Ep. 181: Vertical Farming

I, V, M. How many men? Okay. So what happens if simplified listeners are going to have to improve with you and me Tony?

Yeah, and we don't even have a special address this time. So, yeah. So what we've got a good topic to discuss hopefully that will make up and yeah, we'll, we'll switch right into it. Yeah.

Tell us what what vertical have you picked the topic from the same? So I've vertically challenged for a long time. So when, when, when I had an average marriage, right? So my, the protocol is that the girls, I did that's, that's what used to happen in our community.

The girls that was for your bio data, right? And my mom in the bio data, she gave out the bio data and she mentioned that I was five feet 10 and a half inches top. And actually I'm five feet nine inches. So she left to this every way, married for 28 years now.

And she still tells me that she's been cheated. But she's been, she's been cheating. I think you have to marry the expectations of one. I think then a half and she got someone just here.

Yeah. We have five feet nine inches. But I also exaggerated by one and a half inches. Okay.

Sorry. Actually, I think the reader or listeners can read more about this in Marien's new book, which is called Long Story Shot. Yeah. Every time you come, come on.

We are going to keep pressure. You finally write that book or mainly why not? I have a whole bunch of anecdotes that I've heard. So it is just going to be a string of anecdotes, most of them pointless, most of them.

But that's what life is actually in hindsight after seeing all this COVID-19 business is mostly pointless and there's no use pretending otherwise. So we shall make a light of the situation and talk about something completely irrelevant, such as vertical farming. So vertically challenged guy talks about vertical farming could be the tagline for this episode. Okay.

So when all this lockdown thing was happening, one of my daily chores was to go and, you know, almost phage for vegetables. So vegetables were difficult to combine in our character. So you had to go around and for some inexplicable reason, the authorities are politically hard on the vegetable vendor. So they keep chasing them from place to place.

So guys would sit in a regular place and find them there. And then you go there and then you sort of look around and then you find that guy is sort of desperately waiting somewhere. I'm sitting here now. We go there and then you ask him what happened.

It's a name. This is despite him pulling up his feature to make it into a mask. Yeah. And they are absolutely clueless.

Right? So they had no idea. They had an initial data. Later, I think the police also become a little more simple than they took.

So one day I was standing at a vegetable place and there's a whole bunch of people crowding out and a policeman came and he actually explained, you know, he told all of us that, you know, this is what happened. And he was very nice about it. He wasn't rude. He wasn't aggressive.

He just very sort of matrophactically said that, you know, you really don't want to get COVID. You're dead if you get it. So that's it. Yeah.

So he said that and he went there and that was far more effective than any sort of harsh, you know, bluster or wireless. And like now, our resident welfare association, uncle, suddenly found power. Who are like, okay, this feels nice to police. But I guess all important.

So I'm, we have several of them, I mean, in the neighborhood and it's great source of entertainment. So there'll be some uncles who want to basically have a stand in the street and then there'll be a few, you know, sort of left wing, right wing or whatever, freedom, voice of freedom kind of things. Yeah. So we have, there's one building just down the road where there are frequent vocal arguments and it's great entertainment.

So we don't have anything to go here, hang around there and soon or later, young vapors napper will be something. It's a month. But the intersection of residents welfare association and right wing affiliates, it's RWA and RWA. It's like a very nice.

You know, when I run the whole most computer. But you were talking about vegetables and yeah. So because of this vegetable situation, I really, you know, I was reading and for some reason I came upon this concept called vertical farming, which I thought it would be interesting. So basically what they do in vertical farming is as the name implies, they grow things, what you use a vertical space and they say that you can grow.

So like if let's say you have a space in your, you know, building compound, which is fine with swiveting and that's free space and you really couldn't grow anything and fine with swiveting. So you know, building is probably some story high. So if you plant, you know, plants stacked up one on the other for seven stories, you could really have seven times 500. That is half a square feet and that would be a lot.

So you could probably grow enough vegetables for, you know, like the upper building. Okay. So this is not vertical farming doesn't mean you grow it on your terrace, which is also. Yeah, you can also grow it on your terrace, but basically utilizing the z dimension.

