Civic Issue Post 1: Indoor Farming

Hello and welcome to the first post of my spring of 2023 civic issues blog. The focus of this blog will be on environmental issues.

If any of you have read any of my other blog posts, you probably already know that I like plants. In fact, they’re the topic of both my fall and spring semester passion blogs. So what better way to bridge the gap into this new style of blog than starting with a bit of a familiar topic?

Todays blog will be a compilation of my thoughts on the following TED talk by Stuart Oda:

I’d recommend you take a few minutes to simply watch the talk, but if you are unable to for whatever reason, the description from TED themselves is as follows:

“By 2050, the global population is projected to reach 9.8 billion. How are we going to feed everyone? Investment-banker-turned-farmer Stuart Oda points to indoor vertical farming: growing food on tiered racks in a controlled, climate-proof environment. In a forward-looking talk, he explains how this method can maintain better safety standards, save money, use less water and help us provide for future generations”

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My Thoughts:

Firstly, reading the description tells you that Stuart Oda was originally an investment banker, not a horticulturist or environmental scientist. That doesn’t necessarily discredit his entire project, but in my opinion it is worth noting.

Oda opens by setting the stage so to speak in regards to the need for a change in agriculture. He brings up several figures regarding an increasing population both in overall size and percentage living in urban areas. This, he claims, will require an increase in global food production by about 70% by the year 2050. This seems like a fairly reasonable take if the world population grows in the way we expect it to. Oda then brings up some of the current challenges with agriculture today. Things such as the need for improved food safety, more efficient water use, and the high (~30%) percentage of food that is wasted. Again, no arguments here, these are all very real concerns.

To remedy these issues, Oda introduces his type of farming which he calls “Controlled Environment Agriculture” or “Indoor Farming”. He essentially claims it to be the next big thing, and the ultimate solution to all the aforementioned challenges. He presents us with the following picture:

This is an example of one of his indoor lettuce farms. His claims are that these farms will be the solution to the problems he mentioned:

• • • They use 90-99% less water, fertilizer and land use than traditional farms
      • • Water is recycled through the system so none goes to waste
        • Nutrients are directly available to plants so plants can be fed more efficiently
    • They use 0 chemical pesticides
    • He did acknowledge that they are somewhat energy intensive with the need for lighting, but made sure to state that they used LED lights which are among the more energy efficient lighting options

This all sounds great initially, but to me it did raise a couple thoughts:

• • • Water use is definitely reduced in a closed system compared to a field where you have more losses to either draining through the soil or evaporating in the hot sun/windy days
      • However, not every farm requires additional irrigation (depending on climate, precipitation, etc.), so in some cases his hydroponic system would not provide as much, if any, water savings.
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    • Fertilizer is more efficient, yes, but to provide water soluble, plant available nutrients usually requires synthetic fertilizers to meet both these requirements. In soil, bacteria and other organisms convert organic forms of nutrients into plant available forms, but in a hydroponic system this bacteria is absent and so the fertilizer needs to be provided in exactly the form the plants will use, otherwise it will be unavailable to them.
    • Obviously stacking trays of lettuce on top of one another is a way to provide more plants in less square footage, and yields per square foot are usually higher for hydroponics as well, so this makes sense for lettuce.
      • However, I have to wonder about other crops… Corn for example is one of the most widely grown crops in the US, and while it could be grown indoors, you’d have a hard time stacking it in shelving systems like these because the plants can get up to 10-12 ft tall. In this case, your land efficiency is either not that much greater than that of a field, or you’re building a massive corn filled sky scraper, perhaps 20 stories high if you want to fit even 10 layers of corn plants.
    • “0 Chemical pesticides” is certainly an alluring claim, but as anyone who’s ever dealt with pests in their houseplants can attest, simply being indoors doesn’t make you immune to bug problems. While good sanitation and quarantining procedures will definitely go a long way to making the grow rooms pest free, the nature of being indoors is that eventually you will inevitably deal with some sort of pest outbreak, and unfortunately being indoors without any natural predators even a minor outbreak can quickly spiral out of control and require the application of pesticides.
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• • • Perhaps my biggest hang-up with this indoor farming situation however is not the pest issues or the exact percentage of water being saved, but simply the amount of electrical energy required to run this whole operation.
      • The lights may be LEDs which are fairly efficient, but the numbers of them required even in a small room, like the one shown in the demonstration, certainly leads to the energy usage building up
        • • In just that small room, there are two rows of shelves, each with 5 shelves containing 4 layers of lights. Each layer has 6 lights. That’s a total of 240 of those lights for just that room.
          • Each light will run for 12-18 hours a day, so a single day uses quite a bit of power
          • And to top it off, lettuce is a crop that can be grown in fairly low light conditions compared to many other crops, meaning the lighting cost would be even higher for other staple crops like corn.
      • But the energy costs don’t stop at the lights. The entire system requires electricity.
        • • The fans to replace the air circulation (which helps prevent plant diseases) of the wind have to be running many hours a day.
          • Since the water is reused, there need to be pumps running constantly circulate the water and nutrients around the system.
          • All of those lights give off heat. As do the pumps and fans. Without an air-conditioning system running, this room would quickly cook every single plant inside of it, and the bigger the room, the more heat you’ll have to get rid of.
  • Finally, the system seems to be designed primarily for salad greens like lettuce. If your goal is to feed a growing population, lettuce-which is 96% water and contains only 63 calories per POUND (that’s a lot of lettuce)-is probably not the most efficient way to do so.
    • • But to grow more energy dense staple crops like cereal grains, many of the benefits of this system would be greatly diminished simply because the crops literally don’t fit well.

Overall, I don’t hate the idea of indoor farming, I think it definitely has potential in certain applications (like high value crops such as herbs or salad greens), but given the current technology surrounding lighting, and the cost (both finically and environmentally) of production of electricity, it seems to me that this method cannot be relied on to provide an economical and sustainable food supply large enough to support the predicted population. Currently (because of the things I pointed out above) its not really even close.