a) You should learn to structure the talk. The unspecified and non-linear presentation makes the information inaccessible b) I'm 12 minutes in and the only thing you've presented so far is appeal to authority - yours. c) You make the same false static world assumptions that dogmatic types use. All electricity will always be fossil fuel based etc. e) You've presented the same false dichotomies that dogmatic types use. It's not "either local PV array or fossil fuels" is crap. f) You're playing games with varying costs, you're talking about carbon costs in some cases, but then you switch to fuel cost, as in the case of transportation costs analysis. What happened to the carbon costs? Why weren't fuel costs included in energy input calculations for conventional agriculture? g) What about the cost of the extensive packaging the produce for shipping? h) What about the nutritional quality of the delivered food? Crap that's been on a truck for 3 days and sitting in a i) You completely ignored the difference in cost of harvesting crops in the field vs. the trivial access in a vertical farm j) What's with injecting desalinization into the discussion? Why aren't you including the CO2 and electricity costs of pumping the water out of the ground? Everyone knows that fresh water is being given away to big ag at the expense of the citizens. k) You're being very provincial in your arguments, they only apply to US agriculture. As Africa becomes more arid and produces more renewable energy, the equation changes. l) Put some error bars/ranges on your calculations so that it's possible for people to consider what might actually happen instead of accepting your claims of what will/must happen. Your initial argument/calculations appear to be based on how much solar energy *received* on the ground, not on how much solar energy is *required* to produce the food. Have you tried turning your calculations around and verified that growing plants in the ground _is_ possible according to your claims/calculations? You sound like you have an agenda, so prove that your calculations and claims are accurate by turning _all_ of them around and applying them conventional agriculture and applying all the same standards - the costs of electricity, the carbon costs, the full costs of packaging and transport. Then factor in resilience and crop insurance. Your assumptions completely ignore widespread extreme weather that is likely to accompany climate change. Basic capitalism says that those with product in hand, and those who can provide a reliable supply of consistent quality produce will get paid. We're about two or three consecutive years of wheat crop failures due to extreme weather events away from your price calculations sounding irrelevant. I suspect that your physics is correct but I also suspect that which bits of the physics and economics you chose to apply where, aren't. I also suspect that vertical farms are currently more hype than value (in some cases they seem to be pump-and-dump stock scams) and I'm absolutely certain that it will take decades of trial and error for real, working vertical farms to find their niche in the marketplace, but I have no doubt that they will contribute. It seems like you're selling "Bumblebees can't fly" thinking, you've done the body-weight to wing surface area calculations and declared the math proves that it's impossible for them to fly, but when the whole system is considered, bumblebees can and do fly. I'm not suggesting they're going to violate the laws of physics and produce infinite food at zero cost, I just think there's more to the costs and values than you're presenting.
+ExperienceCounts2 a) It was for live audience not youtube, so it may be crude / unstructured but it succeed in delivering the message that its marketing stunt and complete facts and figures are deliberately not being given by vertical farming advocates using cherry picked lines. b) Don't understand what you meant by that, the initial few minutes were subtle way of saying this is a dirty business when investors have invested real money in one or other technology, economy whatever you call it. c) Electricity is being discussed because of LED lights, running pumps, heating/cooling systems to get maximum yield, how else are you gonna plant indoor?
+Afaq Saleem "complete facts and figures are deliberately not being given by vertical farming advocates using cherry picked lines." No, those are not advocates of vertical farming, those are businesses/corporations with a vested interest in the success of their financial venture. One can advocate for an idea without being associated with marketing schemes designed to capitalize on ignorance and the unknowns of a new technique. The fact still remains that the speaker is doing a great deal of cherry picking of his own, which does nothing for his argument. It's still a false dichotomy to present electricity as either non-existent or comes from fossil fuels. Electricity from renewable sources is increasing. It already supplies about 10% of the energy in the USA, and it's around 25% in the UK. That's the problem with static world arguments, they don't reflect reality. The world is changing, and the changes favor vertical farming on whatever scale it might be feasible. He's building different models of two different systems. One model is for corporate agriculture and he conveniently leaves out calculations that he includes in the other model, the one for vertical farming. In the vertical farming model he leaves out calculations that favor it. As I said in my response, if he wants to prove something he should build *one* model that accounts for all the significant variables and then apply that *one* model to both vertical farming and corporate agriculture. If it's going to cost energy to pump water up into a vertical farm, then he damn well better include the cost of pumping water for corporate agriculture, or include the costs of building and maintaining canals to get the water. If he's going to include fuel costs then he needs to include all the fuel costs. If vertical farming can grow food closer to where it is consumed, then that needs to be factored in. If vertical farming can reduce food waste (3/4 of which occurs before food even gets to a store) then that needs to be factored in. One model would allow tweaking one parameter - like the percentage of renewable energy to fossil fuel energy - and that should demonstrate that the results for any scale of vertical farming is a negative. If there is some point in the model where vertical farming might have lower CO2 costs than corporate agriculture, then he should accept that as a consequence of his model. That's what being honest and being a scientist is about. All he's presented so far is this: "If you select these values for measuring corporate agriculture and this other set of values for measuring vertical farming, the corporate agriculture that his department is closely involved with is "better" by his specific definitions of what constitutes "better" That isn't good science, nor is it a compelling argument. Afaq Saleem
Chowder Head I wouldn't call it "anti anything progressive", I'd call it anti-science or anti-reason. I'd be fine if there was a decent model that could be applied to both systems of growing, and that model showed that vertical farming doesn't work and big ag does. It would be a valuable exercise because we could look at the model and say "It doesn't work because of x and ration of y to z" or whatever the analysis was. I forget who pointed it out just recently in a video I watched, but to be ignorant requires knowledge. If you can say "I am ignorant about x..." then you know something: What still needs to be done/overcome. In this case we could say "We were ignorant about x and y in vertical farming" and that might lead us to a new/better idea. Maybe pole farming is a better idea, where rather than doing it in a building we just have motorized hoists that allow us to stack plants on top of each other while still being exposed to natural sunlight Maybe a vertical farm needs to be like that giant VW storage facility, the circular multi-story garage where the automated lifts go up and down to retrieve the cars. Program a lift like that to rotate palettes that hold growing crops so that some minimum percentage of the time they do get natural sunlight and the rest of the time they get artificial light. Could be that there's some optimization that could be done and that giving plants natural sunlight for 20% of their lifetime might reduce their need for artificial light somehow and reduce the overall energy input. Maybe a vertical conveyor belt setup, so that the plants on top get watered and excess water drips down on the plants on the shelf below it, and those turn very slowly. Only the tops stick out of the building so they get natural sunlight for part of the time and if severe weather comes along, you only lose the plants that happened to be exposed to weather at the time the storm hit, the rest are safe and snug inside. I'm just spewing random conjecture pulled fresh from my butt, however I think it illustrates my point that building a model of the system is valuable regardless of whether the answers fall nearer to any particular political or philosophical school of thought. I don't know that the science supports either scenario as being feasible, but he'd built a proper model, we could make use of it to test other scenarios. I do know that corporate monoculture/big ag is the system we've been using and that system uses/wastes a lot of fossil fuels and a lot of fresh water and is very vulnerable to severe weather, which we are experiencing more frequently and it is expected to get worse. We need to make changes, and going vertical is one of the things we can try thanks to modern engineering/building techniques. I refer to this sort of thing as the "Get in the fucking boat and row" scenario. There are always people who for religious, political, financial or personal reasons, want to hold on to the rope that ties the boat to the pier, while the majority of human beings are trying to row our boat towards a better future. One luddite can slow our progress more than 2 or 3 can pull us forward. If they get in the boat and don't row, that's fine, but sitting in the boat and holding on to the fucking rope that anchors us to the past is just plain annoying. Mr. Bugbee could have spent his time rowing (i.e. doing proper science) and instead he's just clinging to the rope and telling everyone we'll row right off the edge of the world if we don't keep doing things the way we have been. Quantify specifically what's preventing us from getting us where we need to be, build models that others can use and extend in the future, demonstrate specifically and without bias)that what we're considering can't work, that's all cool. Just picking out a handful of numbers and oversimplified calculations and declaring that it cannot ever work...what the hell is the point in that? (see list above: religious, political, financial, or personal...)
+Afaq Saleem How else do we grow indoors? Humanity has over four thousand years of experience buildings and modifying structure to direct light. But you are in the strawman world. As soon as you accept his premise that all sustainable closed loop farming has to be on the grid you are sucked into this guys short-term world view.
+Afaq Saleem He is incoherent on his own proof points. He compares fossil fuel farming costs, then says shipping is irrelevant. Then he consider long distance, and concludes the opposite. Heck he starts using desert farming as a comparison point. Desert farming! The entire point of grow local addresses his second concern. The one he just told us was irrelevant. He spends thirty minutes refuting himself on refrigerated shipping alone. The most charitable interpretation is he wants to ship dry grains instead of fresh vegetables because vegetables have a high water content. Eat more boxed cereal and rice I guess? Not fresh vegetables? Maybe all the "photons" and "mole" comments, which he then later tells us he *does not understand* but adopted someone else's research, confused you. Latin doesn't confuse me. He muddles points, refutes himself, and uses mixed "orange" arguments to complain apples are not oranges. He's at best a useless academic. More likely a flack for a corporate sponsor.
I feel like a lot of (unjustified) dislikes come from people who do not understand the physics, chemistry and biology of growing plants. Another major source of dislikes is the destruction of people's overhyped dreams of vertical farming. Mr Bugabee presented the topic really well, his talk was well reasoned, supported by science and filled with information.
And Science is always 2 side's arguments but Only 1 side can be right and this guy is dead wrong in his assumptions. A vertical gardening will save land amount used. I use no solar no giant building structures. I took 1/3 of an acre and it's producing 7 to 10 time's yield no gmo seed no chemical Uriah fertilizers no gmo pesticides. So please explain his PHD to me ??? Useless as the toilet paper it's written on & that's the facts. The issues with gmo's is there all derived from oil aka cancer yummy. Next proof the United States has the most medicated people on the planet & yet still the sickest one Only has to look at the soils after all the decades of Gmo Fertilizers & Pesticides. The bug population has exploded in Nebraska & Iowa & many other state's that use that stuff. The bug's themselves have become Immune. Bee keeper's solved the mystery of bee death. They won't ship & rent their bee's to farmer's that sprayed pesticides for @ least 2 to 3 weeks after application Fact. No amount of GMO food's are safe to eat fact & tractor farming with GMO fertilizers & pesticides is a dead practice besides the enormous amount of diesel fuel waste & air pollution.
There is much to be learned from this presentation but Mr Bigbee took a really narrow use case to bash the totality of vertical farming. Funny coming from a guy who sells a par meeter which is design to help people grow marijuana indoors. People in the northeast dont have access to the heat and the sun in january and so one has to figure out how to accomplish this indoors. if you live in the suburbs of the northeast and you are just a blue collar bloke with a starter house and a small garden a garage and basement then you are going to have some ratio of indoor and outdoor growing strategies. How am i going to get the sun in the basement? If i add windows to the garage will it be too cold for the plants? What if i already have solar panels to power my computer and electric car could i not augment the winter light with some indoor lighting? what if im growing microgreens and not full blown tomatoes in the winter? So once you think of other use cases other than trying to replace a whole farm with a verticle skyscraper set up or some warehouse at the edge of town you start to see real benefits like farm to table health benefits, buffers against supply chain outages, a small universal basic income to get you through tough times, less pressure on the supply chain to increase yeilds using questionable methods like Chemicals and pesticides. i can go on.
@@p4rsec yeah the guys an idiot. this lecture did not age well. there are multiple vertical farming ops that have surfaced in the recent years. many more to come. for christ sake the guy didnt even talk about the automation involved. ONE PERSON 6 HOURS A WEEK CAN MANAGE AN AUTOMATED FARM THAT PRODUCES 900 LBS/week. he also missed many other points such as how transportation leads to nutrition loss
The real question I have is how much of this is truly insurmountable? There was a time when all of the most learned men of the world believed flight was going to be forever impossible, and then once that happened, commercial flight was going to be impossible, and then when that happened, commercial flight for the masses was going to be impossible. Engineering combined with time has this way of overcoming what seems like impossible obstacles. Personally, I'm happy for the efforts in vertical farming, as it provides a forcing function to push our technology forward. You never know what you'll uncover along the way.
All the problems are trivial from the technological point of view and the solution on reach. But not sustainable, both economical and environmentally just like flying on massive scale. You can have one or two for the fun but don't belive you are solving any problems with it.
@@mat650 I couldn't disagree more. The fundamental reality of technology is that it always moves toward better sustainability, in fact that's THE driving motivator. People get this false idea that new technologies are less sustainable than older technologies because they compare small implementations of the old ways to MASSIVE implementations of the new ways. However, the old technologies were so inefficient that modern scale was simply not possible. As much as people dislike fossil fuels today, they are FAR more environmentally friendly than burning wood and using horses. If all of our light and heat came from wood, and all our transport came from horses, you'd really hate what that world would look like. When fossil fuels first came out, one of their BIG driving forces for adoption was how much cleaner they were. But every technology has a scale limit, and once you start to reach it you start looking for new and better ways, which will scale further, better, cheaper. But it's a mistake to believe that technology isn't sustainable, when in fact, it's the ONLY hope for a sustainable future.
@@bujin5455 absolutely agree, but you forgot many factors in your equation: at the time when wood burning was our best source of energy the global population was massively smaller. Even though we got more efficient technology we use it in such a larger scale that it's more impacting on the environment. Concrete, steel and glass buildings on multiple floors are nothing new and very energy and resource intensive to build and maintain (I hold a major degree in Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) ), you are never going to recover with the supposed increase of yeld in comparison to open field agriculture. It's hard to make them cheep enough to provide a safe indoor environment to people with very basic requirements, not very different from those of plants in vertical farming. I hope for technological advancement but more in smart adoption of it and not marketing campaigns to still the money of invertors and consumers.
I am not an agricultural scientist (I am an engineer/attorney) but thinking about investing in hydroponics. After watching this presentation I have some concerns about the potential bias of Professor Bugbee. My first impression was that he exhibits all the signs and verbal cues of a witness that is being less than truthful on the stand. For example: at the end he made comparisons of soil growing using the "best" for high value crops as the comparison to the worst in vertical farming. His claim about conventional soil water lose seems at best disingenuous, because reaching 95% efficiency in conventional farming is rarely done and would be extremely labor intensive. Also his initial "math" analysis appears to use the full spectrum of solar radiation from the sun, while plants use only a small portion around 450 and 600 nm. LED lights can be constructed to emit in these narrow bands and therefore are very efficient. Logan UT, where Utah State is located, is a primarily agriculture based economy, I wonder if there is an undisclosed agenda at play here. Finally, It would be nice to have a realistic comparison of conventional verses vertical hydroponic farming, instead of this apples to oranges comparison.
Thanks Jonathan, in fact I did try to grow some plants a month ago using a fogger system, they did pretty well but I had a hard time keeping the nutrient levels right and most of my plants died. I will be trying again when time permits.
aeroponics? but then you would have to buy the fertilizers from companies that sell you water with soluble ingredients Better make them your self from scratch using concentrates or powders added to water. Even better, by using an underground/ drip/ gutter system and organic compost from your kitchen/garden you are more than well
as far as all the ponics stuff is concerned. if you do some looking you can find natural ways to fertilize your plants and add stuff to your water. lye, thisel weed can be mashed and fermented. all at no cost just a little time. if your concerned about it I recommend forgetting everything you herd in this video. you can take it one further and try aquaponics where you raise fish with the growing system and they fertilize your garden. that is the new adventure im starting. keep looking, there is a ton of good ideas on here and good ways to go about hydroponics.
This man uses so many fallacies... I'm just perplexed. You can't just convert mechanical modification of land (farming) and water use to energy and then say: "well this is nothing compared to the energy of sunlight"... Sunlight isn't a finite resource, in practicality it's infinite. In his comparison you could just leave out water and your crops would grow 2% less. They don't. Also plants don't need 10.000 lux to grow, they have saturation curves from where they don't benefit from extra sunlight. Reverting and preventing photo-inhibition costs energy. I couldn't bear to watch it all... I, I, I just can't even... Lastly, as a scientist, don't ever, EVER, tell me someone is right because he has status. It's foolish, think for yourself, check it for yourself. Even the best people make grand mistakes. If a renowned scientist and a PhD or Msc disagree, the former isn't right because he's someone. The person with the best evidence is right.
I can understand before a presentation sometimes you need to introduce yourself but to establish a technical credibility is something else. If the presentation is INFORM audienc simple introduction is enough, if the presentation is to CONVINCE audience then one needs to establish technical credibility. Then we enter phase for crafting the message of presentation - that can be done any number of ways - quantitative or qualitiative... personally i read these top comments and gave up watching the video... i believe in vertical farming...the success is not a simple technical solution it will be a combination of both technical and process solution (IMHO as a business analyst and technical architect...wins EVERY TIME trust me!!).
There is one pumping and filtering system. There are multiple pv panels and vertical axis wind turbines. The lights are high efficiency led lights. The water expired from the plants is condensed from the air and reused. This creates the perfect conditions for growth and the growing time is drastically reduced resulting in increased productivity.
