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!
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