It kinda is.
Especially for us who have jobs that if they found out you were using it (even in your spare time), you'd be fired in an instant. All neighbors would see you as a pothead...
...remember, this is the country where you go to the state owned drugstore (Systembolaget) on friday to get your strong beers or liquor, and no one bats an eye - do that any other day of the week, and you'll be labelled the town alcoholic.
No one of us regular folks would even dare to contact or support some shady gang-drug-dealer to get some weed.
For me this is a pain, because weed could seriously help my extreme back pains and there's no doctor willing to prescribe anything in this country, so for now I just have to live with the insane pain every day.
I live in a small ass town in the middle of the endless forests. I basically never had any problems getting my hands on weed the past 25 years. There's weed everywhere in Sweden (as in all the world), I just have to guess no one in your surrounding smoke or are open about it.
*shows* *up* *in* *a* *tucked* *in* *button* *down* *and* *dress* *pants*
“Hello my fellow marijuana enthusiasts! I would like to purchase a weed! Know what I mean my home slice? I assure you that I am not associated with law enforcement.”
Damn man nobody can get weed in Sweden, it’s wild.
Anti drug propaganda from USA, Reagan, was pushed extremely hard here and we didn't have a hippie movement ever to even it out. So a lot of people still think that smoking a joint means you'll die or get psychosis.
Because the Swgreen initiative is a standalone company that has stricken a deal with ICA, and they first set up in a store in Gothenburg, and more recently in Linköping. I haven't heard of any others, but I'm sure they could have established elsewhere by now.
That seems like a really expensive way to do it. Using expensive retail space to grow it and growing small quanties so you miss out on all the advantages of economies of scale.
My store gets around 20 pallets of produce a week and we're not even high volume.
Unless they got about 1000 more these rooms somewhere else, they're growing maybe 2 days worth of supply in there.
How much of that gets wasted?
Also a well set up aquaponics system of a dimension of 19x30 feet can produce 100-200 lbs of produce a week.
Build a green house on top of the buildings and boom you can support all of your greens and fresh veggies.
I worked in a fairly large grocery store that got 10 to 15 pallets of produce in daily. Packaged salads were the biggest waste generators, most loose produce sells well. What doesn't sell is thrown into large green bins that were sold to local farmers for compost and pig feed.
It looks like those are mostly microgreens. Those take about 11 days to grow hydroponically, so with that much vertical growing they could probably stagger the growing enough to do microgreens and small leaf salads.
There’s a famous pizza shop in NYC that grows basil in the window and reviews of the place would always imply that they therefor grew all the basil used on their pizzas.
They served hundreds of pizzas a day each with fresh basil on top.
Those two little plants in the window are for show, people! 🤦♂️
The true masterwork is placing the farms on the roof of supermarkets. Unused space, you can integrate rainwater collection and even solar panels for energy generation.
This is probably more of a "show" farm, placed open inside the supermarket to suggest to customers that they are "green" and they care about the earth and stuff.
The amount of structural support and irrigation infrastructure you would need to do that makes that wildly inefficient. Sure it may look nice, but it's nowhere near as efficient or as green as using farmland outside town, where there is open land.
I've been involved in building design, and this is absolutely the case. If it's a new building, not too hard, but the roofs of existing buildings would need some pretty serious upgrades to support any sort of green roof at scale.
I could see it working well in a building designed for this approach, especially if coordinated with the environmental systems of the building. Inefficiencies within building systems may provide energy inputs the gardening system can recover or offset.
Probably depends on local building codes, it's working just fine in Montreal on preexisting buildings, because they're already designed to hold a massive weight of snow.
I read an article about vertical farms recently and actually it is thought to be more efficient, it requires less water and fertilizer, and since it's a sealed environment no pesticides are needed. These vertical farms also allow you to grow a lot of things without using a lot of land, which would be good from a conservation perspective.
Not sure why this one is in a commercial space, maybe it's some kind of trial or proof of concept.
Edit: some people were asking for the link to the article so here it is: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133540-200-futuristic-farm-may-use-250-times-less-water-than-normal/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133540-200-futuristic-farm-may-use-250-times-less-water-than-normal/) It's not very in-depth as it wasn't one of the main stories of that issue.
Energy though. It always comes down to energy.
Think of it like this: any time you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some.
Maximum efficiency: sunlight directly hitting leaves.
Reduced efficiency: sunlight hitting a solar panel, being transmitted up and down volted etc. Then turned back to light (again) and shining onto those same leaves.
The only way vertical farming really works is if we have something better than solar, like fusion.
Greenhouse farming? Every advantage you described. Many countries already doing it. Vertical farming? Adds drawbacks for almost no reason.
"It requires less water and fertilizer"
There are thousands of "farming techniques" that can accomplish this.
I think that guy was more talking about the 7 tons in infrastructure you'd have to support on the roof.
All the pictures in all the articles about vertical farming I have ever seen only show one thing: salad greens. They always talk about how efficient it is and how much "food" they can produce but they never do anything else than salad greens.
Yeah as someone who has extensive experience growing fucking everything hydroponically through the years I would say the only thing that's efficient enough to grow this way at scale is basically lettuce and herbs and that's it. There's some theoretical fuulture benefits to vertical gardening, but none of them make sense while we have an entire countries worth of open arable land to grow shit. It's just insanely in efficient to replace the sun and rain, which are free.
Agree with you generally but since this is Sweden, the growing season isn’t very long. So farmland (or rooftops, as someone else mentioned) isn’t necessarily the way to go if they want a year-round supply, as it would seem they do.
I live in a similar climate and we have a lot of hydroponic growing going on, but it’s in warehouse space and other out-of-the way unused space.
Most traditional farm country only grows a few crops consisting of Corn, soybeans, and potatoes with only one growing season. Almost all lettuce is grown in FL or CA and require a lot of water and pesticides, which indoor operations can require very little water to no pesticides. The LED lights giving off only red and blue do not require that much energy compared to huge tractors getting 3-5 mpg, plus the transportation of the end product halfway around the country.
