Berlin Gets First Taste of In-Store Vertical Micro-Farms (rt.com) 95
An anonymous reader shares an article on RT: German shoppers now have the chance to buy fresh greens and herbs in supermarkets with tiny vertical farms which both grow and display the produce. The new delivery method for the freshest possible produce is being pioneered by INFARM which is currently testing its live herb gardens at METRO stores in Berlin. The people behind the project say these are the first indoor farming installations of their kind, placed directly in supermarkets. "Imagine a future where cities become self-sufficient in their food production, where autonomous farms grow fresh premium produce at affordable prices, eliminating waste and environmental impact," The farms look like a tiny greenhouse inside the store where shoppers can pick their own freshly harvested salad greens and herbs right from the growing plants. The advantages of the indoor micro-farms are lower transport costs and associated emissions. They use less water, energy and space than conventional farms and horizontal greenhouses.
Farrrrrm livin' is the life for me! (Score:2)
I heard they have a new electric tractor sitting out in the parking lot because German law requires a new green tractor for all farms.
Re:Farrrrrm livin' is the life for me! (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, the tractor is sitting in a drawer ... it's a micro-farm, after all, so you only need a micro-tractor.
It charges off USB, so it's pretty green since you can do that with solar.
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Re:Farrrrrm livin' is the life for me! (Score:4, Informative)
LOL ... well, there's these guys [nmmtpapullers.com]. National Micro-Mini Tractor Pullers Association
No [nmmtpapullers.com], I didn't make that up.
You're welcome.
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> open modified
Wait, what?
They have a stock, unmodified class? 'Cause that sounds too awesome to click the link.
See, if I click the link I might find out that I'm not as pleased by the results as I want to be. In my head, this is awesome. I'm afraid that reality won't match the awesomeness that is in my head. Sadly, that's often the case - more so where people are involved.
Also, I read the headline as "Velcro" farming. That too was incredibly awesome in my head. Like I said, life seldom turns out as awes
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You know you wanna [nmmtpapullers.com]:
Well, here's the abridged version:
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I opened it in a background tab. I'll look at it later. I'm gonna remember who sent me there... So, it'd better not be too awesome and I end up with yet another hobby with too much spent on it and never finished projects scattered across both State and country borders. :/ *sighs* I need to finish my robot before I go back to Maine.
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It depends on how much farming you plan on doing. The Aerogarden line has some relatively inexpensive stuff, as long as you don't plan on growing too much, too big, or too many.
I noticed the local hardware store has been stocking up on grow-light assemblies and similar stuff lately.
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I seem to recall something about a home-brew semi-vertical garden design. "MyGrowPonics" or something similar. Basically a wallmount of long plastic flowerpots, rockwool growth matrix, and a small fish-pond pump, pumping fertilizer/water mix up to the top level, and letting it drain through the stack at alternate ends, until it ended up in the bottom reservoir with the pump. . . Site is apparently long gone, it's a Chinese site now. But basically, vertical hydroponics on a home budget...
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I've seen some of the hardware for this before. It really doesn't look like it'd be all that difficult to make it yourself. There are a variety of ways to do it and, worst case scenario, you can even 3D print (yeah, I said it) some of the plastic bits if you didn't feel like using PVC and the chemicals that go along with holding them together - though I'm also sure you could use the PEX and get away with it just fine.
It doesn't even seem like it'd be tough to make it so that it looked good. You can even aut
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That's the strangest spot, in the entire thread, that you could possibly pick to thread that comment. I had to double check (I'd scrolled down so they weren't visible) and, sure enough, you threaded your (probably) insightful, witty, and topical reply beneath a meaningless troll post that hadn't a damned thing to do with anything.
I have a confuse.
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I heard they have a new electric tractor sitting out in the parking lot.
Unfortunately, the "new electric tractor" is made by Volkswagen and billows out clouds of diesel fumes when it is started.
VW's motto used to be "Fahrvergnügen" . . . now it is "Fehlerbehebungsmaßnahmen" . . .
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How can you have a "micro-garden" in a country where they can have words like that?
scale? (Score:2)
I'm interested, but if we've got to the point where it's more efficient to grow something in a tiny urban space rather than reap the efficiencies of scale out in the vast acres of agriculture, hasn't something gone badly wrong? Where are the costs we're saving: in transport? refrigeration? waste?
(No of course I haven't RTFA! I was too busy posting my ill-informed musings.)
Re: scale? (Score:2)
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We've got a local (Florida) company that grows salad greens in portable containers that are shipped living to the restaurant - so the greens aren't harvested until the salad is prepared. The "better" restaurants keep the greens in plant-friendly sunlit / well watered locations, others just put them on display by the hostess podium and sell them so fast it doesn't matter that they're slowly dying in the air-conditioning/dim artificial light.
