The article discusses the recovery period for agricultural assets, including greenhouses, which are classified as single-use farm buildings/structures and have a 10-year recovery period under MACRS GDS and 15-year recovery period under MACRS ADS. The greenhouse is a “single-purpose horticultural structure” with a 10-year recovery period under MACRS GDS or 15-year recovery period under MACRS ADS. Medium-sized greenhouses have slightly higher costs but provide more gardening space. Budgets may range from $5,000 to $20,000 to account for more.
The article also discusses the seven-year recovery period, including business management decisions to consider in the near-term and long-term potential. The greenhouse is a “single-purpose horticultural structure” that meets all of the requirements set by AF Wagner 1920, such as determining a correct heating cost, charging labor and expenses connected with the boiler room or steam plant, including depreciation, and charging all labor and expense connected with the boiler room or steam plant.
General-purpose farm buildings are 20-year assets, eligible for 50 or 100 bonus depreciation, but not eligible for the MACRS class life. The deduction rate of 2.5 or 4 depends on the date construction began, the type of capital works, and how the property is used. The article concludes by discussing the relationship between the MACRS class life and the “asset depreciation range” midpoint life of the property.
📹 Quarter ProjectDepreciation and ATCF
Depreciable now our Greenhouse depreciation is going to. Be this 140000 and we’re. Tag. This times the appropriate makers rate …
How many years to depreciate a generator?
Generators installed and attached to a structure are considered real property with a useful life of over 20 years, except for power generators with a rated total capacity of over 500 kilowatts, which are considered personal property with a recovery period of less than 20 years. Generators not meeting these criteria can be classified as personal property, supporting other personal property, and qualifying for bonus depreciation.
However, any portion of a real property generator will not qualify for Section 179 deduction, as it is typically installed outside the building structure and is a residential property. Consulting a tax advisor is recommended for proper classification and bonus depreciation.
What is the 6 month rule for depreciation?
The article discusses the half-year convention, a method used in fixed assets to calculate depreciation. It uses the acquisition year or the year the asset was placed in service, calculates five years of depreciation from that year, and adds six months. For example, if an asset was acquired for 50, 000 and placed in service in April 2020, its first year of service will end in December 2020, and its five-year service life will end in December 2024. The half-year depreciation convention will add six months to the asset’s life, resulting in its service life ending in June 2025.
What happens after 27 years of depreciation?
Depreciation on rental property ends after 27. 5 years, or can stop after the property is sold or the property ceases to generate income. If not depreciated, rental property depreciation can provide a significant tax advantage for investors, as a $3, 000 depreciation expense reduces the property’s taxable income to $5, 000. However, the IRS assumes that investors have taken a depreciation deduction, and they will owe 25% of the potential depreciation recapture tax when the property is sold, regardless of whether they take a deduction or not.
What is the 6 year rule for depreciation?
The “6-year rule” permits the designation of a former residence as a main residence for up to six years following the cessation of residency. This allows the individual to determine the point at which they wish to conclude the aforementioned period.
What depreciates over 5 years?
Depreciation is a method used to reduce the value of assets over time, such as computers, office equipment, vehicles, and appliances. It is an income tax deduction that helps small business owners lower their tax burden by reducing the value of the asset over time. Common time frames for depreciating property include 5 years for computers, 7 years for office furniture, 27. 5 years for residential rental properties, and 39 years for commercial buildings and nonresidential property. By calculating depreciation expenses, small business owners can lower their tax burden and potentially lower their tax liability.
How many years is property depreciation?
Tax deductions can be claimed for depreciation on older rental properties, especially for structural components or capital works. For properties built after 1987, capital works deductions can be claimed for up to 40 years from the construction date. For example, a property built in 1998 can claim depreciation until 2038. However, claiming depreciation on plant and equipment for older properties can be more complicated due to changes in legislation that took effect on 9 May 2017. Investors who acquired a rental property before this change can continue to claim depreciation for both assets and capital works.
What is considered a 7 year property for depreciation?
The term “class life” is used in the context of accounting and taxation to describe the duration over which an asset can be depreciated. The specific class life of an asset is defined by tax law for different types of assets, including real property, office furniture, and vehicles such as cars and trucks.
What is 7 year property for depreciation?
The tax law delineates a particular class life for each asset category, such as real property (39 years), office furniture (7 years), and automobiles and trucks (5 years). This allows for depreciation over a specified period.
How long does it take to depreciate a building?
