Abstract
Vertical farming is a rapidly expanding type of indoor controlled environment agriculture whose promises have attracted widespread praise and considerable early-stage capital in recent years. Among vertical farming’s many claimed benefits, per-area productivity is frequently mentioned, proposing crop yields at least two orders of magnitude higher than outdoor field agriculture. These extremely high yields form the basis for a theory of land use change whereby yield-increasing technologies reduce or reverse the expansionary demands of lower-yielding farms, retaining or returning those areas to “wild nature”. In a sensational articulation of this kind of intensification, from 2007 to 2017 many vivid proposals portrayed centrally located skyscraper farms as a key strategy for building self-sufficient cities. This skyscraper articulation of vertical farming captured the public imagination and led to substantial investment into contemporary vertical farming facilities, the majority of which are in large suburban high-ceiling single-story warehouses. This paper traces the politics of vertical farming’s land-sparing narratives beginning early in the twentieth century, with a closer analysis of two contrasting historical examples: Othmar Ruthner’s 1960s tower greenhouses, which closely resemble the imaginary skyscraper farms of the 2010s; and Noel Davis’ 1980s PhytoFarms, which more closely resembles the well-funded warehouse vertical farms of the 2020s. This analysis suggests that, despite their high yields, the extremely high capital investments needed to build the precise controlled environments of today’s vertical farms preclude the profitable production of staple crops, rendering them unlikely to fulfil their land-sparing promises.
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© Othmar Ruthner Archives; Capitol Records 55-m headquarters in Hollywood, constructed in 1956 as the first cylindrical office building (Hartnell 2006) Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0; Chris Jacobs’ 2007 40-m (est.) vertical farm rendering inspired by the Capitol Records headquarters, where “modular floors stack like poker chips” (Chamberlain 2007) Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0
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Notes
The terms “revolutionary” and “revolution” can be found on the public websites of the three largest VF companies in the US (Bowery, Plenty, and Aerofarms). Dickson Despommier consistently refers to VF as a revolution. As recently as 2020, Despommier estimated that fully realized VF would satisfy 60–80% of global urban food demand (Holland 2020).
See Scoones et al (2019) for a typology of scarcity narratives. The claim of absolute land scarcity in the Malthusian sense is highly contested.
Beginning the second half of 2022, four well-capitalized VFs closed in rapid succession. Some analysts consider these to be signs of a bubble bursting, whereas others view them as a market correction.
The authors cite best-case (lowest) electricity use of 435 kWh/kg for mature wheat in a VF in Sweden (Kobayashi et al. 2022, p. 4). Using current Swedish industrial electrical rates hovering around 100 CSEK/kWh (Statistiska Centralbyrån 2022) this would be equivalent to more than USD 40,000/t of wheat just to cover the cost of electricity. This price is roughly one hundred times higher than the world price was during the early weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (International Monetary Fund 2022).
Beginning in the 1970s, researchers in Japan used the term “Plant Factory” (家庭用植物工場, literally “household plant factory”) to describe this kind of high-yield indoor growing.
Kristin Specht and co-authors use “ZFarming” to refer to many forms of emerging and speculative urban agriculture (largely in Berlin) in and on buildings, including green roofs and walls, rooftop farms, and vertical farms (Specht et al. 2015, 2014; Specht et al. 2016; Thomaier et al. 2015). The vertical (z-axis) in this essay refers specifically to the stacking that enables multiplicative yields, which Dickson Despommier considers the defining characteristic of VF (Despommier 2016).
Valuation estimates are derived from two commercial databases: Crunchbase and PitchBook. Because the largest VF firms remain privately held, analyst-published estimates remain highly speculative and are inferred from partial data.
VFs are generally a small part of fund manager’s portfolio, and expectations for early-stage capital are that most companies will fail. Every individual company in the portfolio, whether they end up failing or end up being a unicorn, must present a plausible scenario for a satisfactory return on investment (ROI) or, more typically in the cases of VFs, the somewhat more subjective indicator of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) (Hayes 2022). The satisfactory ranges presented here are derived from two main sources. The first source is Aerofarms’ analyst day presentation materials (2021), prepared prior to an unsuccessful bid for acquisition by a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The second source is from AppHarvest’s SEC filings available on EDGAR, which provide an example of satisfactory EBITDA forecasts presented prior to a successful SPAC, as well as inference as to what unsatisfactory earnings might be, based upon share price and investor response (AppHarvest, Inc 2022; Cheves 2022).
