May 26, 2020

By Kendell Lang, Fusion Farms

Two years ago, Dr. Jonathan Foley, a climate and environmental scientist from the University of Minnesota, published an article titled No, Vertical Farms Won’t Feed the World, which was followed by the tagline: “While they are well-intentioned, new indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. We would be better to focus our efforts elsewhere.” Lately, this article has resurfaced and is being circulated on LinkedIn, seemingly in an effort to undermine the momentum of the vertical farming industry. 

Now, anyone who has ever dabbled in CEA (controlled-environment agriculture) – of which vertical farming is a subset – will understand empirically that the degree of achievable success in growing certain plants within indoor environments oftentimes exceeds that which can be achieved in an outdoor garden or farm. This is because a CEA facility permits you can create the most favorable environment possible for any indoor-appropriate plant to flourish. This benefit is derived without nighttime halting growth, without colder seasons substantially limiting annual crop yields, and without the destructive or limiting effects of high winds, excessive rain, drought, pests, molds, and fungus. 

No, vertical farms won’t feed the entire world, but one would be hard-pressed to determine that the model doesn’t work well.

Productivity to the Power of  ‘X’

Vertically stacked grow racks in an indoor vertical farm

Vertical agriculture essentially takes this innovative model for growing food crops and raises it to the power of two (or three, or four, or five, depending on how many tiers you set up in your grow rack system).

“The vertical farming model was proposed with the aim of increasing the amount of agricultural land by ‘building upwards,’” writes University of Melbourne engineering researchers Kurt Benke and Bruce Tomkins in Future Food-Production Systems: Vertical Farming and Controlled-Environment Agriculture. “In other words, the effective arable area for crops can be increased by constructing a high-rise building with many levels on the same footprint of land.”

Think of the possibilities of such a system: without external influences like pests, bad weather, poor soil, and even a lack of acreage being a concern, vertical farms can grow food anywhere, in any climate, and in any country, provided they are connected to a source of power and have access to some water (because of the recycling of grey water and less evaporation, hydroponic/aquaponic systems only require 10 percent of the water used by traditional agriculture). 

These systems can be set up within cities, right next door to the people, communities, restaurants, and grocery stores they feed, thereby eliminating food miles (the distance farmed food has to travel to reach the plates of consumers) and providing a reliable source of fresh, nutritious food that was still growing that very morning.

In an article chapter published on Clean Metrics, titled Food Transportation Issues and Reducing Carbon Footprint, the authors write: “Transportation is the largest end-use contributor toward global warming in the United States and many other developed countries. Transportation has a significant impact within the food and beverage sector because food is often shipped long distances and not infrequently via air. Pirog et al. (2001) report that nearly half of all fruit sold in the United States is imported, and that produce grown in North America travels an average of 2,000 km (1,200 miles) from source to point of sale.”

With hyper local vertical farms, “transportation costs can be eliminated due to proximity to the consumer; all-year-round production can be programmed on a demand basis; and plant-growing conditions can be optimized to maximize yield by fine-tuning temperature, humidity, and lighting conditions,” says Benke and Tomkins. Also, nutritional depletion can be prevented, delivering fresher, healthier, and more nutritious produce to consumers.

Wherever in the world there isn’t enough space for traditional agriculture, or the soil is barren, the climate unforgiving, or the consumers too remote; an indoor, climate controlled, closed environment vertical farm can be built to provide a steady, reliable source of fresh food that is organically grown and full of nutrition.

Are the Benefits of Vertical Farming Too Good to be True?

According to Dr. Foley, the benefits of vertical farming are too good to be true and he makes that clear in his opening statement: “New indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture.”

Sure, vertical farms won’t feed the world but whoever claimed that to be the case in the first place?

Jamie Burrows, the founder and CEO of Vertical Future, had this to say: “It’s clear that vertical farming solutions, when designed and implemented properly, can provide “some” crops for “some” of the world – and this is indeed a step in the right direction.”

Micki Seibel, operating partner at Radicle Growth, a San Diego-based acceleration fund that invests in agtech and food tech start-ups, commented: “You are missing the fact that there is already a significant controlled environment indoor agriculture industry that is already feeding a portion of the world. The fact is, indoor agriculture in a controlled environment is already a contribution to feeding the world and it’s only getting better, more local, and more cost effective.”

At the time the article was published in August 2018, vertical farms only constituted 1 percent of controlled environment indoor agriculture in the United States, a paltry 900 hectares, and yet it was a $14 billion a year industry.

Given all the benefits, goodwill, and better product, why pooh-pooh indoor vertical farming when, clearly, it can make a very real and important difference?

It All Comes Down to Money

Dr. Foley’s greatest criticism of vertical agriculture is cost, using an example of a turnkey, fully kitted-out, high tech container grow system by Freight Farms as a benchmark for the cost of vertical agriculture as a whole.

“The shipping container systems developed by Freight Farms, for example, cost between $82,000 and $85,000 per container — an astonishing sum for a box that just grows greens and herbs,” writes Dr. Foley. “Just one container costs as much 10 entire acres of prime American farmland – which is a far better investment, both in terms of food production and future economic value.”

To be clear, vertical agriculture is simply a technique for growing plants and it can be set up in any indoor space, from a garden shed in your own back yard or abandoned warehouse in Detroit to a building basement in New York City or research bunker in Antarctica. Freight Farms’ hydroponic units are built into shipping containers and given a state-of-the-art makeover with the latest automated, AI technology for climate control and data monitoring, as well as adjustable plant panels, powerful LED arrays, and other sophisticated technology. 

So, of course they’re expensive.