Rental property owners can use depreciation to deduct the purchase price and improvement costs from their tax returns. Depreciation begins when the property is placed in service or available for rental use. Most U. S. residential rental property is typically depreciated at a rate of 3. 636 annually for 27. 5 years. Only the value of buildings can be depreciated, and land cannot be depreciated. Owning and renting property is considered a business endeavor, as it generates income.
The property is an asset that helps generate income, similar to a manufacturer’s equipment or machines. Over time, the value of the property declines, and the IRS assumes that it will lose value as you rent and maintain it. This allows you to deduct these costs and loss of value by spreading them out over a period of years.
Is equipment 5 or 7 year depreciation?
Depreciation is a systematic and rational allocation of the cost of tangible property over its estimated useful life. Duke calculates and reports depreciation in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principals. Depreciation is calculated using the Fixed Assets module within the SAP system, using a straight-line method on a monthly basis. For newly acquired items, depreciation begins the month following the acquisition, while for custom built or constructed equipment, it begins one month after the item is put into service.
When an item is disposed of, depreciation is taken through the month of disposal. Plant Accounting uses resources such as the American Hospital Association guidelines and recommendations from American Appraisal to determine the “useful life” of an item. It also considers technological obsolescence and utilization. Due to the unique nature of many assets purchased, individually significant items are reviewed for depreciable life as needed. Plant Accounting consults with the vendor and the department that will be using the piece of equipment.
What is 20 year property for depreciation?
A property with a useful life of 25 years or more is regarded as a 20-year property. It is depreciated over a 20-year recovery period using the 150-percent declining balance method, with a transition to the straight-line method in the tax year that optimizes the deduction.
📹 The EPIC Failure of Vertical Farms – What Happened?
Vertical farming, once hailed as the answer to global hunger and sustainable agriculture, saw a massive influx of investment, …
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
I think a lettuce is about £2 in london. However, everything from the supermarket is always old, weeks old… There’s no point in eating vegetables that are old…. I enjoy eating, not sitting on the toilet. I might as well not eat ballast from the supermarket. How do carrots from the supermarket start rotting literally the next day when I bring them home? When i get a carrot from the garden it literally stays fine on the kitchen countertop for weeks. Any vegetable… eat it in less than 24-48h it was picked……..
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 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.
I remember perusal a critical article 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.
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 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.
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.
The author showed amazing incompetence in the area under study. Not only does he confuse the physiological roles of red and blue light in plant ontogenesis, but he also compares fundamentally different markets – the market for vertical farms and greenhouses, growing and thriving in countries with harsh climates, and the market for traditional farming, thriving in countries with temperate climates. Extreme incompetence!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This never made sense to me on so many levels. You have to pay for the building and the lighting and all the nutrients that would have come from the soil. You lose the mutualistic bacteria and fungi that help plants thrive. You also lose the natural pollinators. Growing crops in soil with natural rain and sunlight is just so much simpler. Where indoor gardening makes sense is for high value highly perishable crops. We are talking about fresh herbs and some berries. Growing some of these inside of increasingly empty office spaces in major cities could produce highly desirable fresh product directly to consumers as well as create a desirable indoor greenspace.
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.
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.
Aight you said the main things I wanted to hear, it’s not about vertical farming not being good, just not profitable enough for investors. My main issue i would have with this article is not talking with the actual people on the ground that do use this technique. Just like there are community gardens in NYC and LA that feed a small co-op they are doing the same with vertical farming techniques, but it requires boots on the ground meeting people to find this kind of thing out not just searching online
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.
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.
One of the things I noticed quickly with vertical farms is they also have a very restricted amount of produce they can provide. Like, what about root vegetables? Stalk grains like wheat or corn? Vine vegetables and fruits? They’ve essentially limited themselves to leafy greens and small plants that are, quite frankly, easy to grow in your own back yard
Use the Joel Salatin method. Using real land. So the food has real nutrients. It is organic so it doesn’t destroy rivers, streams, and ecosystems with pesticides and herbicides, (like the large conglomerates do as they give lipservice to the environment). Joel Salatin has a wealth of articles on Youtube.
Wow! Just wow! I forgot about all this ever since I got my garden going! The only thing I pay with is my time. Ever since I started collecting leaves from nut trees, organic matter from the house and the occasional coffee grounds from the local coffee shop, I’ve not spent a dime on fertilizer as I amend my own soil and have my own seeds!