Ironically, starts the lecture talking about Professors making huge errors when speaking about subjects outside of their field, and then goes on to talk about solar power and lights. It was not that long ago that I was debating that L.E.D. technology would be bright enough to replace bulbs. I was told over and over that I was wrong, because they would be so expensive. Did no one stand up and tell this guy that the price per kilolumens had already dropped by 90% in the previous 7 years? Or that the price of solar had halved over that time? Meanwhile the price of water had risen by over 40% during that same time. My tip for the day, Professors can make huge errors, when they step outside of their field. As I am sure the farmers who first saw the cost of a tractor said "I think the old way makes more financial sense", they were shown to be wrong too.
Even if you assume 100% efficiency it's still a metric-assload of power. The amount of light energy falling on Iowa every day is more than the sum total of all human electricity generation worldwide.
@jake mr honest 100% agree. And while we wait for fusion, solar still has yet to unleash its full potential in powering our modern infrastructure projects, including indoor farming.
@jake mr honest if your "IS" statement requires an "IF" statement as a precursor your logic is flawed. VF's are a piece of the pie but not the sole thing that will work for future generations. as a sole solution.
Professor bugbee is the real deal! He doesn’t rule out vertical farming, just bounds the scope of it. If you think he is mistaken, invest your time/money to prove him wrong!
Why is everyone complaining about the video lol? Its not meant to be a bite size youtube clip. It is long and boring because it is a university lecture. But if you watch the video you will learn a lot. I'm a big fan of indoor farming , but once you understands the economics of it, you quickly realize why it can never compete with outdoor farming. Outdoor farming capitalizes on MASSIVE MEGA QUANTITIES of solar energy in ways that are impossible to compete with indoors no matter how many LED bulbs, fancy gadgets or solar panels you plan on using. It is precicely this kind of detailed analysis that I was looking for.
Maybe the professor could refresh the content of this video with revised data from improvements in vertical farming methods, techniques and technological advancements. The new remarks can help us all understand where have come from wherever we were back when the video was shot
how about screw the professor and just watch any of the 100 vids about actual vertical farming companies that are muilti million dollar operations and highly profitable and help to reduce food insecurity
The talk starts slowly with no clear objective, but it picks up later. It is worth waiting for the good part. The presenter asks and answers very good questions. It is a very good starting point for thinking on the subject. I also think that it is possible to go further, and when we do, perhaps some of his conclusions may not hold entirely anymore.
Vertical farming might well work if designed properly. I don't see why one couldn't grow mushrooms in low light, for example. If you look at a rainforest, it is vertically layered.
In Singapore, there is a high rise vertical farming that only uses direct sunlight. The vertical farming technique is also highly efficient as it requires very little water, labour and energy. A 9m tall rack only requires 40W per hr per day. 1 kg of vegetables requires only SGD0.50 of electricity and 12l of water. Annual yield of about 800 tonnes per hectare. Please take a look at Sky Greens vertical farming.
Bock Keat, I am stunned too, when he said vertical garden has a lot of problems on his studies. But I am optimistic, we need more green indeed on our planet, vertical garden is an option among all. However, Vertical garden must not suibtitute tranditional method. As my point of view, vertical garden bring up the landscape looks nice. If I got an option to buy veggies grown organic one, on vertical water method and grown on land method and same price and same nutrition value; I think I would choose the land grown one, just the feeling. For landscape, vertical gardens exist make me feel grace, and I can say the air quality much better, and attracting bees and butterflies, also other insects too. I think vertical is a good back up for emergency situation also a platform to promote and to cultivate nearly extinction plants. This professor should really studies about it instead of just giving the nay saying all in cover in his presentation.
Vertical farming isn't a single solution to resolve the problem of population and food resources. It is a specific niche based approach to producing food in areas where renewable energy is the primary energy source (think Iceland), that typically don't have access to food production and typically import food. The title of the video is correct but it also doesn't make sense because I don't believe anyone is calling for a total shift to vertical farming. It is simply one of many solutions. Another niche based solution is Food forest gardening in the suburbs, where people build a small personal food system for themselves meeting some of their dietary needs from outside of their back door. Beyond the suburbs you move into integrated farming systems, like Sepp Holtzer's farm, and then maintain the industrial food system to make up the difference. The idea that any one system will solve the problem is ridiculous, because it isn't a simple problem. But the problem is the solution, and in the case of available farming land being on the decline, vertical farming does resolve that issue in a specific use case.
@Allen Loser Sure why not. But at the end of the day the problem is that the vertical farm as a solution is being bashed because someone walked in the door with an assumption that this is the only way we should do farming. Basically they are arguing against a point no one is making.
@Allen Loser I doubt anyone that can do basic math thinks that skyscraper farming with an man made energy source is more profitable that gardening using the sun. I'm not aware of having said that I am in favor of conventional agriculture as the solution to the food problem. I think millions of small farms, built on integrated management and sustainable permaculture practices is probably the best way to go if we are talking about replacing one major conventional ag corporation. But I also believe that the skyscraper farmer might also have a role to fill. Not in it's current form because it is basically chemical agriculture.
@Allen Loser There is a place for both. We wouldn't be able to convert to the type of agriculture I would prefer over night. Conventional agriculture is a transition technology.
Awesome!! Broken down so even the lay person could understand. Excellent Job. Bottom line , "using electricity to grow plants is wasteful to a much higher degree than some would like you to think." New ways must be developed.
With solar panels and lv lights improving in efficiency and cost, some farms are already the same price as farm goods, give it another 5 years and it will be cheaper.
it shifts the focus. if electricity becomes even cheaper, mostly by solar becoming increasingly cheaper then the benefits might soon outweigh the cons of the high energy consumption. No pesticides, vastly less water used, no runoff water that is full of chemicals and polluting the waterways and ground water, closer to cities so it does not have to be transported through the whole country, better tasting produce (I am not 100% sure about that since I have not actually tasted food produced in vertical farms). Did I miss anything else? There is probably other factors that I am not considering, pros, as well as cons, but I think given vastly cheaper energy that is cleaner than it is right now will yield to this concept becoming a viable alternative to convential farming sooner than most people think. Will it make up even 5% of the world's food consumption by 2030? Very, very unlikely. But it might play a bigger role in the future. Especially with technological progress becoming exponential.
the solution is nuclear energy, and we've had it for decades. but so much propaganda has basically ensured nuclear will never become the dominant power source.
Reminds me of when I was getting my computer science degree and every freaking class the first two years spent a month explaining to us why computers are important and how some admiral once found a moth in the machine. If you have to spend half the time explaining and selling the idea to people who are already receptive you have nothing to say, and certainly no respect for adult learners. And I sure as heck do not need to hear about your internecine bickering in academia. This is a classic example of someone spending his time knocking down strawmen that no one took seriously in the first place. No one expects fossil fuels to make sustainable local foods. I have yet to hear anyone confuse sustainable farming who has actually set out to learn claim they will do it off the coal-fueled electric grid.
Excellent presentation! Good analysis of the situation. To all the people with attention deficit disorder complaining about the length of the video: This is not a silly cat video, it is a lecture. Prof. Bugbee has summarised the findings of a large number of research papers and presented it in a very clear and understandable manner here. It would take all of you people hours and days to first find, read, understand and condense all of this information, which he has done here for you more expertly than you probably could. I've seen a lot of lectures with a lower information density than this one, so no, it is not too long. And not all videos on youtube are made specifically for youtube. Thankfully!
When we consider "harvest" of sunlight energy by a natural system, I recommend reading Mark Shepard's book "Restoration Agriculture." Here, the professor compares conentional agriculture with vertical farming -- but Mark speaks of the most food-productive systems even before human societies -- for example the savannas maintained through disturbance by megafauna. Applying this to the present day, he recommends a multi-storied system such as alley-cropping which mimics the distribution of annuals and perennials in a treed savanna. It is fairly obvious the solar harvest is superior based on exposed leaf surfaces in such a system. The challenge becomes how to harvest so much diversity -- but the inputs for the farmer (except for initial setup of the system) become lower and lower. Profit margin is carved out of drastic reduction of inputs. Harvest becomes a long-term calculus shifting from annuals to the increasing growth of the perennial system.
Cost. When I see images of vertical farms, I see vast expenditures of steel, plastics, artificial soils, and electronics. And vertical farms with artificial light for plants? I design vertical farms for walls, fences, walkways, parking lots, temporary open land. These vertical designs employ hydroponic devices fixed to exploit otherwise unused space and sunlight. Solar panels power pumps to circulate nutrient water over clay medium, the nutrient solution runs over the roots in the clay medium, the solution runs through pipes to return to the reservoir. Standard hydroponic method with different designs for different spaces. In the video above, Professor Bugbee discusses the expense of electric light to grow plants. He is correct. Plant lights consume more power than any food crop can return in sales. For that reason, I do not waste money installing light. I am now 20 minutes into his presentation. He has not yet discussed the cost of the supporting structures of ' vertical farms. ' The cost of the structures negate any possible return-on-investment. For that reason, I use existing chainlink fences, cheap chainlink panels taken from construction sites, wasted steel pipe from dismantled structures, rebar, wire, etc. Whatever is available, I use. The greatest money expense becomes the solar panel, the pump, and the PVC, CVC, ABS pipes that be used to move the nutrient solution. A greater expense is the labor of design, assembly, and maintenance. For what? Lettuce? No. I grow stevia, a sugar-substitute for diabetics and dieters. I also grow lemon grass and other spices for taste. These combinations of sugar substitute stevia and flavors cost 75 cents to 2 dollars per ounce on Amazon dot com. ( At 28 minutes, he says the electricity to grow wheat costs 100 times the price of wheat. To grow with electric light, "We'd to grow something to get $900 a bushel .... " True. Most hydroponic growers grow a Schedule One Federally prohibited substance. At the risk of prison. I don't and won't ) Yet at $2 a dry ounce for stevia, Amazon price, hydroponics exploiting sunlight becomes a viable crop. I design for urban environments. And I use a hedge trimmer to cut the stevia. I harvest kilos. See a harvest from a proof-of-concept project here: ruclips.net/video/lVp4VeLrZF8/видео.html
Interesting, I like how it focuses on the nuts and bolts of the economics of the matter. However I'd like to see some case-studies of the ACTUAL costs of large-scale vertical farms.
Unfortunately I was not able to understand any of your supposed points. Every time you build up to making a real point you go off on to another complete subject. I don't care about how much professors make or who looses their job teaching. I do care about the real reasons why vertical farming is less productive, healthy, more expensive or profitable than growing crops traditionally. My point is that 95% percent of youth growing up on farms, leave the farm because they can't make a living farming. Costs of equipment, legal, and municipal issues labor ETC. ETC. ETC. If you are going to teach me something make a point then substantiate it.
+John Merryman His point out the exaggeration made by companies to sell their products, its one thing to advertise the positive aspects of it, like no pesticide (if they really don't use it) and fresh crop (these two are the only two good reasons I could think of for buying them) and ask people to spend more money for that, but going to lengths of claiming it is environment friendly without proper facts is criminal negligence and misleading of people. As far not making money of farms is failure of govt policies, not the process, once in our country there was govt initiative to increase per acre production of wheat, teaching programs, telling farmers how to do the farming, when to sow, when to use fertilizer etc etc, and result there was a influx of wheat the next year and what did the govt do, lowered the price of wheat, now the farmers were screwed because the per income remained the same but they have spent more money this year to get fertilizers, pesticides, hiring machinery etc, have you ever seen the price of milk go down because cows yielded more milk this year, so please do not bundle up the failure of govt policies with the technical issues, and if you see govt announcing tax relaxations for vertical farming, just look at the investors and you would know why farmers are getting screwed.
I find there are a number of reasons that growing using hydroponic methods either vertical with grow lights, various methods in greenhouses to be superior to some field grown crops. Growing plants in water do not require pesticides as normally used in field grown crops. Only certain vine crops inherently are plagued with certain bugs which are dealt with using bees or other insects which combat the blight. Being environmentally friendly if you mean this method of growing crops are not assisting the environment, here are some facts, contour strip farming, sediment control, run off of chemicals which are commonly used in field production. Each crop grown are usually trucked long distances before landing in a store or even close before you consume them. Then there is the time frame from picking the crop to when it lands in a distribution center, then to another supplier to the restaurant Etc. From seed to harvest represents a fair amount of fuel, equipment rental (or GOD know the cost to buy the equipment) then storing the yield, drying, milling or processing, where necessary. Although I don't exactly know by how much the ground and soils are diminished by the growing of crops, especially where a crop like corn is planted and replanted over and over, will suck the nutrients out of the soil (which is why fertilizers are used in the first place.) Water being the primary requirement for Hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics and vertical methods, produce 5 - 8 times the harvest for 1 acre = 43,560 sq. ft. At a cost which is nothing like the cost of 1 tractor, let alone all the other equipment necessary. The growing seasons are not just one per year, but 4 - 7 times a year. Another reality is that if we created just one 320 sq. ft. shipping container properly set up, would have a ROI of 3 - 5 years. Imagine how much time it would take for a farmer to recoup his investment for all of the above expenses. What about the environmental impact of unemployment. Look into Freight Farms, GrowPonics, American Hydroponics, Etc check out the costs, labor, profits. Unemployment could be lowered by massive percentages. And this guy is teaching WHAT? He offers nothing, produces nothing but paper degrees telling everyone who buys this BS that they know the answers.
The costs of food are in refrigeration, transport, and loss. Disperse food growing and that goes away. Whether vertical farming is outdoors on racks or indoor for inclement weather, growing near the consumer is worthwhile just for that savings. Growing wheat might be silly. Do that out in the fields. But bean vines are a good hit. Raise chickens local on the scraps and you get meat too. Raise fish in tanks and likewise.
Speaking of the water usage, water that is cycled in a contained or closed system, is reusable and the losses are minimal. When he began speaking, he already showed his propensity to stack the deck and it was easy to see which way it was leaning. (In a field, like this, where there is a big company with unlimited funds and the country's food supply at stake, you can imagine that anyone who can join forces with Monsanto and chooses not to (or worse, prepares to write or speak out publicly against Monsanto), could quickly find themselves mysteriously sacked or worse. Like they say, "Follow the money" trail (to see whodunit and who was probably an innocent bystander).
This was 7 years ago and now Holland is using the principles of Vertical Farming to become a major exporter of foods. Hope you have updated your data professor.
I'm only 19 minutes in but I'm incredibly confused as to why we're comparing the energy of raw sunlight to photovoltaic. Are we to assume that all of that energy is directly converted into growing power which has to be completely replicated by solar panels? Plants don't require the full power of sunlight to grow at maximum efficiency. Doing back of the envelop calculations it's still a bit over in terms of area required if it's 100% solar powered bit that's not nearly what's shown in the picture.
This guy isn't wrong, for 2015, however electricity prices are going to trend toward zero globally in the future, and when that happens then it obviously becomes much better to grow vertically. At least if you discount the embedded carbon cost in building all the infrastructure to grow vertically.
Interesting presentation. Next it would be interesting to see a study comparing costs from indoor grown vegetables vs purchasing from grocery stores. Just to see if there is still a financial incentive for the home grower.
Given climate conditions of the day, the professor was correct. Indoor farming can't compete with field farming. But today there is some evidence that global cooling is possible. Several degrees warmer will be inconvenient for many reasons, but NOT lethal to most people; however, several degrees cooler would bring back the climate of the Little Ice Age. In that situation, field farming is problematic. To feed today's population under Little Ice Age climates, two technologies will be necessary, cost notwithstanding: First, thorium nuclear energy, and second, indoor farming. When the choice is eat or starve, cost is of less importance. The Precautionary Principle dictates that we should be researching and developing both thorium energy and indoor farming. It would cost a lot less than currently being spent trying to prove that mankind is the main cause of global warming.
which types of vertical farming are examined here? I dont think any one way or any one size fits all is the one answer. It depends on so many environments and inputs and outputs and being able to identify and measure them.
So the Cliff's notes version- vertical farming is viable for niche markets and expensive crops. If you can get paid $30.00 per pound for what you grow, you have a bright future. For mass market crops, factory farming on a large scale has the market cornered. We will most likely never have vertically farmed wheat or tomatoes. If cropland and irrigation water were 100 times more expensive, or if electricity were 100th of its present cost, Vertical farming would be able to compete head to head with traditional large scale farms.
This hasn’t really aged well. Vertical farming is a broad term it doesn’t necessarily mean indoors with no natural light. It just means… vertical. Maximizing yields to area. You can have a vertical farm in a greenhouse or even outside. You spent so much time worrying about electricity then kinda glossed over fertilizer and water. I’d really like to see these farms you speak of with in ground irrigation. Sounds super cheap and definitely won’t get in the way of tilling the soil.
Solar panels are under $0.60 per Watt now in 2018, though. Your figures might need adjustment. Also, if an acre can grow $800,000US worth of food in a year isn't it worth coating it in $400,000 worth of solar panels and other growing equipment?
This video really should be called "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet in the Next Six Weeks." His opening slide shows a conceptual design for a vertical farm that includes wind turbines, but doesn't mention wind power once. Let alone geothermal, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, or even the ever increasing efficiency of solar power.
