Valuetainment - May 09, 2023


How Vertical Farming Could Fix The Food Crisis Using 95% Less Water

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Elon Musk Kimball Dixon Despomier Square Roots
How Angry Parents Can Fight The Woke School Agenda Will The U.S. Dollar Collapse As a Reserve Currency？ - History of World Currency Explained

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

203.54

Word count

2,105

Sentence count

200

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the growing problem of food shortage around the world, and why vertical farming could be a solution. We look at the benefits of vertical farming, how it can replace arable land, topsoil, and freshwater supplies, and the potential for vertical farming.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You know a lot of people are talking about AI. It's a concern. We got climate change. Oh my god,
00:00:03.720 this is the end of the world. Nuclear war. But very few people are talking about actual shortage
00:00:08.940 of food. According to The Economist, in the next 40 years, we will need to produce more food in
00:00:15.660 the next 40 years than we have in the previous 10,000 years combined. And one of the industries
00:00:20.860 that a lot of people are talking about is called vertical farming. Matter of fact, a guy named Elon
00:00:25.980 Musk. His brother, Kimball, is now a farmer investing into vertical farming. Let's get right
00:00:31.780 into it. By the way, if you get value from this video at the end, give it a thumbs up and subscribe
00:00:43.480 to the channel. Let's get right into it. You know what's crazy? I'm at Fort Lauderdale right now.
00:00:46.560 We had a big flood. 22 inches of rain in Fort Lauderdale. Record breaking. Everybody's talking
00:00:50.400 about it. For a couple days, there is no gas in Miami. Everybody is calling saying, I can't fill
00:00:55.160 up the tank. How am I going to come up to Fort Lauderdale? I got to drive up. People are panicking
00:00:58.700 just because there was no gas for one day in Miami. Gas stations were all sold out, right?
00:01:03.060 So you remember saying, Pat, what's your point there? What would you do if you didn't have food
00:01:06.000 for one day? How about two days? Three days? Think about that shortage. What happens when you're at a
00:01:10.080 hotel or your place? The bathroom doesn't work. You can't use the bathroom. There's flooding.
00:01:14.040 What do you think about? That stress goes from something you never think about all of a sudden to
00:01:18.720 something massive, right? That's exactly what the concern is with food shortage. I'll give you a stat here.
00:01:23.100 Food production needs to increase by roughly 70% by 2050 to support the expected 10 billion
00:01:30.880 world population. And that's only 27 years from now. So now let's look at a bunch of different
00:01:35.900 data here and see if this is something we ought to be thinking about. The things we'll look at today
00:01:40.260 is arable land. We'll look at topsoil, freshwater supply. We'll look at benefits of vertical farming
00:01:45.280 solutions, different types, how they do it, cost of it, what different companies are doing today.
00:01:49.760 And then at the end, I want to get your thoughts. If this is something we ought to be concerned about
00:01:53.020 and potentially how big of an industry this is going to be by 2030. Wait till you see the number.
00:01:57.500 So let's get right into it. Arable land is land capable of being used to grow crops. So now arable
00:02:02.880 land is down 30% since the 1970s. It is expected to drop another 60% from the current number by 2050.
00:02:11.420 So it's already down 30% since the 70s. And it's expected to drop another 60% between now and 2050,
00:02:17.520 27 years from now. Now let's look at different regions worldwide, Australia, Canada, US. Look
00:02:23.060 at this number here, this chart. Far left is Australia. Dark blue is 1975. Light blue is 85.
00:02:30.040 That orange color is 95. And then the yellow one is 2005. Australia is down 20% of arable land
00:02:36.500 because we're building more buildings. Canada is down 25%. Russia is down 17%. US is down 32%. The benefit
00:02:43.780 of capitalism, we're building a lot of different places. But at the same time, the arable land is
00:02:48.180 going to be cut as well, right? So you got Brazil down 16%. India is down 45% because India just is 0.97
00:02:54.320 getting into capitalism. Their economy is growing. They got a lot of different things. So why is this
00:02:58.080 a concern if we have our arable lands that's decreasing at the pace that it is just in 40 years
