Nicole Garman

May 22, 2019

When most consumers consider vertical farms, they think of grocery store lettuces. They’re not wrong — leafy greens are an excellent crop for a controlled, hydroponic growing setup. But are year-round edible flowers and spring salad mixes enough to disrupt the future of food? 

What Is Vertical Farming?

Growing fresh food has traditionally been subject to the elements: location, climate, seasonal conditions, and weather trends are just the start of the challenges that can impact plant health and crop yield.

Indoor, or greenhouse, farming creates a controlled environment to combat troubles like pests and drought. The strategy dates as far back as the Roman Emperor Tiberius, and its latest iteration bears the promise of an efficient “Plantopia” that we’ve yet to truly tap.

Vertical farms grow upwards, engaging with shelf-style structures that tend to operate via hydroponics or aeroponics. Robotics, data analysis, computerized controls, and sophisticated algorithms do the heavy lifting of optimizing every inch of the growing environment — all day long, every day of the year.

Perks Of Production

Two words: perpetual growing. The high tech engineering of vertical farms makes them practically invincible. Pests, poor weather, diseases, and even seasonal temperature changes carry no weight in these environments of complete control. Their products are organic by default — there’s no need for pesticides, and they grow with very little water for maximum efficiency.

All of that fine-tuning makes for fast growth, too. Vertical facilities can turn around a crop in significantly less time than the traditional field, with growth rates up to 390 times more productive than competitors. 

The Trouble with Tech

High-efficiency growing facilities hosting plants at ten and twenty deep, growing at double time, and with less of an environmental footprint? It all sounds too good to be true... And it just may be.

These brilliant feats of agricultural engineering come with a steep price tag — one large indoor vertical farm costs millions of dollars. Agritecture Consulting estimates the cost of a 30,000-square-foot-facility for leafy greens and herbs near New York City at almost $4 million in startup capital - and that’s without labor.

Most of the costs come from high-end equipment including custom ventilation, shading devices, and high-powered lights. Sophisticated heating, cooling, and ventilation systems add to the mix, along with the immense amount of electricity needed to power it all: think nearly a $350,000 annual tab for lighting, power, and HVAC at the same facility near NYC.

Along with the obvious concerns of carrying such a large carbon footprint, vertical farming faces another serious challenge: competition. Smart greenhouses with advanced automation and the advantage of sunlight, while they may not host the same level of engineering, can operate at well less than a third of the cost per square foot. 

Trans-Plantation

While vertical farming may have a host of complications, it’s particularly effective at one task: growing starter plants.

For many growers, starter plants, or transplants, are extremely valuable. These fledglings can be grown rapidly, at extremely high densities, in the controlled environments of vertical farms before being inserted into the agricultural supply chain. They offer hardiness and ease of planting, saving growers the time and labor of having to start the young plants from fragile seeds in a greenhouse or field.

The quality of these transplants is consistent and immune to shifting outdoor conditions: hiccups in weather or seasonal conditions don't alter their growth, making for a very uniform product with higher dry mass. They serve as an exceptional base for field growers and greenhouses who bring the final crops to market.

While these starter plants may not be the answer to the operational challenges faced by vertical farming facilities, it’s safe to say there’s more innovation in store. Between 2016 and 2017, investments in such facilities saw a boost of 653% and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Forthcoming research from Cornell University, funded by the National Science Foundation, will help to tell us whether those investments will come to harvest — and we can’t wait to find out.

Image Credit: Yein Jeon / Shutterstock.com