This sounds the “why Tesla will never work argument.” Selling rich people what they want as a starting place to pioneer new technology is a good strategy even if it doesn’t feel good to you.
At first glance. I challenge you to find a technique (Being executed commercially, demonstrated in a paper, or clearly described) where high-calorie foods are grown indoors.
I'm not trying to be snarky; I'd love to see something like this, but the comment you reply to is my conclusion as well. I used to be very excited about this stuff, but the only viable crops are leafy greens sold at a high price.
I own a business selling sensors for use in hydroponics. I started because I wanted to make an impact in food availability. I've abandoned that, and continue because hobbyists, and companies like this have a use.
> I challenge you to find a technique...where high-calorie foods are grown indoors.
The GP isn't saying this is happening, though. They're saying that selling rich people overpriced kale and strawberries can fund further research and innovation. Maybe the next step is corn. Maybe it's bankruptcy. But it has cash flow to invest in the research to see which one it is, in part from growing and selling the less impactful stuff now.
> The GP isn't saying this is happening, though. They're saying that selling rich people overpriced kale and strawberries can fund further research and innovation. Maybe the next step is corn. Maybe it's bankruptcy. But it has cash flow to invest in the research to see which one it is, in part from growing and selling the less impactful stuff now.
Something about vertical farms for staple foods just doesn't pass the smell test. One big aspect of farming is the conversion of solar energy to edible chemical energy. Assuming natural plants and some efficient way of using natural light, stacking farmland vertically just means less energy per acre. And barring some new kind of clean energy like fusion, using artificial light will just introduce conversion inefficiencies and expense, at best.
> Assuming natural plants and some efficient way of using natural light
That’s the surprising result of "closed" greenhouses: standard solar panels convert to electricity that convert to LEDs at the right frequency that offer more yield. Plants only absorb very narrow bands of light. Then you have more gains because the plants don’t have to maintain temperature, fight pests, dig deep roots for water; day/night cycle can be optimised. It is leafy greens for now, but there’s no strong reason that other high-energy crops (like sugar cane, carrots, beetroot) wouldn’t work.
Source: Friends working at the Umeå university grow house.
Right. Would it go too far to say that the conversion of solar to chemical energy is the biggest aspect of farming?
I’d like to see the accounting for how much of the “100% renewable” energy is actual production and how much is an accounting practice that involves offsets somewhere. Maybe it is, plants don’t need lighting at night so you could use solar. But the efficiency of sun -> cell -> transmission -> LED -> plant is much less than sun -> plant, it’s not a winner there. Are they attached to the grid and push more electricity to it than they draw?
Balancing production costs vs the carbon chain of transport is good to look at. Our springtime apples come from Chile, New Zealand, and other far-flung places. How many joules of energy went into getting that kale to your Boston store from California vs from Worcester in January? If the energy to grow to harvest is less than the energy to transport, and people really really need that fresh-picked kale in January, it’s a niche win. I’m doubtful you can make much of a dent in New England’s produce needs using New England’s available renewable energy during wintertime. But gathering evidence is better than listening to my doubt.
Vertical orchards- I don’t see that happening. So my apples will still be imported from across the globe.
From what I understand about chicken and pig feed, soy meal is typically used, and it's from the part of the bean that humans don't use, since the oil is the key ingredient in so many foods consumed by people. Is cricket farming more efficient than soy farming? Seems like the economies of scale for soy are so much greater.
Yeah, the cricket protein thing is a fad. Anything that can be produced by an animal, can be produced by a (potentially genetically-modified) plant or yeast more efficiently. Animals are above plants trophic-level-wise, and their feed conversion efficiency can't be more than 100%.
That said, insects are way more efficient than mammals at converting plants into human-edible calories thanks in part to their lack of internal temperature control and growth rate.[0] If you had to choose an animal to use as a protein-constructor, crickets would be a great choice.
>> So your saying that I have to decide that all of a sudden I can't wait to eat crickets because they are more efficient?
No no, not you. All the poor people. They're the ones who will be fed "efficiently". You and I and most people on HN will retain our privilege to eat what we want.
