Isn't there a big economic problem to vertical farming? You're using relatively high value real estate and fairly energy and tech intensive methods to produce something that's relatively low value. Seems like willfully ignoring competitive advantage and trade.
Is the hope that people are going to pay premium for vertically farmed produce because of the brand or is this actually cheaper?
In the video for the farm they explain that the aim is to produce extremely high end strawberries that taste much better but aren’t as tough and able to be transported. I can imagine places like restaurants paying 4 to 5 times as much to get the absolute best taste.
> In the video for the farm they explain that the aim is to produce extremely high end strawberries that taste much better but aren’t as tough and able to be transported.
Most things people claim can’t be transported can be transported just fine. Maybe not on a six week boat trip from Panama, but certainly on a refrigerated truck from an extra hour upstate.
When people say that something can’t be stored, they usually mean that it only keeps for a few weeks, rather than over a year like commercial apples.
I live in an area where strawberries are grown commercially. Strawberries are sold at local farmers markets which were picked earlier that day. I have learned that strawberries are much better if eaten the same day that they are picked. I thought that I didn't like strawberries because the ones you get at the grocery store have a bit of a rotten fruit flavor. The fresh berries do not. Even day old strawberries have a noticeable rotten fruit flavor.
Even if you have lower standards, strawberries rot quickly. Even refrigerated, they don't last more than a week or so.
An extra hour is fine, but a Spain-to-Czechia truck trip (two days at least) is not. A lot of produce is grown in Almería, in the south of Spain, up to the point that all the hothouses are seen from the orbit as one huge pale blob on the surface. This agricultural powerhouse supplies almost entire Europe, but transportability is a key issue. Spain is located very peripherally in the EU.
This is an under-appreciated point. Most vegetables sold in supermarkets are varieties bred for durability (both physical and temporal).
If you grow the produce at point-of-sale and don’t transport it, you can make it feasible to sell more heirloom varieties (and many species like huckleberries) that just don’t travel/scale well in modern mechanized agriculture.
You’re not going to compete on price, but you can potentially get a far superior product.
Yes. Growing anything but very shade loving plants requires about 1.5 million watts in LEDs per acre. That is why most demos use lettuce, it will grow in abyssal lighting conditions and only requires a tiny amount of nutrients since it is all leaf with a like 90% water content.
These vertical farms will require dedicated nuclear and fusion reactors if they ever catch on. After all they are ditching the free fusion reactor we call sun.
There’s a definite economic niche for high value low shelf life produce. It’s just a question of local economics. Fresh strawberries in a large market like this might be able to pay for themselves even with the costs of real estate and energy usage by way of being able to sell at a higher price due to selling extremely fresh produce to customers prepared to pay that higher cost for the quality difference.
This does all assume the end result is a higher quality product of course.
Strawberries also have a bad reputation for pesticide usage. Indoor strawberries could potentially be marketed as zero pesticide for another premium angle.
I imagine it's a bit of both, premium and that it has been getting cheaper to pull off.
On a more societal level, I think it is a skill we are going to need as time goes on, as things get denser, more populated, less arible and more insecure. So it's a worthwhile investment in technology, and I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't some government grants and research grants funding a portion of the endeavor.
With indoor farming, you save on transportation and refrigeration, which is also energy intensive. Gotham Greens is doing something similar with salad mix, and they're supposedly profitable. That said, lettuce is a lot less calorie dense than strawberries, so I'd imagine that indoor strawberries will always be a luxury product.
Is the hope that people are going to pay premium for vertically farmed produce because of the brand or is this actually cheaper?