But you are also right. The equipment needs to operate in freezing cold or dusty environments or humidity. Indoor growing inside hoophouses or greenhouses and glasshouses are a lot more effective.

I agree. Pest issue is the Achilles Heel and weapon of wholesale complete destruction of harvest. They are trying to combat it with more technology. I want to say that I am really impressed by how Indoor Ag has evolved over the years. It’s not perfect but way better than how it was ten years ago.

Pests are one such reason. They are extremely difficult to control outdoors, but far simpler to do so inside. Both fertilizer and pesticide treatments (if necessary) can be far more specific - e.g. less wasteful and environmentally damaging) when done indoors. Similarly, inclement weather generally does not affect indoor farms.

There's also my favorite argument: if we're ever going to try to colonize space or other planets, we better be damned good at growing plants artificially. IMO every dollar spent improving this space gets us one step closer to unlinking our future from Earth's.

This depends entirely upon a bunch of various factors, but the major draws are that you can control the environment, and with specialized hydroponics techniques you can drastically reduce the usage of fertilizers and water to obtain an equal-quality crop. You can also drastically reduce the footprint required - in certain hydroponics systems, what would normally take 1 full acre of land (say, alfalfa) could be done in 1/8 of an acre. Depending on the crop, you can even get away without using light at all (most grass crops work with this) reaping even more savings on energy usage.

Many of these farms are failing because they've got a bad mix of factors that they did not thoroughly think through before implementing. All of the farms I've set up in Australia, UK, and the Middle East are still working just fine, a decade later.

My impression has always been that too many of these entities end-up building what I call "monuments to computer science and technology", rather than farms. The last paragraph in the article is, to me, a typical sign of this issue:

“What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”

Right.

Maybe this is just marketing/fund-raising language. I get it. There's stupid money out there that will throw dollars at anything that sounds like it is aligned with trends. Maybe they should have added "GPT" to that paragraph.

I know indoor farms that are doing well. It's challenging, yes, most businesses are. Upward Farms decided to raise fish and plants. Yeah, good luck. That's likely where some of the "infinite challenges" they refer to came from.

Yes, technology is an absolute requirement for indoor farming. The key is to not make it about technology for technology's sake. Don't introduce a backhoe for a job that can be done with a shovel.

The farm business equation isn't, at a basic level, terribly complex. You are no building a data center. If you do, you will eventually be plowed-over when you fail.

Firstly, geography: there are places with somewhat long periods of darkness and/or cold, where agriculture is feasible only during the relatively short, but often intense, summer season. For example mid-to-northern parts of the Nordics. Indoor farming can deliver throughout the year.

Secondly, logistics/sustainability/locality: it's more sustainable to farm locally than to transport something from the other end of the world, or even from the other side of the country. I've seen onions from New Zealand in the shops here in the Nordics and it's probably normal but I thought it was downright weird.

Thirdly, organic farming: by being able to control the growth environment, the amount of pesticides and insecticides should be greatly reduced, maybe even down to nothing.

Fourthly, the known-unknown future: an ongoing major change in climate will likely make some of the nowadays arable land non-arable. For example rising sea levels threaten rice production in low areas of Asia, and so on. Dr. Gwynne Dyer spoke (in "Geopolitics in a Hotter World") of a rule of thumb where one degree (Celsius) rise in average global temperatures loses 10% of global food production. If we expect over 3 degrees then one third of global food production will be gone. Maybe that's OK if the world becomes better in logistics, but I think the key is to grow locally and indoor farming is possible basically anywhere.

Here is what current greenhouse tech looks like: a human (called a grower) uses their intuition to adjust hundreds of settings that parameterise what the actuators should do in different circumstances. For example, 20 settings might parameterise a 'ventilation setpoint line', which determines what air temperature the vents should start opening at given a measurement of the solar radiation intensity from a weather station. All the different actuators (heating pipes, vents, screens, misting systems, irrigation systems) have their own set of heuristics that need to be adjusted by hand..then beneath that a low-level control layer (e.g., PI control) manipulating individual motors/valves.

It's crazy but the grower has to manually adjust the settings as the weather, energy prices and crop state changes. With better software/automation we can improve the control of the environment within the greenhouse and thereby increase yields [kg/m^2] and minimise energy costs.

If the farmers are producing more tomatoes per m^2 for the same input costs they can afford to sell them to consumers (via supermarkets) at lower prices and still make money. It won't solve all the problems but would be a step in the right direction.

Modern day agriculture techniques feed billions of people. It's on a scale that's hard to imagine.

"Is there something I'm missing as far as where its clearly deficient to a standard large scale farm?"

* The cost of the land/building/facilities is going to be substantial, and would get much much worse if you try to do this at a scale that would even barley put a dent into the food production system. This gets far worse if you want to put them in urban areas to reduce transportation costs.