Roasted crickets are actually very tasty. I’d compare them to Cheetos. To each their own, sure, and I won’t tease you for refusing, but I can completely see then as something you wouldn’t be surprised to find in a corner deli, as complementary snacks in a bar, or while gaming at a friend’s. I prefer peanuts but many people are allergic. You want alternatives.
I think you're going to have a lot easier time getting people to eat lentils than crickets, but sure, if it has to be cows or crickets then go for the crickets.
It may be easier to grow and great for humans, but reducing it to just that is like the people who want to subsist only on Soylent; it's missing the bigger picture about food.
Some people like eating things beyond just basic nutritional subsistence. It's why meat is so popular. We've also been eating it since time immemorial. The demand for meat isn't going away no matter how many cricket/insect ads you shove in people's faces. If anything, it just breeds resentment for sustainable food practices, because the rich and powerful will always still have access to meat products.
Making meat into a luxury product like the days of yore will not work. The monkey's out of the bottle on that one. We need to work with this fact, not around it.
Climate change is going to necessitate a lot of uncomfortable changes, including not eating whatever you want whenever you want. Selfishness at that level doesn't work with 8 billion people.
That said I think lab grown meats look pretty promising.
It’s common for chickens and other poultry or even cows to be grown indoors. Animals don’t need direct sunlight, but they still need food grown somewhere.
Yes - likely growing lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe some simple berries... That’s the same stuff that’s been growing in hothouses for over a century.
I think GPs point is that those aren’t the high-calorie, high value crops needed to make this a real revolution in food production.
Show me vertical vineyards, maize, grains, stone fruits, apples etc.
It seems to me that vineyards should be the easiest thing to 'verticalize' since you're growing vines anyway. You should be able to cover the entire sunward side of a skyscraper with vines and harvest the grapes using a robot hanging off a crane.
> It seems to me that vineyards should be the easiest thing to 'verticalize' since you're growing vines anyway. You should be able to cover the entire sunward side of a skyscraper with vines and harvest the grapes using a robot hanging off a crane.
Except when you realize that the most highly valued added product (wine) relies on soil/region specific soil (terroir). No one buying table grapes, even at Whole Foods, is going to spend the kind of money to make something like that at scale. I've worked in a vineyard for a Summer in Croatia, it's how I got run my own Kitchen in Italy soon after as it crated a good 'marketing hook' for a chef, and I can go into why that skyscraper idea is impractical for anything fruit bearing but suffice it to say: it won't work unless you want a small, low yield plaything that can be outperformed from anything in most common grape growing regions even if hyper-local expenses are removed. Hell, even using them as a cover crop/ornament on a trellis in a backyard garden may yield better results.
Cash crops, as specified, are based on economies of scale for a reason and are actually very efficient when properly done and have 10,000+ years of refinement behind them--crop rotation, efficient irrigation, cover crops in the off season, livestock grazing for fertility and micro-organism replenishment. With the advent of more automation, and no till methods we are seeing increases in yield, despite global climate change. Water scarcity, irrigation and water table replenishment and growing organically is something I wished we placed a greater focus on and would do more good for us and our Ecosystem as a whole than anything else hindering cash crop modality if I'm honest.
I sincerely wish people were forced to have to farm as part of their formal education, and continued gardening as their is so much deadly ignorance in regards to where our food comes from and the maladies it creates as a result of being so far from it: obesity and heart disease kills more in the West than anything else.
With that said, I see this as very good data for Mars colonization and food production; but for terrestrial purposes its absurd for anything but Hype/Marketing an expensive and impractical bridge with fanciful ideas of 'closing the gap between food deserts' when urban farming is the real answer in the US (see: Detroit). This model only semi-worked when they were aligned to expensive fine dining restaurants, now that those have been systemically destroyed and may never come back, I don't see it having much if any potential as I've eaten greenhouse stuff that aren't herbs or salad from Holland and its awful!
We could honestly make more headway in solving hunger, food scarcity if they just allotted community gardens in vacant land not in use and mandated fruit bearing trees be used instead of ornamental ones in urban landscaping and reinstated gleaning as a form Community Supported Agriculture.
