Essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently the amount and cost of electricity to run the indoor grow lights is a problem.
Vertical farms, indoor crops a growing trend as climate change drives advances in protected farming
ABC Southern Qld / By David Chen
Australia’s rich food bowl regions keep the nation fed but a year of storms and floods has repeatedly put them to the test and added to the soaring cost of fresh fruit and vegetables.
Climate-driven events are forecast to increase in the future but supply shortages experienced across the country this year could become a thing of the past as producers use their ingenuity and pivot towards indoor farming to shore up food security.
In a cavernous 4,000-square-metre warehouse on the Gold Coast, soon-to-be-planted lettuce seedlings will be safe from the elements.
…
Once complete in July next year, the company expects to produce about 400 tonnes of lettuces a year, supplying businesses including local high-end restaurants and fast-food outlets.
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The amount of electricity required is another barrier to indoor farming and with recent spikes in prices, that has been a problem in Europe and the United States.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-06/climate-change-causes-indoor-farming-grows-in-popularity-qld/101718034
Greens seem curiously attracted to the idea of indoor farms. In 2018 WUWT covered an indoor farm in a carpark in Sydney, they wanted to solve the world’s food problems by growing mushrooms in coffee grounds, and other vegetables under grow lights. But Sydney is a very expensive place – in most cases in a situation like that, it would surely make more economic sense to grow vegetables in a field outside of town, and drive them in by truck every morning.
Indoor farming and hydroponics can massively improve yield, which can sometimes make economic sense with high value crops like orchids and other premium flowers, and in places where land is expensive, or for an in-demand product like high value off-season fruit and vegetables.
Mushrooms are frequently grown indoors – the high value and need to maintain optimum growing conditions makes indoor cultivation viable.
The father of an old school friend at one stage had $50,000 worth of rare orchids growing in his small back yard – more value per square yard than an illegal dope plantation. Until someone stole all the plants when the family was away on holiday. He wasn’t growing indoors, but with plants that valuable, the cost of building a small indoor growing facility could potentially be dwarfed by increased profit, if growing indoors significantly increased yield.
Such high value plants are the exception rather than the norm. So long as energy and setup costs remain significant, I doubt indoor farming will substantially displace traditional farming for the foreseeable future.
There’s an underground farm in London.
It seems one of the advantages is that fresh salads attract a premum in price and proximity to the customers is thus important
These new technlogies are the kind of adaptations that disprove catastrophic climate change. .
If things become difficult, we innovate. Whether the difficulty comes from the weather or traffic congestion.
Is there any danger of the faithful getting their ducks in a row?
“The Dutch government is planning to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to be in compliance with EU environmental rules.
Trudeau’s nitrogen policy will decimate Canadian farming
Call for culling of the NZ dairy herd is among responses to IPCC report on climate change
Ireland would need to cull up to 1.3 million cattle to reach climate targets
And the pilot study:
Sri Lanka’s economy has ‘completely collapsed,’ Prime Minister says
“Greens seem curiously attracted to the idea of indoor farms.”
They won’t be keeping any livestock; this is presumably their idea of reaching a plant-based future – with a side dish of roaches, of course.
Indoor farms are an urban idea and urban areas are where they will be. It’s hardly a new idea.
“….in a network of abandoned WWII bomb shelters hidden beneath Clapham”
World’s first underground farm grows sustainable vegetables | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
It’s a couple of miles down the road and its been going for some time, after all we need the land for wind and solar….
The BBC loves it.
“The BBC loves it.” – what better way to know that it’s a complete failure from beginning to end?
My explosive single laugh scared my neighbors’ dogs and my windows are closed. It IS 3:30am here but still.
The innovation on traffic in London is to tax it out of existence and block all the roads. Nothing new there then!
A friend of mine used to say he could solve Manhattan traffic jams very easily.
“Just make all the bridges and tunnels ‘one-way’ – going OUT.”
There soon will be plenty of land available in London for indoor farming. In order to provide the ‘sustainable electricity’ to heat and light these farms, charging of the mandated EVs will be impossible. Thus all of the roadways will be available for the indoor farms. Viola! All problems solved.
Not mention the real estate left empty by businesses going bankrupt. There is something known as the Polo Effect where city centres collapse and business activity moves to the outskirts which then grow further out and the centre decays even more.
That’s OK, they can just change the zoning in the city centres to “crack houses.” They’ll be brimming with activity based on their new zoning in no time.
I think you have it backwards: ultra high urban organic produce prices can enable an otherwise crap farming method.