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Well, I guess relative to how much it did the same thing in a box inside a dark, refrigerated shipping-container travelling half way around the world is an important consideration.
"Slowly dying" when it was harvested yesterday instead of, oh, a few weeks ago is a hell of an improvement.
Oh, that and e coli and listeria and other nasty crap is far less likely to creep in along the way due to industrial processing.
Yep, they're quite tasty too.
Re:scale? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is more about hipsterism than efficiency. And even for the hipsters, urban farming is only about fresh herbs and salad greens, which are difficult to transport and store. There is no way that urban farming is going to work for staples like wheat or oil seeds, so the notion that cities will be self-sufficient in food is silly.
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Wait, what? It would be a hipster thing to want to have fresh herbs and salads which are difficult to transport and store so they don't have to come from half way around the world? Maybe even have them in winter in places which can't normally have them and have to import them? Or in remote places where you simply can't get it pretty
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(Parent's comment about self-sufficiency relates to a claim made in the Slashdot summary.)
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Sure, but TFS says this:
It didn't say "this will make cities self-sufficient".
And any degree to which you can grow locally instead of importing adds a degree of "self-sufficieny" and is stuff you don't need to import, and which doesn't need to travel thousands of miles.
I'm assuming TFA is an April Fool's joke ... but the idea isn't so crazy.
Hell, at one point this year cauliflower was something like $11 each. For ONE damned caulif
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All valid points.
BUT, the kind of thing this article is talking about is indoor growing, not out in the wild, and with a significant amount of automation ... you know like this [weburbanist.com].
So, really ... are you so sure abo
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In many cases, bulk-farmed items are cheaper.
On the other hand, I just about fall on the floor laughing whenever I pass the citrus fruit displays at the local supermarket. They're charging 50 cents a fruit for stuff that I'm begging neighbors to take surplus off me and the stuff I grow isn't small and nasty like theirs is. All for about $20 in fertilizer every few months.
Or the pineapples. On sale, they're still $2.50 or more, off sale closer to $ and the ones in my garden are as big and tasty as the ones i
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Because this is Slashdot, and it's April 1st, and I've learned that makes for a combination requiring some distrust.
I know these kinds of things exist, and people are building them. I have no idea if this specific story is fake or not.
I'm not disputing that, I actually agree this is cool technology which needs to exist, and I know people are working on it.
Whether or not, today, in Berlin the
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Who the hell said anything about solely surviving on salads? I'm a vegetarian, but I'm not a fucking cow.
Green leafy things have lots of other nutritional stuff as well. Which means while they may not provide all of your calories, they might provide some valuable nutrients. Oh, and they're tasty. Which is why you'd also grow herb.
Now, imagine, you're a researcher in the arse end of the world ... oh, I don't know, Antarctica maybe. How happy would you be to have a salad once or twice a week instead of w
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Man does not require any specific caloric source, but he absolutely does requires calories. Ever checked out the caloric content of lettuce?
The reason things like lettuce are amenable to in-store growing is precisely because they have so few calories - they don't take as much energy to grow.
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What on Earth are you talking about?
1) I never claimed anything to the contrary.
2) It was the GP talking about eating diets with a "tremendous amount of salad", not me.
3) I'm a vegetarian.
4) Not only am I a vegetarian, but I'm a vegatarian whose pet peeve is people who think that vegetarian diets are predominantly salad.
This is not about "scale" or "efficiency". (Score:2)
It is about a high-end taste/smell/quality food product. Germany is not a third-world country full of starving poor people. Actually, the whole EU has opted to not maximize efficiency when growing food, but mandates some efficiency-lowering rules (like on the population density of animal farms or limits on HFCS production [wikipedia.org]) that favor moderation of health risks or promote quality.
I know it's a concept hard to comprehend for many who've been raised in an extremely capitalist environment, but a significant par
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Hey relax, I am absolute sure they mess up. It is METRO after all. Usually, the vegetables they sell are substandard like with all other conventional supermarkets in Germany (an NDR investigation showed fungi in many vegetables and fruits). The best thing to do (even in Berlin) go to markets where they sell food direct from farms aka farmer markets. In season vegetables are usually cheaper there than at Metro, REWE etc.
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But does it have to be lit using artificial light?
The concept is not bad. There are some things that could be improved along the way (during the day, solar tubes could provide proper light). Worth investigating.
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Until I saw the photo, I took it for granted they'd be piping in natural light.
Failing that, what about the great German Solar Farm experiment?
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What about the fuel needed for farming equipment?