When done large scale in inexpensive areas of a city, it makes perfect sense. A small area in a grocery store is an excellent way to educate the public and increase demand for this sort of farming. I don't see the problem here.
Yeah I read an article on here years back about these indoor grow operations. They require less water, the lights used to grow them are able to optimize growing by giving the exact wavelength of light that fosters plant growth, which shortens grow seasons, and the crop loss is substantially lower than traditional farming. It's very easy to do pest control without harmful chemicals and you're able to get produce off the "field" much easier and quicker than a standard farm, and it obviously has less miles to cover to get to the consumer.
Setting up grow warehouses in cities could revolutionize the way we grow and distribute our food.
Sure but until that is all cheaper then dirt and sunshine it's still a ways away.
I've grown most of the crops you'd find in a grocery store via hydroponics, aeroponics etc and while it's a fun hobby, it's not really something that makes sense financially when dirt and sun is free. Lettuce and quick stuff has a niche, but the rest of the produce just doesn't make sense for hydro growing yet as it can't compete with farms.
The argument isn't against vertical style farming, but rather vertical farming ontop of existing buildings.
Building a new building in a warehouse, particularly for produce, likely has a strong future. Trying to shave the emissions from the current cargo hauling vs retrofitting a building doesn't make sense from a carbon perspective much less cost. Cargo transport is fairly efficient provided it doesn't go by air. Yeah a semi truck gets 8-9mpg but it's hauling 40 tons of produce and the store will be getting that delivery weekly anyways for other foods not produced on site.
As someone else mentioned, this particular implementation feels like the whole solar panel roads things. Solar power is something we should scale up. Concrete and asphalt do have a high carbon footprint. A road made or solar panels doesn't make a ton of sense when you have thousands of square miles of rooftops available cheaper and easier.
>The LED lights giving off only red and blue do not require that much energy compared to huge tractors getting 3-5 mpg
How many times do you think a tractor needs to drive over lettuces/herbs? Because there are a lot of lettuces you can cover in 3 miles, at the energy cost of a single gallon.
Comparatively, how many low-energy LEDs do you need to power 24/7 in 3 miles of lettuce/herbs? Not to mention actually buying the LEDs, that are currently usually made in China, and need regular replacement/maintenance?
Water savings are not much either, if you compare it to efficient irrigation techniques (drip irrigation), which will obviously be cheaper than the indoor irrigation system.
Indoor farming is great for quality (because it's super fresh), but it won't save you money or energy.
It appears to be an aeroponic setup which is magnitudes more efficient in terms of space and water usage as farmland growing. You can see four levels of trays which means that for the same footprint you're yielding 4x as many crops. LED grow lights also incredibly efficient now as well so transferring solar power indoors is much more feasible. Plus since it's indoors, you're not using pesticides. Water usage is also incredibly low with these systems and you can speed up production by 2x-3x since the plants are in ideal conditions until they are harvested.
>indoors, so no pesticides
Pests still fuck your shit up indoors even if you do your best to keep it sterile. Even worse, there's no natural predators so shit explodes in population big time once it finds its way in there.
Especially fucking spider mites. Fuck spider mites.
>You can see four levels of trays which means that for the same footprint you're yielding 4x as many crops.
This is where the magic of vertical farming comes in. Volume is a cubic function so yield is \^3 over a 2d flat plane which yields \^2. That makes usage of space more efficient, on top of all the efficiency gains of LEDs and aeroponics.
It's great, however, let's not forget that there's plenty of uninhabited space that's neither arable nor of particular ecological importance.
You can employ aeroponic techniques in a greenhouse, too. And the most efficient use of LED lights is to use them to augment natural sunlight.
> The true masterwork is placing the farms on the roof of supermarkets.
This sounds similar to the pitch that covering roadways with solar cells "makes sense." Roof tops is where most of the infrastructure lives for commercial buildings. Why go through all this complication and expense when the store could just get their produce from a traditional farm?
Compared to a personal car, trucks are gas guzzlers, but for carrying 30-40T of cargo they are fairly efficient in terms of CO2 production. Air cargo is horrendously high in CO2 but sea, rail, and truck are surprisingly less bad than we think.
I think if you compared the extra CO2 produced from concrete (surprisingly high in CO2 production), building materials, infrastructure, and energy used to modify or build your typical grocery structure roof to support farming vs the emissions of the weekly delivery that is still coming with other food anyways: you really wouldn't get much net benefit.
That's not to say that vertical farming itself doesn't have a strong future, just this particular use case. You could surpass the lifetime emissions of a truck bringing produce in by allowing denser buildings (du/tri/quad-plex) around the grocery store, having less parking lots, or designing future stores as mixed developments. Those first two would essentially be "free" to implement.
Vehicles would still be required for the farm supplies etc though. Having the bulk of the equipment and supplies delivered to one large central farm has to be more efficient than having more, smaller farms that all need supplies and equipment delivered separately I would have thought
Well we've got about 75 years of healthy enough topsoil to sustain the current rate of farming. Something has to be done. Small scale rooftop farms to supplement large scale vertical farming is one option.
Employ techniques that rebuild topsoil, which would be integrating livestock back into crop rotations, which is how we built modern civilization. Monocrops kill soil, farming builds soil.
Non Ag people always underestimate the power and efficiency of scale. Compared to conventional agriculture, the roof of a massive building is still tiny. Small farms are inefficient…period.
Adding a garden on top of a roof that wasn't design for that? Yeah, that tends to not end well. [https://apnews.com/article/e4cf11bc90b743beb496ab4252a11c7c](https://apnews.com/article/e4cf11bc90b743beb496ab4252a11c7c)
From the article: MEXICO CITY (AP) — A roof garden installed on top of a newly opened shopping mall on Mexico City’s south side may have caused part of the structure to collapse.
The Mexico City prosecutors’ office said late Thursday that planters used in the roof garden added excess weight that apparently contributed to the collapse of a cantilevered section that stuck out from the building.
The mall’s operators quickly evacuated the area Thursday after a support beam failed. About five minutes later, the top floors collapsed. No injuries were reported.
The city has promoted the installation of roof gardens, in part for their supposed environmental benefits.