The movement we need, rather than vertical farms, is a grassroots local organic system, where the costs of distribution and administration are minimalized and done by small farm business. I never understood how anyone planned to make verticle farming more efficient by removing the single biggest expense of free sunlight.
I plan on in the next few years starting a vertical farm but only as a by product of raising flat head catfish through Hydroponics in a greenhouse in my backyard, with Catfish on bottom and plants on top to purify the water and the catfish to create nutriant rich water through thier waste and a solar panel to run the small water pump in a closed water system. Only thing I am worried about is how to deal with pollinating the flowering plants in a closed system with few bees around these parts.
I did some work for a vertical farm start-up a couple of years ago. I haven’t been back that way so don’t know if they are still in business or not. Their crop was mariju…excuse me…cannabis for CBD oil so my guess is they are probably still around. 😁 I remember perusal some articles about these vertical farms (the food kind) back when they blew up. I wondered about the cost of the mechanical equipment and the electric bills. It seemed like a good idea but, like most things that you only get the 30,000 foot view of, it’s the details that really define it as good or bad.
As I suspected, vertical farms require a lot of equipment that require skilled labour to use and maintenance costs. This sinks vertical farms in advanced countries with high labour costs, low population and highly mechanised, massive size traditional open field farms. Vertical farms thus require low labour cost, perhaps robust, autonomous humanoid robots capable of multiple tasks are the answer, simple and efficient irrigation and harvesting processes and really cheap energy. It’s a technical problem just waiting for technology to catch up. Check.
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.
If labor is the greatest downside then the solution is simple: have people pick their own. Think of it like apple orchards, where they rake in huge profits by having people pick their own apples. Since vertical farms can be constructed inside a major city, it won’t be hard to find people willing to do this. Many urbanites love the idea of having the freshest food they can possibly get, especially if they don’t have to drive somewhere to get it. So, not only would vertical farms reduce their greatest expense, but they could actually profit from labor. I also think it’s moronic to produce the cheapest food in such an expensive environment. You can grow lettuce in some of the most inhospitable places, it hardly bruises, and it has a good shelf life – how does it make sense to grow that in a well-regulated environment close to its customers? It would make so much more sense to, for example, grow tropical plants in a country/state they cannot survive in. Again: freshness factor would be a huge selling point. Think of it like EVs: the only reason Tesla succeeded is because they started off making a luxury vehicle. If they started off making an electric economy car, they would have failed, because the battery alone costs more than what an economy car does.
My concern with factory farming, indoor or outdoor, plant or animal, is the potential lack of trace elements/minerals/etc that get leeched out of the ground or are not provided by the medium that feeds the plants or animals. And honestly, we need to adjust our views on profitability. If it pays for the infrastructure and labor and maybe a bit extra for maintenance, that’d be good. It’s the people who only want to take the money out of it.
There was no bet here. This was a stupidly designed business and too many companies trying to get into that business. The cash crops weren’t lettuce but other exotic things like micro-greens and herbs. But only so many farm to table restaurants are going to pay top dollar for some fresh micro-greens. If these vertical farms were going to be on Mars there’s no way they would have been designed this way. If you fail on Mars.. it’s people starving to death, not bankruptcy. The biggest tip off by far is that Vertical Farms weren’t disrupting regular farms. This is like WeWork all over again.
I think this was a case where perfect became the enemy of the good. Instead of looking at how to improve yield, while maintaining a competitive price, they went full gonzo. Things that cost the same or less thrive (solar & EV’s), things that cost more don’t. Start with greenhouses that control environment while reducing water consumption. Increase CO2, augment sunlight to improve yield, only add automation and robots when it improves profitability.
The simple issue is energy. You cannot grow anything but broadleaf plants in the low energy lighting they are trying to use. You have to use real grow lights, and those use a lot of energy. Hydroponics are incredibly resource cheap, as long as you use the sun. If you replace the sun, the cost skyrockets because of energy prices. I don’t believe that price breakout. The Netherlands, Arizona and New Mexico all run large hydroponics setups, with enormous greenhouses. You would need the same labor to do that job as you would in a vertical farm.
Thanks for this informative article. Here n Germany the decline of Vertical Farm busniesses din’t really make the news. I saw that the Infarm-Section at my supermarket was removed but couldn’t get an explanation from the people there. Seeing that the cost for blue collar labor is highest is easy to explain with the difference in workforce (students etc. vs. unskilled farmhands from Mexico). What disappoints me is the lack of patience investors have with these businesses. They take longer than current hightec startups to turn a profit. And stock prices for hightec can get hyped up much easier than for vertical farming. An alternative to the massive vertical farms was (and still is) a smaller sized application. Cubicfarms has a much smaller footprint and can be installed in remote locations as well as in city centres. Maybe have a look at them and compare to those mentioned in the article.
