Preface. Vertical farms sound even more impossible than rooftop farms, which at least can use free sunshine. And they use massive amounts of energy to heat, cool, ventilate, light, and so on, not a good direction to go given energy decline beginning in the near future.

 

In the news:

You sure don’t want to work at one of these farms! (2023) A celebrated startup promised Kentuckians green jobs. It gave them a ‘grueling hell on earth.’ The inside story of how AppHarvest’s indoor farming scheme imploded—and took its blue-collar workforce down with it.

Turns out VP candidate Vance worked at and helped fund AppHarvest, looks like Trump picked a fellow grifter to be his running mate: 2024 Workers allege ‘nightmare’ conditions at Kentucky startup JD Vance helped fund.

Elon Musk hates Paul “the Population Bomb” Erlich who dares to challenge endless growth forever and wants us to all vote Republican (Elon Musk Reveals the Person He Despises). He has an equally stupid brother (and fellow grifter?) who started vertical farms in 2016 that are now failing   Square Roots, a tech farming startup that was cofounded by Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal, shut down the majority of its remaining locations

Kay (2023) Elon Musk’s brother’s ‘smart farm’ startup is shutting down most of its locations and gutting its workforce   The “smart farm” company had over $90 million in total funding as of April 2022

Peters A (2023) The vertical farming bubble is finally popping Climate change might make growing produce indoors a necessity. But despite taking in more than a billion dollars in venture capital investment, most companies in the industry seem to be withering, unable to turn a profit on lettuce. Fastcompany.  This article lists several large companies with many facilities going under or laying off most staff. As of December 2022, $1.7 billion has been invested in indoor growers, more than any other part of agricultural tech. Nearly 20 years after the first vertical farm opened, we need to ask: Is it even possible to compete with the economics of outdoor farming? And how did investors think that they could find Silicon Valley-style returns in . . . lettuce?  Then a long list of how expensive they are, such as “a small, 10,000-square-foot farm might have a lighting bill over $100,000 or even $200,000 a year”.

putting a few solar panels on the roof can’t cover the total amount of electricity needed. “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce,” says Kale Harbick, a USDA researcher who studies controlled-environment agriculture. A hypothetical skyscraper filled with lettuce would require solar panels covering an area the size of Manhattan.

Reynolds M (2022) Vertical Farming Has Found Its Fatal Flaw. Europe’s energy crisis is forcing companies to switch strategies or close down. The industry’s future hangs in the balance. Wired.   the industry is extremely vulnerable to increases in electricity prices, which uses a lot of electricity, about 25% of operational costs, but prices have risen 58% so electricity now eats up about 40% of the costs. Vertical farms are expensive to build compared with conventional outdoor farms. AppHarvest—a US-based firm that builds high-tech greenhouses—has struggled to find enough cash to fund its ongoing operations despite going public in 2021. In its latest quarterly report the company said there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue into the future. Most vertical farms grow herbs, shoots, and other leafy salad vegetables. Leafy greens are the industry’s go-to produce because they grow quickly under LEDs and have a short shelf life and premium price point. But with inflation high, consumers might prefer to forgo expensive vertically farmed herbs for something a little more budget-friendly. That’s particularly true for European vertical farms.

Nor has the technology transformed agriculture in the way early proponents promised. For a long time the industry has touted itself as a more sustainable way to grow vegetables, but all the energy needed to light up those LED bulbs means that vegetables grown on vertical farms can end up having higher CO₂ emissions than those grown in open fields and trucked hundreds of miles to their final destination. In a world where all electricity is generated by renewables, those emissions would be much lower, but that’s not the world we’re living in.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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I have a vegetable garden, and after pressing seeds into the soil, with almost no effort I can come back and harvest whatever I planted six weeks later.  All of this bounty came from free soil, free sunshine, and free rain, though we do use drip irrigation half the year.    

Your proposal of a vertical farm is a laudable goal for increasing food security, helping to feed the 3 billion more people expected by 2050, and reducing the energy and emissions caused by the production and transportation of food long distances.

