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Guest Op-Ed: From Field To Skyscraper
Imagine rows upon rows and layers upon layers of crops, enough food to feed a city grown locally right in your next-door skyscraper. Growing food in warehouses or skyscrapers is the future, and this new innovation is called a vertical farm
By Nathan Riehemann
May 13, 2021
Imagine rows upon rows and layers upon layers of crops, enough food to feed a city grown locally right in your next-door skyscraper. Growing food in warehouses or skyscrapers is the future, and this new innovation is called a vertical farm. New research shows crop yields in vertical farms can be 200-600 times greater than your typical field farm. The world is growing and farming is growing with it.
This growth has resulted in the need for another form of farming. With an alarming decrease in the world’s topsoil, farm yields are decreasing. Topsoil contains all the important nutrients necessary for healthy plants, but erosion is washing or blowing the topsoil away and the plants are not being nurtured. Compacted soil, which limits root growth, is also prevalent in our ever-industrializing civilization. Crop yields in compacted areas of China, even after soil rehabilitation, produce yields that are 60% less than a typical farm, and rehabilitation of the soil can take up to two years. The world needs another solution like vertical farming until our soil can be managed and preserved properly.
AgriHouse Inc. and AeroFarms are both well-known vertical farming companies located in South Korea and the United States. The methods these companies use are LED lights designed specifically to meet the PPF (photosynthetic photon flux) a plant needs and aquaponics which reduce both water and fertilizer use while maximizing produce.
Currently, vertical farms produce spinach, lettuce, cabbage, peas, strawberries, peppers, potatoes, radishes, carrots, and tomatoes. By stacking growing areas, a vertical farm is able to produce 500 fold what a traditional farm can. This is all completed with a workforce of about six to 10 people. It is amazing to see how much food can be produced with such a small amount of manpower. This is just the beginning because rice is also perfectly suited for vertical farming. It is a prominent crop in Eastern Asian countries so it will surely join the others. Wheat is also one of the top 10 most prevalent crops in the world and has been tested and found to be growable in the controlled environments of vertical farms. Soon, most crops will be grown not out but up.
Vertical farms do have some drawbacks such as the possibility of insects terrorizing the controlled and pesticide-free crops. And since vertical farms are dependent on electricity, power outages could potentially destroy entire yields. The initial cost of building vertical farms is also potentially high. These are valid concerns and more research is needed to address them. With technology constantly updated and redesigned and with increased support, vertical farming will continue to grow along with the produce. Vertical farms are still more reliable than field farms because they are not affected by seasons or natural disasters. Soon, your local farmers won’t have to look down at their fields but rather up at the towering gardens.
Lead photo: Nice leafy vegetables at the Sky Greens vertical farm in Singapore.
Nathan Riehemann is a senior at NUAMES graduating with his associate degree from Weber State University. He is planning to study mechanical engineering and participate in Air Force ROTC at Montana State University. He enjoys playing hockey, traveling and board games.
Skyscraper Farms, Solution To World's Rising Food Demand, Set To Go Global
In a suburb of Kyoto in Japan, surrounded by technology companies and startups, Spread Co is preparing to open the world’s largest automated leaf-vegetable factory.
At vertical farms sealed room protects the vegetables from pests, diseases and dirt
The problem has always been reproducing the effect of natural rain, soil and sunshine at a cost that makes the crop competitive with traditional agriculture
Bloomberg Last Updated at October 31, 2018
In a suburb of Kyoto in Japan, surrounded by technology companies and startups, Spread Co is preparing to open the world’s largest automated leaf-vegetable factory. It’s the company’s second vertical farm and could mark a turning point for vertical farming — bringing the cost low enough to compete with traditional farms on a large scale.
For decades, vertical farms that grow produce indoors without soil in stacked racks have been touted as a solution to rising food demand in the world’s expanding cities. The problem has always been reproducing the effect of natural rain, soil and sunshine at a cost that makes the crop competitive with traditional agriculture.
Spread is among a handful of commercial firms that claim to have cracked the problem with a mix of robotics, technology and scale. Its new facility in Japan will grow 30,000 heads of lettuce a day on racks under custom-designed LED lights. A sealed room protects the vegetables from pests, diseases and dirt. Temperature and humidity are optimised to speed growth of the greens, which are fed, tended and harvested by robots. “Our system can produce a stable amount of vegetables of a good quality for sale at a fixed price throughout the year, without using pesticides and with no influence from weather,” Spread President Shinji Inada, 58, said in an interview at the company’s existing facility.
Inada won the Edison Award in 2016 for his vertical-farming system. He expects the new factory to more than double the company’s output, generating 1 billion yen in sales a year from growing almost 11 million lettuces.
About 60 per cent of indoor-farm operators in Japan are unprofitable because of the cost of electricity to run their facilities. Most others only turn a profit because of government subsidies or by charging a premium to consumers for vegetables that are chemical-free. Spread sells lettuces for 198 yen a head to consumers, about 20 to 30 percent more than the normal price for conventionally grown varieties, according to Inada.
First Published: Wed, October 31 2018