Vertical Farming: A Professional Grower Checks the Hype
Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm when I mentioned the term "vertical farming" what exactly is it that you envision? Is it these gleaming stainless steel and glass towers : mega-structures like from some science fiction novel? Or are you thinking of a cavernous warehouse completely sterile with staff and lab coats and face coverings growing micro greens and solid greens under artificial light? Given what the conception is in popular culture of vertical farming you'd be justified in thinking either one of those things but what really is it? Vertical farming is kind of the place where agriculture meets not only science fiction but tech company valuations and hype because they're raising hundreds of millions of dollars towards these mega-projects in North America alone I watched an award-winning documentary and great quality called "Vertical: the future of farming" where they take a rather uncritical look I have to say at these vertical farming technologies as they emerge and let's take a look at a clip of that some vertical Farms yield as much as 10 times the amount of crops in the same amount of space as a conventional Farm but the benefits go deeper than simply space because they're indoors the environment is controlled there are no Seasons so crops can be grown any time of the year in any part of the world use of pesticides herbicides and fertilizers aren't necessary now wait a second it sounds like they just said there would be no fertilizer I mean the plants are going to need to get their nutrients from somewhere and looking back a little further did they just say that there would be no pests at all well they didn't quite say that but this other video by Freethink goes the full way when you grow things outside the elements are much more unpredictable if you grow indoors you can control a lot of those factors in ways that aren't accessible to outdoor Growers and the result is that our produce can be you know hundreds of times cleaner plenty doesn't need to use pesticides because there are no bugs I promise to give a fair shot to all of the other claims of vertical farming but I have to stop this one in its tracks because that idea that you can exclude or eliminate pests altogether just is wrong it's something that has been tried in the real world for many many years in controlled environment Agriculture and it just hasn't happened you still no matter how tight the grow room no matter how tight the growing space you still get pests to get big outbreaks and what they basically have to end up doing is managing it by the introduction of beneficial insects to try to manage the levels of pests not to eliminate them entirely so that's just well I'm going to rate that one as false but that's what I want to do with the claims of vertical farming the truth is it's a valid system there are places where this actually makes a lot of sense and I want to go through those in this video today but what probably has to happen is those Sky High claims of vertical farming have to be brought back down to earth and that's what I intend to do in this video I think it's going to be useful for the rest of the video to divide vertical farming into two general areas the first one is the one that uses sunlight like traditional field agriculture or like modern Greenhouse agriculture this one uses the sun uses the seasons doesn't pretend they don't exist the other one is more like a grow up a grow room where they enclose it and they put in completely artificial LED lights and try to control the environment entirely and although both can be called vertical farming systems they are quite different from each other and so I'm going to treat them in separate sections first I'm going to talk about those that use sunlight as a gardener as a professional grower my experience has all been with systems that take advantage of the Sun and I have to say right up front almost if you have the choice why wouldn't you use the sun it's a giant free source of light energy tuned in exactly to what your plants want and need and it also provides a big bump up and head start on any heating needs that you may have in growing those plants so if you've got this big resource free ready to use abundant why wouldn't you just go ahead and use it directly instead of trying to find a way to capture energy someplace else pump it in transform it into LED lighting now let me just say that these systems that I'm talking about big greenhouses don't always go entirely without manipulating the seasons they don't just follow the Sun or follow the seasons oftentimes they will add supplemental lighting they sometimes will add supplemental heat to stretch those Seasons but very rarely will you find a grower who entirely ignores them and in our local area here the Lower Mainland of the Fraser Valley has a big industry of pepper Growers tomato Growers cucumber Growers the big veggie Growers have these tall greenhouses and they don't ignore the sun they actually have a cycle that kind of follows when light is most abundant they start their cycle before it's very abundant when the plants are quite small they put them in as seedlings and that happens usually in January or February light levels are still low but they can handle it because there's no canopy of plants up above it by the time they've grown in grown up put on lots of leaves they get a giant head start on the season going all the way through until the following say November when light levels have dropped down below what's useful for the plants they have the big canopy they have the mature plants they take the plants down they clean that growing environment give it a little rest do all their maintenance and they start back up again in January or February it's a growing cycle that makes almost full use of that entire space throughout the sea Seasons but doesn't fight against the Heat and the light requirements that you would need in the winter when that sunlight is at its brightest it actually is more light than most plants can use and I want to put some values to this some number values to this although everybody uses different numbers strangely to uh