[Animats]

The startup mentioned is an urban indoor farm for lettuce. As a manufacturing process, it's a good case. One product. Few changes. No need to retool for the 2017 Lettuce. Few operations. (In a manufacturing plant, an "operation" is one step in the process.) This is the best case for classic mechanization. You just need to do the same thing over and over while holding the process parameters within tolerance, and do it cheaply.

This indoor farm, EdenWorks, has a nearby competitor, AeroFarms, in Newark.[1] AeroFarms claims to be much bigger, and claims a new patented technology for growing plants on a cloth substrate made from recycled plastic bottles, with the plant roots in a nutrient-enriched spray mist instead of water or soil. (AeroFarms may be exaggerating how far along they are. See Google StreetView.[2]) Welcome to manufacturing, where it's about volume and price.

[1] http://aerofarms.com/ [2] https://goo.gl/maps/amxpekwPEGr

[avn2109]

>> "...No need to retool for the 2017 Lettuce."

These indoor farm outfits have nothing to do with lettuce. There's a reason they're building them in/around NYC, aka in the densest concentration of pot smokers the world has ever seen, far from Humboldt county's fields and Colorado's manual hydroponics.

The business model is just to get the automation figured out with some low-value crop, e.g. salad greens, while waiting for the legislature to decriminalize. The day Albany finally comes around to the idea, they'll retool for sticky green weed faster than you can pin up a Bob Marley poster.

It'll take them about fifteen minutes after the governor's signature dries to get the first pot plants started. The economics could not possibly work out for lettuce alone.

[michaelt]

Do you think this explains the reports of Toshiba [1] Fujitsu and Olympus [2] growing lettuce in clean rooms? I was under the impression that weed legalisation was low on the political agenda in Japan.

It might be that these producers expect higher human-labour costs, making automation more profitable - such as due to rising nationalism reducing the supply of cheap migrant labour.

[1] http://qz.com/295936/toshibas-high-tech-grow-rooms-are-churn... [2] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/13/national/science...

[rmah]

Japan is a different situation. There is very little arable farmland left underutilized in Japan. There are millions of acres of farmland sitting dormant in the USA.

[rlonstein]

> There are millions of acres of farmland sitting dormant in the USA.

However in the higher energy cost future the production, processing, and distribution of that farm product to a far away base of consumers is not viable. The various direct and indirect subsidies and availability of relatively cheap fuel, which is itself subsidized, make it possible to get fresh foods to urban consumers. It seems like a smart play to plan for arcologies or reuse of decayed urban cores around food production.

[jakewins]

> distribution of that farm product to a far away base of consumers is not viable

Can you source this? My understanding of academic research in this area was that the energy used for artificial lighting by far outweighs the energy used for production and transportation for conventional produce.

Eg: If you're interested in climate impact or energy use, warehouse farms burn significantly more coal to keep the lights on, and the divide can be expected to expand as LED efficiency is already extremely high, while there are gains every year in lowering the energy usage in transportation.

Cornell Dept. of Horticulture has a good video on this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrpyUA1pQqE

[odbol_]

Who said they needed to exclusively use artificial lighting? They do have the sun over there, right?

[JoeAltmaier]

As I understand it, the whole aim of agriculture is reduced energy per unit output. The reason some US farmland lies dormant is, its slightly less productive per unit effort.

Further, any other high-tech food solution (electric boxes that grow lettuce under lights etc) is more energy-expensive. Can't bean letting Mother Nature do all the work, and just driving by later and picking up the food.

Also there is a surfeit of farmland (read: food production) in the US. Iowa produces enough calories to feed 2 United States all by itself. The feds pay to leave 10% of Iowa fallow. Not as a soil-conservation effort (though that is a result) but instead to control supply. Which is yards cheaper than trying to support prices. So that's part of it too.

[Bartweiss]

There are a bunch of complicating factors here, though.

The first is that fallowing isn't exactly equivalent to supply control. It's partially an inertial, special-interests effect, and partially an attempt to maintain high productive capacity for bad seasons - food is vital, and has a long production cycle, so funding unused capacity is a sensible hedge against bad conditions.

