Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Worried about food miles? The solution according to these greens is growing food in your basement under grow lights.
Driverless cars and climate change prompt push for urban farming
With autonomous vehicles promising to reshape buildings and even entire cities, and climate change beginning to bite, the opportunities for urban farming solutions are growing.
Five kilograms of mushrooms, 100 heads of lettuce and 25 trays of micro-greens. These are the spoils so far from Mirvac’s urban farm pilot set up in the basement of its 200 George Street HQ in Sydney.
The pilot program, Cultivate, has been operating for about six weeks, and has seen 200 staff sign up to get involved in fresh food production.
The farm includes veggie patches and hydroponic vertical farms, as well as mushrooms grown in coffee grounds diverted from landfill. Special grow lamps are used to stimulate plant growth in the basement environment.
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“An urban farm could be created in a building’s redundant car park and the produce used to service local kitchens and cafes within that proximity,” JLL head of property and asset management – Australia Richard Fennell said.
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I understand the urge to grow your own food, but I can’t help thinking urban farmers promoting the climate benefits of their initiative have overlooked a few details.
Running grow lights on any scale requires a stupendous amount of energy – you have to produce sunlight levels of light intensity to grow vegetables. Depending on latitude the Earth’s surface experiences up to 1000 watts per square meter of solar irradiation. While grow lights can improve on this a little, by only producing colours which are useful for plant photosynthesis, you still need a lot of energy to run a decent size bank of grow lights.
Its difficult to see how you could produce enough energy to replace millions of acres of farmland from a few wind turbines.
Small problem.
https://youtu.be/bb5IXSPmEnk
Just over a century ago agriculture was labor intensive, employing a large percentage of the population. Now these nuts want us to go back to that era?
“Five kilograms of mushrooms, 100 heads of lettuce and 25 trays of micro-greens.”
Humans and other living things need calories to thrive. Calories come from wheat, rice and corn not from lettuce and micro-greens. How many acres of corn can be grown inside under lights?
If you are Algore, probably quite a lot given the size and number of his houses
But, but, but … won’t a couple of solar panels on top of a 40-story building provide enough energy for grow lights on all those floors?
It sounds so cool, it has to work! Right? Right?
Alas, the education system is doing the job it was intended to.
Exactly, Bill G. They can’t even do the quick back-of-an-envelop calculation which shows most of these ideas should have been strangled before birth, if you’ll pardon the imagery.
The simple calculation is that in most urban areas you could rent out the room in the basement as accommodation for much more money than the value of the food you could grow there. Simple economics of land value. Of course, when you are saving the planet, economics apparently doesn’t matter any more.
Glowworms would be more eco-friendly than grow lights, and you could probably serve them up with mushrooms and eat them at the end of their lifecycle.
Instead of artificial lights, they could use “Light Pipes” to funnel real sunlight to their plants.
SSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!
Tom ! DON’T ENCOURAGE THEM !!!
That just might work and then EVERY building would
look like the Pompidou Centre in Paris .
ONE IS ENOUGH OF THOSE ! FUGLY !!!
Is there nobody in the media or the environmental movement or politics who can THINK any more?
I read the headline to Mrs N and got the expected reaction in a nanosecond. I mean …. just how bright do you need to be to draw the obvious conclusion?
Brighter than a glow light.
Doing this is a good way to have a SWAT team kick in your doors and shoot you. After the fact they will merely shrug shoulders and say oops, thought they were growing marijuana.
Why not encourage people to use container gardening? Easy, effective and cheap. Hell, with cheap plastic window boxes you can grow plenty of lettuce, herbs, peppers, even onions. 5 gallon buckets work great for larger plants such as tomatoes, cucumbers, brussel sprouts, any number of vegetables and fruit. Using grow lights is expensive, and yes, idiots have burned down their homes using them. Lots of choices in this field, just search strawbale farming.
OK, why did my 2 paragraphs get smushed into one big blob?
