This looks really promising. So what kind of vegetable can they grow? And what about strawberries? Can that system accommodate for that as well? And corn?

*related=http://videosift.com/video/The-future-of-indoor-farming

The future of indoor farming has been added as a related post - related requested by blacklotus90.

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

Think about it this way. Stack the corn trays just once and you just doubled your output for a given area.

You're right about getting less mileage from taller crops. But every vertical layer would in theory still double the area you have to work with each time you added one.

Scale this up to a skyscraper sized building and you could supply any city with all the food it could need locally.

It probably could start to skew the market towards squatter plants as you say, but I can't see why most if not all of the things we grow now couldn't be viable. (doubly so if they ever nail the process of growing meat)

I think corn would be doable, but the advantages would be less efficient compared to short plants.

At some level of efficiency, there is a break even point (which can also take into consideration shipping costs and fossil fuel usage to major metro areas). I'm pretty convinced that vertical farming could be a significantly good / efficient idea for those plants that it is best suited for, but I do think there would be some early-adoption issues that would make it less practical for tall stuff like corn. At least until it has been done enough to work out the kinks and economy of scale kicks in.

So at least for the time being, I think we'll see it first be applied to leafy plants and tuber / root plants. But I could definitely be a biased opinion since my family revolves around conventional corn farming on irrigated fields...