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I come from the Dutch greenhouse industry. Dutch greenhouses produce about 10X of what is possible on the best open-air farms. Such greenhouses are probably at the pinnacle of cost-effectiveness. Besides, crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, and pumpkins, are already grown vertically in these greenhouses. They grow vertically because it's relatively easy to lead their growth vertically. Lettuces and other leafy greens and herbs can be automated a great deal on a horizontal plane. In low-light conditions, one can add lighting. I think vertical farming is one step too far in automation and complications with humans. Perhaps further automation with AI and humanoid robots could be the path to success. Fun fact: greenhouses grow the most pesticide-free produce. They do this by adding natural predators of pests into the greenhouses. Unfortunately, it's more difficult to control fungal pests, but it can be done.

Sounds like the issue is companies relying too heavily on outside investors coupled with piss poor planning at ground level.

I am an old farmer who people I knew in the press used to tell me these ultra-expensive high tech operations would put us all out of business! Ha, ha, all they had to do was look at greenhouse operations and see what happens over the years, eventually greenhouses are almost always overwhelmed by plant debris which causes insect pest infestations that can become permanent! Cleaning up the mess the plants leave behind is ultimately what kills the operation by incurring high labor costs from pest control. There is also this weird thing that happens in farming where the top people become convinced fertilizers are magical elixirs resulting in over fertilizing and under watering, so those highest paid most educated agricultural workers often give very BAD advice and or the head managers/owners won’t listen to good advice. Most farms don’t know how to do what is the most basic thing, properly watering 💦 of their plants, and this failure results in plant disease, when this happens farms then respond by spraying insecticides which absolutely shocks the plant killing fruit production! The high cost of these reactions to poor watering eventually puts the farmer out of business and the farmer believes he failed because of plant disease. When plants are under watered they become weak and sickly, they will begin to fruit very early while they are still very small because they are dying, these plants will become diseased as they age. The farm manager sees the disease and responds with insecticides which shocks and ends fruit production early and finally kills the plant. Then next season that manager increases fertilizer in his fields believing it will cure his disease problems. The increased fertilizers in the soils increases salts in the soils and actually reduces productivity in the soils and leaches into the ground water 💦 making the irrigation water more salty. In the summer some years rains will occur only adding small amounts of water 💧 to the growing season, the manager believes this water 💦 is inconsequential but can cause a tremendous bloom of growth in the fields very visibly a couple of weeks later, because rain waters have no salt in them and temporarily leach the salts from the soils increasing production. The farm manager will often credit this bloom to his excessive fertilizing and his fertilizer salesman will do his best to reinforce these mistaken beliefs! Then the farm manager begins to behave like a drug addict constantly adding more and more fertilizer and insecticides believing that is what causes the beautiful blooms he sees some years, but his costs continually rise and his soils become infertile from too much fertilizer salts in the soils, causing the farm to gradually go broke. The solution reduce your field sizes and irrigate frequently, DO NOT FERTILIZE UNTIL THE PLANTS BEGIN TO SHOW NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES IN THEIR LEAVES, likewise do not listen to the fertilizer salesmen. When applying insecticides use only the insecticides that show the least toxicity to the plants, pests are never as bad for well watered plants as toxic pesticides can be. Farm managers should never become obsessed with having fields clean spotless of insects and weeds keeping fields too clean requires applying too many very expensive and toxic pesticides to crops, soils, and farm workers. Farms that supplement their incomes with outside investment will often become obsessed with creating pleasing appearances for investors, these practices should be discouraged, heathy plants naturally attract lots of insects and weeds will grow because there is water and low salts in the soils, this is natural!

Hello, the main problem that got most vertical farms/indoor farms to go out of buisness here in Quebec is that most of the people that start that kind of buisness know literally nothing about plants and don,t even inform themself. My teacher went to a conference about it for fun with some of her specialists friends and she told us that it's actually insane how most of them don't know jack shit and don't even take notes and plant mesurements. The main issue that she saw is that most of them forget to add Co2 in their indoor farms which makes them unable to compete during summer (cold climate) because of their really low yields per plants. Also, to make this profitable, you have to hire professionnals to optimize the light input.

I got laid off a vertical farm project last month. I was the lead designer, but even though I was able to save millions of dollars on lighting and other parts of the system, the business side had no idea how to make this project profitable. We would have to sell at exorbitant prices to make it work.