So okay. And there are no floor space index restrictions for vertical farming and guessing. So the, there's really the restriction that we use in on really private and India. This is a concept that's been tried in, in the US, it started in the US.

So the modern concept was proposed in as early as 1999. So not very old by a gentleman named Dixon, this one year. So Dixon, this one year is a professor of public and environmental health at Columbia University in New York. And he's an interesting guy.

So he's done work on sort of, you know, they're called eco-tones. So you put on the zones, which like, like, you know, you have a water body and you have a natural land body. And the interface, you usually find a little bit of marshy space. You'll find grass growing, a really growing, something like that.

And what, what happened is the reefs, you know, they collect a lot of rock and vegetation. And that after a period of time becomes nutritious enough for trees to grow. So you find, it's in the lake and a land marsh and there's a bank of reefs going alongside the shore over a period of time, you'll find the shore encroaching onto the lake. Okay.

So it's not, not with us of real estate. Yes. Yeah, not because this is nature. This is how, and there are factors.

So human, human occupation is a big factor. So when humans come, they come with a lot of it. So they have to have a, they have different patterns of use. They put influence into the water bodies.

They do a lot of things. So this guy was studying all those kinds of things. So he wasn't really into anything other than that. And then he took this class and as just in the project, he decided to ask people to design a, you know, a 30 story building, which would just be agriculture.

So his concept was you have plants on the product and as you grow lower, the waste of the plant growing thing would feed chickens and birds and fish and things like that. And then there was a whole thing that envisaged that as a self-tentain sort of unit. It was, you know, it was interesting and he got, he came on called there some, seven, and then that really got everyone's imagination growing and people have to grow vegetables in the windows and things like that. Yeah.

But only someone from either Mumbai or New York could have felt the desperate need to do this. And absolutely, you know, as we go later on into the podcast, we'll find out that it's, it's not, it's not all as practical as, as the advocates make it out to be. So first I just, I'll just go on to describe what, what the farming is. Just, just to give an idea of what people do.

So basically there are three ways of the thing about vertical farming is you don't use soil. And the reason you don't use soil is you need a lot of soil in order to grow plants. Soil is not very efficient. And usually that's not a problem because you have a lot of land.

So land is really not scarce at all. So, you know, you just grow plants and you have large farms and people grow. But if you don't use soil, if you just use some inert medium to hold the plants together and you feed the plants what whatever nutrients the plants want, the plant will do what it does best, that is photosynthesis. You'll be able to find the only output.

So you'll be able to maximize the growth and what do you want out of the plant. Right. This is sort of like how orkits are grown or is it completely? Yeah, I think orkits are basically epiphytes.

So anyway, epiphytes are plants that grow on other plants but without doing parapsylic it's so basically they have roots running in the air and everything like so. Orkits are anyway nature's vertical farms. But this is, you can grow anything vertical. But basically if you add substance they'll give you a soil alert alert.

Okay, sorry. Yeah. So, so hydroly started off with hydrolysis pretty old. It was invented sometime in the 20s or the early 30s by a guy in UC Berkeley and he demonstrated it.

So he came to the conclusion that all the plants want are the, you know, he identified some 16 nutrients and he figured that those are the only nutrients that I just wanted. And out of those 16, three of them that is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are available in water and air. So, there are 13 which are required and basically these are nitrogen phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, sulfur and a bunch of other trace ones. Calcium, there is boron, there is manganese, there is a bunch of other iron is there, chlorine is there and curiously one total odd man out is one element, molybdenum, which the only other instance I found is in stainless steel.

And sometimes stainless steel use molybdenum, but then it comes to a system. So all these, he figured out cocktail of these nutrients, he figured that you would have to make them water soluble so that the roots would absorb them. And if you just, the only other thing that the plant needs is sunlight. So if it got sunlight into all its nutrients, it would perform and perform growth and it would produce fruits or flowers or whatever it was that you are interested in.

So these are just basically uncomplicated plants with no emotional baggage. So they do their own thing. Yeah. Yeah.