There will never be a system that beats using nature, she reins over us all and as smart as we think we are we don’t know everything. I still don’t understand why we aren’t looking at helping further micro farms that are actually doing things as ecologically as possible. No chemicals, equals less overhead, same with the lack of equipment, less water use and need for less infrastructure. It’s a no brainer, but for some reason investing in multiple projects rather than large industrial projects is a blind spot
many years ago in a previous job here in the UK, i used to unload full lorry loads of lettuce from Spain, each load was 26 pallets & each pallet was 75 boxes and each box was either 10 or 12 lettuces per box, a typical normal week i would unload between 6 and 12 lorry loads from Spain, they would end up in wholesale markets from London to Glasgow, from our location just outside of Peterborough,i do know that the importer used to use 2 different grower co operatives to source his products, and when there was rain forecasted in 5 days he would order more,as when it was raining in Spain the pallet price could raise by £600 per pallet and the importer used to factor that in, the Jorney time from Almeria in Spain to me in the UK was typically 2 and half days so that was also factored in, but i was kept busy with the Icebergs 52 weeks a year, note none of this Icebergs went into Supermarkets it was all destined to wholesale markets the end customers being local greengrocers and fast food shops along with restruants/schools and the like, the same importer also imported peppers/broccoli and lemons as well 🙂 🙂
This was very interesting and informative. With continued research into lab-grown meat, I hope the lessons from vertical farms (both positive and negative) are applied when folks try to ramp up production into amounts that try to supply large volumes of consumers. The labor costs are something I noticed quite a bit. On dairy farms, labor is quite a problem: finding people willing to both deal with the results of animal handling, as well as follow process for milking and handling the cows. Happy, healthy animals are productive animals, after all. Still, robotic milking systems are becoming increasingly popular in the US, after much success in Europe as the design is sufficiently quality to properly milk the cows which voluntarily bring themselves in to the milking stalls. The skill levels required for tilling/planting/pest control/fertilizing/harvest varies according to crop as well. Harvesting vegetables for the most part looks to be a low-skill process with a lot of manual labor. Fruits are a high planting cost crop, with quite a bit of human-judgement maintenance (trimming back branches to encourage new growth), and despite the regular maintenance still needs a lot of space for the tree itself. In most crops in general, as I think of it, planting is a high skill process to run the equipment, and tillage is increasingly so. Pest control (weeds, insects) is also a high skill process, requiring certification to properly apply pest-control substances (including for organic items, which use different environmentally-neutral chemicals that are still under long-term development), or careful tillage for mechanical weed control between rows of crops without ruining said crops.
@Two Bit da Vinci “Blurples” the red and blue lights. They are out of date, technology wise. Do a bit more research on led lighting. Most people are using LM301B, LM301H, along with a choice of red led diodes. Also, something that should be reviewed, is the nutritional value of the crop grown. The nutrients plants absorb from the soil or water mixture you feed them are then transferred to you. If you grow the food in depleted soil, it does not have the same nutritional value. Adding soil amendments is key, which is not occurring in large production farms. They literally have to rotate the fields in order for salt to not build up.
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.
I love hearing the line, “vertical farming needs expensive equipment.” Like that’s different from normal farming. Most people I know who farm talk about how it’s so costly on the front end to get in that it’s nearly impossible for someone to start up without being gifted most of what is needed in the first place.
For most of my youth there were greenhouses and hothouses, terms that were used all the time. Hothouses were plant 🌱 sanctuaries that were built with clear glass, greenhouses were built with clear or white plastic and I believe not sure whitewashed glass was also called a greenhouse. Greenhouses did not endlessly heat up they had a low upper limit of heat, hothouses were very hot and could just keep getting hotter during hot days and there are all sorts of simple physics that clearly explains why this happens. Then global warming started to emerge as a concern and the term hothouses during that time and after was never heard again!😮 During that time of emergence of concern over climate we heard about the green effect all the time, scientists chose this metaphor very carefully, as they always do with metaphors. Why didn’t they use “HOTHOUSE” to describe CO2, methane, and other compounds concerning atmospheric chemistry? Today in all media and scientific publications CO2 and especially methane is talked about as having the characteristics of a hothouse gas, not a greenhouse gas, yet they NEVER give up on calling them greenhouse gases? Up until around 2013 scientific papers about climate change showed climate scientists were obsessed with “forcing”, what does that term refer to? Forcing means that the very large water vapor cloud that exists over the tropics in the tropical climate around the entire Earth 🌍 at the equator and north and south of he equator, forcing refers to that vapor cloud going further north or south than it had ever been seen before, which would have been solid proof that global warming was happening.