Dude, my vertical farms are tested extensively in Minecraft before I ever realize that I won't build them IRL

When it comes 2 selling food, competition is ferocious. Coming from someone whos family sells honey and olive oil in farmers markets and small shops.

vertical farming is done big time here in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the biggest exporter of flowers. Most flowers don't grow on fields but inside of big greenhouses on multi level platforms that rotate each day so the flowers get enough light. Nothing in this cycle is done by humans, everything is done automatically, even the planting of bulbs is done by robots more and more. the only part where humans are still involved is picking and packing of the flowers after they've grown. Many people talk about pests and funguses etc. It's true these are big things and can bankrupt an entire company. That's why there are many extremely strict hygienic rules. When u enter greenhouses you need special clothing (like those white cloth onesie suits) and there's multiple stages of disinfection of hands, arms and shoes. You CANNOT enter these facilities with food that carries the deceases, for example you can't enter tomato greenhouses with tomatoes/paprikas (even those insta soup packs are forbidden) and some other food that's that might contain deceases. It is also not possible to travel between different greenhouses in one facility. The facilities also use things like doors, high and low pressure areas and vapor screens between parts to make it even more difficult for pests to spread.

Here in the Netherlands they introduce bees and other insects inside the hydroponic systems to hunt the pests that eat the plants. no insecticides are used.

I know homesteading and small community in the mountains of VA and Oregon and they use vertical farming. They aren't scienctist, they just used the free info on the net and make their food all year round. They mainly feed themselves, and sell some at farmers market. They use renewable energy and collected/recycled water to power equipment etc. Now imagine an America where every neighborhood employed Vertical Farming to feed that neighborhood all year round instead of trying to make MBA's rich. There are food deserts all over urban areas that need leafy greens, mountain community that don't have greens all year unless they pickle it. There's a whole other aspect, the human aspect of vertical farming to address

Vertical farms seemed like a brilliant idea if you have zero experience in horticulture and growing/propagation. Otherwise we've known for decades they're terrible ideas unless you absolutely need the space. In reality it's so much cheaper and more efficient to just grow where the growing good and ship it to places that can't grow, not exactly complicated lol.

Here’s a kind of vertical farm nobody ever thought to call a vertical farming. On one plot of zucchini that I personally managed and redesigned in an operation that had many fields and multiple farms of zucchini and other squash and cauliflower. We planted to 12 inch spacing instead of the usual 18”. Watering was with drip irrigation and gypsum block sensors indicated proper watering. The field was north facing and very steep, the steepest of all plots on the ranch, with coastal heavy clay soils. Initially I had to water for nearly 5 days continuously to get the sensors to indicate a properly wet soil. The close spacing caused the zucchini to grow straight up like a small papaya tree instead trailing over the ground like a vine, which is normal for zucchini. These plants continually grew straight up over a long summer season and were eventually very uniformly 7+ feet tall, that’s VERTICAL! We had to bring in more bees 🐝 for pollination because the foliage was soo thick! At about 4 feet tall we saw nutrient deficiencies and started fertilizing with a complete combination of nutrients that had been used for years with fruit trees in those soils. I always made sure the zucchini were properly water and never allowed to wilt even slightly. The zucchini fruit grew straight out at the base of the plants and often never touched the ground for their entire life. We picked and packed the fruit into a redesigned box that was much stronger and 40% larger than the standard, because the standard vegetable box we found to be breaking the zucchini and poorly ventilated for cold storage. The production with the larger box on this field was 1200 boxes per acre, a new record for all the fields on the farm even with the much larger box, and would have easily been 2000 if we had brought in more bees earlier in the season. Poorly shaped fruit were not allowed in the pack. That year was the last year of this farm operation because the wealthiest partner in the operation saw this success as a great threat to his management of the operation and his own farm operating separately that had cooler storage and sales for our fruit. He admitted that we were profitable, but claimed problems that were not real, and production would have been so much greater the next year he had to shut us down immediately! This was a great embarrassment for him, the success of my radical growing system was the opposite of all the practices that he used in his farming operations.

I have a friend who worked in one of these places. They specialized in leafy greens and were doing well. The entire place was wiped out with a fungus infestation that they couldn't get rid of. He said that in nature the insects would have kept it in check by eating it but indoors, with no bugs, it just ran wild. The whole building was infected and could no longer be used for farming. I think it's a warehouse now. the other thing he mentioned was that the lighting they used, while great for the plants, wreaked havoc on his moods and mental health. The spectrums used might be nutritious for plants but they can be very bad for people.

