I don’t think they’re the answer now, but they might become one among many answers in the future, as they improve.
I feel like a lot of the issues pointed out are a result of inefficiency. You’d need better designed systems, but for example:
- heating - solar panels pretty much waste Sun heating. This should be redirected towards plants.
- cooling - instead of cooling the farm, design it so you can reflect heat in hot days
- lighting - instead of converting blue/red lights into electricity and back into light, couldn’t the light be redirected towards the plants?
And there’s an obvious benefit of vertical farms the text doesn’t mention: you can produce electricity in otherwise wasted land.
TLDR they require electricity. Yawn.
I think they only make sense if the entire process from top to bottom is redesigned to minimize impact. This could be pretty tough and I’m not sure the energy requirements are even possible with today’s technology. Maybe if advanced geothermal really takes off? The land occupied by solar doesn’t make sense unless maybe it’s in extreme desert or something.
If the land isn’t otherwise arable, such as extreme desert, then there most likely isn’t any population centers nearby. Minimizing environmental impact would have to factor in the transportation of resources to the facility and grown food out of the facility to consumers too.
I think verticals farms are going to be an important component for future food production, especially with climate change. You are right though, the entire process needs to be redesigned holistically before it is a viable option compared to traditional farming.
That isn’t to say we shouldn’t be building these facilities now though; I think the more we build now the faster we will solve these problems by putting practical research into the needed technology.
Double land use, or double arable land use?
Arable land. The issue is the vertical farms rely on jute fibers, which are farmed conventionally, and take up more land than the crops grown in the vertical farms normally would.
The article discusses some workarounds to this problem, but currently it’s another entry in the “technological solutions to climate change are predominantly scams” column.
The study only covered Lettuce farms. Using Jute fiber plugs requires more land use than traditional farming, replacing them with coconut coir would use less land than traditional farming.
Beyond the emissions footprint the most surprising, and altogether unintuitive, result was that vertical farms had a greater land-use impact than field farms. This came down to the roots of the plants—literally. In vertical farms, lettuce plants are often sown in natural casings made of jute fibers, which come from a tall grass crop that’s cultivated in tropical regions.
Is it jute, or is it grass? They cannot have it both ways. (In either case, coconut coir or a sustainable non-timber forest product would definitely make more sense for large-scale deployments.)