4 years later and you have been proved oh so wrong... plenty of very profitable and efficient indoor vertical farms now exist. Don’t always listen to those who claim authority....
sir, you seem to negate Photo-synthetically Active Radiation. Also, the light plants actually draw from the total produced from the sun. Maybe i#m being naive but, the red and blue spectrum's used in the production in these farms, is not going to equate to the amount of light produced by the sun in these spectrum's, but it would reduce the gap of energy if you calculated only how much red and blue the sun gave off instead of the total. Additionally, the invisible spectrum's of light also account for much of that energy and is unnecessary amount of energy for plant photosynthesis?... secondly you seemed to forget that the majority of vertical farms designed for the future aim to grow in regions where there is abundant sun, but not necessarily arable land. this means the use of natural light, and substituted with solar powered artificial lights would be totally viable.
There are some inexcusable and large leaps made in this presentation which make the conclusions questionable at best. As an example, at 30:59, "tons of CO2 equivalents per year" is somehow extrapolated into total food system cost, the conclusion of what is "small" is assumed for us, and an irrelevant factor (cars we drive) is introduced to the discussion for no perceivable reason. There are leaps made in the math in the early portions of the video which skip the crucial step connecting "plant growth possible on an acre" to "plant growth possible on an acre using only electronic lights." As well as ignoring the question of what logic would assume you are forced to use nothing but electronic lights. With ideal building design it should be very possible to use natural sunlight for nearly all lighting requirements. "vertical farming" doesn't mean growing underground. It was stated plants growing in a field use a fraction of the available light, meaning that excess is simply wasted. Was that number factored into the comparison a few minutes later of sunlight to electronic lights? Somehow this presentation makes the leap from vertical farming to growing under electric lights. He also neglected to mention the better LED arrays actually eliminate a large portion of light that is not used by photosynthesis. Whether this was a part of the behind the scenes calculations done (kinda like the admittedly iffy behind-the-scenes calculations those vertical farming companies did) is not mentioned, so I have to assume they aren't.
you may want to use artificial light if it is in a closed envirement like a wherehouse or if the plant are stacked in a way that doens t allow much sunlight, but there are solutions for this led light using only the part of the spectre that laight need are becoming more cheaper and durable and consume less energy than white light lamp
@@giacomomezzini9598 When light (even plant unsuitable light - you damn PAR fanatic) hits the floor/leaf/whatever it heats it up. What's the point of super efficient LED lights if your environment is too cold ? Those old HPS/MH/CMH HID lamps, which are used as supplemental lights in orchards/greeneries in the North are already very efficient. And they produce (more) heat which you need anyway (In Summer you have light, you don't need more). LED lights might be evolutionary (saving a couple percentage points maybe even as high as 25% on electricity( but they are absolutely not revolutionary). And it will not solve the difficult problem of growing STAPLE crops productively indoors without dragging "MINED" (top)soil around. And they are essential to food sufficiency, all the rest is just bonus. Herbs are magical. Cheers.
@@kevinpaulus4483 can something like hydroponics solve the soil problem? Yes of course if the enviroment Is too cold you Will Need a heating light but maybe It would bebmore efficent to use a heater?
@@giacomomezzini9598 No not really ... potatoes are roots and don't really like sitting in water and they will get very heavy. This makes them very hard to grow hydroponically. Tomatoes and peppers - the fruits of their genetic cousins - on the other hand are grown very easily hydroponically (usually using an inert media like grodan or stonewool and drip irrigation). The Netherlands are full of heated greenhouses that do just that.
You can easily solve the light problem using reflectors, fiber optics and centralized renewable energy systems. Intelligent designs can easily cut down on climate control costs. You have obviously, not done a thorough research. The initial investments are high but so are malls, stadiums, parliament houses etc... Your presentation is wrong on many levels. Please correct them before you ruin the reputation of a very well established research and farming method.
"Easily" So your proposal is to use the same unit area of farm land only instead of having crops on the fields fill them with mirrors and glass. This is a pretty stupid solution.
Taking the light from outside directly inside, without converting it to electricity first, that's an interesting idea. But who the hell is talking about that? Everyone is just using electric lights, and claiming it to be cheap and revolutionary, just like his presentation says they are. So the technology you appear to have just made up may not be viable.
@NotAsian, Not the same unit area, but to use other areas where light falls, like roads, rooftops, ocean and land that is not used for agriculture. Also, light falls on many levels in the same unit area. a vertical building would use the vertical space to accommodate for photovoltaics, wind turbines etc. Sun light can be tapped at every next floor that has a Southern/Northern exposure. This electricity generation, may be used for electric lights but the point is it can work. The carbon footprint would reduce because of the carbon absorption by plants. Also, photovoltaics have an average lifespan of 25-30 years so it would eventually have a negative carbon footprint in the long run. @eggory, Yes, it is an interesting idea and the technology exists right now. I did not make it up and it is very viable. High initial investment but so are malls, airports, Govt. halls etc.
OK let's try to falsify it. 1) No solar panel ever built has created more energy than it took to produce thereby, increasing the carbon footprint. Now, we are giving it a time of 25-30 years so eventually, it will produce energy and render the problem solved. 2) Direct solar light reflected or directed solves the problem indefinitely. Ex: reflectors, fiber optic cables etc. 3) the amount of plant growth per unit area would increase so much that it would eventually reduce the carbon footprint since no additional input is required to run the farms. Conclusion: The carbon issue is a time issue. I actually did not try to falsify it but to prove it as true. Perhaps, you can present data to contradict me. So far, I seem to be correct. Pls note: I am assuming that least amount of planned obsolescence is used in the products that is procured for running a farm. If we have to keep buying the same solar panels or lights every next year or so then this argument is invalid.
I wish the Bruce put just as much thought into solutions to the problems he has identified in his presentation. Good presentation though for guys like me, looking to create an abundance of water, food, land and positively impact global warming in the process.
The point of vertical farming is not entirely about efficiency. Yes, with solar technology, LED technology, fiber optics, and mirrors, we may eventually catch up to near the same amount of lumens coming out of LEDs as is hitting the solar panels that power them. Actually, to go on a tangent here, it is well known that plants only use red and blue light, but the sun produces all kinds of light. This means that we could potentially have more red and blue light coming out of an LED than is going into the solar panel powering it. Please correct me about that if I'm wrong, I am genuinely interested. But, to come back to my original point, vertical farming is not about increasing the efficiency at which we farm, even though that could be a bi-product of the process, vertical farming is about decreasing the amount of land used for farming and decreasing the amount of water we use for farming. So, yes, vertical farming could potentially save humanity, even if it is not as efficient where lighting is concerned right now.
The long standing problem I have with all these eggheads that claim they know best is, 1. Jesus was not an accredited expert, train by his peers. but his presence Change the world. 2. Amitures built the Ark, Experts built the Titanic. 3. All the experts said at the time of the Wright brothers that scientifically and mathematically man can not Fly, heavy than air machines. I am glad that the Wright Brothers were just humble bicycle mechanics. I am guessing that their minds were not polluted with the facts. 4. The US NASA program, At 10 times the budget of the Russian space program, had all the engineers agreed, that a certain type of rocket motor can not be built. The computers proved it, so do not even try. Again I am guessing that the Russians missed that memo, because they built 40 of them, and sold them to NASA. THEY work considerably better than what NASA Made at 10 times the budget. Summary: Never listen to anyone. Just go out and build it to failure, until it works. That is what Ford did. Yes they told Ford his factor idea will not work. He was not "Smart Enough" to believe the Banker experts. Conclusion: The sanity of the plan is of no consequence, Follow your dreams. Tesla did, and that's Right again, all the Experts said alternating current is a Ponzi scheme. Did this guy ever do any real life, hands on, start his own company, get it done. Anything? I bet not. He is an expert, not a doer.
Ok it's kind of stupid to try to replace the sun. But what about the nutritional value of the food? If you transport lettuce over 3000 miles (with all the storing involved), what's left of it's nutritional value once it gets to your caddie?
This video is way too long. I started watching it, then I was skipping around to listen to different parts, then I gave up. I know the guy was doing a presentation and I am sure he is very proud of his work. But the average person isn't going to be interested in watching the whole thing. A five or ten minute video summarizing the main points would be easier for more people to watch.
At 43:20 you have the conclusion that ordinary farming has a fraction of carbon footprint than vertical farming. To know the reason one has to watch the previous 43 minutes
The onus is not on the viewer to prove a certain level of interest by being willing to sit through a certain length presentation. The onus is on the presenter to make the the information as concise as possible to keep people's attention. Remember, this social media platform doesn't specialize in a scientifically trained audience that would be willing to watch a long, technical presentation. It's a video channel for the general public.
Michael Bane You're absolutely right. I'm didn't look at it in general public POV. I think that even though this exists in a "casual" environment it's meant for a specific demographic; after all this wasn't your average YT video it was a lecture at an university. Perhaps in the future they could make a video where it showcases the highlights of the presentation.
The University hosted a guest speaker. You'll get the reply you're seeking if you reach out to the speaker rather than the hosting venue to address questions or concerns with content delivered by said speaker. Please post the responses you get from the speaker in the comment threads you mention! -Carjack
Vertical Farming is not to save the planet, but to eliminate unnecessary long procedures from planting to harvesting. It’s a science of shortcut and effecient production.
The issue with growing plants in a water solution is simple, many minerals will not go into solution so will not be available to the plant. Soil biology makes many minerals plant available while others are made available via symbiotic partnerships with fungi. All of these conditions are absent in either a hydroponic as well as in an aeroponic growing setup. If you don't want to grow in native soil you best bet is to construct a soilless blend with peat moss/coconut coir, perlite, lime, organic fertilizers and trace minerals. Plants can take up some percentage of 75 minerals, if they are available. The challenge when constructing your soil mix is to make it biologically active, which basically means you need to blend your components, add biology and water and let the material "cook" or go through a heat, ensuring it is alive and ready to take care of the plants. This is why I formulated MightyGrow Organics 4-3-4 Living Organic Fertilizer which contains 75 trace minerals and all the other minerals plants need.
He’s assuming that solar cells won’t increase in efficiency, which they’re bound to. That’s just one thing he seems to be intentionally naive or just plain wrong about. It really seems like there’s an omitted agenda behind this lecture.
If electricity is so expensive, what about light tunnels with TIR (total internal reflection)? That could at least offset some of the total energy demand, even if it isn't sufficient to grow that crops on its own.
I haven't finished yet, but there are many things not addressed at 18:30ish he mentions it would take 5.4 acre per 1 acre with photovoltaic. Yes, but not 5.4 arable land. This can go in the mountains, off the coast, in the desert, etc. Another thing is, the issue of transportation, one of the points is you don't have to transport nearly as far. Another point is, modern farming also uses fossil fuels more so than his diagram showed. It's not just fertilizer.
I finished and he addressed transportation. But I have to say he is hand waving the solar panels, nuclear, or other sustainable energy models to run the leds. He doesn't address the water shortage issue, the increasing cost of arable land as we are running out. I'm not the biggest proponent of vertical farms. but high density hydroponic growing definitely could be the future.
Bruce great talk, but I have a question related to the calculations. The energy used assumption was 1000 w per m^2 if I remember right, and the equivalent amount of energy was shown for photo synthesis. While I love rounding numbers for simplicity etc. I can't see how using the total energy supplied by the sun at ground level can be used as a constant when figuring out cost of indoor farming. What I was looking for and maybe missed is the amount (energy) needed for plant growth (I know different plants different numbers but you gave examples). Reasonably speaking that number would be much lower than the number you used for the calculations as not all of the sunlight in one square meter is going to hit plants in a field, and if I can plant at a higher density in vertical gardens won't I be able to deliver the amount of energy (its all about energy ) to the plants significantly impacting the numbers in your calculations? Well its just a thought...
It's not just a thought, it's a damn good one. And you should also consider how plants reflect most of the light the sun emits, and a part of the energy emitted by the sun is thermal, not light. His calculations fall flat on their face.
In minute 14-15 there is a mistake in the thinking. Photosynthesis only requires a very small spectrum of sunlight hence the "yellow arrow" is actually wrong, which results in wrong calculations!
A lot of this is over my head but HE got my attention when He spoke of CLAIMS by the vert farmers about growing apples, pears, cherries, peaches, oranges and other tree type crops. How will vert famers grow things like pecans, walnuts and similar food stuffs? There is NO QUICK TURN-AROUND with tree type crops like there would be for lettuce, tomatoes, onions. cucumbers, radish, beets etc. Just asking?
honestly i feel like it would be just more convenient to automate standard farms in the first place and once we start running out of space where it's possible to farm, then go vertical there are areas where you can't farm crops, so you can use those to gather solar energy or something like that
Classroom look at why competing against free sunlight will be so difficult without recycling wasted energy (various forms of renewables) or changing the types of agriculture that is grown.
Wow, I thought I was alone with such a thought! You know, we could stop climate change TOMORROW! Just detonate a small nuclear wepone in the desert of Nevada, maybe 50 KT (atom bomb -- not hydrogen). Make it as clean as possible and kick up a little dust into the stratosphere, and cut the sun light 10%. Wa La -- temperature dropped, problem solved. Oh would that set their hair on fire!
Look at it this way instead: While plants ARE inefficient as Mr. Bugbee says at converting sunlight to yield, this is actually because the photosynthesis process only uses .023 percent of the total spectrum of sunlight. So most of the natural light hitting plants doesn't do anything for the growing process. This is why the vertical farms don't use sunlamps, they use lighting which produces the specific wavelenths of light that the plants require. Current solar panels are 23% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. Since the plants use .023%, and the solar panels convert 23% (1000 times more power!), it seems to me that there is plenty of power available from a rooftop-sized panel to run a vertical farm, even if there is considerable waste energy in the lights.
Plants need the equivalent of full sunlight to reach the .023% they can convert. You would need a little over 4 times the square footage of solar panels than the square footage of vertical planting surface. The panel may be 1000 times more than the plant USES, but it's 23% of what it NEEDS.
6 years have passed. How things have changed since then? LEDs have surpassed HPS in both light intensity and efficiency, but water and fertilizer usage claims have been proven true or false?
An interesting discussion; however, nowadays the numbers he's quoting are fairly outdated. We've made big strides in LED lighting technology, and understanding more about the specific wavelengths of light that plants need, among other things. He also makes a lot of broad generalizations which just don't make sense- The amount of water, light and nutrients that you need to grow a head of lettuce are vastly different than what you need to grow an ear of corn. And making the assumption that the power generation will continue to come from fossil fuels and coal is so wildly short-sighted that even that alone brings his entire prediction into question. It'd be more accurate to title this video as "Why vertical farming ISN'T saving the planet (as of 2015)", rather than why it won't. Everything in this video is wildly short-sighted, and almost completely outdated even 7 years later. It's especially grating that he dances around the biggest elephant in the room- It doesn't matter how efficient vertical farming is, if all of your traditionally farmed crops are dead due to pests, bad weather conditions, or other unforeseen circumstances. This is purely an anecdotal example but; where I live, we have experienced a significant amount of cloud cover the past few months, and my outdoor garden is struggling. Meanwhile, the exact same types of plants that I have inside, beneath grow lights and are being grown hydroponically are flourishing. It doesn't matter how much money you can save if the end result is that everyone dies of starvation.
It is a long lecture. A15% efficiency in for photovoltaic solar panels sounds about right, but will the efficiency and the cost of solar energy improve in the foreseeable future? Also, solar panels could be built on irrigable/undevelopable land, where other usages of the land are limited. The production of CO2 could decline in the near future as electric transportation technology becomes viable.
This is an excellent talk! It's given me a much more informed view on the subject. The main points I took away from it are: 1) The energy cost to farm using grow lamps is huge; it's a financial and ecological net loss 2) Powering the grow lamps with solar panels would take 5x the land used by crops relying on sunlight 3) Desalinated sea water is only 2-4x the price of local fresh water (depending on location) 4) Traditional farming is water efficient if it uses sub surface irrigation
Why don't you calculate how many more crops are grown in this stacked system. Then calculate how much land it would take to grow the same number of crops in a field. With Led lights energy use is reduced significantly. To be so narrow minded as to only consider solar energy is ignorance. Also calculate the fuel and energy used to clear land for a field. Plow the field, seed the field, irrigate the field, spray herbicides and pesticides. Then the fuel used to harvest the field and transport from field to silos. The trucks that take products from silos to distribution centers. The energy and fuel to run the distribution centers. Finally the trucks that go from distribution facilities to super markets and the energy and fuel consumption of the supermarket to preserve products. In no way can the price of all the fuel and energy in today's agriculture be less expensive or consume less than the energy and fuel used in local vertical indoor growing with no harvesters or tractors. No major transportation no distribution center's. The calculations prove this fact over and over again. There is no modern field irrigation system that is more efficient than aqua or hydroponics what so ever. It has been proven that aqua or hydroponics can use as little as 1% of water used in the most efficient field irrigation. Because of aqua and hydroponics water recirculation abilitie that enables multiple applications of a single reservoir of water. Thus the only water leaving the system is through the uptake from the plants. ABSOLUTELY NO FIELD IRRITATION TECHNIQUES ARE THAT EFFICIENT!!!
