Food for Thought

[MissS]

Thoughts?

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[pepperhead212]

I like the idea, as long as they really can keep the pesticides/herbicides out of it.

[karstopography]

Looks good to me.

[Seven Bends]

90% less water, 97% less land use, and 618% more energy use. Not to mention the resource, energy, and pollution costs of constructing the facility in the first place. I don't see how this is this a good solution to anything except "how can we grow food with as little human labor as possible?"

In Virginia, we have plenty of land and plenty of water, but we don't have a lot of renewable energy yet -- only 11% of our electricity came from renewable sources in 2022. Natural gas fuels 54% of Virginia's electricity generation, and coal fuels 4%. Nuclear power plants account for 31%. We do, however, have plenty of sunshine, so I'm not sure why it makes sense to farm here using intensive LED lighting.

My source for the 618% more energy usage number is something called the 2021 CEA Global Census Report, cited here: https://www.greenforges.com/blog/energy ... nd-farming. I haven't fact-checked it. My calculation is based on their statistics of 38.8 kWh per kg of produce for vertical farming (generally, not this specific facility) vs. 5.4 kWh per kg for traditional greenhouses. I don't know the energy number for traditional field-grown produce.

Gratuitous, fact-free, wholly invented statistic based on my personal experience at the grocery store the past decade or two: vertically-farmed strawberries will deliver a 99% decrease in flavor compared to field-grown strawberries. I wasn't surprised to see that these strawberries will be sold under the Driscoll name.

[bower]

I've seen Driscoll in the supermarket here, so they are exporting as well. I've tasted supermarket strawberries, and no thanks. Even grown in ground, whatever they're doing is not holding up as flavor or freshness either by the time they get here.

The only advantage of adding power costs and construction costs in lieu of sunshine and natural dirt and water, would be to continue production year round, and sell out of season fruit at ridiculous prices. I was reading about the vertical design for this recently as I picked up a few everbearing strawberry plants and thought to pot up the one that didn't get planted in the ground, to try and get fruit under lights. Found a corporate page where they described their work designing a system for that purpose, and probably where Driscoll's setup came from.

Vertical farms have not lived up to the hype, from what I've read about it.
Hydroponic lettuce and herbs have been done with massive investment in structures that didn't pay off. Investors were very unhappy.

I haven't read any of the details about other problems (besides the fail to amortize the costs), but you know that sooner or later, some micro-organism gets into any structural grow system, and has to be dealt with. Maybe they design them with sanitation in mind? I would think so. However as facilities age, you get corner niches happening. Something that bent, foundered, or just wasn't cleaned out as thoroughly because of the geometry there. It gets harder to maintain a 'disease-free' environment. And in order to satisfy the humidity needs of plants, you are always creating environmental conditions that some microbes will also love.
So when a fancy structure is built for growing plants, its productive lifespan as a building is not going to be as long as a people space.
Taken with the power costs, it can't be easy to turn a profit.

I wonder how much strawberry taste is determined by environment and how much by variety...
The everbearing plants I bought this summer produced really delicious fruit... we'll have to see if we can still get great fruit under winter lights indoors. They will be in regular dirt (potting mix and compost).

Strawberries have to be hand pollinated if you grow indoors. Not sure what they are doing for the pollination task, in the vertical farm? Another expense that is 'free by nature' in the field.

[worth1]

We used to grow giant sweet strawberries.
I think it was the soil and picked ripe.
I think we'll drained soil makes a difference an not too much water.
I grew Ozark here one year and they were good.

[slugworth]

Back in the 60's I had a spray can of blossom set for tomatoes.
I was surprised to learn they use the same chemical spray to make strawberries huge.
You can't even buy it now.
had β-naphthoxyacetic acid as the main ingredient

[JayneR13]

Interesting thought, especially for urban agriculture, where land is harder to come by. Electricity usage is a thing and if the power goes out, so do the pumps. There are CEA systems that grow plants in soil; one of my old volunteer gigs, the Farmory, did that, as did Growing Power in Milwaukee. Both organizations close due to financial insufficiency. Basically, it cost more to produce the food than they could sell it for.