Something to do with the “Read more” function.
If you click on “read more” then your paragraph will reappear properly. I suppose the writers of the code wanted to cram as much text into the part that is visible so they skipped the paragraph breaks.
Ahh, I see, said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw! Thought it might have something to do with the “texting” generation. I spend quite a bit of time deciphering the unintelligible chicken scratch of the under 30 crowd, it gets painful.
So some moron grows the least nutrient dense plants in his basement
nihil novo sub sole
I don’t understand the laughing here, since this is just the way industrialization goes: away from the sun and the wind, toward artificial use of energy and control of environment to have the plant reliably run 24/7 without all the natural, uncontrolled, hazards and pest.
Why would you laugh, when that’s just the case here made on a daily basis against renewable energy?
Sure, it cost money to light the plant. Just like it cost money to fuel an engine instead of running a windmill to grind flour, and still, what happened? The trick is
1) light is cheap (LED are very efficient), and you don’t need lot of it
2) most of the cost are NOT light, and with artificial light you can triple or more the productivity of the really costly inputs. So you actually save money even if it cost energy to light the plant
3) the customer target are people willing to pay more just because it is locally grown. It may sound nutty, but selling to nutty people is actually fairly solid business model, isn’t it? “ye, my salad is 1$ more expensive, but as you can see it is grown just here with NO chemicals, yes ma’am, so you save the planet, and that’s worth the cost”
This (hydroponics under artificial light) wouldn’t (still ) make sense for bulk food of easy storage like wheat, rice, peanuts, etc., but it DOES makes sense, and is actually pretty common, for high value, low nutritional, fast self-destroying fancy plant like salad or flowers (or drugs, as been pointed out).
I hope they are not using any fossil fuel-/coal-based plastic to hold these crops or to run the water/hydroponic liquids.
Hey…..Hey…..Hey — Do you reckon it may make it even more entertaining to add a brief proposal for using solar cells to produce the electricity and storage batteries with which to store the produced energy so the produced energy could then be used to power the lights if the lights were operated 24 X 7?
I’m not sure that argument makes sense, but if you want vegetables grown with no pesticides this is the way to go. Other advantages might include little or no fertilizer run off into rivers and the oceans and better use of water resources among other possibilities.
But I’m still not getting into a self driving car until they build a robot that can pick a strawberry.
If they don’t build a robot that can see and pick a strawberry, it’s not because they cannot, it’s just because it would still cost too much to be worth building.
Tomatoes look more promising
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a14518441/this-robot-picks-tomatoes-as-well-as-you-ever-could/
so lets see..apart from the powercost and the manufacturing of the light sources power/ fuel/production cost to add in.. theres the buying in of dirt, fake fertiliser, unless they buy cowpoop,mushroom compost n pot mix and thats all transported to the city from rural areas too. comes in nice TOUGH unbiodegradable plastic bags too;-) coffeegrounds from the office pods? lol
mushrooms alone are fiddly n require a fair bit of prepping to grow well, boiling straw to sterilise it when mixing with coffeegrounds n spawn..office kitchen could get messy.
they could just as well stick planters along window ledges or desks n do better.
but it sounds so…clever yuppie green dont it?
Yes. It’s usually called “a farm”.
As well as needing lots of sunshine, rain, and other messy things, farms are usually found where land prices are much less, i.e. not in cities.
And most people today would actually also prefer not to be farmers. They are happy to let a few people do the farming and sell their produce in supermarkets. That way the rest of us can get on with all the other things that actually make modern industrial civilization work.
Basement pot farms are often caught by using thermal cameras to find the hot spots caused by the grow lights.
..Fox News
GOP lawmakers raise red flags over environmental group’s ties to China
“The committee is concerned about the NRDC’s role in aiding China’s perception management efforts with respect to pollution control and its international standing on environmental issues in ways that may be detrimental to the United States,” the Republicans wrote.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/07/gop-lawmakers-raise-red-flags-over-environmental-groups-ties-to-china.html
Greenie economics means never having to provide a balance sheet.