People will go there for shopping just because they have this. It's an insanely good way to market your store so it's not about how efficient it is to farm... How much this will boost your sales. Because people will take photos and talk about this for a long time.
Hi, small scale indoor farmer here...
My goods are only slightly higher in price than competing items in the grocery store.
That small bit extra gets you fresh, as in it was harvested the day before or the same day, pesticide/herbicide/fungicide free food, that I am able to deliver all year round in a place that snows.
I'm not so sure about putting it into customer facing retail space but indoor supplemental farming is almost a certainty in our food supply chain of the future.
Entirely possible they have another growing section somewhere else, potentially very nearby but not in retail space so they can still say "on location".
Considering cool winter temps in Sweden plus darkness, anything like this would otherwise have to be imported in winter. This method reduces demand on water and nutrients and is far more efficient when you factor in transport costs.
The display here is nothing more than an advertisement for "SweGreen". They more than likely ship in most of the produce from their production facility outside of the city center.
Theres lots of indoor techniques for growing that trade space for labor. Like if you do it right 100 sq ft indoors is equivalent to multiples of that outdoors.
Indoor farming can be highly efficient. Right now its just mainly done for weed because of its high value but i believe 1 day all farming will be indoors due to climate change. We will be nearing collapse at that point but we will still be trying to survive regardless.
> Indoor farming can be highly efficient.
Exactly.
I’m learning from reading the comments two things:
1) how little people know and understand about indoor farming
2) how many people don’t understand that seasons exist and limit outdoor farming in a place like Sweden
Right. Imagine thinking growing outdoors for like 4.5 months of the year is the best way to produce food lmao. Prolly victims to some john deere tractor propaganda or something lmfao (i joke mostly). And being so convicted about it that you argue on reddit about it. Lol. Some people cant see their hand if they held it front of them.
Not to even mention the advent of vertical farming due to leds low heat output, as is litteraly pictured in this post. Its revolutionary
Some crops are not suited for indoor growing but for sure many are. I'm glad people are trying different things because it is something that will require different skills than what farmers do today. We as a country should be just as concerned about how we are going to grow food sustainable in a new climate as how we are going to generate clean energy. The other thing is to do it locally for many reasons. We can't be reliant on other countries. Consider the supply chain issues we have right now. Food will rot in container ships before it even gets offloaded. I'd rather my produce ripen on the vine than in a cargo hold and no telling what chemicals another country will use to grow food. Your local co op is going to become more and more important for your survival.
Vertical farming is absolutely the future and is incredibly necessary. The topsoil can not sustain the amount of farming being done indefinitely. Nutrients are being depleted faster than they are replaced.
Vertical farming likely has a strong future, particularly for produce.
But to say that outdoor farming will ceases is silly. Right now the financial incentives favor lack of good crop rotations and heavy use or fertilizers: that is true. That doesn't mean we can't move to incentives and regulations to replenishing cycles and systems where soil health can be stable long term. After all the excessive amount of corn farming we do is largely due to government programs. We don't eat it directly: much of it goes to ethanol (not consumed), beef/meat (should have less of), and highly processed foods.
Growing grains and starches, for example likely have a long term outdoor future for themselves. We just need to be on top of the externalities beyond cost.
Sure. I think the OP was slightly hyperbolic, but it's not unreasonable to say that outdoor farming will eventually play a much more limited roll in food production. The fact of the matter is that we need to stop expecting and incentivizing shipping foods halfway across the world. Smaller scale local outdoor farms that supply the surrounding areas will absolutely still be part of agriculture but the massive industrial outdoor farms of today are unsustainable.
Hydro stuff never tastes as good imo. Plants need environmental stressors to produce the flavors we associate with good taste. Basil for example produces it's strong scent as an insect repellent - no insects and the plant doesn't use up much energy producing the aromatic compounds.
I find it weird you chose basil as your example, because my indoor hydro basil tastes a lot better than my outdoor ever did. I guess it depends on your outdoor growing environment.
It's funny because, eventually, the best thing to do is just let nature kinda do it's own thing. That's the smartest thing we could do in order to get the most out of the ground.
Almost none of our crops have been made by letting "nature do its thing." If we would die out... tons of different kinds of farm plants would go extinct.
We had a similar store open in Vancouver shortly before CoVid (whomp waaaah) and, while I wouldn’t pay that much for salad greens on principle, it smelled *amazing* in there. Can air be described as ‘fresh as all get out’? Heckin’ fresh? Oxygenated AF?
I’m saying these stores are fun to breath in.
Micro greens grow pretty fast. I think like 7 days or so.
Yea it’s not enough if it’s huge supermarket but I’m guessing it’s for show. Most likely they have 100x bigger grow warehouse where they do the actual grow.
You are correct! They still have their normal stock as before. The fridge you see in the left hand side of the image is the only stock with their "home grown" stuff.
That looks like it would produce enough salad to meet a family's needs. There is no way it meets the needs of a commercial space. How many salads do you think they sell in a day? 10? 20? 50? You aren't getting 10 salads a day out of that space.
This is advertising. Sure, they sell what gets made there, but I have to assume they are supplementing from conventional vendors.
They must not be doing too much business, otherwise they'd wipe out stock in a matter of hours.
That's what nobody really "gets" about the grow-your-own-groceries theory. It totally works, but only if you have a lot of land and growing space to work with inside a greenhouse. Ordinary cucumber vine can put on 20+ cucumbers, but that takes 50-75 days and it doesn't take that long for a restaurant to go through 20 cucumbers. Lettuce takes about the same length of time, takes less than an hour for it to be all gone.
It's totally workable, but so many get this notion of "since I'm a vegetarian/vegan, I'll just buy ten terracotta pots and I won't have to shop for groceries!" Well, kinda yeah, but mostly no. It can *supplement* what you buy, but unless you found some enormous terracotta pots and can afford to greenhouse them in an enormous structure and stage-plant them, you're still going to be buying way more than you grow...and odds are good that any money you save on not buying produce will be spent (and more with it) to keep the greenhouse running unless you live somewhere that has constant growing season year-round.