There is no unanimous dismissal of VFs among high-level experts, even with respect to land use. The esteemed Danish economist and former Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, wrote in 2018 that he had left the chorus of academics who dismissed Despommier’s proposal as a pipedream, and now counted himself as agnostic, holding out hope for VF as an important strategy for addressing micronutrient deficiences, contingent upon economic analysis (Pinstrup-Andersen 2018).
While it’s called a “book” by Google, it might more accurately be called a 69-page advertisement for DuPont blasting powders and dynamite, especially their “Red Cross” line, which Bailey assures the reader is “as safe as anything explosive can possibly be” (Bailey 1915, back cover).
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a semiconductor circuit, a transducer that converts electricity into light. As a class of semiconductors, it’s possible to see their technological progress following Moore’s Law, an exponential growth curve celebrated in Silicon Valley, endowed with a sense of inevitability and granted an imperative positive moral valence as well. Unlike Moore’s law, which is ultimately concerned with the processing of immaterial bits (binary units of information), Haitz’s law for LEDs is ultimately concerned with the conversion of a thermodynamic quantity. Put another way, the increase in LED efficienty from 28 to 68% has to stop sometime before it reaches 100%, also limiting the exponential cost reductions that can be theorized more readily when dealing with pure binary information processing. Kusuma et. al. (2020) report that current LED technologies are on the diminishing side of a logistic (S-shaped, or sigmoid) curve, a growth pattern consistent across materially finite systems such as living organisms, ecologies, and economies.
Dennis Hoagland had a successful legacy in hydroponics. In a 2022 VF you can still find the “Hoagland Solution” in daily use, with only minor modifications since its 1933 release.
Because nuclear “cyclotrons” attracted so much funding, attaching the suffix “tron” seemed a good way to get defense money.
Silage on large farms is not made exclusively in pressed “ag bags” but also in plastic-wrapped bales (baleage) and bunkers and trenches (“horizontal silos”). The focus on the pressed bags in the main text was mostly to see if the phrase “brobdingnagian ag-bags” could be reprinted in this journal, testing an unpublishable hypothesis about search engine optimization. A query for “silage bag” into Google’s image search on July 18, 2022 returned images that included (1) silage bags, (2) culverts, (3) wingless aircraft fuselages with drooping noses, (4) anhydrous ammonia tanks, and (5) the beached carcass of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus, the planet’s largest toothed predator).
Authors’ calculations based upon quotes from Noel Davis printed in Roger Field’s article “Old MacDonald Has a factory” (1988).
In 2017, food crops returned to Biosphere 2, in the form of vertical gardens (Beal 2017). A 2023 upgrade to shipping container farms (Vertical Farm Daily 2023) in Biosphere 2 echoes the facility’s earlier characterization, by one of the original Biospherian inhabitants, as a “Garden of Eden atop an aircraft carrier” (Poynter 2006, p. 89).
Author’s estimate using data from Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and other commercial sources, with provisos as indicated earlier.
Oishii, based in New Jersey, was the first to offer high-end VF strawberries which reportedly sold out when offered to NYC consumers at the price of $4.50 per berry. This makes Bowery’s berries relatively affordable at $2.50 per berry. Oishii recently lowered its prices to the equivalent of $1.82 per berry for its launch into Whole Foods Markets. At $10 per quart, field grown berries purchased at the Union Square Farmers Market in-season in NYC work out to $0.21 per berry, roughly one tenth of the recently reduced price for VF berries (Fabricant 2022).
Stacked brassica microgreens present a particularly perverse yield scenario, because seed growers rarely yield more than 1 t/ha from an annual harvest and the equivalent seeding rate for microgreens indoors is often double that for each sowing. This would imply that for every yield improvement based upon stacking vertically or squeezing in more crop turns in a year, the same factor gain is inverted by the outdoor land required just to produce the seed. A single indoor acre, rather than producing the equivalent of 100 outdoor acres, may instead plausibly demand an additional 100 outdoor acres just for seed production (Authors calculations using data from Bulgari et al. 2017; Mir et al. 2017; Nolan 2018).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank: The Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN) members who participated in an online workshop of an earlier draft; Kelly Bronson, Karly Burch, Mascha Gugganig, and Julie Guthman for their written feedback; three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions; the staff and supporters of the Yale Sustainable Food Program for their wide-ranging support and assistance; Beth Greenhough, Jamie Lorimer, and the More-than-Human research group at the University of Oxford for their encouragement, inspiration, and guidance; Samara Brock and Austin Bryniarski for their careful editing and additional insights.
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This work is financially supported by the Yale Sustainable Food Program with non-financial support from the University of Oxford School of Geography and the Environment.
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Bomford, M. More bytes per acre: do vertical farming’s land sparing promises stand on solid ground?. Agric Hum Values 40, 879–895 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10472-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10472-0