I find it more interesting that they are growing this lettuce in a completely artificial environment at scale. One step toward a closed loop habitat but at a potentially larger scale than simple aquaponics installations. I'm still waiting for a 'high rise' farm, basically a multi-story hydroponics installation which can produce more food per surface acre than an existing farm can. If you can master the pollination cycle and control pests through environmental controls you have the basis for a sort of 'super-organic' type of farm.
Growing more food per acre in an indoor hydroponic farm is a reality today. The problem is your romaine from that hydro farm down the road is $3.99, and from the traditional farm shipped across the country is $1.99. Lights are a big part of the equation. Most plants need 10+ hours of sunlight a day, so even if you put the plants on a rotisserie you still have to supplement with artificial light ($$$).
The amount of water and land you save is immense, however, the water and land cost of putting a farm in an urban area counters that.
Pollination is easy - bees. Even basement/garage growers will use bees to pollinate. That said, you don't need bees in this example as you never want lettuce (or any leafy green) to flower. You can control the flowering with reduced temp and different light temperatures, too.
In tomato/pepper/fruiting plants, you'll need manual pollination or a beehive in your hydro-warehouse.
Re: super-organic - Most hydroponic growing is not organic. By nature of adding nutrients (fertilizer, salts, ph adjustments) that replace what is found in soil means hydroponics is traditionally not organic. There are organic hydroponics going on (I am not aware of a large-scale one) and they are NOT clean nor bug free, given the nature of making organic nutrients (they smell like shit, really, as most are compost or something-rotting-based).
There are externalities that are increasing the cost of 'land' farming, among them water availability, GMO concerns, pest control, and land/labor costs. At some point robot harvested, hydroponically grown, vegetables will cap the cost of producing food that way. And if the 'old fashioned' way will become more expensive than that.
The key difference in cost between the two is, as you point out, the cost of energy. Using 'free' solar power versus using grow lights, changes the equation fairly dramatically. But one of the possible futures is that humans will master the ability to harvest more abundant energy. In so doing, I believe humans will have changed the economics of hydroponics dramatically, and things like pest control and labor cost advantages will swing over to the hydroponics side.
They have 8 acres of greenhouse in Watsonville, and a producing some really impressive quantities of greens: more than 10 times per acre per year over conventional. They are aquaponic, which means they are growing both vegetables and fish (mostly sturgeon in their case). I have a friend with lots of traditional ag experience who visited them recently, and he seemed close to proclaiming they were the path to the future. I'll join you if you wrangle a tour.
Nice! I've 'reached out' to them, to use the vernacular, to see if they are open to informal tours. I'd love to see the control systems they use in a place like that. And understand where their current challenges are.
Do you have any links/references for a large scale hydroponics operation?
According to [0] from 2000, about 8% of the greenhouses in Almeria, Spain use hydroponics. [1] from 2010 says it's now 10%. The pictures in [2] show that 10% is still a lot...
Re: cost --
"FarmedHere CEO Jolanta Hardej says a 5.5-ounce box of its arugula retails in local markets for $4.99, 50 to 75 cents more than imported organic arugula. Still, she says it sells out because it is fresher and tastier. "
That is a ton, price wise, considering it is over the price of the organic which is over the price of what most consumers are buying.
If you can use solar to power lights within your grow building, good, but you'll never make it a 1:1 sun:light ratio... Plus the cost of panels (going down).
I'm not a naysayer, just trying to be realistic.
I have a fair amount of stuff growing in my basement in a mostly hands-off approach (reporting is here: http://www.oakwoodproduce.com/hydrolog/dashboard.html).. I think after a year I am breaking even or even ahead on kale, chard, lettuce, and for sure herbs. We haven't bought leafy greens or herbs in a long time, and often give away to the neighbors, food trucks, etc. My monthly cost is around $80 for lights and $20 for water/nutrients/supplies/seeds.
Tomatoes and peppers get pricey - need higher powered, hotter lights which need cooling and more electricity...
I grow herbs in my house in a consumer grade hydro system (really, like basil and mint, and sometimes lettuce, not weed) and a big thing for the organic types is no herbicides and no pesticides and that is pretty trivial for indoor hydro.
"If you can master the pollination cycle and control pests through environmental controls you have the basis for a sort of 'super-organic' type of farm."
Ironically, if you mastered indoor multi-story growing and it became the norm, you would almost certainly create a new marketing label for food that was grown in one layer outdoors. Similar to how we currently have a marketing label for "organic" food.
I've been seeing nephrologists (some of the best in the country) for almost a decade, and none of them has ever been remotely useful in planning out a diet. Neither have the nutritionists they've sent me to. They all know lots about nutrition, but they don't know anything about food. They also get really cagey/evasive when you try to ask for quantifiable guidelines -- like "tell me how many milligrams of potassium to stay under per day".
And don't get me started on hospital food. (Short version: my "renal diet" at Cedars Sinai was just half-portions of the regular diet -- including half a banana, and a 4-oz container of orange juice. No joke.)