I gladly pay extra for “Little Leaf Farms” lettuce, grown near Boston. They have 10 acres of totally automated horizontal greenhouses. Fresh and crisp for two weeks instead of wilting in a few days like lettuce trucked across the country. By keeping horizontal they use both sunlight and LEDs. By staying local they deliver to supermarkets in 24 hours.
I have a large piece of land with all the favorable conditions for agricultural development. As a person who is passionate about farming and raising livestock, I hope that in the near future I will achieve great success like you. Currently, I am learning a lot but still do not know where to start. Can you share with me some advice?
Strange… I live in an appartment and have 3 bedrooms. One i turned into a greenhouse where i grow chicorey, carrots, tomatos, paprika, potatos. onions and parsley. I do need blue, red and white light to enlight the whole room but the ligts works on solar energy. It has been 2 years now, since i went to the grosseries to buy vegetables … I think vertical farming isn’t popular because it’s beeing boycot/lobbied by the farming/pesticides and farming vehicle industries ! 🤔
Remember – there is a difference between calories and nutrition. The problem with a lot of food supplied by hydroponic or vertical farm operations may have the calories, but the nutrient solutions do not provide anywhere near the nutrients that a good farm-raised crop would provide. That is true of most corporate farming, as well. Just pour the fertilizer on the mostly sterile soil and you get edible food-like substances rather than real food. It is great for the vitamin and mineral industry, though.
Vertical farms are power-hungry. And to stack things vertically, you need an initial investment into a shit ton of iron or steel. Also, if you don’t automate the farm, you need tons of folks to get the food out of those racks. But automation is harder in vertical farms. Ground farming: Buy ground, get truck, go wroom wroom!
10:18 Electricity is not the most of the cost, but it still adds 0.44 $ to the total cost of production. 11:13 Adding 0.44 $ to usual 0.90 $ gives us almost 1.5x increase in cost. In general, vertical greenhouses should be compared with usual non-vertical greenhouses. I can not see any positive differences.
Iron Ox start up from Cali came to Texas and overspent its way to oblivion. They wanted to automate the farm but built the farm around the technology instead of the other way around. We had 5 years worth of clam shells and a million dollar packing machine that never truly was used. Now it’s a seedling farm using the hydro beds as raised soil planters.
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.
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.
One problem I see with people who setup hydroponics is, they buy setups at exorbitant prices. That’s the venture capital at play. If you were to hire an engineering intern to design the low cost setup, with the specs that you need, you could reduce that initial cost. Also pests and maintenance depends on how well do you design your setup. So make sure that you and your intern know what you are doing.
I actually talked with local farmer about this while ago. The reason there’s no other than lettuce (the question you didn’t actually answer… 😉) is that plants in general are very inefficient to turn light into sugars. (Strawberry for example) It’s like 1-2% of the light that the plant can use. So it turns out that there’s no point to even try to compete with sunlight which is free and intense. Lettuce and herbs etc. don’t have much energy in them so they are the plants that can be grown inside with artificial light. So it comes down to energy efficiency after all. We all function with sun energy that is stored into sugars by plants.
I’ve grown mushrooms and salad for over a decade and have recently taught myself to grow hydroponically. There are many issues embedded into hydroponics that will eventually be addressed as we are witnessing the pioneer stage of what will eventually be the neo modern food system. The biggest issue is that land, food transportation, and synthetic fertilizer are way to cheap to make production of water grown salad mixes to be viable. The next big issue is that you can only really grow baby leaf varieties on hydroponics in order to keep the grow period before harvest as low as possible in order to maintain high returns. the final issue is that since these are usually calcium or salt based synthetics nutrient systems, they lack the biodiversity that will help to moderate the inevitable build up of bio sludge in the systems that ultimately becomes a vector for disease and pests. If you build a system that requires hyper infrastructure in order to reduce contamination, your system will eventually catch an issue. The last issue, and is what caused the downfall of large investment hydroponic projects like Appharvest, is that they lacked the experienced hydroponic managers to keep the food factory alive, but that will change once Ai has been properly integrated. ontop of all the surface level issues, there is the issue of scaling production. As a farmer you have to be able to match your production to the size of your customer basis, so if a single room hydroponic system were built with maximum output in mind, but they take a decade to reach that weight per week, then they are essentially paying people to constantly clean and maintain all of that dead space until it gets utilized.
