If Matt Damon can grow
potatoes on Mars, why can’t we grow lettuce and basil in Bushwick?
Is vertical farming the next big green thing? You would think so if you follow the growing interest of the media. Or will it turn out to be like Webvan and other dot-com busted ideas?
It’s too early to tell if the billions that venture capitalists have plowed into food and agriculture (ag) tech startups like AeroFarms, Edenworks and Plantagon will provide fiscal fruit in addition to actual produce. But vertical farming is definitely being talked about way beyond Silicon Valley as well as the Central Valley’s and Florida’s non-vertical “flat-land” farms. Its promoters euphorically predict VF will change the way food is produced and ultimately even help mitigate hunger.
Vertical farming (VF), also called warehouse farming and urban farming, refers to indoor food production without sunlight or soil. Instead, VF uses hydroponics, aeroponics, frequency-specific LEDs and systems to grow vegetables in columns of vertically-stacked racks from 6 to 80 feet high inside warehouses or other open-space buildings, as shown in the picture below. Although the first vertical farm in the world was a hydroponics facility built in Armenia sometime before 1951, Japan has emerged as a leader in commercial VFs after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tidal wave destroyed a substantial amount of cropland.
Most vertical farms grow “microgreens” – salad vegetables such as lettuce, arugula, Swiss chard, sprouts and herbs – picked right after the first sets of leaves have developed. Lettuce is the most popular microgreen grown by VFs.
City-Hydro’s Vertical Farm. Source: New York Times
Here's a brief summary of what’s known about lettuce. Lettuce is a member of the daisy family. The first record of its production was in Egypt 4700 years ago. It was initially grown for the oil from its seeds and considered a sacred plant of the reproduction god Min. Lettuce believe in Min.
Lettuce leaves’ consumption came at bit later. Based on hieroglyphic information, Egyptian lettuce may have been an ancient ancestor of what we now call romaine lettuce. There are 2 general types of lettuce, head lettuce – like the iceberg lettuce you consumed as a child and still do in a Caesar salad; and leaf lettuce – like romaine, bib and red-leaf. California’s Central Valley accounts for 71% of US head lettuce production, followed by Arizona producing nearly 29%. These 2 states also produce over 98% of leaf lettuce in the US. Lettuce is grown year-round in CA and AZ.
According to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, 3.88 billion pounds of lettuce were produced on 323,359 acres, up 3% since 2007. In 2014, annual consumption was 14.1 pounds and 10.8 pounds per person for head and leaf/romaine lettuce, respectively. Due to its very high water content (94.9%), lettuce cannot be successfully frozen, canned or dried and thus must be eaten fresh. The number of farms producing lettuce on 5 acres or less (such as vertical farms) increased 38% between 2007 and 2012. Twelve percent of domestic lettuce is exported. Sales of US lettuce in 2013 totaled nearly $1.5 billion, making lettuce the leading vegetable crop in terms of value.
Because VFs are a new type of farm operation, they account for a very thin wedge of the leaf lettuce market. Although VF techniques use far less water and fertilizer and no pesticides, because the sun doesn’t shine indoors VFs use much larger amounts of electricity than conventional farms. Alas, VFs get no free sunshine.
Recently VF start-ups have enjoyed quite a bit of media attention. After all, who wouldn’t be interested in folks who grow micro-romaine in warehouses in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the east-coast center of nearly everything cool, now including micro-lettuce?
Part of this tech-oriented attention is concentrated on the amount of green (funding) ag start-ups have received. “Food and ag tech” start-ups have received notable venture-capital (VC) backing; $4.6 billion in 2015, a considerable sum that represents 3.5% of all VC funding.
The pluses of VF are enticing. Vertical farms can produce microgreens much faster than their horizontal, dirt-based brethren. Some VFs indicate their leaf greens can be produced in 12 to 16 days. That’s far less time than regular, horizontal leaf lettuce farms’ harvest cycle. Depending on the variety and time of year, outdoor lettuce is produced between 65–130 days from planting to harvesting. With the reduced growing cycle and the increased amount of food grown per unit of production area, VFs’ lettuce yield is probably at least 180% of the outdoor leaf lettuce yield, although some VFs claim far higher yields.
