Agriculture needs another revolution

Indoor (vertical) farming has the potential for multiplicative gains and can be a catalyst for the development of technologies (precision farming, rapid genetic engineering, robotics, and automation, etc.). So I wondered why it hasn’t taken off and where the sector is currently stuck.

A deep dive into this made me realize that while there is a huge potential for indoor farming to be a foundational and key transformative technology, the current focus on it is not effective. To effectively deploy indoor farming and reap its multiplicative benefits, the focus must be on cereal, pulses, and oil crops that use ~85% of the land used for agriculture for human consumption.¹

Background

Currently, about 50% of the habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture.² About 33% of the total agricultural land is used for growing crops (crops for food, feed, biofuels), with the rest 67% used as grazing land for livestock. For this article, I will only focus on the land use for growing crops.³

This is a lot of land used for agriculture! And it is massively spread out over large regions of land, which brings in a lot of inefficiencies to the system that manifests at multiple levels, making it hard to:

Maintain consistent yields throughout. This averages out globally, but the variabilities (profits, losses) are borne by farmers. This makes it a very uncertain sector, which will be made even more uncertain due to the effects of climate change.
Enable precision agriculture throughout all of agricultural land. Embedding sensors over the whole space, monitoring the land, ensuring water and nutrient sufficiency, eliminating pests, etc., all scales with land area.
Deploy automation and robotics. Robotics ideally requires a constrained environment. Land spread over a large area, generally with animal activity, makes it hard to build robots to help with monitoring and harvesting of plants.
Efficiently transport agricultural yield. Losses can occur over multiple stages (processing, storage, transport, etc.), with typical losses being around 10-20% but sometimes going as high as 40%.⁴

A potential foundational technology

A common solution to all this is to figure out how to grow plants, and even trees, in a constrained indoor environment. This has the potential to be a foundational (and disruptive) technology for multiple reasons (many of which solve the above-mentioned problems):

Exponential yields, especially when combining advancements in civil and structural engineering to farm in multistoried buildings.
Precision agriculture, by embedding sensors, designing climate-controlled buildings, real-time crop monitoring, and automation. Additional side effect of increased reliability, especially under the effects of climate change.
Robotic automation, by specifically growing plants, allowing easy automation of every part of the plant life cycle (seeding, maintaining, harvesting, and composting) using swarm-based robots.
Spatially concentrated yields allow relatively easy supply chain management and transportation, reducing post-yield losses currently suffered by agriculture.
Help ameliorate climate change and species extinction. The reduced land use for agriculture implies more land for forests and wildlife reserves. This would allow flora and fauna to spring back up, giving cascading effects such as increased carbon capture, reducing species extinction (and possibly increases of species).
A necessity to become a space-faring civilization.

However, there are some key assumptions:

Using multistoried buildings is cost-effective in the long term. The basis for this assumption is that eventually having an engineered building for agriculture would allow for lower costs per yield due to continuous monitoring, yield-optimized conditions, and automated harvest.
Reduced power costs in the future. Moving agriculture out of the sun and indoors implies generating light, maintaining climate, etc., which would have increased power costs. The assumption is that newer technologies with high power capabilities (per land use), like nuclear reactors (possibly fusion reactors), would reduce power costs substantially in the future.

Effective change

Most of the land is used for growing cereals/grains, oil crops, and pulses (~85-90% of the land).⁵ To make effective change, we need to focus on decreasing the land use required to grow these crops.

Currently, the focus of indoor and vertical farming is to grow fresh produce (vegetables). From what I gather, the reason for focusing on vegetables is because of ease of growth in soil-less systems (like hydroponics, aeroponics, etc.), ability to scale them vertically to increase yield, and a high rate of spoilage loss, necessitating local centers of fresh produce.

However, vegetable crops currently make about 3% of the total land use, so they are unlikely to make an effective dent. In addition, methods developed for these plants will likely not be generalizable for cereals, oil, and pulses.

To effectively reduce land use for agriculture, the key focus should be on developing technologies that enable mass indoor farming of cereals and pulses.

Shout out to Our World in Data for compiling the information and making it very accessible. ↩
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2019) - “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture’ [Online Resource] ↩
Reducing livestock related land use would require change in food preferences (covered in detail here) and/or development of plant-based meats (focus of good food institute). ↩
Number based on actual loss section in Post-harvest losses ↩
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2019) - “Land Use” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/land-use’ [Online Resource] ↩

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