* It would take a great many years to achieve a scale that would change anything, even if the costs work out(which as I said earlier, I highly doubt).

* Any business model revolving around this idea will be under dire threat of any cost optimization/wins on the open air large scale farms. For a metaphor, take a look at the multitude of solar start-ups that went into the market thinking X cost-per-watt was competitive only to have chinese panels drop by 30% in a year, immediately putting them under(see solyndra). This technique can't just be competitive, it has to destroy open-air farming in terms of cost in order to be safe enough to place a bet on it big enough to change anything.

* I would like to see some solid research on the affects of artificial light on plants. Nutritional changes, in particular.

Don't get my wrong, I am into technological solutions, I just don't see this panning out. For the record, I am in the automated ag industry, we build robots that perform various tasks on and around the farm.

Solutions that I do see panning out in the near-term future in terms of ag are:

* Autonomous/semi-autonomous farm robots/machines * Big data analytics, allowing farmers to make better/smatter/faster decisions. Things like smart crop selection based on data from projected weather patters and market conditions, crop cycle planning to better respond to water/market/field conditions, accurate yield prediction allowing better financial planning, etc. * GMO's that do something else other than allowing a farmer to douse a field in round-up or making a plant produce it's own pesticide. * The commoditization and expansion of "modern" farming technology to the various 3rd world countries.

To maximize the efficiency for indoor farming, you have to install these systems in the most arid or hostile locations where nothing has been grown before. For example, California or pacific north west doesn’t need this.

We can do better with crop rotation and crop diversity in most parts of the world where we grow food and it can be done in an environmentally friendly way.

But, indoor farming is not well suited for calorie-rich foods (think grains, corn, potatoes, etc). Many of those crops are not suited for hydroponics. They need soil and lots of sunlight. Corn roots grow down to almost 7 feet in the soil. Attempting to grow these crops out of soil and sunlight is incredibly inefficient and expensive.

In order for indoor farms to feed the majority of the world, we believe there needs to be more than one breakthrough than just the indoor farm system itself, including a breakthrough in the production of energy (enough to replace all the solar energy provided by the nuclear reactor in the sky that we use in agriculture today), a breakthrough in the production or collection of water that irrigates the millions of acres of land by rain clouds, and the biological breakthrough of high calorie foods that are adapted to grow hydroponically.

We also believe that the same money spent developing indoor farm systems is better spent developing better adapted crops and researching more efficient and sustainable agriculture practices.

Aquaponics is an infinitely better system as it can be truly organic. It has to be tackled entirely differently..lots of AI/automation for constant monitoring and systems control.

Major expense in traditional Ag is labour. This can be optimized and minimized with indoor Ag.

As an outdoor farmer, the control of variable factors in indoor systems is appealing to me but I can also see how being risk averse is better. Small indoor farms are better than the broad acre mind set we have with outdoor Ag. Taking everything indoor except fruit and grains and fiber and spices etc is very attractive to me. But a new supply chain and control of markets has to be in place.

I am not even worried about energy long term as we would go nuclear at some point eventually. Impending climate change should require us be mindful of alternative Ag systems. I am particularly interested in saline agriculture. I think it would be useful research.

I firmly believe this is a necessary future of the reality we are facing. I believe this to such an extent that we have been developing various technologies for CEA over the last couple of years, some of which will allow us to grow the same or better crops using 1/3 to 1/2 less energy (and heat) than best-in-class solutions in the market today.

I think this is an important element of humanity adapting to the changes ahead. It does not solve all problems. It solves one.

One thing missed by a lot of the comments: Indoor systems tend to be incredibly fragile affairs. If you've ever been in a well managed commercial greenhouse, you will notice a ton of sanitation procedures. There are greenhouse pests and diseases which are never an issue in the field, in large part because there is an entire ecological system of checks and balances working out in a field. Even in modern intensive ag fields. The truth is an agricultural field is an amazingly complex system which we don't fully understand (we are only starting to explore soil ecosystems and plant roots). Vertical farms are disconnected from this, though the costs might not be obvious. As a consultant, I watched a "trendy" aquaponics startup crash and burn because they underestimated this.

I'm not sure we actually gain anything by this.

National security for one; it times of war no one can starve your population into submission by cutting off shipments of food into your country. Your crops are also more resilient to pestilence and disease if grown in a controlled indoor environment.

All this makes it a worthwhile line of exploration, no?

Plants don't really give a shit. Implementing a convoluted tech solution in greenhouses for an additional 5% efficiency will never pay back for itself.

> (My bias: I work for a startup that is working on this and I'm kind of obsessed with the industry.)

I suggest you actually learn more about growing plants than optimizing 20 different atmospheric and HVAC parameters. Many of these recent startups folded because they couldn't figure out that growing lettuce indoors hydroponically doesn't actually make anyone any money.