The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettuce

That's why vertical farms wouldn't solve it even if they weren't imploding

My latest Canary essay is about vertical farms, which use much less land, much less water and much less fertilizer than traditional farms, release no polluted runoff into the environment, and aren’t affected by droughts, floods, heat waves and other traditional agricultural risks that will intensify as the climate keeps changing. They produce local food that doesn’t have to be shipped around the world. They don’t use pesticides, and unlike outdoor farms, they prevent birds from pooping on their crops.

Also, they’re failing, and the investors who just a couple years ago thought they’d be the sustainable answer to agricultural sprawl are losing their shirts.

I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it. But the essay isn’t really TL, and I hope you will R, because it’s really about the problems of horizontal farming that vertical farming is supposed to solve. The Canary folks told me it was their best-performing article last week, which is great because they took a risk commissioning a regular food and climate column for an energy and climate site.

You can R it here.

The main point of just about all my Eating the Earth columns, as I laid out in the introductory column, is that it’s going to be incredibly difficult, but also incredibly necessary, for the world to produce much more food with much less land. That’s also going to be the main point of my annoyingly unfinished book for Simon & Schuster about how to feed the world without frying the world. Vertical farms, unfortunately, aren’t going to feed the world without frying the world, because you can’t feed the world with salad greens, but they really help illuminate the problem.

One more thing: We’re going to need a lot of cool technology to solve the problem - I've banged my spoon on my high chair about this - and vertical farms use a lot of cool technology. They’re food factories run by robots. They use artificial intelligence to optimize their harvests. Their magenta LED lighting gives them a futuristic club vibe.

But vertical farms are not technologies. They’re farms. They’re manufacturing facilities that deliver physical products to brick-and-mortar grocery stores; they don’t make digital software that they can distribute around the world at no cost with a click. That’s why it’s crazy that so many exuberant investors gave them tech valuations, and that’s why those valuations have crashed. I’m way more bullish on alternative proteins, but I think this explains the collapse of Beyond Meat’s stock, too; it’s a food company that was valued as a tech company. It makes atoms, not electrons.

Unfortunately, these realities might make it harder for food-tech and ag-tech startups to raise cash. Like I said, food and ag is an incredibly difficult problem. But the future of humanity does depend on it, and as Kenny Torella of Vox Media explained in a recent piece that quoted me, the media tend to ignore it. Kenny’s main point, which I must confess I find quite compelling, is that it’s good when obsessive dorks write about this stuff.

And of course when extremely attractive and intelligent people read about this stuff, so thanks for reading, and for sending around links to my articles and this Substack. I’m going to start emitting more regularly soon, especially now that it looks like Twitter is using the vertical farming industry as its business model.