Why don't you calculate how many more crops are grown in this stacked system. Then calculate how much land it would take to grow the same number of crops in a field. With Led lights energy use is reduced significantly. To be so narrow minded as to only consider solar energy is ignorance. Also calculate the fuel and energy used to clear land for a field. Plow the field, seed the field, irrigate the field, spray herbicides and pesticides. Then the fuel used to harvest the field and transport from field to silos. The trucks that take products from silos to distribution centers. The energy and fuel to run the distribution centers. Finally the trucks that go from distribution facilities to super markets and the energy and fuel consumption of the supermarket to preserve products. In no way can the price of all the fuel and energy in today's agriculture be less expensive or consume less than the energy and fuel used in local vertical indoor growing with no harvesters or tractors. No major transportation no distribution center's. The calculations prove this fact over and over again. There is no modern field irrigation system that is more efficient than aqua or hydroponics what so ever. It has been proven that aqua or hydroponics can use as little as 1% of water used in the most efficient field irrigation. Because of aqua and hydroponics water recirculation abilitie that enables multiple applications of a single reservoir of water. Thus the only water leaving the system is through the uptake from the plants. ABSOLUTELY NO FIELD IRRITATION TECHNIQUES ARE THAT EFFICIENT!!!
Why don't you calculate how many more crops are grown in this stacked system. Then calculate how much land it would take to grow the same number of crops in a field. With Led lights energy use is reduced significantly. To be so narrow minded as to only consider solar energy is ignorance. Also calculate the fuel and energy used to clear land for a field. Plow the field, seed the field, irrigate the field, spray herbicides and pesticides. Then the fuel used to harvest the field and transport from field to silos. The trucks that take products from silos to distribution centers. The energy and fuel to run the distribution centers. Finally the trucks that go from distribution facilities to super markets and the energy and fuel consumption of the supermarket to preserve products. In no way can the price of all the fuel and energy in today's agriculture be less expensive or consume less than the energy and fuel used in local vertical indoor growing with no harvesters or tractors. No major transportation no distribution center's. The calculations prove this fact over and over again. There is no modern field irrigation system that is more efficient than aqua or hydroponics what so ever. It has been proven that aqua or hydroponics can use as little as 1% of water used in the most efficient field irrigation. Because of aqua and hydroponics water recirculation abilitie that enables multiple applications of a single reservoir of water. Thus the only water leaving the system is through the uptake from the plants. ABSOLUTELY NO FIELD IRRITATION TECHNIQUES ARE THAT EFFICIENT!!!
im not a scienetist at all but is it not so that they use only a really small portion of the light sectrum to give to the plants and so use way less energy?
All of Dr. Bugbee's arguments boil down to "Vertical farming is not currently capable of competing with our present system when growing the food we currently eat using the technology we currently have." That's just stating the obvious, though, isn't it? Are there really that many people claiming that vertical farming could be implemented immediately and solve all our agriculture problems? Because I've never heard that argument. I've only ever heard of it being talked about in the future tense, based on the expectation that technology will improve over the next few decades to the point where vertical farming will be the most effective production method. He touched on GMOs, the physical limitations of crops to metabolize light, the limitations of renewable energy, atmospheric water harvesting, the cost to consumers, and the need to change consumption habits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, he simply ignored the fact that all of these factors are variable. He says it's important to consider the inputs to the agricultural system, but he barely did that. He mentioned some ways that the problems facing vertical farming could be overcome, but he didn't frame them as viable solutions. Is there any reason these farms couldn't be powered by nuclear reactors? Or that the water couldn't be supplied through seawater desalination? After all, if the environmental impact of transportation is negligible, desalinated seawater could be transported in. And what about using genetic engineering to create crops that could grow more efficiently, and could replace some of the more problematic foods we have now? If we're really supposed to be thinking about the inputs, why not question whether we'd even be growing food? Maybe the vertical farms of the future are producing specific molecules? Chains of protiens and cellulose, vats of acids and other chemical precursors that would serve as the raw materials for the computerized synthesis of any number of final products? Dr. Bugbee scoffed at that other guy for speaking on topics too far outside of his expertise. It's a valid criticism to say that he probably doesn't understand all the details of such a complex topic. He's only looking at the public health aspect, and not the agricultural. On the other hand, Dr. Bugbee appears too hesitant to think too far outside of agriculture. I know it's only a 50 minute lecture, but it's all based on a very narrow framing of a very broad idea. It comes off as flippant, and at worst, disingenuous. Instead of simply asserting that vertical farming can't save the planet right now, why not propose a couple of ways that it potentially could someday? "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke
I'm starting a tall greenhouse using LED lights only at night. All the production will be stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Can anyone say that I'm not vertical farming? I'd sure like to pick your brain about a lot of this. It sounds like I may be able to beat the standard vertical farm according to some of these assumptions.
@31:45 Once again. Stating that we use a crap tonne of fuel to grow our food is a point in your favour (as you imagine this) here and then you just finished saying that energy and water for field growth is free??? This gets more shameful every minute. All students in my country need to listen to this in class so they can clearly see how NOT to argue a point.
It is not only about CO2 and energy. it is also about seeds production ... vertical and hydroponic systems still depending on normal fields for their seeds.
I don't think his calculation at 18:30 takes into account that plants only use a small percentage of white light for photosynthesis. If you use artificial light, you can put energy only into those frequencies (colors) used by plants. I think the efficiencies of the two approaches are much closer.
It works for me I'm not growing corn but peppers, green beans, tomatoes, lettuce spinach and others that I eat works fine have 1200 gallon aquarium with 110 fish for the winter in a spare room of my house takes about 3 weeks to 6 weeks for majority of plants to be ready to eat and always have fresh fish plus a couple of worm composting buckets for food waste in basement for garden in the spring and my house has 6 sollar pannels for that room it feeds 6 house holds all year round and all off of solar none of lights are hooked up to house only thing that is is pump and that is 200 watts but that room has 2 massive windows so it has a lot of natural light
Far too long winded, but the man does have a point. These vertical farms are set up as huge industrial complexes, and they make claims that no one can confirm as they get no actual insight into what they consume, but at the very least we are talking factory levels of electricity with highly labour intensive daily management. This sure as hell will not be usable anywhere but the richest parts of the world, parts where food is already being thrown away due to excess of everything.
Annnnd what if they use windmills/graphene solar-panels? What if they do away with the need to cut down forests to make room for new arable growth plots? Vertical farms are inefficient now, but economy of scale and green energy will make them viable.
Prof. Bugbee assumed in his calculations that the plant canopy needs/uses 100% of the energy hitting it (1400 mmol/m2/s) in the greenhouse scenario so when he compares it to solar voltaics/indoor leds there appears to be the need for a tremendous surface area of solar panels. From my readings there appears to be a rather large oversight that is not addressed and that is that plants do not use the full spectrum of light for photosynthesis. Much of the suns energy comes in the form of heat, UV and frequencies of visible light that plants reflect entirely. I am not an biologist nor a physicist so I can't say how this would affect the analysis, but it seems to me to be a large enough oversight to make the whole analysis questionable. Led lights can produce targeted frequencies so you wouldn't necessarily need to reproduce the raw energy output per acre of the sun to replicate the same yields. My best efforts to estimate the amount this changes things is 47% (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency). Which means 5.4 acres of solar panels gets reduced to 2.86. Now if you layer other renewables into the mix (wind) and allow for additional sunlight to enter in through windows (as most of his own drawings show) you would only need to supplement light during the fall, winter, spring months where the days are too short. Again, I'm no scientist but using only LED lighting as a supplemental light source and adding multiple renewable source would seem to me to make this idea potentially feasible from an energy perspective. Now the cost of building the structure, maintaining it and the land cost (presumably you are not building this out in the boonies but close to a city) would again make this untenable.
It was a great presentation. I have been intrigue by vertical farming due the production yield for the foot print with out knowing the exact cost of electricity/energy required so this lecture definitely provide that context in a very scientific way. He also gave detail analysis of various examples of the economic of different food groups including different energy cost of transportations for different product (whether they need refrigerated truck or not) which I really appreciate. The professor definitely looks at this situation from an energy efficiency point of view and it’s hard to argue that natural farming is a very effective use of the sun energy. He definitely wasn’t looking at this vertical farming issue from the space efficiency issue.
if you cannot use sun light for some reason then use grow light and that will not be cost effective unless you ban import of vegetables from other countries or tax them heavily.
I forgot to mention the new home-scale freeze-drying units. Now about the same cost as a large, fancy new refrigerator, freeze drying can nearly eliminate the waste of food in the typical American home, more than paying for the unit for the average family in one year. It's easy to freeze-dry both raw and cooked foods. Once freeze-dried, no further energy is required to store food, unlike refrigeration or freezing. Supposedly this method uses less energy than canning, and the appearance, flavor, and nutrient content is almost identical after freeze-drying (unlike canning). Not only does eliminating food waste save money, it would also mean that we would not need to grow as much. Kitchen scraps can still be fed to poultry, pigs, or a worm bin. Most of the wasted food in the world - more than enough to feed everyone on the planet - is pre-consumer waste, BUT published estimates state that as much as 1/4 of all the food Americans buy and take home is thrown away. How would you like to cut your grocery bill by 1/4 without depriving yourself? Sadly. most of that food is not even 'recycled' through animals or composting, but is incinerated, buried in landfills (where it creates methane that is not harvested), or dumped into our already overloaded sewage systems.
He kind of crushes his own argument. If it takes 5 acres of solar panels to power 1 acre of farm, there's no cost of lost crop from weather or pests, no need for roundup seed buying, 70% reduction in water pollution and 70% reduction of fresh water usage. A little hydro dam on a small river or a wind turbine to help supplement the solar system would also make it viable.
Obviously artificial light is hugely inefficient. However, there are desert areas where there is a vast amount of light. The solar concentrator systems trialled in Spain could potentially generate heat, not just for electrical lighting, but for distilling/desalinating water. Personally I think that artificial lighting does not make a lot of sense, but augmenting sunlight might be practical.
I believe the idea is that the lights being used and the light being generated is at a very specific wavelength, at which plants respond most favorably. The growth that results may very well yield disproportionate results when compared to sunlight, which is far more broad in spectrum.
several of your arguments are not sound. !. There are already entire buildings that are solar powered. 2. A trucking company is not going to dead head from Michigan to Cali. Water is a constant problem in farming
While I understand his views when it comes to trees growing in sky scrapers and producing fruit is exactly probable. The guy needs to pay attention to the quote he likes the most. He isn't an electrician, or an electrical engineer. Speaking as one and having installed "frequency specific" LED lights for vertical gardens for various fruit and vegetable growers they don't spend $50 a month on electricity off the grid to grow 1 Arce of crops. Also the guy needs to take a few public speaking classes at his college to better his lectures. He'll, ask the pot growers in Colorado or Washington state how they grow mass quantities of weed. lol and they are making some crazy profit lol
Indeed. I'm an engineer and I'm very optimistic about Hydro, and I knew there were constraints like this. These people aren't able to listen and understand what he's saying, which is not that hydro is useless. Just that with current technology we can't exactly go in a fully artificial light rout.
Thank You, Professor, you have clarified my suspicions about indoor farming. It's going to be a niche industry for a while. Maybe with worsening climate change, cheaper sustainable energy, cheaper lighting technologies, more automation, etc., indoor farming will be a slow-growth industry for decades until some novel biotechnology is developed that more directly converts sunlight or electricity to proteins, fats, and carbs. Then maybe both indoor and outdoor farming will be replaced.
Seems like some valid points in this presentation. I live in a place where the ground water is running out, and the rock that encases our water is interminable, so the refresh rate of our water is something like 2 feet every 1,000 years. Wouldn't some sort of closed vertical system be a good thing in places where the water is running our? We have tons of farmland and we have tones of cattle.
I reclaim traspiration and enviroinmental humidity, large scale enviromental water generators like dehumidifyers and Ac units or by salt brine extraction already exist, such as bilboard in lima and even airid places. I reclaim aprox 5 gal pr day for my hydroponics solution.. I dont run the traditional high RH environment of which is a welcoming env for pests. My system runs low TDS as well so I can re run through stand alone RO system. Thus type of system with Fiber optics, reflection and suplimental HPS is the future. My electric for a near 3000 sf home, flower room, veg/clone room was $300. pr month with a swimming pool. Vertical gardens are the future, is he saying a nursery cant have a crated apple tree? They do, hes arrogant.
I am thinking of going into vertical farming/aeroponic farming and this video helps me to be extra careful about future decisions. I think Hydroponics will be complementary to existing agriculture in the future but as long as energy is expensive and not environmentally friendly I think it is important to consider options and effectivization. I live in Sweden with very weak sunlight most of the year and cold temperatures. But that does not mean we should import greens from across the world with less nutrition, sprayed with pesticids and other shitty chemicals to make it look fresh. The "ecological" alternatives to buy during the colder months are commonly of bad quality and lasts for a short time. Perhaps it is better to harness as much energy naturally from the sun as possible and use LEDs and complementary when needed. The electricity for LEDs, heating and dehumidifying would be quite significant here in Sweden, but if possible to build, multiple small windturbines would help alot. The latest aeroponic devices are also completely soiless and use up to 95% less water.
whatever the light source, solar or LED, the plants will use only two specific colors, blue and red (has corresponding specific wavelengths), sometimes UV. That's it. The question is the optimal Lux and their longevity of exposure which differ across species. I don't think the sustainability problem is the energy input to turn on LEDs but more on the materials and fuel needed to make them, moreover, these LEDs have lifespans needing complete reinstallations-- due to this, sunlight is still the cheapest and sustainable source but of course, we are all aware that energy is not the only concern, but so is water, land, and minerals in quantity and quality,and of course, the erratic issues of climate change.
but I thought that the whole point was that plants don't need the yellow or green wavelength of the light spectrum so you could use ultra low consumption lighting?
Your presentation seems intentionally confused. It confuses vertical farming with indoor farming. Most of your presentation does not apply, if we are talking about vertical farming outdoors to get more product per acre. If you claim that solar energy is important, wouldn't a volumetric use of it (through pillars) lead to better use of it? Please remove 'vertical' from all parts of your presentation -- none of that applies to 'vertical'.
his analysis is a little skewed to suit his opinion, but a lot of what he says is true, its about cost vs benefit, what we need is much more cost efficient energy, aquaponics would help ( but remember it sucks a lot of electricity and the fish food is mostly not sustainably harvested, scraped off the bottom of the oceans around Asia )
LOL!!! Omg!!! GMO livestock is intrinsically very expensive and inefficient. That's why it doesn't exist and likely won't unless some serious disease developed.
a) You should learn to structure the talk. The unspecified and non-linear presentation makes the information inaccessible
b) I'm 12 minutes in and the only thing you've presented so far is appeal to authority - yours.
c) You make the same false static world assumptions that dogmatic types use. All electricity will always be fossil fuel based etc.
e) You've presented the same false dichotomies that dogmatic types use. It's not "either local PV array or fossil fuels" is crap.
f) You're playing games with varying costs, you're talking about carbon costs in some cases, but then you switch to fuel cost, as in the case of transportation costs analysis. What happened to the carbon costs? Why weren't fuel costs included in energy input calculations for conventional agriculture?
g) What about the cost of the extensive packaging the produce for shipping?
h) What about the nutritional quality of the delivered food? Crap that's been on a truck for 3 days and sitting in a
i) You completely ignored the difference in cost of harvesting crops in the field vs. the trivial access in a vertical farm
j) What's with injecting desalinization into the discussion? Why aren't you including the CO2 and electricity costs of pumping the water out of the ground? Everyone knows that fresh water is being given away to big ag at the expense of the citizens.
k) You're being very provincial in your arguments, they only apply to US agriculture. As Africa becomes more arid and produces more renewable energy, the equation changes.
l) Put some error bars/ranges on your calculations so that it's possible for people to consider what might actually happen instead of accepting your claims of what will/must happen.
Your initial argument/calculations appear to be based on how much solar energy *received* on the ground, not on how much solar energy is *required* to produce the food.
Have you tried turning your calculations around and verified that growing plants in the ground _is_ possible according to your claims/calculations? You sound like you have an agenda, so prove that your calculations and claims are accurate by turning _all_ of them around and applying them conventional agriculture and applying all the same standards - the costs of electricity, the carbon costs, the full costs of packaging and transport.
Then factor in resilience and crop insurance.
Your assumptions completely ignore widespread extreme weather that is likely to accompany climate change. Basic capitalism says that those with product in hand, and those who can provide a reliable supply of consistent quality produce will get paid.
We're about two or three consecutive years of wheat crop failures due to extreme weather events away from your price calculations sounding irrelevant.
I suspect that your physics is correct but I also suspect that which bits of the physics and economics you chose to apply where, aren't.
I also suspect that vertical farms are currently more hype than value (in some cases they seem to be pump-and-dump stock scams) and I'm absolutely certain that it will take decades of trial and error for real, working vertical farms to find their niche in the marketplace, but I have no doubt that they will contribute.
It seems like you're selling "Bumblebees can't fly" thinking, you've done the body-weight to wing surface area calculations and declared the math proves that it's impossible for them to fly, but when the whole system is considered, bumblebees can and do fly.
I'm not suggesting they're going to violate the laws of physics and produce infinite food at zero cost, I just think there's more to the costs and values than you're presenting.