I've worked in a vineyard for a Summer in Croatia
Which region of Croatia if you don't mind me asking?
My family has a vineyard (800 liters, for our personal consumption) so I know the hassle you are talking about. From what I can tell there has been some advancement regarding automation in the area of vine making over the past years with tractor attachments that allow automatic and precise spraying of fungicides as well as machines that automatically pick the grapes (shake,comb and vacuum). By that I mean, that it has become available even to smaller-medium producers as I see people using it.
As you probably know, a lot of what a winemaker does is adaption of the vineyard to seasonal conditions by adjusting variety and quantity of spraying with (usually) fungicides, reducing the leaves and reducing the grapes (in order to increase overall sugar and quality). This variation would be something that would be reduced using greenhouse/indoor growing.
> we are seeing increases in yield, despite global climate change
I'm ignorant about this. I want to learn more.
I've read that increasing CO2 %, increasing temperature, and increasing water availability will improve plant yields. Is this true?
I also understood that one of the positive feedbacks for the climate response is the increased amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, water vapour being a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. I'm confused about how we can have more water vapour in the atmosphere and yet less water availability, presumably because less rain - these things appear to be conflicting.
I understand that the change in climate will change the established weather patterns that we're used to now, and create drought in areas that are currently wet. I don't understand why we can't adapt to this and move our farms to where the water is.
In short: I keep hearing this, that global climate change will reduce our ability to grow plants, and I don't understand why this is true or how the science for it works. Can anyone shed some light on it, please?
> farm as part of their formal education, and continued gardening
Enthusiastic agreement.
Maybe even get credits (and maybe even some cash) working in the school cafeteria.
My father had a veggie garden. Including heirloom seeds from the family's farming past. My siblings and I had a completely different relationship to food, compared to my school mates.
“Terroir” is just marketing gobbledygook, just like they once said that California wines would never compete with French wines. Get a plant the right climate and nutrients and the fruit will produce well. No mysticism to it.
The big one would be soy beans or potatoes in vertical farms. I've seen some buzz about startups attempting it, but I am unable to find anyone who actually succeeded.
But on the other hand, vertical farming could possibly increase yields for traditional greenhouse owners, and cheap lettuce and tomatoes are definitely not a bad thing.
Same here (Netherlands) but it’s important to realize that greenhouses make a lot of use of natural light and soil and are therefore not entirely the same as indoor/vertical farming.
Nothin wrong with greenhouses at that scale, for obvious reasons more often than not these vegetables are what I eat. You can taste the difference so between greenhouse stuff that never saw true dirt to grow in and things from your own garden or that grew in actual soil I was quite amused when i saw tomatoes and so on grow in soil and small plantations in fron tof a farm house in the Netherlands surrounded by greenhouses.
And still, this industrial style of grwing food is what enables our high living standard. if we now could just figure out how not have too much food in Europe and not enough in other places...
Certainly in any remote or isolated community. Definitely in Hawaii - and in Northern Canada (where fresh produce is flown in by air every day, and a head of lettuce goes for over $7 and a thing of orange juice for $26 [1]).
I think a lot of it is based on locale. Many of the foods may not be easy or possible to grow local, imports are expensive, food grows faster in greenhouses, additionally you can have many grow cycles over the entire year including winter, where that may not be possible with just typical land. They are growing greenhouse operations exponentially, it is a multi-billion dollar business in our locale.
I should have clarified re indoors: My comment was about setups like in the article, which are reliant on electric lights. One of the biggest limitations they have is electricity cost.
I think a comparison to tesla is a red herring, the analogy doesn't hold up to food.
Where I suspect this kind of growing technique would work is probably the spices aisle of the grocery store, and they have always been pretty high margin.
It's a good strategy only if you can take the same technology downmarket eventually. It's not yet clear how downmarket Tesla can be even in the car market, and the car market is very different than food, in that only 18% of people globally, mostly the richest, have cars, but 100% of them need to eat. Another important difference is that cars don't grow out of the ground.
