Indoor farms are remaking the produce market — at a cost to the planet
Indoor farms are remaking the produce market — at a cost to the planet
Energy use in the industry varies widely depending on greenhouse size and what crops are being grown. A study of 12 indoor farms by the nonprofit Resource Innovation Institute found that five of them used as much energy, per square foot, as a hospital. One vertical farm, an outlier, was guzzling as much energy as a data center.
I mean very high energy use is and has been known to be one of the primary costs to indoor and vertical farming from the outset. The other being most plants require far, far more manual labor to produce.
Outside of their current use to provide crops that otherwise couldn’t be grown in a region, the primary argument i’ve heard for such methods is we want the dense land use to rewild some areas, and don’t mind heavy construction, higher energy consumption, and drastic increase in manual labor needed to do so.
There is also the fact that they consume a lot less water. In regions where solar and wind energy are a surplus but fresh water is scarce, indoor farming makes more sense.
Except the energy, carbon, and labor costs massively outweigh the costs of growing food out in the open where there is plentiful and reliable water and just putting it on a train or ship. That also cuts down on the amount of people who need to do labor and therefore live in areas where water is scarce.
I’m not saying that greenhouses are useless of course, just that I would expect them to be found more in water rich areas that just lack the growing season for the relevant crops and don’t think they can ever be a good solution to growing major crops like wheat, corn, rice, etc…
Indoor/Vertical farming requires powering artificial light unlike traditional farming, but the energy use is a red herring.
Traditional farming typically requires more labor, not less. The key factor is that it is very easy to have most of that labor done by migrant temporary-visa and undocumented workers, for lower wages than would be legal in an industry where exploitation on that scale has not been normalized.
The primary cost, and the reason corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits is their professional labor force. If they could also be run by slaves, most would be competitive with traditional farming.
Except nearly all traditional farming, at least of the staple crops that actually feed people like wheat, corn, and rice have all been near exclusively mechanized for about a century now. We’ve actually gotten to the point where farms have tended to consolidate in no small part because a small team can farm a few dozen square miles and produce enough food to feed a small city.
Migrant, temporary visa, and undocumented workers are a factor in things like fruit tree harvesting, which is obviously absurdly difficult to stack on top of itself, or vegetables which are already often grown indoors so i’m not sure where your getting the idea that greenhouses can’t hire them.
Corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits because it’s very difficult to make an expensive multistory building compete with free unused dirt, trains, and decades of refinement of large scale machinery, and so foucus on trying to automate labor intensive and season unfriendly crops to show a pathway to improvement, generally neglecting that there is very little one can do in a multistory building one can’t do in far cheaper greenhouse. This sort of robotics have also proven a lot more finicky than silicon valley anticipated, which has limited adoption across the board.
In a world where two of the most carbon intensive sectors are electricity generation and construction, replacing direct sunlight and naturally supported dirt with electrical sunlight and concrete and steel is always going to be a big ask, even if we neglect that construction is also a dangerous and hard job heavily reliant on migrant and undocumented workers.
A vertical farm wouldn't be able to power itself with solar on its own roof. You can't convert from light to electricity to light again and end up with more light. Possibly it could if you're converting to specific wavelengths used by the plants, but given the sheer number of layers in even a single floor vertical farm, it's still unlikely to be able to power itself.
So if solar and wind is the answer, you have to have fields full of those two. But then, why not just grow food in those fields? There might be specific situations that have a good answer to that, like the land isn't suitable for agriculture, but otherwise, we have to look for solutions other than solar and wind.
Alternatively, if water use is a big deal, then we can seek ways to reduce water use in traditional agriculture.