What is most surprising to me is the fact that investors didn't see this coming. It's not rocket science to calculate profit. It shows that most rich people and investors are just humans with more money in their pockets.

In the late 1970s in my father’s and his partner’s greenhouse business they decided to produce a new product and built 2 very large cutting edge technology greenhouses. His partner said it was designed by a genius teenager 😅! It had a boiler heating system that pumped water 💦 through pipes in twin rails for each row that held pallet sized racks with rollers on them for plant 🪴 containers so those racks could be moved around down the rows after delivery with a fork lift. And it had power controlled vents in the roof and ends which were all controlled automatically with small circuit board controllers. But it was basically very similar to my home that I own now that heats with water 💦 pipes in the floor and many homes have this but people don’t really like anymore because it doesn’t warm all that much during a cold 🥶 winter. It’s a system that has a lot of problems but will heat the house a little, reliably, if I don’t push it too hard and give it yearly maintenance, which I have learned to do myself. I saw this greenhouse right after it was first built and then went off to University, two years later I saw it again and it looked like it had barely been used and 1/4 of one had racks of seedlings 🌱 in it but all the rest of the 2 greenhouses were empty. I didn’t ask because it would have been very rude! I was rushed outside and told, “We do it this way now!” So for the first time in many years of this greenhouse operation they were using cheap hoop PVC greenhouses that are just half circle ⭕️ arches of 1 inch PVC pipe with white plastic tarp over it, so you can walk through it, and they had young citrus trees inside and they said these greenhouses are the best because they get the HOTTEST, so these small trees will fruit and that was what sells in the retail market! The old and new greenhouses were a big waste of money! 😮 If they had designed their growing systems first, responding to how the plants respond to their cultural practices then they could have built their growing system around what worked initially, instead of having wasted all that money 💰and time on CRAZY ASSUMPTIONS! Those hoop greenhouses are easily collapsed and moved out of the way so a big tractor could come in and disk the plant wastes into the sand, and then the greenhouses can be put back up again. This and all the news in this UKposts are very disappointing to me because I see a culture that has lost its MIND 😮 INDEFINITELY, where did that thing go? It’s on your shoulders, I think, oh thank you! We plan incredibly expensive systems like we think we are GODs and know EVERYTHING and then they don’t work at all! And the rational thing to do ALWAYS WAS, first document every fine detail of the requirements to grow the desired crop and then build everything around that. But that’s not what happens, build a system and force the biology to cope with the system, so the plants never grow well, is what we do. How can we possibly survive on a distant planet 🌎 if we don’t know how grow anything? Sooner or later some company will find a way in space to make a lot of money and everyone and everything will start dumping into space to copy that new thing! It ALWAYS works that way. But if we can’t even learn how apply science 🧪 in practical way, which is all I did with my growing system, then people will go into space to do business and then quickly starve to death! 😢 People who first sold shovels to the miners in the gold rush made more money than anyone else and the miners stole from each other and killed to get control of the best mines!

Another reason growing that way doesn’t always pay off, most veggies and fruit grown that way taste like watered down garbage. Tomatoes, berries, peppers, etc. will all have their taste affected by environmental stressors. A tomato’s taste is at it’s peak when it hasn’t been watered for several days and you pick in the middle of a sunny day because that’s when it’s sugars are the most concentrated. Whereas a cucumber will taste best picked before the sun hits it for the day. Soil, sunlight, pests, etc all play a vital role in the taste and quality of your food. It’s frankly impossible to fully mimic nature’s design.

I was the lead designer in a vertical farming company in Canada. (once upon a time...) We were focused on Cannabis Exclusively. The only crop with high enough end value to justify the labour and capex expenditure according to our math. We were repeatedly asked to grow vegetables by investors and the like... The math never worked.

It is quite clear that soil bacteria are essential. At a recent talk at the NIH, a plant biologist asked, "How many other species contribute to growing an apple?" The expected answers were like, bees, and other pollinators. The correct answer is, "we don't know how many". The underground ecosystem is large.

I researched farms and was very keen. It took no time to realise that they were a bad idea making low nutrition foods and open to all sorts of challenges including mold. I hate mold, rodents also chew, things like pumps break killing crops.

