About The Episode

What are Vertical Farms and how will they future jobs. Are vertical farms even feasible or are their challenges too much to make this technology work?

Transcript

So right after publishing last week’s episode I came across another interesting application for IoT which has been getting a bit of publicity over this past week. The Ocean cleanup project is tackling one of the most visually apparent environmental issues of today, namely the plastic waste polluting the earth’s oceans. According to the project some 1000 rivers give off 80% of the oceans new plastic waste, so this project developed an ‘interceptor’ – an automated barge that collects all floating plastic from a river. The relevant aspect here is that it has sensors on it that allow it’s levels of waste to be checked remotely. Even more impressive though is that once the bins are full, a notification is automatically sent to operators that can remove and replace the bins. Though this is a “bandage solution” and doesn’t get to the root of the problem of actual plastic waste creation, it is an interesting and ambitious project and a good example of IoT in action. The link is in the shownotes if you want to see their quick 2 minute introduction video and current pilots in Malaysia and elsewhere. But let’s move onto to today’s topic which looks at further automating agriculture. As mentioned in previous episodes, the 3 areas of work that human workers have predominantly moved through across history are agriculture, then manufacturing then a shift into services. And today we can see the start of a real move into a 4th area (information services sector) while the previous sectors are undergoing greater and faster degrees of automation. As mentioned in the robotics episodes, robots have been highly used in industrial manufacturing to automate many processes, and I also mentioned the use of drones and IoT support automating parts of agricultural work, but vertical farming, the focus of today’s episode, takes this to another level. Vertical farming was actually one of the first technologies that I stumbled across in my journey to learn about automation. In my mid 20’s I was accepted into an international work program and went to work and live in Cuba for 8 months with 3 other Canadians, where we tried to support a local community in Guantanamo city on sustainable development practices. (Not the US military base but the nearby city where it gets its name, although we did see it from a distance on a road trip one weekend). Part of the preparation for this program was a 3 month training period where we learned about dealing with working overseas, but also sustainable practices in agriculture and energy amongst other things. It was here that I came across vertical farming as a concept, and though not relevant for the work we had to do, stuck with me as an interesting idea. However, the complete failure of the project and absolute insanity of the communist system was actually one of my turning points for being more interested in automation and partial disillusionment of overseas aid and environmental work which I had been involved with for a few years.  

Side Tangent

Quick off-topic tangent as I know some of you will ask if I don’t say anything. I have a thousand examples and stories from my time in Cuba, like all store shelves in all cities being nearly empty all the time, dial up internet costing 5 dollars per hour, the entire city of Guantanamo running out of eggs for a few days, seeing zero product advertisements anywhere but having revolutionary propaganda on any and all billboards and even covering entire building walls, hearing that our actions were being watched and reported on by government agents, to occasionally having people not wanting to talk to us for fear of getting long prison sentences. But more than anything the bureaucratic nightmare that we had to deal with was infuriating, from waiting almost 2 months to get a piece of paper allowing us to work in the South where the project was, to having to request permission to leave the city for any trip, to me personally talking to over 10 local government offices to get the permission, resources, and labour request to open up a small point of sale for the local community we were supporting to sell their goods legally (and avoid years of prison if they were caught selling their products in the black market), only to have the eventually constructed wooden structure disassembled the very next day due to the decision of one local bureaucrat for reasons still not fully known. Though of course our time in Cuba wasn’t all bad, I could easily devote an entire podcast talking just about Cuba if I wanted to, which I absolutely don’t. But to get back on point, I am quite happy to revisit the topic of vertical farms which came near the start of my interest in automation especially as it comes with a bit of controversy. 

Context

Over the past 40 years, the world has lost a third of its arable land. By 2050 there will be an extra 2 billion people on earth, and mass urbanisation estimates put 2.5 billion new people moving to urban areas, or some 68% of all humans. Together, just these two trends lead to great challenges when it comes to food security and access, and it is argued that vertical farming can be an answer to that challenge. 

History

In 1999, Dickson Despommier a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbus University challenged his class with a thought experiment, feed the entire population of Manhattan (about 2,000,000 people) using only 5 hectares of rooftop gardens. The class calculated that rooftop gardening methods could feed only two percent of the population. Unsatisfied with the results, Despommier made an off-the-cuff suggestion of growing plants indoors, vertically. By 2001 the first outline of a vertical farm was introduced. 

What Is it?

