Victoria Dmitruczyk

04-23-20

If you’ve ever seen a farm, you know it looks something like this:

So cute. So inefficient, but cute.

These are normal farms. There’s nothing special about them. This is what we’re used to.

That’s not necessarily a good thing.

These farms typically use pesticides (which means the crops we get aren’t as nutrient-rich as they should be), are at risk from all weather conditions, take up SO much land, and uses 70% of the world’s water supply.

Not so ideal now. What if there was a way we could change that?

Meet your new best friend: Vertical Farming

In a nutshell:

Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers. It takes in controlled environment agriculture, and soilless farming techniques like hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics to produce nutritious yields of food.

Plenty’s Vertical Farm

Physical Layout

The main goal of vertical farming is to produce more food per square metre, hence, why everything grows upwards ⬆️.

Vertical Farm Structures

Now, one of the great things about vertical farming is that it’s pretty dang versatile. There are two main kinds of farms:

Above Ground Vertical Farms

The majority of vertical farms right now take place above ground. They’re generally more convenient to build. This could mean taking place in warehouses, greenhouses, the list continues. That doesn’t mean they’re boring though:

Abandoned buildings are becoming increasingly popular as a spot to host vertical farms. ‘The Plant’ is a farm in Chicago that was transformed from an old meatpacking facility.
‘Vertical Harvest’ built a three-story hydroponic greenhouse next to a parking lot, which aims to grow 100,000 lbs of produce annually.
‘Lokal’, by IKEA’s Space10 innovation lab, is making miniature vertical farms where you can grow crops out of your own kitchen!! The greens grow three times faster in Lokal than in traditional gardens.

Recycled shipping containers are also becoming a popular option for hosting vertical farms (See Square Roots down below 😉) .

These containers combine smart climate control and LED lighting, monitoring systems, and vertical hydroponics to get an efficient farm that is able to produce a high yield of produce per square food.

Freight Farms is also a company changing the vertical farming shipping container game

But wait… It gets better 🤩.

By stacking the shipping containers, we can save EVEN MORE space and achieve an EVEN HIGHER yield per square foot.

Underground Vertical Farms (Deep Farms)

As the name suggests, underground and deep farms are vertical farms, simply built underground, taking place in refurbished underground tunnels or even abandoned mine shafts (Say what?!! 🤯)

Growing Underground is said to be the world’s first underground farm. The produce is grown in a World War II bomb shelter 33 meters under Clapham, London.

Temperature and humidity underground are usually consistent and mild, and so, deep farms require less energy for heating. They can also use groundwater (which is nearby) to further reduce the cost of water supply.

When you combine all of these qualities together with automated harvesting programs, you get a fully self-sufficient farm that’s able to produce 7–9x more food than conventional farms above ground with the same amount of area used!!! 🤯

Lighting

🔑 Having good lighting is key to having a good vertical farm.

In order to get this to be perfect, combinations of natural and artificial lights are used to maintain optimal light levels while technologies such as rotating beds improve lighting efficiency.

Most vertical farms use blue and red LED lights. But, it’s not just for the sake of looking futuristic.

Crop One Holdings — A Vertical Farm start-up out of San Francisco uses smart LED lighting to grow nutritious plants for Dubai’s United Airlines ✈️

The white light of sunlight that plants receive in conventional farms emits wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. However, plants don’t need all. of these wavelengths.

Studies have shown that plants respond best to the blue and red wavelengths. The evolutionary reason behind this is that millions of years ago, plants only grew in the ocean. These wavelengths were able to penetrate the water most efficiently, and plants have grown to like this 🌊.

This means that traditional lights give plants unnecessary light spectra, and waste energy in turn. LED lighting isn’t like that. It gives the option of targeted wavelengths, meaning they’re able to emit solely the red and blue spectra. This is where we see that pink hue come from.

Process

Instead of soil, hydroponic, aeroponic, aquaponic, or growing mediums are used. Peat moss or coconut husks and similar non-soil mediums are very common in vertical farming.

Point being, vertical farming using membranes over the soil to grow plants. This helps eliminate the work that goes into maintaining good soil and ensures quality.

Notice how there’s no soil here 🧐

Controlled-Environment Agriculture (CEA) is what allows vertical farming to be used year round. It controls factors like air, temperature, light, water, humidity, carbon dioxide, and plant nutrition to extend the growing season and crop yield.

Current Vertical Farms Changing the Game

Square Roots

Apparently, Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, is revolutionizing vertical farming 🤩 (Oh… and he’s also a cowboy 🤠)

His company, Square Roots is a vertical farming facility that is hosted in shipping containers.

