April 3, 2013 • 25 mins
What is a vertical farm? What would be the benefit of a vertical farm? What are the challenges of making vertical farms work? Join Jonathan, Lauren and Joe as they dig into the potential benefits and challenges of vertical farming.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Welcome everyone to Forward Thinking. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
I'm Lauren Vocaldam, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we
(00:22):
wanted to talk about something that we think is an
interesting subject. It's a bit problematic, but we wanted to
talk about vertical farms, what they are, why they might
be important, and some of the challenges that we could
see if we decided to try and pursue vertical farms
as an actual solution. But before we get too far
(00:43):
into it, I guess we really need to talk about
what exactly is a vertical farm. Uh. Really, it's kind
of what it sounds like. It's it's a farm that
is arranged vertically as opposed to horizontally, so instead of
a big farmland exactly you start us stacking it kind of, Joe,
you were talking about it sort of being like, imagine
a greenhouse. Yeah, Well, essentially, the main ideas you would
(01:07):
have a mostly glass structure that allows sunlight to penetrate,
and it would be as if you were to take
a greenhouse and put a greenhouse on top of it,
and then at another greenhouse and keep building up as
far as you can go. And the main idea is
to see if you can create a farm that stretches
up towards the sky instead of out in all directions, right,
(01:28):
So you're taking advantage of a vertical alignment so that
you don't you don't need as much land to produce crops.
And obviously the purpose of this is to fit it
within a city, right, because if you've got plenty of
land out in the countryside, why not use it, right,
assuming that, of course the environmental impact would not be
so negative as to actually harm the production of crops
(01:53):
over a certain amount of time, And obviously that's something
that you have to take into account. But yeah, so
so really it's kind of an idea of producing crops,
even livestock within an urban environment so that you aren't
draining the resources of all the land around you. Well, yeah,
I looked this up. Apparently according to the U. S
(02:16):
d A that's the Department of Agriculture, about the land
use in the United States is is agriculture farming? Yeah,
that's a huge number, right, right, and as populations grow,
obviously that that is only going to increase, so uh,
putting aside the the issue of waste, how much of
(02:37):
that food or how much of those crops go towards
a food source as opposed to force something else, whether
it's to feed livestock or to use an energy Our
cars are that gets exported to feed other people. Right
Once you once you take out those factors and you
just look at the food that we need. It still
(02:58):
is one of the things where we need to look
at salute oceans besides just just just farms. And could
vertical farms be that solution? Um, Joe, what was it
that you wanted to say? Well, I guess we need
to talk about, uh, what are the advantages of a
vertical farm? Right? Well, and and to to the version
that we're really concentrating on is one that was proposed
(03:19):
by Dixon Despomier, who is a Colombia professor. Uh. He
kind of posed this question in his class and sort
of got to think about this vertical farm idea, and
and why would you want that? And how how could
it have an advantage over traditional farms? And one of
them we already answered, which is that it takes up
less real estate, less horizontal real estate than your rate. Um,
(03:43):
so that's that's one advantage right there. Another is the
idea of producing your food very close to where the
consumers are. Uh, there's a large percentage of the world's
population located in urban areas, and that that numbers actually
growing more and more people are moving towards cities, or
you could look at it as cities are sprawling out
(04:05):
to slowly envelop and swallow hole all the people, right, Yeah,
because that's where the jobs are, right, That's yeah, Metro Atlanta.
I mean, that's a great example. It's definitely more of
a sprawl rather than growing up, which is kind of
what we're talking about here, is really the concentration is
building upward rather than outward. But but that that's one
(04:26):
of the big advantages, right that you have the food
where you are where you need it. Right, if you
could make a vertical farm work, and will introduce some
challenges to that in a few minutes here, but if
you could make it work, you would have fresher produce
in the city. For one thing. I mean, that's just
an advance an advantage in the culinary tasty food. Yeah,
(04:47):
that we're picked an hour ago, right before you get them,
and then maybe maybe on the floor above you, right exactly,
they came down the elevator. Um. And also you would
have much less transportation cost and so that it's a
we can look at the economics of that in a minute.
But one of the things that has concerned people is
this idea of food miles. Right, how far does your
(05:09):
food travel before it gets to you, and how much
energy is spent taking the food from a farm in
Kansas or Mexico, or Chile or China, southern California, any
of these places to get it to your grocery store. Sure,
so we've got the advantage of the food being right here.
We have the advantage of you don't have to worry
(05:30):
about the transportation costs, although we'll we'll get into that
in a second as well. Um, the other advantage not
just the transportation costs from an economic standpoint, you also
have uh greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation. You've got
toxin emissions associated with that. Now, granted, there are greenhouse
(05:50):
gas emissions and toxins that are associated just with the
production of food, so you're not going to get around
that as much as you would the transportation issue, but
that's still something that you can take into consideration with
the vertical farms. Another potential advantage, at least that I've
wade about, is the ability to reuse materials, especially water.