So that was how it started. And then all these guys started optimizing it for various, different plants. So if you want to grow stronger space, it needs a different amount of light, it needs a different amount of blue kind of temperature, different humidity from let us say lettuce or maybe lady figure. So, we know scientists got to work and they put everything together and soon they were hydroponic farms.

And there are places like Israel, the desert of Israel is one where it makes sense. So Israel is generally, it's in its strategic interest to be self sufficient food rights because it's got a lot of host time neighbors. So they developed it into a fine art and the technology is really spread all over the world. The only problem is it is quite expensive.

And if you sort of measure it up against other, you know, like building land based farming systems in countries where labor and land is not very expensive, it just doesn't make sense at all. But people still kept at it and they optimized it for them. So then they realized that there wasn't enough sunlight all the time. So if you have a vertical farm, you won't have enough sunlight to, you know, the south side of the bear, whatever it will be the sunlight will be available.

But only a part of the day. So you won't get enough sunlight for enough food. So then they by this time, LED lights were available. This is like late 1990s, early 2000s, and it started becoming more common.

Is this how like, was cultivating marijuana in lab salary? Yeah, there was some marijuana cultivation is a major use case of hydroponics. Sorry, I jumped the gun. Actually, it's a very good, you can do it very quietly.

Yeah. You don't need sunlight. We are not advocating that, of course. But there's a very interesting fact about this.

I'll have to check my sources again. But basically, the thing was apparently marijuana farming in labs takes up about 1% of the total electricity in the US because these are very high energy lights. So the contradiction was like this energy intensive thing is going to be a double-vami, right? Like it's very ironic that something that promotes peace is actually sucking up so many resources.

So you get a very ironic high when you smoke lab cultivated marijuana. Yeah, so the little irony is that make life so interesting. So that became, I think that was the maximum number of hydroponics experts in the US, at least, will be guys who started off growing parts. But there are people who, after people smoked up and so forth, they realized that they probably could extend the principle to other crops as well.

And then there have been a number of political farms and private. Before that, I'll tell you what, I'll do other interesting techniques of growing, of vertical farming. So one is called aquaponics. So aquaponics comes from aquaculture and hydroponics.

And what they do is they grow it entirely in water and the downstream of the water is a fish tank. They take the water purified by the plants, it goes into the fish tank, the fish, they live in the water, they eat, and they contribute a lot of their poo into the water. And they clean all this, they clean all the solid matter. And for some reason, water in which fish are living tends to get rich in ammonia.

So there's a process by which you can convert it to nitrate ammonia and that is used by the plants. So the cycle is such that there's nothing wasted in that. So the fish produce the nutrients for the plants. The plants take up all the nutrients, they clean up the water and they're going back to the fish.

And in theory, this is great. But in practice, the system is too delicate because you have too many living creatures depending on each other. And if any one of them dies, so if the fish die, the plants are dying to end. The plants are too difficult to manage.

So that's why it really hasn't gotten. That's the coalition government of the world. The biological world there. And the other one is something called aeroponics.

And aeroponics is this hydroponics thing except that instead of immersing the roots and water, which is what they do in hydroponics, they just sort of mist it with nutrient rich miserosomes. So it uses much less water than hydroponics. So if hydroponics uses 100 liters, this would use probably 1 meter. But on the downside, again, it's very delicate and you forget to look after your plants for one day and they all take them.

Oh, God. Okay. So, what you're farming uses any or all of these techniques. So that is the promise of the vertical farm that you can grow a lot of crops in a small space very efficiently.

Right. And you managed to do it successfully, right? Yeah, if you manage. So there are, people have done very interesting things.

So there is this startup called Local Roots. So Local Roots in the US, it launched a system called the Tenar Farm, which is a vertical farming system hosted in a 40 foot shipping container. So this is really fancy. And because it's the start up, it has the works, right?

So it has computer vision integrated with artificial neural network to monitor the plant. So basically you have AI and computer vision, you have machine learning and other works. And the whole objective is to achieve cost parity with traditional output farming. And this startup claims to have done that.

