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Vertical Farming · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hi, welcome to Hydroponics Daily. I'm Dr. Russell Sharp, and today we're going
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  to be talking about vertical farming.
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  Vertical farming is a way of growing hydroponically, but the difference is that
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  you grow multiple layers.
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  So you have one layer, then another layer, then another layer,
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  and it really suits big box warehouses we're seeing going up nowadays that are maybe, you know,
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  I don't know how tall, you know, some can be crazy tall and you need forklift
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  trucks to get to the top of them.
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  And so you can pack in so many different layers of plants.
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  And vertical farming became possible because of the introduction of LED lighting.
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  Now, before LED lighting came along, you had to have things like high-pressure sodium lamps.
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  And if you were to stack in plants layer after layer after layer in a warehouse
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  situation with sodium lamps, the heat would be so large, so high that the lights
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  would fail, the plants would die, and the place would probably burn down.
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  But now with led lights since about 2015
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  they've been good enough that you can stack on
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  multiple hydroponic systems and grow things and
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  it's called vertical farming or controlled environment agriculture i do not
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  like the term controlled environment agriculture because none of the crops grown
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  commercially are agricultural crops they're all horticultural crops so they
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  should be called controlled environment horticulture c-e-h agricultural crops
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  are things like cereals potatoes.
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  And they're not grown maize they're not grown commercially you'll find universities
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  and institutes dicking around with them you know even people growing cotton
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  hydroponically but not commercially no one's making money out of growing them
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  even tomatoes they struggle to grow tomatoes in vertical farms there's a couple
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  of downsides to vertical farms,
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  as you stack you get issues with controlling the humidity and access to the
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  plants they're normally grown for leafy veg and herbs because you can get a quick turnaround.
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  The economies of scale and the economies of growing don't tend themselves to
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  perennial crops and long-lived crops.
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  So vertical farms don't tend to deal with them. And then the automation is what
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  makes it all come together.
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  And so when you're moving, anything that needs moving a lot around,
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  like herbs and if it needs harvesting that's
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  where vertical farming comes into its own any one thing where you need
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  to control human pathogens then vertical
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  farming is good and hydroponics in general getting the
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  crop away from the field because you're obviously controlling things like human
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  pathogens it's think about lettuce it's a crop that you you wash but you don't
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  cook and even a lot of people don't even wash it so if you can reduce the pesticides
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  if you can reduce the human pathogens of the bacteria.
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  You know, you think about a salmonella outbreak, or then, you know,
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  it costs a lot of money to control a lot of insurance claim anyway.
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  There's a salmonella outbreak. So, vertical farming is coming to their own there.
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  There's a lot of them that sprung up a few years ago. There was a lot of money
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  from Wall Street and the City of London, and there was some big failures as well.
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  So, in the last year, a lot of these companies have gone bust,
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  there's a lot of bankruptcies.
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  But some of them are thriving and growing well.
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  Some notable examples, fisher farms in East Anglia in the UK and.
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  A lot of them in america there's a few in germany and
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  yeah it's going from i wouldn't
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  say it's going from strength to strength but it's an interesting time they're not going away
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  anywhere soon i mean if you speak to it's interesting
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  to speak to the guys who grow herbs and
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  microgreens and veg outdoors so
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  like bagged salad growers they can't
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  see the economics of it even if they could invest in it so
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  there's a there's a company near me
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  here in rugby and they they say
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  that from one strip of their field they should get more veg in one year than
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  a whole vertical farm so they just don't think the economic stand up but maybe
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  you know if you're coming from the vertical farming perspective you can see
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  a niche and whenever you can see a niche you know you can expand out of your
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  niche and grow from there.
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  So I recently went on a tour of a vertical farming facility in Stockbridge Technology Center.
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  They've got like a demonstration unit there and they were looking at all sorts
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  of interesting things that you could implement on vertical farming,
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  things like nitric acid generators that could produce their own fertilizer from
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  nitrogen in the air. That was really interesting.
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  They had all sorts of systems for optimizing in the vertical farming.
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  And of course, one of the main advantages of a vertical farm,
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  just like hydroponics in general, is that you can exclude pests and disease,
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  or that's the theory anyway.
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  However, if you did get a bit of spider mite in one of these vertical farms,
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  it would travel fast, I would imagine.
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  So I wouldn't want to be the agronomist in charge of a massive vertical farming
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  operation when a spider mite infestation came about, because that would be you
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  know game over you'd have to sterilize the whole place down because a lot of these,
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  companies base their whole you know raison d'etre is
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  that they don't use any pesticides in production so they can't
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  be organic because they're not growing in soil in the ground that's that's
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  not my opinion that's you know how organic certification works
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  of crops and so but they can be pesticide free
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  but if you get an infestation you know once it's in there it'd
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  be very difficult to control and same with mildew very difficult
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  so that's been hydroponics daily for today vertical farming i
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  probably missed loads out so yeah let me know and i'll
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  do a follow-up thank you very much anyone wants to invite me
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  in for a tour of their vertical farm i'd be more than happy to
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  we work with a few vertical farms here and we supply them
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  with a number of different ingredients and different biostimulants
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  things like that so yeah but i've not been on any visits to
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  them i've been on to the out seen some outside ones but never on the inside
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  grow up farms in they're in kent they've got a massive facility and they're
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  going to be one of the ones that's going to be growing majorly in 2025 and beyond so watch this space.