+ExperienceCounts2 a) It was for live audience not youtube, so it may be crude / unstructured but it succeed in delivering the message that its marketing stunt and complete facts and figures are deliberately not being given by vertical farming advocates using cherry picked lines.
b) Don't understand what you meant by that, the initial few minutes were subtle way of saying this is a dirty business when investors have invested real money in one or other technology, economy whatever you call it.
c) Electricity is being discussed because of LED lights, running pumps, heating/cooling systems to get maximum yield, how else are you gonna plant indoor?
+Afaq Saleem "complete facts and figures are deliberately not being given by vertical farming advocates using cherry picked lines." No, those are not advocates of vertical farming, those are businesses/corporations with a vested interest in the success of their financial venture.
One can advocate for an idea without being associated with marketing schemes designed to capitalize on ignorance and the unknowns of a new technique.
The fact still remains that the speaker is doing a great deal of cherry picking of his own, which does nothing for his argument.
It's still a false dichotomy to present electricity as either non-existent or comes from fossil fuels. Electricity from renewable sources is increasing. It already supplies about 10% of the energy in the USA, and it's around 25% in the UK.
That's the problem with static world arguments, they don't reflect reality. The world is changing, and the changes favor vertical farming on whatever scale it might be feasible.
He's building different models of two different systems. One model is for corporate agriculture and he conveniently leaves out calculations that he includes in the other model, the one for vertical farming. In the vertical farming model he leaves out calculations that favor it.
As I said in my response, if he wants to prove something he should build *one* model that accounts for all the significant variables and then apply that *one* model to both vertical farming and corporate agriculture.
If it's going to cost energy to pump water up into a vertical farm, then he damn well better include the cost of pumping water for corporate agriculture, or include the costs of building and maintaining canals to get the water. If he's going to include fuel costs then he needs to include all the fuel costs.
If vertical farming can grow food closer to where it is consumed, then that needs to be factored in. If vertical farming can reduce food waste (3/4 of which occurs before food even gets to a store) then that needs to be factored in.
One model would allow tweaking one parameter - like the percentage of renewable energy to fossil fuel energy - and that should demonstrate that the results for any scale of vertical farming is a negative. If there is some point in the model where vertical farming might have lower CO2 costs than corporate agriculture, then he should accept that as a consequence of his model. That's what being honest and being a scientist is about.
All he's presented so far is this: "If you select these values for measuring corporate agriculture and this other set of values for measuring vertical farming, the corporate agriculture that his department is closely involved with is "better" by his specific definitions of what constitutes "better"
That isn't good science, nor is it a compelling argument.
Afaq Saleem
Chowder Head I wouldn't call it "anti anything progressive", I'd call it anti-science or anti-reason.
I'd be fine if there was a decent model that could be applied to both systems of growing, and that model showed that vertical farming doesn't work and big ag does. It would be a valuable exercise because we could look at the model and say "It doesn't work because of x and ration of y to z" or whatever the analysis was.
I forget who pointed it out just recently in a video I watched, but to be ignorant requires knowledge. If you can say "I am ignorant about x..." then you know something: What still needs to be done/overcome. In this case we could say "We were ignorant about x and y in vertical farming" and that might lead us to a new/better idea.
Maybe pole farming is a better idea, where rather than doing it in a building we just have motorized hoists that allow us to stack plants on top of each other while still being exposed to natural sunlight
Maybe a vertical farm needs to be like that giant VW storage facility, the circular multi-story garage where the automated lifts go up and down to retrieve the cars. Program a lift like that to rotate palettes that hold growing crops so that some minimum percentage of the time they do get natural sunlight and the rest of the time they get artificial light. Could be that there's some optimization that could be done and that giving plants natural sunlight for 20% of their lifetime might reduce their need for artificial light somehow and reduce the overall energy input.
Maybe a vertical conveyor belt setup, so that the plants on top get watered and excess water drips down on the plants on the shelf below it, and those turn very slowly. Only the tops stick out of the building so they get natural sunlight for part of the time and if severe weather comes along, you only lose the plants that happened to be exposed to weather at the time the storm hit, the rest are safe and snug inside.
I'm just spewing random conjecture pulled fresh from my butt, however I think it illustrates my point that building a model of the system is valuable regardless of whether the answers fall nearer to any particular political or philosophical school of thought.
I don't know that the science supports either scenario as being feasible, but he'd built a proper model, we could make use of it to test other scenarios.
I do know that corporate monoculture/big ag is the system we've been using and that system uses/wastes a lot of fossil fuels and a lot of fresh water and is very vulnerable to severe weather, which we are experiencing more frequently and it is expected to get worse. We need to make changes, and going vertical is one of the things we can try thanks to modern engineering/building techniques.
I refer to this sort of thing as the "Get in the fucking boat and row" scenario. There are always people who for religious, political, financial or personal reasons, want to hold on to the rope that ties the boat to the pier, while the majority of human beings are trying to row our boat towards a better future. One luddite can slow our progress more than 2 or 3 can pull us forward.
If they get in the boat and don't row, that's fine, but sitting in the boat and holding on to the fucking rope that anchors us to the past is just plain annoying. Mr. Bugbee could have spent his time rowing (i.e. doing proper science) and instead he's just clinging to the rope and telling everyone we'll row right off the edge of the world if we don't keep doing things the way we have been.
Quantify specifically what's preventing us from getting us where we need to be, build models that others can use and extend in the future, demonstrate specifically and without bias)that what we're considering can't work, that's all cool. Just picking out a handful of numbers and oversimplified calculations and declaring that it cannot ever work...what the hell is the point in that? (see list above: religious, political, financial, or personal...)
+Afaq Saleem How else do we grow indoors? Humanity has over four thousand years of experience buildings and modifying structure to direct light. But you are in the strawman world. As soon as you accept his premise that all sustainable closed loop farming has to be on the grid you are sucked into this guys short-term world view.
+Afaq Saleem He is incoherent on his own proof points. He compares fossil fuel farming costs, then says shipping is irrelevant. Then he consider long distance, and concludes the opposite. Heck he starts using desert farming as a comparison point. Desert farming!
The entire point of grow local addresses his second concern. The one he just told us was irrelevant. He spends thirty minutes refuting himself on refrigerated shipping alone. The most charitable interpretation is he wants to ship dry grains instead of fresh vegetables because vegetables have a high water content. Eat more boxed cereal and rice I guess? Not fresh vegetables?
Maybe all the "photons" and "mole" comments, which he then later tells us he *does not understand* but adopted someone else's research, confused you. Latin doesn't confuse me. He muddles points, refutes himself, and uses mixed "orange" arguments to complain apples are not oranges.
He's at best a useless academic. More likely a flack for a corporate sponsor.
I feel like a lot of (unjustified) dislikes come from people who do not understand the physics, chemistry and biology of growing plants. Another major source of dislikes is the destruction of people's overhyped dreams of vertical farming.
Mr Bugabee presented the topic really well, his talk was well reasoned, supported by science and filled with information.
And Science is always 2 side's arguments but Only 1 side can be right and this guy is dead wrong in his assumptions. A vertical gardening will save land amount used. I use no solar no giant building structures. I took 1/3 of an acre and it's producing 7 to 10 time's yield no gmo seed no chemical Uriah fertilizers no gmo pesticides. So please explain his PHD to me ??? Useless as the toilet paper it's written on & that's the facts. The issues with gmo's is there all derived from oil aka cancer yummy. Next proof the United States has the most medicated people on the planet & yet still the sickest one Only has to look at the soils after all the decades of Gmo Fertilizers & Pesticides. The bug population has exploded in Nebraska & Iowa & many other state's that use that stuff. The bug's themselves have become Immune. Bee keeper's solved the mystery of bee death. They won't ship & rent their bee's to farmer's that sprayed pesticides for @ least 2 to 3 weeks after application Fact. No amount of GMO food's are safe to eat fact & tractor farming with GMO fertilizers & pesticides is a dead practice besides the enormous amount of diesel fuel waste & air pollution.
There is much to be learned from this presentation but Mr Bigbee took a really narrow use case to bash the totality of vertical farming. Funny coming from a guy who sells a par meeter which is design to help people grow marijuana indoors. People in the northeast dont have access to the heat and the sun in january and so one has to figure out how to accomplish this indoors. if you live in the suburbs of the northeast and you are just a blue collar bloke with a starter house and a small garden a garage and basement then you are going to have some ratio of indoor and outdoor growing strategies. How am i going to get the sun in the basement? If i add windows to the garage will it be too cold for the plants? What if i already have solar panels to power my computer and electric car could i not augment the winter light with some indoor lighting? what if im growing microgreens and not full blown tomatoes in the winter? So once you think of other use cases other than trying to replace a whole farm with a verticle skyscraper set up or some warehouse at the edge of town you start to see real benefits like farm to table health benefits, buffers against supply chain outages, a small universal basic income to get you through tough times, less pressure on the supply chain to increase yeilds using questionable methods like Chemicals and pesticides. i can go on.
some of us also just disagree with him, which is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. it's called "professional dissent"
@@p4rsec yeah the guys an idiot. this lecture did not age well. there are multiple vertical farming ops that have surfaced in the recent years. many more to come. for christ sake the guy didnt even talk about the automation involved. ONE PERSON 6 HOURS A WEEK CAN MANAGE AN AUTOMATED FARM THAT PRODUCES 900 LBS/week. he also missed many other points such as how transportation leads to nutrition loss
The real question I have is how much of this is truly insurmountable? There was a time when all of the most learned men of the world believed flight was going to be forever impossible, and then once that happened, commercial flight was going to be impossible, and then when that happened, commercial flight for the masses was going to be impossible. Engineering combined with time has this way of overcoming what seems like impossible obstacles. Personally, I'm happy for the efforts in vertical farming, as it provides a forcing function to push our technology forward. You never know what you'll uncover along the way.
well said! but the thing is we dont have to listen to every video posted on youtube sometimes pleople are wrong
They are building them all over the world
All the problems are trivial from the technological point of view and the solution on reach. But not sustainable, both economical and environmentally just like flying on massive scale. You can have one or two for the fun but don't belive you are solving any problems with it.
@@mat650 I couldn't disagree more. The fundamental reality of technology is that it always moves toward better sustainability, in fact that's THE driving motivator. People get this false idea that new technologies are less sustainable than older technologies because they compare small implementations of the old ways to MASSIVE implementations of the new ways. However, the old technologies were so inefficient that modern scale was simply not possible. As much as people dislike fossil fuels today, they are FAR more environmentally friendly than burning wood and using horses. If all of our light and heat came from wood, and all our transport came from horses, you'd really hate what that world would look like. When fossil fuels first came out, one of their BIG driving forces for adoption was how much cleaner they were. But every technology has a scale limit, and once you start to reach it you start looking for new and better ways, which will scale further, better, cheaper. But it's a mistake to believe that technology isn't sustainable, when in fact, it's the ONLY hope for a sustainable future.
@@bujin5455 absolutely agree, but you forgot many factors in your equation: at the time when wood burning was our best source of energy the global population was massively smaller. Even though we got more efficient technology we use it in such a larger scale that it's more impacting on the environment. Concrete, steel and glass buildings on multiple floors are nothing new and very energy and resource intensive to build and maintain (I hold a major degree in Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) ), you are never going to recover with the supposed increase of yeld in comparison to open field agriculture. It's hard to make them cheep enough to provide a safe indoor environment to people with very basic requirements, not very different from those of plants in vertical farming. I hope for technological advancement but more in smart adoption of it and not marketing campaigns to still the money of invertors and consumers.
I am not an agricultural scientist (I am an engineer/attorney) but thinking about investing in hydroponics. After watching this presentation I have some concerns about the potential bias of Professor Bugbee. My first impression was that he exhibits all the signs and verbal cues of a witness that is being less than truthful on the stand. For example: at the end he made comparisons of soil growing using the "best" for high value crops as the comparison to the worst in vertical farming.
His claim about conventional soil water lose seems at best disingenuous, because reaching 95% efficiency in conventional farming is rarely done and would be extremely labor intensive. Also his initial "math" analysis appears to use the full spectrum of solar radiation from the sun, while plants use only a small portion around 450 and 600 nm. LED lights can be constructed to emit in these narrow bands and therefore are very efficient.
Logan UT, where Utah State is located, is a primarily agriculture based economy, I wonder if there is an undisclosed agenda at play here. Finally, It would be nice to have a realistic comparison of conventional verses vertical hydroponic farming, instead of this apples to oranges comparison.
If I were you I'd consider Aeroponics. You save A LOT more water with Aeroponics. You should look into it.
Thanks Jonathan, in fact I did try to grow some plants a month ago using a fogger system, they did pretty well but I had a hard time keeping the nutrient levels right and most of my plants died. I will be trying again when time permits.
Yeah, I think you need to make sure the water is the right pH every SINGLE day. Or else the plants aren't going to get the right nutrients.
aeroponics? but then you would have to buy the fertilizers from companies that sell you water with soluble ingredients Better make them your self from scratch using concentrates or powders added to water.
Even better, by using an underground/ drip/ gutter system and organic compost from your kitchen/garden you are more than well
as far as all the ponics stuff is concerned. if you do some looking you can find natural ways to fertilize your plants and add stuff to your water. lye, thisel weed can be mashed and fermented. all at no cost just a little time. if your concerned about it I recommend forgetting everything you herd in this video. you can take it one further and try aquaponics where you raise fish with the growing system and they fertilize your garden. that is the new adventure im starting. keep looking, there is a ton of good ideas on here and good ways to go about hydroponics.
This man uses so many fallacies... I'm just perplexed. You can't just convert mechanical modification of land (farming) and water use to energy and then say: "well this is nothing compared to the energy of sunlight"... Sunlight isn't a finite resource, in practicality it's infinite. In his comparison you could just leave out water and your crops would grow 2% less. They don't.
Also plants don't need 10.000 lux to grow, they have saturation curves from where they don't benefit from extra sunlight. Reverting and preventing photo-inhibition costs energy.
I couldn't bear to watch it all... I, I, I just can't even...
Lastly, as a scientist, don't ever, EVER, tell me someone is right because he has status. It's foolish, think for yourself, check it for yourself. Even the best people make grand mistakes. If a renowned scientist and a PhD or Msc disagree, the former isn't right because he's someone. The person with the best evidence is right.
Best comment.
Shifterfire Every problem he mentioned are things that can be overcome.Many of us love the idea of insecticide free food.
I can understand before a presentation sometimes you need to introduce yourself but to establish a technical credibility is something else.
If the presentation is INFORM audienc simple introduction is enough, if the presentation is to CONVINCE audience then one needs to establish technical credibility.
Then we enter phase for crafting the message of presentation - that can be done any number of ways - quantitative or qualitiative... personally i read these top comments and gave up watching the video...
i believe in vertical farming...the success is not a simple technical solution it will be a combination of both technical and process solution (IMHO as a business analyst and technical architect...wins EVERY TIME trust me!!).
Corn is a C4 plant, it's not like weed. Grow up, kid.
True. I stopped watching when he started with his μmol sunlight misrepresentation
There is one pumping and filtering system. There are multiple pv panels and vertical axis wind turbines. The lights are high efficiency led lights. The water expired from the plants is condensed from the air and reused. This creates the perfect conditions for growth and the growing time is drastically reduced resulting in increased productivity.
Ironically, starts the lecture talking about Professors making huge errors when speaking about subjects outside of their field, and then goes on to talk about solar power and lights. It was not that long ago that I was debating that L.E.D. technology would be bright enough to replace bulbs. I was told over and over that I was wrong, because they would be so expensive. Did no one stand up and tell this guy that the price per kilolumens had already dropped by 90% in the previous 7 years? Or that the price of solar had halved over that time? Meanwhile the price of water had risen by over 40% during that same time. My tip for the day, Professors can make huge errors, when they step outside of their field. As I am sure the farmers who first saw the cost of a tractor said "I think the old way makes more financial sense", they were shown to be wrong too.
Even if you assume 100% efficiency it's still a metric-assload of power. The amount of light energy falling on Iowa every day is more than the sum total of all human electricity generation worldwide.
@jake mr honest 100% agree. And while we wait for fusion, solar still has yet to unleash its full potential in powering our modern infrastructure projects, including indoor farming.
@jake mr honest if your "IS" statement requires an "IF" statement as a precursor your logic is flawed. VF's are a piece of the pie but not the sole thing that will work for future generations. as a sole solution.
Professor bugbee is the real deal! He doesn’t rule out vertical farming, just bounds the scope of it. If you think he is mistaken, invest your time/money to prove him wrong!
Why is everyone complaining about the video lol?
Its not meant to be a bite size youtube clip.
It is long and boring because it is a university lecture.
But if you watch the video you will learn a lot. I'm a big fan of indoor farming , but once you understands the economics of it, you quickly realize why it can never compete with outdoor farming. Outdoor farming capitalizes on MASSIVE MEGA QUANTITIES of solar energy in ways that are impossible to compete with indoors no matter how many LED bulbs, fancy gadgets or solar panels you plan on using.
It is precicely this kind of detailed analysis that I was looking for.
