The biggest problem is that there is nothing to buffer moisture on the roots if there is an intermittent problem.
You might get a nice crop of basil growing and then a clogged emitter for 12 hours can be the death of those plants.
Here are all of the failure modes I have experienced:
- pump dying - Leak in base causing all water gone in 24 hours - clogged emitters - water choosing off route through tower and not hitting the plants on top - emitters getting blown off causing water to spray outside tower - circuit breakers trip from pump
Overall I’ve probably lost half of everything I’ve planted in a zipgrow.
A professional operation with a daily maintenance routine could probably use them, but they are no panacea.
I've build several of these over the years. There's no need to spend extra money. But the soil and the sun are free if you can get it and imo better.
If you're an average person who isn't interested in dedicating their life to hydroponics, the Aerogarden is going to be the safer bet. It's small-ish, it's simple, it has a nice touch screen and beeps reminders at you.
Soil is an amazing technology.
For those interested in starting your own farm or just gardening I'd highly recommend "UpStart Farmers" [2]. A friend of mine help's moderate it and is really focused on helping people learn vertical farming and aquaponics. They have an enormous selection of content regarding various aspects such as nutrient mixes, dealing with pests, etc. The community is also active and helpful to each other.
FYI: This is from the Canadian licensee's of the original Bright Agrotech that was acquired by Plenty Ag [3]. I'm bullish that indoor farming will be a big boon in providing more localized and therefore fresh and nutritional vegetables and leafy greens for much of the world's population. The economics are slowly improving with LED efficiency increases and capital infusion to scale farms.
1: https://search.proquest.com/openview/ccf876147b3e8a224da6770... 2: https://www.upstartfarmers.com 3: https://www.plenty.ag/the-feed/plenty-acquires-bright-agrote...
Do you know what happened to the company? Did they go bankrupt and have to liquidate their IP?
Their first "major" greenhouses were behind the building that my company was in. Really interesting people.
People do often live in crowded cities, but there's plenty of space to grow stuff on outside of cities. It's the same kind of thinking that gave us the solad roads (which were, predictably, a catastrophic failure).
Note that this product site touts how much lettuce the system can grow.
More radical claims about how vertical farms will reduce CO2 emissions or feed a growing world population are aspirational to the point of delusion. Vertical farming isn't going to replace the calories that people get from potatoes and beans grown in big plots of dirt outdoors. If you ate potatoes grown in a nearby vertical farm instead of ones grown in Idaho and shipped across the country, you'd actually be increasing your carbon footprint.
It takes only a little energy to move a potato a thousand miles cross-country. It takes a lot of energy to grow a potato under artificial light. Even though renewable energy is ~20x better in life cycle emissions than fossil energy, it takes more than 20x as much energy to grow potatoes under artificial light. From a CO2 life cycle perspective you're better off eating potatoes that had ordinary diesel powered tractors, trains, and trucks involved in their production and delivery than to eat potatoes that were grown in a wind-powered vertical farm next door to you.
Cities can be plenty dense while still having enough space for people to grow potatoes for themselves and their neighbors.
AFAIK traditional artificial light sources do indeed dissipate much more energy for the same amount of 'useful light', and also produce so much heat that they cannot be placed near the plant.
Is artificial light mandatory in urban farming? Aren't some (non fiber-optics-based) "light tubes" able to transmit light along with the necessary UV?
The reason decentralization doesn't make a lot of sense is because we need to produce food cheap and at scale to feed the world. Putting thousands of dollars into vertical farming equipment that doesn't fit into the apartments of most people on the planet is kind of silly.
There's also simply division of labour at work here. It's uneconomical for large portions of the population to spend their time farming.
It's essentially just a recreational hobby for wealthy people or maybe reasonable on a Mars Colony, but here it does not make much sense.
As far as the urban agriculture crowd goes, they're concerned about the length of their logistics lines to their tables. Raspberries grown half a mile down the street in winter is better for the environment than flying them in from another hemisphere... provided you get the energy costs of the indoor farming system low enough.