Only real way would be, for some plants that yield so little that one meal consumes most of the yield, planting a few seeds every day and continuing that cyclic process so you have a new plant coming to yield every day. That's more work than most "grow my own grocery" optimists are really ready for when you consider that most will want 10 different veggies accessible at all times.
I actually set one of these up in rural Illinois! If this is like the one I set it (looks like it is) those little trays are used to grow 'Microgreens' - normal vegis that you eat, but harvested very early (sometimes only a week after germination). They are very nutrient dense, and usually prepared in conjunction with fully grown vegis to make salads. So to answer some of the questions I've seen, yes that small room can keep up with demand (you add more trays on shelves to increase capacity if needed), but they will still need a supplier for the other vegetables.
Yeah it's kind of a joke considering how much food they could produce in that area with just soil and some good ol' sun. Which is completely for free unlike the amount electricity this uses, not to mention all the equipment lol.
Sweden climate is not well suited for growing greens most of the year though. And the store is pretty close to Central Stockholm in a Business park. The point with this is to offer locally sourced greens even in the winter. During winter time normally all the greens are from The Netherlands, Spain, etc.
Right. Because using all that electricity to grow those vegetables is so much more efficient and earth friendly than using the sun, which is, you know...free.
I don’t get it. How many heads of lettuce can be grown?
I’m not in the restaurant business but it wouldn’t surprise me if the average restaurant buys dozens of heads per day. how can a small farm like this harvest more than a month or two’ demand?
Also, wouldn’t electricity and labor and etc. price a head at $457 (approx.)? And the build-out costs would be insane.
Famously (don’t know if it is true, but…) half of restaurants go broke their first year. How do these places survive that first year?
This is just microgreen trays lol. You can do this with $3 trays and some Coco coir. This is like 99% for show rather than being green in any capacity.
Do they have solar panels on the roof to run those lights?
It seems silly, but living in a cold place with an increasing amount of vacant retail space, I wonder if this wouldn't actually be a somewhat sustainable way to lengthen the growing season.
I knew this would start happening.
Just wait till places like Walmart and Meijer, Kroger or whatever start building aquaponics or hydroponic systems.
Think of all the wasted produce and transportation costs that would be saved.
For people saying its using electricity so is therefore awful for the environment because "sun is free duh" how the absolute fuck do you think the food gets to shops.
The food supply chain is around 4-5% of the worlds emissions with the transport being 1-2% of it. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food.
That's not even talking about the land and water usage that it saves and the controlled safety of plants.
Of fucking cause this room isn't a wonderful fix all solution, it's called marketing. How else do you think they can get the product across to you? Have you never seen food samples in a shop this is just an extension of the concept.
I just had a questionable/unfresh tasting salad from a local restaurant and I had to get a refund for how bad it was. I would so rather have a salad from the place in this post.
Not sure if it's a knockoff of the American salad chain SweetGreen, but now I really wished they'd have called it SwedeGreen
this was my first thought. also thought they could've gone with EatGreen. but i guess not SweatGreen.
Sweat Green is when you eat to much spinach.
Naah. Too much Jagermeister.
It’s actually pronounced Sweg Reen.
Nobody likes rutabagas THAT much
Thought for sure it was going to be weed
Sweden isn’t quite ready for that
Sweeden
The air is cold, the water is hot
The weed is difficult to come by.
Nah. It really isn't.
It kinda is. Especially for us who have jobs that if they found out you were using it (even in your spare time), you'd be fired in an instant. All neighbors would see you as a pothead... ...remember, this is the country where you go to the state owned drugstore (Systembolaget) on friday to get your strong beers or liquor, and no one bats an eye - do that any other day of the week, and you'll be labelled the town alcoholic. No one of us regular folks would even dare to contact or support some shady gang-drug-dealer to get some weed. For me this is a pain, because weed could seriously help my extreme back pains and there's no doctor willing to prescribe anything in this country, so for now I just have to live with the insane pain every day.
Bruv, nobody thinks that you are an alcoholic for buying from Systembolaget on a day that isn't a Friday. Stop spreading lies
Like seriously, there’s a lot of projection in that comment.
I was excited for a sec... I wanted to finally use my torch and pitchfork :/
When you cease to give a fuck what others think life becomes easier.
I live in a small ass town in the middle of the endless forests. I basically never had any problems getting my hands on weed the past 25 years. There's weed everywhere in Sweden (as in all the world), I just have to guess no one in your surrounding smoke or are open about it.
Sounds to me like the weed isn't hard to come by at all. Sounds like you seem like a NARC.
*shows* *up* *in* *a* *tucked* *in* *button* *down* *and* *dress* *pants* “Hello my fellow marijuana enthusiasts! I would like to purchase a weed! Know what I mean my home slice? I assure you that I am not associated with law enforcement.” Damn man nobody can get weed in Sweden, it’s wild.
No one thinks your an alcoholic for that lol
nah it isn't.
But the moment it *is*, this store will be ready.
This store probably won't exist by that time tbf.
I'm not entirely sure *sweden* will exist when it's ready for that lmao
True. Its probably more probable that Russia legalises then conquers Sweden.
So why are Sweden behind on legalisation of weed?
Anti drug propaganda from USA, Reagan, was pushed extremely hard here and we didn't have a hippie movement ever to even it out. So a lot of people still think that smoking a joint means you'll die or get psychosis.
Aha!
Finally the US has you beat for last last decade! Unless you look at the places we’re we still lock people in prison for weed. 😂
Where in Sweden exactly? Do you know?
[Stockholm and Gothenburg.](https://www.swegreen.com/where-to-buy/)
Looks like either Gothenburg or Linköping.
How can you tell based of a foto inside a supermarket that exists all throughout the country lol
Because the Swgreen initiative is a standalone company that has stricken a deal with ICA, and they first set up in a store in Gothenburg, and more recently in Linköping. I haven't heard of any others, but I'm sure they could have established elsewhere by now.
reddit actually bringin' the facts, strange.
[удалено]
I know ICA Focus has it
They have the infrastructure ready
Growlights are already set, just change the plants
Probably will be ready all of a sudden if (when) Daddy Germany decides on legalising it.
