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.

Vertical farms seemed like a brilliant idea if you have zero experience in horticulture and growing/propagation. Otherwise we've known for decades they're terrible ideas unless you absolutely need the space. In reality it's so much cheaper and more efficient to just grow where the growing good and ship it to places that can't grow, not exactly complicated lol.

Here’s a kind of vertical farm nobody ever thought to call a vertical farming. On one plot of zucchini that I personally managed and redesigned in an operation that had many fields and multiple farms of zucchini and other squash and cauliflower. We planted to 12 inch spacing instead of the usual 18”. Watering was with drip irrigation and gypsum block sensors indicated proper watering. The field was north facing and very steep, the steepest of all plots on the ranch, with coastal heavy clay soils. Initially I had to water for nearly 5 days continuously to get the sensors to indicate a properly wet soil. The close spacing caused the zucchini to grow straight up like a small papaya tree instead trailing over the ground like a vine, which is normal for zucchini. These plants continually grew straight up over a long summer season and were eventually very uniformly 7+ feet tall, that’s VERTICAL! We had to bring in more bees 🐝 for pollination because the foliage was soo thick! At about 4 feet tall we saw nutrient deficiencies and started fertilizing with a complete combination of nutrients that had been used for years with fruit trees in those soils. I always made sure the zucchini were properly water and never allowed to wilt even slightly. The zucchini fruit grew straight out at the base of the plants and often never touched the ground for their entire life. We picked and packed the fruit into a redesigned box that was much stronger and 40% larger than the standard, because the standard vegetable box we found to be breaking the zucchini and poorly ventilated for cold storage. The production with the larger box on this field was 1200 boxes per acre, a new record for all the fields on the farm even with the much larger box, and would have easily been 2000 if we had brought in more bees earlier in the season. Poorly shaped fruit were not allowed in the pack. That year was the last year of this farm operation because the wealthiest partner in the operation saw this success as a great threat to his management of the operation and his own farm operating separately that had cooler storage and sales for our fruit. He admitted that we were profitable, but claimed problems that were not real, and production would have been so much greater the next year he had to shut us down immediately! This was a great embarrassment for him, the success of my radical growing system was the opposite of all the practices that he used in his farming operations.

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.

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.

Silicon Valley is great in creating problems to sell solutions, not so much in creating solutions to solve existing problems.

Another reason growing that way doesn’t always pay off, most veggies and fruit grown that way taste like watered down garbage. Tomatoes, berries, peppers, etc. will all have their taste affected by environmental stressors. A tomato’s taste is at it’s peak when it hasn’t been watered for several days and you pick in the middle of a sunny day because that’s when it’s sugars are the most concentrated. Whereas a cucumber will taste best picked before the sun hits it for the day. Soil, sunlight, pests, etc all play a vital role in the taste and quality of your food. It’s frankly impossible to fully mimic nature’s design.

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 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

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.