As a professional greenhouse gardener, all the principles of vertical farms are sound. But the images you see of those facilities always looked like total overkill for producing salad that would sell for very little. It really should have viable applications. Either to produce plants that are very expensive, or to produce fresh greens in places where delivery would be even more expensive. For antarctic research stations, or even future space stations or moon bases, this really is the way to go. Because those places don’t have to sustain themselves with the sales of their food products. But for producing a significant portion of the global food supply, this never looked like it could be feasible.
your breakdown of the costs says it all: its not competitive and it will never be. In traditional agriculture everything but the sowing and harvesting is kind of for free, vertical farming pays for everything, even the depreciation of their “soil”. Its like food delivery apps, a lot of VC hype for a doomed business model
I saw the failure of these farms when I first heard of them because I’ve already failed at similar experiments. smh I come from a farm family and when we retired in Arizona it was too obvious that we would homestead. There were immediate problems. Back home, chickens pretty much took care of themselves. Other than giving the birds fresh water and kitchen scraps, my aunt let her birds free range. They ate forage and bugs that they found in the woods, roosted in the trees, built their own nests, and reproduced. She had a few key locations for daily egg gathering. Other than that, she really didn’t do anything. My mother had a slightly more complex setup where the hens were locked up at night for protection, but they pretty much did their own thing and spent their time in the garden offering pest control services. She’d give them some grain at night, but that was about it. The fresh creek provided water. In Arizona, humans have to provide EVERYTHING for our animals. The birds can’t free range or the coyotes and hawks will make sure there are no more birds. There is no fresh water source, there’s nothing for the animals to forage, and barely any bugs to eat. Most breeds will suffer in our heat and need to be kept cool. Some fast growing breeds like the Cornish Cross can’t survive our altitude. To keep chickens, I’d have to build a climate controlled coop, buy their feed, and plumb their water. The setup is stupidly expensive, but the maintenance costs are what’s really insane. In our location, even composting is ridiculously difficult.
I was in a hydroponics operation once. I got interested in vertical farming. Then i started doing a rough calculation of the cost vs benefit. Huge problem is the upkeep. Is just doesnt work. Not until food becomes expensive and out weighs the cost of hardware and energy. A big problem that i see is just the hardware itself. Vertical seems like a scam to sell racks, plastics, nutes, substrates, and electronics used in growing the plants. Equivalent to that gold rush anecdote “If you wanted to make money you would have sold shovels.”
As a conventional farmer I can not see how someone can calculate vertical farming into being profitable. There is way too much hardware involved and the agronomic side is not fully incorporated. In my country the so far most successful enterprise is a conventional greenhouse farmer who is experimenting his way into vertical farming with the support of a multinational tech company.
i once atteded a workshop at hydroponic facility of ARID UNIVERISTY, Pakistan. i saw no con of hydroponic farming that we see in rest of the world. they used sun lights, traditional heating methods combined with modern infrastructure, rain water storage units and more. they lacked business mindsets somewhat back in the day but they are doing very well now
Another consideration when comparing the costs of vertical farming to conventional agriculture is that those “field-hands” (8:21) are almost always underpaid, if not also being exploited. This lack of a living wage and scarcity of worker’s rights means that we vary rarely pay anything close to the true of our food under business as usual. For those curious, these dysfunctional cost structures are only exacerbated by animal agriculture. With an increased risk of zoonotic diseases, unpriced environmental externalities, disproportionate and inefficient land and water use, and massive subsidies all combining to make the price of meat and dairy consumption artificially low. Ref: ecological efficiency and trophic levels. To effectively disrupt these systems, we need to understand just how broken they are.
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.
In Australia farmers claim that their biggest customer is land fill because Supermarkets won’t buy produce. It appears that supermarkets manufacture scarcity to put up prices of their stock and rip off customers. Leaving the Farmers to trash most of their harvest. So over here, we couldn’t justify the electricity for something like that. Especially when they will only probably move 30% of their stock because the middle man is trying to maximise profits.
