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.
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Greens cannot do math.
They’re also completely disconnected from reality.
Math(s)? Simple arithmetic appears to be beyond them. Does that make them more simple than simple?
The law of unintended consequences is about to raise its ugly head. This isn’t even interesting enough to be a fad; more like a passing fancy when they find out it is much more expensive than real food grown by experts. If this kind of thing really worked, I’d take up doing my own plumbing.
Math is the province of dead white European males.
I have NO fear of GMO food … however I am scared bat-shitless of basement grown micro greens
The only basement grown micro greens used to be an illegal crop back in the day.
Nuts, just nuts. And I don’t mean grow them in your basement.
Best add some CO2 into the grow houses.
And be mindful of increasing O2 levels from plant respiration, especially in enclosed Basements which also contain potential open fire sources … Water heaters, furnaces, and boilers and such.
I tried growing a tomato plant in my basement about 12 years ago. It produced no fruit. I then realized that I didn’t have any bees (or any other pollinators) in my basement to do the job. Since I didn’t also want to keep bees in my basement, nor did I want to do the pollination job myself, that ended my basement agriculture experiment. lol
The next summer I grew a dozen tomato plants on my backyard deck. About a week before they were all ready to harvest, a massive hailstorm of almost-golfball-size hailstones destroyed the roof of my house and every tomato plant and all except five tomatoes in about five minutes. That ended my backyard-deck agriculture experiment. lol
One plant you can pollinate yourself.
Though, it is terribly inefficient to grow a single plant, both environmentally and practically. They are wasteful and expensive tomatoes.
This hype will go away. But some salads will be grown underground because you can.
“pollinate yourself”
Kinky
And one (1) tomato plant is all you need, and it is neither “wasteful or expensive” to grow, ….. be it outside your house or inside if you pollinate it yourself, …. just keep the “suckers” trimmed off, ……. keep it loosely wrapped around a vertical stake ……. and let it continue growing upward ….. and it will continue producing new fruit at the top of the vine, ….. all the tomatoes you care to eat. If the top of the plant bends or falls over, it will stop producing.
OF Topic: …hmmm….Had to click the “READ MORE” click button to read the rest of your comment and it is annoying. YouTube did this and failed and it is a shame to see this similar tact in place here. What a shame.
Sorry to hear about your tomatoe mistake. *sigh*…
“failed” in the sense that scrolling through comments is a much more efficient navigation means for those who want the ‘big picture’. Sorry to hear WUWT went down this road.
The READ MORE employed here would be more tolerable if it embedded a visual marker in the expanded text after the last word that was previously visible. Or if it “broke” text at the end of a sentence or paragraph. Or both.
The ‘read more’ button will statistically encourage those who are expert in the art of the ‘one liner’……Mainly it discourages reading long and well thought out comments…..forget sentences or paragraphs.
As i say…..”the scroll down the page function embodied in a normal mouse does the job better than a “READ MORE” click, click button…. My patronage to this site is diminished by more than 95%….or a lot more at this point. And thanks for all the fish.
“As i say…..”the scroll down the page function embodied in a normal mouse does the job better than a “READ MORE” click, click button”
I agree. Much faster and doesn’t use up internet resources.
Nature, always wins.
How much energy is consumed by the artificial light and how much CO2 released compared to conventional farms and transport by truck to market? The article is full of pictures with lots and lots of electrically powered light, and I assume pumped water source somewhere.
Those plants will be growing under low level, cool LED lights. Salads do no take heat kindly, and the system is very efficient and vermin free, if done properly it uses almost no chemicals and the nutrient solution is also utilised far better than in soil. Also, working in this kind of plant is far easier (and often automated already).
Whether this saves energy or chemicals is not as important as how fresh the produce can be delivered to the local shops and how high the quality is.
You can try it for yourself — your local IKEA will be happy to sell you some LED grow lights and kit for your very own salad farm to play with. It’s a lot of fun, and no, just in case any here is suddenly inspired, you cannot grow whacky-bacci with this, and sadly, orchids that need a lot of sunlight also are out of the question.
This kind of horticulture is both extremely capital and energy intensive. It is only economically viable for one plant, and thats not the one these people have in mind!
I think they came up with the idea after smoking said plant.
Sure it is, Peter!
‘Mircro-greens’ is the marketing name for their ‘herbs’!
Reminds me of time when my kids were young and one of them went over to a school friend’s place after school. He was told by the kid that they weren’t allowed to play in the basement cuz his dad had is ‘tomato plants’ down there.
Thanks but I’ll stick with my country grown, free range, direct solar powered and CO2 fed veggies, fruit, grains, beef, pork, chicken, fish, deer, and any other thing out there that looks good, smells good, and tastes good.
Have you ever picked a sun warmed, soft and fully ripe peach off the tree… and eaten it, right then? You’re inhaling the perfume of the peach in your nostrils, as the gush of peach perfection floods your taste buds and leaks out the corners of your mouth? Your eyes close as you swallow, in a moment of near gastronomic nirvana.
Yeah…….. you aren’t gonna get that outta nooooo basement grow!!!!