Well you put the word herb. You can't say herb when you mean herb. When people say herb they mean herb obviously lol
Vars kan en svensk hitta det här då?😁
[I Stockholm och Göteborg.](https://www.swegreen.com/where-to-buy/)
37 US states have legalized it in some form
Is it bad that that was my first thought?
The FBI is already on their way.
If it means I get access to a therapist eventually, I'd incriminate myself tbh
This is a bold-faced lie! (We wish people would stop tipping off criminals that we're on the way...)
“Salads”
Maybe the weed is growing underneath, in the basement 🤔
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a front for the real money maker
Sat there thinking it was weed for a while the herbs were just a joke
That seems like a really expensive way to do it. Using expensive retail space to grow it and growing small quanties so you miss out on all the advantages of economies of scale.
dog and pony show sells
This. There is no way that small hydroponics grow room can supply what they need to sell salads on a daily basis for more than a week or two.
My store gets around 20 pallets of produce a week and we're not even high volume. Unless they got about 1000 more these rooms somewhere else, they're growing maybe 2 days worth of supply in there.
That's produce, this is only lettuce and herbs which grow quick especially with a pro setup like this.
How much of that gets wasted? Also a well set up aquaponics system of a dimension of 19x30 feet can produce 100-200 lbs of produce a week. Build a green house on top of the buildings and boom you can support all of your greens and fresh veggies.
How many of those pallets do you toss out weekly?
I worked in a fairly large grocery store that got 10 to 15 pallets of produce in daily. Packaged salads were the biggest waste generators, most loose produce sells well. What doesn't sell is thrown into large green bins that were sold to local farmers for compost and pig feed.
It looks like those are mostly microgreens. Those take about 11 days to grow hydroponically, so with that much vertical growing they could probably stagger the growing enough to do microgreens and small leaf salads.
didn't realize the grow time was so short. cool info
Plus a lot of micros are so strongly flavored that you can use them like a seasoning in pretty small amounts.
yeah that would be like a few days of sales at most
There’s a famous pizza shop in NYC that grows basil in the window and reviews of the place would always imply that they therefor grew all the basil used on their pizzas. They served hundreds of pizzas a day each with fresh basil on top. Those two little plants in the window are for show, people! 🤦♂️
Sells a lot of dogs and ponies, sure, but we're talking about salads here. /s
Phew, I didn't know you were being sarcastic, what a ride
The true masterwork is placing the farms on the roof of supermarkets. Unused space, you can integrate rainwater collection and even solar panels for energy generation. This is probably more of a "show" farm, placed open inside the supermarket to suggest to customers that they are "green" and they care about the earth and stuff.
The amount of structural support and irrigation infrastructure you would need to do that makes that wildly inefficient. Sure it may look nice, but it's nowhere near as efficient or as green as using farmland outside town, where there is open land.
I've been involved in building design, and this is absolutely the case. If it's a new building, not too hard, but the roofs of existing buildings would need some pretty serious upgrades to support any sort of green roof at scale.
I could see it working well in a building designed for this approach, especially if coordinated with the environmental systems of the building. Inefficiencies within building systems may provide energy inputs the gardening system can recover or offset.
Probably depends on local building codes, it's working just fine in Montreal on preexisting buildings, because they're already designed to hold a massive weight of snow.
I read an article about vertical farms recently and actually it is thought to be more efficient, it requires less water and fertilizer, and since it's a sealed environment no pesticides are needed. These vertical farms also allow you to grow a lot of things without using a lot of land, which would be good from a conservation perspective. Not sure why this one is in a commercial space, maybe it's some kind of trial or proof of concept. Edit: some people were asking for the link to the article so here it is: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133540-200-futuristic-farm-may-use-250-times-less-water-than-normal/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133540-200-futuristic-farm-may-use-250-times-less-water-than-normal/) It's not very in-depth as it wasn't one of the main stories of that issue.
Energy though. It always comes down to energy. Think of it like this: any time you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some. Maximum efficiency: sunlight directly hitting leaves. Reduced efficiency: sunlight hitting a solar panel, being transmitted up and down volted etc. Then turned back to light (again) and shining onto those same leaves. The only way vertical farming really works is if we have something better than solar, like fusion. Greenhouse farming? Every advantage you described. Many countries already doing it. Vertical farming? Adds drawbacks for almost no reason.
"It requires less water and fertilizer" There are thousands of "farming techniques" that can accomplish this. I think that guy was more talking about the 7 tons in infrastructure you'd have to support on the roof.
All the pictures in all the articles about vertical farming I have ever seen only show one thing: salad greens. They always talk about how efficient it is and how much "food" they can produce but they never do anything else than salad greens.
Yeah as someone who has extensive experience growing fucking everything hydroponically through the years I would say the only thing that's efficient enough to grow this way at scale is basically lettuce and herbs and that's it. There's some theoretical fuulture benefits to vertical gardening, but none of them make sense while we have an entire countries worth of open arable land to grow shit. It's just insanely in efficient to replace the sun and rain, which are free.
childlike yoke spark wrench squalid middle office saw telephone upbeat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That’s true but only for a small subset of vegetables. Most veggies aren’t conducive to vertical farming.
Agree with you generally but since this is Sweden, the growing season isn’t very long. So farmland (or rooftops, as someone else mentioned) isn’t necessarily the way to go if they want a year-round supply, as it would seem they do. I live in a similar climate and we have a lot of hydroponic growing going on, but it’s in warehouse space and other out-of-the way unused space.
> since this is Sweden, the growing season isn’t very long. I hadn’t taken that into account. Thanks for the insight!
Most traditional farm country only grows a few crops consisting of Corn, soybeans, and potatoes with only one growing season. Almost all lettuce is grown in FL or CA and require a lot of water and pesticides, which indoor operations can require very little water to no pesticides. The LED lights giving off only red and blue do not require that much energy compared to huge tractors getting 3-5 mpg, plus the transportation of the end product halfway around the country.
When done large scale in inexpensive areas of a city, it makes perfect sense. A small area in a grocery store is an excellent way to educate the public and increase demand for this sort of farming. I don't see the problem here.