(06:12):
Um there's a lot of water that goes into agricultural production,
and one idea that's been floated is that you could
reuse gray water from residential areas or even in a
mixed use building, say water that comes from the drain
in your sink or in your shower, and that goes
to water the crops right. And then of course there's
(06:34):
also the fact that you would not necessarily need to
use up so much soil. We were talking before we
started recording about the idea of hydroponics, and essentially hydroponics
is growing crops using a nutrient base that does not
require actual soil. You don't have to plant the plants
and soil. You use this nutrient base, and usually you
(06:55):
have the plants suspended in something like they might have
their roots surrounded by a kind of inert gravel or
some other uh item that keeps them upright, or you
could even in theory, have them suspended. As long as
you were able to supply the nutrients to the the
root systems, then you would be able to continue growing them.
(07:17):
Another advantage is the idea that you don't have seasons anymore,
because if you have a climate controlled vertical farm, meaning
that you have control over how much light is introduced,
you have the control over the actual temperature, the moisture levels,
the nutrient levels. If you can control all those factors,
then you could grow crops all year round. You wouldn't
(07:38):
have a season, so you wouldn't have to worry like, well,
you know, I want to get ocrab, but it's not
in season right and you don't have to worry about
the expensive importing oranges from somewhere extremely far away. They're
can grow them right there. So this all sounds so great,
but I'm not seeing them everywhere yet. Yeah, So I
wonder if there are some curious challenges that we would
(08:02):
have to overcome in order to implement something like this.
There are both serious and humorous challenges to this. Uh No,
there are a lot of challenges. One of the big
challenges comes down to energy. How much energy do you
need to be able to make a vertical farm work.
Even when you're talking about conserving water by recycling it
as much as possible, Even if you're talking about say
(08:25):
co location, where you try and put other things that
generate heat so that you can use that heat as
part of the HVAC system. If you have a server
farm next to your food farm, then you can use
the heat from one to heat the other. Right, So
like Google headquarters is right next to the cornfield, right,
that wouldn't that wouldn't the corn towers Actually wouldn't surprise
(08:45):
me one bit knowing the way Google works. But uh,
and in fact Google does have some of the largest
data farms out there. But that's you know, that's still
that's still just one part of the problem. I mean,
the taller you build the building, the greater your energy
needs are to keep that system going. Because you know,
it's it's water circulation, it's the heating and cooling, it's
(09:08):
the artificial light. Because one of the issues you have
is how do you design a tall building to take
advantage of sunlight because it's not going to be the
sunlight is not going to be evenly distributed across each
floor for an entire day. In a horizontal farm, the
sun is free and yeah, it's yeah, it becomes a
(09:29):
whole separate problem, right, And so when you have a
vertical farm. Then for it to really work, you're going
to have to supplement the light that any one floor
gets in some way, whether that is through moving the
plants around. Because Joe, you were talking about the system
that was kind of interesting. Well, one thing you've seen
in a couple of prototypes is something like a ferris wheel.
(09:50):
You load the plants up to a moving tray or
card of some kind and it it cycles them through
with giving them greater access to the light from the
roof um as the day goes on. But of course
you're still dealing with a problem there that even if
you cycle them through the one they're not getting the
constant actually just planted them in the middle of a field.
(10:13):
So so really you have to supplement the light in
some way, either by moving the plants or by by
creating artificial sunlight. Uh. And that means that you're actually
expending energy just to give them the energy they normally
would get for free if it was in a horizontal farm.
So that's that's something that a lot of people have
pointed out as a big problem and the idea that
(10:35):
it's not energy efficient to build these vertical farms. Even
if you are talking about supplementing the energy they require.
With things like solar panels or wind turbines, you're probably
not going to generate the energy you need to keep
that that going without it tapping into the power grid.
And the question then becomes is it actually more energy
(10:55):
efficient to operate a vertical farm versus a traditional farm?
And if it's less energy efficient, then why are we
doing Why are we doing it right? Especially when you're
talking about artificial light, that's the big one, because you're like,
this is a this is a resource that's literally free
to us with the traditional setup, and it costs us
(11:16):
in the vertical setup. So unless we can demonstrate that
the benefit we get from the vertical standpoint is greater
than the energy expenditure that we we get using this method,
why do we do it well? So, these concerns are
out there, and we know that people have had to
think about them before they've invested in prototypes of vertical farms.
(11:36):
But so one thing it might help to do is
to look at where people have tried to build these
things and and see what reasons might have motivated them.
One thing I think we all read about it, of course,
is an NPR piece about the sky greens farm right
in Singapore. Of course, Singapore seems like an ideal location
for vertical farm because I mean real estate values there.
(11:59):
It's densely populated places on Earth, is sure, yes, um,
And so obviously there's no room in Singapore to really
go out and lay out a unless you're going to
raise a few buildings. Then yeah, you're not going to
build any farms out there. So it may be an
issue of there's an economic conflict here. Um, there are
(12:20):
great costs to investing in something like this, but in
tight enough circumstances it might pay off. Right. Yeah, in
certain countries where you either have very little farmable land
that's that's available, or the seasons just don't don't really
um fall in such a way that makes it easy
(12:41):
for you to to grow anything, it might actually make
a lot of sense to do vertical farms, although a
lot of people have argued that perhaps the greenhouse route
would be as efficient or perhaps more efficient. So apart
from the energy barriers that we have here with vertical farms,
there may all so be economic barriers. First of all,
(13:02):
just building a vertical farm would require a pretty enormous
initial investment, so that asking for that can be difficult.
