That tweet is snarky, but it's also wrong. Growth chambers have indeed been commercially available for over 50 years, but a "food computer" appears to be a little different, because it also includes the plumbing and reservoirs for growing plants hydroponically.
Shameless self-promotion here; but I think it meets your requirements.
Hexafarms (https://hexafarms.com/ )- an indoor farming startup which can match a throughput that will enable us to grow food in the urban pockets at an efficiecy between 10-200x (depending on what you're meauring).
The website is a bit flashy and not very detailed. Also it is only this month I'm gonna be working ~full time hours on it. Here's why it's radical:
* A empty single-floor 2000 sq. ft. space can produce ~200k KGs of produce. Hence also the idealization of distributed and small farms and not those 10-storey robot driven ones.
* Possibility of growing 'crafted-produce', say low-sodium lettuce for diabetes, bitter and juicy lettuce for kids (apparently they like it), very high oil content mint plants so you get same amount of mint oil from half the weight.
* All of this greatly affects (and positively) the current supply chain.
* It's heavily data driven. And this is not just because it's cool. Think of it as openAI GPT, but for X produce.
Someone posted a research paper [1] a few months ago that says that due to energy consumption, the use of vertical farming doesn’t provide a net space savings for caloric dense foods.
I’m curious what you think of that paper and what it would change about your suggested solution.
Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space.
It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser.
We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place!
Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.
Vertical, robotic farms can compete favorably with greenhouses because of reduced labor costs, increased energy efficiency and better usage of available space. That's enough of a difference that it will disrupt under glass growing. If that's all it does it is already well worth the investment, if it does more than that that would be an amazing bonus (but I'm not counting on it for reasons that you've already touched on).
I disagree with that 'feeds some restaurants', regular consumers take in far more in terms of leafy greens, tomatoes, cucumbers and a raft of other vegetables besides than the restaurants do (in particular right now, but also under more normal conditions).
If anybody cracks the staple foods under glass problem with any degree of efficiency that would really be a game changer but this vertical farm option is already quite impressive from what I've seen. There are some interesting trials underway in NL by people that at least seem to know what they are doing.
Yeah. The only way vertical farming could make sense would be with crops that usually get much more sunlight than they need. Even then, if it's a crop that allows to use machines with massive throughput in conventional farming - vertical farming would need something similarly cheap, too.
It seems like vertical and hydroponics are great for leafy green cash crops and spices, but don't work well to produce cereals, soy, or pulses, which are materially where all of the calories come from.
Vertical farming in its current form doesn't save space. I use regular recycled containers, milk jugs, cans etc. with a DIY mount on one of the walls of my house. Last season's harvest was about 80-90 pounds of tomatoes, multiple harvests of beets, lettuce, spinach and herbs. The wall is almost 20 ft x 20 ft. Even if my spacing is double that of regular farming, that's still a lot of space saved. Sure, not all crops can be vertically farmed, but plenty of them can be and thereby saving precious land.
With vertical farming, we can feed any number of people with less and less inputs. It's a solved problem, if we just scale up this technology everywhere.
"It’s also indoors, can be placed anywhere on the planet, is heavily integrated with robots and AI, and produces better fruits and vegetables while using 95% less water and 99% less land."
I imagine space is a factor, but energy will be a big one as well. Calorie dense foods will likely need more space and energy (light) inputs. Vertical farms are very water efficient, so I don't think that matters much.
Vertical farms make a lot more sense with fresh vegetables like leafy greens that grow quickly, command high prices if grown organically, and benefit from being closer to market.
Potatoes are the exact opposite. If it ever becomes more cost effective to grow corn, wheat, and potatoes in virtual farms then outdoor agriculture is dead. While I don't agree with the article that it will never happen, it might require energy advances like fusion power or drastically higher _rural_ land values and water prices.
Greenhouses make sense long before vertical farming, just look at agriculture in the Netherlands, it's mind boggling how much they produce for such a tiny country.
Great video. My major takeaway: vertical farming is not economical for many crops due to the cost of electricity. Another takeaway: vertical farming might work well for some crops that are mostly water by weight and have low energy requirements (e.g. bazel, lettuce).
I wonder how the numbers work out. I guess they'd want to avoid (1) limiting themselves to certain crops and (2) limiting themselves to specific geographical areas in order to make their market as large as possible.
If you have a house with space for a garden and the time to dedicate gardening, sure. You can grow some things in an apartment even, but not much. Taking the labor, time, and space requirements out of food production is a huge deal, especially today. If computerized farming means fresher and cheaper vegetables in the city, why shouldn't we use that?
reply