The first time I tried hydroponics, I was perplexed as to why such cheap plastic equipment costed so much. So i made my own. The prices are absurd and completely unjustified. Why is labor so expensive? I don’t think such skills are required. You need good sensors and tools to manage the environment but they don’t require Ph.Ds. I made my equipment from PVC pipes and fish tank pumps, etc. I am far more interested in aquaponics now, though. And, my thoughts are on burring 12′ culvert pipes to grow in, using gravity for water flow and a simple mechanical wind turbine for recycling water (like is used to water cows on farms). In fact, if the water is cycled back into a tank (say a culvert pipe burried in a vertical orientation and sealed on the ends, then the water flow could also generate consistent reliable electricity for the lighting. Another thought is to use mirrors to redirect more sunlight down fiber optic lines to diffusers over the plants.
But considering the increasing risks of weather problems outside (at least in France for the past few years), with more frequent thunderstorms, dryness or flood, I think it’s good to have a few of those vertical farming things around, and get more cost-efficient just in case and avoid food crisis or importation shortages. Even though, they still need to find a way for diversification on the food.
I grow my own lettuce and it grows like crazy so I pay nothing. I paid $2 for a bag of seeds. It grow so well in my backyard, my parents come and visit to pick some of the other varieties that they don’t sell in the store like red lettuce. It’s a very easy crop to grow. In many ways it’s like a weed. It likes cooler temps around 50-70 degrees so most people could grow it even if it’s in a pot on a balcony at least part of the year. I let it fully flower so it makes more seeds. Excess I put in my compost pile to refeed the next crop so I don’t need fertilizer either. I collect rain water so I don’t pay anything for water either though most could simply collect shower water they waste while waiting for the water to warm up in a bucket. They do have kitchen tabletop products like aerogardens that could be used to grow lettuce so there is no reason anyone should have to buy lettuce. People just are never taught these things in school.
This is the best and most detailed breakdown on the issues yet. Id say one of the additional issues (that you kinda alluded to) is that a lot of the venture capital investors were pitched an idea that vertical farming could be scaled up almost like software. It just doesnt work that way. The CAPEX alone should have rang some bells but I think the general FOMO and high running financial markets just made a lot of investors lose their ability to think clearly and to do proper due diligence. This is an important topic to discuss if we every want to rebuild the industry with the learnings, and more importantly, if some of the surviving players ever want to rebuild the trust that was lost.
Didn’t watch the article, but let me guess: 1. land that replaced with verticality to save the cost didn’t work since the verticality has cost for the building and the tech? not to mention if they build on high density place then the land also have higher price anyway. 2. the energy usage for the “sun replacement” 3.the product they are selling is capped with normal farm pricing.
I’m at 8:30 and the fact that nearly all farming in the US is EXTREMELY subsidized by taxpayers still has not come up yet. Let’s see if this main reason “traditional” agriculture still exists is brought up lol. That’s not to mention all the undocumented workers that are the only reason many of the crops we eat get harvested.
I always thought that products from vertical farms are way too expensive. The higher a building, the higher the costs to build and maintain it, while farmland at that point is still for free. Then you have to add all the real farming costs, benefits and problems of greenhouses ( hire some expert from the Netzerlands 😉 ) which are also cheaper because of their simple construction. And open air farming benefits from mass production and large fields that can be harvested with minimal work. Vertical farming reminds me of 3d printing – creating a few hundred pieces with 3d printing is okay, but mass production of ABS parts is so much cheaper with a moulding machine once you need a million pieces …
Ok, so, use tinted windows and only run lights during times of low lighting such as storms or during winter, also since plants naturally experience darkness at night it would be completely fine to not run them at night. Also, the whole building needs to be completely sealed off and needs a decontamination chamber before entering to not allow diseases or pests or harmful bacteria in the first place including pumping in fresh air and water that is purified.
Unfortunately, all equations comparing the status quo with sustainable alternatives typically lack three critical components: 1. Environmental impact – In the case of traditional agriculture, this includes everything from access to and availability of freshwater, to watertable and watershed contamination, to aquatic desserts/dead zones, to soil degradation, to greenhouse gas emissions. Water for agriculture is available to farming interests both small and large at bargain prices. That is, if they’re charged at all. Water tables for surrounding populations are being depleted, and rivers that once flowed fast and full dwindle to almost nothing as water is pumped for irrigation upstream. Some rivers that once flowed to the ocean don’t even reach there during periods of drought. Periods that are becoming both more frequent, severe and longer lasting. Heavy fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide usage leeches to underground aquifers, flows off the land into streams and rivers. Heavy nitrogen and phosphorus loads are deposited in deltas and bays, doing damage to both flora and fauna. These once teaming marine habits now no longer support life, causing those in the fishing industry to go further out to achieve catches that result in sustainable profits. Knock-on effects include high costs due to longer hours and increased fuel consumption. Costs that go on to affect consumers’ pocketbooks and wallets. The UN estimates that the world has approximately 60 years of current agricultural productivity left if farming practices don’t change.