And also if it's you'd be taking a risk too,
because it's somewhat unproven. Sure, and uh, if you are
spending all this money, that also may mean that in
order to recapture those costs, that you end up having
(13:25):
to charge more for the produce you produce in your
produce you produce within the vertical farm, right, right, although
you know, at a certain point, is it worth it
if you can get a tomato that is incredibly delicious
and only have to go upstairs to get it, is
you know, would people pay for them? Right? I mean,
if you buy greens that are picked today, people would
pay up for that? I think, well, yeah, that some
(13:46):
people would. They say in that same piece we were
talking about, they said, in Singapore, the greens from that
vertical farm there costs five to more than standard greens
at the grocery store where people were buying them. Well,
it's not bad. I mean, you know, a five increase
is you know? Yeah, I was thinking of some kind
of outrageous like fifty kind of increase in food coast
it was it might and so and so the vertical
(14:09):
farms may make a lot more sense in particular communities
you know, where we have these pre existing conditions, like
for example, there are islands in the Caribbean where they
have really no agriculture whatsoever, so they import everything or
their communities, say in Alaska that have to or Hawaii
that have to import a lot of the stuff they use. Uh,
(14:30):
and those expenses get pretty high because they're they're in
fairly remote areas. That's you know, it's a challenge to
get stuff there in a way that's efficient and economically feasible.
So it may make perfect sense there. It might actually
offset some of the prices that they're spending on certain
items right now. Right if you even if you live
in a place like New York or something like there,
(14:51):
or even in Atlanta, it might make sense to target
certain crops for vertical farming, right um to say, you know, well,
we have fairly close access to the corn and the
all these other things we teach, but we really you know,
we've got to fly vegetables in from Europe or from
South America if we want this special fruit or something
(15:14):
like that. So if I want my wassabi, I have
to fly in either from one place in Hawaii or Japan.
So in those cases it might make sense to invest
in uh, urban farming solutions for for yeah, things like
like grapes that don't grow very well here in this particular. Yeah,
that's a terrible example, because we totally have wine country
(15:35):
in the Georgia Hills. There's a wine in them their
hills even even so there, but the point at the
point being that depending upon where in the world you are,
you may not have access to certain kinds of of foods,
and so if you were to design vertical farms that
specifically targeted that, then that would be a reason to
do so, right, And this also I wanted to mention
might kind of go along with I think what is
(15:58):
going to need to happen, which is a little bit
of a change in in perception of food because we're
also used to being able to get whatever we want
whenever we want it, and if we really want to
live in a more energy conservative way, um, you know,
we're not always going to have access to green globe
grapes that we can just run down to the store
and grab. Um we might need to future is dark
and frightening, well, but you know, but it's but it's
(16:21):
not a terrible thing to to to think more about
eating seasonally and and appreciating really good strawberries when you
get them, versus having terrible cardboard strawberries six months out
of the year that cost you five times more than
they otherwise would. Well, and also another solution that people
could look at for these these problems that we're talking
about with these vertical farms, some of them involved just
(16:43):
designing buildings differently instead of we all have kind of
a stock image in our minds of what a skyscraper
looks like, but some of these vertical farms look a
lot different from that image. For example, there are some
designs that are heard in a way so that each
level is slightly smaller than the level below it, which
(17:05):
increases the amount of sunlight the lower levels can receive
on any given day. And you know, you orient that
building when you build it to such a way so
that you get as much sunlight throughout a typical day
as you possibly can, and you lower the need for
things like that artificial sunlight we were talking about earlier.
Of course, then it becomes less like the skyscraper, right,
(17:26):
but it's still a vertical farm, it's just not in
the form. It's not necessarily a vertical Yeah, it's not
like a it's not like a multi use building where
you know, floors one through fifteen or residential sixteen through
thirty our offices, and thirty one through fifty are farms.
It's it's not like that. But but it would still
(17:48):
be a vertical farm. It just might not it might
not stretch up thirty stories. It may be more like fifteen,
but uh, diagonal farm. Yeah, still vertical. Yeah, I believe you.
I can show you pictures. Uh non audio podcast unfortunately,
but these are you know, these are the possible solutions
(18:10):
we're looking at. And beyond that, there are alternatives there.
You know, we have people work living in urban areas
today who are looking at and or even creating uh,
gardening spaces and farming spaces within the city limits. Yeah. Yeah,
there's you know, lots of park space that is certainly gorgeous,
but it can be gorgeous and also have apple trees.
(18:30):
You know, it doesn't these things don't. Food does not
have to be mutually exclusive with urban beauty. And also
just just roof rooftop gardens are small personal gardens on
a porch are all terrific ways to get a little
bit extra food. There's actually quite a few community gardens
in the Atlanta area in particular. In fact, I know
of three or four that are pretty close to where
(18:50):
I live now. That can be complicated because depending upon
what city you live in, there may be very strict
rules as to what you can and cannot grow. But
but that's one of those things that could help offset
the need for going outside the city limits to get
your food. Those uh, those rooftop gardens have a lot
of advantages, don't they don't They say that they like
(19:12):
cut down on that urban heat island defects. Sure, yeah.