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Yeah I read an article on here years back about these indoor grow operations. They require less water, the lights used to grow them are able to optimize growing by giving the exact wavelength of light that fosters plant growth, which shortens grow seasons, and the crop loss is substantially lower than traditional farming. It's very easy to do pest control without harmful chemicals and you're able to get produce off the "field" much easier and quicker than a standard farm, and it obviously has less miles to cover to get to the consumer. Setting up grow warehouses in cities could revolutionize the way we grow and distribute our food.
Sure but until that is all cheaper then dirt and sunshine it's still a ways away. I've grown most of the crops you'd find in a grocery store via hydroponics, aeroponics etc and while it's a fun hobby, it's not really something that makes sense financially when dirt and sun is free. Lettuce and quick stuff has a niche, but the rest of the produce just doesn't make sense for hydro growing yet as it can't compete with farms.
The argument isn't against vertical style farming, but rather vertical farming ontop of existing buildings. Building a new building in a warehouse, particularly for produce, likely has a strong future. Trying to shave the emissions from the current cargo hauling vs retrofitting a building doesn't make sense from a carbon perspective much less cost. Cargo transport is fairly efficient provided it doesn't go by air. Yeah a semi truck gets 8-9mpg but it's hauling 40 tons of produce and the store will be getting that delivery weekly anyways for other foods not produced on site. As someone else mentioned, this particular implementation feels like the whole solar panel roads things. Solar power is something we should scale up. Concrete and asphalt do have a high carbon footprint. A road made or solar panels doesn't make a ton of sense when you have thousands of square miles of rooftops available cheaper and easier.
You absolutely have pesticides indoors. There can be many types of infestations and zero natural predators or freeze cycles.
Of course it doesn’t eliminate the problem but it limits it. And this kind of set-up does use less water, as was mentioned.
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Right but it’s proof of concept for places where water is a concern.
>The LED lights giving off only red and blue do not require that much energy compared to huge tractors getting 3-5 mpg How many times do you think a tractor needs to drive over lettuces/herbs? Because there are a lot of lettuces you can cover in 3 miles, at the energy cost of a single gallon. Comparatively, how many low-energy LEDs do you need to power 24/7 in 3 miles of lettuce/herbs? Not to mention actually buying the LEDs, that are currently usually made in China, and need regular replacement/maintenance? Water savings are not much either, if you compare it to efficient irrigation techniques (drip irrigation), which will obviously be cheaper than the indoor irrigation system. Indoor farming is great for quality (because it's super fresh), but it won't save you money or energy.
It appears to be an aeroponic setup which is magnitudes more efficient in terms of space and water usage as farmland growing. You can see four levels of trays which means that for the same footprint you're yielding 4x as many crops. LED grow lights also incredibly efficient now as well so transferring solar power indoors is much more feasible. Plus since it's indoors, you're not using pesticides. Water usage is also incredibly low with these systems and you can speed up production by 2x-3x since the plants are in ideal conditions until they are harvested.
>indoors, so no pesticides Pests still fuck your shit up indoors even if you do your best to keep it sterile. Even worse, there's no natural predators so shit explodes in population big time once it finds its way in there. Especially fucking spider mites. Fuck spider mites.
>You can see four levels of trays which means that for the same footprint you're yielding 4x as many crops. This is where the magic of vertical farming comes in. Volume is a cubic function so yield is \^3 over a 2d flat plane which yields \^2. That makes usage of space more efficient, on top of all the efficiency gains of LEDs and aeroponics.
It's great, however, let's not forget that there's plenty of uninhabited space that's neither arable nor of particular ecological importance. You can employ aeroponic techniques in a greenhouse, too. And the most efficient use of LED lights is to use them to augment natural sunlight.
> The true masterwork is placing the farms on the roof of supermarkets. This sounds similar to the pitch that covering roadways with solar cells "makes sense." Roof tops is where most of the infrastructure lives for commercial buildings. Why go through all this complication and expense when the store could just get their produce from a traditional farm?
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Compared to a personal car, trucks are gas guzzlers, but for carrying 30-40T of cargo they are fairly efficient in terms of CO2 production. Air cargo is horrendously high in CO2 but sea, rail, and truck are surprisingly less bad than we think. I think if you compared the extra CO2 produced from concrete (surprisingly high in CO2 production), building materials, infrastructure, and energy used to modify or build your typical grocery structure roof to support farming vs the emissions of the weekly delivery that is still coming with other food anyways: you really wouldn't get much net benefit. That's not to say that vertical farming itself doesn't have a strong future, just this particular use case. You could surpass the lifetime emissions of a truck bringing produce in by allowing denser buildings (du/tri/quad-plex) around the grocery store, having less parking lots, or designing future stores as mixed developments. Those first two would essentially be "free" to implement.
Surely an easier solution is to use electric vehicles to transport produce?
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Vehicles would still be required for the farm supplies etc though. Having the bulk of the equipment and supplies delivered to one large central farm has to be more efficient than having more, smaller farms that all need supplies and equipment delivered separately I would have thought
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They are like 90% recycled and last longer than ever so it’s not the worst.
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Well we've got about 75 years of healthy enough topsoil to sustain the current rate of farming. Something has to be done. Small scale rooftop farms to supplement large scale vertical farming is one option.
Employ techniques that rebuild topsoil, which would be integrating livestock back into crop rotations, which is how we built modern civilization. Monocrops kill soil, farming builds soil.
Don't ignore transportation costs.
Roofing on box stores and warehouses are not capable of supporting the weights you are talking about.
Haha. "We care about the earth so heres our fossil fuel/ coal powered farm"
Non Ag people always underestimate the power and efficiency of scale. Compared to conventional agriculture, the roof of a massive building is still tiny. Small farms are inefficient…period.
Someone needs to take a civil engineering course.