So vertical farming, rather than the traditional farming done in fields or greenhouses, produces the food in stacked layers typically inside of a building like a shipping container, skyscraper, or repurposed warehouse. The goal is to generate more food per square meter as compared to traditional agricultural practices with less inputs. To do this, the environment is typically controlled, this includes: light, temperature, humidity, soil etc. Technologies used to increase efficiencies are also implemented like rotating plant beds with a single UV light in the middle or different soil configurations like hydroponic (no soil but a mineral nutrient solution diluted in water instead) or aeroponic (instead of water an air or mist medium is used). Vertical farming also uses 70-95% less water than traditional practices. According to an independent estimate, a 30-story building with an area of 5 acres can potentially produce an equivalent of 2,400 acres of conventional horizontal farming.

Examples

A few projects lifted off since the 1999 class challenge, but in 2014 in Scranton Pennsylvania (Home of many people’s favourite paper company Dunder Mifflin) a single storey 3.25 hectare ‘vertical farm’ implemented a series of vertical racks which had 17 million plants that could be monitored from a smart phone, and produced lettuce, spinach, kale, tomatoes, peppers, basil and strawberries. With water recycling it used 98% less water per item than traditional methods. The largest Vertical farm currently is run by Aerofarms in New jersey and produces 2 million pounds of lettuce every year in its 70,000 foot warehouse. Even Kimball Musk, Elon Musk’s brother is working on a form of vertical farms, using retrofitted shipping crates in New York. There are Hundreds of examples of vertical farms across the world, from Europe, parts of the Middle East, Canada, China, and also Japan, which experienced a boom since the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster created fear of contaminated food across the entire country forcing the retrofitting of buildings and warehouses for vertical farms. A long list of the farms found across the world and descriptions can be found in the shownotes if you’re interested. However, many of these examples still require human labour to do most of the farming tasks. One company Iron 0x, takes the grow cycle to the next level by redesigning the entire process around automated solutions and uses a robot called ‘angus’ to move and place plants in the necessary spot. Another company Bowery Farming uses a combination of conveyor belts, sensors and monitoring software to automate a majority of the growing cycle. However, Sanabio has recently produced a platform called Uplift that has automated the entire growing process from seeding, germination, plant transportation, harvesting to packaging. The move towards full automation in vertical farming is therefore on its way. 

Controversy

As I mentioned at the start, this specific technology has been surrounded by a bit of controversy. Most notably, the taste! Several years ago I went to an urban farm outside of Montreal as they had a guided tour showing their operation. I was with a friend (actually one of the other Canadians I went down to Cuba with) who very clearly supports traditional agricultural practices and even refused to take back the free tomato seedling they gave out at the end of the tour saying that the flavour of plants not grown in soil had a far inferior flavour. My palette isn’t as refined but this is something that I have heard and read a number of times, food tastes better if grown in the ground. What do you think? Is there a difference? On the question of nutrient content though, I was unable to find any conclusive papers either way as it seems to be a bit mixed with some plants having higher levels and others lower. If you know or can point me to a definitive example please let me know. One of the best cases for vertical farming is that weather isn’t an issue and crops can be grown year round, and there is no need for chemicals like pesticides or herbicides, which means that the plants are inherently organic, though some doubt the label can be applied here. One of the main points against vertical farming is the price tag, as electricity and labour expenses often make it quite challenging. Many of the examples stated above are startups with large seed funding and commercially viable examples are few and far between, even if you account for the proximity to the city which greatly cuts down on transportation costs. Also any power failures could be catastrophic especially if our food system becomes too dependent on vertical farming. One of the stronger arguments deals with the fact that we already waste something crazy like a third of all food produced (some 1.3 billion tonnes per year), so building expensive vertical farms has been argued as the wrong path and we should rather be focusing on dealing with reducing the waste. Finally, and a great point that segues into the impact on jobs, is that the pollination of the plants is seen as a massive problem. 

Jobs

As pollination is practically impossible within such controlled and cramped environments, this might need to be done by hand, as it is done in apple and pear orchards of South West China where all wild bees were killed off due to excessive pesticide use (One of the main contributing factors to colony collapse disorder). Like most of the other technologies we’ve discussed in the podcast, vertical farming has a really high potential to eradicate almost all jobs associated with certain forms of agriculture. However, it might also lead to a massive growth in time consuming, low skill tasks through manual pollination. Apart from this, Vertical farming follows the standard theme of requiring both data experts and higher IT skills to deal with automated systems, where none were required before in agriculture. But overall, for vertical farming, the vision and certainly the move that is being experienced right now is that large parts of plant agriculture will be completely automated in the future. The only interaction we would need to take would be to pick up the produce when it is ready (if not delivered by a drone of course).