Vertical Farms Grow Veggies On Site At Restaurants and Grocery Stores (newatlas.com) 83
New Atlas reports on ag-tech company Vertical Field's efforts to produce soil-based indoor vertical farms grown at the very location where food is consumed. From the report: The Vertical Field setup retains many of the advantages of hydroponic vertical farms, but instead of the plants growing in a nutrient-packed liquid medium, the container-based pods treat their crops to real soil, supplemented by a proprietary mix of minerals and nutrients. The company says that it opted for geoponic production "because we found that it has far richer flavor, color, and quality."
The recycled and repurposed 20- or 40-ft (6/12-ft) shipping containers used to host the farms can be installed within reach of consumers, such as in the parking lot of a restaurant or out back at the grocery store. Growers can also scale up operations to more than one pod per site if needed, and the external surfaces could be covered in a living wall of decorative plants to make them more appealing. The vertical urban farms are claimed capable of supporting the production of a wide range of fruits and veggies -- from leafy greens and herbs to strawberries and mushrooms, and more. And it's reported to use up to 90 percent less water than a traditional farming setup.
Unlike some high-tech farming solutions, staff won't need special training to work with the vertical farm as the automated growing process monitors, irrigates, and fertilizes the crops as they grow thanks to arrays of sensors that continually feed data on climate, soil condition, LED lighting and so on to management software. Each vertical farm unit has its own Wi-Fi comms technology installed to enable operators to tap into the system via a mobile app. The company told us that, by way of example, one container pilot farm offered a growing space of 400 sq ft (37 sq m) and yielded around 200 lb (90 kg) of produce per month, harvested daily. Lighting remained on for 16 hours per day. We assume that the pods are completely powered from the grid at their respective locations, though the company says that it is looking at ways to make use of solar panels as well as making more efficient use of water.
The recycled and repurposed 20- or 40-ft (6/12-ft) shipping containers used to host the farms can be installed within reach of consumers, such as in the parking lot of a restaurant or out back at the grocery store. Growers can also scale up operations to more than one pod per site if needed, and the external surfaces could be covered in a living wall of decorative plants to make them more appealing. The vertical urban farms are claimed capable of supporting the production of a wide range of fruits and veggies -- from leafy greens and herbs to strawberries and mushrooms, and more. And it's reported to use up to 90 percent less water than a traditional farming setup.
Unlike some high-tech farming solutions, staff won't need special training to work with the vertical farm as the automated growing process monitors, irrigates, and fertilizes the crops as they grow thanks to arrays of sensors that continually feed data on climate, soil condition, LED lighting and so on to management software. Each vertical farm unit has its own Wi-Fi comms technology installed to enable operators to tap into the system via a mobile app. The company told us that, by way of example, one container pilot farm offered a growing space of 400 sq ft (37 sq m) and yielded around 200 lb (90 kg) of produce per month, harvested daily. Lighting remained on for 16 hours per day. We assume that the pods are completely powered from the grid at their respective locations, though the company says that it is looking at ways to make use of solar panels as well as making more efficient use of water.
Vegetables suck (Score:1, Informative)
Re: Vegetables suck (Score:4, Interesting)
That is not a thing.
There are literally peoples on this planet, that eat nothing but meat and fat, proving you wrong... Not that you ever did prove yourself right, by the way.
E.g. because that is the only thing around, in a snowy or sandy desert.
The key is that they eat all of it, to get all the nurtrients of the plants that the animal ate.
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The key is that they eat all of it, to get all the nurtrients of the plants that the animal ate.
Just not the liver. Burn that to keep the dogs from eating it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re: Vegetables suck (Score:5, Informative)
That is not a thing.
Actually, it is a thing: Protein poisoning [wikipedia.org]
Protein poisoning is not caused by "too much meat," but by too much extremely lean meat, without enough fat or carbs.
Re: Vegetables suck (Score:4, Informative)
technically, not enough fat. It has nothing to do with carbs
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That is not a thing.
Oh my god why do you persist in your own ignorance for something that you could google in 2 seconds and instantly establish why people aren't proving him wrong.
Re: Vegetables suck (Score:4, Interesting)
I am mainly a carnivore, but as a good cook, I must disagree. There are very delicious plants and methods of preparation out there. (And lame bland meats, like chicken breasts, especially boneless and skinless ones.)
Also, look up where your spices come from.