They also, of course all plants take in carbon dioxide,
so there's that there's a as long as we've got
cars is a pretty excellent thing, right, it's a carbon
dioxide sink. It may not offset that. That's actually that
brings up another criticism I've read about vertical farms, in
(19:32):
the idea that in in greenhouses and in these vertical
farm models, often you would want to uh pump in
more carbon dioxide than would normally be in a regular
mixture of of atmosphere in an attempt to essentially are
feeding the plants. Right, It's like it would be like
an oxygen rich environment for us, right, so would be
(19:55):
a carbon dioxide rich environment for them. And I've said,
I've read some some criticisms that say, well, you know,
how do you get the carbon dioxide, And one of
the common ways is through combustion, you burn something in
common box side is but that just ends up releasing
other elements. Yeah, so so there so there again more
(20:16):
problems here, but it's not all all bad and um.
And of course, even if we reach the ideal vertical
farm world where it makes perfect sense, maybe we have
some energy surplus for some reason, we've we've cracked that
nut and the energy isn't an issue anymore, so we
can we can, depending upon your point of view, invest
(20:40):
or waste energy on these vertical fusion reactors online. We've
we've harnessed the power of the galaxy itself and now
we're gonna have our vertical farms. Gosh darn it. But
even if we do that, uh, the numbers really don't
add up, you don't. It's really hard to envision a
world where we have enough vertical farms to offset the
(21:02):
need for our food. So it looks like it's not
just hard, it's kind of impossible. Right, There's just a
scale problem. We we we would essentially have to replace all
of our buildings with vertical farms. Even then that wouldn't work, right,
I mean, what the vertical farming future, if it is
a feasible possibility, it's supplemental. It's not to replace all
(21:24):
of the farms culture. It can't, It can't possibly, right, So, really,
what we're looking at is a way to kind of
offset it a little bit, to reduce our reliance upon
traditional horizontal farms and thus reduce the impact that we
make either through the whole the production process the environmental
(21:46):
impact of just clearing out land to make a farm.
We can we can definitely take a chunk of that out,
which is an important part of conservation and sustainability, especially
if we do things like Lauren you were mentioning when
we were meeting about this earlier. You know, if if
we were to to shift our diets to be more
of vegetable and fruit heavy diet as opposed to eating
(22:08):
lots and lots of meat, then yeah, yeah, it takes
something like six liters of water to raise a two
pound steak. Um, not even not even a two pound cow.
I mean like a yeah, two pound steak just just
nurturing a two pound steak. How many big gulps of water?
Is that? That's a lot. It's a lot of big gulps. Um. Yeah,
(22:29):
that's that. I mean obviously, if we were to shift
to a more vegetarian type of diet, not necessarily strictly vegetarian,
but but more so, then we would, uh, we would
really a lot of the need for that kind of thing,
exactly exactly. And also, yeah, there's probably a lot of
crops that are a lot more I mean, you know,
a watermelon is a lot more difficult to grow, for
(22:50):
example than uh. I don't have a good counter example,
but watermelons man lots of water enough. Seriously, it's right
there in the name. Uh, I would imagine more so
than say a cucumber. Um. But anyway, Yeah, it's it's
it's an interesting idea and it's definitely one of those
things where you can look at it and you you
(23:10):
see like an artist rendering of what a vertical farm
could look like, and you're like, wow, that's a super
cool building of the future. And also these are the
same sort of uh techniques that we're looking at as
possible ways of helping us get from Earth to some
distant planet. I mean, these are these growing techniques, These
these things that we have to take into consideration just
(23:32):
to grow plants here on Earth and urban settings could
eventually inform us in our quest to get off this
rock and visit other planets. Uh So, you know, it's
it's definitely God's use. And we don't mean to downplay
the importance of vertical farms. That may very well be
that one day they are a common sight in any
major metropolitan area. But but there are issues that we
(23:55):
definitely need to take into consideration and acknowledge before we
jump it in. Well, we know it's not a sure
thing yet, but that doesn't mean it's not a good
idea to keep trying. Definitely, Yeah, trying at things that
are hard or even seem impossible is how we make improvements. Yeah. Yeah,
And if nothing else, even if we eventually get to
(24:16):
the conclusion that vertical farms are not not a viable
way to go, we could learn that there are other
through that process, we could learn other things that improve
growing in uh in in traditional farms. Or even if
we just say, okay, maybe we don't make vertical farms,
but we do make more greenhouses within urban areas to
(24:37):
help with this issue. Uh, you know, no matter what
we learned through that process, So, like like you were saying, Joe,
it's definitely a positive thing in the long run, it
just might be a little longer than what everyone was
hoping for. That's okay, that's what the future is for
nothing but the future. The future is everywhere. It is
(24:59):
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(25:42):
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Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Welcome everyone to Forward Thinking. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
I'm Lauren Vocaldam, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we
(00:22):
wanted to talk about something that we think is an
interesting subject. It's a bit problematic, but we wanted to
talk about vertical farms, what they are, why they might
be important, and some of the challenges that we could
see if we decided to try and pursue vertical farms
as an actual solution. But before we get too far
(00:43):
into it, I guess we really need to talk about
what exactly is a vertical farm. Uh. Really, it's kind
of what it sounds like. It's it's a farm that
is arranged vertically as opposed to horizontally, so instead of
a big farmland exactly you start us stacking it kind of, Joe,
you were talking about it sort of being like, imagine
a greenhouse. Yeah, Well, essentially, the main ideas you would
(01:07):
have a mostly glass structure that allows sunlight to penetrate,
and it would be as if you were to take
a greenhouse and put a greenhouse on top of it,
and then at another greenhouse and keep building up as
far as you can go. And the main idea is
to see if you can create a farm that stretches
up towards the sky instead of out in all directions, right,
(01:28):
So you're taking advantage of a vertical alignment so that
you don't you don't need as much land to produce crops.
