Energy use in the industry varies widely depending on greenhouse size and what crops are being grown. A study of 12 indoor farms by the nonprofit Resource Innovation Institute found that five of them used as much energy, per square foot, as a hospital. One vertical farm, an outlier, was guzzling as much energy as a data center.
Indoor/Vertical farming requires powering artificial light unlike traditional farming, but the energy use is a red herring.
Traditional farming typically requires more labor, not less. The key factor is that it is very easy to have most of that labor done by migrant temporary-visa and undocumented workers, for lower wages than would be legal in an industry where exploitation on that scale has not been normalized.
The primary cost, and the reason corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits is their professional labor force. If they could also be run by slaves, most would be competitive with traditional farming.
Except nearly all traditional farming, at least of the staple crops that actually feed people like wheat, corn, and rice have all been near exclusively mechanized for about a century now. We’ve actually gotten to the point where farms have tended to consolidate in no small part because a small team can farm a few dozen square miles and produce enough food to feed a small city.
Migrant, temporary visa, and undocumented workers are a factor in things like fruit tree harvesting, which is obviously absurdly difficult to stack on top of itself, or vegetables which are already often grown indoors so i’m not sure where your getting the idea that greenhouses can’t hire them.
Corporate vertical farms are failing to see profits because it’s very difficult to make an expensive multistory building compete with free unused dirt, trains, and decades of refinement of large scale machinery, and so foucus on trying to automate labor intensive and season unfriendly crops to show a pathway to improvement, generally neglecting that there is very little one can do in a multistory building one can’t do in far cheaper greenhouse. This sort of robotics have also proven a lot more finicky than silicon valley anticipated, which has limited adoption across the board.
In a world where two of the most carbon intensive sectors are electricity generation and construction, replacing direct sunlight and naturally supported dirt with electrical sunlight and concrete and steel is always going to be a big ask, even if we neglect that construction is also a dangerous and hard job heavily reliant on migrant and undocumented workers.
What is your experience with modern industrial farms? How recently have you been involved in the industry?
Also, what does “small team” mean to you?
No direct experience beyond what I learned in farm related classes a decade or so ago about what it takes to run a modern farm and a bit about it advances in robotics due to my internet in industrial automation or what comes up in the local osmosis of living in an area that does some ag research.
Small team means a dozen or so people, but it’s inherently a rather large abstraction since in practice so much is either rented, shared, or owned by large agricorps that cover that can use vast scale to smooth out volatility.
Since you asked, what’s your experience in ag? How recently were you involved in the industry.
Not recent, but I was privy to the latest advancements at the time. Perhaps there were a half-dozen overseers who lived near the fields and did labor management and crop observation, but there was always an army of latinx workers share-cropping less profitable crops during rotation seasons, driving pesticide sprayers, doing firewatch during dry days, maintaining the cesspool, and a number of other tasks that were either too person-intensive or beneath the white owners and their middle-class wage managers. 90% of the people on the industrial farm were people of color, and all the jobs they did were dangerous, underpaid, and essential. That percentage includes the white people working in the machine shop, and the contracted crop-dusting pilots.
Ironically, the automation in development was targeted at reducing the number of middle-class white people needed to run the farm, and would have little effect on the army of cheap labor that was ever-present.
I’ve seen a small portion of the beast that is large agribusiness, and I’ll admit there may be other sides I haven’t seen that may contradict my experience. But it is wise to doubt the rosy self-congratulatory picture taught in textbooks when confronted with the experiences of real life. Most of the people who bring you food for the prices you enjoy are invisible, and your education system is complicit in keeping things that way.
What were they actually growing, how often did they do thouse crops, and most importantly, where actually was this? I ask because things like maintaining a firewatch or cesspool don’t sound liek tasks you’d find on a mechanized breadbasket planes or irrigated valley wheat or corn farm that make up the majority of north american food production.
I mean obviously my experience is going to be tailored to the farmland I actually live on, but statistically the US national average somewhere about six to eight farm workers per square mile, and that’s doing things like assuming that companies have multiple times as many completely undocumented workers than they do H-2A visa’s, report on taxes, or who show up in studies on undocumented workers.
Given that’s an average that includes orchards and hand crops which take about an order of magnitude more labor-hours than the heavily mechanized crops we are taking about that’s going to be a significant overestimate.
All of this though is pretty irrelevant to the original question though, which had to do with moving to systems that outside of the rosey picture presented by tech startups looking to make investors horny by promising that all their labor costs can be replaced by stepper motors invariably involve vast increases to the amount of low wage manual labor actually needed to produce a ton of food. Or that such a change to a far more carbon intensive way of producing food is a really bad thing when climate change exists.
I agree that it is worth looking at this in a more distinguished way, but carbon budgets for large farms rarely take into account the carbon emissions produced by organic soil loss, besides the vast negative effects that has otherwise. Indoor farms on the other hand can be pretty carbon neutral after their initial construction, assuming that the electricity they use comes from renewable energy sources.