Sides make a meal much more interesting. And save you a ton of money too. At least during the current overpopulation, until nature has ... ehrm ... fixed things.
But yes, there are sides. For those that failed to catch the beast.
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Can you define "overpopulation" and how our current situation fits?
Earth could possibly sustain trillions of people with technology like this.
Re: Vegetables suck (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you define "overpopulation" and how our current situation fits?
Earth could possibly sustain trillions of people with technology like this.
Wikipedia has this: Overpopulation or overabundance occurs when a species' population becomes so excessive that people deem it must be managed. It can result from an increase in births (fertility rate), a decline in the mortality rate, an increase in immigration, or a depletion of resources. When overpopulation occurs the available resources become too limited for the entire population to survive comfortably.
Which basically means that if there was an all mighty galactic empire out there and they saw what is going on down here they might decide to regard our planet like some kind of national park and manage the human population by culling it, like we do with feral hogs.
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Easier said than done. It's not something that can happen with a snap of the fingers.
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Easier said than done. It's not something that can happen with a snap of the fingers.
Why? Do you think a galactic alien empire, a Kardashev III civilisation, capable of interstellar travel would suffer failure under the muzzles of you and your militia buddys' AR-15s? Any civilisation advanced enough to build a galactic empire would have little trouble culling humanity which they would regard about as primitive as we regard a prairie dog colony.
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Good thing there's no galactic empire then.
Your definition and explanation leaves more questions than it answers. One question is, how is this culling supposed to work and help? It appears to me that there's no need to cull the global population. If there is a need of a culling then this galactic empire needs to take out a dozen or so dictators in the world. That would let billions of people being starved today by their governments be free to grow their own food, and free to have trade domestically and
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Earth could possibly sustain trillions of people with technology like this.
Do you have any idea of how big one trillion (let alone trillons) really is? From that quote, you don't.
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We should start with you. I see "cow" in the name and I approve
Re: Vegetables suck (Score:2)
Stop pushing that stupid fad. (Score:3, Insightful)
A vertical farm that produces the same amount of biomass, must use the same amount of light and digestig soil nutrients. Obviously. Otherwise it would just be a higher water content and worse nutritional value, or grow equivalently slower to kill its density 'advantages'.
So it takes up exactly the same area of sunlight covered lands. (As in: Behind it, everything will be in the dark for n hours, and have just as much worse crops, as yours are better due to stealing sunlight.)
So this only seemingly "works" if they are sparse, and not anywhere around a farmer or apartments where they might get angry if you're being an antisocial dick, stealing their sunlight.
And for any place where darkness is OK, just having wider building with the crops on top will also be exactly equivalent. Except you don't have to artificially pump water around and irrigate plants, wasting space and energy on power plants too.
It is not "green". It is the plant equivalent of meat factories. With just as destructive and bad results, and the same solution: Stop making so many humans! Then you don't need all that nonsense.
This is just wannabe engineers trying to treat nature as cogs im a factory again. Leave it to the experts, please.
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Makes far too much sense, you must be some kind of super-troll. Getting people to understand there are too many humans on the planet, good luck with that.
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Getting people to understand there are too many humans on the planet, good luck with that.
How many humans on the planet is "too much"? Is there some range on where it's "just right"? And, I'm almost afraid to ask, is there such a thing as "too few humans"?
I'm curious to understand this thought process on how someone calculates the ideal human population for the planet.
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How about too many is an amount which is unsustainable and risks the extinction of the race far sooner than would naturally occur. What you have to do to see the shit is about to hit the fan is to look ahead.
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How about too many is an amount which is unsustainable
Sustainability is a technical problem.
With the proper technology, the earth can easily sustain several times the current population.
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Once we have several times the current population, what are we going to do to make it stop growing further ?
Seriously? We educate the population and provide access to birth control and sterilization. When people have access to education, birth control, and have peace and prosperity, then they learn to have a sustainable number of children all on their own. No need for coercive population control policies like China had. The government isn't going to have to force sterilizations. Social pressures are very strong motivators. People will want to keep up with their neighbors on even the number of children they
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Why don't we start with that right now, before we hit the maximum sustainable number ?
How about people with genes that cause them to desire large families despite having prosperity ?
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How about people with genes that cause them to desire large families despite having prosperity ?
Such genes don't exist, idiot.
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Family size is culture.
Not Genome.
And most of that culture is: Oh, we have no pension funds!!!