And obviously the purpose of this is to fit it
within a city, right, because if you've got plenty of
land out in the countryside, why not use it, right,
assuming that, of course the environmental impact would not be
so negative as to actually harm the production of crops
(01:53):
over a certain amount of time, And obviously that's something
that you have to take into account. But yeah, so
so really it's kind of an idea of producing crops,
even livestock within an urban environment so that you aren't
draining the resources of all the land around you. Well, yeah,
I looked this up. Apparently according to the U. S
(02:16):
d A that's the Department of Agriculture, about the land
use in the United States is is agriculture farming? Yeah,
that's a huge number, right, right, and as populations grow,
obviously that that is only going to increase, so uh,
putting aside the the issue of waste, how much of
(02:37):
that food or how much of those crops go towards
a food source as opposed to force something else, whether
it's to feed livestock or to use an energy Our
cars are that gets exported to feed other people. Right
Once you once you take out those factors and you
just look at the food that we need. It still
(02:58):
is one of the things where we need to look
at salute oceans besides just just just farms. And could
vertical farms be that solution? Um, Joe, what was it
that you wanted to say? Well, I guess we need
to talk about, uh, what are the advantages of a
vertical farm? Right? Well, and and to to the version
that we're really concentrating on is one that was proposed
(03:19):
by Dixon Despomier, who is a Colombia professor. Uh. He
kind of posed this question in his class and sort
of got to think about this vertical farm idea, and
and why would you want that? And how how could
it have an advantage over traditional farms? And one of
them we already answered, which is that it takes up
less real estate, less horizontal real estate than your rate. Um,
(03:43):
so that's that's one advantage right there. Another is the
idea of producing your food very close to where the
consumers are. Uh, there's a large percentage of the world's
population located in urban areas, and that that numbers actually
growing more and more people are moving towards cities, or
you could look at it as cities are sprawling out
(04:05):
to slowly envelop and swallow hole all the people, right, Yeah,
because that's where the jobs are, right, That's yeah, Metro Atlanta.
I mean, that's a great example. It's definitely more of
a sprawl rather than growing up, which is kind of
what we're talking about here, is really the concentration is
building upward rather than outward. But but that that's one
(04:26):
of the big advantages, right that you have the food
where you are where you need it. Right, if you
could make a vertical farm work, and will introduce some
challenges to that in a few minutes here, but if
you could make it work, you would have fresher produce
in the city. For one thing. I mean, that's just
an advance an advantage in the culinary tasty food. Yeah,
(04:47):
that we're picked an hour ago, right before you get them,
and then maybe maybe on the floor above you, right exactly,
they came down the elevator. Um. And also you would
have much less transportation cost and so that it's a
we can look at the economics of that in a minute.
But one of the things that has concerned people is
this idea of food miles. Right, how far does your
(05:09):
food travel before it gets to you, and how much
energy is spent taking the food from a farm in
Kansas or Mexico, or Chile or China, southern California, any
of these places to get it to your grocery store. Sure,
so we've got the advantage of the food being right here.
We have the advantage of you don't have to worry
(05:30):
about the transportation costs, although we'll we'll get into that
in a second as well. Um, the other advantage not
just the transportation costs from an economic standpoint, you also
have uh greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation. You've got
toxin emissions associated with that. Now, granted, there are greenhouse
(05:50):
gas emissions and toxins that are associated just with the
production of food, so you're not going to get around
that as much as you would the transportation issue, but
that's still something that you can take into consideration with
the vertical farms. Another potential advantage, at least that I've
wade about, is the ability to reuse materials, especially water.
(06:12):
Um there's a lot of water that goes into agricultural production,
and one idea that's been floated is that you could
reuse gray water from residential areas or even in a
mixed use building, say water that comes from the drain
in your sink or in your shower, and that goes
to water the crops right. And then of course there's
(06:34):
also the fact that you would not necessarily need to
use up so much soil. We were talking before we
started recording about the idea of hydroponics, and essentially hydroponics
is growing crops using a nutrient base that does not
require actual soil. You don't have to plant the plants
and soil. You use this nutrient base, and usually you
(06:55):
have the plants suspended in something like they might have
their roots surrounded by a kind of inert gravel or
some other uh item that keeps them upright, or you
could even in theory, have them suspended. As long as
you were able to supply the nutrients to the the
root systems, then you would be able to continue growing them.