Inside one of the containers

This not only makes the possibility of urban farming more feasible (and less transportation means we maintain the maximum amount of nutrients & have everything remain fresh!!), but it also makes it super versatile.

After all, it’s not that difficult to move a shipping container, while moving a whole traditional farm is well, more difficult…

Plenty

Plenty is a vertical farming startup that aims to make plants that taste so good, you’ll want to eat them over everything else.

Their facilities are HUGE, producing, well, plenty of food.

20 foot tall walls of Arugula. Need I say more?

Its farm in San Francisco can produce 1 million pounds of produce per year, while the farm being built in Compton will be a 95,000 square foot facility, also producing millions of pounds of food.

Even though it seems like this would leave a massive environmental footprint, it not only uses 1% to 5% of the water used to grow comparable crops on a traditional farm but also uses a fraction of the land. Not to mention, it’s all being run in a 100% renewable facility powered by a combination of wind and solar energy.

Farm.One

Rare Produce + Convenience = Farm.One

Farm.One is a New York underground vertical farm that grows rare produce for Michelin star restaurants, while being directly underneath them.

Farm.One’s main facility TriBeCa, under Atera, a two Michelin star restaurant.

They produce 500 different microgreens, edible flowers, and rare herbs year-round. This helps bring otherwise pretty inaccessible ingredients closer to home, all while maintaining freshness (#quality).

Why Vertical Farming?

Vertical Farming sounds scary to invest in. After all, why leap from the conventional system that you know has worked for years, to this, a whole new approach? But, there are many advantages:

By 2050, 80% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas, while food isn’t as accessible as we’ve grown used to it being. With this increased demand for food, not only from the actual growing population but from the population condensation means that vertical farming could make food easier-to-access.
Vertical farming allows us to produce more crops from the same square footage of growing area. In fact, 1 acre of an indoor area offers equivalent production to at least 4–6 acres of outdoor capacity, and this can still get monumentally higher. A facility in Japan is able to grow 100x more crops than the traditional farm.
We have a limited amount of fresh water on Earth, and conventional farming uses 70% of it. Vertical farming allows us to produce crops with 70–95 percent less water than traditional systems.
Crops in fields are vulnerable to storms, bugs, and other disasters, all things which are increasing as a result of climate change. Vertical Farms are protected from all of these things.
Since there are no bugs, vertical farming doesn’t require pesticides either. Special lighting provides the growth of nutritious, organic, pesticide-free crops.
Big equipment is controlled by robotics, and farmers don’t have to worry about receiving sicknesses or getting injured from machinery like on conventional farms.

Okay… that sounds great, but what are the downsides?

Now, vertical farming isn’t perfect, and there are definitely some downsides, the majority of them economical.

Vertical farming requires SUPER high amounts of energy. A hydroponic farm growing lettuce in Arizona would require 15,000 kJ of energy per kilogram of lettuce produced while a traditional outdoor lettuce farm in Arizona only requires 1100 kJ of energy per kilogram of lettuce grown.
Vertical farms have yet to overcome high upfront start-up costs. The initial building costs can exceed $100 million, for a 60-hectare vertical farm. This means it could take around approx. 6–7 years to pay back the start-up cost.
Vertical farming takes place in a controlled environment without the presence of insects, which means they don’t need pesticides. However, because of this, the pollination process needs to be done manually, which will be labor-intensive and costly.

Vertical farms have their weak spots, but, they also have so much potential. This is the future of farming.

With a growing population, and challenges like space flight on the rise, we’re going to need to invest in farming systems that are efficient and versatile, and this is precisely what vertical farming is.

It’s already making an impact, and it’s not long before it completely revolutionizes the way we approach our food.

🔑 Key Takeaways

Vertical farming is the process of growing food in vertically stacked layers. This allows more food per square meter to be grown.
Key components like Controlled Environment Agriculture and LED lighting make farms yield nutritious crops year round, regardless of outdoor weather conditions.
There are many vertical farming initiatives out there right now, which firms such as Square Roots, Farm.One, and Plenty changing the game.
Vertical farming has many advantages, such as being adaptive to a growing population, eliminating pesticides, and being available whenever, locally.
The biggest barriers to vertical farming right now are associated with large, upfront, energy costs.

👋 Hey! If you liked my article and would like to read more of my work, feel free to follow me on Medium! I’m also always thankful to hear feedback so, if you would like to get in contact with me (I don’t bite, shoot me a message!), connect with me on LinkedIn!

WRITTEN BY: Victoria Dmitruczyk

Tags: Vertical Farming Agtech Farming Agriculture Innovation