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There’s a new trend in agriculture called vertical farming. As humans learned to farm, we arranged plants outside in horizontal fields, and invented irrigation and fertilizer to grow bumper crops. But with modern technology and farmers’ cleverness, we can now stack those fields vertically, just as we stacked housing to make apartment buildings. Moving plants indoors has many benefits: Plants are not at the mercy of weather, less wilderness is cleared for farmland, and it’s easier to control the runoff of fertilizer and pesticides. But the choice of lighting can make or break the cost of a vertical farm and affect how long it might take for urban agriculture to blossom.

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Writer:
Sam Lemonick

Narrator/Scientific Consultant:
Darcy Gentleman, Ph.D.

Executive Producer:
Adam Dylewski

Video Producer:
Sean Parsons

Scientific consultants:
Kyle Nackers
Dickson Despommier, Ph.D.
Alison Le
Video Rating: / 5

Is this the Farm of the Future?

| Vertical farming | 20 Comments
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20 Comments

  • Dank Nugs

    If sunlights a problem why not just make a hybrid greenhouse for indoor crops? That would easily supply the majority of plants until night comes. Marijuan-Tomato farmers will often expose seedlings / vegetative growth phase plants for 18 hours to ensure the fastest possible growth and there would be free energy for around 10-14 hours a day. (depending on the time of year)

  • phlogiston

    In the future we'll just have food facilities. You'll go there, press a button, and hamburger pops out.The bottom 25% of the population won't even know how that happens. They'll think it's magic and form a religion around it.

  • Hushoo

    Wouldn't it be possible to have glass roofs and walls that allow daytime light onto the plants? That could cut energy costs by half depending on where you live.

  • Quintinohthree

    When it comes to the excess energy requirements, I wonder how much of that could be offset by placing the equivalent area of solar panels and by requiring less transportation. I could probably find myself a professor or two who'd be able to answer that to be honest.

  • foobargorch

    What?! The same old way?! Farming today is NOTHING like it was 100 years ago. Nutrients and minerals do NOT come from "dirt", they come from soil, active living soil, with interspecies cation exchange taking place as part of a regulated, tesselated system. That is, unless we decide to force feed them this stuff in salt solution after we've killed off the rhyzosphere.

    The temperate european approach of ploughoing and fertilizing to maintain a monocultureis a relatively recent invention, that has been exported around the world very unsuccessfully from an ecological perspective, and successfully enough from a business perspective (cf. slash and burn agriculture in the tropics, especially palm oil, and soy and corn for beef feedstock).

    This has been augmented with chemicals and mechanization, most notably the nitrogen based fertilizers based on the Haber Bosch process. This only looks good from the lens of an industrialist, or GDP measurements, from any biological or ecological point of view it's pretty obvious the approach is flawed and inefficient.

    Vertical farminmg does not address pests, the energy source, nutrient cycling, or really any other aspect, it's a pharmacy approach to food production, which has been demonstrated repeatedly through recent history to lack the resilience of polycultures.

    It might be the way to produce consistent foods, boutique things, it might even be efficient in an urban setting, but sunlight is free, and an active living soil can do much more for plants than we can hope to with industrial type interventions, at least for the foreseeable future. It might make economic and even ecologic sense in dense cities in light of transportation cost, but this will not supply the billions of city dwellers world with staple foods any time soon, and that goal is dubious at best.

    Furthermore we are nowhere near replacing the complexity of a living soil, and with the extremely low efficiency of photosynthesis (18% at best due to mainly due to limitations in carbon fixation, rubisco evolved in a CO2 rich environment), artificial lighting will always have a huge overhead involved with it, whereas using plants to capture sunlight has many benefits apart from that the energy is free.

  • TheTerminator1919

    I can totally see fancy restaurants building something like this in the heart of metropolitan areas to help them get fresher products. But expect the prices to go up for us.

  • Yan Tse

    It would be amazing if our cities were so futuristic that meat, while synthesized from vertical farming veggies, still tastes like meat that we love so much.

  • Edwin Luciano

    I have had very little success growing anything other than shade-loving houseplants outside of the ground. In my experience, food plants really like to be in the ground.

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