(07:17):
Another advantage is the idea that you don't have seasons anymore,
because if you have a climate controlled vertical farm, meaning
that you have control over how much light is introduced,
you have the control over the actual temperature, the moisture levels,
the nutrient levels. If you can control all those factors,
then you could grow crops all year round. You wouldn't
(07:38):
have a season, so you wouldn't have to worry like, well,
you know, I want to get ocrab, but it's not
in season right and you don't have to worry about
the expensive importing oranges from somewhere extremely far away. They're
can grow them right there. So this all sounds so great,
but I'm not seeing them everywhere yet. Yeah, So I
wonder if there are some curious challenges that we would
(08:02):
have to overcome in order to implement something like this.
There are both serious and humorous challenges to this. Uh No,
there are a lot of challenges. One of the big
challenges comes down to energy. How much energy do you
need to be able to make a vertical farm work.
Even when you're talking about conserving water by recycling it
as much as possible, Even if you're talking about say
(08:25):
co location, where you try and put other things that
generate heat so that you can use that heat as
part of the HVAC system. If you have a server
farm next to your food farm, then you can use
the heat from one to heat the other. Right, So
like Google headquarters is right next to the cornfield, right,
that wouldn't that wouldn't the corn towers Actually wouldn't surprise
(08:45):
me one bit knowing the way Google works. But uh,
and in fact Google does have some of the largest
data farms out there. But that's you know, that's still
that's still just one part of the problem. I mean,
the taller you build the building, the greater your energy
needs are to keep that system going. Because you know,
it's it's water circulation, it's the heating and cooling, it's
(09:08):
the artificial light. Because one of the issues you have
is how do you design a tall building to take
advantage of sunlight because it's not going to be the
sunlight is not going to be evenly distributed across each
floor for an entire day. In a horizontal farm, the
sun is free and yeah, it's yeah, it becomes a
(09:29):
whole separate problem, right, And so when you have a
vertical farm. Then for it to really work, you're going
to have to supplement the light that any one floor
gets in some way, whether that is through moving the
plants around. Because Joe, you were talking about the system
that was kind of interesting. Well, one thing you've seen
in a couple of prototypes is something like a ferris wheel.
(09:50):
You load the plants up to a moving tray or
card of some kind and it it cycles them through
with giving them greater access to the light from the
roof um as the day goes on. But of course
you're still dealing with a problem there that even if
you cycle them through the one they're not getting the
constant actually just planted them in the middle of a field.
(10:13):
So so really you have to supplement the light in
some way, either by moving the plants or by by
creating artificial sunlight. Uh. And that means that you're actually
expending energy just to give them the energy they normally
would get for free if it was in a horizontal farm.
So that's that's something that a lot of people have
pointed out as a big problem and the idea that
(10:35):
it's not energy efficient to build these vertical farms. Even
if you are talking about supplementing the energy they require.
With things like solar panels or wind turbines, you're probably
not going to generate the energy you need to keep
that that going without it tapping into the power grid.
And the question then becomes is it actually more energy
(10:55):
efficient to operate a vertical farm versus a traditional farm?
And if it's less energy efficient, then why are we
doing Why are we doing it right? Especially when you're
talking about artificial light, that's the big one, because you're like,
this is a this is a resource that's literally free
to us with the traditional setup, and it costs us
(11:16):
in the vertical setup. So unless we can demonstrate that
the benefit we get from the vertical standpoint is greater
than the energy expenditure that we we get using this method,
why do we do it well? So, these concerns are
out there, and we know that people have had to
think about them before they've invested in prototypes of vertical farms.
(11:36):
But so one thing it might help to do is
to look at where people have tried to build these
things and and see what reasons might have motivated them.
One thing I think we all read about it, of course,
is an NPR piece about the sky greens farm right
in Singapore. Of course, Singapore seems like an ideal location
for vertical farm because I mean real estate values there.
(11:59):
It's densely populated places on Earth, is sure, yes, um,
And so obviously there's no room in Singapore to really
go out and lay out a unless you're going to
raise a few buildings. Then yeah, you're not going to
build any farms out there. So it may be an
issue of there's an economic conflict here. Um, there are
(12:20):
great costs to investing in something like this, but in
tight enough circumstances it might pay off. Right. Yeah, in
certain countries where you either have very little farmable land
that's that's available, or the seasons just don't don't really
um fall in such a way that makes it easy
(12:41):
for you to to grow anything, it might actually make
a lot of sense to do vertical farms, although a
lot of people have argued that perhaps the greenhouse route
would be as efficient or perhaps more efficient. So apart
from the energy barriers that we have here with vertical farms,
there may all so be economic barriers. First of all,
(13:02):
just building a vertical farm would require a pretty enormous
initial investment, so that asking for that can be difficult.