We needed that experience, we may need those farms in future, like growing crops on Moon or Mars colony or closed environments like bunkers…

The “burn” included millions in salary for the founders.

Two major problems. The first is tech investors. You want people who are actually knowledgeable about the intricacies of farming. Not a bunch of techies who expect near instant gratification. The second is that you need to grow stuff people actually want to eat. Growing nothing more than cow fodder is going to bore people's taste buds real quick.

I did some engineering for a vertical farm about that peak time you’re describing, helping them get airflow across the plant faces long after they built it - I should go see if they’re still around

Interesting. I have a degree in horticulture, and amusingly way back in higschool, I totally did a project on what wavelengths plants preferred. The use of lettuce here.. makes sense, but also really doesn't. Lettuce is really easy to grow, so it makes 100% sense to use as the staple... the problem is lettuce is real easy to grow, and cheap, thus not cost effective as stated. Lettuce are cold weather crops that dont need much light, and can withstand cold temps, for extended growing seasons. Greenhouses in general extend growing seasons, via heating, and allow shade or lights to cut down on light, or extend daylight as needed. like, corn has a very specific daylight requirement to produce. 6-8hr days might be required for some. 180 days for corn. other plants require cold periods. daffs/tulips for example, need a cold period to bloom. got to put them in a fridge to force them, if you dont' have a natural winter. so, the obvious here is.. high value crops with very specific growing conditions. strawberries. tomatoes. coffee. vanilla. Other fruits out of season. I'd still be confused why the blue collar cost is so high. regular greenhouses don't have costs like that.

Been around farms and farming my whole life (not the only things I did in life, however). I knew from the very start of the news about vertical farming in the USA, that indoor farming costs too much in capital investment, overhead, and labor, to be profitable. Having an old green house on the farm as a boy and being a biology major at the university, taught me that controlling Pests and disease in a closed system is close to impossible. You would think it to be the other way around but reality is the opposite. Dr, O

Those companies failed because the investors wanted a quick ROI which doesn't happen in farming. They did mono-cropping which isn't the answer either. There is greater success with diverse cropping whether it be earth , vertical, or hydroponic growing.

Another point that should get put in here somewhere is that 1. national exchange with countries with cheaper labor and few safety / health regulations 2. agricultural exemption, which I'm pretty aure could not apply to a building (I had ag exempt land, was required to prove at least 10 acres of land and x number of "animal units" on a chart that's available on usda 3. farming subsidies of several levels. On the largest scale is corn and soybeans getting a check for real money from the government for selling their corn and soy at prices LOWER than the cost of GROWING them. Elsewhere there are special privileges available to farmers (lines of credit, a special grant money for farmers and ranchers that helps pay for or completely pays for fencing, or a greenhouse, among other directly related items). I also had an Ag/Timber card, that allowed me to buy many of my supplies for the farm tax free--animal feed, paint, building materials, etc) Agriculture in the US is very far from a level playing field. Local / sustainable / organic farmers face much the same battle against the very established conventional machine, in that they are frequently too small to qualify for the price reductions or special treatment. Inner-city farms, small family farms, large "gardeners" cannot compete with this in many ways. I think growing in buildings in cities must suffer the same fate.

First video from you I watched love the style immediately subscribed👍🏽

You overlooked a basic problem. By expanding too rapidly as investors chased instant profits, the supply swamped demand. Had the industry started small with few producers, matured best practices and skilled labor, then scaled up it would be more sustainable. Your point about location, arid regions vs wet ones, points this out clearly. A comparable industry is the EV industry, built on excessively exuberant expectations, is nearing collapse as China floods the market with cheap unreliable cars, and people find the five year cost including $0 resale value, this niche market will also collapse then rebuild along much more sustainable practices. There are numerous PhD thesis level topics for anyone interested.

I tried a small vertical farm and cost me more than my conventional farm. Keeping the lights on buying the nutrients and water filters add up fast. But i transitioned to a vertical greenhouse farm instead and has worked well so far.

I have a friend who was obsessed with telling me that you can increase your food production by many orders of magnitude, but growing things outside vertically, on structures with multiple levels. I was like 'mate, think about it scientifically, there's only a certain amount of energy per m3 from the sun. Its impossible to amplify that. Wherever you build up in one place, you're casting shade in another.' He still persisted. If he thought it was that great, he should've done it himself.