The cost of fuel as a percentage of deliverable product is insignificant and you don't have the efficiencies of mechanization.
http://freakonomics.com/2011/1... [freakonomics.com]
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Living up to the stereotype [satwcomic.com], I see ;)
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Yes this goes against the core idea of cities. Put people together very closely to save space and resources which is then available for farming. The only positive use case of urban gardening is to improve the micro climate in cities. That is why we have parks in cities, roof gardens, and hopefully not too many houses taller than 6-8 stories. In such layouts trees in the backyard and along the roads can regulate the climate in cities.
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For example, the population of Houston, TX (Harris County is 4.337 million people.
The area of Harris County is 1,777 square miles or 4.60e+09 square meters.
The solar insolence of Houston is 5 kWh/m/day.
So that yields 2.30e+10 kWh/day.
Divide that by the population and that's 5.306 Megawatt hours per person per day.
Who's going to be satisfied with only 5.306 MWh?
Autonomous (Score:2)
It's popping up in all sorts of places.
Autonomous Cars
Autonomous Medicine
Autonomous Weapons
Autonomous Factories
etc
It really is going to be interesting to see how in the not too distant future, one of our primary roles will be to try to maintain control over a growing list of autonomous technologies that allow our civilization to function.
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"Autonomous" is the new "smart"
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Autonomous Cars
Autonomous Medicine
Autonomous Weapons
Autonomous Factories
. . . Autonomous Posts . . . ?
Vertical farms (Score:5, Funny)
cows are going to have a hard time
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They'll have to de-criminalize cow-tipping
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That makes for a 27 degree angle, by my calcs.
That seems like it could be interesting (Score:2)
But I do wonder where our obsession with "freshness" comes from. Is it because we're so divorced from the places where our food comes from?
To be honest, I'm happy not seeing the entire process of growth through harvest. I have other things I'd rather do with my time than tend to crops and livestock. And when it comes to processing, I have a preference that livestock be treated well in their life since it's fueling mine...but I have absolutely no desire to be part of the slaughtering process. None. Again, I'
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Your question is leaping two steps ahead, you should ask "Have you ever eaten a carrot?", then "Have you ever eaten an unprocessed carrot?". Neither can be taken for granted anymore. Many of the younger generation have never witnessed the process called "cooking" which was so common amongst our ancestors, but were raised on food coming from factories. And even amongst those who personally witnessed the preparation of a meal one time or the other, many will only have seen a very last step of mixing/heating p
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But I do wonder where our obsession with "freshness" comes from. Is it because we're so divorced from the places where our food comes from?
Yes.
Actual fresh-from-the-garden produce is so much better than what's in the store.
I think some of this high-tech vertical "farming" is quite interesting and it does make you wonder if the benefits of not having to ship stuff half-way around the world is worth the local infrastructure investment.
It may not work for bulk crops that are large (corn, wheat, etc) but these
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On a broadcast of America's Test Kitchen a while back, the host talked about his childhood where they literally raced in from the fields with fresh-picked corn (or maybe it was peas). Because the minute that the produce was picked, the sugars in it began converting to starches, so for full sweetness, you wanted it prepared ASAP.
He did mention that more modern strains are less susceptible to that sort of thing, but there's still a virtue in freshness for many items.
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not a new idea (Score:2)
So what. Home Depot has those occasionally during the year. You have to buy the whole pot though.
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name one.
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oh, snap!
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Ah! (Score:2)
How are they fed? Probably non-organic liquid mineral fertilizer...
All nice and sterile, no earth worms, other critters visiting - anyone wants to be a plant THERE?
Skyscraper vertical farms in the future? (Score:3)
In some ways this complements the trend of rooftop gardens/lawns in urban areas.
not sure if this is an AFJ (Score:2)
...since verticulture is actually a thing. I grow herbs in a home built vertical planter. I grow potatoes in a denim sculpture comprising a pair of jeans filled with compost (it actually stands up on its own).
Growing local not always a good idea (Score:1)
At least the veggies will be really fresh (Score:2)
Because I totally want my Romaine and arugula to be grown under fluorescent store lights.
Fresh, as still growing (Score:1)
This approach does solve need of delicate storage, if greens were harvested for sale instead. As they are still connected to the infrastructure of their growth, it makes them not only freshest possible when buying, but also incomparably better enduring, than any other storage option.
Why does /. reference Russian propaganda on this? (Score:2)
First, this is kind of old news, here is an official press release from the METRO corporation [metrogroup.de] from February on it.
But why does the ./ article amongst all possible sources reference a Russion government financed propaganda channel on this? That's like referencing the US-propaganda channel "RIAS Berlin" when talking about supermarkets in Moscow...