And also if it's you'd be taking a risk too,
because it's somewhat unproven. Sure, and uh, if you are
spending all this money, that also may mean that in
order to recapture those costs, that you end up having
(13:25):
to charge more for the produce you produce in your
produce you produce within the vertical farm, right, right, although
you know, at a certain point, is it worth it
if you can get a tomato that is incredibly delicious
and only have to go upstairs to get it, is
you know, would people pay for them? Right? I mean,
if you buy greens that are picked today, people would
pay up for that? I think, well, yeah, that some
(13:46):
people would. They say in that same piece we were
talking about, they said, in Singapore, the greens from that
vertical farm there costs five to more than standard greens
at the grocery store where people were buying them. Well,
it's not bad. I mean, you know, a five increase
is you know? Yeah, I was thinking of some kind
of outrageous like fifty kind of increase in food coast
it was it might and so and so the vertical
(14:09):
farms may make a lot more sense in particular communities
you know, where we have these pre existing conditions, like
for example, there are islands in the Caribbean where they
have really no agriculture whatsoever, so they import everything or
their communities, say in Alaska that have to or Hawaii
that have to import a lot of the stuff they use. Uh,
(14:30):
and those expenses get pretty high because they're they're in
fairly remote areas. That's you know, it's a challenge to
get stuff there in a way that's efficient and economically feasible.
So it may make perfect sense there. It might actually
offset some of the prices that they're spending on certain
items right now. Right if you even if you live
in a place like New York or something like there,
(14:51):
or even in Atlanta, it might make sense to target
certain crops for vertical farming, right um to say, you know, well,
we have fairly close access to the corn and the
all these other things we teach, but we really you know,
we've got to fly vegetables in from Europe or from
South America if we want this special fruit or something
(15:14):
like that. So if I want my wassabi, I have
to fly in either from one place in Hawaii or Japan.
So in those cases it might make sense to invest
in uh, urban farming solutions for for yeah, things like
like grapes that don't grow very well here in this particular. Yeah,
that's a terrible example, because we totally have wine country
(15:35):
in the Georgia Hills. There's a wine in them their
hills even even so there, but the point at the
point being that depending upon where in the world you are,
you may not have access to certain kinds of of foods,
and so if you were to design vertical farms that
specifically targeted that, then that would be a reason to
do so, right, And this also I wanted to mention
might kind of go along with I think what is
(15:58):
going to need to happen, which is a little bit
of a change in in perception of food because we're
also used to being able to get whatever we want
whenever we want it, and if we really want to
live in a more energy conservative way, um, you know,
we're not always going to have access to green globe
grapes that we can just run down to the store
and grab. Um we might need to future is dark
and frightening, well, but you know, but it's but it's
(16:21):
not a terrible thing to to to think more about
eating seasonally and and appreciating really good strawberries when you
get them, versus having terrible cardboard strawberries six months out
of the year that cost you five times more than
they otherwise would. Well, and also another solution that people
could look at for these these problems that we're talking
about with these vertical farms, some of them involved just
(16:43):
designing buildings differently instead of we all have kind of
a stock image in our minds of what a skyscraper
looks like, but some of these vertical farms look a
lot different from that image. For example, there are some
designs that are heard in a way so that each
level is slightly smaller than the level below it, which
(17:05):
increases the amount of sunlight the lower levels can receive
on any given day. And you know, you orient that
building when you build it to such a way so
that you get as much sunlight throughout a typical day
as you possibly can, and you lower the need for
things like that artificial sunlight we were talking about earlier.
Of course, then it becomes less like the skyscraper, right,
(17:26):
but it's still a vertical farm, it's just not in
the form. It's not necessarily a vertical Yeah, it's not
like a it's not like a multi use building where
you know, floors one through fifteen or residential sixteen through
thirty our offices, and thirty one through fifty are farms.
It's it's not like that. But but it would still
(17:48):
be a vertical farm. It just might not it might
not stretch up thirty stories. It may be more like fifteen,
but uh, diagonal farm. Yeah, still vertical. Yeah, I believe you.
I can show you pictures. Uh non audio podcast unfortunately,
but these are you know, these are the possible solutions
(18:10):
we're looking at. And beyond that, there are alternatives there.
You know, we have people work living in urban areas
today who are looking at and or even creating uh,
gardening spaces and farming spaces within the city limits. Yeah. Yeah,
there's you know, lots of park space that is certainly gorgeous,
but it can be gorgeous and also have apple trees.
(18:30):
You know, it doesn't these things don't. Food does not
have to be mutually exclusive with urban beauty. And also
just just roof rooftop gardens are small personal gardens on
a porch are all terrific ways to get a little
bit extra food. There's actually quite a few community gardens
in the Atlanta area in particular. In fact, I know
of three or four that are pretty close to where
(18:50):
I live now. That can be complicated because depending upon
what city you live in, there may be very strict
rules as to what you can and cannot grow. But
but that's one of those things that could help offset
the need for going outside the city limits to get
your food. Those uh, those rooftop gardens have a lot
of advantages, don't they don't They say that they like
(19:12):
cut down on that urban heat island defects. Sure, yeah.
