Why Vertical Farms WORLDWIDE Are FAILING!

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I come from the Dutch greenhouse industry. Dutch greenhouses produce about 10X of what is possible on the best open-air farms. Such greenhouses are probably at the pinnacle of cost-effectiveness. Besides, crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, and pumpkins, are already grown vertically in these greenhouses. They grow vertically because it's relatively easy to lead their growth vertically. Lettuces and other leafy greens and herbs can be automated a great deal on a horizontal plane. In low-light conditions, one can add lighting. I think vertical farming is one step too far in automation and complications with humans. Perhaps further automation with AI and humanoid robots could be the path to success. Fun fact: greenhouses grow the most pesticide-free produce. They do this by adding natural predators of pests into the greenhouses. Unfortunately, it's more difficult to control fungal pests, but it can be done.

I got laid off a vertical farm project last month. I was the lead designer, but even though I was able to save millions of dollars on lighting and other parts of the system, the business side had no idea how to make this project profitable. We would have to sell at exorbitant prices to make it work.

My D&D group had a recurring gag character who would try and sell you on his vertical farm idea whenever he showed up in a campaign.

vertical farming is done big time here in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the biggest exporter of flowers. Most flowers don't grow on fields but inside of big greenhouses on multi level platforms that rotate each day so the flowers get enough light. Nothing in this cycle is done by humans, everything is done automatically, even the planting of bulbs is done by robots more and more. the only part where humans are still involved is picking and packing of the flowers after they've grown. Many people talk about pests and funguses etc. It's true these are big things and can bankrupt an entire company. That's why there are many extremely strict hygienic rules. When u enter greenhouses you need special clothing (like those white cloth onesie suits) and there's multiple stages of disinfection of hands, arms and shoes. You CANNOT enter these facilities with food that carries the deceases, for example you can't enter tomato greenhouses with tomatoes/paprikas (even those insta soup packs are forbidden) and some other food that's that might contain deceases. It is also not possible to travel between different greenhouses in one facility. The facilities also use things like doors, high and low pressure areas and vapor screens between parts to make it even more difficult for pests to spread.

Sounds like the issue is companies relying too heavily on outside investors coupled with piss poor planning at ground level.

Dude, my vertical farms are tested extensively in Minecraft before I ever realize that I won't build them IRL

Hello, the main problem that got most vertical farms/indoor farms to go out of buisness here in Quebec is that most of the people that start that kind of buisness know literally nothing about plants and don,t even inform themself. My teacher went to a conference about it for fun with some of her specialists friends and she told us that it's actually insane how most of them don't know jack shit and don't even take notes and plant mesurements. The main issue that she saw is that most of them forget to add Co2 in their indoor farms which makes them unable to compete during summer (cold climate) because of their really low yields per plants. Also, to make this profitable, you have to hire professionnals to optimize the light input.

When it comes 2 selling food, competition is ferocious. Coming from someone whos family sells honey and olive oil in farmers markets and small shops.

Here in the Netherlands they introduce bees and other insects inside the hydroponic systems to hunt the pests that eat the plants. no insecticides are used.

I have a friend who worked in one of these places. They specialized in leafy greens and were doing well. The entire place was wiped out with a fungus infestation that they couldn't get rid of. He said that in nature the insects would have kept it in check by eating it but indoors, with no bugs, it just ran wild. The whole building was infected and could no longer be used for farming. I think it's a warehouse now. the other thing he mentioned was that the lighting they used, while great for the plants, wreaked havoc on his moods and mental health. The spectrums used might be nutritious for plants but they can be very bad for people.