So it claims that if you invest in one of their containers, you would grow less. So you can use the data as much as you could if you're growing them on a lot of land. And you're not dependent on the elements itself. So one 40 foot container for them can produce the equivalent of five acres of farmland and use only 3% of the water.

That sounds promising. Yeah, so they'll recapture the water, they'll, you know, they'll evaporate water, they'll condense it through the air conditioning, all kind of thing. And there are, you know, they've got a lot of publicity back in the day. And now you don't hear about them that much.

So it's probably not that straightforward. But they made all the money they wanted to and they retired peacefully and are doing some change from local routes to grassroots, if you know what I mean. Actually, yeah. It's more VC farming than vertical farming.

So basically advantages of course are agricultural efficiency. So, you know, in a smaller, so this, you know, in a 40 foot container, if you can grow 3 to 5 acres worth of produce, that's a lot of efficiency there. So most, most people accept that vertical farming is at least 10x more efficient than open farming, land farming. And second advantage is resistance to weather.

So most of the most vertical farms are completely climate controlled because when you don't, when plants don't have the soil to lean on, they have to, you know, everything needs to be controlled for them. So you may do it. Carbon dioxide, also. And interesting thing is they actually pumping carbon dioxide to increase the yield of the plant.

Wow, okay. Everyone knows that they're launching, making carbon dioxide into the raw oxygen. So if you have a closed space and you just leave a bunch of plants in it, the carbon dioxide levels will go up and the plant will come down. So you actually have to pump in carbon dioxide.

The opposite of casinos. They're actually pumping oxygen. So you have to keep you over there. Yeah, but this also means that it's quite intensive that you need to take care of it constantly and it means constant monitoring.

Yeah. So it is very, you know, it's very capable of being automated. So they have, they have, they have sensors for everything. So they have humidity sensors.

They have sensors for pH. They have, so when you provide a plant with, you know, water fields and nutrients, you want to make sure that there are enough nutrients. So there are sensors available, which will be placed in the electrical conductivity of the water and from that electrical conductivity, because it knows the electrical conductivity of the nutrients, it will sort of deduce what proportion of nutrients is in the water and it will alert the farmer to add more nutrients because the system thinks that now it doesn't have enough nutrients. That can't take.

So you just go on and watch nitric centers and get another, it's coming up and apparently it happens once in a week or once in 10 days. It's not in like every day. This is the famous thing called Internet of Hings. Sorry.

Go on. So that is, you know, that the other thing is traditional farming is often prey to weaves and you know, pace, rodents, birds, that kind of thing. So all that is not there because it's, you're doing that in control circumstances. So nothing.

So we'd hear it is purely intentional. Yeah. Yeah. So we just grown.

Yeah. But you've managed to basically produce some lovely vegetables and some nice chilies and habaneros during a pandemic. I think this is what they refer to as habaneros fiddling with homes. Yeah.

For those of you who might know what Tony is referring to, I planted, I had some, I found some seeds of habanero chilies I planted then at home during this COVID lockdown and they did very well. So we got four clients and he harvested nearly 40 or 50 habanero chilies and these trees are really, really, really spicy. So, you know, so now my son is making some kind of a sauce out of it. I had a, so part of the, part of the recipe is 14 data from it.

So that is going on. But I, I ate a little bit of that and it was, which set my tongue on fire. It was really, you know, on the COVID scale there some hundred thousand to 350,000. Yeah.

Which is, I think, 10x more than the normal spicy chili green chili, which is 10,000. Correct. 30, actually. But they look as colorful as capsicum, which is basically just an imposter of a chili, right?

This is the opposite. So, yeah, capsicum is like, you know, it's, what, what can be, it's like these national leaders who wear this fake card, right? So, actually, when you're cutting, you know, difficult, fabulous. Yeah, capsicum is like the homeo version of a chili, right?

It's so diluted, but supposedly effective. No, you're chili, yeah. You know, and they're like, they're like, they're like, they're like, they're like, but the plants look remarkably identical. So, we have capsicum plants and we have this hybrid chili plant.