to measure light but I'm just going to put it in lumens here and just say that a day that has or when you're delivering say a hundred and thirty thousand lumens onto the crop that's more than most any crop can use fully itself a plant reaches what it's called its saturation point when more light doesn't create more photosynthesis on tomatoes that might be somewhere around a hundred thousand lumens it's pretty high actually because tomatoes generally have that canopy of leaves corn would be the same thing where they build this canopy of leaves around themselves and that intense light can try to penetrate all the way down so it can use about a hundred thousand lumens of it let's say on the other hand something that is low growing leafy greens say something like oh lettuce or strawberries something that doesn't have a large canopy that's actually more light than the plant could use and this is the premise for some of these vertical farming systems that use the sunlight they kind of go with the idea that well traditionally Market gardeners what they would have done to deal with that abundance of light is they would have grown very tightly together and planted those crops and harvested those crops in quick succession trying to manage it but they can't get the density that you can get with a vertical farming system I'm going to show you some video now from Sky greens Canada we're kind enough to show me their system how it is that they pack so many more plants into that same amount of space and it starts with the fact that they do go vertical they have a 30 foot Tower and on that 30 foot Tower they have 38 trays if my math is right that's 19 on each side and think of those trays as filled up with say something like lettuce now the ones at the Top If You Think from the very start are getting far more light than the ones on the bottom but that's not the way they leave it because they use a water powered pump they use their pump to turn this the to rotate these trays around this thing think of it like a ferris wheel or the one on the bottom then moves around the top and then returns back to the bottom so they all get their time in the Sun and so for a while they get intense sunlight but then they're dropped back down into a dappled shade in the lower areas of the greenhouse they can fit far more plants into the same amount of space now I have some figures based on strawberry density and how many they can fit into their system and it is far more than you would get from traditional ways of laying out strawberries in your Greenhouse well as you can see the numbers add up or multiply out in so far as you can fit in 20 times more strawberries in this tower system than you would ever fit by using even the modern efficient gutter systems now 20 times more strawberry sounds pretty good but now let's talk about light because he may not have enough light at that point if you go that dense to get the same amount of yield remember those other systems are already maximized for yield per square foot now going back to the number I talked about before a bright clear day can give you 100 to 130 000 Lux of energy coming down on your crop and strawberries have a light saturation Point somewhere in the range of about 40 000 Lux so you're getting about three times as much light as the plant needs and by stacking it like that now you're fitting in 20 times as much for that you can see there's a deficit there you can see that you might have to make up the difference by adding supplemental light now here's where it comes in the idea and the main concept of vertical farming is that space is tight especially in urban spaces but also well anywhere I mean land is not free if you have land and you're using it for agriculture you may want to pack in as much plants as you can per square foot greenhouses are not free greenhouses once you've already put in the the investment to put in a Big Greenhouse you're controlling the heat you're controlling the humidity you're controlling that environment might it make sense just pack in more plants even if it means you have to supplement with artificial light it could but it's one of those things you'll have to do with real calculations you'd have to sit down with the supplier of the of the vertical farming system you'd have to sit down with your expected yields per plant and work out a real financial plan around this but I I can see a path to making higher density work for you the next topic I really wanted to talk about is which crops this actually could make sense for and I think I want to start by debunking the question about whether cro the other crops the crops that are not in vertical farming systems are actually flat so think about when you first plant corn in a field okay now of course at that point if you look at the at the ground and the sun coming down there's a ton of wasted space on there the seedlings are tiny and there's a lot of room in between them but very very quickly that corn will grow upwards and it becomes a little more vertical and in fact what it will do is it will fill in all of the space between those corn seedlings with leaves and it will take full advantage of that sunlight so again if you have that 100 130 000 lumens of light coming down on the plants they shade all the lower leaves down to where that sunlight has to work hard to penetrate that canopy and the plant soaks it all up in his power hooks it's very useful so for a lot of cereal and grain crops that's why places like Canada and Ukraine and these higher latitudes with a longer days during summer actually have such amazing yields on these grain crops is because the plants are very very good at taking advantage of all that intense sunlight over such a long period so it certainly is not a flat crop as as for as far as vertical goes it's quite vertical it it grows up and it absorbs all of the light over the distance that before it hits the ground or substantially all of that light likewise if you looked at tomatoes and I've used that example already is it would make no sense to take tomatoes and put them in a vertical cropping system the tomatoes will Vine up and they'll reach high heights themselves and in fact in most tomato