimises for normal usage patterns, and adapting to abnormal usage patterns causes widespread issues in the short term.
A decentralised supply chain is (at least in theory) better able to adapt to local distrubances.
You're absolutely right. De-centralized systems can definitely respond better to local disturbances. Conversely, they're sometimes more vulnerable to larger scale disturbances that can more easily overwhelm the capacity of smaller systems to absorb shocks.
The reason decentralization doesn't make a lot of sense is because we need to produce food cheap and at scale to feed the world. Putting thousands of dollars into vertical farming equipment that doesn't fit into the apartments of most people on the planet is kind of silly.
There's also simply division of labour at work here. It's uneconomical for large portions of the population to spend their time farming.
It's essentially just a recreational hobby for wealthy people or maybe reasonable on a Mars Colony, but here it does not make much sense.
As far as the urban agriculture crowd goes, they're concerned about the length of their logistics lines to their tables. Raspberries grown half a mile down the street in winter is better for the environment than flying them in from another hemisphere... provided you get the energy costs of the indoor farming system low enough.
Aside from environmental effects, it’s also just a more secure logistics chain. A person needs water, food, and shelter to survive. Sometimes it feels strange to me that the trend of the past centuries has been to increase the distance between a person and those sources — to introduce more points of failure between you and the things you need in order to survive.
In the UK you can grow crops all year round outdoors [0], and the growing seasons could easily be extended with a passive greenhouse (polycarbonate is more insulating than glass). You can also use tried and tested preservation techniques like canning and fermenting to keep food for other seasons.
[0] https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/vegetables-all-year-round
Vertical farming only really works as either artistic preference for maximum visual appeal or the kind of science fiction where you assume only a small handful of technology advanced.
But that’s hardly required as solar panels to LED’s can’t reach 100% efficiency. Further, the limited lifespan of solar panels and LED’s means you need to cover their construction etc which requires resources.
Ultimately, looking at theoretical limits it’s simply a net loss.
PS: Monoculture is far from required, it’s an outgrowth of current automation rather than having any theoretical advantage.
Those blurple lights are just awful, and not only do the LEDs have far less energy efficiency being old tech, but their supposed "optimal" wavelengths are anything but. They are blasting out extremely narrow wavelengths of light and trying to make it more continuous by using a bunch of slightly different narrow range colors, but it doesn't work as well as one would hope, especially when they are coming from different point sources.
That 1200 watts is only really covering a 6 by 6 foot square worth of growth area at about 35 watts a square foot at 200 lumens per watts. It could be slightly larger but only if you want most plants to grow extremely slow or be really weak, and you can go up to 50 watts per square foot before requiring supplemental CO2 but not all plants like that amount of light.
Converting that to 1 acre worth of coverage, which is what is about what is needed to feed a single human for one year, you are looking at about 1,500,000 watts running 12-18 hours per day. That is a ridiculous amount of energy. Even assuming you can get away with 1/3 of that area by super careful and efficient growth year round that is still a half million watts in lighting costs alone. Not to mention all the other work and costs.
I don't see indoor farms being good for anything other than extreme specialty plants or extremely fragile plants until we can pull essentially limitless energy out for far cheaper than we can get even with fossil fuels.
This is for an indoor leafy green, mostly sallad, aquaponics growing facility.
Perhaps with a bigger more automated setup I could do slower growth, but there are other costs like ventilation or dehumidification or possibly heating or cooling too that don't really change a lot whether the plants are growing fast or slow, which makes faster growth possible optimal financially, even if I might be losing out a few percentage worth of light absorption.
Second, it's climate change which is making outdoor farming more and more difficult by the year, as well as a push towards higher efficiency. Also, having a garden (or being around nature, things growing) has been clinically shown to reduce stress in humans.
Third, it's MUCH less climate impact to transport renewably sourced electrons over a regional grid than it is to transport decaying produce in cold storage to a grocery store. Free sunlight is still cheap, but creates dependence on the seasonality (frequency, duration) which means a variety of crops are totally non-viable in certain hemispheres. Full outdoor growing has a much higher level of exposure to pests, requiring pesticides -- whereas indoor growing under lights gives you a higher level of defensibly without that risk.
Another appeal is knowing exactly what goes into your food.
Furthermore, putting farms in urban buildings means that some urban businesses or residences will ha e to be moved further out, increasing pollution. In reality, this would move the pollution to the urban areas, and not reduce it.
Lastly, I can’t think of a reason that you’d know more about farming practices if it happens in an urban environment than in a rural environment
Given the (OP) solution, I was imagining having a broccoli wall in my apartment. This would give me a lot more insight into the farming practices as I would be growing it. Also, near zero transportation externalities.
Tractors are moving tens of thousands of pounds of material at a time and are extremely efficient for the energy they utilize. Tractors may seem like they are using ass tons of fuel from looks alone, people see the huge engine and big cab and chunks of large steel and think it just eats fuel to produce crazy tons of power, but many consumer cars have more horsepower than tractors and frivolously spend fuel on saving mere seconds in both acceleration and braking which are huge wastes. Tractors don't accelerate for long periods of time or waste tons of energy braking all the time just for personal convenience. Tractors are just geared down super low and built ultra-robust with zero concern for physical size. The run better and more efficient than car motors specifically because they didn't have to make any trade offs for compactness, weight, or engine and transmission form. How many cars have turbos and super-chargers? How many of them are tuned for fuel efficiency rather than peak performance? Tractors commonly have them for the sole purpose of fuel efficiency, they never lacked power in the first place because of the lack of other restraints.
More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment...the benefits are pretty much endless. It isn't about "urban" but using what we have more efficiently.
Mirai ( http://miraigroup.jp/en/ ) states some benefits.
That's a bit of a misconception. Most people get the impression from the headlines that they produce a lot of food, but that is not really the case. The Netherlands is the world's second largest EXPORTER of "agricultural products", by dollar value. 10% of that is consulting and equipment. Another 10% is flowers. Those are not food. Even in the remaining 80%, it is mainly products that are high in monetary value, but low in land efficiency, like cheese and flavorless hydroponic tomatoes. The Netherlands actually only produces 50% of the calories needs of their population, and exports away a good chunk of that. They rely on importing staples to feed their population.
>More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment
The Netherlands model is none of those things. It is just used as a propaganda tool for a corporate greenwashing campaign to convince people that spending lots of money on environmentally destructive and wasteful technology is good for the environment, when it is actually being done because it is good for the bank accounts of a small minority of wealthy people.
I have yet to see salad roads, but would love to see it. Diversity is "weed" edibles would be awesome.