In the late 1970s in my father’s and his partner’s greenhouse business they decided to produce a new product and built 2 very large cutting edge technology greenhouses. His partner said it was designed by a genius teenager 😅! It had a boiler heating system that pumped water 💦 through pipes in twin rails for each row that held pallet sized racks with rollers on them for plant 🪴 containers so those racks could be moved around down the rows after delivery with a fork lift. And it had power controlled vents in the roof and ends which were all controlled automatically with small circuit board controllers. But it was basically very similar to my home that I own now that heats with water 💦 pipes in the floor and many homes have this but people don’t really like anymore because it doesn’t warm all that much during a cold 🥶 winter. It’s a system that has a lot of problems but will heat the house a little, reliably, if I don’t push it too hard and give it yearly maintenance, which I have learned to do myself. I saw this greenhouse right after it was first built and then went off to University, two years later I saw it again and it looked like it had barely been used and 1/4 of one had racks of seedlings 🌱 in it but all the rest of the 2 greenhouses were empty. I didn’t ask because it would have been very rude! I was rushed outside and told, “We do it this way now!” So for the first time in many years of this greenhouse operation they were using cheap hoop PVC greenhouses that are just half circle ⭕️ arches of 1 inch PVC pipe with white plastic tarp over it, so you can walk through it, and they had young citrus trees inside and they said these greenhouses are the best because they get the HOTTEST, so these small trees will fruit and that was what sells in the retail market! The old and new greenhouses were a big waste of money! 😮 If they had designed their growing systems first, responding to how the plants respond to their cultural practices then they could have built their growing system around what worked initially, instead of having wasted all that money 💰and time on CRAZY ASSUMPTIONS! Those hoop greenhouses are easily collapsed and moved out of the way so a big tractor could come in and disk the plant wastes into the sand, and then the greenhouses can be put back up again. This and all the news in this YouTube are very disappointing to me because I see a culture that has lost its MIND 😮 INDEFINITELY, where did that thing go? It’s on your shoulders, I think, oh thank you! We plan incredibly expensive systems like we think we are GODs and know EVERYTHING and then they don’t work at all! And the rational thing to do ALWAYS WAS, first document every fine detail of the requirements to grow the desired crop and then build everything around that. But that’s not what happens, build a system and force the biology to cope with the system, so the plants never grow well, is what we do. How can we possibly survive on a distant planet 🌎 if we don’t know how grow anything? Sooner or later some company will find a way in space to make a lot of money and everyone and everything will start dumping into space to copy that new thing! It ALWAYS works that way. But if we can’t even learn how apply science 🧪 in practical way, which is all I did with my growing system, then people will go into space to do business and then quickly starve to death! 😢 People who first sold shovels to the miners in the gold rush made more money than anyone else and the miners stole from each other and killed to get control of the best mines!

Another point that should get put in here somewhere is that 1. national exchange with countries with cheaper labor and few safety / health regulations 2. agricultural exemption, which I'm pretty aure could not apply to a building (I had ag exempt land, was required to prove at least 10 acres of land and x number of "animal units" on a chart that's available on usda 3. farming subsidies of several levels. On the largest scale is corn and soybeans getting a check for real money from the government for selling their corn and soy at prices LOWER than the cost of GROWING them. Elsewhere there are special privileges available to farmers (lines of credit, a special grant money for farmers and ranchers that helps pay for or completely pays for fencing, or a greenhouse, among other directly related items). I also had an Ag/Timber card, that allowed me to buy many of my supplies for the farm tax free--animal feed, paint, building materials, etc) Agriculture in the US is very far from a level playing field. Local / sustainable / organic farmers face much the same battle against the very established conventional machine, in that they are frequently too small to qualify for the price reductions or special treatment. Inner-city farms, small family farms, large "gardeners" cannot compete with this in many ways. I think growing in buildings in cities must suffer the same fate.

What is most surprising to me is the fact that investors didn't see this coming. It's not rocket science to calculate profit. It shows that most rich people and investors are just humans with more money in their pockets.

I was the lead designer in a vertical farming company in Canada. (once upon a time...) We were focused on Cannabis Exclusively. The only crop with high enough end value to justify the labour and capex expenditure according to our math. We were repeatedly asked to grow vegetables by investors and the like... The math never worked.

I'm considering indoor farming myself. My calculations are based on the price of electricity vs buying food from the store, but even then the profit would come solely from using the waste heat of the lamps to heat the house.

We needed that experience, we may need those farms in future, like growing crops on Moon or Mars colony or closed environments like bunkers…

I know homesteading and small community in the mountains of VA and Oregon and they use vertical farming. They aren't scienctist, they just used the free info on the net and make their food all year round. They mainly feed themselves, and sell some at farmers market. They use renewable energy and collected/recycled water to power equipment etc. Now imagine an America where every neighborhood employed Vertical Farming to feed that neighborhood all year round instead of trying to make MBA's rich. There are food deserts all over urban areas that need leafy greens, mountain community that don't have greens all year unless they pickle it. There's a whole other aspect, the human aspect of vertical farming to address

It is quite clear that soil bacteria are essential. At a recent talk at the NIH, a plant biologist asked, "How many other species contribute to growing an apple?" The expected answers were like, bees, and other pollinators. The correct answer is, "we don't know how many". The underground ecosystem is large.

I did some engineering for a vertical farm about that peak time you’re describing, helping them get airflow across the plant faces long after they built it - I should go see if they’re still around