Whoever thinks grow lights are a great substitute for direct sun for growing food crops… needs to examine the power bills accrued by pot growers, who do this exact thing already.
Hint: the main way they get caught by law enforcement is via their four-figure monthly electric bills.
Now, how do the “indoor urban farming” crowd propose to generate all that extra electricity??
Grow pot together with the vegetable. At least now, they can say they are growing vegetable and they grow pot on the side to pay for the electricity.
But, but… the thermodynamic efficiency of photosynthesis (the percentage of the light’s energy that is turned into increased chemical energy) can be as high as 3 or 4%!
LEDs have changed all that, and I do believe there is at least one profitable indoor LED grow light farmer — http://boweryfarming.com/
I’ve been experimenting over the last year with indoor grow lights. I’ve got about 1,500 W equivalent of LED lights (220 W Power usage) running 12 hours a day — hardly noticeable on the electric bill. None of it is hydroponic.
After 1 year:
1 Mulberry bush – 7 ft tall (3/4″ trunk) and producing a handful of berries. So far this is a 100% female plant and I assume it is being pollinated by mulberry trees from outside because the pollen is so fine and makes its way anywhere. A female mulberry will actually clean your air of pollen and dust, whereas a male will fill your air will pollen to the point of miserable allergies.
9 coffee trees – 8 to 18 inches tall and all healthy. Coffee start to produce fruit on their second year so the viability of them is yet to be seen.
1 replanted pineapple and broccoli from store bought. The pineapple is too early to tell but it hasn’t died. The broccoli has now started producing new stems with large adult leaves and looks healthy. Just started avocado from seed.
The rest are typical house plants and all have thrived under the LEDs.
I chose a mulberry and coffee because they are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum as far as their voraciousness for sunlight — mulberry wants all it can get and coffee is an under canopy tree that doesn’t want any direct sun . I am actually surprised that the mulberry has done so well and appears as big or even bigger than a first year tree growing outdoors around here. Not having to deal with winter hybernation and the 100+ F degree days of summer certainly helps with that. I also chose coffee because it cannot grow outdoors here and this type of “farming” obviously has the greatest potential for growing tropical produce outside of its zone.
This is just an experiment to see if good fruit and vegetables can be produced this way, I’m not expecting a large harvest like from an outdoor garden. I’ll probably sell the coffee trees next summer and easily recoup all costs involved.
I’m thinking mangoes and mangosteens next.
According to ‘Cushman and Wakefield’ average costs for Sidney commercial real estate is $720 AUD per sq. meter per month.
Realistically, that makes for very expensive lettuce and carrots…
Commercial real estate is expensive, even basement business real estate is pricey. It is certain that urban grown food costs fail to include all these expensive niggling details.
Which puts employee grow farms on the lowest rung possible when the business needs expansion room, or simply needs to cut costs.
Looked into a hydroponic setup to grow feed for the hay burners. It worked out to the equivalent of buying $160/ton hay when factoring in electricity costs. Of course this wasn’t paying me for my labor either…For the curious, hay out of the field is $140-$160/ton in these parts and jumps $200+ once in the barn. I didn’t do it because of the labor required part of the calculation. Taking off for a day, doable. Taking off for the weekend, problematic. Any longer than a weekend gone and you basically have to either find someone to take care of the operation or shut it down and restart again when you get home.
So, pave over thousand acres of farm land with solar farms that flash fry flying birds to power enough grow lights to grow about 150 acres of food?
I know, I know, math and logic are patriarchal rape culture
Maybe people can grow some veggies in such a setup, provided they are willing to effectively pay a lot more for them. But one thing they surely will grow is mold. The normal house just isn’t set up, designed, or built, to have large trays of wet soil or hydroponic tanks. Filling your windows with green plants is about right. More than that and your walls will start to drip with condensation. And then to slime over with mold. Yech.