Inside Singapore's Huge Bet on Vertical Farming (technologyreview.com) 90
Covid-19 has made food security a major issue. Now Singapore is investing heavily in high-tech farming as it tries to become more self-sufficient. From a report: From the outside, VertiVegies looked like a handful of grubby shipping containers put side by side and drilled together. A couple of meters in height, they were propped up on a patch of concrete in one of Singapore's nondescript suburbs. But once he was inside, Ankesh Shahra saw potential. Huge potential. Shahra, who wears his dark hair floppy and his expensive-looking shirts with their top button casually undone, had a lot of experience in the food industry. His grandfather had founded the Ruchi Group, a corporate powerhouse in India with offshoots in steel, real estate, and agriculture; his father had started Ruchi Soya, a $3 billion oilseed processor that had been Shahra's training ground. By the time Shahra was introduced to VertiVegies founder Veera Sekaran at a friend's party in 2017, he was hungry to make his own entrepreneurial mark. A previous attempt had involved sourcing organic food from around Asia: "an eye-opening experience, one with a lot of pressure," he says. It helped him spot a problem that needed solving.
"I'd seen how much dependency farmers have globally on weather," he says. "Yields were hugely erratic: there are so many inconsistencies and dependencies that it's a hugely difficult profession for the bulk of farmers. The perishable supply chain was so broken." And what Shahra saw when he stepped into Sekaran's repurposed shipping containers was a solution. Inside, mismatched plastic trays sat carefully stacked on industrial metal shelves, stretching all the way from the concrete floor to the corrugated-steel ceiling. In each tray were small green plants of different species and sizes, all with their roots bathed in the same watery solution, their leaves curling up toward the same pink glow of faintly humming LED bar lights above. With VertiVegies, Sekaran was farming vertically: growing vegetables indoors, with towers of crops stacked one on the other instead of in wide, sprawling fields, and in hydroponic solution instead of soil. He was growing food without exposure to weather or seasons, using techniques pioneered by others, in a country that was badly in need of a new way to meet its food needs.
Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, known for its tightly packed high-rises. But to cram all those gleaming towers and nearly 6 million people into a land mass half the size of Los Angeles, it has sacrificed many things, including food production. Farms make up no more than 1% of its total land (in the United States it's 40%), forcing the small city-state to shell out around $10 billion each year importing 90% of its food. Here was an example of technology that could change all that. Sekaran came from a world very different from Shahra's. The fifth of nine children, he had lost his father at five years old and grew up poor. So little money did the family have that Sekaran would show up to school in an oversized uniform, clutching his textbooks in a paper bag. But he climbed out of poverty, paying his own way through university and never losing his irrepressible passion for living things. By the time the pair met, Sekaran had qualified as a botanist and worked in the Seychelles, Pakistan, and Morocco before returning home. In almost every media interview or biography he is referred to, almost reverently, as a "plant whisperer."
"I'd seen how much dependency farmers have globally on weather," he says. "Yields were hugely erratic: there are so many inconsistencies and dependencies that it's a hugely difficult profession for the bulk of farmers. The perishable supply chain was so broken." And what Shahra saw when he stepped into Sekaran's repurposed shipping containers was a solution. Inside, mismatched plastic trays sat carefully stacked on industrial metal shelves, stretching all the way from the concrete floor to the corrugated-steel ceiling. In each tray were small green plants of different species and sizes, all with their roots bathed in the same watery solution, their leaves curling up toward the same pink glow of faintly humming LED bar lights above. With VertiVegies, Sekaran was farming vertically: growing vegetables indoors, with towers of crops stacked one on the other instead of in wide, sprawling fields, and in hydroponic solution instead of soil. He was growing food without exposure to weather or seasons, using techniques pioneered by others, in a country that was badly in need of a new way to meet its food needs.
Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, known for its tightly packed high-rises. But to cram all those gleaming towers and nearly 6 million people into a land mass half the size of Los Angeles, it has sacrificed many things, including food production. Farms make up no more than 1% of its total land (in the United States it's 40%), forcing the small city-state to shell out around $10 billion each year importing 90% of its food. Here was an example of technology that could change all that. Sekaran came from a world very different from Shahra's. The fifth of nine children, he had lost his father at five years old and grew up poor. So little money did the family have that Sekaran would show up to school in an oversized uniform, clutching his textbooks in a paper bag. But he climbed out of poverty, paying his own way through university and never losing his irrepressible passion for living things. By the time the pair met, Sekaran had qualified as a botanist and worked in the Seychelles, Pakistan, and Morocco before returning home. In almost every media interview or biography he is referred to, almost reverently, as a "plant whisperer."
Might work (Score:1)
If they find a million acres out in the middle of nowhere to do it. Pretty sure the city is too densely populated to make it possible.
interesting side effect of green power (Score:5, Insightful)
However, as our solar and wind capacity ramps up, we're going to have spikes of surplus power. What do we do with that? I have many crazy ideas of good uses for free electricity, but one I never considered was to grow food crops in vertical farms. Grow lights are pretty cheap to purchase, so leave a bunch on low power until there's a grid surplus and then crank them up to increase food production. This is a massive job creator...many low-skilled jobs picking and shipping produce a dozen miles instead of 1000. It greatly reduces emissions globally and moves jobs from agricultural centers to the communities where the goods are purchased. It also provides nice entry level jobs for high school students or people desperate for work. Seems like a win-win...cheaper and higher quality produce for the local community, more local jobs, higher investment in agricultural research. It seems very exciting!
Re:interesting side effect of green power (Score:4, Insightful)
The power-leveling aspects of this had not occurred to me before now... unlike machinery, plants are used to growing with a variable level of sunlight. Combined with the lower use of inputs such as pesticides this could really be a boost to the economic competitiveness of these operations.
Re:interesting side effect of green power (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm looking to do this in Iceland right now. If you have a contract with a grid provider that lets them curtail your power, you can get crazy-cheap rates - in US terms, a couple cents per incremental kilowatt hour. It requires industrial scales to get such contracts, mind you. The main questions are how much curtailing and how long the gaps can be. Plants can survive for periods without light input, but not for many weeks on end; you need to be able to have some degree of guaranteed minimum energy supplies. Also, the greater the percentage of time time in which power is curtailed, the more you have to spend on LED fixtures (so that you can consume more power when it's in abundance to make up for the downtime) - and said fixtures are not cheap.
It's also important to consider what sort of plants are in question. Vegetables are often a good choice as they don't have significant stores of sugars, carbohydrates, or fats, which fundamentally require a lot of energy input to produce. By contrast, the shipping of fresh perishable vegetable to market can often represent a significant amount of energy consumption and a large expense, often well greater than that used to produce them in the first place.
The intersection of cheaper power and eliminating transport costs - alongside ever-increasing LED efficiencies - appears to be well en route to making a certain subset of cultivation quite practical via vertical farming.
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Because you can get more plant-friendly light this way. And because you can run it off wind power as well. And because you can use a smaller building to contain and recycle water, prevent pests from invading, keep toxic environmental contaminants out of your product, and control for optimal growing temperatures. And as the parent said because it can be done closer to the market to reduce transportation costs (both energy and financial.)
There's a lot more up-front capital costs but if the things you buy a
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No.
No.
What part of "Iceland" makes you immediately jump to "solar power"?
No. To use the LEDs to provide light that there's no other way for them to get here.
Additionally, see below. [slashdot.org]
why not do it in a greenhouse? (Score:3)
So let me get this straight... You're planning to take sunshine, run it through a PV panel to create electricity, then you're going to use the electricity to run LEDs to provide "sunshine" to your plants?
Why not just use the sunshine on the plants directly? Duh.
Why not do both? It's safe to assume any growing operation will have windows, when possible, if not a full greenhouse. There's lots of creative ways to redirect light. However, when you have spikes of surplus unwanted power, which will be a thing in the near future, a greenhouse could store it locally in batteries and shine grow lights at night, if not shine them during the day when the solar surplus is typically happening.
It may not be the best use of surplus electricity, but it is an interesting can
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It will. Though they do precious little in the winter except increase your rate of heat loss and add to your structure costs.
Still worth it for light in the rest of the year, though.