Have worked in the hydropic/horticulture industry on and off since the 90s and could see the ponzi scheme a mile away, so many factors not understood by investors. main one is the Sunlight to nutrient relationship. limited light spectrum can grow plants just not good ones....

When I was looking into hydroponics, I found mention of 'nutrients' being fed the plants. The nutrients come from a third party source. That destroys the whole concept of hydroponic farming being 'self-sufficient.' And yes, they always talk about growing lettuce.

I have worked for Kalera since 2018 as the Mechanical Design Engineer and later promoted to Maintenance Director while still having the engineering design responsibilities. The cost he showed for maintenance cost per year is over 10x greater than my budget. I can tell you for a fact, we sell a head of lettuce for way less than $4.50, we are competitive with the $2.50 for traditional ag, and we beat that price by a good margin for some varieties. We do that with our blue collar workers having much higher wages than workers in traditional ag where those companies lobby govt to pay their field workers below minimum wage.

Here in Peru. The "gucciest" of heads of lettuce in the most upscale place is about $2. Most, however will be in the $0.50 to $1 range.

Why do they need all the LED’s anyway? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use windows and well placed mirrors to try to utilize as much natural free light as possible?

Dirt is cheap in rural areas; the sun is free, rain is free, and the only costs are seeds, fertilizer, and planting/picking labor. Hard to compete with that just so you can label it locally grown year round.

I grow my lettuce hydroponically in my house, upfront cost was 250$ but now i don't pay anything, solar covers the lights and water pump.

2:09 There is nothing to be solved, this problem has already been solved, big-agro just don't want the fix to be applied. Permaculture, getting rid of 90% of chemicals... Also, farm land DO lose value as precious nutriments are washed away because of conventional farming practices. It might not be obvious today, it will soon.

Great video, very informative and to the point.

I remember watching a critical video about one of those "water from thin air devices", it was basically a dehumidifier. The critic pulled up the shipping costs of trucks. You can get an entire pools worth of water shipped to you for around $150 to $400 depending on how rural you are. The shipping of water was cheaper than producing it with electric dehumidification lol. Shipping is so insanely cheap even for super heavy loads.

I used to work in a supermarket and one day the boss told me "This is your lucky day, I'm giving you a promotion to Head of Lettuce"

Last week here in Germany i bought a head of lettuce for 1.1€. During summer the price is usually below 1€.

Thank you for the video! However, I didn't feel like I learned how could they have misjudged the business case so catastrophically.

This also says something about how poorly paid fieldhands are for the traditional farming, assuming harvesters aren't used. The harvester definitely was a game changer to the farming industry.

This would work for a high yield green leaf plant that will ultimately end up being burnt for recreational purposes in states where it’s deemed legal.

So, this brought up some really interesting points I hadn’t thought of before. One being, collateral for loans. Farmers lose crops all the time. Crop failures are nothing new. But the land their farms are on holds inherent value so they can weather rough times by using it as collateral for loans to produce the next crop, or buy/replace/maintain equipment. A vertical farm is in a rented space with highly specialized equipment that generally has no collateral value. So one crop failure will crush them. The need for that highly specialized equipment and more importantly specialized labor is its own conundrum as well. But that is a problem whose solution is time and scaling or potentially technological breakthroughs. The former problem actually seems more insurmountable than the latter. Which is depressing because the vertical farming upside for the environment is quite enormous. But economically there just doesn’t seem to be a viable path for its induction into the mainstream economy.😢

I always wanted to try using quarts crystals in the walls to focus beams of real sunlight into the building

Nothing can beat the natural mycelium-root symbiosis that happens in the ground.

The vertical farming concept is sound. The biggest reasons it has failed in execution so far is the VC mentality of "move fast, break things", and the overblown, unrealistic expectations that generated.

Looks like a maintenence nightmare. Back to the drawing board. Who wants to pay €5,- for a lettuce. It solves non existing problems while exaborating the real problems.

Look here. It's simply basic maths. A given amount of soil contains a finite amount of nutrients. And no, plants do not only need phosphorus and nitrate fertilizer. To produce the vitamins and micronutrients that we need, plants need to either absorb them or chemically produce them from the soil. Most of the trace elements in soil come from rain, insects and small rodents, from mushrooms and other life thriving and dying. All of this is missing in a sterile greenhouse, so obviously at some point the soil gets depleted of vital micronutrients. You can use genetical engineering and fertilizer all you like, but a fixed amount of soil can only produce a finite amount of vitamins. That's why an orange today has only 1/3 the vitamins than an orange in 1912. You simply cannot trick math. Yes, you can grow larger or more oranges, but they will have less vitamins then.