Vertical farming only really works as either artistic preference for maximum visual appeal or the kind of science fiction where you assume only a small handful of technology advanced.
Aside from environmental effects, it’s also just a more secure logistics chain. A person needs water, food, and shelter to survive. Sometimes it feels strange to me that the trend of the past centuries has been to increase the distance between a person and those sources — to introduce more points of failure between you and the things you need in order to survive.
That 1200 watts is only really covering a 6 by 6 foot square worth of growth area at about 35 watts a square foot at 200 lumens per watts. It could be slightly larger but only if you want most plants to grow extremely slow or be really weak, and you can go up to 50 watts per square foot before requiring supplemental CO2 but not all plants like that amount of light.
Converting that to 1 acre worth of coverage, which is what is about what is needed to feed a single human for one year, you are looking at about 1,500,000 watts running 12-18 hours per day. That is a ridiculous amount of energy. Even assuming you can get away with 1/3 of that area by super careful and efficient growth year round that is still a half million watts in lighting costs alone. Not to mention all the other work and costs.
I don't see indoor farms being good for anything other than extreme specialty plants or extremely fragile plants until we can pull essentially limitless energy out for far cheaper than we can get even with fossil fuels.
Second, it's climate change which is making outdoor farming more and more difficult by the year, as well as a push towards higher efficiency. Also, having a garden (or being around nature, things growing) has been clinically shown to reduce stress in humans.
Third, it's MUCH less climate impact to transport renewably sourced electrons over a regional grid than it is to transport decaying produce in cold storage to a grocery store. Free sunlight is still cheap, but creates dependence on the seasonality (frequency, duration) which means a variety of crops are totally non-viable in certain hemispheres. Full outdoor growing has a much higher level of exposure to pests, requiring pesticides -- whereas indoor growing under lights gives you a higher level of defensibly without that risk.
Another appeal is knowing exactly what goes into your food.
Furthermore, putting farms in urban buildings means that some urban businesses or residences will ha e to be moved further out, increasing pollution. In reality, this would move the pollution to the urban areas, and not reduce it.
Lastly, I can’t think of a reason that you’d know more about farming practices if it happens in an urban environment than in a rural environment
More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment...the benefits are pretty much endless. It isn't about "urban" but using what we have more efficiently.
That's a bit of a misconception. Most people get the impression from the headlines that they produce a lot of food, but that is not really the case. The Netherlands is the world's second largest EXPORTER of "agricultural products", by dollar value. 10% of that is consulting and equipment. Another 10% is flowers. Those are not food. Even in the remaining 80%, it is mainly products that are high in monetary value, but low in land efficiency, like cheese and flavorless hydroponic tomatoes. The Netherlands actually only produces 50% of the calories needs of their population, and exports away a good chunk of that. They rely on importing staples to feed their population.
>More efficient, cheaper, better for the environment
The Netherlands model is none of those things. It is just used as a propaganda tool for a corporate greenwashing campaign to convince people that spending lots of money on environmentally destructive and wasteful technology is good for the environment, when it is actually being done because it is good for the bank accounts of a small minority of wealthy people.
Mirai ( http://miraigroup.jp/en/ ) states some benefits.
Doing that in schools teaches kids about farming, about food, and how it gets on their table. I'm doing the same at home to teach my children the same.
Also in the times of the crisis you reduce the pressure to producers and shops by consuming your own instead of going to the shop.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3037719/turn-your-kitchen-into-a...
First, you should use food grade plastic, then there are lights, a pump, shelving, growing medium, fertilizer, ph adjustment, extension cords, timers, cups, air tubing, and air stone, and a bunch of other stuff.
Then you have to get it all home, double and triple check you are doing it correctly.
I don't think I spent $500, but no way anyone can put together an equivalent system for $25. Like most things, there's a lot more complexity than people realize.