13:52 – you don’t need to have an enclosed building for your food supply – that’s where it gets silly – if you have a glass building with sunlight coming in, like original vertical farms have – then it’s not an issue. If you have plant waste recirculating back to the plants – you don’t need fertilizer either. Plus if you grow plants to reach the seed stage – you don’t need to buy more seeds. Maybe these places didn’t do it the right way. We’ll try again and do it right another way.
I hail from Finland, where growing anything outside is impossible for 7 moths of a year. Unless you want imported goods, you will have to grow the produce in greenhouses. Mostly it is tomatoes, cucumbers etc. I also live half a year in the worlds most densely populated metropolitan area, in a city with the most densely populated area of the that metropolitan area (Manila). I have a green thumb and I am working in the field of automation. I never saw vertical farming from the late 1990’s to today as a viable way to replace regular farming, I always had the goal to try to make growing high yeal, low cost or high cost, perpetual growth plants to sustain my and my family needs. That is basically micro-greens and spices. Those work. If you have a garage and you like to tend your plants those are the things you can write off of your shopping list forever and still get them more cheaply than you would from a 3rd world country open market. Trying to implement the idea in places like USA where land area is basically unlimited, cheap labour for farms is available and you have several different climate areas to base your operations in, then you will not succeed with vertical farming. Vertical farming, hydro-, aero- or aquaponic farming shines in low scale in an enviroment that is fully saturated with people and extremely cheap commercial buildings or community areas to set up the grows. As a business? I wouldnt invest in it. As a supplemenatation to your own needs if you have few hours a week to tend to your plants?
So 2 main takeaways: 1. Don’t operate a complex business with zero technical knowledge as “an investment” 2. The main selling point of the vertical farms was land usage, so shockingly they will only be beneficial in situations where land is limited. So long as we have cheap land and transports systems available, there is no need. BUT if you had a 2 acre property, start up money, the desire to learn and experiment, and we’re trying to farm as efficiently and profitably as possible in that space, you could still argue its a valid option.
The whole concept doesn’t make sense. When I lived in DE I used a combination of square foot and 4 season gardening. In a 20×40 ft plot of raised beds, I grew every vegetable I ate for the year plus gave 600 lbs of produce per year to the local food bank. My inputs were mostly kitchen scraps and rainwater, and I kept pests under control by creating areas for beneficial insects and predators. Outside the initial setup and at harvest times, the labor involved was about 20 mins per week. Initial capital for setup was around $300 (I recycled a bunch of materials) with maybe another $50 per year after. If HOAs and municipalities would open up green spaces to small agriculture, every city in the US could be fed by the surrounding suburbs, and every small town could feed itself. It will never happen though, ’cause the right people won’t be making the money.
Vertical farming is extremely labor intensive. While traditional farming has to deal with more pests and occasional incliment weather they have lower overhead on watering and lighting( sunlight is free), light bulbs are expensive and need to be changed every 6 months to two years. So while you may get several crops out of a bulb most of your crop yeild will go into replacing those bulbs. Add in electricity, maintence of watering systems, cost of cleaning and replacing trays, labor to move and monitor plants ect. Its almost impossible to break even. Meanwhile traditional farming has extremely low labor costs. Farm equipment can make planting and harvesting much much cheaper than vertical farming planting and harvesting. Youll have more pests to deal with and occasional crop failure due to blights, pests or weather. Even with those failures the labor saving usually outweigh any advantages vertical farming can provide.
Happy Ground News subscriber here, glad you work with them, raises my trust factor for your content. Anyway I personally summarize this article as this: the solution is to remove capitalism from the equation. Reframing these projects as community efforts and not hinging everything on profitability and balance sheets (which also will allow for the reframing of those biggest “expenses”), and we can get back to the concept of feeding people locally. The second I heard you start talking about venture capitals in this space, in my head I reflexively shouted “WHY?!” They literally have no business here, so I’m glad for their exiting this realm, good riddance. “Who will fund it then?” If you can only think in terms of capitalism, you’re already lost and will struggle to understand many things about humanity. Community is the answer and the best show of the late 2000’s.