This isn’t rocket science: let’s say we have a 25 watt grow light under which we can grow 4 lettuces. A lettuce takes 4-8 weeks to grow, so electricity cost alone would be 25*12*7*7 (average 7 weeks) = 14.7 kWh. Electricity prices in London are probably 18 pence/kWh = 20 cents/kWh, so electricity cost alone would be $3 for the 4 lettuces. Throw in labor, building rent, water, nutrients – the result is going to be pretty damn expensive lettuce but that’s ok when you’re selling them for $4 or more in Whole Foods…
Note that even under this highly optimistic example, the electricity cost is very high. I’m not an indoor farming expert but I’d expect more like 25 watts or more per lettuce as opposed to for 4.
Urban farming looks like classic Marie Antoinette/PMC bullshit right up there with EVs.
Another example of scaling up!
There are many things that work on a small individual scale with minimal expenses and effort. But it is when you attempt to scale up something to provide for the masses, those minimal expenses & efforts scale up to make the idea unworkable.
Mushrooms are grown in the dark because they grow much better, and there are no weed problem. No electricity consumption there (or any other fuel)!
This new place will need at least 1MW, I hope they have a big turbine outside (and the wind blows constantly and steadily)!
I did work in an underground mushroom farm here in western PA back in the ’90s, nice operation, grow an incredible amount of mushrooms. And uses a lot of electricity, gas and water to do so. Growing some in a container in your house is cheap and easy, doing it commercially is an entirely different matter. See derbrix’s comment just above yours.
“Greens seem curiously attracted to the idea of indoor farms.”
In these types of proposals, “indoor farms” usually consist of salad greens being produced under electric lights. Where the building comes from, how the electricity is generated, and so on, is simply assumed, as if it were magic. Plus, greens seldom mention that fruits and vegetables supply only a handful of important nutrients: virtually no protein, fat, or calories in any form except for the fructose in some fruits, which greens abhor if it’s used elsewhere as an “additive.”
Greens seldom mention that fruits and vegetables require only a small percentage of farmland in any event, so “saving space” is a minor concern. The biggies, land-use-wise, are grains and grazing land for animals.
As a kicker, greens ritually deplore the foods that can be raised efficiently indoors, such as milk cows, and chickens for both eggs and meat. Greens work hard to ban those things, or make them more expensive, which amounts to the same thing for poor people.
In my experience, “greens” are city kids with negligible practical experience in food production or economics of any kind. They’re a throwback to medieval monks who wandered the countryside in sackcloth, begging, then biting the hands that fed them by denouncing the sinners all around them who were practical-minded.
I was a career farmer, and I got tired of greens talking down to me as if I were a criminal.
I had a slightly different take on that sentence, Tom.
GangGreen is largely comprised of city kids, who find all the yucky stuff found on outdoor farms rather off putting! Indoor farms are SO much better because they’re cleaner and less smelly.
If they spent a summer, or even a few weeks, mucking out stalls or collecting manure they would probably develop a new attitude. Sadly, that type of work seems to be considered a human rights violation in “Green” circles!
Don’t forget fresh herbs. Also “organic”.
Unless the electricity is free, the only solution is to return to the 1950s when fruits and vegetables were grown outside in summer and consumed in summer — or canned for off-season consumption.
Why not grow them with green power from any of the usual sources? Because until we have 100% green power, what we have should be used to heat and light our homes and drive industry before being wasted on “fresh” tomatoes.
That said, there are many high-production, energy-efficient, mostly automated greenhouses being built in the US Midwest and Northwest in areas close to markets with cheap land and inexpensive power… replacing corn and soybeans,
Markets rule — for now anyway.
Related: We used to have tomatoes in winter — grown locally in greenhouses heated by coal. The greenhouses are long gone but there are still a few tall brick chimneys that remind me of the expensive and flavor-free hot-house tomatoes of my youth.
Look at this:
https://www.appharvest.com/
Just ignore the ESG crap.
Ain’t capitalism great? Well, maybe …
AppHarvest is a public benefit corporation and a Certified B Corp.
What’s a B Corp you ask?
Certified B Corporations are enterprises that have committed to investing in values for non-shareholding stakeholders. B Corps are officially verified by B Lab, a nonprofit organization that evaluates how a company is contributing to an element of social good that goes beyond financial interest.
https://www.wework.com/ideas/professional-development/business-solutions/what-is-b-corp-certification
Non-shareholding stakeholders …. like a governing council (that translates into Russian as a soviet).