Right now there's a flood of capital available, so it's very hard to tell a priori which ideas have legs and which are just mirages that look good in a slide deck. This could be amazing. But it could be another Juicero or WeWork, where the unit economics just don't make any sense.
You're kidding, right? The model 3 rivals competitors in price and will only drop in price and it's a perfectly serviceable car for most people. Well as long as you don't get it "loaded"
For comparison the best selling new car was Toyota Corolla for 80 000 zł.
But the real bestselling cars are for over a decade the same - 5-10 year old VW Passat Combi from western Europe for 10-50 000 zł.
For 200 000 zł you can have a single-room flat in a big city and rent it out for considerable passive income. 2 such flats and you can live out of that (not very luxuriously but still).
That's why Tesla is considered a luxury car here. Most people drive cars worth less than 10% of a new Model 3.
It's also important to note that a lot of car purchasers buy used cars, because the low end of the new market is too expensive for them.
And really the appropriate comparison versus food is the transport sector, not cars alone. Cars are, as I said, the rich end of the market. In many places, cars are less popular than motorcycles, scooters, and bikes. I don't see any reason to think Tesla has an advantage going downmarket there. Indeed, as a luxury brand, there are significant brand barriers to them going lower in the car market, let alone down to scooters.
The model 3 is way too large for any market that isn't the US. (which is most people). Over last year alone in Europe the M3 market share fell from 33% to 13% IIRC. In China I think the loss of market share was even larger.
In some markets, or overall, it's my impression the model 3 and the BMW 3 series compete head to head and the BMW is losing dramatically. I don't want a Tesla, but I drove a new 3-series loaner and definitely came away thinking this is why people are getting Teslas. But I decided for me, a Honda hybrid at half the price would be better.
It's not a question of pioneering, it's a question of base resource inputs. Tesla can promise an electric car but they can't promise one that costs less than the lithium and metals required to manufacture it, let alone the cost of labor. Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible.
Take a look at the scale of fertilizer manufacturing and use in agriculture. The amount of power required to make that fertilizer is likely an order of magnitude or two less than the amount of power that the sun feeds into photosynthetic systems. Classical agriculture gets that massive power input for free by trading off land use, which also has important follow on effects for fertilizer use, compounding the advantage in fertile areas like California.
It's not like it's impossible if climate change gets really bad and we have to move underground with plentiful nuclear power, but it's so far from economically viable at scale as to be a pipe dream.
Speaking of base resource inputs, I would be concerned with the soil erosion inherent in intensive farming methods. By every estimate I've seen of the rate of topsoil depletion[0], we'll reach a crisis point in agriculture within half a century. Could vertical farming, perhaps paired with a less pollutative energy source like nuclear power, stave off that eventuality? I know a lot of people push organic farming as the solution, but it doesn't appear to be productive enough to feed a growing global population.
You still have the problem that you need to be able to grow plants beyond lettuce and strawberries. No one is growing cereal grains or root crops vertically. It’s not economical viable.
Quite simply, the energy and capital costs of growing bushel of wheat are more than the bushel price of wheat. This difference isn’t just a little, but a lot. If I’m reading the table right in page 19 of the appendix linked, it’s as bad as 37x in 2019, and only projected to fall to 4.6x by 2050.
This might be a stupid question, but could a vertical farm use systems of mirrors to direct sunlight to the crops? That way the vertical farms can collect sunlight from a wide area. Maybe the mirrors could be positioned in such a way as to take up less ground space overall than an equivalent flat farm.
That doesn't seem very plausible: fundamentally all accessible sunlight hits the ground somewhere or other (until we start talking about space mirrors and things like that), so while you can use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (as solar thermal plants do) you can't really beat collecting x amount of solar radiation from y square meters of ground. You can build a tall structure that collect the sunlight hitting the side of it, but obviously that's going to block said sunlight from a correspondingly large area of ground in its shadow; at extreme latitudes where the sunlight mostly comes in sideways you get more concentrated sunlight that way (at the cost of an even bigger shadow), but I doubt it'd be worth the overhead.