Maybe the professor could refresh the content of this video with revised data from improvements in vertical farming methods, techniques and technological advancements. The new remarks can help us all understand where have come from wherever we were back when the video was shot
how about screw the professor and just watch any of the 100 vids about actual vertical farming companies that are muilti million dollar operations and highly profitable and help to reduce food insecurity
The talk starts slowly with no clear objective, but it picks up later. It is worth waiting for the good part. The presenter asks and answers very good questions. It is a very good starting point for thinking on the subject. I also think that it is possible to go further, and when we do, perhaps some of his conclusions may not hold entirely anymore.
Vertical farming might well work if designed properly. I don't see why one couldn't grow mushrooms in low light, for example.
If you look at a rainforest, it is vertically layered.
In Singapore, there is a high rise vertical farming that only uses direct sunlight. The vertical farming technique is also highly efficient as it requires very little water, labour and energy. A 9m tall rack only requires 40W per hr per day. 1 kg of vegetables requires only SGD0.50 of electricity and 12l of water. Annual yield of about 800 tonnes per hectare. Please take a look at Sky Greens vertical farming.
Bock Keat, I am stunned too, when he said vertical garden has a lot of problems on his studies. But I am optimistic, we need more green indeed on our planet, vertical garden is an option among all. However, Vertical garden must not suibtitute tranditional method. As my point of view, vertical garden bring up the landscape looks nice. If I got an option to buy veggies grown organic one, on vertical water method and grown on land method and same price and same nutrition value; I think I would choose the land grown one, just the feeling. For landscape, vertical gardens exist make me feel grace, and I can say the air quality much better, and attracting bees and butterflies, also other insects too. I think vertical is a good back up for emergency situation also a platform to promote and to cultivate nearly extinction plants. This professor should really studies about it instead of just giving the nay saying all in cover in his presentation.
"40W per hr per day"
New Unit: Energy per time³
@Allen Loser "40W per hr per day" is power per time²
^^
@Allen Loser So i guess its "A 9m tall rack only requires 40W"
@Allen Loser Yeah i was thinking all this points, too. Including that 40W is too low
Vertical farming isn't a single solution to resolve the problem of population and food resources. It is a specific niche based approach to producing food in areas where renewable energy is the primary energy source (think Iceland), that typically don't have access to food production and typically import food.
The title of the video is correct but it also doesn't make sense because I don't believe anyone is calling for a total shift to vertical farming. It is simply one of many solutions.
Another niche based solution is Food forest gardening in the suburbs, where people build a small personal food system for themselves meeting some of their dietary needs from outside of their back door.
Beyond the suburbs you move into integrated farming systems, like Sepp Holtzer's farm, and then maintain the industrial food system to make up the difference.
The idea that any one system will solve the problem is ridiculous, because it isn't a simple problem. But the problem is the solution, and in the case of available farming land being on the decline, vertical farming does resolve that issue in a specific use case.
The Autonomous Gardener absolutely agree with your thinking here.
Thank u
@Allen Loser Sure why not. But at the end of the day the problem is that the vertical farm as a solution is being bashed because someone walked in the door with an assumption that this is the only way we should do farming. Basically they are arguing against a point no one is making.
@Allen Loser I doubt anyone that can do basic math thinks that skyscraper farming with an man made energy source is more profitable that gardening using the sun.
I'm not aware of having said that I am in favor of conventional agriculture as the solution to the food problem.
I think millions of small farms, built on integrated management and sustainable permaculture practices is probably the best way to go if we are talking about replacing one major conventional ag corporation.
But I also believe that the skyscraper farmer might also have a role to fill. Not in it's current form because it is basically chemical agriculture.
@Allen Loser There is a place for both. We wouldn't be able to convert to the type of agriculture I would prefer over night. Conventional agriculture is a transition technology.
Awesome!! Broken down so even the lay person could understand. Excellent Job. Bottom line , "using electricity to grow plants is wasteful to a much higher degree than some would like you to think." New ways must be developed.
With solar panels and lv lights improving in efficiency and cost, some farms are already the same price as farm goods, give it another 5 years and it will be cheaper.
it shifts the focus. if electricity becomes even cheaper, mostly by solar becoming increasingly cheaper then the benefits might soon outweigh the cons of the high energy consumption. No pesticides, vastly less water used, no runoff water that is full of chemicals and polluting the waterways and ground water, closer to cities so it does not have to be transported through the whole country, better tasting produce (I am not 100% sure about that since I have not actually tasted food produced in vertical farms). Did I miss anything else? There is probably other factors that I am not considering, pros, as well as cons, but I think given vastly cheaper energy that is cleaner than it is right now will yield to this concept becoming a viable alternative to convential farming sooner than most people think. Will it make up even 5% of the world's food consumption by 2030? Very, very unlikely. But it might play a bigger role in the future. Especially with technological progress becoming exponential.
the solution is nuclear energy, and we've had it for decades. but so much propaganda has basically ensured nuclear will never become the dominant power source.
@@p4rsec No. Nuclear fusion is zero waste nuclear energy> This still has kinks that are being worked on.
Reminds me of when I was getting my computer science degree and every freaking class the first two years spent a month explaining to us why computers are important and how some admiral once found a moth in the machine.
If you have to spend half the time explaining and selling the idea to people who are already receptive you have nothing to say, and certainly no respect for adult learners.
And I sure as heck do not need to hear about your internecine bickering in academia. This is a classic example of someone spending his time knocking down strawmen that no one took seriously in the first place. No one expects fossil fuels to make sustainable local foods.
I have yet to hear anyone confuse sustainable farming who has actually set out to learn claim they will do it off the coal-fueled electric grid.
Thanks for saving me 46:67 of my life....does he make any arguments against Aquaponics?
"they will do it off the coal-fueled electric grid"
They could do it with sunlight on field. Tada!
Excellent presentation! Good analysis of the situation.
To all the people with attention deficit disorder complaining about the length of the video:
This is not a silly cat video, it is a lecture. Prof. Bugbee has summarised the findings of a large number of research papers and presented it in a very clear and understandable manner here. It would take all of you people hours and days to first find, read, understand and condense all of this information, which he has done here for you more expertly than you probably could. I've seen a lot of lectures with a lower information density than this one, so no, it is not too long.
And not all videos on youtube are made specifically for youtube. Thankfully!
When we consider "harvest" of sunlight energy by a natural system, I recommend reading Mark Shepard's book "Restoration Agriculture." Here, the professor compares conentional agriculture with vertical farming -- but Mark speaks of the most food-productive systems even before human societies -- for example the savannas maintained through disturbance by megafauna. Applying this to the present day, he recommends a multi-storied system such as alley-cropping which mimics the distribution of annuals and perennials in a treed savanna. It is fairly obvious the solar harvest is superior based on exposed leaf surfaces in such a system. The challenge becomes how to harvest so much diversity -- but the inputs for the farmer (except for initial setup of the system) become lower and lower. Profit margin is carved out of drastic reduction of inputs. Harvest becomes a long-term calculus shifting from annuals to the increasing growth of the perennial system.
Cost. When I see images of vertical farms, I see vast expenditures of steel, plastics, artificial soils, and electronics.
And vertical farms with artificial light for plants?
I design vertical farms for walls, fences, walkways, parking lots, temporary open land.
These vertical designs employ hydroponic devices fixed to exploit otherwise unused space and sunlight.
Solar panels power pumps to circulate nutrient water over clay medium, the nutrient solution runs over the roots in the clay medium, the solution runs through pipes to return to the reservoir.
Standard hydroponic method with different designs for different spaces.
In the video above, Professor Bugbee discusses the expense of electric light to grow plants. He is correct. Plant lights consume more power than any food crop can return in sales.
For that reason, I do not waste money installing light.
I am now 20 minutes into his presentation. He has not yet discussed the cost of the supporting structures of ' vertical farms. '
The cost of the structures negate any possible return-on-investment.
For that reason, I use existing chainlink fences, cheap chainlink panels taken from construction sites, wasted steel pipe from dismantled structures, rebar, wire, etc. Whatever is available, I use.
The greatest money expense becomes the solar panel, the pump, and the PVC, CVC, ABS pipes that be used to move the nutrient solution.
A greater expense is the labor of design, assembly, and maintenance.
For what? Lettuce? No.
I grow stevia, a sugar-substitute for diabetics and dieters. I also grow lemon grass and other spices for taste. These combinations of sugar substitute stevia and flavors cost 75 cents to 2 dollars per ounce on Amazon dot com.
( At 28 minutes, he says the electricity to grow wheat costs 100 times the price of wheat. To grow with electric light, "We'd to grow something to get $900 a bushel .... " True. Most hydroponic growers grow a Schedule One Federally prohibited substance. At the risk of prison. I don't and won't )
Yet at $2 a dry ounce for stevia, Amazon price, hydroponics exploiting sunlight becomes a viable crop.
I design for urban environments. And I use a hedge trimmer to cut the stevia. I harvest kilos. See a harvest from a proof-of-concept project here:
ruclips.net/video/lVp4VeLrZF8/видео.html
Very good comment indeed.
@@harryme472 Here is the correct URL for a stevia video: ruclips.net/video/JBO4OuvH1J8/видео.html
Interesting, I like how it focuses on the nuts and bolts of the economics of the matter. However I'd like to see some case-studies of the ACTUAL costs of large-scale vertical farms.
If anyone has any would love to read x
@@LanxOfficial ruclips.net/video/J4SaSfnHK3I/видео.html
Singapore is busy proving you very wrong. Highly successful vertical farming. Some very productive innovations.
Unfortunately I was not able to understand any of your supposed points. Every time you build up to making a real point you go off on to another complete subject. I don't care about how much professors make or who looses their job teaching. I do care about the real reasons why vertical farming is less productive, healthy, more expensive or profitable than growing crops traditionally. My point is that 95% percent of youth growing up on farms, leave the farm because they can't make a living farming. Costs of equipment, legal, and municipal issues labor ETC. ETC. ETC. If you are going to teach me something make a point then substantiate it.
+John Merryman His point out the exaggeration made by companies to sell their products, its one thing to advertise the positive aspects of it, like no pesticide (if they really don't use it) and fresh crop (these two are the only two good reasons I could think of for buying them) and ask people to spend more money for that, but going to lengths of claiming it is environment friendly without proper facts is criminal negligence and misleading of people.
As far not making money of farms is failure of govt policies, not the process, once in our country there was govt initiative to increase per acre production of wheat, teaching programs, telling farmers how to do the farming, when to sow, when to use fertilizer etc etc, and result there was a influx of wheat the next year and what did the govt do, lowered the price of wheat, now the farmers were screwed because the per income remained the same but they have spent more money this year to get fertilizers, pesticides, hiring machinery etc, have you ever seen the price of milk go down because cows yielded more milk this year, so please do not bundle up the failure of govt policies with the technical issues, and if you see govt announcing tax relaxations for vertical farming, just look at the investors and you would know why farmers are getting screwed.
I find there are a number of reasons that growing using hydroponic methods either vertical with grow lights, various methods in greenhouses to be superior to some field grown crops. Growing plants in water do not require pesticides as normally used in field grown crops. Only certain vine crops inherently are plagued with certain bugs which are dealt with using bees or other insects which combat the blight.
Being environmentally friendly if you mean this method of growing crops are not assisting the environment, here are some facts, contour strip farming, sediment control, run off of chemicals which are commonly used in field production. Each crop grown are usually trucked long distances before landing in a store or even close before you consume them. Then there is the time frame from picking the crop to when it lands in a distribution center, then to another supplier to the restaurant Etc. From seed to harvest represents a fair amount of fuel, equipment rental (or GOD know the cost to buy the equipment) then storing the yield, drying, milling or processing, where necessary. Although I don't exactly know by how much the ground and soils are diminished by the growing of crops, especially where a crop like corn is planted and replanted over and over, will suck the nutrients out of the soil (which is why fertilizers are used in the first place.)
Water being the primary requirement for Hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics and vertical methods, produce 5 - 8 times the harvest for 1 acre = 43,560 sq. ft. At a cost which is nothing like the cost of 1 tractor, let alone all the other equipment necessary. The growing seasons are not just one per year, but 4 - 7 times a year. Another reality is that if we created just one 320 sq. ft. shipping container properly set up, would have a ROI of 3 - 5 years. Imagine how much time it would take for a farmer to recoup his investment for all of the above expenses.
What about the environmental impact of unemployment. Look into Freight Farms, GrowPonics, American Hydroponics, Etc check out the costs, labor, profits. Unemployment could be lowered by massive percentages.
And this guy is teaching WHAT? He offers nothing, produces nothing but paper degrees telling everyone who buys this BS that they know the answers.
The costs of food are in refrigeration, transport, and loss. Disperse food growing and that goes away. Whether vertical farming is outdoors on racks or indoor for inclement weather, growing near the consumer is worthwhile just for that savings. Growing wheat might be silly. Do that out in the fields. But bean vines are a good hit. Raise chickens local on the scraps and you get meat too. Raise fish in tanks and likewise.
You got it.
Speaking of the water usage, water that is cycled in a contained or closed system, is reusable and the losses are minimal. When he began speaking, he already showed his propensity to stack the deck and it was easy to see which way it was leaning. (In a field, like this, where there is a big company with unlimited funds and the country's food supply at stake, you can imagine that anyone who can join forces with Monsanto and chooses not to (or worse, prepares to write or speak out publicly against Monsanto), could quickly find themselves mysteriously sacked or worse. Like they say, "Follow the money" trail (to see whodunit and who was probably an innocent bystander).
This was 7 years ago and now Holland is using the principles of Vertical Farming to become a major exporter of foods. Hope you have updated your data professor.
I'm only 19 minutes in but I'm incredibly confused as to why we're comparing the energy of raw sunlight to photovoltaic. Are we to assume that all of that energy is directly converted into growing power which has to be completely replicated by solar panels? Plants don't require the full power of sunlight to grow at maximum efficiency. Doing back of the envelop calculations it's still a bit over in terms of area required if it's 100% solar powered bit that's not nearly what's shown in the picture.
Yes you need all of it as it's not only fostering photosynthesis but also and mostly warming the environment in which the Plat graws.
This guy isn't wrong, for 2015, however electricity prices are going to trend toward zero globally in the future, and when that happens then it obviously becomes much better to grow vertically. At least if you discount the embedded carbon cost in building all the infrastructure to grow vertically.
I am very grateful to know that you are my "neighbor". I live in utah- Draper city.
Interesting presentation. Next it would be interesting to see a study comparing costs from indoor grown vegetables vs purchasing from grocery stores. Just to see if there is still a financial incentive for the home grower.
Given climate conditions of the day, the professor was correct. Indoor farming can't compete with field farming. But today there is some evidence that global cooling is possible. Several degrees warmer will be inconvenient for many reasons, but NOT lethal to most people; however, several degrees cooler would bring back the climate of the Little Ice Age. In that situation, field farming is problematic.
To feed today's population under Little Ice Age climates, two technologies will be necessary, cost notwithstanding: First, thorium nuclear energy, and second, indoor farming.
When the choice is eat or starve, cost is of less importance. The Precautionary Principle dictates that we should be researching and developing both thorium energy and indoor farming. It would cost a lot less than currently being spent trying to prove that mankind is the main cause of global warming.
which types of vertical farming are examined here? I dont think any one way or any one size fits all is the one answer. It depends on so many environments and inputs and outputs and being able to identify and measure them.
I see no problem with building a nuclear power plant to power indoor farms.
Expensive lettuce .........not to mention a political hot potato.......not likely to happen.
So the Cliff's notes version- vertical farming is viable for niche markets and expensive crops. If you can get paid $30.00 per pound for what you grow, you have a bright future.
For mass market crops, factory farming on a large scale has the market cornered. We will most likely never have vertically farmed wheat or tomatoes.
If cropland and irrigation water were 100 times more expensive, or if electricity were 100th of its present cost, Vertical farming would be able to compete head to head with traditional large scale farms.
Oh, then it will be viable in 25 years.
This hasn’t really aged well.
Vertical farming is a broad term it doesn’t necessarily mean indoors with no natural light. It just means… vertical. Maximizing yields to area. You can have a vertical farm in a greenhouse or even outside.
You spent so much time worrying about electricity then kinda glossed over fertilizer and water.
I’d really like to see these farms you speak of with in ground irrigation. Sounds super cheap and definitely won’t get in the way of tilling the soil.
Solar panels are under $0.60 per Watt now in 2018, though. Your figures might need adjustment. Also, if an acre can grow $800,000US worth of food in a year isn't it worth coating it in $400,000 worth of solar panels and other growing equipment?
his math of pink lights are correct? most of the raw sunlight is energy in frequencies plants don't use?
This video really should be called "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet in the Next Six Weeks." His opening slide shows a conceptual design for a vertical farm that includes wind turbines, but doesn't mention wind power once. Let alone geothermal, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, or even the ever increasing efficiency of solar power.
4 years later and you have been proved oh so wrong... plenty of very profitable and efficient indoor vertical farms now exist. Don’t always listen to those who claim authority....
No , they don`t actually.
sir, you seem to negate Photo-synthetically Active Radiation. Also, the light plants actually draw from the total produced from the sun. Maybe i#m being naive but, the red and blue spectrum's used in the production in these farms, is not going to equate to the amount of light produced by the sun in these spectrum's, but it would reduce the gap of energy if you calculated only how much red and blue the sun gave off instead of the total. Additionally, the invisible spectrum's of light also account for much of that energy and is unnecessary amount of energy for plant photosynthesis?...
secondly you seemed to forget that the majority of vertical farms designed for the future aim to grow in regions where there is abundant sun, but not necessarily arable land. this means the use of natural light, and substituted with solar powered artificial lights would be totally viable.