And “urban farming” (green house by another name) will still require replacement nutrients for the plants, even if soilless methods are used. In other words, fertilizer will still be needed, so mining, processing, and transportation will still be required. Water use can be more efficient, but still a lot of water will need to be supplied. There is a company doing this sort of thing on a large scale, it would be interesting to see a rigorous input/output analysis.
http://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/201804?pg=1#pg1
This magazine has some info you may like to know about.
Simply tons of fertilizer is going to waste in cities (from treatment plants)…does that make you hungry?
Biosolids (treated human waste aka night soil) is already used in agriculture and some additional areas where fertilizer is required.
And the growing environment will provide an ideal habitat for a range of adorable little beasties, insect and mammal, which will eat the plants and wander round and colonise the house.
It’s a kind of innocence you see: when you have ideology you don’t need knowledge or common sense.
Fertilizer is easy, plenty of invasive fish species to scoop up and turn into paste.
It sounds like it has taken six weeks to grow enough to give the 200 participants 1 meal.
Basements in the buildings I have lived in here in Sydney are usually for vehicle parking which are covered in dust, soot and other forms of crud deposited on surfaces. Not good on your food.
You mean, used for useful stuff like parking cars? Read the subtext. You will not be allowed to drive to work in the future. Or park a car under your apartment block, so then it will be available for green virtue signalling.
Wow, just a little bit of thought and math says it’s a terrible idea. Lights are what about 10% efficient, plants are what 1-2% efficient. Transforming 100 watts (with 100% transfer rate) to chemical energy of 0.1-0.2%. Seems like a winner.
Yes! Worse than that, to generate the benefits they want, the electricity cannot come from coal or natural gas, only renewable will do. For funsies, let’s assume your numbers above are correct, and the electricity is going to come from solar panels.
Solar panels are about 20% efficient. So 1 acre of solar panels can support 0.2 acres of lights at 100% efficiency. Factor in a 30% loss for transmission losses gives you only 0.14 acres of lights. Ooops, the lights are only 10% efficient, so we’re down to 0.014 acres of lights powered by 1 acre of solar cells. But wait… we’ll need water circulated, temperature controlled, air circulated and fertilizer. So let’s figure 50% of the energy gets consumed with those things. That means our 1 acre of solar panels can support 0.007 acres of grow op. Or, to flip it around, we’d need 143 acres of solar cells to support 1 acre of grow op.
Seems to me that’s like taking 142 acres of food production out of the system. That can’t be good….
Solar panel manufacturers may disagree.
Lots of watts in the basement = air conditioning watts upstairs.
This too shall pass.
“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.”
GM is spending a lot of money on AVs. They won’t begin to put a dent in reshaping buildings, except for a very few experimental ones. Maybe 2 to 4 in 10 years.
Someone may fund (hope it isn’t tax payers) an entire city, say of 5,000 to 10,000 people. As for NYC, Chicago, or Seattle being “reshaped” to suit AVs — not a chance. Okay, chance may be greater than zero, but just.
And if Climate Change is beginning to bite, folks must be watching CNN, listening to NPR, or visiting some other fantasy land.
These urban gardens may, in some small way, increase the demand for CO2.
Interesting. Formatting went the way of T. Rex – – gone!
Formatting reappears when you click “read more”.
Which also makes it harder to find where “read more” starts after clicking.
People keep telling me that autonomous cars are going to eliminate the need for personally owned vehicles.
If taxis didn’t, I don’t see how self driving cars will either.
Not forgetting the interest the police drug squad might take because of abnormally high power bills.
Indoor or warehouse gardening is not far-fetched. It can be, and has been, profitable but there are only a few profitable crops, mostly organic greens, and that market is limited, so not much room for growth. If you are interested in pursuing the subject, review http://www.zipgrow.com .
Tomatoes are self-pollinating. What the indoor environment lacks for tomatoes is wind. There are various methods to overcome this. Hand pollination is also not a very big deal with bee or other insect pollinated fruit.
There are also indoor fodder systems that can efficiently supply supplemental feed for livestock, but that is not very green for the Greens.
By organic greens, do you mean marijuana?
I rate market growing food in poly tunnels as indoor food cropping and it works well on a commercial scale because the light comes from the Sun naturally, temperatures are higher because warmth is conserved by the PLASTIC sheeting forming the tunnels and probably CO2 levels are slightly elevated compared to outside. All exactly intelligently conceived and commercially viable.
The idea of growing useful quantities of food in your basement rates at the same level of intellect as the professional footballer who decided to have his firework show indoors and, surprise surprise, set fire to his house requiring a swift visit from the fire brigade. Yes it really happened. Nice to know there are lots of potential recruits still out there for the green daft ideas machine.
We often hear about such schemes in the UK (London of course). All they seem to be able to grow are salad-type crops. It’s a waste of energy in a highly populated world – big farms are needed, not this micro-culture beloved of greens.
It is already economically viable in London.
The key issue issue is the demand for fresh salads of reliable quality in London’s restaurants. Being underground enables great consistency of produce.
Radio 4 reported on a successful business on Inside Science.
What next?????
Ranching in your basement?