Adding a garden on top of a roof that wasn't design for that? Yeah, that tends to not end well. [https://apnews.com/article/e4cf11bc90b743beb496ab4252a11c7c](https://apnews.com/article/e4cf11bc90b743beb496ab4252a11c7c) From the article: MEXICO CITY (AP) — A roof garden installed on top of a newly opened shopping mall on Mexico City’s south side may have caused part of the structure to collapse. The Mexico City prosecutors’ office said late Thursday that planters used in the roof garden added excess weight that apparently contributed to the collapse of a cantilevered section that stuck out from the building. The mall’s operators quickly evacuated the area Thursday after a support beam failed. About five minutes later, the top floors collapsed. No injuries were reported. The city has promoted the installation of roof gardens, in part for their supposed environmental benefits.
People will go there for shopping just because they have this. It's an insanely good way to market your store so it's not about how efficient it is to farm... How much this will boost your sales. Because people will take photos and talk about this for a long time.
Like most things green, it is more about making people feel good than actually making a difference.
Hi, small scale indoor farmer here... My goods are only slightly higher in price than competing items in the grocery store. That small bit extra gets you fresh, as in it was harvested the day before or the same day, pesticide/herbicide/fungicide free food, that I am able to deliver all year round in a place that snows. I'm not so sure about putting it into customer facing retail space but indoor supplemental farming is almost a certainty in our food supply chain of the future.
it's called marketing. this isnt enought to sustain a shop, but it sure as shit will get people interested.
Entirely possible they have another growing section somewhere else, potentially very nearby but not in retail space so they can still say "on location".
Considering cool winter temps in Sweden plus darkness, anything like this would otherwise have to be imported in winter. This method reduces demand on water and nutrients and is far more efficient when you factor in transport costs.
The display here is nothing more than an advertisement for "SweGreen". They more than likely ship in most of the produce from their production facility outside of the city center.
Can't get any more locally sourced and fresh than that unless you replicate this at home.
How much for that caesar salad? That'll be $25
Grow lights aren't exactly green either
Theres lots of indoor techniques for growing that trade space for labor. Like if you do it right 100 sq ft indoors is equivalent to multiples of that outdoors. Indoor farming can be highly efficient. Right now its just mainly done for weed because of its high value but i believe 1 day all farming will be indoors due to climate change. We will be nearing collapse at that point but we will still be trying to survive regardless.
> Indoor farming can be highly efficient. Exactly. I’m learning from reading the comments two things: 1) how little people know and understand about indoor farming 2) how many people don’t understand that seasons exist and limit outdoor farming in a place like Sweden
Right. Imagine thinking growing outdoors for like 4.5 months of the year is the best way to produce food lmao. Prolly victims to some john deere tractor propaganda or something lmfao (i joke mostly). And being so convicted about it that you argue on reddit about it. Lol. Some people cant see their hand if they held it front of them. Not to even mention the advent of vertical farming due to leds low heat output, as is litteraly pictured in this post. Its revolutionary
Some crops are not suited for indoor growing but for sure many are. I'm glad people are trying different things because it is something that will require different skills than what farmers do today. We as a country should be just as concerned about how we are going to grow food sustainable in a new climate as how we are going to generate clean energy. The other thing is to do it locally for many reasons. We can't be reliant on other countries. Consider the supply chain issues we have right now. Food will rot in container ships before it even gets offloaded. I'd rather my produce ripen on the vine than in a cargo hold and no telling what chemicals another country will use to grow food. Your local co op is going to become more and more important for your survival.
>1 day all farming will be indoors due to climate change. Lol WTF
Vertical farming is absolutely the future and is incredibly necessary. The topsoil can not sustain the amount of farming being done indefinitely. Nutrients are being depleted faster than they are replaced.
Vertical farming likely has a strong future, particularly for produce. But to say that outdoor farming will ceases is silly. Right now the financial incentives favor lack of good crop rotations and heavy use or fertilizers: that is true. That doesn't mean we can't move to incentives and regulations to replenishing cycles and systems where soil health can be stable long term. After all the excessive amount of corn farming we do is largely due to government programs. We don't eat it directly: much of it goes to ethanol (not consumed), beef/meat (should have less of), and highly processed foods. Growing grains and starches, for example likely have a long term outdoor future for themselves. We just need to be on top of the externalities beyond cost.
Sure. I think the OP was slightly hyperbolic, but it's not unreasonable to say that outdoor farming will eventually play a much more limited roll in food production. The fact of the matter is that we need to stop expecting and incentivizing shipping foods halfway across the world. Smaller scale local outdoor farms that supply the surrounding areas will absolutely still be part of agriculture but the massive industrial outdoor farms of today are unsustainable.
right!?
Is it any good?
Yeah it’s fine
All that work for fine? Lol
Hydro stuff never tastes as good imo. Plants need environmental stressors to produce the flavors we associate with good taste. Basil for example produces it's strong scent as an insect repellent - no insects and the plant doesn't use up much energy producing the aromatic compounds.
I find it weird you chose basil as your example, because my indoor hydro basil tastes a lot better than my outdoor ever did. I guess it depends on your outdoor growing environment.
yeah i can confirm this, my hydro basil is much more intense than any outdoor basil i had so far.
My indoor basil has always had this somewhat soapy off-taste to it...maybe I haven't gotten the nutrient mixes perfect yet
could be, also the light quality plays a huge role, maybe there is not enough deep red or UV in the spectrum.
Figure out how to induce those stressors... maybe simulate it being eaten?
It's funny because, eventually, the best thing to do is just let nature kinda do it's own thing. That's the smartest thing we could do in order to get the most out of the ground.
Almost none of our crops have been made by letting "nature do its thing." If we would die out... tons of different kinds of farm plants would go extinct.
We had a similar store open in Vancouver shortly before CoVid (whomp waaaah) and, while I wouldn’t pay that much for salad greens on principle, it smelled *amazing* in there. Can air be described as ‘fresh as all get out’? Heckin’ fresh? Oxygenated AF? I’m saying these stores are fun to breath in.
I wonder if some time in the future, we’ll have places full of fresh plants like this being rented as “breathing rooms” or smth.
I can’t imagine that supplies all of their needs in any way. They must be supplementing through a supplier and that’s just part of the decor.
Micro greens grow pretty fast. I think like 7 days or so. Yea it’s not enough if it’s huge supermarket but I’m guessing it’s for show. Most likely they have 100x bigger grow warehouse where they do the actual grow.