00:03:04.300 of this chart? Well, the next one is about topsoil. Topsoil is the primary resource for plants
00:03:09.940 to grow and crops to thrive. Each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are
00:03:16.440 lost due to erosion, which is 25% of the total land area has been degraded. So when you look
00:03:21.100 at this map here, you see what it's looking like. Very degraded soil, degraded soil, stable soil,
00:03:26.600 and without vegetation. These are some things that people are sitting there thinking, saying,
00:03:30.480 we may not be worried about it today, but this could be a big issue for us within the next 27 years.
00:03:35.520 And this leads to water because we also need water. Freshwater supply. Agriculture currently
00:03:40.300 uses roughly 70% of the global freshwater supply. Irrigation, in other words. Only 1 to 3% of water
00:03:47.680 on earth is freshwater. Pesticides and fertilizers and other toxic from chemicals can poison fresh
00:03:53.560 water. So if you look at this here, where is the water on earth? You'll see 97.2% is oceans. You got a
00:03:59.440 small percentage there. 2.15% is glaciers. And a 0.65% that is groundwater, lakes, and rivers,
00:04:06.580 soil moisture, and atmosphere. So we also need this. So so far, we got what? Arable land. We got topsoil.
00:04:12.240 We got freshwater supply. All of these things are leading to a concern of what we're going to do if
00:04:17.180 we have a shortage of food over the next 27 years. So now, farming problems. Let's look at these.
00:04:22.280 So for those of us that are not farmers, and maybe you didn't grow up on a farm, you're like, okay,
00:04:25.480 why is it such a concern? I don't know any of this stuff. These are the traditional farming problems
00:04:29.600 and why a lot of people are starting to consider vertical farmers. So let's look at the problems
00:04:33.460 traditional farmers have. Number one, tillage negatively impacts soil quality. It fractures
00:04:38.200 the soil, disrupts soil structure, accelerates service runoffs, and soil erosion. That's number
00:04:43.800 one. If you're a farmer, you know exactly what we're talking about, where you have to move them.
00:04:46.780 This leads to the next one. The government pays farmers to limit crop growth to put a price floor
00:04:51.900 in place so farmers can stay in business. Number three, irrigation is highly inefficient.
00:04:57.020 Number four, unpredictable weather. Number five, insects. It's limited to only portions of the
00:05:01.820 year. Fertilizer dependent on last but not least, chemicals and pesticides. There is a timeline for
00:05:06.860 this. This is why it's not sustainable for us to go this way long term. Now, vertical farming,
00:05:11.480 if you look at it, came about in 1999 when this professor from Columbia University, Dixon Despomier,
00:05:17.240 he's a professor of environmental health sciences, and 105 graduate students were exploring methods
00:05:23.980 to address this problem and came up with the concept of vertical farming. A multi-story building
00:05:29.660 growing layers of crops on each floor. Pretty common sense for us to be, like, if you and I
00:05:33.860 were thinking about this, you're like, we probably should have known this 100 years ago. 1999 is when
00:05:38.000 we thought about, what if we go this way? Right? Kind of cool when you think about it. In fact, if you look at
00:05:41.800 some of these videos that we're showing you, this is called vertical farming. This is what Elon Musk's
00:05:46.620 brother, Kimball, got involved. And so now the benefits of vertical farming. Here's what it is.
00:05:51.440 No soil required, which alleviates the top soil problem. Requires 99% less water and fertilizer.
00:05:57.100 Can grow year-round. No pesticides. Occupies 99% less space because you're simply going up. Can be
00:06:03.700 placed in cities, cutting the burden of long transportation. So you may say, Pat, who cares
00:06:08.220 about transportation? Here's why. Currently, average distance of farm food transportation is 1,500 miles.
00:06:14.280 68% of people live in cities far from farms. Fruit and vegetables lose up to 50% of nutrients from
00:06:20.920 farm to store and less carbon emissions from transportation. There you go. That's the benefit
00:06:25.480 because you can put it anywhere. You can literally put it in New York City if you wanted to. You can
00:06:29.800 put it in Miami, in LA, in Beverly Hills, right there, and then boom, deliver it to the people in
00:06:35.580 Beverly Hills. So now, different types of vertical farming. There's three types. Hydroponics, this is where
00:06:40.240 plants grow in water or growing medium with nutrients delivered directly to their roots.