Micro greens??? Must be smaller than sprouts. Moss maybe? Are we talking about the stuff that grows on wet driveways? Pond scum? 25 trays of it?? Or are we talking about little, tiny environmentalists??
And the genius of salvaging coffee grounds from land fills! I love the smell of grant money in the morning.
I mix used coffee grounds into the soil for my herb garden. It’s actually quite good in this part of the country – the native soil is quite alkaline, and the acids from the grounds neutralize some of that without adding other elements that I don’t need, like sulfur.
However – the nearest coffee plantation to my house is more than 1,000 miles away. Bulk transport of the beans, grinding (I don’t do my own), transport to the store – well, I’m helping to green the planet with all of that extra CO2 just to have my own fresh basil, thyme, and whatnot.
“Micro greens”… I think they mean herbs like basil, thyme, oregano, etc. Not something you’d base a whole meal on, just something to add a bit of flavour.
microgreens are salad stuffs, baby cos and butter lettuce and spinach beet rocket endive etc cut when only around 3 to 4 inches/leaf stage, takes a fair bit of effort to crop and then you keep recropping for a few weeks, indoors you cant let -or get -them to go to seed, they all need pollinating and the cost of replacment seed isnt that cheap for large area planting either.
Where will i find the space for the cows?
Obviously you are going to need micro cows.
Mushrooms do not require light. In fact UV destroy mushrooms that is why they grow in shaded areas.
As for other foods, we can grow vegetables that naturally require less light: lettuce, sorrel, peas, beans, cabbage, brussel sprouts, spinach, kale …
And we can always breed more that will tolerate low intensity light.
I noticed that some commenters here are automatically skeptical of new ideas. While skepticism is a healthy attitude, too much is also bad. I suggest open mindedness spiced by a dose of skepticism to maintain balance.
Mushrooms do not require light.
Not sure about this but… do they not require something else though?
Mushrooms don’t need light, agreed. They need straw or other high value food material to grow on, though this can be waste material like sawdust for some varieties.
But other vegetables need light. A lot of it. Even if you manage to get a reasonable result by dropping the light to 100W / square metre, 1/10th of solar irradiance, you still need a lot of power to run an indoor garden at any kind of scale.
I agree that you still need light. But you can actually pipe in light from the roof using acrylic fibers. (as in fiber optics but carries no data, only photons). The only reason you’ll be using the basement is to avoid the need to reinforcing your load bearing columns and avoid piping water up. This could actually make it practical to grow vegetables in the basement. The initial cost may be higher but the savings in electricity will be huge.
normal super tasty mushrooms grow out in the paddocks where the cows/horses etc pooped some months before, indoor ones are tasteless in comparison!
Agree on this. But it’s the poop that gives it flavor and not the light.
Most all DC “swamp” politicians are really great “mushroom farmers” ……. simply because they keep the public in the “dark” and are constantly feeding them horse manure.
Since plants need light to grow, the only way to breed a plant to use less light is to breed it to grow more slowly.
There is a condition where this appears to work, the arctic.
In arctic communities, fresh food has to be flown in. A head of lettuce can cost $8.00. The normal thing is to not have fresh food. In coastal communities, food is shipped in by sea, once a year. You buy everything you need then.
The other thing about the arctic is that electricity is usually produced by diesel generators. It’s pretty expensive. The reason indoor farming works in the arctic is that shipping food is even more expensive.
Note that in summer there is light 24/7 in the Arctic, so greenhouses do well, though they have problems with heavy snow in winter.
made me laugh the desert areas in NT in aus and other isolated areas also slug folks 8$ or more for a lettuce or cabbage too. madness when people COULD grow their own easily in those places.
And there are several issues that will make this more viable in the future – population growth, aquifer depletion, and transportation costs.
Seems like it would work alright in cold countries.
Have a fossil fuelled generator in the basement, vent the exhaust into the growing area to raise CO2 levels, use heat pumps to move the excess heat to the rest of the building. Fuel consumption should be about what would be needed to heat the building by other methods and you could grow crops all the year round.
and you AND the food cop carbon MONoxide and keel over? and the taste of the fuel particulates that are on the food if you survived?
blah.
you run thermal heating via water OR using solar thermal units made from drink cans and some wastewood and a sheet of glass.
youve not researched it have you 😉
I live in a cold country. Greenhouses are a common sight but they are rarely used to grow food. Mostly they produce flowers and plants for transplanting outdoors. In other words, they are used to extend the growing season.
If growing food indoors was economical, why is it that tomatoes, vegetables, and fruits from Mexico and from even further south are competitive in Canadian supermarkets.
Growing food in greenhouses may be economical in warmer areas with less need for supplemental heat and more hours of wintertime sunlight.
I do not see how using artificial light can be economical or environmentally friendly.
I know a guy who already grows his food this way. Only, he doesn’t eat it, he smokes it.
When I was a kid I remember that just outside the city center most houses had a garden big enough to grow your own vegetables and even have a goat and some chicken.. Now we grow grass and flowers and it is even forbidden to grow food.
Greenies often use rediculous meaningless terms like that.
My favorite one is when they say they are “tackling climate change”. Like they are working hard toward stopping the earth’s climate from changing. These people are delusional.