(Also, because people seem not to be able to follow threads: the post I was replying to was talking about using power when it's cheap for lighting (since plants can tolerate uneven lighting), not windowless plant cultivation in shipping crates).
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Re:Seems more like a solution looking for a proble (Score:5, Informative)
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That said, hydroponic farming indoors is likely more energy efficient even with lighting added in than traditional farming. You make exponentially better use of fertilizer/nutrients and water, you do not need to use a tractor for seeding or harvest, and you can optimize the growth cycle with temperature, humidity, and light control.
IIRC, the production yield on an area (tray area vs field area) basis is something like 5-1
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Side-effect, no John Deere DRM to worry about. Right-to-repair all the way.
Polynomial improvement (Score:2)
Something tells me the improvement is polynomial, not exponential.
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Using solar power for grow lights is plan stupid. Silicon solar cells are 20% efficient. LEDs are 50% efficient, so you end up being able to use only 10% of the solar power. The math for this just does not add up. What Singapore needs is more area. It would make more sense if they proposed farming on off-shore platforms, because they solve the area problem. Also, using roofs for farming has some merit to it, assuming the roof area gets enough sunlight.
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Solar cells are using sunlight, which is broad spectrum
Plants use two bands of light, one in the red zone and one in the blue (ok, there is some use for uvb but far less energy needed)
It is less expensive to use LEDs to produce those two bands of light than the entire spectrum, so it likely falls well below the 80% power loss you are complaining about allowing for at least as good of growth from the light delivered in specific spectrum
Funny thing, fields can still be grown around solar installations, and pl
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Agrivoltaics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Hah, they whipped out the old Licor 6400 at 1:55. Not the newer fancy touchscreen one either, the old grey on grey alphanumeric model with lead acid batteries.
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Actually, abandoning old food system for new is the most sensible. Bio-engineered algae is definitely the way to go, forget the nonsense around soylent green (when the planet can no longer support algae, we would be long extinct).
Anything could be achieved in terms of flavour and texture, algae being so simple is easy to genetically alter. Don't just think pond scum, think kelp. A nice big thick leaf, that mimics beef in terms of flavour, texture and as a bonus that super food mix of trace elements. Grown i
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If they find a million acres out in the middle of nowhere to do it. .
Or one acre with a million growing levels. Note the "vertical" in "vertical farming".
I don't think the idea would be to produce 100% of the food the county needs this way, but to provide a margin of stability. A country like Singapore, which produces virtually none of its own food, has to be looking at the global supply chain disruptions caused by COVID and feeling a bit nervous.
It is quite certain that this kind of energy-intensive system cannot be price-competitive with regular agricultural imports, but
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A million levels, and you'll have your space elevator...
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Excellent idea, except for one flaw: the shipping containers are stacked horizontally!
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And how does vertical farming improve your access to sunlight? Even when using grow lights you need surface area for solar panels. Now, remember that solar panels are 20% efficient and LEDs in grow lights are 50% efficient. What they need is more area. They could put some green houses on the roofs, and that would work. Some area for farming is better than no area for farming.
Vertical farming is a good idea in buildings with unrestricted access to sunlight, but vertical farming in a building which is mostly
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Electricity is less expensive to deliver than produce, so the solar farms can be anywhere that they have access to the same grid that the vertical farm is attached to.
Also, the solar farms can be placed on pasture-land, where the shade actually encourages more plant growth [scientificamerican.com], or land that is completely unsuitable for any other use
Is it really that hard to figure out?
hmmmm, seem trollish, nah not on a solar energy discussion on /. what was I thinking
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They're actually growing plants 100% by grow lights as far as I can see. It's incredibly energy intensive, and therefore it is not *economically* competitive, as I noted, especially as electricity in Singapore is expensive, at least by US standards. However, that does free you to stack layers of plants fairly close to each other, which may well offset the cost of energy if the cost of land is extremely high, which it is in SIngapore -- something like $7000 per *square meter*.
But you just don't do somethi
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The proposed Sun Cable [abc.net.au] (a massive solar farm running in the north of Australia's desert and an undersea cable to Singapore, would at least solve the energy side of the equation for them.
