Is Vertical Farming the High Tech Future of Food?

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▻ Audio file(s) provided by Epidemic Sound

[rolypoly]

I love the idea of "farm towers" in major cities making it easier and cheaper to eat healthy in cities.

[coldtesla]

It is the future, as soon as they figure out the cost, I tried this in my small outdoor garden, failed on a grand scale, but, learned a lot and hopefully this year will be better.

[mikeferris]

10-12 years ago I seriously discussed with my team the idea of finding funding and starting up in vertical farming. One of our concepts was to build over the roofs of hockey arenas (I'm in Canada) and inspire the local community to volunteer.

[lshrd]

In my experience with hydroponics, you do not run the lights 24/7. More like 19 hours per day. Small nitpick, I know.

[The_Digital_Samurai]

I used to do Aquaponics in NJ. A heavy snowfall 3 years ago wiped out all my progress however when my greenhouse collapsed and crushed all my gear. It took me 5 years to get to that point as I don't have a lot of money. Rebuilding seems to be taking longer.

[davidpk]

I think that is important to say that even 70% of freshwater is used in agriculture, most of this food goes to feed animals. So reducing our consumption of animal products will reduce the amount of water consumed as well

[kylecramer]

Awesome topic. Also great audio mixing on this one!

[peteaulit]

"Have you tried any yet?" yes, I had my own aquaponic system, one outdoor running on sunlight and one indoor with LED and they worked fine. It's more than doable on a small scale for a family. Pretty soon we'll also have meat grown in a lab hitting the market. Maybe fewer vegetarians in the future... :)

[HyenaBlank]

Technically, it's not a new concept.
The greenhouses that we know of today started out as a kind of 'vertical farm' that are referred to as Fruit Walls.
I'm not too sure what they were originally called, but that's the main name I see em called now.

Basically used thermal energy to help plants grow on the walls as the heat soaked up by the wall during the day would also keep the plants warm at night

[cherubinth]

I just imagine a Mos Burger in Tokyo in the first floor of such a vertical farm. The salad on your burger was farmed just one minute ago.

[jgudgell]

Haven't done it yet myself, but I've seen several projects that I want to start with for growing some veg at the house. Great video and content!

[JimPekarek]

After hearing about lettuce being popular in vertical farms, I'm curious how food waste breaks down by plant. In my experience, the vast majority of lettuce ends up thrown away, but things like broccoli, artichokes, cauliflower, bell peppers, etc are usually eaten before they rot. I don't have larger statistics on that though, and google searches don't seem to turn up much good research.

[mattwardynski]

Cool stuff! Logan Ashcraft, the energy manager at Plenty, says most plants actually only need 18 hours of light before they go into a night cycle, not 24 hours of non stop lights. She says the load from the plant factories can actually be pretty malleable, which can be helpful for the grid (but of course it's still a lot of energy). She was on an interesting podcast from Greentech Media's The Interchange where she talked about the energy use associated with indoor farming.

[shermanpotts]

"The growth of vertical farming" I see what you did there.

[stephenmabry]

Great topic. Currently building hydroponic greenhouse, sans grow lights.

[eaaeeeea]

It's a very interesting topic. I see these becoming even more scalable and modular. At that point we can put a farm wherever we need one, from small apartments to city centers and massive warehouses. High efficiency indoor farms are necessary for Mars colonization too.

[timcamp]

I’ve had two separate Aquaponics systems. Loved them. Loved the fish too. Nice job!

[aabbccddeeffgg]

i plan on doing vertical strawberry farming in a 24m2 greenhouse, and because of that i can get as much yield on those plants as i would on a lot more plants on a 2 or 3 acre farm land for strawberries.
can fit about 500 plants in the greenhouse can get a 5kg (10kg at max if i was a expert) yield per plant. where out in the open the plants would give around 0.5 to 1kg yield each plant. it really does make a huge difference having it in a controlled environment

[Maadhawk]

I have had dreams of this for years, but never realized others were already tackling this problem. Vertical farming is indeed the future of food growth.

As I envision it, eventually all crops, including most fruiting trees will be grown in this manner. I picture a skyscraper, 100 stories tall with 10 meters per floor. 1 meter is the structural space between floors leaving 9 meters for actual setup. This barely gives enough room for things like apple and orange trees. Other crops, like grains, can be stacked 2 or 3 times before that space is used up. Other crops still, like lettuce, can be stacked dozens of times in that much space per floor.

My building would be 1 square KM in size. The ground floor would be packaging, shipping, and computer control from where the farmers would monitor their FarmScraper. Subterranean levels would house water recycling systems. Massive freight elevators would be designed to be used in conjunction with robotics to automate the entire process. A service elevator would provide for human access for maintenance and the like.

These buildings would be built from reinforced concrete and designed to last 250 years or more. The outside would be lined with a mesh of some kind that would hold more soil and allow for climbing plants to grow on the outside of the FarmScraper to provide more space for plants that can convert CO2 emissions back into O2 and capture the carbon. The roof would be lined with solar panels and vertical wind turbines. This wouldn't provide for all of the power needs of such a structure, the pumping power for nutrient reinforced water alone would be huge, but it would help.

Such a structure could reduce the need for arable land in the United States alone by more than 90% allowing us to repurpose the land for other things, both for cities to live in, but also to expand our wild life preserves and national parks and forests.

Such structures could also be built in places traditionally not known for growing large crops, like the deserts of Africa and the Middle East. This would go a long way to helping stabilize the world as well as a well fed people is a far less violent people.

[moritzbrinkmann]

i literally watched that ted talked 30 seconds before you posted this video! As always, it was a great one Matt!