Oh, you wouldn't want to mix this to work. You have a job bar in the UK for some amount, but I can't like, I don't know. Wow. Are you content from the fruit, but not from the plant itself?

So, yeah, so those are the advantages. The other advantages that you can grow any, what you do, anything, any time you like. So, in normal farming, you have seasons for everything. So, you have seasons for grapes, shivers for strawberries, for example.

And you could grow your strawberries like in the middle of the monsof you wanted. Oh, yeah, okay. And that's, that's touted as a big advantage of, yeah. So, it's whatever we wanted to make.

To help with seasons, whatever it needed to be. So, those are the advantages of vertical farming. We looked at the other side on the other side of the break. Stay tuned.

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So, we were just hearing about the advantages of vertical farming. It was like the best thing since sliced cheese. And then it turns out that it's not all that great. So, there are naysayers for everything.

And there are a bunch of people who think that vertical farming is simply too over high and it's really not a solution for any major economic situation. So, vertical farming is okay for very specific use cases. But in general, the field that the economics is very against vertical farming. So, in normal farming, land is pretty cheap.

So, most farming land is under a couple of likes, any acre. Like, I'm not talking about land around city one town. Yeah, yeah. Farming land is not really expensive.

And so, if you had a 100 acre farm, maybe you would like to start it from scratch, the whole thing wouldn't cost you more than a couple of crores. And so, someone I was speaking to, he said for a couple of crores, you wouldn't be able to put up even a half an acre hydroponic farm. Oh, okay. Because there's a lot of it, right?

So, everything is fighting, all the people in these farms, and a lot of sensors, and it can't be calibrated, everything. So, they're not, you know, it's not simple. So, you need a lot of engineering to go into, you need control, humidity, you need to have a fan, you need to have anything. So, it's pretty expensive.

And the yield of half an acre, even if you assume it's 10x or 20x more, it can't be comparable to 100 acre farms. So, the capital cost is just going to make it all viable. There are studies which are so usually in very high cost economies where a neighborhood is very expensive or something like that. There might be some advantage because, you know, there's a smaller area, even if you have people to work on the farm.

But in general, it is at least a vertical farm that is at least 10 times more expensive than conventional farms. So, that is one of the big disadvantages. So, there's this guy named Louis Albright, who is a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell, and he calculated that a loaf of bread made from wheat grown in a vertical farm would cost 27 US dollars. And the average cost of a loaf of bread at that time was 1.296 dollars.

So, it's a lot of... But it probably works for some specialized things, right? Like, EV fruit. Again, another fact about KV fruit is that, I think when it goes to the US, it costs more for the airline fuel to carry one KV fruit than the fruit itself.

Like, it's grown only in very specific areas. Can you grow 18-year-old in a vertical farm? Pretty much. Yeah, I'm sure you could grow KV fruit.

I haven't really come across any, but I've come across the YouTube videos that talk about growing strawberries in Bombay. I'm very interested in that. So, I'm planning to build a small hydroponic system in my house. And if I ever get around to doing that, I'll put up a little link on simplified.

So, I've got a few strawberry plants from Mabali, so when they last a few months ago. And they actually grew here. And we got strawberries. Wow.

So, okay. We got strawberries in April in Bombay, but not really very many houses. So, we had to drink a total of six strawberries. So, all these three tiny little plants.

And now, they're still alive, but they aren't growing any strawberries. The season is over, so it's not strawberries season anymore. But it was six that grew. They were pretty nice.

They were a little sour, but they were nice. They had to strawberry smell. They had strawberry taste. It was nice.

Right. We got a Boogangila from, I think, Panchini, as Ali Bagha somewhere. And even that doesn't grow here. So, that's why we're doing something wrong.

No, Boogangila is not a sunlight. It seems a lot. No, you don't get sunlight. So, we have Boogangila's mouth.

And they have a smell and they're beautiful. So, on the terrace, they have a lot of sunlight. You know, on a window sill, you know, you were very limited sunlight. So, only a few hours a day.

