They were all the vogue a few years ago. Going to save the world from famines. FSM knows we could use them now, hey? What with the climate warming, and all?
If you want to hear what's going on, Two Bit da Vinci has a video. It's a 14m watch and lays out some issues that have seen Vertical Farms (I prefer the term I think I may have coined, Agricultural Vertical Farms or AVFs) go from venture capitalists' darlings to shunned money sinks. And it started me thinking. I pinned a lot of hopes on AVFs becoming a real thing. And they almost would have, if it wasn't for those pesky people building them...
Why Are Vertical Farms Failing?
There were a few spreadsheets in the video near the latter half and they didn't paint a good picture. Because they used "agricultural technology trained" staff because their whole system of techno-farming is still experimental. Whole vertical farms have been wiped out by something as simple as mold. (True - at least one farm had to be turned into a warehouse because once it's in an ideal space with plant-friendly air and surfaces and lighting and recirculating air and water, it stays around...)
I can't recall the figures Ric used for "blue collar" labour. But upwards of $24,000 and the largest cost, easily outpacing electricity costs. Hang on - weren't they "agricultural technology trained" staff? I can't remember, but I do remember thinking that if you put people into the same space as your crops, you pretty much guaranteed that something random and not good would happen. A person who has mold in their home forgets and because they have a cold, bring their handkerchief into the grow area. Or sneezes...
There are people who say that greenhouse operations are among the most productive grow operations out there, and produce by far the best, most plentiful, and cost-effective solutions for a range of food crops. Then again, I've heard of greenhouses also wiped out by introduced pests and plant pathogens.
Is There A Solution?
If you believe the doomers, no. It's always going to happen. (Which, I'll explain a bit later, would be a pity for colonies on the moon or any other moon or planet...) But Nature's done all this groundwork for us, and we're shutting it out. I think that's not the best approach.
If you believe the bean counters, having to have plant biologists and botanical specialists on staff is another game-ender. Again - not the best approach that I can imagine.
The solution is to rethink, rethink, and then get a man and a dog to sit in the control room of each AVF. The man to keep an eye on the computer and the dog t keep the man from touching the computer. (I know, a joke so old Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace chuckled about it... Git offa my lawn...)
You know what doesn't bring pathogens and unwanted lifeforms into an otherwise pristine sealed environment? Keeping people out. Filtering the incoming air. Using the AVFs to scrub CO2 out of the filtered air.
And you know what fixes pathogens and pests? Their natural antagonists. Certain bacteria and insects devour mold. Others, pollinate and hunt down pest species. Twenty-seven bazillion microbes and minutiae in soil, they balance out pests and nutritional deficiencies. Humans, don't.
AVFs are good for fast-growing leafy greens, some vine crops, and some larger crops. But they can't be the total expenditure we make on improved agriculture. They can't be the Saviours Of Suburbs. They belong out in the fields. And there IS a solution.
What's The Basis For This Article?
I've thought about this - a lot. Since I realised that solar farms were the way of the future, that our soil in heavily-farmed areas was becoming so denatured and impoverished that we were eating foods that were of lower nutritional density than the same crops in the same locations a century earlier due to that bastardising the soil, and some trace elements and nutrients are all but gone from the food.
This all adds up to the whole list of challenges the human race is facing. We've poisoned ourselves with plastics, PFAS, and lead, to name a few, and it's affected our fertility rate to the point where it'll become a crisis in this generation. Not helping has been our profligate waste, and those waste dumps releasing greenhouse gases more potent than CO2 at an ever-increasing rate. Methane. From food waste. Food that's already nutritionally poor, and we throw between a quarter and a half of it away.
(Estimates vary, depending on if, as well as the estimated one-third wastage rate of all the food we buy, you also count crops that farmers plough back into the ground because the supermarkets don't buy it - because they realise that we won't buy it if it has the slightest blemish. Either way - attributable to us, not those bastard supermarkets. Something to think about when you chuck out that half a cabbage you bought, but only needed half of for your recipe...)
We need a complete overhaul of our food systems. From coming up to going into us to coming back out of us.
From In To Out, To In To Out, Again.
What's most missing from our supply chain? End-to-end connection. I don't care if that's a conventional farm growing food the old-fashioned way, someone's aquaponics system in their backyard, a greenhouse farm, a robotic vineyard, the Vegetable Production System (Veg-01) on the ISS, or AVFs.
Of all of them, Veg-01 comes closest to encapsulating the problem. I had a quick look at the system that the Vegan Society wants to see in the ISS, and it's - simple. And lacking. The system in the movie The Martian came a bit closer, but was still miles off anything that might work for more than one rotation. (Aside from the inconvenient fact that any food crop grown in Martian soil would kill anyone eating it.)
And all - ALL - of them have those other great big huge disconnect with the way growing anything works. Everything we depend on, is circular. We breathe out CO2, the plants absorb it. The plants breathe out O2, we breathe it back in. The thing that powers that magic cycle is the energy of the Sun.
Similarly, a rabbit (or human) eats a carrot, they absorb all those nutrients that the carrot extracted from the soil and packaged as sugars and trace elements we evolved to make use of to power our activities and our growth.
The first cycle, that's circular. O2 into human, CO2 out of human, CO2 into plant, O2 out of plant, repeat. The second one used to be closed. Carrot nutrients into animal, excrement our of animal on the ground, excrement into plant, nutrients out of plant.