ESG is Marxism, plain and simple, wearing only a thin disguise
In other words, a woke scam.
“…flavor-free hot-house tomatoes of my youth.”
______________________________________
Iceland has a hot house factory that produces tomatoes. It is much
ballyhooed by the tour companies that in turn provide tours of the
facilities. Very interesting place, but as your youthful recollection
says, the tomatoes are “Flavor Free”.
I’m guessing that Icelanders don’t know what garden grown late
August tomatoes taste like.
To me, practically all store-bought and mass-farmed tomatoes are “flavor free”. Maybe the hot house ones are a little less so but not that I’ve noticed. It’s because they grow varieties bred for appearance instead of flavor.
My indoor ones are decidedly NOT “flavor free”, but I can understand why they wouldn’t be a choice for commercial growers – the yield isn’t all that great.
To me, practically all store-bought and mass-farmed tomatoes are “flavor free”
_______________________________
None of them taste like home grown and some worse than others, but the Iceland Cherry Tomatoes were really crappy.
I always think of ripe, homegrown cherry tomatoes as sweet, liquid sunshine!
If they are grown in a 5 gallon bucket on the deck out back, they ARE ‘sweet, liquid sunshine’! Easy to grow, no weeds, NO electricity, just a bit of water and the occasional shot of fertilizer. Maybe a rare horn worm or two, but otherwise trouble free gardening!
As feral, freerange humans are pushed into the mega cities or exterminated, these indoor farms will provide the surviviors with their one-leaf-per-day roughage requirements! snarc/
This brings to mind the third film of Marijn Poels trilogy; Return To Eden. I may have to rewatch just to see his incredibly cool treehouse again! As the hammer is brought down on farmers in the Netherlands, the main message of his films is reiterated; big government globalists suck!! They seem to be targeting farming and even gardening now; you can have my home grown tomatoes when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers!!
i wonder if these indoor farms will have co2 pumped in to enhance growing.
personally i prefer my food to be grown under the abundant, full color spectrum of natural sun light. you?
Greenhouse Carbon Dioxide Supplementation(from 2017)
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-dioxide-supplementation.html
“This is also called ‘CO2 enrichment’ or ‘CO2 fertilization.”
Known to the green crowd as carbon pollution!
I can envision a house with a screened in back room, or one where panels can be opened to the outdoors, allowing AMPLE CO2 to enter and enrich the plants. Or, would that be ruled a violation by the Green crowd? Common sense seems to be in SUCH low supply among that crowd!
Thanks for that extract from a very interesting reference. This also has a nice graph of the level of CO2 to produce a benefit and interestingly shows that it can also be somewhat harmful above about 1800ppm. So about 1200ppm is great!
According to medical doctor and agronomist Dr Arden Anderson, hydroponically grown food that is fed on a limited amount of nutrients is basically empty carbohydrate.
Add in factory farmed meat and health problems will escalate.
But, you can supplement with assorted bugs and vegi-burgers! Delicious AND nutritious! NOT!
” … that is fed on a limited amount of nutrients … “
I think I see the problem here. This is true whether the food is grown hydroponically or in a traditional farm basking in the sun and rain. Farming of any kind requires the application of nutrients.
True that! The farm lands where corn is constantly grown are so nutrient deficient that the corn, without added fertilizer, is lacking in even the basic nutrition! The few elements that are added are hardly sufficient to make up for the loss of the MANY elements, due to over overplanting. I’m no expert at this, but, again, it’s just plain common sense!
Thanks, Eric!
I’ve come up with a great name and ad campaign for them:
“Soylent Greens; only climate deniers are used to fertilize our products!”
It should be a real growth industry!
Depends on who’s definition of denier used. I can think of some lipid rich bodies which, as oxygen thieves could be repurposed as fertilizer. You know, the hypocrites have made plenty of green with scare tactics.
I don’t know about “oxygen thieves,” but definitely wasters of oxygen, and space! And we know that the alarmists refuse to honor their own beliefs; they keep exhaling!
And, might I add, ‘farting’, too! Yet they want to get rid of all the cows because they, you know, fart.
So much garbage:
Lettuce is 96% water (like tomatoes & cucumbers) and nothing else of note…..
…..apart from, wait for Green Heads to explode: Nitrate. = that really bad stuff found in bacon that you’re not supposed to eat? It controls blood pressure and nobody would even look at lettuce let alone eat it if it didn’t
Mushrooms grown in the dark are similarly nutrient free and worse than a worse thing, are more similar to animals than plants and emit CO2 as they grow.