Watching serving sizes is the trick, because "suggested" serving sizes are usually totally unrealistic. People will tell you to avoid spinach like the plague because they're used to thinking of it as a crapton of leaves boiled down to a few spoonfuls. But they might make you so paranoid that you avoid a sandwich that has three leaves of fresh spinach on it, despite the fact that there's more potassium in the bread! And conversely, they might not mention potatoes, because the suggested serving size is so small, but you'll get a ton of potassium if you eat a giant plate of french fries (potato skins even more so).
Some things nobody told me:
1) A baked potato has twice as much potassium as a banana.
2) So does an avocado.
3) Some fancy grains, like quinoa, are reasonably high in potassium.
4) Foods claiming to be "a good source of potassium" aren't always the most potassium-rich; that's just marketing, and tells you more about the calories per unit potassium than it does about the potassium per serving.
Often what is used to 'replace' salt is potassium chloride, which would be dangerous for those with kidney issues. I take a popular medication for high blood pressure control, lisinopril, which can interfere with potassium elimination by the kidneys so I have to be careful with it myself. I haven't needed to avoid potassium-rich foods which contain it naturally (periodic testing of potassium serum levels confirms this), but artificial supplementation with potassium chloride can be especially dangerous; V-8 vegetable juice is an excellent example: it's processed so heavily during production that nutrient are destroyed, so supplements are added, including enough potassium chloride to bring potassium levels to > 700mg in a 6 oz serving, so it's best avoided.
This pushes home the idea that to have food you essentially need energy. If electricity were abundant enough it could even make sense to grow vegetables close to people in cities, perhaps in the same buildings.
It's almost all energy... food, electricity, clean water, a lot of recycling options, even hydrocarbons could be synthesized from atmospheric carbon if you have cheap enough energy. The only exception is atoms, and even for many of those, if energy was cheap enough, we can just go get some more of the desirable atoms, like the rare earths, from space. Civilization is ultimately all about the energy.
By being able to control the nutrients and how fast the lettuce grows. Potassium intake varies with how fast the plant grows, so adjusting the light and temperature (along with other nutrients, like nitrogen, salt, etc) allows the lettuce to grow quickly (possibly under lights 24hrs a day) without taking up excess potassium.
With a clean environment, potassium levels can be reduced as well, as high potassium soil (fertilized that way) will allow the plant to uptake more potassium and increase its resilience to disease and bug damage.
"No pesticide is used and because the lettuce is produced in a clean room, it stays fresh for about two weeks when stored at 10 degrees Celsius or lower."
They don't need to use pesticides because of the clean room, which in turn makes for lower potassium content in the lettuce.
That's whats implied in the article, and it may be true, or a part of the truth, aside from that, from growing up with my gentleman farmer uncle, I know low K results in weak stems/leaves. This was often a problem with his popcorn field (yes there are specific breeds of corn for popcorn its not just generic corn, although he also grew sweetcorn for picnics and stuff... he was a popular guy) Those lettuce plants would probably blow flat if you breathed on them hard, much less put them out in the wind. I would predict low-K lettuce is significantly less crunchy that normal lettuce.
This is deducing that pesticides increase potassium uptake and storage in the lettuce which is not true.
You can, however, use lower potassium levels for plants that will not be subject to disease or bug stress. But there is not a direct relationship here.
That's hardly special. I've stored lettuce that I bought commercially for 4 weeks and it was fine. So that's 4 weeks plus however long it took to get to me. (I bought too much by mistake.)
Then it sounds like better preservation would be expected. The article says it lasts two weeks at 10°C. I have no idea how exceptional that is as I've never knowingly stored lettuce at 10°C, but it probably doesn't last as long as lettuce as refrigerator temperatures.
Http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/33540/does-a-head-of-lettuce-really-need-to-be-refrigerated gives a table showing that leaf lettuce at 10 degrees C evaporates only about 30% faster than leaf lettuce at 5 degrees C. That difference isn't that large.
It also gives head lettuce at best two weeks at five degrees centigrade. So, two weeks at 10 degrees seems a good result.
On the other hand, the article says _about_ two weeks; they might mean 'ten days plus', and 'freshness' may be highly subjective (I bet there is a standard for measuring lettuce freshness)
Humidity is a huge component of lettuce lifespan. You can't just plop lettuce into your fridge near 0c as it is quite dry (hence why fridges have crispers that maintain higher humidity for veggies, and are selectable to low humidity for fruits).
Frankly, if you're not using a head of lettuce in 2 weeks something is wrong with your eating and/or buying decision making :-)
The article only mentioned kidney disease, low potassium dietary restrictions, that the factory vegetable industry is going to grow, and that kids like factory lettuce better. No other details on motivations for getting into the factory vegetable business. The article makes it seem like the reason was just because they had the clean room facilities and they could - so why not?
No pesticide is used and because the lettuce is produced in a clean room, it stays fresh for about two weeks when stored at 10 degrees Celsius or lower.
Fujitsu Semiconductor and Toshiba Corp have both started to grow greens and believe the tightly-controlled conditions produce superior plants that can be tuned in terms of trace elements and therefore for taste or for specialized diets to meet health-care needs.