Mirrors can neither increase photosynthetic efficiency nor reflect more light than they receive, so to get an equivalent amount of light you'd need a massive structure of mirrors the size of the fields you replace. There might be some clever optimizations possible, but between cooling to keep the plants from burning and occlusion from nutrient delivery systems, it'd be a very large net loss once capital costs are figured in
> Just like Tesla, a farmer can't promise to produce vegetables for less than the cost of fertilizer. Based on the foods that the world prefers to eat, it's just not feasible.
Actually, they do: subsidies distort the hell of out the price discovery mechanisms in Markets. At no point in time can a farmer sell a 1lb(~1/2Kg) of tomatoes at the hieght of season for for $1 or less, much less in the off-season. And yet they do because of the distortions in correctly pricing the inputs, transport and labour as a result of wanting to remain on the crop insurance and subsidy program.
This is seen the World over in various ways too, in the EU farmers are paid to let their fields go fallow and orchids entirely neglected for seasons; it's one of the biggest reason why Farming as a profession has an average age of 60+ World wide as any younger person not born into the Lifestyle or from a Legacy Farming family will quickly see how impractical it is to operate with this system in what amounts to near subsistence levels of poverty. As an outsider going into the Industry for culinary and ecological activist reasons it's incredibly daunting when you realize that in 100 years we created a system in which less than ~2% of the World's population feeds the ~98% and how fragile this system is and how much of a miracle it hasn't blown up in our faces long ago.
It's maintained by fanciful economic machinations and make-believe accounting created by Nation-states to essentially keep a slave labour class in place and avoid peasant revolts due to mass hunger to the detriment of everyone--and that often breaks down, see EU dairy farmer protests in 2012/13/20, and the widespread Indian suicides in the early 2000s and now the farmer revolts happening in New Dehli. Not to mention the amount of subsidies there are for multinationals to sell processed junk into the Market and sold to children school programs at an inflated prices that have resulted in lots of disease and have actually made the average population shorter: a possible inference and consequence of undernourishment due to consuming nutrient deficient food.
The Tesla model, while only slightly relevant due to State and Federal subsidies for EVs, is not painting as good as a picture as an analogy for the reasons you think if you have an understanding of either or both Industries: I happen to have worked in both.
But suffice it to say that up until recently (Federal subsidy of $7500 expired in 2019) in the US where most Tesla deliveries take place--specifically CA-- and where most of the fruit in the US is grown in (Central Valley) it is safe to say that EXACTLY both of those things happened to a certain degree.
Farming works at scale. Back the day when i was a kind, there were a hell of a lot of part-time farmers in bavaria. Working a day job in a factory and running a farm, usually an old family farm, as a side business. That changed, now most of those I know rented out their farmable land to larger full-time farming neighbors. none of these people were necessariyl poor, so. At least going by their equipment and cars, even back when cars were bought and not leased. It still is a hell of a job, with basically no free time.
I think it is different for others regions, were soil is less well suited and getting the necessary scale is difficult.
That’s not how the Tesla subsidies works and that is a naive interpretation of what I said. The tax credits were a transaction between the Federal government and Tesla’s customers. Tesla still got paid the $7,500 and there was no fanciful economics there.
> That’s not how the Tesla subsidies works and that is a naive interpretation of what I said. The tax credits were a transaction between the Federal government and Tesla’s customers. Tesla still got paid the $7,500 and there was no fanciful economics there.
Actually it isn't, and you are only focusing on the Federal Tax credit whereas I purposely mentioned California's EV program in my statement (but didn't elaborate for brevity's sake) that deducts the sticker price for the end consumer in various ways [0] with State/Local Government based subsidies that make Tesla's product (and other EVs for that matter) more accessible to the end consumer.
In the end I think its one of the few examples of a good use of taxes, unlike the Ag based subsidy model; but to deny it isn't a direct benefit to Tesla is to deny reality as most EV and Hybrid deliveries take place in California by a significant margin and thus proves my actual claim that you see these practices in Ag as well.