So, probably that's not enough for the plant. Yeah. So, yeah, that is one of the disadvantages of, but yeah, as you said, a growing week is not the right use case for, for people farming. It's probably something more exotic.

So, like, activity food, strawberries, grapes, perhaps, and out of season grapes. So, grapes are very seasonal. So, how lovely it would be to have fresh grapes in June. Yeah.

That would be a good use case for a vertical garden. And the second disadvantage is energy use. Right? So, during the growing season, the sun shines, you know, on a, like, suppose you were vertical farming on one side of your building.

On, for one season, it would be perfect. So, whenever, whatever time of the year, you know, the angle of the sun would be just right. And you'd have a great crop in that few months. But the sun keeps moving around.

And then rest of the year, that would be the shadow side of the sun. And you're building, you know, that's ways of building one getting sun. And that means that you would have to then shine light sun. And which is what commercial products do.

So, they put LED lights and they use electrical power and then they use that. And they calculate that you take, you use about 4X to 6X more power to grow under artificial light than natural light. Yeah. And the vertical farming guys answer to that is, but we use renewable energy.

So, what they're doing is they're putting solar panels on top. They capture the sunlight to give the light, which the sunlight can do. So, it's very, very planet-obstical. You know, economists say that this is foolishness.

So, you have a lot of solar panels and you're capturing sun and then you're piping it back to the plant. When you didn't have all this nonsense, you just brought in a plot of land and all that would be available. Yeah. So, I just looked up the pot fact that I mentioned.

In California apparently where it's grown, it takes up as much as 3% of the energy of the entire state. Just the LED lights. So, yeah, it can be pretty intense. And I'm not even sure they can be energy neutral given the small space.

That is a physical limit to how many solar panels you can place. Yes, getting to energy neutrality might take way more than one day. Even solar panels, they come with a negative carbon footprint. So, they cost a lot of energy to make solar panels.

Sorry. Yeah. So, if you account all that, green energy is not all that green energy. I rotate some non-green energy.

So, they feel they calculate that in northern United States, it can be over $200,000 per hectare. It's a hell of a lot. Oh, wow. And the third thing is pollution.

So, that is most commercial farms in order to increase yields, try to increase the proportion of carbon dioxide inside the farm, inside the vertical farm. And they do that by burning hydrocarbon, burning fuel by money, obviously fuel-y. So, not all of it is used by the plant. And when they have to keep an eye on it, they feel that carbon footprint of lettuce is 4 times more than lettuce grown in a whole year.

And that's just the tip of the lettuce iceberg. Iceberg. Iceberg. I got it wrong.

I hope that remains in the podcast and it's not a good one. Let's leave it at the back. So, they add a lot of other things like sulphur dioxide and ethylene. We're burning, it's never, it's not pure.

So, if you burn, let's say diesel, we're not going to get just carbon dioxide. You also burn it at sulphur dioxide, you're also going to get ethylene. And all these things are harmful to the atmosphere. So, that is the anti-vertical farming lobbies, you know, argument.

So, on the whole, it's pretty clear that it's great for growing marijuana. Which, anything else, which of course is a mobile sort of endeavor. We don't support that particular activity. We can understand why people do it.

But the only other advantage I can see and one that I'm interested in is growing things out of season and growing them in your house. So, we grow a lot of things on our terrace garden. So, among other things, we grow lemons, right? So, it is the same as the lemons you buy in the market.

This is the inverse of that. When life doesn't give you lemons, vertical farming. But it's so satisfying. So, it's one lemon and there's a lot of excitement.

You make lemons, you make lemons. The lemons are five to be in the market. Yeah. It's a little bit sense growing lemons.

It reminds me of the time when we went to Munar once and found one passion fruit. And we made juice out of it. And it tastes really horrible. But it's a memory that still remains.

You found it in the wild. Yeah. So, that's about it from me. Yeah.

Very nice thing to find out about how to turn over a new leaf quite literally. Yeah. It's kind of all going up. Yeah.

All right. On that note, Mary. Yeah. So, yes, it is.

We found a simplified. Bye. Bye.