How High Is High Enough? Assessing Financial Risk for Vertical Farms Using Imprecise Probability

Decarbonization of Agriculture: The Greenhouse Gas Impacts and Economics of Existing and Emerging Climate-Smart Practices

The worldwide emphasis on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has increased focus on the potential to mitigate emissions through climate-smart agricultural practices, including regenerative, digital, and controlled environment farming systems. The effectiveness of these solutions largely depends on their ability to address environmental concerns, generate economic returns, and meet supply chain needs. In this Review, we summarize the state of knowledge on the GHG impacts and profitability of these three existing and emerging farming systems. Although we find potential for CO2 mitigation in all three approaches (depending on site-specific and climatic factors), we point to the greater level of research covering the efficacy of regenerative and digital agriculture in tackling non-CO2 emissions (i.e., N2O and CH4), which account for the majority of agriculture's GHG footprint. Despite this greater research coverage, we still find significant methodological and data limitations in accounting for the major GHG fluxes of these practices, especially the lifetime CH4 footprint of more nascent climate-smart regenerative agriculture practices. Across the approaches explored, uncertainties remain about the overall efficacy and persistence of mitigation-particularly with respect to the offsetting of soil carbon sequestration gains by N2O emissions and the lifecycle emissions of controlled environment agriculture systems compared to traditional systems. We find that the economic feasibility of these practices is also system-specific, although regenerative agriculture is generally the most accessible climate-smart approach. Robust incentives (including carbon credit considerations), investments, and policy changes would make these practices more financially accessible to farmers.

Design and validation of an open-sourced automation system for vertical farming

The Modular Automated Crop Array Online System (MACARONS) is a scalable, customisable and open-sourced platform designed for plant care, monitoring, and transportation. It offers specific dosing for individual plants, automated data logging of temperature, humidity, and images, and custom behaviours programmable in Python. Monitoring and control of the system is achieved through a web-interface. The system was validated by autonomously caring for five lettuce plants over a five-week period. This was done indoors under artificial lighting and uncontrolled ambient conditions. The system is estimated to perform the tasks required 30% faster than a human operator and can handle payloads of up to 5 kg with a maximum footprint of 750 mm × 500 mm. The validated system supports 12 payloads and can be easily scaled to accommodate more. The designs are released and meets the requirements of CERN-OSH-W, which includes step-by-step graphical build instructions and can be built at a cost of GBP 2241.72 (USD 2793.82). The system aims to provide cost-effective automation to reduce labour costs and provide precise control of irrigation and nutrients. The current system is limited by the dosing time and the space-use efficiency. We provided future directions and modifications that can be made to address this.

Economies of scale in constructing plant factories with artificial lighting and the economic viability of crop production

Since the introduction of LED lamps a decade ago, the plant factory with artificial lighting (PFAL) has been expected to be a savior that overcomes the food crisis, brings food safety, and enhances environmental friendliness. Despite such high expectations, the diffusion of commercial crop production in PFALs has been slow. It has been said that the main reason for this is the huge initial investment required to construct PFALs. This situation has attracted studies to access the economic feasibility of the crop production in PFALs. One thing strange in these studies is that they pay little attention to the scale of their PFALs. PFALs are factories so that they would be subject to economies of scale. If so, the scale of PFALs is an important factor that determines the economic feasibility of plant production in PFALs. However, no study has thus far attempted to examine whether economies of scale exist in the construction of PFALs. To fill this gap, this paper tries to examine, based on the data on the investment cost of PFAL construction collected from various countries and regions in the world, whether economies of scale exist in PFAL construction and, if yes, how it affects the economic viability of the plant production in PFALs by searching for the minimum scale that ensures PFAL crop production economically viable. The results show that economies of scale exist in PFAL construction, and that the production of lettuce, PFALs' most popular crop, is now well on a commercial basis with the technology level of the most advanced PFAL operators, but strawberries has not reached that stage yet. It is also shown that crop production in PFALs is highly sensitive to changes in the yield and the price of the crops: A 30% decline either in the yield or the price of lettuce would easily bring PFALs bankruptcy. It is discussed that the optimum scale of PFALs would depend not only on the economies of scale but also on the transaction costs, such as the costs of searching and keeping a sufficient number of buyers who offer good and stable crop prices.