Singaporeans would get energy cheaper than we get it here in Australia, due to our ultra-conservative governments flat-out denial of climate change and therefore will not back a single energy policy that goes anywhere near renewables [reneweconomy.com.au]. As an Australian, this makes me sad.
Re: Might work (Score:2)
falling cows (Score:2)
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But you're supposed to assume a perfectly spherical cow...
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But all the cow management software assumes spherical cows for some odd reason.
Re: falling cows (Score:2)
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Velcro. It keeps them from moooving.
Mathemtical nonsense. (Score:3)
This only "works", if nobody else around you has the same idea.
Otherwise you'll end up with narrow street corridors that barely get any light, and if, then only weak rays at a steep angle right at the outside wall, for a few minutes a day. Where the only leftover growth area is your roof. Until somebody has the equally stupid idea to build higher... which again works until everyone else catches up.
In the end, you can never grow more than you could with a flat piece of land at ground level (the same level as everyone else).
But hey, bridges and Eiffel towers and iPhones have been sold ... Not that improved anything but a short term pocket bloat for some scam artist.
Re:Mathemtical nonsense. - it works (Score:5, Informative)
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This is not direct-sunlight agriculture. It's hydroponics plus LED lights.
Re: Mathemtical nonsense. (Score:2)
Doesn't add up (Score:1)
The energy math doesn't seem to add up. If you use electricity to give light to the plants, that energy has to either come from somewhere. If it comes from the sun, then just put the plants there instead of solar panels, because there is less loss in energy transfer and usage. The alternative is from fossil fuels, and that's not a good thing. I suppose it could come from ocean waves or wind, but farms can be put in those places instead also.
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The energy math doesn't seem to add up.
How about water? If you're in a drought, growing food in controlled indoor conditions means you'll be retaining a lot more of the water you're using vs. outdoor irrigation. You can also maximize the yield potential of crops grown indoors, since you can precisely cater the conditions to what they need.
The energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Solar, hydro, wind, nuclear are also good options. Furthermore, non-vertical indoor farms often use natural light from the sun. Vertical farms instead have the
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In the short term, there's really no practical way this can scale up to meet the world's food requirements. Go to Google Earth, and zoom in on the anywhere in the midwest [google.com], or in the non-urban areas of California [google.com], or Eastern Washington [google.com]. It's almost all agricultural fields. In Iowa, there are so many square fields that the state literally looks pixelated [google.com].
Put into numbers, in the US alone is an estimated 897,400,000 acres of farmland, divided up among 2,023,400 farms [usda.gov].
Can you imagine the construction costs a
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I'm not suggesting we replace traditional agriculture entirely. It certainly isn't reasonable to use these approaches for all crops or even all production of some crops. And yes, even at a modest scale it would require a large amount of resources. However:
- As interest in these methods of farming grows, cheaper (less resource-intensive) construction methods can be devised.
- You're ignoring the potential benefits of generally increased yield from controllable photoperiod, higher efficiency of hydro growth te
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That being said, I agree this could not be implemented full-world-scale any time soon, but I do not think anyone is trying to. But it
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If there is a shortage of water in a country, then there is a shortage of water, period. The supply has to be rationed regardless of where you water things.
Re: "areas with little arable land"
As I mentioned elsewhere, almost all land is arable with a bit work and the right crop selection, probably less average work than managing a vertical farm.
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Using the same amount of water for outdoor irrigation will result in much less of that water actually being absorbed by the plants (due to evaporation), as opposed to with indoor farming.
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Indoor soil has less evaporation? I suppose if it's more humid in there, but high humidity changes what kind of plants you can grow, and invites more critters and mold.
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You can control the humidity level. The water that evaporates is not "lost" like it is when you're outdoors. With proper air circulation, mold is not a big issue. I'm not sure why you're so dead-set against this idea.
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All that tuning and maintenance is not cheap.
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Will denying the local climate that evaporation have an effect on the biome?
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The energy math doesn't seem to add up. If you use electricity to give light to the plants, that energy has to either come from somewhere. If it comes from the sun, then just put the plants there instead of solar panels, because there is less loss in energy transfer and usage.