He missed more than that.
Yeah but can't you use lights that emit only in the spectrum that plants like to utilise the solar energy more effectively?
There are some inexcusable and large leaps made in this presentation which make the conclusions questionable at best. As an example, at 30:59, "tons of CO2 equivalents per year" is somehow extrapolated into total food system cost, the conclusion of what is "small" is assumed for us, and an irrelevant factor (cars we drive) is introduced to the discussion for no perceivable reason. There are leaps made in the math in the early portions of the video which skip the crucial step connecting "plant growth possible on an acre" to "plant growth possible on an acre using only electronic lights." As well as ignoring the question of what logic would assume you are forced to use nothing but electronic lights. With ideal building design it should be very possible to use natural sunlight for nearly all lighting requirements. "vertical farming" doesn't mean growing underground. It was stated plants growing in a field use a fraction of the available light, meaning that excess is simply wasted. Was that number factored into the comparison a few minutes later of sunlight to electronic lights?
Somehow this presentation makes the leap from vertical farming to growing under electric lights. He also neglected to mention the better LED arrays actually eliminate a large portion of light that is not used by photosynthesis. Whether this was a part of the behind the scenes calculations done (kinda like the admittedly iffy behind-the-scenes calculations those vertical farming companies did) is not mentioned, so I have to assume they aren't.
you may want to use artificial light if it is in a closed envirement like a wherehouse or if the plant are stacked in a way that doens t allow much sunlight, but there are solutions for this led light using only the part of the spectre that laight need are becoming more cheaper and durable and consume less energy than white light lamp
@@giacomomezzini9598 When light (even plant unsuitable light - you damn PAR fanatic) hits the floor/leaf/whatever it heats it up. What's the point of super efficient LED lights if your environment is too cold ? Those old HPS/MH/CMH HID lamps, which are used as supplemental lights in orchards/greeneries in the North are already very efficient. And they produce (more) heat which you need anyway (In Summer you have light, you don't need more). LED lights might be evolutionary (saving a couple percentage points maybe even as high as 25% on electricity( but they are absolutely not revolutionary). And it will not solve the difficult problem of growing STAPLE crops productively indoors without dragging "MINED" (top)soil around. And they are essential to food sufficiency, all the rest is just bonus. Herbs are magical. Cheers.
@@kevinpaulus4483 can something like hydroponics solve the soil problem?
Yes of course if the enviroment Is too cold you Will Need a heating light but maybe It would bebmore efficent to use a heater?
@@giacomomezzini9598 No not really ... potatoes are roots and don't really like sitting in water and they will get very heavy. This makes them very hard to grow hydroponically. Tomatoes and peppers - the fruits of their genetic cousins - on the other hand are grown very easily hydroponically (usually using an inert media like grodan or stonewool and drip irrigation). The Netherlands are full of heated greenhouses that do just that.
You can easily solve the light problem using reflectors, fiber optics and centralized renewable energy systems. Intelligent designs can easily cut down on climate control costs. You have obviously, not done a thorough research. The initial investments are high but so are malls, stadiums, parliament houses etc...
Your presentation is wrong on many levels. Please correct them before you ruin the reputation of a very well established research and farming method.
"Easily"
So your proposal is to use the same unit area of farm land only instead of having crops on the fields fill them with mirrors and glass.
This is a pretty stupid solution.
Taking the light from outside directly inside, without converting it to electricity first, that's an interesting idea. But who the hell is talking about that? Everyone is just using electric lights, and claiming it to be cheap and revolutionary, just like his presentation says they are. So the technology you appear to have just made up may not be viable.
@NotAsian, Not the same unit area, but to use other areas where light falls, like roads, rooftops, ocean and land that is not used for agriculture. Also, light falls on many levels in the same unit area. a vertical building would use the vertical space to accommodate for photovoltaics, wind turbines etc. Sun light can be tapped at every next floor that has a Southern/Northern exposure. This electricity generation, may be used for electric lights but the point is it can work. The carbon footprint would reduce because of the carbon absorption by plants. Also, photovoltaics have an average lifespan of 25-30 years so it would eventually have a negative carbon footprint in the long run.
@eggory, Yes, it is an interesting idea and the technology exists right now. I did not make it up and it is very viable. High initial investment but so are malls, airports, Govt. halls etc.
Shashank Gogoi
No this would increase the carbon footprint, its pretty clear you haven't tried to falsify these ideas of yours.
OK let's try to falsify it.
1) No solar panel ever built has created more energy than it took to produce thereby, increasing the carbon footprint. Now, we are giving it a time of 25-30 years so eventually, it will produce energy and render the problem solved.
2) Direct solar light reflected or directed solves the problem indefinitely. Ex: reflectors, fiber optic cables etc.
3) the amount of plant growth per unit area would increase so much that it would eventually reduce the carbon footprint since no additional input is required to run the farms.
Conclusion: The carbon issue is a time issue. I actually did not try to falsify it but to prove it as true. Perhaps, you can present data to contradict me. So far, I seem to be correct.
Pls note: I am assuming that least amount of planned obsolescence is used in the products that is procured for running a farm. If we have to keep buying the same solar panels or lights every next year or so then this argument is invalid.
I wish the Bruce put just as much thought into solutions to the problems he has identified in his presentation.
Good presentation though for guys like me, looking to create an abundance of water, food, land and positively impact global warming in the process.
The point of vertical farming is not entirely about efficiency. Yes, with solar technology, LED technology, fiber optics, and mirrors, we may eventually catch up to near the same amount of lumens coming out of LEDs as is hitting the solar panels that power them. Actually, to go on a tangent here, it is well known that plants only use red and blue light, but the sun produces all kinds of light. This means that we could potentially have more red and blue light coming out of an LED than is going into the solar panel powering it. Please correct me about that if I'm wrong, I am genuinely interested. But, to come back to my original point, vertical farming is not about increasing the efficiency at which we farm, even though that could be a bi-product of the process, vertical farming is about decreasing the amount of land used for farming and decreasing the amount of water we use for farming. So, yes, vertical farming could potentially save humanity, even if it is not as efficient where lighting is concerned right now.
Great video, not sure why everyone in the comments thinks they are suddenly experts on agriculture.
The long standing problem I have with all these eggheads that claim they know best is,
1. Jesus was not an accredited expert, train by his peers. but his presence Change the world.
2. Amitures built the Ark, Experts built the Titanic.
3. All the experts said at the time of the Wright brothers that scientifically and mathematically man can not Fly, heavy than air machines. I am glad that the Wright Brothers were just humble bicycle mechanics. I am guessing that their minds were not polluted with the facts.
4. The US NASA program, At 10 times the budget of the Russian space program, had all the engineers agreed, that a certain type of rocket motor can not be built. The computers proved it, so do not even try.
Again I am guessing that the Russians missed that memo, because they built 40 of them, and sold them to NASA. THEY work considerably better than what NASA Made at 10 times the budget.
Summary:
Never listen to anyone. Just go out and build it to failure, until it works. That is what Ford did. Yes they told Ford his factor idea will not work. He was not "Smart Enough" to believe the Banker experts.
Conclusion:
The sanity of the plan is of no consequence, Follow your dreams. Tesla did, and that's Right again, all the Experts said alternating current is a Ponzi scheme.
Did this guy ever do any real life, hands on, start his own company, get it done. Anything?
I bet not. He is an expert, not a doer.
In Indoor farm, you can use Photons more efficient. Plants dont Need everey part of the light spectrum in different phases of growth
Ok it's kind of stupid to try to replace the sun. But what about the nutritional value of the food?
If you transport lettuce over 3000 miles (with all the storing involved), what's left of it's nutritional value once it gets to your caddie?
This video is way too long. I started watching it, then I was skipping around to listen to different parts, then I gave up. I know the guy was doing a presentation and I am sure he is very proud of his work. But the average person isn't going to be interested in watching the whole thing. A five or ten minute video summarizing the main points would be easier for more people to watch.
At 43:20 you have the conclusion that ordinary farming has a fraction of carbon footprint than vertical farming. To know the reason one has to watch the previous 43 minutes
Maybe it wasn't meant for the average person. I for one am tired of so many un-technical videos about highly technical subjects on RUclips.
To me the length wasn't a problem, I guess you're not as interested as you think you are.
The onus is not on the viewer to prove a certain level of interest by being willing to sit through a certain length presentation. The onus is on the presenter to make the the information as concise as possible to keep people's attention. Remember, this social media platform doesn't specialize in a scientifically trained audience that would be willing to watch a long, technical presentation. It's a video channel for the general public.
Michael Bane You're absolutely right. I'm didn't look at it in general public POV. I think that even though this exists in a "casual" environment it's meant for a specific demographic; after all this wasn't your average YT video it was a lecture at an university. Perhaps in the future they could make a video where it showcases the highlights of the presentation.
we know it is quite long for RUclips. It was public lecture; we reposted in its entirety because many people could not attend
Judging by the comments, its length is one of the smallest problems people have with it.
Can you please reply to the engineer above who pointed out some of your misrepresentations and misleading statements?
The University hosted a guest speaker. You'll get the reply you're seeking if you reach out to the speaker rather than the hosting venue to address questions or concerns with content delivered by said speaker. Please post the responses you get from the speaker in the comment threads you mention! -Carjack
Terrific talk.
Utah State University Extension I am thankful for this video 😊
Vertical Farming is not to save the planet, but to eliminate unnecessary long procedures from planting to harvesting. It’s a science of shortcut and effecient production.
The issue with growing plants in a water solution is simple, many minerals will not go into solution so will not be available to the plant. Soil biology makes many minerals plant available while others are made available via symbiotic partnerships with fungi. All of these conditions are absent in either a hydroponic as well as in an aeroponic growing setup. If you don't want to grow in native soil you best bet is to construct a soilless blend with peat moss/coconut coir, perlite, lime, organic fertilizers and trace minerals. Plants can take up some percentage of 75 minerals, if they are available. The challenge when constructing your soil mix is to make it biologically active, which basically means you need to blend your components, add biology and water and let the material "cook" or go through a heat, ensuring it is alive and ready to take care of the plants. This is why I formulated MightyGrow Organics 4-3-4 Living Organic Fertilizer which contains 75 trace minerals and all the other minerals plants need.
He’s assuming that solar cells won’t increase in efficiency, which they’re bound to. That’s just one thing he seems to be intentionally naive or just plain wrong about. It really seems like there’s an omitted agenda behind this lecture.
If electricity is so expensive, what about light tunnels with TIR (total internal reflection)? That could at least offset some of the total energy demand, even if it isn't sufficient to grow that crops on its own.
I haven't finished yet, but there are many things not addressed at 18:30ish he mentions it would take 5.4 acre per 1 acre with photovoltaic. Yes, but not 5.4 arable land. This can go in the mountains, off the coast, in the desert, etc. Another thing is, the issue of transportation, one of the points is you don't have to transport nearly as far. Another point is, modern farming also uses fossil fuels more so than his diagram showed. It's not just fertilizer.
I finished and he addressed transportation. But I have to say he is hand waving the solar panels, nuclear, or other sustainable energy models to run the leds. He doesn't address the water shortage issue, the increasing cost of arable land as we are running out.
I'm not the biggest proponent of vertical farms. but high density hydroponic growing definitely could be the future.
Bruce great talk, but I have a question related to the calculations. The energy used assumption was 1000 w per m^2 if I remember right, and the equivalent amount of energy was shown for photo synthesis. While I love rounding numbers for simplicity etc. I can't see how using the total energy supplied by the sun at ground level can be used as a constant when figuring out cost of indoor farming. What I was looking for and maybe missed is the amount (energy) needed for plant growth (I know different plants different numbers but you gave examples). Reasonably speaking that number would be much lower than the number you used for the calculations as not all of the sunlight in one square meter is going to hit plants in a field, and if I can plant at a higher density in vertical gardens won't I be able to deliver the amount of energy (its all about energy ) to the plants significantly impacting the numbers in your calculations? Well its just a thought...
It's not just a thought, it's a damn good one. And you should also consider how plants reflect most of the light the sun emits, and a part of the energy emitted by the sun is thermal, not light. His calculations fall flat on their face.
In minute 14-15 there is a mistake in the thinking. Photosynthesis only requires a very small spectrum of sunlight hence the "yellow arrow" is actually wrong, which results in wrong calculations!
There was no mention of the potential for crop gains over fields due to mother natures destruction (lack of rain, storms, insects etc).
A lot of this is over my head but HE got my attention when He spoke of CLAIMS by the vert farmers about growing apples, pears, cherries, peaches, oranges and other tree type crops. How will vert famers grow things like pecans, walnuts and similar food stuffs? There is NO QUICK TURN-AROUND with tree type crops like there would be for lettuce, tomatoes, onions. cucumbers, radish, beets etc. Just asking?
honestly i feel like it would be just more convenient to automate standard farms in the first place and once we start running out of space where it's possible to farm, then go vertical
there are areas where you can't farm crops, so you can use those to gather solar energy or something like that
Classroom look at why competing against free sunlight will be so difficult without recycling wasted energy (various forms of renewables) or changing the types of agriculture that is grown.
so PUT a small thorium reactor next to the vertical farm...problem solved and then some
WE CAN DRIVE TO THE VERTICAL FARM ON THE SOLAR ROAD!
@@LarsLarsen77 Solar roads suck tho.
Wow, I thought I was alone with such a thought! You know, we could stop climate change TOMORROW! Just detonate a small nuclear wepone in the desert of Nevada, maybe 50 KT (atom bomb -- not hydrogen). Make it as clean as possible and kick up a little dust into the stratosphere, and cut the sun light 10%. Wa La -- temperature dropped, problem solved. Oh would that set their hair on fire!
Mindustry?
@@chipfriday9967 that's not a permanent solution cause carbon can increase 100 of times more so we need a permanent solution
Earth is completely safe my friend, we need to care about human being. Vertical farming it's a great option that needs more tests to evolve. tks
Look at it this way instead: While plants ARE inefficient as Mr. Bugbee says at converting sunlight to yield, this is actually because the photosynthesis process only uses .023 percent of the total spectrum of sunlight. So most of the natural light hitting plants doesn't do anything for the growing process. This is why the vertical farms don't use sunlamps, they use lighting which produces the specific wavelenths of light that the plants require. Current solar panels are 23% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. Since the plants use .023%, and the solar panels convert 23% (1000 times more power!), it seems to me that there is plenty of power available from a rooftop-sized panel to run a vertical farm, even if there is considerable waste energy in the lights.
Plants need the equivalent of full sunlight to reach the .023% they can convert. You would need a little over 4 times the square footage of solar panels than the square footage of vertical planting surface. The panel may be 1000 times more than the plant USES, but it's 23% of what it NEEDS.
6 years have passed. How things have changed since then? LEDs have surpassed HPS in both light intensity and efficiency, but water and fertilizer usage claims have been proven true or false?
An interesting discussion; however, nowadays the numbers he's quoting are fairly outdated. We've made big strides in LED lighting technology, and understanding more about the specific wavelengths of light that plants need, among other things. He also makes a lot of broad generalizations which just don't make sense- The amount of water, light and nutrients that you need to grow a head of lettuce are vastly different than what you need to grow an ear of corn. And making the assumption that the power generation will continue to come from fossil fuels and coal is so wildly short-sighted that even that alone brings his entire prediction into question. It'd be more accurate to title this video as "Why vertical farming ISN'T saving the planet (as of 2015)", rather than why it won't. Everything in this video is wildly short-sighted, and almost completely outdated even 7 years later.
It's especially grating that he dances around the biggest elephant in the room- It doesn't matter how efficient vertical farming is, if all of your traditionally farmed crops are dead due to pests, bad weather conditions, or other unforeseen circumstances. This is purely an anecdotal example but; where I live, we have experienced a significant amount of cloud cover the past few months, and my outdoor garden is struggling. Meanwhile, the exact same types of plants that I have inside, beneath grow lights and are being grown hydroponically are flourishing. It doesn't matter how much money you can save if the end result is that everyone dies of starvation.
It is a long lecture. A15% efficiency in for photovoltaic solar panels sounds about right, but will the efficiency and the cost of solar energy improve in the foreseeable future? Also, solar panels could be built on irrigable/undevelopable land, where other usages of the land are limited. The production of CO2 could decline in the near future as electric transportation technology becomes viable.
Why converting Light into electrical energy and than back to light, if you can have it for no cost on a open field?
Boo.... There are so many forms of vertical growing that are extremely efficient, even vertical growers are moving away from this skyscraper model!
*there
Yes , it`s an unfortunate choice of images.
Other forms of vertical arrays still face similar issues.
This is an excellent talk! It's given me a much more informed view on the subject. The main points I took away from it are:
1) The energy cost to farm using grow lamps is huge; it's a financial and ecological net loss
2) Powering the grow lamps with solar panels would take 5x the land used by crops relying on sunlight
3) Desalinated sea water is only 2-4x the price of local fresh water (depending on location)
4) Traditional farming is water efficient if it uses sub surface irrigation
Why don't you calculate how many more crops are grown in this stacked system. Then calculate how much land it would take to grow the same number of crops in a field.
