Weeding the Garden

Up until now I have attempted to present the prospect of using vertical farming in a number of capacities in as positive a light as I could; not for sake of my biases, which I won't deny, but rather because there is little information to indicate that this technology will not work as intended if implemented correctly. However, it behooves me to play the devil's advocate and attempt with my best effort to undo the case I have thus-far constructed. So let's dive into it!

What are some potential drawbacks or stumbling blocks that might need to be overcome if we sought to implement vertical farming on a mass scale? Well, there are at least a strong handful of candidates that we should look to for clarity on this question, however most of them have already been addressed in earlier posts. So for this exercise start-up costs, maintenance costs, material and man-hours costs, and opportunity costs are where we will direct our attention for now. But asking the question "how much does a farm cost?" is a lot like asking the question "how much does a car cost?", there is just too broad a scope to put a single figure on. It could be a Honda Civic, it could be a Bugatti, we don't know right now; so let's instead ask what we can do with a loan we could get from a bank for our start-up costs.

Let's say we want to start up an asparagus farm and the bank loaned us $100,000 to get the ball rolling. So what can that cool $100K get us in terms of  a traditional farm? Well according to the University of California's Farm Start-up Cost Checklist and with the price of arable land in Colorado averaging $3,020 per acre in 2015 we could expect to set up a 20 acre farm if we were somewhat liberal with our spending and kept around $5,000 for maintenance costs. At 12,000-14,000 asparagus plants per acre, that's not too bad! However, much of that cash--approximately 35% of it actually--will be spent on fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, and soil treatment/fertilization. Now if we take that $100,000 and build a small vertical farm instead, what can we expect to end up with? Well first we need to make some necessary suppositions due to the myriad of controlled environment growing options; so let's assume this vertical farm will use a hydroponic pump-circulated system. Let's also assume we're using electric lighting instead of sunlight to grow our plants. Incredibly enough, a company called American Hydroponics sells a commercial hydroponic growing system which costs about $45,000 and can grow up to 15,120 plants at a time. The best part is that the system fits within a 392 square meter area, which is less than a tenth of an acre. So we just need to spend about $3,020 for one acre of land where we could install a single one of these systems with room to grow to nearly 10 times our starting size; and we haven't even started building vertical yet! Unfortunately that is not the most expensive part of the grow, the most expensive part is the electric lighting. We can expect to spend around $50,000 to blanket our hydroponics in LED growing lights which leaves us with about $2,980 and 90% of our land being unused. The crop yield per area of our farm will of course be much higher than the traditional farm, and far less likely to experience crop failure, but with just $100,000 we can't do much more. However if the start-up cost weren't an issue and we just had the same 20 acres as the traditionalist with no upper limit on our start-up cost, we could build a 100 story skyscraper for a few hundred million dollars and feed the entire state on the same area of land; and we could grow anything, because asparagus would probably get old if we had it for every meal--maybe even worse than potatoes. 

So the start-up cost for a vertical farm is its limiting factor, at least at first. However with the benefits of the controlled environment, the increased crop yield, and the ability to grow 24/7 through rain, sleet, snow, or even a total solar eclipse, the pros still outweigh the cons. Also, because the vertical growing method can grow with profits in the sense that you could start with a smaller farm and continually add floors above your first floor as your profits will allow, you can expect to experience strong business growth as well as strong agricultural growth. To me, even the Achilles heel of the vertical growing method, the start-up cost, does not undermine any of the benefits associated with the model itself. In fact, I could go on and on and on about the economic benefits of the vertical growing model alone, but I simply couldn't swing the opportunity cost associated with following through on that. So for now I must say farewell!

Here's an image of a potato as a reward for slogging through my wall-of-text: 

Stay healthy and grow strong everybody!

Optimizing plant growth

So I've already talked about some of the impacts of vertical agriculture in the broadest strokes, but now I wanna dive into the nitty-gritty details and I hope to explain a bit more about why this technology or approach is as important as I'm making it out to be. So lets look at the smallest unit of this structure and a good candidate for pilot programs using this technology: the humble potato. Now if you're Matt Damon you probably want to skip this next part; sorry, Matt.


The potato plant is part of the Solanum genus, which is a broad group of flowering plants which also includes tomatoes within its cohort. Like virtually all plants, the potato needs some basic things to grow and to thrive. The basic requirements for plant growth generally are light, warmth (or "livable temperature"), water, a growing medium, mineral nutrients, and oxygen. These are all somewhat of a given, but the process of optimizing the growth of our potatoes is where things get technical. According to the Soil Testing Lab at Colorado State University, potatoes rely heavily on specific concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorous in the soil. In addition to those two elements, the researchers at the Soil Testing Lab recommend specific levels of zinc and potassium in the soil that will boost potato production. The exact details regarding perfecting potato production through optimal soil fertilization can be found within this report. Obviously it isn't just potatoes that we know so much about, just about every crop you can think of has been analyzed to a mind-boggling level of detail.

This is where vertical agriculture comes back into the picture. So we know what it takes to grow the perfect potato plant, but can it be done using traditional methods? The answer is: not really. In addition to pests, weather conditions, and other unforeseen circumstances, variables in the traditional agricultural model such as acidic rain and rogue pollen also negatively influence the growth of these plants. However, in a controlled environment we are able to give the plants exactly what they need; no more and no less. One method of controlling the delivery of nutrition to the plants is through a hydroponic growing system which itself has proven to be capable of increasing crop yields. Being able to manage nutrient content by adding measured amounts of soluble nutrients to a measured quantity of water is perhaps one of the simplest and most accurate ways to achieve optimal nutrition for your crops; and this concept can scale with virtually no limit. What's more, technology like this means that vertical agriculture can itself be optimized on a plant-to-plant basis, thereby multiplying the effects of this already remarkably efficient and productive technology.