Freight Farms’ turnkey climate-controlled, hydroponic smart container farm

The Limitations of Traditional Agriculture

Dr. Foley claims that prime American farmland is a far better investment than vertical farms, both in terms of food production and future economic value. But traditional farming’s arable land requirements are too large and invasive to remain sustainable for future generations. With the ever-so-rapid population growth rates, it is expected that arable land per person will drop about 66 percent in 2050 in comparison to 1970, according to the 2017 study by Benke and Tomkins. 

One also needs to consider the environmental impacts of traditional farming as they relate to CO2 emissions. When you take land from nature and turn it into a mass production farm such as those we see across the United States, you destroy the ability of that land to absorb carbon from the atmosphere as it once did when it was covered with trees and indigenous vegetation.

Moreover, in order to expand traditional farmlands, indigenous land needs to be razed of its vegetation, displacing countless species of birds, animals, and essential insects in order to set up an unnatural ecosystem where only one or two crops are planted. This is what’s happening in the Amazon and the large-scale deforestation is one of the greatest tragedies of our time.

The overall consequence of this kind of farming is a myriad of negative environmental influences, from soil erosion and exhaustion to excessive carbon emissions from the transport of food all over the country (if not to other countries entirely) and increased atmospheric warming due to changing land surface type. In short, we need other solutions and indoor vertical farming is an intelligent one that is already making a significant difference in cities and communities around the world.

More Broccoli for Your Buck  

Vertical farming allows for, in some cases, over ten times the crop yield per acre than traditional methods, according to a study by Statista, a global data platform. Additionally, unlike traditional farming in non-tropical areas, indoor farming can produce crops year-round and this multiplies the productivity of the farmed surface by a factor of between four and six, depending on the crop. With crops such as strawberries, this factor may be as high as 30 (Opportunities and Challenges in Sustainability of Vertical Eco-Farming: A Review).

Furthermore, because vertical farms most frequently make use of hydroponic or aquaponic methods to grow crops, plant density and the number of crops planted per unit of area are much greater than traditional agriculture. To explain: in an open field, plants develop large root systems to anchor themselves in order to access the water and nutrients needed to grow. As a result they need to be planted further apart to accommodate for their complex root systems.

In a hydroponic or aquaponic system, however, the plant’s roots are suspended in nutrient-rich water, which means that (1) they can be placed much closer together because they don’t need to develop large root systems, having total access to water and (2) most of the energy is concentrated on developing the plant leaf/stem density. Consequently, indoor farm produce tends to be lush, dense, and nutritious, requiring up to six times less space to grow the same yield as traditional agriculture.

On Issues of Energy

The final major point that Dr. Foley raises is that indoor farms use a lot of energy and materials to operate; however, most proponents of indoor agriculture are also proponents of renewable energy generated by solar panels, wind turbines, and even, in some cases, nuclear reactors. So, they are not relying entirely, or even at all, on the electrical grid for fossil fuel generated energy, which means that their operations produce vastly reduced or even no greenhouse gas byproducts at all.

To this, Dr. Foley counters: “Any system that seeks to replace the sun to grow food is probably a bad idea.”

Indoor agriculture does so much more than just replace the sun. It powers a continuous and optimal plant growth, irrespective of punishing external conditions and pressures. Inside these climate controlled facilities, plants can grow 24 hours a day and 365 days per year with an output that is upwards of six times that of traditional agriculture. And they can do this in locations that may not receive optimal, year-round sunshine. So, if anything, indoor farms improve upon the power of the sun, with all due respect to our star, of course.

The Proof is in the Pumpkin

No. 212 Rome Street, in Newark, New Jersey, used to be the address of a steel-supply company but today, AeroFarms, the world’s largest indoor vertical farm, leases the property for its nearly 70,000 square foot operation. The building’s ceiling allows for grow tables to be stacked twelve layers tall, to a height of 36 feet, in rows eighty feet long. The vertical farm grows kale, bok choy, watercress, arugula, red-leaf lettuce, mizuna, and other baby salad greens.


AeroFarms’ 70,000 square foot operation with grow tables stacked twelve tiers tall

In Singapore, Sky Greens is a three-story vertical farm in a greenhouse that produces five to 10 times more food per unit area than traditional farms. Their mission is to provide improved agricultural solutions with minimal impact on land, water, and energy resources; to help cities with food supply security; and to promote low carbon footprint agriculture in urban living.

Sky Greens’ three-story vertical greenhouse farm in Singapore

Fusion Farms is a modern, sustainable, and hurricane-protected indoor aquaponics farming facility in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Within the concrete-reinforced, 11,500 square foot confines of their warehouse building, Fusion Farms has built a vertical indoor aquaponics farm that is powered by renewable energy and protected from outside influences, including tropical storms, harmful microbes, temperature extremes, and the island’s unreliable power grid.

Fusion Farms’ hurricane-protected indoor aquaponics farming facility in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico

Vertical Farming isn’t Just an Alternative: It’s a Necessity

Vertical aquaponics, hydroponics, and indoor agriculture is a smart, space conservative way to produce food for communities of people and one that is gentle on the environment, delivering much fresher, more nutritious food to people without the thousands of miles required to deliver food from a farm in Mexico, for example, to consumers in Michigan.

There is a reason that vertical indoor farms are gaining enormous momentum around the world and it’s not because it’s a fad. It’s because the business model works, not only to produce a large volume of fresh food for local communities, but also to turn a profit for the farm owners, while doing so at a much lesser cost to the environment. 

Read Dr. Jonathan Foley’s full article

DISCLAIMER

All views, data, opinions and declarations expressed are solely those of the author(s) and not of Global AgInvesting, GAI News, GAI Gazette, or parent company HighQuest Group.