Kids have to pay/care for their parents, or they starve and die.
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Why don't we start with that right now, before we hit the maximum sustainable number ?
What makes you think we haven't?
How about people with genes that cause them to desire large families despite having prosperity ?
I think that's called "being human", and there's no cure, only the treatments I mentioned of education, birth control, and sterilization.
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What makes you think we haven't?
Population growth in Africa is not slowing down.
I think that's called "being human", and there's no cure, only the treatments I mentioned of education, birth control, and sterilization.
Some people will have genes that will make them immune to these "treatments", so they will get more children than others, and pass these genes on, which means that you can change the environment, but nature, uhm, will find a way.
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Population growth in Africa is not slowing down.
Africa's population has not yet hit its inflection point but shows the same response as elsewhere to peace, prosperity, healthcare, and education.
Illiterate African women have five children each.
Literate African women have three children.
College-educated African women have two.
The poorest country in the world is Niger.
The highest birthrate in the world, seven children per woman, is in Niger.
Some people will have genes that will make them immune to these "treatments"
Tell the Japanese about that. Or Singapore, Korea, Spain, Italy. They are all struggling to get women to have more b
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and you expect us to convince them of not having babies?
No convincing is needed.
Just give people peace, prosperity, and education, and they stop having babies.
It is like turning off a light switch.
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I'm not disagreeing with you in general, but you have ignored the biggest advantage of indoor cultivation, which is that they can be located where they are needed thus saving packaging and transportation costs. I don't think they will replace farms, but for expensive stuff like herbs and spices they might make sense.
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Not the expensive stuff, the stuff that needs to be fresh. Most spices do well dried. Fresh oregano is nice, but not that much better, and in many recipes worse, than dried oregano. And let me know when they start producing saffron (made from the pistils of a certain flower, harvested by hand [robots might do that, but not cheap ones]).
That's bullshit... Sorry, but it's bullshit... (Score:2)
I'm not disagreeing with you in general, but you have ignored the biggest advantage of indoor cultivation, which is that they can be located where they are needed thus saving packaging and transportation costs. I don't think they will replace farms, but for expensive stuff like herbs and spices they might make sense.
Herbs are weeds. Easy to grow and a simple pot will do.
Spices are spicy (as in potent and you don't need a lot of it, certainly not a shipping container-full) AND tend to be SEEDS.
You literally have to let the plant grow fully then let it GO TO SEED. Then harvest that 1% of the entire plant.
Not something done effectively in a container. You need fields. And they tend to need to be situated in tropical regions. [fao.org] Spicy chemicals need energy.
Thirdly, parking a fucking trailer-truck in front of your restaurant a
Not a fad (Score:2)
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You appear to assume they use natural light for the crops. They stated they do not. They use artificial light.
What I do find amusing is the plan to use solar power for powering these vertical farms. At that point I see little to gain in the vertical farming. Maybe they can "squeeze" some gain on using solar PV and artificial light. They can even out the "too much" and "too little" with batteries. Take what might be a scorching noon sun and tone that down, then shift that in time to give a longer day,
It still needs lots of space (Score:2)
What you said is all true, but 200 pounds per month is not a lot. I buy at least 10 pounds of produce per week for a family of four, although that's probably less than we should consume for best health. But even that suboptimal number means that one container could supply -- ignoring the fact that it won't provide anything that grows on large plants like tree fruits -- about 20 people. That's a tiny fraction of the number of people fed by a single grocery store or restaurant.
Maybe it scales well; they do
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What about the roof? Urban grocery stores often have apartments or offices above them already. Roofs of suburban grocery stores generally are not designed to hold hundreds of tons of containerized gardens.
If you rebuilt every suburban grocery store in the country to accommodate this kind of equipment, it would make more sense to grow the plants in the basement, but then you would not need or want them to be in a container. You would want a modular system that could be installed in a typical building.
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The basement is not as good either because there is not very much in the way of Solar there. I live in the suburbs, no grocery store has a basement there, so reconstruct would have to happen either way. It would be cheaper to build extra support for a second floor than to dig for a basement. That said, there isn't much reason why they couldn't shift their product into modules rather than a Container, then you could sp
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Re: Stop pushing that stupid fad. (Score:2)
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And also all that's associated with the manufacturing of that packaging.