Humans can't eat solar panels. This is about feeding humans. The energy math adds up just fine, because the absolute necessity of the form of energy required at the end is fixed and immutable. This is about gathering energy from wherever, including places where you can't grow crops, and shipping it in (with the amazingly convenient technology known was 'wires') and using it where you can grow crops.
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"Humans can't eat solar panels. This is about feeding humans."
No it isn't.
All those vertical farms of the world produce greens with a calorie density of about zero.
Salads, sprouts and tomatoes don't 'feed' anybody, on average 100 calories pro Kilo just isn't enough.
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The Bundys don't do vegetables.
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All those vertical farms of the world produce greens with a calorie density of about zero.
Today, sure, vertical farming is used to cater to the food prejudices of hipster twits with a scientific understanding of the world that falls short of your typical goldfish, because it's profitable. People who can be convinced that kale has mystical properties will pay anything for crunchy water.
Singapore will grow rice.
Tuned for the finicky, not raw energy math (Score:1)
Even the worst real-estate is more growth-worthy than hanging pots in terms of human input. I suspect it's more about controlling the kind of food rather than producing sufficient food to feed the populace. It's catering to the spoiled middle class. (And I admit I am spoiled by choice myself.)
Well, okay, maybe if the land is a chemical dump or the like, but that doesn't appear to be a key problem.
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Even the worst real-estate is more growth-worthy than hanging pots in terms of human input.
Well, okay, maybe if the land is a chemical dump or the like, but that doesn't appear to be a key problem.
This is Singapore we're talking about. Nobody seems to grasp the nature of the problem. Singapore has more than 5.7 million people packed into 725.7 square kilometers. A population density of 7,804 per square kilometer, the second highest density in the world, jammed into a space smaller than all but the smaller Caribbean islands and a smattering of islands in the South Pacific. And Vatican City and Liechtenstein. Everywhere else is bigger. There's no chemical dump. There's city. And more city. Try
Re:Doesn't add up (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh come on. It easily adds up. Solar panels are so much more efficient than photosynthesis that indoor farming for crops that can grow in hydroponics settings is basically a no-brainer.
Photosynthesis efficiency is about 2%, but only during the right season, in the right temperatures and only up to a certain level of sunlight intensity.
Solar panels have an efficiency of about 15%-20%, work in all seasons and temperatures and can effectively use sunlight at much higher intensities than what plants can do. Also, they can use much more of the sunlight spectrum than plants can (but that's already in the 2% photosynthesis efficiency). In most places on earth, indoor farming with LEDs with a suitable spectrum that use solar panel electricity easily competes with outdoor farming in a field the same size as needed for those solar panels from an energy efficiency point of view. And that's without the big ass wind turbine you could also place in that field.
But there are many more benefits to indoor farming. It's more reliable, the produce is of higher quality, easier to harvest, requires less water, works year-round so does not require storage and can be done near the consumer so transportation costs are also much lower.
For crops that can be farmed indoor, doing so is a no-brainer, especially in places with very high or very low sunlight intensity, a short growing season or limited water supply.
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As a mentioned elsewhere, it's not really a contest between panel efficiency and plant efficiency because a plant is in the chain under both scenarios. If I implied it was a direct competition, I apologize for the poor wording.
Re: works year-round
Only if you use expensive environmental control, such as heating.
Re: It's more reliable, the produce is of higher quality, easier to harvest,
Well, I generally agree, but I don't think this will offset the downsides. If the goal is to have "pretty" food rather than
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Fair enough. But I think the vast majority of food eaten in locations where indoor farming would be an option (because of the rather large initial investment required compared to traditional farming), is such "pretty" food; the energy currently employed to make food for the typical diet in such places is about 10 times that of the actual food! So I don't think the survival aspect is relevant in this case (which is a huge part of why we're killing our planet...).
Also note that heating is usually not the issu
Re:Doesn't add up (Score:5, Insightful)
Plants are actually less efficient at harvesting solar energy than solar panels. They use smaller bands of solar wavelengths. LEDs designed to emit those specific bands can convert the entire bandwidth of the solar cell to to the bands the plants can actually use, minus system loss. Add to this the ability to control pests without pesticide application, control the water cycle and environment and you can grow crops with a lot less energy input (and with shorter growing cycles). Wind and tidal power may also be applied.