Also, mushrooms grown in the dark contain no Vitamin D – again like animals, they need Ultraviolet light to make it.(You can shine a UV lamp on them when you get them home tho. or put them out in the sun)
Haha (1) The little film we’re pointed to at abc is entitled “blah blah blah under a UV glow”….
There is no UV in their film, what you see is blue and red LEDs combining to make that pinkish purple colour. The lights they use have, for every 4 LEDs, 2 red ones, one blue and a white one.
The very last thing in there is UV
Haha (2) In the video, what does anyone imagine the original nationality of the person(s) we see at point 2:00?
In a conventional greenhouse? What happened to the 4,000 square metre shed?
The Dutch grow vast numbers of orchids, for export and not least to the UK. Seemingly that’s now kaput because of energy prices.
Dutch livestock farmers are now going to have their farms effectively confiscated because they’re now deemed to make too much Ammonia and NOx. (Maybe the cost of live ammo is now so high even the polis cant afford to shoot them anymore. Thanks Vlad.)
Ain’t that ammonia thing just a perfect fit for this insane world, it being vital to the production of lettuce.
(Also Global Greening – heretic to everybody that I am for even suggesting such hideous and blatant misinformation)
Cucumber and pepper farmers near London (the Lea Valley) are out of business – they cannot afford heat and light for their glasshouses.
One wonders why they think they need the shed and the greenhouse, Australia appears to be a very ‘sheltered place’ else how do they not know that 10% of all of Spain is now under glass, growing tomatoes mostly.
Rock hard acidic otherwise tasteless blobs that the Dutch police could use as ammo next time they see a farmer in a tractor.
And there’s a funny thing, how tasty nice tomatoes grow out-of-doors on the slopes of a nearby volcanic island group…
Not looking good. We are a million miles, and receding, from knowing even what is and is not good to eat.
We’ll never figure out how climate works at this rate. The wrongness & junk science accumulates and grows on a daily basis
Lettuce is a carrier for the tasty dressings and keeps the tiny tomatoes from rolling around. Apparently, salads have a high mark-up in restaurants and give the patron something to do while waiting for the chateaubriand to sear.
Lettuce is also rabbit food. I’d rather eat the rabbit.
It is also the only ingredient of the Honeymoon Sandwich……you know, let us alone.
It’s a fact that if you feed your bunnies nothing but lettuce, they will die of starvation, due to the lack of any real nutrition!
Electricity and water, the two items you have to have in large volume to do any indoor growing operations. And the political left is doing everything they can to reduce the widespread availability of both.
Progressives seemingly lack any economic sense. That’s probably why they need unfettered access to everyone else’s money.
I prefer food produced the natural way – outdoors or in a greenhouse (to protect from the cold). I love meat and I can’t see sheep, cattle, pigs and deer being reared in vertical farms and fed on lettuce.
Look at this indoor pig farm in China:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-26-storey-pig-skyscraper-ready-to-produce-1-million-pigs-a-year
I grow some stuff indoor over the winter (kinda cool to have fresh picked veggies mid-winter) It takes quite a bit of energy with all the lights and heat mats just for my little basement setup. I would love to see the cost breakdown for something like this.
It is unfortunately pretty expensive because of energy costs. Honestly water costs are not that bad as the environment is fairly well controlled.
What really would be awesome is getting high value items to grow indoors from seed to full plant quickly like trees etc. This however is probably a pipe dream. I am thinking raspberries and cherries. Keep the critters away, grow the fruit quickly, multiple harvests per year, precise nutrients fed, etc.
Right now you basically can grow LETTUCE at a profit… that is it.
I’ve been growing food indoors for the past 50 years. Started with a few 10 watt fluorescent on top of the water heater for tomato seedlings. Now we have a 20 watt aerogarden for herbs as well as a larger 100 watt 4×5 foot grow tent for peppers and tomatoes. Barely notice the change in the electric bill because the entire system is tuned towards vegatative growth and is incredibley efficient. Just the fact that it saves a 40 mile round trip per week to the store pays for itself.
So indoor hydroponics etc is a WONDERFUL technology that needs a ton of energy. Cheap energy and you can grow foods with less cost/all year round. Expensive energy and you should rely on the sun.
I wish people would come to realize that ‘GREEN’ energy keeps us from realizing the actual real green revolution. One of my dreams is to run a hydroponics/indoor farm. Only two real issues. I am a terrible cultivator and ENERGY COSTS.