They also, of course all plants take in carbon dioxide,
so there's that there's a as long as we've got
cars is a pretty excellent thing, right, it's a carbon
dioxide sink. It may not offset that. That's actually that
brings up another criticism I've read about vertical farms, in
(19:32):
the idea that in in greenhouses and in these vertical
farm models, often you would want to uh pump in
more carbon dioxide than would normally be in a regular
mixture of of atmosphere in an attempt to essentially are
feeding the plants. Right, It's like it would be like
an oxygen rich environment for us, right, so would be
(19:55):
a carbon dioxide rich environment for them. And I've said,
I've read some some criticisms that say, well, you know,
how do you get the carbon dioxide, And one of
the common ways is through combustion, you burn something in
common box side is but that just ends up releasing
other elements. Yeah, so so there so there again more
(20:16):
problems here, but it's not all all bad and um.
And of course, even if we reach the ideal vertical
farm world where it makes perfect sense, maybe we have
some energy surplus for some reason, we've we've cracked that
nut and the energy isn't an issue anymore, so we
can we can, depending upon your point of view, invest
(20:40):
or waste energy on these vertical fusion reactors online. We've
we've harnessed the power of the galaxy itself and now
we're gonna have our vertical farms. Gosh darn it. But
even if we do that, uh, the numbers really don't
add up, you don't. It's really hard to envision a
world where we have enough vertical farms to offset the
(21:02):
need for our food. So it looks like it's not
just hard, it's kind of impossible. Right, There's just a
scale problem. We we we would essentially have to replace all
of our buildings with vertical farms. Even then that wouldn't work, right,
I mean, what the vertical farming future, if it is
a feasible possibility, it's supplemental. It's not to replace all
(21:24):
of the farms culture. It can't, It can't possibly, right, So, really,
what we're looking at is a way to kind of
offset it a little bit, to reduce our reliance upon
traditional horizontal farms and thus reduce the impact that we
make either through the whole the production process the environmental
(21:46):
impact of just clearing out land to make a farm.
We can we can definitely take a chunk of that out,
which is an important part of conservation and sustainability, especially
if we do things like Lauren you were mentioning when
we were meeting about this earlier. You know, if if
we were to to shift our diets to be more
of vegetable and fruit heavy diet as opposed to eating
(22:08):
lots and lots of meat, then yeah, yeah, it takes
something like six liters of water to raise a two
pound steak. Um, not even not even a two pound cow.
I mean like a yeah, two pound steak just just
nurturing a two pound steak. How many big gulps of water?
Is that? That's a lot. It's a lot of big gulps. Um. Yeah,
(22:29):
that's that. I mean obviously, if we were to shift
to a more vegetarian type of diet, not necessarily strictly vegetarian,
but but more so, then we would, uh, we would
really a lot of the need for that kind of thing,
exactly exactly. And also, yeah, there's probably a lot of
crops that are a lot more I mean, you know,
a watermelon is a lot more difficult to grow, for
(22:50):
example than uh. I don't have a good counter example,
but watermelons man lots of water enough. Seriously, it's right
there in the name. Uh, I would imagine more so
than say a cucumber. Um. But anyway, Yeah, it's it's
it's an interesting idea and it's definitely one of those
things where you can look at it and you you
(23:10):
see like an artist rendering of what a vertical farm
could look like, and you're like, wow, that's a super
cool building of the future. And also these are the
same sort of uh techniques that we're looking at as
possible ways of helping us get from Earth to some
distant planet. I mean, these are these growing techniques, These
these things that we have to take into consideration just
(23:32):
to grow plants here on Earth and urban settings could
eventually inform us in our quest to get off this
rock and visit other planets. Uh So, you know, it's
it's definitely God's use. And we don't mean to downplay
the importance of vertical farms. That may very well be
that one day they are a common sight in any
major metropolitan area. But but there are issues that we
(23:55):
definitely need to take into consideration and acknowledge before we
jump it in. Well, we know it's not a sure
thing yet, but that doesn't mean it's not a good
idea to keep trying. Definitely, Yeah, trying at things that
are hard or even seem impossible is how we make improvements. Yeah. Yeah,
And if nothing else, even if we eventually get to
(24:16):
the conclusion that vertical farms are not not a viable
way to go, we could learn that there are other
through that process, we could learn other things that improve
growing in uh in in traditional farms. Or even if
we just say, okay, maybe we don't make vertical farms,
but we do make more greenhouses within urban areas to
(24:37):
help with this issue. Uh, you know, no matter what
we learned through that process, So, like like you were saying, Joe,
it's definitely a positive thing in the long run, it
just might be a little longer than what everyone was
hoping for. That's okay, that's what the future is for
nothing but the future. The future is everywhere. It is
(24:59):
so way guys, thank you so much for listening. I
hope you are enjoying the podcast the video series. Remember,
we have blogs at f w thinking dot com that
you can go and check out. We write about stuff
that relates to the podcast. We also write about other
topics that we don't really touch on in either the
series or the podcast, So I highly recommend to check
(25:20):
that out and to follow us on Facebook, follow us
on Twitter, follow us on Google Plus. Let us know
what you are interested in. We definitely want to tackle
those futuristic topics that are just gnawing at your brain.
You've got to know, how is it going to turn out.
We want to hear from you, so get in touch
with us and we will talk to you again really soon.
(25:42):
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
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