growing systems they're stripping off leaves from the lower parts of the plants because there's so little light reaching the bottom of the greenhouse so tomatoes are already vertical likewise you're not going to try this with something like almond trees or avocado trees there's some things that just make no common sense insofar as these plants are already quite vertical and use up all of the light I also wanted to say just as an aside here that many Greenhouse Growers already without any fancy vertical systems will have a plant canopy across the bottom and let's say if you're growing annuals like I saw over at Clearview they had the annual baskets or the hanging baskets up higher in the rafters of the greenhouse so that would be considered well I guess a low-tech vertical system where you have a crop up above and it's shading a little bit and there's a crop down below taking advantage of the leftover light so how how unvertical are crops already is the first thing I would ask there and then what are useful in these vertical cropping systems and so far the things that they have really focused in on the things that have actually made it into commercial applications are things like lettuce and leafy greens herbs microgreens those are the main strawberries it's another one so again these very low profile things that they're going to try to split the light in between underneath the sunlight now I did have a good interview with Bob Holm from Sky greens Canada he's the CEO there and he talked a little bit more about the kinds of crops you can put on this and it's a very common sense guy about what makes sense in that and some other things that he mentioned to me Beyond just what I said in terms of leafy greens and herbs but he also talked about animal fodder and that's almost like a microgreens application you showed me a video where they've grown say barley fodder up to a certain height because it doesn't grow micro greens you typically just about only Sprout them and then and and then take and then Harvest them straight away with these ones you would grow the microgreens to a higher height and then feed them on and of course now I'm going to treat you to a piece of video of Bison eating those micro green trays or the the fodder trays which I think is actually where else you're going to see that so that's kind of cool yeah we've we've been growing everything in there from beets to all all the herbs the Basils The Parsley Cilantros all those things are great and you know what there's a short supply of that stuff so especially in the winter it's a big Supply so I talk to people like when you're looking at setting up a vertical Farm I look at what what is your Market you know what do you guys got in your area like and then what can you sell and how much can you sell and then let's build a grow room around that and so I've had a lot of discussions with Cisco and they want things like arugula parsley Cilantros they do not want any more micro greens like there's just too much of that out there you know there's a lot of guys doing cucumbers Tomatoes which doesn't really work in a vertical Farm because they're tall crops already yeah so yes we've got to stick to something a little shorter I mean the Cannabis guys can do it too if they're doing their clones but you're not going to get the end results in there but they're great for clones because you can put so many in a row he also brought up an application of using it for Forest Nursery there's a forest nurseries that grow little trees and of course these are young and they don't need tons and tons of light but they the space I mean if you pack these into a greenhouse and you're trying to fill a greenhouse with all of these it just takes a ton a ton of space and if you put them into the vertical farming system you can pack far more seedlings into a smaller space and that's something that they're trialling right now so I think he envisions this as being uh as people apply their imagination and their own crops to it that people can find things that this works for obviously they're not going to go to the extreme examples of trees and field crops like wheat and Grains although you know if you listen to the hype of the um of the vertical farming industry that's almost exactly what they're saying is that this could work for any crop so far I've talked a lot about the sunlight based systems because I think they have the best shot of being viable at least over the short term but there are producers even today who are using fully enclosed dark grow spaces that are supplemented entirely by artificial light and that they're using those to produce mainly micro greens and small salad greens and it's no mistake that they've chosen those crops as their proof of concept the thing about micro greens is that a lot of the energy that those plants need are already stored in the seed they've already that was already stored by the mother plant in the field in the past growing season they come in with all that chemical ready to go and the growing cycle is relatively short if you sprout micro greens at first you don't even need any sunlight all you need is a little bit of warmth a little bit of moisture or humidity and these plants will start up they'll Sprout and they'll get to a couple of inches with almost no light at all if you give them just a minimal amount of light they'll start to green anyway if you give them then on the next five to seven days of bright light that crop is ready for Harvest so this is why this crop can make particular sense in that system is that you don't have an extended period of time that you're having to support it under artificial lights here's the problem generally with this and it's not just a problem of current technology it's a problem of energy and physics is that if you're trying to push that much energy into that much space what they estimate is that a fully enclosed facility may need five and a half acres of solar panels to create one acre of indoor Farm wow that's that's a lot of footprint for a system that's trying to reduce the footprint of Agriculture is I guess what I'm going to say so that's why these producers have done a great job of focusing on these very