Not Tesla, but aquaculture. Aquaculture works and reasonably well for a few decades. Here's what we know now.
1. Aquaculture works
2. It's successful with only a handful of species
3. It can't replace marine caught wildlife
4. Flavor-wise it is frequently inferior.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't grow salmon, tipalia, shripm or oysters, we just shouldn't make a claim or claims that aren't reasonable (i.e. aquaculture can feed the world or aquaculture will revolutionize modern food production).
Vertical farming is great for greens, microgreens, strawberries, herbs and that's about it.
Nothing wrong with starting there as long as there is a path to profitability with a mass market product! Do you think there is one for vertically grown potatoes? Or corn? Both are 10-100x less valuable per pound and both take 10-100x longer to grow, 10-100x more water, and 10-100x more energy. I am not sure Tesla was battling the same order of magnitude of order of magnitudes.
Wow, I wrote a three paragraph argument in response to the parent comment that is not nearly as explanatory or elegant as yours, but essentially says the same thing. I think the parent commenter is looking at this problem from the MBA perspective, not an engineering one.
You're convoluting a quantitative argument with a qualitative one. The parent comment pointed out some hard facts about nutrient density and farming logistics, and how the current model for vertical farming won't solve world hunger, on a nutritional level.
You respond with a qualitative argument that you can grow a business and/or industry and maje better technologies if you have profit.
The issue isn't that the technology isn't good enough, it's that there isn't as many nutrients (as in soil) in a city or apartment to grow highly nutritional food. You'd have to truck in bags of soil to do this, which isn't nearly as efficient as leaving the soil where it is and growing it there.
The problem isn't at all soil or nutrients: those are cheap and make up a very small fraction of the final mass of food. Instead, it's energy required to power photosynthesis, turning them into delicious calories.
I think the point is that yes, this technology as it exists today is only commercially viable for some products which are only appetizing to a wealthy elite market. But that's an advantage, it provides a stepping stone. The profits from that can be pumped into R&D to further commercialize the technology, and build a commercial ecosystem. Perhaps at some point in the future the technology will be applicable beyond the simple crops planted today.
In Tesla, the roadster not only proved that electric cars can be good, but that they can be better. Though not everyone can afford a roadster, enough people could and that car was a launch pad for R&D of electric car technology, manufacturing (which it turns out is truely the hard problem in building a car company) and consumer desire.
I absolutley agree regarding the development of EV tech. The main reason I have my doubts about tesla fulfilling all the visions people seem to have about them is manufacturing. This is a well solved problem for existing car makers, so tesla's real value would be as a brand. I dont see batteries being the USP, same as I don't see engines right now, no matter what certain engine fanboys say. Also, Panasonic is usually not getting the credit it deserves when people talk about Tesla's battery tech. As long as Elon is at the helm and manages to sell the vision peopl what to hear, tesla should be fine so. the last two years taught me as much.
But isnt that the contrary of what Christensen postulates, starting at non-competitive down-market nieche and work upwards?
I'm rather bearish on Tesla for various reasons. I also believe current stock prices for Tesla and Amazon are mainly driven by general uncertainty and too much liquid cash with nowhere to go.
That being said, vertical farming doesn't realy solve any problems, food nd water are distribution and not availability problems. None of which are solved by vertical farming. Obviously that doesn't prevent people from raising a shit load of VC money. If anything, the wetern world is producing too much food, incl. meat, in hyper industrialized farms already.
Tesla had a direct path to drop the price by using economies of scale. If you just can't grow a crop, it just won't work. This is more akin to saying that battery density is low enough that it only works up to scooters.
Tesla obviously works today as well as do these vertical farms, but only in the niche they are operating in. The point being made is that they both could remain as a very niche product for looooong time.
I'm not trying to be snarky; I'd love to see something like this, but the comment you reply to is my conclusion as well. I used to be very excited about this stuff, but the only viable crops are leafy greens sold at a high price.
I own a business selling sensors for use in hydroponics. I started because I wanted to make an impact in food availability. I've abandoned that, and continue because hobbyists, and companies like this have a use.