A major problem is that many places, like California, the open land farms do not pay anywhere close to the real cost on the water they use.

My wife and I have a rose nursery. Our newest greenhouse recycles the nutrient solution. The biggest challenge we have found is that the industry lacks experienced people to learn from. If you are lucky you come across some company reps that take on the challenge of finding the answers one needs. Any industry magazines only publish articles that do not offer specifics and many advertisers don't know their own products. University professors lack any useful knowledge depth, which means they turn out graduates lacking skills. I understand why these businesses go under. There are to many nuances that one has to recognize, this takes time, something bean counters don't offer.

I grow cucumbers and tomatoes on my deck in a hydroponic trough setup, great yield, just need a small aquarium pump to run it. Just keep an eye on the nutrients and water, no pests, keep it pruned back for good air flow, amazing results

Could one create a system to refract sunlight, then channel the blue and red ends into a grow-room, and the other bits to light something else? Would look cool I bet, at least.

As they used to say about the gold rush: the one who makes the money is the one who sells the shovels. I was looking at this tech for home gardening. If a solar roof can power your house, then why not have your house produce your veg as well? With good planning you could raise enough for your household in the space of a closet.

I grew HERBS hydroponically under LEDs for 5 years. Full spectrum lights were/are essential to maximize nutrient and flavor. Bugs indoors? Simple to add/spray with Silica which bugs HATE. There's more afoot here than what you are aware of

A lot of crops just down grow well out of soil in n open group. Some do. Chilli trees for example. They need an equal size root as the surface plant. So you need huge pots to grow them. Not all plants are like this, but they are similar to a degree

I produce lettuce in Zimbabwe and producer prices range from USD0.10 (when market is flooded) to USD0.50. Consumer price ranges from USD0.25 to USD1!

In a major retail outlet, Tesco, in England, one Iceberg lettuce costs 79p. That's less than a dollar. Specialty bagged 'organic' lettuce leaves cost £12 per kg or about $6 per pound, at the same shop, but that's really an extreme case. Lettuce bought at local markets cost less than 79p. Weights are not specified for whole lettuces, but the market-bought ones are significantly larger than those at major retailers.

It's always interesting when you find a UKpostsr that makes two times speed sound normal

In Cyprus, a head of lettuce is generally .35 euro cents. We're talking romaine lettuce, and sometimes they're large and heavy, but other times they're small.

The problem described here is a business process model problem not a vertical farm problem. Although I'm confused by the Blue collar expenses. How is that high? Does a vertical farm need more blue collar workers or less? If less, then what's with the high cost? If blue collars cost more, then they're not blue collars.

Reminds me of growing up in Humboldt County in the 00s where you would see a vertical farming on a small scale. Growers would try and pack as many plants in a room as possible and create elaborate watering and lighting systems to accommodate. Essentially each "farmer" became a construction worker, electrician, and plumber to create their own grow rooms. Economics worked heavily in their favor though because they could sell at $4,000 a pound.

Here's my current grocery store prices: $1.64 - head of Iceberg Lettuce $2.58 - Organic Iceberg Lettuce $1.94 - Romaine Lettuce. No way in the world would I pay 5x that amount

On pests: if the grow lights they use are simple LEDs with no UVB, that likely also why. UVB is theorizied to help with pests. The plants I have in my frog vivariums that have UVB do seem to be less pest issues then the ones I have under regular LEDs, but that may also cause they just grow better in the humidity with sprintails/etc.

Space shouldbt be the major focus. Growing hyriponically in greenhouses is very effective for some crops. Eg tomatos. However you will never be able to replace the efficiency of large machinery if its a crop suitable for it. Eg, root vegetables,

I am frustrated by the idea that this world continues to value things based on how excited investors are about it. No matter how many times it bites them, they still feed the next promising beast, and then suddenly starve it when they get scared that it needs more development to work well. Time and time again, the fact that this happens seems to be a large part of why we struggle with innovation.

They should have done vertical farms in places with no fertile land, like deserts, or with little land in general, like remote islands. Where produce is super expensive. It's a great idea, but their biggest mistake is how badly they choose their locations.

