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In the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey, tucked between a packaging manufacturer
and an aquatics center lies a farm. Except if you’re driving down the nearby highway
you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that this particular farm is churning out
thousands of pounds of greens each year. In fact, all you’ll see is a bunch of buildings,
because this is a vertical farming operation called AeroFarms which grows all their food
in a warehouse. Like the owners of AeroFarms, tech enthusiasts across the world have embraced
the dream of vertical farming, exclaiming that their operations are the answer to feeding a
growing global population, combating climate change, and eradicating food deserts. So,
today we’re going to look under the hood of these vertical farms in order to answer three questions.
Do they work? Are they sustainable? And are they a viable alternative to growing food outdoors?
How Does Vertical Farming Work?
The many-shelved farming operation that is AeroFarms is just one of many companies
that uses vertical space to grow vegetables. What sets AeroFarms apart, however, is that
it grows in a fine mist filled with nutrients instead of a typical growing environment like
rockwool and nutrient-rich water. But AeroFarms is an outlier in the vertical farming space. The
typical vertical farm looks a lot more like that at Bowery, a company that uses a more
traditional hydroponics system to grow their produce. Essentially, Bowery grows greens and
other veggies in a nutrient-rich tray of water, which is consistently recycled in a closed-loop
system. This system is then replicated en masse and expanded not horizontally,
but vertically to maximize space. But because all these plants are stacked on top of each other,
access to light becomes a big obstacle, which means that each shelf is equipped with LED lights
to act as artificial sunlight. Some operations like Plenty go even further by shining only
the beneficial colors in the light spectrum for growth. While some of these large-scale
vertical farms can quickly become laden with advanced technologies like robotic arms and AI
monitoring systems, at their most basic, vertical farms use a combination of artificial sunlight
and vertical space to maximize the amount of yield per acre. These food factories seem promising,
but they also seem like a lot of work. So why are people so excited about them?
The Benefits of Vertical Farming The typical American farm is 444 acres,
and, if you’re a lettuce farmer, on average you can pull around 36200 lbs per acre from your field
every year. Vertical farming, however, boasts much higher yields per square foot, with some companies
like San Francisco-based Plenty claiming they can produce 400x times the yield of a conventional
farm. This is where the benefits of a vertical farm begin, but it’s certainly not where they end.
Vertical farming proponents point to disease and pest prevention, water-saving, season extension
and exacting control as some of the many benefits of growing vertically. In a sealed,
indoor environment disease and pests are rare, meaning that pesticide and herbicide use is at
its minimum. Hydro or aquaponics systems which are common in vertical farming, recycle water
in a closed loop system and can conserve up 95% of the water used. While artificial lights means that
plants can grow regardless of the season and location. You could theoretically grow plants
right next to a supermarket. And this farming method can do all this without depleting the
soil. All this sounds amazing. Who wouldn’t want a pesticide-free operation that uses less water,
less land, and is closer to urban centers? Well, unfortunately, there’s a cost.
The Problem with Vertical Farming
The vertical farming space seems to be inundated with Silicon Valley tech investors dead set
on finding a solution for growing food that will catapult us into an era of sustainably grown
produce. Their warehouses are full of AI driven robots, software that monitors plant growth,
and spaceship-like white columns that all seem right out of a sci-fi movie. All these futuristic
devices couldn’t possibly have a downside, right? Wrong. The technology-ridden vertical farm comes
at a high cost, both in terms of money and the environment. In order to start-up just
one of these food factories, costs could be as high as $39 million, which is prohibitively
expensive even for an already costly industry, which might require as much as $5 million just
to start a grain farming operation in Iowa. Even vertical farming in shipping containers,
which have a small startup cost compared to big warehouse farms like AeroFarms or Plenty,
is expensive. Sometimes this is to the tune of 10 times the cost to grow produce than a
regular dirt farm. In part, this has to do with the expense of retrofitting a shipping container,
but it can also be tied back to the energy required for lights, heating,
ventilation, and cooling. According to research conducted by Civil Eats,
a 30,000 sq ft New York City vertical farm might pay $216,000 annually just for lighting and power,
and another $120,000 for air conditioning systems. These costs can differ drastically depending on
the location of these vertical farms but on the whole the costs of most vertical farms lead to
higher prices on the consumer side. Agriculture consultant Peter Tasgal estimates that lettuce
from vertical farms costs roughly 5 times more per pound than when it's conventionally grown.
Alongside their high monetary cost, these systems also generate a larger carbon footprint than
field farmed produce. A number of papers have studied the lifecycle impact of a kilogram of
lettuce in a vertical farm and, depending on the context, they found that vertical farms can
emit anywhere from .156 to 4 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent for every kilogram of lettuce
grown. While one Washington Post reporter writes that in places with heavy fossil fuel use,
vertical farms could generate as much as 7 to 20 times more greenhouse gases than outdoor farms.
Yes, vertical farms do cut down on the need for transportation, but Paul West, lead scientist at
the Global Landscapes Initiative at the University of Minnesota, asserts that 80% of a farm’s carbon
emissions are created on the farm, so food miles are negligible. I also think the key thing to keep
in mind here is that vertical farms can really only grow a small range of veggies, like lettuce
greens and kale, efficiently and profitably. And when grown outdoors these crops already tend
to have low emissions footprints. Essentially, vertical farming is tinkering at the edges when
it comes to agriculture’s carbon footprint. If we truly want to drastically reduce agricultural
emissions we should instead use our resources to address the biggest emitter in the industry: meat.
Is Vertical Farming a Viable Solution to Food Scarcity and Climate Change?
Food production facilities like AeroFarms easily cling to the imaginative areas of
our brains. They’re big, futuristic, shiny, new, and exciting. But vertical farms are not
a sustainable silver-bullet solution to solving world hunger. While there certainly is use for
them in some contexts, like in the cold seasons, or in water-deprived areas like California
or cities like Abu Dhabi, they provide a different service than small and large traditional farms.
And in terms of feeding the world, our problem is not a lack of food, it’s a lack of appropriate
infrastructure to distribute the food we have to those in need. For instance, globally we waste
⅓ of the food we produce. So, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into vertical farms feels
similar to trying to colonize Mars to escape a changing climate. It’s a prohibitively expensive
and technology ridden solution to a problem that has other, more just, and less expensive answers.
There are many appropriate technologies and methods on conventional farms that have been
proven to increase yields on extremely small plots, all without AI, white columns, or smart
cameras. And if we genuinely want to address climate change through agriculture our first step
should not be to fiddle with greens, it should be to address the huge impact that beef has on our
land, water, and greenhouse gases. Techno-fixes like vertical farming are alluring, and when
used in appropriate contexts, beneficial, but looking ahead towards 2030 and onwards to 2050,
we’ll need a hell of a lot more than technology to fix the societal problem that is climate change.
After being on YouTube for over four years, I still find it really hard to
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