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Not really. Plastic packaging, usually bags, are a great source of non-renewables. They can't be recycled because it's not economical to do so (recycling is a scam by the plastic manufacturers who wanted to create a disposable product. It only worked because China was willing to go along and make it work. Now that they aren't, more and more plastic "recycling" actually ends up in the landfill). A plastic bag is cheaper new tha
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Re: Stop pushing that stupid fad. (Score:2)
Re: Stop pushing that stupid fad. (Score:3)
The effecienyy points you are missing is location and distance to end users
That tomato you just bought was grown 1,000's of miles away. If you can setup so that 20-30% of crops grown are used within 20 miles of their location you save tremendous amounts of energy in transportation and dstribution. Yes using solar and batteries to turn on lights seems like lots of waste. But remember theses farms work 365 days a year and can be placed near grocery stores. So in the dead of winter your yeilds are as good a
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The effecienyy points you are missing is location and distance to end users
Any conventional greenhouse can do that.
They can use direct sunlight on the plants. In winter heating might need to be augmented with nuclear or something as low carbon energy. Piling them higher and deeper is unlikely to help a whole lot on distances. Maybe from the deepest part of some really big super metro area someone needs to go 200 miles instead of 20 miles to find enough sun and cheap land to put a conventional greenhouse for growing tomatoes or whatever. Perhaps the climate is such that natura
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A lot of grocery stores have big parking lots, and most of the people who park there would appreciate some shade,
You must not have winter where you live. (Score:2)
A vertical farm that produces the same amount of biomass, must use the same amount of light and digestig soil nutrients. Obviously. Otherwise it would just be a higher water content and worse nutritional value, or grow equivalently slower to kill its density 'advantages'. So it takes up exactly the same area of sunlight covered lands. (As in: Behind it, everything will be in the dark for n hours, and have just as much worse crops, as yours are better due to stealing sunlight.)
So this only seemingly "works" if they are sparse, and not anywhere around a farmer or apartments where they might get angry if you're being an antisocial dick, stealing their sunlight. And for any place where darkness is OK, just having wider building with the crops on top will also be exactly equivalent. Except you don't have to artificially pump water around and irrigate plants, wasting space and energy on power plants too.
Perhaps you live in a tropical paradise where you can get fresh local food year-round, but my job requires me to be someplace that has winters. Grow lights are hugely popular here, especially post-pandemic, so we can start seedlings before the last frost or continue growing plants after the first. Here's the problem with produce. Americans NEED to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. Most of America has winters. In order to get fresh produce in the winter, we either ship it or grow it artificially, whi
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Stop making so many humans! Then you don't need all that nonsense.
We should start with you. Constantly spouting out shit you know nothing about. Hint: Vertical farming has nothing to do with light or soil nutrients. You'd know that if you spent even 1/10th of the time googling the subject as you do posting shit on slashdot.
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Not if there are efficiencies gained in delivering the nutrients and light. A common middle-school science experiment involves growing plants with different colors of light, showing natural, unfiltered sunlight is not the most efficient. Using grow lights, more efficient nutrient delivery, and reducing both loss to pests and the need for pesticides by tightly controlling the environment are all efficiencies that lead to much better results.
Locating these container farms close to restaurants greatly reduces
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You are missing the points about: you can have the light on, on the plants, 18h - 20h. ... etc. p.p.
You have no transportation or cooling costs, you simply pick what you need.
Pest control should be easy
For a restaurant or a grocery store in a small sky scraper that probably makes perfect sense.
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The density of farming is very rarely limited by either sunlight or nutrients. Much more often it's limited by space and water. Vertical farms make far more efficient use of both of them. By being vertical, they can pack a lot more plants into the same amount of land. By being a closed system, they use a lot less water than a traditional farm where most of the water you put on the crops either evaporates or soaks down into the ground without being absorbed by the roots.
They also provide a much more cont
Eat that, Malthus! (Score:3)
There's long been the claim that the limit to human population that Earth can sustain will be reached soon, and be quite disastrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If we can grow food in abundance with teeny tiny containers, and we have access to just an unfathomable amounts of energy from uranium from seawater, and obviously water from seawater, then the population carrying capacity of the planet will be just immense.
I tend to believe those that describe a slow decline in population growth over the next few decades until we reach something like 12 billion people. We won't be growing plants in recycled shipping containers for much other than its novelty. We will be using farming methods much like we are now for a very long time inside Earth's atmosphere. There's no shortage of dirt in the sun yet.