<sigh>
Indoor hydroponic technology is getting better all the time. I carry a 1″ x 0.50″ COB LED in my pocket, it emits 1000 lumens and runs for over 2 hours on Li polymer battery. That amount of light in such a small space was not available even 5 years ago. For the veggies, I use a 100W LED array equivalent to a 200W HID light. Besides a large increase in efficiency, the LED system only produces light which can be used by the plants, which is actually a small part of the visible spectrum (thankyou NASA).
It is like encouraging electric cars while restricting the supply of cheap power (both fossil fuel and nuclear) that could make them practical. One of my key reasons for opposing climate alarmism is that its related political policies would hamstring the actual future. Hydroponics is a perfect example of this.
There ARE NO “CLIMATE DRIVEN” events.
It doesn’t matter how often or how much they insist there are, or will be. Pure nonsense.
“the company expects to produce about 400 tonnes of lettuces a year,”
I suppose the company motto will be :
“Let us feed you”
Growing food seems to be a perfect application for solar energy. The generation of electricity not so much.
Why do these idiots get everything backasswards?
Over in Helena MT there has been several greenhouse operations over the years. One
was a tomato operation that went hydroponic, expanded and did well for many years.
When the owner tried to sell when he aged out there were no buyers so it was
shut down and the adjoining acreage was subdivided. I was a customer for many
years. Another was heated by a natural hot springs, raised mostly flowers and
also did well. It was sold and the new buyers made it marijuana operation and the
feds busted it and its now a mess–literally. There was a new greenhouse operation to the west of it also off of hotsprings that raises flowers and does reportedly well. There is now
a new indoor grow operation with legalized marijuana the north valley, a very large warehouse type building build next to a major power substation. I would guess it’s power
bill is huge. With the new legalized weed shops all over town the green don’t much care.
The trend that I find interesting is the farm to fork operations. There is one next to me and
he is quite successful. he claims a 20% net return which is very respectful for a ag operation.
The biggest obstacle to that is government interference from the meat inspectors eg corruption.
“Mushrooms are frequently grown indoors” — My area of the US was a huge mushroom growing area with “mushroom caves” (actually two and three story concrete block buildings with shelves filled with “mushroom dirt”) — the father of a friend was a secret millionaire hiding his cash sales from the Feds.
They tore down the last of the caves two years ago. Foreign imports (canned mushrooms) pushed down prices. Today, most fresh button mushrooms in the USA are grown in one county in Pennsylvania.
This is more magical thinking. These people must believe that just imagining something is the same as actually making something that works.
Engineering? Economics? Phhhtt! That’s for the little people to figure out.
US farmland being bought by China and elite/rich people not associated with farming. US food processing plants burning down at an alarming rate. Governments preventing their farmers from working their land. Farming restrictions on growth and insect preventive chemicals are multiplying. Movements to dictate what people eat aren’t being questioned and treated like a natural progression. And when the dots are connected people are being accused of conspiracy theories.
4000 sq m to produce 400 tonnes?
So 10 sq m per tonne?
Seems a bit low…
I wonder how long it will be before the elites begin to realize that they need farmers but farmers don’t need them.
Grass eventually produces exactly the same amount of CO2 whether it goes through and animal(s) or rots on the ground. It’s exactly the same amount as it consumed when it was growing.
Well, vertical farming is the future.
Much smaller footprint (!), much less pollution of the environment through herbicides (actually no need for that): much healthier food.
The electricity can come from PVs, converting the broad spectrum of sunlight to much more efficient colors.
I do like it!
The power requirement isn’t that bad but the indoor farming techniques are absolutely useless for 85% of the crops we eat.
Existing PASSIVE indoor systems work for 12 of the remaining 15% in their off-seasons too. So you can grow citrus trees in one-sided greenhouse systems in North Dakota year round and even trigger twice-yearly fruiting. Given a large enough scale other techniques can be used to ensure most of the crops grow while only adding about 3% cost to their production.
This type of nonsense is, sadly, all over the place.
I suspect the problem is exactly like that of growing meat in a petri dish: utterly unrealistic. For example: you need some type of nutrient broth to sustain cells. This is typically agar. The entire world produces something like 10000 tons of agar at its peak, it is less now. Sounds like a lot until you consider the world consumes 350 million tons of meat per year.
Even if you could just use sugar – the world produces only 165 million tons of sugar a year.
Vat meat, algae oil, and probably urban farming are all about the positioning and nothing about the economics or logistics. As I note above, these are Marie Antoinette/PMC/urban elite bullshit memes.