Another interesting idea in urban agriculture is the rooftop garden. We have plenty of rooftops in the city!

https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/1 ... 022.701756

Boston Children's Hospital has a thriving garden: https://www.statnews.com/2023/07/24/bos ... al-garden/

Some of the garden initiatives here in Green Bay place small raised beds in schools and various shelters. Urban agriculture is definitely a popular thing, but again, there are tradeoffs. My own garden is only 130 ft2, which won't produce 100% of my needs and will definitely have problems should the city water grid fail for any reason. Yes, I know about rain barrels but the city has regulations about those which trust me, are odious! There are even restrictions on where I can place my city-owned garbage bins! Leave it to the bureaucracy to complicate a good idea into oblivion, right? Anyway.

Great idea though!

[karstopography]

Best strawberries I’ve ever had were Alpine strawberries. Those are tiny. Been a long time since I had a store bought strawberry that was truly good. I think store bought strawberries have about 1/2 the amount of sugar of an alpine strawberry in 100 times the volume and the store bought strawberries are 10 times more sour.

In my experience, store bought commodity strawberries are about the equivalent of store bought commodity slicer sized tomatoes. If I have to buy them for some reason, I will, but I tend not to put myself in that situation.

[worth1]

For a chocolate covered strawberry to work the strawberry has to be sweet.
Since the majority of the population has never had a really sweet strawberry they don't know any better.
It's comparable to a woman that's lived in a country all her life that only has ugly men and biting dogs.

[slugworth]

When I was a kid,the strawberry plants hid the strawberries from sight of me and the birds.
Modern plants the strawberries are exposed and easy prey for birds.
Ones in contact with the ground ants eat the a$$ off.
One year I covered the plants with cheesecloth and the birds pecked right thru.
Looked like a bloody mess.
I tried hanging baskets but watering was a problem.

[bower]

@JayneR13 I hadn't even thought about, what happens if there's a weather event that puts the power out for more than a few hours!
I suppose if the power was out for a week, you'd have a building full of dead plants. What fun that would be to clean up....

Assuming as SevenBends pointed out, abundant land for an alternative approach, low tunnels or row hoops over plants in the ground would have a much better chance of surviving a weather disaster and actually providing some food at the end of the day.
I do think the winter tunnel design could be improved on to make a passive system that ventilates automatically etc. or even switches on some battery powered lights, for a more ideal system, at least in moderate winter climates.
Your row hoop system would have to be very deluxe expensive to cost as much as the indoor growing structures.

[worth1]

Independent power source other than outside power from the grid.
Hydrogen cells would be a great source.

[slugworth]

methane power
they never talk about the vents on all buildings

[worth1]

methane power
they never talk about the vents on all buildings

Might as well burn it off.
Methane is a so called greenhouse gas.

[bower]

Vertical farms under solar or wind installations might be a win-win for food security. Unless they use all the power..

[MissS]

I'm on the fence on this one. Big Ag scares me here. The food grown this way, out of necessity would all be grown with plenty of chemicals. The food produced would have less nutrition than from a plant grown in the ground. It would also have much less flavor. The energy costs may be huge. I don't think that I would enjoy eating these berries. I am afraid that they are producing a Trojan Horse. The risk of eating them may be larger than the benefits.

[worth1]

I can imagine only the rich could afford the stuff anyway.
The big majority of all this new technology isn't going to be affordable for lower income people anyway.
I only got my blueberries because they were two for 5 dollars when normally they were 5 dollars for one.
They're not anything to write home about as it is,nothing like we raised on the farm with a sweet earthy flavor.
They didn't even taste like a blueberry.
It's all about the bottom dollar.

[GoDawgs]

It will be interesting to see what the strawberries taste like and how much they cost. To me that will determine pass/fail. Still, I will support those grown traditionally. Plant City Florida (kind of in the Tampa area) is the winter strawberry capitol of the world. They should start shipping berries to groceries late January or February weather depending. They're usually pretty good unless some slip through that aren't completely ripe. Once picked, they don't continue ripening.

I buy my berries at the local u-pick-it place about five miles down the road. Oh, so good! They almost lost their crop this spring due to all the excessive rain. There was no u-pick-it and you had to call to order how many buckets of berries you wanted them to pick for you. The fields were too bad to support customer picking. I sure hope their business makes it. I'll know they have when I see along the highway the big "STRAWBERRIES!" sign with the arrow pointing down their road. That should be late April. I hope.