The best use of hydroponics may be home grown high value herbs and veggies. Don't need a lot of space. Don't bother growing your own potatoes cause they are always cheap, grow the stuff that is expensive in the supermarket instead. The investment quickly pays itself back.

thanks for the report and data backed insights. I had no idea.

I started a small scale vertical farm in 2016. I started with the most profitable crops: herbs and microgreens. But there’s only so many herbs and microgreens high end restaurants need that are willing to pay a small premium for more intense taste and special variations that are harder to source from conventional suppliers. Selling b2c is way harder because it’s still more expensive than the grocery store. After doing this for a year, I realized this was not the future and quit. Every vertical farm operator should know that even leafy greens are not profitable when doing simple opex en capex calculations It’s a shame the marketers and operators are dishonest about the profitability of these operations.

Who would have thought that growing food in the dirt with real sunlight was easer??

my first thought was "how do you fit a tractor in those buildings?" You. Need. To. Mechanize.

Thanks for the well provided information and an interesting topic! First time here on the channel. If one more video keeps my attention i'll subscribe

I grew up on a small farm where we ate what we raised and grew. In high school I was in the Vo-ag program and was made fun of. I was in FFA and teased for that. The skills I learned from vo-ag and FFA have helped me my entire life.

They are countries that invest heavy in vertical farming. Singapore sees it has a way reduce their dependency on imported food (about 90%), and they remember the food shortages they had in the past due to their limited farm land. That being said, in the documentary I saw on vertical farm in Singapore, they where much more optimized than the own shown in the image (though, I would guess those are old filler image). For example, the plants where on vertical carousels that rotated vertically, making it even denser.

Grown my garden corn under LED lights, germinated but sad, a couple of days in the green house fixed them!

Its amazing anybody ever invested in this. Im a farmer and a business development engineer.. and there is no basis for this to having ever been tried... You liking it, says more about your vonurability to the hype than the facts of the idea ;)

How many acres of solar panels are needed for each acre of vertical farm?

Basicly it boils down to bad implementation/opperation. This technology is fully viable but the ROI is long-term and venture capital insists on a rapid payback. The labor costs definitely indicate it's being done wrong.

Growing up in a rural town around agriculture my whole life I kinda saw this coming. My town located on the old ICG railway was once the biggest exporter of Okra, Waxbeans, and strawberries. Now we only produce Corn, wheat, Soy, milo, and live stock. Why? Labor, you cant pay a person $7.25 an hour to plant, fertilize, irrigate, and pick strawberries for $2 a quart. Its very hard to turn any kind of profit in agriculture outside of cereal crops. The only way it could break even would be 100% organic and ship them 3 hours up the road to the ultra premium markets of Nashville.

Found my town Trieste (Italy) out of blue at 12:26 ! :) I don't know how it has to do with the electricity prices but thank you anyway. :)

I know that here in Montreal there is a company renting big factory rooftops and reinforcing them to install their farms and apparently, it is a great success, and at last count they had 5 huge installations.

I learnt the lesson in late 1990s, that trying to mimic farming in a warehouse cannot win against growing the product in its natural area on acreage and then shipping it.

worked at a vertical farm, you’re correct about the labor. Employees of a “singular” department became knowledgeable about other areas, while labor makes up most of the costs those employees were not getting paid a wage they deserve.

Great video. Invaluable intro to the industry for some

The problem is that we have to much food not getting to enough people this is a distribution issue not a production issue

So glad that he identified the cost, technology and energy it takes to produce "lettuce" and little other produce.

industry branch depending heavily on electricity in an era of rising prices of energy sources. gosh golly, never saw this coming...

This video explains the key difference between agriculture and agronomics.

Home based vertical scaled for a family might be the sweet spot, especially factoring in near zero waste and fun to use it

I grew up farming, there's more to growing plants than the raw data we now understand. I have tasted hydroponic and aeroponic strawberries, it is a regrettable experience. Maybe the soil biology (fungus, bacteria, yeast, etc) is more important than we know. Maybe the 'struggle' of nature make things taste better. As people we become stronger and better because of adversity in life, plants need the work of reality to become the best plant. Even if the cost were the same, flavor would go to nature raised.

Feel like it might be that debt bubble systems don't jive well with the slow growth that farm markets often require. Since someone needs to be willing to buy the crops, and getting that consumer base is really hard.

