Vertical farming may be a practical path toward transforming traditional African food production. The technologies can boost climate resilience and crop yields to feed the growing population.
Pictured: Spinach germplasm in a vertical farm system. Photo by Fred Miller / The Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station (CC BY-SA 2.0)
This article makes the classic mistake that pretty much all vertical farming articles do – of comparing Vertical Farms with traditional farms. The problem is that when you compare this with state-of-the art modern greenhouses (like the Dutch moving gullys for example), you get a very different answer, because modern greenhouses have pretty much all the positive features described above, but far fewer of the negatives – in particular the energy requirements of Vertical Farms far far exceed horizontal greenhouses. As a result vertical farms produce food at a far higher cost (both financial and impact) than regular greenhouses and have been going broke all over the place despite raising lots of investment from people who like the snappy videos and don’t actually do their research !
About Plenty We are on a mission to grow plenty of fresh food for everyone, everywhere. We are building the world’s largest, most technologically advanced, indoor vertical farms. ...
This article makes the classic mistake that pretty much all vertical farming articles do – of comparing Vertical Farms with traditional farms. The problem is that when you compare this with state-of-the art modern greenhouses (like the Dutch moving gullys for example), you get a very different answer, because modern greenhouses have pretty much all the positive features described above, but far fewer of the negatives – in particular the energy requirements of Vertical Farms far far exceed horizontal greenhouses. As a result vertical farms produce food at a far higher cost (both financial and impact) than regular greenhouses and have been going broke all over the place despite raising lots of investment from people who like the snappy videos and don’t actually do their research !