Also VF producers enjoy reduced transportation costs because their markets are often geographically close. However, the transport costs associated with shipping outdoor lettuce ordinarily are a minor expense. Overall, transportation costs account for about 4% of the energy used in the US food system.
The minuses of producing VF microgreens center on its micro scale and indoor-ness. Although some VFs are growing bigger, many remain miniature – using a garage, spare bedroom or small building interior areas to produce greens. Vertical farms save on unit water, fertilizer and pesticide costs but are saddled with much higher electricity costs for lighting, pumping and cooling. VFs are very electricity intensive. Even as price of LEDs diminishes, monthly lighting expenses are sizeable for VFs. One VF owner says his operation, a one-acre VF in Michigan that produces 33 tons of microgreens per year, is profitable but he is paying $7,000/mo for cheaper off-peak electricity, electricity, which represents 8.4% of annual revenues.This owner expects electricity costs can be reduced to $5,000/mo by year-end with the use of frequency-specific LEDs. With these LEDs, he also expects crop yield will increase.
It is not clear that as VFs’ production grows vertical farmers’ marginal electricity costs can be reduced that much because each plant requires a specified amount of lighting. Vertical farms’ profitability will depend on that. One reason that VF may remain a small, tentative niche is that like all horizontal farmers, VFs need to produce green profits, not just greens to be sustainable. And VF profitability has been an issue.
“There are situations in dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights, stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin. Critics consider it unlikely that vertical farming can produce enough food of different varieties to feed a significant number of people in a commercially viable way.
Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University, remains concerned about VFs’ longer-term feasibility when he states, “It’s such an appealing idea — ‘Press Floor 10 for lettuce’ — that people picked up on it right away. The fundamental problem [with VFs] is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require a lot of electricity probably from burning of a lot of fossil fuels. Vertical farming is fine if you’ll let me have a vertical nuclear reactor next to it.” Prof. Bugbee’s tongue is in his cheek regarding the vertical nuclear reactor. But in 2015, 67% of US electricity was generated from awfully un-green fossil-fuels.
Because it’s a newfangled way of producing produce, there are no data available about the total amount of food produced by VFs. Still it’s a miniscule slice of overall food production. The largest VF now in operation is 2.3 acres, which represents 0.5% of the average-sized farm in the US. For a bit more perspective about how tiny VFs are relative to outdoor vegetable farms, the largest vegetable producer (including lettuce) in the Central Valley tills 53,095 acres.
Most members of the VF community do not expect they will ever harvest anything but a small serving of US overall vegetable production. Nonetheless, small servings of high-value local microgreens are fine because few VFs are interested in selling to mass food distributors like Safeway and Kroger. Some more aggressive VFs might want to sell to upmarket retailers like Whole Foods, but VFs’ current production volumes usually do not meet Whole Foods’ requisite needs. Instead, successful FVs are likely to keep selling directly to local higher-end restaurants, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) coops and/or other direct-to-consumer channels where higher prices hold sway. The USDA asserts many consumers are willing to pay a premium for local food, as anyone considering farmers-market produce can attest.
VF-grown microgreens are as local as veges can get. Yet the most-often used definition of “local” food is quite expansive and encompasses far more than VF producers. According to the definition adopted by Congress in the 2008 Farm Act, the total distance that a product can be transported and still be considered a “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product” is less than 400 miles from its origin, or within the State in which it is produced. With this Farm Act local food definition, lettuce grown in Youngstown, Ohio or Montreal, Canada would be considered locally produced in Brooklyn!
The USDA estimates that local food sales totaled $6.1 billion in 2012, which represents 0.45% of total US food sales. Local food sales are quickly growing and are projected to increase 24% per year during the next 3 years.
Hans Hassle, chief executive of Plantagon International a Swedish VF firm that’s expanding in the US and around the globe, says “Vertical farming as an industry is very much at the beginning. We have focused on making it industrial and scalable, and that’s a little bit crazy. It’s like trying to do the impossible. It looks almost like science fiction.”
But not nearly as fictional as Martian potatoes. Here’s to indoor microgreens in Bushwick and beyond…