Credit to Jennifer Mehren for providing links to the CSU Soil Testing Lab!
Also, credit to Matt Damon for being such a good sport!

Location, Location, Location

People who are by now familiar with the practices and techniques of vertical farms are likely aware of the immense potential in scalability of the technology itself. This sort of dimensional flexibility allows vertical growing to be generally applicable at every level of production from the smallest home garden to the largest industrial farm.

The concept is a simple one: that a farm or garden is more efficient and more compact when vertical than when it is spread out horizontally across a broader space. The design created by the vertical farm in Singapore which was discussed in an earlier post is a prime example of how vertical growing can scale. This design uses a simple, almost-zero-energy-use waterwheel component that rotates the crops and supplies water and nutrients automatically. While this design may seem intricate, most of the components can be reconstructed from cheap and readily-available products which can be purchased by the average consumer. With this in mind,  you as the every-day-citizen are able to use this technique in your own home to grow considerable amounts of your own food. Vegetables and plants like spinach, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, and even tomatoes can be grown indoors and year-round.
However the true potential of the vertical farm is in its capacity to enable industrial-sized growing operations to be located in urban areas. Countries which import large quantities of agricultural products would stand the most to gain from this technology. Countries like Russia, Venezuela, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and others typically must import food due to their harsh climates which are inhospitable to growth; more than this, water is a valuable commodity in these areas and the optimized use of water via the vertical growing method will have a double-effect of conservation in addition to boosting or even enabling large-scale agricultural growth. Here at home in the U.S., we stand to benefit in other ways, namely the reversal of our growing food imports versus our shrinking food exports.

Due to many economic factors, as well as environmental, the U.S. has suffered a sharp decrease in the amount of food available for consumption. Although the availability of food hasn't reached a point of crisis in decades, there are negative consequences when food has to be grown in one area, processed in another, and then shipped around the country to meet point-of-use demands. However, if we could put a vertical farm in the style of a skyscraper in the middle of New York, for example, we could eliminate at least 95% of the transportation costs as well as some of the negative health-effects associated with the current mode of cultivation. More than New York, there are urban areas in the developing world which can benefit even more from a shift to urban vertical growing; Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon would be ideal areas for the application of vertical growth and a rapid increase in the availability of food in the areas could even help to ease civil unrest. In fact, there are so many positives associated with the application of vertical growth in developing countries that it is almost baffling when considering that these techniques have never even attempted to be applied in the third world. However, with more support and more exploration, development, and proliferation, we may see this technology take a more central role in the near future.

More to chew on, less to worry about

If you made it this far and haven't dismissed the idea you probably have more questions than answers. Some of the technical aspects of vertical farming are, fortunately enough, not too far from the technical aspects of indoor gardening which anyone can do at home (some with more success than others, granted). The first question I had when initially evaluating the idea of vertical farming the growing world's food supply was how much more food can we actually grow using this format? The answer is a lot more.

In fact, an Japanese indoor farm has recorded growing inefficiencies as high as 100 times greater than traditional methods. There are some key aspects to this markedly high efficiency, but the big bullet-points are that the method entrepreneur Shigeharu Shimamura has developed have maximized water usage by virtually eliminating loss, delivering light as efficiently as possible using electric light sources, and by controlling the environment to a surgically-clean degree thereby eliminating pollutants and reducing the presence of free radicals in the air. This mode of agriculture can be extremely robust, being able to withstand droughts and otherwise unfavorable conditions. A good case study would be California, which as we know is in the midst of a historic drought which has in-turn effected the yield-capacity of its agricultural land.

 So the risk is very much there for our agriculture to be undermined by the most powerful force on earth; that being the weather, which we still can't manage to put a leash on, or even a loud enough bell. So when we approach the carrying capacity of our only planet, which is something we may currently be crossing, we should eliminate as much risk to our crop yields as possible.

Vertical Farming Explained

So whenever I bring up the concept of vertical farming, I usually get one or two different reactions. The first reaction is for the person I'm talking to to say "Oh! You mean like a vertical garden," which is somewhat along the lines of what I am typically about to explain to them; but the other reaction is more along the lines of a blank stare or a polite and pleading smile. So I'm just going to start from the very bottom and we can work our way up; and unfortunately the very bottom of the story is probably the most sobering.

According to some estimates we are looking at a world population that is growing faster than it ever has before with some 11 or 12 billion people projected to be living around the year 2100. This may seem like a harmless observation, or even a useful one at first; but it is pretty terrifying when we ask how we are going to feed all of those hungry mouths. We have a problem. And this is where we get to the idea that was mentioned at the very top and the potential solution to that problem, vertical farming. If you picture a typical rice farm today, you might think about a vast stretch of wet land with little green sprouts neatly planted in lines as far as your eyes can see. If you take that concept and instead cut the big swath of land into roughly equal sized portions and then stack those portions on top of each other, leaving enough room for the little rice plants to grow of course, and then you put this stack in a large skyscraper-esque greenhouse, then you have virtually grasped the basics of vertical farming.

 So is this a doable thing? If so, why aren't we seeing more of it than we have? What are some of the drawbacks of doing something like this on a mass industrial scale, and what is the cost? I am sure these are just some of the many questions that you might be asking and I hope to answer all of them in the near future. For now, thanks for reading!