There's still a lot of active work figuring out exactly what the maximum achievable efficiency is. Most of the work I've seen so far is on lettuce [nature.com] growing. This field of research/engineering is still in its infancy.
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Not if you count the energy needed to mine the materials and manufacture solar panels, including disposal costs.
This has been a focus of study for quite some time and no, these costs do not outweigh their benefits. Mostly because solar panels last a decade plus and are drastically more efficient than plants at harvesting solar energy. This isn't a game of margins; it's a matter of 1-2 orders of magnitude.
How do you control the pests? Maybe initially you can, but over time critters will evolve to take advantage of the new environment.
You seem to have a rather distorted idea of the timescales on which evolution, or even epigenetic adaptation, occurs.
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This is not even about the efficiency of plants because ultimately plants will be converting light into food in EITHER case. It's more about direct sunlight versus sun-to-panel-to-grid-to-LED. Panels are lossy versus direct sun.
I think you fail to understand. You can grow plants with LEDs that only emit the wavelengths the plants will actually use, and the plants will waste 90% of that energy, or you can expose them directly to sunlight, in which case they will waste 99% of that energy. You get more growth out of the same amount of sunlight with the LEDs, even with total PEV/LED system inefficiencies.
there will be a lot of different kinds of critters with a shot at it: gnats, ants, flies, moths, rats, roaches, worms, etc., including multiple species of each these.
Not many of them can chew through a shipping container wall, and by your logic, we should just give up on field farming as well an
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What matters is cost. And:
1) The energy to transport fresh perishable vegetables can cost many times the cost of producing the vegetables to begin with.
2) Power prices fluctuate dramatically based on time of day and supply concerns - particularly on high-renewables grids. Plants are relatively flexible energy consumers.
Additionally, it should be mentioned that things aren't as simple as you portray them. Some complicating factors:
1) The in-spectrum and out-spectrum are not identical. You entirely control th
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Addendum:
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], plants can utilize most of the visible spectrum. Leaves absorb red and blue the best, but multiple layers of leaves allows eventual conversion of green/yellow light also as it passes through the first layer of leaves. It thus doesn't "go to waste". Nature found a way to harvest most of it well.
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Sigh. God, where do I even begin? I've been dealing with this stuff for a decade and a half; we're way beyond "Wikipedia" here. I don't even know what you already know, in order to know where to start.
You do understand that a photon's energy is relative to its wavelength, right? Let's start there. The minimum energy it takes to make a photon, if you can do it at 100% efficiency, is (inversely) linearly correlated with its wavelength. At 100% efficiency, it takes almost twice as much energy to make a blu
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It's nothing to do with "together". Different kinds of plants are more vulnerable to different kinds of weather. Some handle floods better, others handle droughts better, etc. If you plant variety on a country-wide basis, then no single bad weather event will wipe out the majority of your crops.
Ants and roaches already find and use small cracks and holes. I
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You seem to be very well informed on this topic. A question I have is will indoor or vertical farming ever be calorie-dense enough? I have seen a few articles that indicate that current indoor farming only efficiently produces low calorie foods such as lettuce, tomatoes, micro-greens, etc. Our staple food crops, rice, wheat, corn, legumes, potatoes, sugar (sugar beets/cane) are very calorie dense but not suitable for indoor farming.
Is this true?
Do you see a future with high calorie indoor farms able to actu
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In the long term, the energy will come from Australia. The proposed Sun Cable [abc.net.au] (a massive solar farm running in the north of Australia's desert and an undersea cable to Singapore) would solve the energy side of the equation for them.
Good hedge against supply disruptions (Score:2)
However, when there is scarcity and prices are driven up, many more types of crops become viable. It might be wise for the local government to subsidize just to have options, thereby funding fur
Re:Good hedge against supply disruptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Every breakdown of vertical farming I've ever read showed it to be massively inefficient when compared with outdoor and greenhouse crops. The only thing that seems to fly in a normal economic climate is pricey salad greens. Between rent, taxes, resource costs and labor, the numbers are really hard to make work.