From what I could find in commercial real estate listings, that’ll set you back about $10 million dollars.

Or you can lease space for $22 to $40 per square foot, at $22 to $40,000 a month for 10,000 square feet in New York city, or better yet lease in the Bronx or Queens where prices are lower (Goodman 2019).

New York City has 193,689 acres, but just a few are indoors or in shipping containers.  At best New York could support 1,864 acres of such farms, nearly all of them rooftop (Goodman 2019).  But 162,000 to 232,000 acres required to provide residents the 40,760,000,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables they consume every year. 

So you found a place.  The first thing you’ve got to do is buy lots of lights.  Outdoors, all the leaves of a plant need to be directly illuminated by the sun to activate photosynthesis.  But indoors, even in a glass-walled room, there’s not enough light.  So you’ll need huge amounts of artificial lighting to match what the sun delivers, about 100 times the lighting seen in a typical office building (SA 2019).

And you’ll need a lot of electricity to light all these bulbs. Crops like potatoes or tomatoes need about 1,200 kilowatt hours of electricity for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) of edible fruit produced.  If half of America’s vegetable crops were to be grown in vertical farms, just the lighting alone would require over half of all the electricity generated in the U.S. (Cox 2016).

Mills (2012) used the low estimates of how much Cannabis is grown indoors in the U.S. and deduced this consumes about 1% of U.S. electricity (3% of California’s electricity) at a cost of $6 billion a year.  That’s equal to the energy used by about 2 million homes.  But then they can afford to do so, marijuana commands a price of about $210 to $320 (Statista.com 2018) per ounce whereas fresh vegetables are just pennies per ounce.

You’ll need to pump water up to all the floors.  I can’t say how much energy or what it will cost, but water is heavy.  The state of California uses a tremendous amount of energy to move water around — 19% of California’s electricity, 30% of its natural gas, and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel every year, and this demand is growing (Klein 2005).   

Although you won’t need pesticides, your crops are still vulnerable to pests and diseases such as black mold (FT 2020)

And that’s just the start, you’ll need haul acres of dirt and fertilizer to every floor, buy shelving to put the plants on, purchase nutrient monitoring systems, machinery to harvest plants, heating and cooling systems, ventilation, shading, dehumidifiers, fans, computers, robotics perhaps, and vans to truck your produce to markets.

There’s only a limited range of crops that can be grown. It only makes sense to grow leafy greens or herbs since most of the plant can be eaten.  Other crops have too many inedible leaves, stems, and roots.

You’re not exactly going to be feeding the neighborhood either. A cup of butterhead lettuce weights 55 grams (2 ounces) and contains 7.2 calories, so customers will need to eat 280 cups of greens weighing 15,400 grams (34 pounds) to get their daily required 2,000 calories (SelfND 2018).

If you don’t find any of this daunting and go ahead with the project, congratulations, you’ll be the only vertical skyscraper farm in the U.S. and the rest of the world, except for Japan (Takada 2018). It will be interesting to see if Japanese, and a new vertical farm being built in Dubai, enterprises can compete with farms on the ground in cities or near them, and nearby massive greenhouse operations that can use natural sunshine.

References

Cox, S. 2016. Why growing vegetables in high-rises is wrong on so many levels. Alternet.org

FT. 2020. Vertical farming: hope or hype? Financial Times.

Goodman, W., et al.  2019. Will the Urban Agricultural Revolution Be Vertical and Soilless? A Case Study of Controlled Environment Agriculture in New York City. Land Use Policy 82.

Klein, G., et al. 2005. California’s water-energy relationship. California Energy Commission.

Mills, E. 2012. The carbon footprint of indoor Cannabis production. Energy Policy 46: 58-67.

SA. 2019. Growing up: skyscraper farms seen as a way to produce food locally–and cut greenhouse emissions. Scientific American.

SelfND. 2018. Lettuce, butterhead (includes boston and bibb types) raw nutrition facts & calories. Nutritiondata.self.com

Takada, A. 2018. As high-rise farms go global, Japan’s Spread leads the way. Japantimes.