Would love to see these implemented for purposes of community food sovereignty rather than corporation profit gains

To quote Geoffe Lawton (well known Permaculture teacher): In order to be sustainable we need to create a surplus. We create a surplus when we create good soil (and even transform dirt into soil - as they did with the Greening The Desert project in the Dead Sea region of Jordan, that Geoff supports). Another way to create a surplus: managing water with earthworks, like ponds, trenches that soak in heavy rain (swales), irrigation systems that are built to last. Improving / creating soil and managing water are very important in permaculture. And creating food forests. A PC gardener or farmer starts seeing improvements in soil after 2 - 3 years, and after 5 - 10 years it starts becoming really good. (the conditions in Jordan were terrible, it was dirt / sand - but even there after 10 years they have good soil all over the property. One asset is the warm temperatures. If they have enough water and manage it well, soil life can be active year round. Another asset is the sunshine, plants can produce biomass year round (which can be composted to support soil life). A vertical farm would have to start doing large scale maintainance after 5 - 10 years. With good soil no repair is needed. On the contrary. There is yearly input needed (compost, cultivating cover crops, mulching, ... ), especially in the beginning, but that is not lost, nothing deteriorates or is worn out. Plants will need some resources like minerals, the content of the parts of a plant that are harvested and NOT composted again will be taken out of the system. So some minerals and elements must be replenished - at least partially. The art is of course to get as much as possilbe for free from underground, from the air, from wildlife like birds (that leave their droppings). If the food is eaten on the property the human waste can be recycled as well (so not much is lost - only that which builds the human body). Animals turn over biomass fast (into manure). That can be cows - or earth worms. Or small animals like chickens or rabbits. There are other processes (like composting) that return biomass to the soil, but they take longer - even with some effort and daily turning of the compost (so work) the composting lasts 18 days in Jordan (and that is with some help of the chickens). One goat or rabbit will do that for you in 1 - 2 days max. The gut of many animals is like a biorecator. Bacteria upgrade the gut content, they will for instance add nitrogen, carbon, and make some things easily accessible. The resources and their benign impact on soil life COMPOUND. Nothing to write off. Once concept of PC is to cultivate perennial plants, shrubs and trees. Better usage of SPACE, less work with planting. The general idea is to take advantage of natural processes and efficiences to be more efficient AND to manage with not too much manual labour. But monoculture and modern farming methods are not possible with that. Natural efficiencies and resources. Use of Sunlight (using height - for instance in agroforestry). Managing water: good soil stores more water, there are also earth works like ponds, swales and efficient ! irrigation systems. Mulching or growing cover / undercrops reduces evaporation. And it suppresses weeds. Rows of trees or hedges reduce wind pressure and thus evaporation. Trees - if grown right (forcing them to grow deep roots with ploughing so they will not compete with the other crops for water) - bring up water from deep below, the fungi in their root network distribute the water - also to the other crops. Green manure / cover crops bring up minerals. Certain plants can fix nitrogen. Covered soil does not lose as much nitrogen (it reacts with oxygen in the air, and gasses out). So that means no artificial fertilizer is needed (which needs a LOT of energy to produce). And phosphor is a very needed but rare mineral. If it is brought up from plants than one must not plunder the few existing deposits on the globe. Artificial fertilizer (as also used in vertical farming) must be easily solveable in water (or the plants - which are more or less on life suport in industrial farming) would not be nourished. No one helps them to take in naturally occuring minerals, industrial farming is bad for soil life. Soil life (moles, mice .... worms down to funghi and all microbes and critters in between) brings value for free (creating soil, making minerals available to plants, creating long carbon based molecule chains (humus). Humus can even enclose salts, even toxins. The substances do not vanish - but they become inert. Humus gives soil the ability to store water well etc. It is not even a large part of soil, but it transforms dirt to something magical Last but not least: good soil is an excellent carbon storage. Industrial farming reduces the carbon content of soil (it reduces humus, which holds a lot of carbon). Organic farming or less aggressive farming increases carbon / humus content of soil. It is so universal, that the carbon content is the nuber that shows the quality of soil. 4 - 5 % is already good.

The total cost of production of vertical farms is just much higher than conventional farming, simple as that.

One correction. "logistics are optomized and add very little to the end price" The current number for produce delivered to groceries is that ~70% of the cost you pay in the store is transportation and logistics. So it does add a significant amount.