Rent is only a factor because vertical farming so far has been done only in urban areas where real estate is already unusually expensive. But for Singapore, this is a national security issue. Minor things like the price of real estate will be swept away by state mandate if necessary. The Singaporean government is not the least bit shy about deciding, "This is how it shall be," and the population goes along with it because as far as they're concerned, that's why they elected their government.
The real kicker is labor. For staple crops grown in fields, ridiculous machines such as this [youtube.com] or this [youtube.com] or this [youtube.com] exist with 18,000 liter grain tanks and 12.3 meter cutter bars, doing the work of an entire city of men with scythes, and doing it faster and more consistently and with less loss. There is no equivalent machine for a vertical farm. Yet. It IS just a machine. Another machine can be built that does all of its functions, but optimized for a different sort of "field". It may actually be more energy efficient than those behemoths, since it won't have to (or be able to) lug the grain separation machinery around with it as it cuts and it will be entirely electrically powered. The expertise already exists at Claas, at New Holland, at John Deere to design and build these machines. These are all new models. Those teams could design and build the vertical farm equivalent in just a few years. They're literally global experts.
When I hear that one of those teams has been engaged to design the rice harvesting machinery for Singapore, I will know I am seeing the rise of the very first arcology. I expect it will be in Singapore. All of the right pressures are there, and so is the financial wherewithal. Ankesh Shahra and Veera Sekaran may or may not be involved, but someone will get it done. Singapore needs it. And I bet it would cost them less than five years of their food bill to do it, but even if it cost them 10 years worth, it would be worth it.
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Depends on what crop you're talking about. Vegetable are still very labor intensive. Whether you grow them in large fields or in artificial vertical facilities, the labor is similar. Broad acre staple crops that can be mechanized, like wheat, rice, oats, etc, don't make a lot of sense for urban vertical growing to begin with.
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Broad acre staple crops that can be mechanized, like wheat, rice, oats, etc, don't make a lot of sense for urban vertical growing to begin with.
They do in Singapore where broad acres are nowhere to be found. There's already city there. That was rather the point of this story.
It remains to be seen just how difficult fresh produce is in these circumstances. The field is in its infancy (no pun intended). There hasn't been much in the way of automation attempts yet. Combines like those I linked are the culmination of two centuries of dedicated engineering effort, beginning with the first mechanized reapers. Automation for fresh produce is just ge
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âoeAt some point we're probably going to have to get better at indoor farming regardless,âoe
Why do you maintain that? Land is hardly at a shortage for most agricultural countries. Singapore has different constraints but itâ(TM)s not the general rule.
Even with a warming climate, I expect farming will simply move north ( to Canada or Siberia)
Real advantage here is Pests Control (Score:1)
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>if you can keep the workers from peeing on the vegetables you should be good to go
You may want to re-think that. Urine contains nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. It's basically a simple fertilizer.
Spend billions (Score:3)
Spend billions to grow some very cheap and abundant crops like rice or beans. What a great idea. It's revolutionary. I understand that the concept of food security is very important. But Singapore is not USA, China, or Russia. Not even Ukraine. You're a tiny city state surrounded by seas.
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It'd be an interesting article... (Score:2)
except for the paywall
Re:It'd be an interesting article... (Score:4, Informative)
In Firefox, select View / Page Style / No Style from the menu. The formatting is gone but you can read the entire article.
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Like that whole internet thing? CRISPR? (Score:2)
The Singaporean government is usually smart enough not to waste their taxpayers' money on such boondoggles. If indoor farming makes sense, it won't take tax money to make it happen.
-jcr
Yeah...every valuable thing in life can be completely funded by the private sector, like...the internet, DNA research, CRISPR technology? genetic engineering? roads? mass transit?
It's a good thing all the tech giants have rejected every dollar of government spending sent their way...same with the medical and automotive sector.
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Greenhouses are the sweet spot (Score:1)
My own experience with indoor farming (Score:2)
The best part about indoor farming is it's a sealed environment. The worst part about indoor farming is it's a sealed environment. Mites, mold, and disease have a great time partying in indoor grows. Speaking from experience.