short crops once again microgreens are very short baby leafy greens or salad greens are also a very short crop but how do you translate this into big bulk crops like say a potato which might take a hundred days to produce a crop I don't want to know what the price of that potato might be and this is where we bump up against the economics of the situation because money isn't just an artificial way that we keep score it's also a way that you can compare one use of resources against another use of resources and when you talk about these centralized Warehouse factory farms that use artificial light completely the startup costs on some of those can be in the range of a hundred million dollars or more and many of these companies like the one you saw in the second clip are still being built under Tech evaluations they haven't had their IPO yet we have no idea if they have any path towards profitability and some tech companies like uber for instance can go many many years without ever posting a profit and you don't know the viability of their system because of that so that's the problem with this and let's talk about a real world example because real world is where it actually makes some sense here is I have an example a case study which is the Cannabis industry and the Cannabis industry was a fully indoor system I'm not going to say fully indoor but a good portion of the producers here in Canada and across North America had to have some of their production let's say underground or undercover for a length of time due to other pressures to do with law enforcement and so on but recently that has changed and so a lot of those big Warehouse operators the big cannabis producers are suddenly up against competition from more efficient greenhouse-based operations and the largest producers of cannabis now the largest production facilities have moved over to greenhouse and of the top 10 cannabis producers in North America today most of them you'll see have started to move into outdoor and Greenhouse operations from previously being a fully Ware host and and artificial light system in many cases so this gives you some idea of where the economics of this lie so I want to return to the outdoor applications or rather the greenhouse applications just for my final thoughts on the cost benefit analysis of vertical farming because I really think there can be a case made for it but you really have to have a fair comparison Apples to Apples and I wanted to show you some footage from a place called little leaf farms and this place is in New England it produces lettuce so that's an Apples to Apples comparison to what most vertical Farmers or many vertical Farms are using but they're not using an up and down system they go flat but they go high intensity and you can see here that they've just gone with very little spacing they're moving through this crop very very quickly they're using high technology and all of the benefits that are talked about with vertical farming are the same benefits that they're going to talk about they're going to say that their plants are grown hydroponically yes they are they use less water absolutely in fact I want to tackle this one second is to say that when you compare it to field agricultural or any drain to waste system of course modern agriculture modern Greenhouse systems are going to have the advantage any place where you are feeding with water and reclaiming that water and recirculating it you're going to have 90 95 percent less water use than you would if you're just overhead sprinkling out in a field so the fair comparison isn't between vertical and horizontal it's between field Agriculture and controlled agriculture which is actually a completely different thing than what they're saying in these videos so again going back to this little leaf Farm they have all of the benefits of these vertical farming systems but they are not using vertical space and it's a brand new facility high tech and yielding tons of lettuce so there's ways to succeed both with vertical farming like Sky greens and in their pilot project in Singapore and there's ways to succeed horizontal you really have to do a cost benefit analysis is the added complexity of having moving Parts in your system actually get you more yield or enough more yield that it justifies the extra cost because there is going to be costs related to that infrastructure and that maintenance of all of these moving parts and as for those centralized fully enclosed Factory style artificial light Farms I can see that approach making some sense for microgreens and solid greens but it's far more energy intensive at least at this stage that it would make sense for a wide range of crops and even though that seems to be the vision of vertical farming is try to get all of these crops Under One Roof and very intensive and removed from nature and I guess I have a sort of a bias or a thing against trying to remove nature from the equation I think there are ways where you can find a way to make your farming and your agriculture follow the seasons interact with nature you may manipulate nature but not to remove it entirely from the equation when you get into a completely controlled environment um you know hey best luck to them if they can make it work but it feels a bit like the feedlot model where you take all the cows and don't don't pasture them because that's going to hurt the environment but rather move them into a feed lot in a more a more centralized and more intensive kind of raising of cattle when what we're seeing in the restorative agriculture circles is that actually grazing can make sense and I think the same thing can be said for agriculture is that you can find a way to make this more consistent with the natural environment and to invite the seasons in and to make sense of it and so far that seems to be the direction it's going that's all the thoughts I have for you on vertical farming I hope you found this an interesting discussion certainly I'm open to any of your questions or comments on this because there's certainly people who know more about this than I do you can drop those into the comments below the video I'll see what I can do to help
2022-11-26 18:48