But we go to great lengths to mismanage our waste cycles at every step of the way. We like to have our food crops close to hand, but our shit as far away from ourselves as possible. The nutrient deficit gets bigger and bigger, the soil gets poorer and poorer, plants get less nutritionally dense. I've omitted a HUGE step in that cycle.
Plants don't use our crap directly - the soil (with millions of tiny lifeforms in every single teapsoonful) first converts it to plant nutrients. THEN the plants hoe into it and use sunlight and photosynthesis to convert it into a nutritious carrot. A carrot that's BTW covered in nutritious microbes that made the soil fertile, and that, instead of allowing to pass through our systems, we wash off carrots with (usually) a bleach rinse, which kills all that microlife that was supposed to go into us and build up our immune system, our gut biome, and end up in our crap to further build up the soil we grew the next carrot in.
Did you notice an "ick!" factor creeping in there? That's why we're in this situation. I'm sorry, but your squeamishness is killing you and everyone around you.
Sewage
We currently either kill our sewage and pump it into oceans, or convert it to a compost and try to sell it to farmers - who try to avoid it because of that "ick!" reaction you experienced earlier - or dry it and burn it.
And one of the reasons we do that is because of another of your habits. Drugs. Illicit drugs, and prescribed drugs. When you partake, it ends up in your wastes. Your wastes, in a well-designed city or town, end up in the sewage, which is as a result loaded with antibiotics enough to cure a third world country of all its sicknesses, enough illicit drugs to power three Splendour In The Grass festivals, and enough rat poison and insecticides to demolish a farm's worth of every "pest" species.
No-one back when we were first designing ways to get rid of the shi in the streets thought about how best to get it back to the farms that grew the food that we ate back then and turned into that shit. And as a result, we now have a perfectly fucked food system that has pipes that go nowhere, pipes that go to the wrong destinations, and starting points that aren't capable of producing what each articular pipe was meant to carry.
Farmers whose
The Answers Won't Be Easy.
A Deeper Dive Into What's Wrong.
At the moment, our toilets are wrong. Our sewage systems are wrong. Our cities are wrong. Because we started with the purpose of increasing productivity and speeding progress - not per se of course, but because we wanted life to become easier through our ingenuity and cooperative efforts - and didn't think about the planet as a life support system which is what it in fact is. That's in fact why I also referred to Moon / Mars / other planet colonies. They too will need carefully-balanced ecosystems - and then try not to throw a spanner in them like we've done here.
I'll start at the farms, since I started this article with them. AVFs are a small part of the equation. By producing some food in a small footprint we're in effect freeing up farmland for other purposes. (Which, knowing us, won't be to regenerate the planetary ecosystems, although that should be our priority right now...)
Conventional farms should stick to things that can't be produced better and easier in greenhouses and AVFs. They should also stop specialising and monocultures. They need diversity, the ecosystem needs diversity, to manage properly. If you can grow spinach in an AVF then rather than give over twenty acres to spinach, use that to grow a range of other greens that aren't so easy to grow vertically. Split your fields between cereals and legumes and animal grazing.
Plant rows of trees between fields. Not just local native forest trees, but maybe a few rows of local fruit trees. Run a few pigs here, some sheep there. And rotate plot usages where you can. Leave nature strips, let nature have them back.
Greenhouse and orchard lots are going to need to do much the same. Surround each stand of trees, each greenhouse, with natural habitat. Find new places to grow food. I've mooted using the land under solar panels to grow crops intensely. It's one option. Moving AVFs near solar panel farms is another.
AVFs themselves need to undergo some pretty deep changes before they become viable.
Ditch the humans! At present I see so many verticals with medium trays that are made for humans to handle, plant, and harvest. What sort of BS is this? Humans introduce (as I said a little while back) most of the pathogens that destroy AVFs.
The stacks are spaced so that humans can get in between them and handle those trays, there are floors for those humans to get in amongst the trays. There are complex mechanisms to rotate stacks for the convenience of those humans.
And nature - specifically, a diverse biome - is zealously kept out while the walking pathogen-spreaders are specially catered for.
All of our AVFs are in development phases, our greenhouses and roboticised farms are in development, alpha, or beta stages. There are no "release" versions anywhere. Imagine transporting ANY of these technologies from a broadacre farm to a cutting-edge AVF to another planet. It's Destination: F, isn't it? There's a zero chance it'll keep the initial colonists alive, let alone another generation.
So our whole approach has been wrong all this time. To how and where we live, how and where we grow our food, and how and where we deal with our waste. There's a LOT of infrastructure involved. And notice I'm steering clear of the whole fossil fuel debate...
I won't steer clear of the whole "pests eating a peach" thing though. You know the one, bugs that are born to eat peaches because they've lived all their life on a peach, and they eat and eat until the weaker ones drop off and die, and finally the last surviving bug is on its deathbed clinging to a shrivelled peach pit and going "But it was all going so well! What happened?"
Summary:
ALL of agriculture needs to change.
ALL of city infrastructure needs to change.
ALL of our transport infrastructure needs to change.
It all has to change by a handful of years. Welcome to the peach pit. We're sooo screwed.
To Be Continued
This has reminded me about several thoughts I've had on the subject of farming, and I'll have to go find those older articles, knock the concepts in them into a more cohesive shape, and post them as I get time. Life's still very up and down at the moment, and will continue to be so for a year or maybe two. But with your help in donations, my beloved wife and I will weather that storm and I'll be able to devote more time to writing and Making and sharing projects with you again.
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