The second is that nature works almost as hard to kill crops as it does to keep them alive. Indoor/greenhouse farming solves the problems of insects, frost, drought, and heat at a stroke. Hydroponic farming roughly solves soil depletion (and fertilizer runoff) issues, and relocating to the northeast circumvents water shortages. That last point is particularly significant - a lot of arable land in the western US lacks the water rights needed to farm it cost-effectively.

I agree that the fundamental economics of indoor, semi-urban lettuce farming are laughable for bulk products. No one is going to outprice Iowa on corn, and I doubt lettuce - even avoiding transport costs - is cost-effective without a lot of specialty markups. My first guess is that this is "pesticide free, sustainable, locally grown lettuce" being sold out of season to people who pay extra for those traits. Even so, indoor farming does have some traits to recommend it when dealing in crops less fundamental than grain.

[rlonstein]

> Further, any other high-tech food solution (electric boxes that grow lettuce under lights etc) is more energy-expensive. Can't bean letting Mother Nature do all the work, and just driving by later and picking up the food.

I like the simplicity of that description-- which might be true for grains, where huge tractors and combines can roll through the fields-- but glosses over all the work done on a farm for other products. It also ignores that there are significant risks to letting Mother Nature take her course where as indoor farming can control light cycle and intensity, watering and humidity, CO2 level, temperature, and (probably) greatly increase density while (maybe) minimizing pest control and herbicides.

[chillydawg]

Growing ganja is a very different thing to growing lettuce. It takes much longer, there's a lot more considerations around lighting and temperature and the physical size of the crop is vastly different. Harvesting is a totally different process, too.

I'm sure some of the stuff learned doing this would be useful, but why not just start an actual robot ganja farm in Colorado now and get growing?

[avn2109]

Because it's not legal in all the states between NY and CO. Crossing state lines opens them up to trouble with the Feds.

[jakewins]

Lettuce production seems to have very little overlap with growing weed: Lettuce grows to a few inches, racks tooled to the height of lettuce wouldn't fit hemp. Hemp has big root systems, it won't grow in tiny little cup mediums like lettuce will, it needs lots of space, mandating a different hydroponic approach than lettuce does.

Tomatoes, specifically determinate tomatoes, expect almost the same nutrient mix as hemp, has the same size root systems and grows to about the same height. Harvesting is also similar.

Hence: If they were planning to retool for weed, why are they building manufacturing capability for a completely different kind of production?

[Animats]

Yes, I've wondered about all the interest in lettuce and kale. I'd expect more interest in growing higher-value seasonal crops such as blueberries or strawberries.

[maxerickson]

Lettuce can be grown at full blast and harvested in a month. For seasonal fruits there has to either be a way to trick the plant into skipping the dormant period or a dormant period.

The marijuana thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me, it's not fragile and has relatively high value compared to the cost of shipping.

[avn2109]

It won't be legal in all the states between NY and wherever you grow it. And transporting it across state lines opens you up to interdiction/legal trouble from the Feds. That's why they have to grow it near the consumers.

[maxerickson]

Yeah, I overlooked that, good point.

[Bartweiss]

The marijuana thing shouldn't make sense, you're right - intensive lettuce growing systems don't translate to hemp well at all. Height, root structure, nutrient needs, schedule, and practically everything else vary and mess up your structure.

As other people here have pointed out, they really are growing lettuce. If they wanted to be ready to switch to hemp, they'd be using a closer analogue like tomatoes.

[eli_gottlieb]

I think if they were planning for pot, they'd move to Massachusetts now. Our state legislature is trying to delay implementation, but we did pass the ballot measure legalizing home growth and recreational consumption of marijuana.

[beachy]

We toured a hydroponic lettuce farm when we stayed in the South Island here in NZ recently. Pretty low tech, staffed by a small cadre of minimum wage people.

My first thoughts about this article were just as you say - how can that pay off?

Now I get it.

[thebiglebrewski]

The devil's lettuce!

[SixSigma]

leans into mic .... wrong

[Pyxl101]

Google Streetview sometimes shows photos that are a year or more out of date, FYI.

[micaeked]

While true in general, you can see the date. In this case, it's from August 2016.