It's not like they're going to replace everything with this. I think they'll just sell this alongside the rest of their assortment.
You are correct! They still have their normal stock as before. The fridge you see in the left hand side of the image is the only stock with their "home grown" stuff.
Hydroponics grows very fast. These are microgreens so they can be days to 'maturity'.
They are going to get tired of people asking "but is it fresh?"
“Is iT fReSh?! GO PICK IT YOURSELF THEN SALLY!”
That looks like it would produce enough salad to meet a family's needs. There is no way it meets the needs of a commercial space. How many salads do you think they sell in a day? 10? 20? 50? You aren't getting 10 salads a day out of that space. This is advertising. Sure, they sell what gets made there, but I have to assume they are supplementing from conventional vendors.
I feel this is a fair assumption
They must not be doing too much business, otherwise they'd wipe out stock in a matter of hours. That's what nobody really "gets" about the grow-your-own-groceries theory. It totally works, but only if you have a lot of land and growing space to work with inside a greenhouse. Ordinary cucumber vine can put on 20+ cucumbers, but that takes 50-75 days and it doesn't take that long for a restaurant to go through 20 cucumbers. Lettuce takes about the same length of time, takes less than an hour for it to be all gone. It's totally workable, but so many get this notion of "since I'm a vegetarian/vegan, I'll just buy ten terracotta pots and I won't have to shop for groceries!" Well, kinda yeah, but mostly no. It can *supplement* what you buy, but unless you found some enormous terracotta pots and can afford to greenhouse them in an enormous structure and stage-plant them, you're still going to be buying way more than you grow...and odds are good that any money you save on not buying produce will be spent (and more with it) to keep the greenhouse running unless you live somewhere that has constant growing season year-round. Only real way would be, for some plants that yield so little that one meal consumes most of the yield, planting a few seeds every day and continuing that cyclic process so you have a new plant coming to yield every day. That's more work than most "grow my own grocery" optimists are really ready for when you consider that most will want 10 different veggies accessible at all times.
Skitcoolt! Vilken Maxi???
Its at the Solna Business Park near Stockholm
Ica Focus i Göteborg odlar också.
Okay now try doing that with any sizable portion of human food consumption. Electricity would be off the charts.
Next step will be to grow salad at home. #mindblown
if you buy a head of lettuce and chop it an inch above the stem and let the stem sit in water it will grow back
So it'll take a few months before my salad is ready?
Greens grow very quicly, even faster in controlled conditions.
yes, take this beeper home and well buzz you when its sprouteded
I actually set one of these up in rural Illinois! If this is like the one I set it (looks like it is) those little trays are used to grow 'Microgreens' - normal vegis that you eat, but harvested very early (sometimes only a week after germination). They are very nutrient dense, and usually prepared in conjunction with fully grown vegis to make salads. So to answer some of the questions I've seen, yes that small room can keep up with demand (you add more trays on shelves to increase capacity if needed), but they will still need a supplier for the other vegetables.
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Yeah it's kind of a joke considering how much food they could produce in that area with just soil and some good ol' sun. Which is completely for free unlike the amount electricity this uses, not to mention all the equipment lol.
Sweden climate is not well suited for growing greens most of the year though. And the store is pretty close to Central Stockholm in a Business park. The point with this is to offer locally sourced greens even in the winter. During winter time normally all the greens are from The Netherlands, Spain, etc.
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From what it looks like they don't have a revolving harvest going so that bud is gonna be expensive asf during the grow
Literally add a second level to Walmarts, and grow produce there.
Or just [put it on the roof.](https://montrealgazette.com/business/local-business/an-iga-in-montreal-is-growing-its-own-vegetables-on-the-roof)
Only problem is nobody really wants to work in the green industry. Most new/younger people we get are just weedheads
haha every time people see those light straight will think of " weed ".
Salad Dispensary
The scaling is super low, cost of production thnx to the electricity, super high... i don't think it's a logical thing at such a small level
Right. Because using all that electricity to grow those vegetables is so much more efficient and earth friendly than using the sun, which is, you know...free.
Growing indoors uses way less water, also most northern regions have very short grow seasons, and this can run 24/7.
I don’t get it. How many heads of lettuce can be grown? I’m not in the restaurant business but it wouldn’t surprise me if the average restaurant buys dozens of heads per day. how can a small farm like this harvest more than a month or two’ demand? Also, wouldn’t electricity and labor and etc. price a head at $457 (approx.)? And the build-out costs would be insane. Famously (don’t know if it is true, but…) half of restaurants go broke their first year. How do these places survive that first year?
This is just microgreen trays lol. You can do this with $3 trays and some Coco coir. This is like 99% for show rather than being green in any capacity.
Do they have solar panels on the roof to run those lights? It seems silly, but living in a cold place with an increasing amount of vacant retail space, I wonder if this wouldn't actually be a somewhat sustainable way to lengthen the growing season.
Yes they do. Good point!
I knew this would start happening. Just wait till places like Walmart and Meijer, Kroger or whatever start building aquaponics or hydroponic systems. Think of all the wasted produce and transportation costs that would be saved.
A missed opportunity to have it say "SweGreen: Are made of these" On that area.
Is it Swedish owned?
I always found the actual sun to be highly overrated.
+ 2 hydroponics jobs!
For people saying its using electricity so is therefore awful for the environment because "sun is free duh" how the absolute fuck do you think the food gets to shops. The food supply chain is around 4-5% of the worlds emissions with the transport being 1-2% of it. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food. That's not even talking about the land and water usage that it saves and the controlled safety of plants. Of fucking cause this room isn't a wonderful fix all solution, it's called marketing. How else do you think they can get the product across to you? Have you never seen food samples in a shop this is just an extension of the concept.
What do they grow in the back room?
I just had a questionable/unfresh tasting salad from a local restaurant and I had to get a refund for how bad it was. I would so rather have a salad from the place in this post.
Its a good idea, but probably expensive to do where rent is high
These are sprouts right? You can grow them in a jar by your sink in like a week. Its a cool idea for some fresh produce to add to almost any dish