With Led lights energy use is reduced significantly. To be so narrow minded as to only consider solar energy is ignorance.
Also calculate the fuel and energy used to clear land for a field. Plow the field, seed the field, irrigate the field, spray herbicides and pesticides. Then the fuel used to harvest the field and transport from field to silos. The trucks that take products from silos to distribution centers. The energy and fuel to run the distribution centers. Finally the trucks that go from distribution facilities to super markets and the energy and fuel consumption of the supermarket to preserve products. In no way can the price of all the fuel and energy in today's agriculture be less expensive or consume less than the energy and fuel used in local vertical indoor growing with no harvesters or tractors. No major transportation no distribution center's. The calculations prove this fact over and over again.
There is no modern field irrigation system that is more efficient than aqua or hydroponics what so ever. It has been proven that aqua or hydroponics can use as little as 1% of water used in the most efficient field irrigation. Because of aqua and hydroponics water recirculation abilitie that enables multiple applications of a single reservoir of water. Thus the only water leaving the system is through the uptake from the plants. ABSOLUTELY NO FIELD IRRITATION TECHNIQUES ARE THAT EFFICIENT!!!
Why don't you calculate how many more crops are grown in this stacked system. Then calculate how much land it would take to grow the same number of crops in a field.
With Led lights energy use is reduced significantly. To be so narrow minded as to only consider solar energy is ignorance.
Also calculate the fuel and energy used to clear land for a field. Plow the field, seed the field, irrigate the field, spray herbicides and pesticides. Then the fuel used to harvest the field and transport from field to silos. The trucks that take products from silos to distribution centers. The energy and fuel to run the distribution centers. Finally the trucks that go from distribution facilities to super markets and the energy and fuel consumption of the supermarket to preserve products. In no way can the price of all the fuel and energy in today's agriculture be less expensive or consume less than the energy and fuel used in local vertical indoor growing with no harvesters or tractors. No major transportation no distribution center's. The calculations prove this fact over and over again.
There is no modern field irrigation system that is more efficient than aqua or hydroponics what so ever. It has been proven that aqua or hydroponics can use as little as 1% of water used in the most efficient field irrigation. Because of aqua and hydroponics water recirculation abilitie that enables multiple applications of a single reservoir of water. Thus the only water leaving the system is through the uptake from the plants. ABSOLUTELY NO FIELD IRRITATION TECHNIQUES ARE THAT EFFICIENT!!!
Why don't you calculate how many more crops are grown in this stacked system. Then calculate how much land it would take to grow the same number of crops in a field.
With Led lights energy use is reduced significantly. To be so narrow minded as to only consider solar energy is ignorance.
Also calculate the fuel and energy used to clear land for a field. Plow the field, seed the field, irrigate the field, spray herbicides and pesticides. Then the fuel used to harvest the field and transport from field to silos. The trucks that take products from silos to distribution centers. The energy and fuel to run the distribution centers. Finally the trucks that go from distribution facilities to super markets and the energy and fuel consumption of the supermarket to preserve products. In no way can the price of all the fuel and energy in today's agriculture be less expensive or consume less than the energy and fuel used in local vertical indoor growing with no harvesters or tractors. No major transportation no distribution center's. The calculations prove this fact over and over again.
There is no modern field irrigation system that is more efficient than aqua or hydroponics what so ever. It has been proven that aqua or hydroponics can use as little as 1% of water used in the most efficient field irrigation. Because of aqua and hydroponics water recirculation abilitie that enables multiple applications of a single reservoir of water. Thus the only water leaving the system is through the uptake from the plants. ABSOLUTELY NO FIELD IRRITATION TECHNIQUES ARE THAT EFFICIENT!!!
im not a scienetist at all but is it not so that they use only a really small portion of the light sectrum to give to the plants and so use way less energy?
All of Dr. Bugbee's arguments boil down to "Vertical farming is not currently capable of competing with our present system when growing the food we currently eat using the technology we currently have."
That's just stating the obvious, though, isn't it? Are there really that many people claiming that vertical farming could be implemented immediately and solve all our agriculture problems? Because I've never heard that argument. I've only ever heard of it being talked about in the future tense, based on the expectation that technology will improve over the next few decades to the point where vertical farming will be the most effective production method.
He touched on GMOs, the physical limitations of crops to metabolize light, the limitations of renewable energy, atmospheric water harvesting, the cost to consumers, and the need to change consumption habits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, he simply ignored the fact that all of these factors are variable.
He says it's important to consider the inputs to the agricultural system, but he barely did that. He mentioned some ways that the problems facing vertical farming could be overcome, but he didn't frame them as viable solutions. Is there any reason these farms couldn't be powered by nuclear reactors? Or that the water couldn't be supplied through seawater desalination? After all, if the environmental impact of transportation is negligible, desalinated seawater could be transported in. And what about using genetic engineering to create crops that could grow more efficiently, and could replace some of the more problematic foods we have now?
If we're really supposed to be thinking about the inputs, why not question whether we'd even be growing food? Maybe the vertical farms of the future are producing specific molecules? Chains of protiens and cellulose, vats of acids and other chemical precursors that would serve as the raw materials for the computerized synthesis of any number of final products? Dr. Bugbee scoffed at that other guy for speaking on topics too far outside of his expertise. It's a valid criticism to say that he probably doesn't understand all the details of such a complex topic. He's only looking at the public health aspect, and not the agricultural. On the other hand, Dr. Bugbee appears too hesitant to think too far outside of agriculture. I know it's only a 50 minute lecture, but it's all based on a very narrow framing of a very broad idea. It comes off as flippant, and at worst, disingenuous. Instead of simply asserting that vertical farming can't save the planet right now, why not propose a couple of ways that it potentially could someday?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke
I'm starting a tall greenhouse using LED lights only at night. All the production will be stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Can anyone say that I'm not vertical farming? I'd sure like to pick your brain about a lot of this. It sounds like I may be able to beat the standard vertical farm according to some of these assumptions.
@31:45
Once again. Stating that we use a crap tonne of fuel to grow our food is a point in your favour (as you imagine this) here and then you just finished saying that energy and water for field growth is free???
This gets more shameful every minute.
All students in my country need to listen to this in class so they can clearly see how NOT to argue a point.
It is not only about CO2 and energy. it is also about seeds production ... vertical and hydroponic systems still depending on normal fields for their seeds.
I don't think his calculation at 18:30 takes into account that plants only use a small percentage of white light for photosynthesis. If you use artificial light, you can put energy only into those frequencies (colors) used by plants. I think the efficiencies of the two approaches are much closer.
How much energy can you save by only focusing on those frequencies?
You’re wrong , you have misunderstood how the calculation works .
It works for me I'm not growing corn but peppers, green beans, tomatoes, lettuce spinach and others that I eat works fine have 1200 gallon aquarium with 110 fish for the winter in a spare room of my house takes about 3 weeks to 6 weeks for majority of plants to be ready to eat and always have fresh fish plus a couple of worm composting buckets for food waste in basement for garden in the spring and my house has 6 sollar pannels for that room it feeds 6 house holds all year round and all off of solar none of lights are hooked up to house only thing that is is pump and that is 200 watts but that room has 2 massive windows so it has a lot of natural light
Far too long winded, but the man does have a point. These vertical farms are set up as huge industrial complexes, and they make claims that no one can confirm as they get no actual insight into what they consume, but at the very least we are talking factory levels of electricity with highly labour intensive daily management.
This sure as hell will not be usable anywhere but the richest parts of the world, parts where food is already being thrown away due to excess of everything.
Annnnd what if they use windmills/graphene solar-panels? What if they do away with the need to cut down forests to make room for new arable growth plots? Vertical farms are inefficient now, but economy of scale and green energy will make them viable.
Prof. Bugbee assumed in his calculations that the plant canopy needs/uses 100% of the energy hitting it (1400 mmol/m2/s) in the greenhouse scenario so when he compares it to solar voltaics/indoor leds there appears to be the need for a tremendous surface area of solar panels. From my readings there appears to be a rather large oversight that is not addressed and that is that plants do not use the full spectrum of light for photosynthesis. Much of the suns energy comes in the form of heat, UV and frequencies of visible light that plants reflect entirely. I am not an biologist nor a physicist so I can't say how this would affect the analysis, but it seems to me to be a large enough oversight to make the whole analysis questionable. Led lights can produce targeted frequencies so you wouldn't necessarily need to reproduce the raw energy output per acre of the sun to replicate the same yields. My best efforts to estimate the amount this changes things is 47% (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency). Which means 5.4 acres of solar panels gets reduced to 2.86. Now if you layer other renewables into the mix (wind) and allow for additional sunlight to enter in through windows (as most of his own drawings show) you would only need to supplement light during the fall, winter, spring months where the days are too short. Again, I'm no scientist but using only LED lighting as a supplemental light source and adding multiple renewable source would seem to me to make this idea potentially feasible from an energy perspective. Now the cost of building the structure, maintaining it and the land cost (presumably you are not building this out in the boonies but close to a city) would again make this untenable.
It was a great presentation. I have been intrigue by vertical farming due the production yield for the foot print with out knowing the exact cost of electricity/energy required so this lecture definitely provide that context in a very scientific way. He also gave detail analysis of various examples of the economic of different food groups including different energy cost of transportations for different product (whether they need refrigerated truck or not) which I really appreciate. The professor definitely looks at this situation from an energy efficiency point of view and it’s hard to argue that natural farming is a very effective use of the sun energy. He definitely wasn’t looking at this vertical farming issue from the space efficiency issue.
The presentation is from 2015 though... I don't think the calculations are still relevant today.
if you cannot use sun light for some reason then use grow light and that will not be cost effective unless you ban import of vegetables from other countries or tax them heavily.
I forgot to mention the new home-scale freeze-drying units. Now about the same cost as a large, fancy new refrigerator, freeze drying can nearly eliminate the waste of food in the typical American home, more than paying for the unit for the average family in one year. It's easy to freeze-dry both raw and cooked foods. Once freeze-dried, no further energy is required to store food, unlike refrigeration or freezing. Supposedly this method uses less energy than canning, and the appearance, flavor, and nutrient content is almost identical after freeze-drying (unlike canning).
Not only does eliminating food waste save money, it would also mean that we would not need to grow as much. Kitchen scraps can still be fed to poultry, pigs, or a worm bin.
Most of the wasted food in the world - more than enough to feed everyone on the planet - is pre-consumer waste, BUT published estimates state that as much as 1/4 of all the food Americans buy and take home is thrown away. How would you like to cut your grocery bill by 1/4 without depriving yourself?
Sadly. most of that food is not even 'recycled' through animals or composting, but is incinerated, buried in landfills (where it creates methane that is not harvested), or dumped into our already overloaded sewage systems.
He kind of crushes his own argument. If it takes 5 acres of solar panels to power 1 acre of farm, there's no cost of lost crop from weather or pests, no need for roundup seed buying, 70% reduction in water pollution and 70% reduction of fresh water usage. A little hydro dam on a small river or a wind turbine to help supplement the solar system would also make it viable.
And you produce all the year long, not only one season.
LED lights do not draw that much power!
How can we solve the problems on all side to find the perfect system if both or all sides are gaming results ?
Obviously artificial light is hugely inefficient. However, there are desert areas where there is a vast amount of light.
The solar concentrator systems trialled in Spain could potentially generate heat, not just for electrical lighting, but for distilling/desalinating water.
Personally I think that artificial lighting does not make a lot of sense, but augmenting sunlight might be practical.
I believe the idea is that the lights being used and the light being generated is at a very specific wavelength, at which plants respond most favorably. The growth that results may very well yield disproportionate results when compared to sunlight, which is far more broad in spectrum.
Yes Bruce .tell it like it is. Big respect.
Yup.power bills.
It's about how much power you can produce.
several of your arguments are not sound. !. There are already entire buildings that are solar powered. 2. A trucking company is not going to dead head from Michigan to Cali. Water is a constant problem in farming
The closer to the end of his speech he gets to the more his argument falls apart.
While I understand his views when it comes to trees growing in sky scrapers and producing fruit is exactly probable. The guy needs to pay attention to the quote he likes the most. He isn't an electrician, or an electrical engineer. Speaking as one and having installed "frequency specific" LED lights for vertical gardens for various fruit and vegetable growers they don't spend $50 a month on electricity off the grid to grow 1 Arce of crops. Also the guy needs to take a few public speaking classes at his college to better his lectures. He'll, ask the pot growers in Colorado or Washington state how they grow mass quantities of weed. lol and they are making some crazy profit lol
+Philip Dillard LED's. Exactly, this guy seems to be a little clueless...
Indeed. I'm an engineer and I'm very optimistic about Hydro, and I knew there were constraints like this. These people aren't able to listen and understand what he's saying, which is not that hydro is useless. Just that with current technology we can't exactly go in a fully artificial light rout.
@@endiminion Agreed.
Thank You, Professor, you have clarified my suspicions about indoor farming. It's going to be a niche industry for a while. Maybe with worsening climate change, cheaper sustainable energy, cheaper lighting technologies, more automation, etc., indoor farming will be a slow-growth industry for decades until some novel biotechnology is developed that more directly converts sunlight or electricity to proteins, fats, and carbs. Then maybe both indoor and outdoor farming will be replaced.
Hydroelectric dams? Most power in the west coast is ran off of dams, not fossil fuel. That's a fundamental flaw.
Your argument was electricity is expensive but then state fresh water isn’t a problem because technology is just making it cheaper and cheaper.
How about fiber optic sunlight?
Seems like some valid points in this presentation. I live in a place where the ground water is running out, and the rock that encases our water is interminable, so the refresh rate of our water is something like 2 feet every 1,000 years. Wouldn't some sort of closed vertical system be a good thing in places where the water is running our? We have tons of farmland and we have tones of cattle.
I reclaim traspiration and enviroinmental humidity, large scale enviromental water generators like dehumidifyers and Ac units or by salt brine extraction already exist, such as bilboard in lima and even airid places. I reclaim aprox 5 gal pr day for my hydroponics solution.. I dont run the traditional high RH environment of which is a welcoming env for pests. My system runs low TDS as well so I can re run through stand alone RO system. Thus type of system with Fiber optics, reflection and suplimental HPS is the future. My electric for a near 3000 sf home, flower room, veg/clone room was $300. pr month with a swimming pool.
Vertical gardens are the future, is he saying a nursery cant have a crated apple tree? They do, hes arrogant.
I am thinking of going into vertical farming/aeroponic farming and this video helps me to be extra careful about future decisions.
I think Hydroponics will be complementary to existing agriculture in the future but as long as energy is expensive and not environmentally friendly I think it is important to consider options and effectivization.
I live in Sweden with very weak sunlight most of the year and cold temperatures. But that does not mean we should import greens from across the world with less nutrition, sprayed with pesticids and other shitty chemicals to make it look fresh. The "ecological" alternatives to buy during the colder months are commonly of bad quality and lasts for a short time.
Perhaps it is better to harness as much energy naturally from the sun as possible and use LEDs and complementary when needed. The electricity for LEDs, heating and dehumidifying would be quite significant here in Sweden, but if possible to build, multiple small windturbines would help alot. The latest aeroponic devices are also completely soiless and use up to 95% less water.
but what percent of the sun light is needed for plant growth compared to specific wavelengths used by LED's?
whatever the light source, solar or LED, the plants will use only two specific colors, blue and red (has corresponding specific wavelengths), sometimes UV. That's it. The question is the optimal Lux and their longevity of exposure which differ across species. I don't think the sustainability problem is the energy input to turn on LEDs but more on the materials and fuel needed to make them, moreover, these LEDs have lifespans needing complete reinstallations-- due to this, sunlight is still the cheapest and sustainable source but of course, we are all aware that energy is not the only concern, but so is water, land, and minerals in quantity and quality,and of course, the erratic issues of climate change.
@@mau345 Well said. Good summation.
but I thought that the whole point was that plants don't need the yellow or green wavelength of the light spectrum so you could use ultra low consumption lighting?
yes, but he is "A PROFESSOR", so you must believe him... "NASA", woooohhhh...
LOL. He's a f**king shill.
sun light is free. grow light electricity is not. that is the difference.
Green photons are photosynthetically active tho
10:59 sums up his bias quite nicely. Cherries in Utah.
Your presentation seems intentionally confused. It confuses vertical farming with indoor farming. Most of your presentation does not apply, if we are talking about vertical farming outdoors to get more product per acre. If you claim that solar energy is important, wouldn't a volumetric use of it (through pillars) lead to better use of it? Please remove 'vertical' from all parts of your presentation -- none of that applies to 'vertical'.
Pretty irrelevant in 2020.
his analysis is a little skewed to suit his opinion, but a lot of what he says is true, its about cost vs benefit, what we need is much more cost efficient energy, aquaponics would help ( but remember it sucks a lot of electricity and the fish food is mostly not sustainably harvested, scraped off the bottom of the oceans around Asia )
by the healthy look of his physical body, id say he has eaten quite a few servings of GMO Bacon.
That doesn't exist
+NotAsian Not yet...
LOL!!! Omg!!!
GMO livestock is intrinsically very expensive and inefficient.
That's why it doesn't exist and likely won't unless some serious disease developed.