Vertical Farming

I don't see any advantage in concentrating the light...what you need is more square footage of light as if the vertical plants were laid flat...not really possible in a large operation...

I think this will add to the costs associated with fresh vegetables and inflation in general...transportation costs associated with this industry add to the price, and this will offset that in some small part....maybe

What I find more interesting is if the tastes and nutritional values change...

Advanced Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) would seem to complete the puzzle here, cheap plentiful energy....One of these small reactors in a cluster of vertical farm buildings could be sold as a package....

https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-smrs

Sounds good to me. Even with the lighting and environmental control costs. No herbicides or pesticides. Consistent and year round fresh product. No weather concerns. No shipping concerns. Should be at less cost with all of that. You wouldn't believe some electric pumping bills for irrigation. And they sell that crop for profit.

No pesticides seems to imply no insects. A lot of crops require insects, including but not exclusively bees, to pollinate the flowers. I'm very far from being a farmer, but I'd think that hand pollinating would be very expensive.

I'm well aware of bee keepers who move their hives from one orchard to another. Perhaps they could do the same from one section of a vertical farm to another. Or perhaps the bees would be able to move by themselves to whichever section of the farm was in bloom at any given time.

I have virtually no knowledge of the role of other insects, like butterflies for example, in pollination. Ditto for hummingbirds or other animals.

Is it possible to bring in one kind of insect without inadvertently bringing in some of their predators/

An agricultural college in England has been trialing a robot to artificially pollinate and, with different actuator attachments, pick strawberry crops grown hydroponically in polythene tunnel greenhouses. The plants held in trays about 4ft above the ground, a height that made hand picking easy, were prior to the trials pollinated by bees released into the enclosed tunnel. The solar powered robot runs on a wheeled carriage between the crop rows and uses a camera and image recognition software to identify flower heads and the yellow anther cluster at it's center. A vacuum sucks up the pollen and puffs it out again onto a different flower head. The suck/blow nozzle is positioned less than 1mm from the flower head making the system extremely accurate, and the software identifies all the flower heads so yield is very high but the speed of pollination is currently too slow for it to be commercially viable. Speed when harvesting the crop is comparable to hand picking and because the image software is looking at both fruit color and size the the quality of the fruit picked is reported to be higher. This may be because hand pickers make only three or four passes over a few days to cater for fruit ripening over a prolonged period but the robot was making up to twenty passes to pick all the ripe fruit. If these trials lead to a mature technology there are obvious applications in vertical farming, eliminating the high labor costs of hand pollinating crops. Unfortunately I have not been able to trace the documentary I watched sometime during the first UK Covid lock down so am unable to provide a link.

The image provided by SE would seem to be from "older" technology. I seem to remember more recent versions have the layered trays on "compactus" style columns, so the whole "farm" only needs a single access row.

Each column is simply harvested/serviced and then moved sideways to enable access to the next and so on.

There is also a smaller version at the Australian Antarctic base to provide some "fresh" additions to the available rations.

They definitely have their place, but not for everything.

The light intensity used in vertical farming is much greater than is generated by sunlight. The day length is controlled fooling the crops into growing faster. Dormant night times can be drastically reduced, nearly doubling crop growth rates. Seasons are eliminated. The light frequency is adapted for root growth, leaf growth, fruit growth and ripening, which all absorb slightly different frequencies, so only the frequency that is needed for a specific phase of the growth cycle is input, reducing the need to shine light that is wasted. The waste heat produced from the lights is used by the plants so the farms are effectively heat and power installations. Crop cycles are staggered so that a part of the crop is ready each week. Food to order with no gluts that go to waste. This results in several crops each year with continuous and efficient use of a small farm labour force. Any nutrient laden water that is not absorbed by the crops is collected at the base and recycled, there is no waste water run off or nutrient pollution and the total amount of water needed is greatly reduced.

Readers may have noticed that I am in favour of this technology.

A cost comparison would be nice. Compare conventional open land, conventional greenhouse, and vertical production. Do not include the cost of the land, but include the capital costs amortized over, say, ten years. Calculate the cost of a pound of pinto beans (I love pinto beans and cornbread) or any high protein vegetable for each different method and base it on a year’s production. Oh, use the same vegetable, of course.

At present a cost comparison would as meaningless as comparing the costs of a high end sports car manufacturer like Maserati with the costs of Scania Trucks. Based on figures published by Bayer™ the German agro-chemicals company. The largest vertical farm in Europe is close to London with 5000m² of growing space. That is about the size of an American Football pitch. So imagine 17 zones placed one above the other in a 12m high stack (about 4x the height of the goalpost crossbar). The total word wide area under vertical farm cultivation is currently (October 2021) 200,000m² or about 40 American Football pitches. Europe only accounts for 21% of vertical farm growing space, with the sector dominated by the USA and the Asia Pacific region. Most of the players are coy about their profit margins so much feedback comes from the companies selling the hardware to set up vertical farms. Claims range from 70% to 98% water use savings, 10x the harvest with ¹/₁₀th the resources, and Return on Investment times of 5 years. That last claim suggests returns in excess of 30% before tax and no small conventional farm comes even close, but these are claims made by salesmen trying to push their product so they should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. It is worth saying that almost all of the current vertical farms are each selling up to 100 different niche products like micro broccoli to high end outlets where they can obtain a premium price. Going mainstream and trying to sell to the general public would massively slash the margins. Would you pay the $400,000 for a Maserati GranCabrio Sport?

jhh brings up a lot of good points, the tailoring of the environment for maximum production can play a huge role perhaps...CO₂ levels can be enhanced as well....so if production can exceed yields from the field and the quality of the produce can be increased, and waste can be reduced, but let's not forget environmental impact, such as runoff and water source depletion, a comparison with all things considered would require a lot of data, and I'm sure that would vary from crop to crop, but certainly there are some crops that would be suited well for this type of farming....tomatoes and strawberries, lettuce, cabbage and other greens come to mind as likely candidates but there must be a wide selection that can be grown this way ...

About 30 years ago I owned a control panel building company and one of our customers supplied computer control systems, designed and manufactured by us, to commercial mushroom farmers. The parameters of; CO² concentration, humidity, temperature, light levels and air flow were all monitored and controlled. We also supplied them with a controller for the composting and sterilization of the mushroom growing medium from straw and the waste droppings generated in battery hen or battery egg farms. In mushroom growing the all the beds in a single mushroom shed are seeded with spores and three crops taken before the growing medium is exhausted when the beds are stripped ready for the next cycle. Continuity of cropping is achieved by having many sheds each at a different part of the growing cycle. Each shed had it's own controller and as all the crop within that shed was at the same stage of growth the parameters could easily be optimized. The difference in vertical farms is that there are batches of crops at different stages of their growth cycle so controlling CO² which is enriched for leaf growth but depleted for fruiting would only be possible if you could barrier off each sub section of the crop. Add to that the many different varieties grown then sub sectioning becomes impossibly complicated. The required variations are therefore all achieved by controlling the light levels and frequencies and the composition of the nutrients. CO², temperature and humidity are left fairly constant.