00:06:44.760 Hydroponics is the largest segment and accounted for more than 45% share of vertical farming in 2021.
00:06:50.640 Aeroponics uses a mist to deliver nutrients to plant roots. And then you have aquaponics,
00:06:55.480 which fish are raised and their waste is used as nutrients for crops, creates a loop system where
00:07:01.220 the fish feed the plants and the plants feed the fish. So now you may say, Pat, why are more people
00:07:05.780 doing this? But because it's a great idea, it's exciting, but it's expensive. This is what they
00:07:09.920 haven't yet figured out. So high capital requirement to start. Facilities require a lot of energy.
00:07:15.340 Growing grains like corn and wheat have been a challenge. So now, when you think about this and
00:07:20.140 you're thinking the current method, they're not yet nuclear. They're currently doing it the
00:07:23.540 traditional way. The simulated yields revealed that vertical farming could produce 600 times the
00:07:28.780 current world average wheat yield. In their study, the authors describe how compared with traditional
00:07:34.020 farming methods in outdoor fields, indoor vertical farming also requires less land area, water,
00:07:39.960 herbicides, and pesticides, and result in less nutrient loss to the environment. But there's
00:07:45.060 got to be incentive. So if the capitalist and a job creator sitting there and there's notice and the
00:07:50.400 margins are like this, you can't really get the big capital into it. But the moment somebody figures
00:07:55.740 out how to do it and not have to use up all the energy, whether they choose to do through nuclear or
00:08:00.760 another form of affordable energy, this could be an industry a lot of people may get involved in
00:08:05.980 in no time. Okay. Because again, the upside is essentially unlimited because the upside is
00:08:12.260 unlimited, right? So now some creative ways they can do to maybe cut costs, right? This is the one
00:08:17.120 thing we talked about earlier, what people fear AI being one of them. This is where AI can actually
00:08:21.260 help solve this problem that they're facing. So number one, using AI, they can cut labor costs.
00:08:26.080 They can operate 24 seven. AI can operate on a cloud connected network, monitor soil health. AI can
00:08:31.100 conduct chemical analysis, machine learning algorithms, use data to optimize the automated
00:08:35.120 system. Drones make it more feasible to monitor high up sections, able to be programmed to move
00:08:40.380 in preset paths around the farms. If they're able to do those types of things, they save a little bit
00:08:44.960 of money. If they can use affordable energy, the rest is history. So let's look at what Elon Musk's
00:08:49.800 brother Kimball is up to with this company called Square Roots. If you look at these containers, you see how
00:08:53.960 they're on top of each other. It's a very interesting model because one of these 320 square
00:08:58.920 foot containers can produce as much as a one to two acre traditional outdoor farm, barely using any
00:09:06.500 water. And by the way, there's so much applications. People want one of these containers. There's people
00:09:11.020 right now making $30,000 part-time doing this. They're flooded with applications, but this is one
00:09:15.580 of the companies out there that's doing this. There's a couple out there right now, the top vertical
00:09:18.840 farming companies. One of them is Agricool revenue of 103 million. That's very small. The other one is
00:09:23.840 Bowery farming, $83 million. Freight farms, $72 million. Aero farms, $22 million. And it's estimated
00:09:30.240 if you look at this industry by 2030, this could be a 25 to $26 billion industry. People are just
00:09:39.260 realizing this. So watch this. What I just presented to you, how are you receiving this content? So use
00:09:44.400 your reason, logic, and the level of skepticism. What area are you skeptical about? Think about it.
00:09:49.500 You're like, no, this kind of makes sense. This is logical. So this is where entrepreneurs come in
00:09:55.540 and solve the world's problems through innovation. That's vertical farming. This is why I trust in
00:10:03.020 capitalism because there's incentive to solve many of the problems we're dealing with today.
00:10:08.460 So thoughts, concerns, comment below. If you got value from this video, give it a thumbs up and
00:10:12.360 subscribe to the channel. I did a video four years ago titled how to disrupt any industry. If you've
00:10:17.400 never seen it before, click here to watch it. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye, bye-bye.