Where I see this technology put to use though is in orbital space stations, bases on the moon and Mars, and on spaceships to Mars and back. Trips lasting months on ships in space will be far more pleasant, healthy, and survivable if there are fresh food crops on board. Plants for producing drugs, medicinal and otherwise, will be helpful too for keeping people healthy outside of Earth's atmosphere.
Malthus didn't see this coming.
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There's no shortage of dirt in the sun yet.
Except that topsoil has dramatically thinned over the years, we're depleting aquifers, we're going to run out of phosphorous and fossil fuels, and climate change is going to disrupt agriculture.
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Except that topsoil has dramatically thinned over the years,
Really? I seem to recall plenty of sustainable agriculture techniques to reverse this.
we're depleting aquifers,
Nuclear powered desalination of seawater.
we're going to run out of phosphorous
It sounds like we can extract that from the sea too. Plenty of bodies of water with too much.
and fossil fuels,
Nuclear power and hydrocarbon synthesis. We can get the uranium from the sea to power the nuclear reactors. Lots of hydrogen and dissolved CO2 in the water as raw material.
and climate change is going to disrupt agriculture.
Nuclear power and hybrid crops.
I'm only being half serious here because it looks like you are panicking when there's
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Cannabis farms on every corner (Score:1)
And suspicions. All the electricity is for lettuce and tomatos
You'd be surprised (Score:2)
And suspicions. All the electricity is for lettuce and tomatos
Cannabis is legal in my state and most of the good ones now. However, LOTS of people, myself included, enjoy growing things that don't get you high. It's not particularly rational, but probably 10% of people I know in general life would be happy to pay $2/month on their houseplants to run a $40 grow light during the winter. A 40w LED covers a 2'x4' area. It's like any hobby. People with means will take it past the point it makes rational sense.
For me, it's because my family loves fresh pesto and ja
This won't last long ... (Score:2)
The recycled and repurposed 20- or 40-ft (6/12-ft) shipping containers used to host the farms can be installed within reach of consumers, such as in the parking lot of a restaurant or out back at the grocery store.
I give it a couple of months before crowds of angry Q-Anon supporters start going around smashing these things to pieces because they are convinced these are supply dumps covertly deployed by the Chinese Communist Party in preparation for a military invasion in cooperation with the deep state, the lizard people, the grey aliens, Obama, 'Killary' Clinton and George Soros.
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Nah, they are obviously the 5G microchip distribution centers for the chemtrail cloud computing remote radio head shop base stations.
The chemtrails form clouds that are used for computing the radio transmissions, and the head shops sell the marijuana that Becky injected and died from, and the base stations blast mind control waves to all the injected 5G microchips.
Can we grow it too? (Score:2)
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There are lots of at-home workalike systems. AeroGarden, Rise Gardens, Tower Garden, Foody, and more. They might not be as automated, because the equipment needed to automate more of the controls would make it impractically expensive for mainstream home use. Even in their current states, many of these systems cater to high-end or boutique niche markets. They are rather expensive for middle-class households.
And in practice they have a limited selection of crops. You won't be getting root vegetables or l
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It's a good start to an overall vision (Score:1)
This is a real thing (Score:2)
Don't diss on it. The indoor farming really works, and it is overall better for the environment. And, how do you think humans will produce food on Mars, or in our underground bankers after WWIII nuclear fallout?
Today, you can buy "aeroponics" kits from places like "AeroGarden" or "Click and Grow" and start growing tomatoes at home. Yes, they are not the most efficient, and more like "toy" versions. However shows it can actually work.
No harmful pesticides for bugs.
No harmful herbicides for weeds.
No damage to
Where Will You Store A Shipping Container? (Score:2)
Where can I buy one? (Score:2)
I have a fetish for growing fresh chili peppers, yet live in an area where the temperatures and rainfall totals are a huge detriment to getting a decent crop. Especially the last few years. If I could grow peppers in one of these vertical container farms, I'd definitely consider setting aside the funds. Lord knows I have the room in the back yard for one where the current garden resides. And maybe I'd finally have a grow season longer than "habaneros just budded - frost," like I've had the last three ye
The new and improved version.... (Score:2)
I want the version where fish are raised in a "pond" under the lattice walkway and their waste is used to provide nitrogen to the plants - protein and veg!
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Up we go! (Score:1)