Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Welcome everyone to Forward Thinking. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vocaldam, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about something that we think is an
Speaker 1: interesting subject. It's a bit problematic, but we wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about vertical farms, what they are, why they might
Speaker 1: be important, and some of the challenges that we could
Speaker 1: see if we decided to try and pursue vertical farms
Speaker 1: as an actual solution. But before we get too far
Speaker 1: into it, I guess we really need to talk about
Speaker 1: what exactly is a vertical farm. Uh. Really, it's kind
Speaker 1: of what it sounds like. It's it's a farm that
Speaker 1: is arranged vertically as opposed to horizontally, so instead of
Speaker 1: a big farmland exactly you start us stacking it kind of, Joe,
Speaker 1: you were talking about it sort of being like, imagine
Speaker 1: a greenhouse. Yeah, Well, essentially, the main ideas you would
Speaker 1: have a mostly glass structure that allows sunlight to penetrate,
Speaker 1: and it would be as if you were to take
Speaker 1: a greenhouse and put a greenhouse on top of it,
Speaker 1: and then at another greenhouse and keep building up as
Speaker 1: far as you can go. And the main idea is
Speaker 1: to see if you can create a farm that stretches
Speaker 1: up towards the sky instead of out in all directions, right,
Speaker 1: So you're taking advantage of a vertical alignment so that
Speaker 1: you don't you don't need as much land to produce crops.
Speaker 1: And obviously the purpose of this is to fit it
Speaker 1: within a city, right, because if you've got plenty of
Speaker 1: land out in the countryside, why not use it, right,
Speaker 1: assuming that, of course the environmental impact would not be
Speaker 1: so negative as to actually harm the production of crops
Speaker 1: over a certain amount of time, And obviously that's something
Speaker 1: that you have to take into account. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: so really it's kind of an idea of producing crops,
Speaker 1: even livestock within an urban environment so that you aren't
Speaker 1: draining the resources of all the land around you. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I looked this up. Apparently according to the U. S
Speaker 1: d A that's the Department of Agriculture, about the land
Speaker 1: use in the United States is is agriculture farming? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a huge number, right, right, and as populations grow,
Speaker 1: obviously that that is only going to increase, so uh,
Speaker 1: putting aside the the issue of waste, how much of
Speaker 1: that food or how much of those crops go towards
Speaker 1: a food source as opposed to force something else, whether
Speaker 1: it's to feed livestock or to use an energy Our
Speaker 1: cars are that gets exported to feed other people. Right
Speaker 1: Once you once you take out those factors and you
Speaker 1: just look at the food that we need. It still
Speaker 1: is one of the things where we need to look
Speaker 1: at salute oceans besides just just just farms. And could
Speaker 1: vertical farms be that solution? Um, Joe, what was it
Speaker 1: that you wanted to say? Well, I guess we need
Speaker 1: to talk about, uh, what are the advantages of a
Speaker 1: vertical farm? Right? Well, and and to to the version
Speaker 1: that we're really concentrating on is one that was proposed
Speaker 1: by Dixon Despomier, who is a Colombia professor. Uh. He
Speaker 1: kind of posed this question in his class and sort
Speaker 1: of got to think about this vertical farm idea, and
Speaker 1: and why would you want that? And how how could
Speaker 1: it have an advantage over traditional farms? And one of
Speaker 1: them we already answered, which is that it takes up
Speaker 1: less real estate, less horizontal real estate than your rate. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's that's one advantage right there. Another is the
Speaker 1: idea of producing your food very close to where the
Speaker 1: consumers are. Uh, there's a large percentage of the world's
Speaker 1: population located in urban areas, and that that numbers actually
Speaker 1: growing more and more people are moving towards cities, or
Speaker 1: you could look at it as cities are sprawling out
Speaker 1: to slowly envelop and swallow hole all the people, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's where the jobs are, right, That's yeah, Metro Atlanta.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a great example. It's definitely more of
Speaker 1: a sprawl rather than growing up, which is kind of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here, is really the concentration is
Speaker 1: building upward rather than outward. But but that that's one
Speaker 1: of the big advantages, right that you have the food
Speaker 1: where you are where you need it. Right, if you
Speaker 1: could make a vertical farm work, and will introduce some
Speaker 1: challenges to that in a few minutes here, but if
Speaker 1: you could make it work, you would have fresher produce
Speaker 1: in the city. For one thing. I mean, that's just
Speaker 1: an advance an advantage in the culinary tasty food. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that we're picked an hour ago, right before you get them,
Speaker 1: and then maybe maybe on the floor above you, right exactly,
Speaker 1: they came down the elevator. Um. And also you would
Speaker 1: have much less transportation cost and so that it's a
Speaker 1: we can look at the economics of that in a minute.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that has concerned people is
Speaker 1: this idea of food miles. Right, how far does your
Speaker 1: food travel before it gets to you, and how much
Speaker 1: energy is spent taking the food from a farm in
Speaker 1: Kansas or Mexico, or Chile or China, southern California, any
Speaker 1: of these places to get it to your grocery store. Sure,
Speaker 1: so we've got the advantage of the food being right here.
Speaker 1: We have the advantage of you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about the transportation costs, although we'll we'll get into that
Speaker 1: in a second as well. Um, the other advantage not
Speaker 1: just the transportation costs from an economic standpoint, you also
Speaker 1: have uh greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation. You've got
Speaker 1: toxin emissions associated with that. Now, granted, there are greenhouse
Speaker 1: gas emissions and toxins that are associated just with the
Speaker 1: production of food, so you're not going to get around
Speaker 1: that as much as you would the transportation issue, but
Speaker 1: that's still something that you can take into consideration with
Speaker 1: the vertical farms. Another potential advantage, at least that I've
Speaker 1: wade about, is the ability to reuse materials, especially water.
Speaker 1: Um there's a lot of water that goes into agricultural production,
Speaker 1: and one idea that's been floated is that you could
Speaker 1: reuse gray water from residential areas or even in a
Speaker 1: mixed use building, say water that comes from the drain
Speaker 1: in your sink or in your shower, and that goes
Speaker 1: to water the crops right. And then of course there's
Speaker 1: also the fact that you would not necessarily need to
Speaker 1: use up so much soil. We were talking before we
Speaker 1: started recording about the idea of hydroponics, and essentially hydroponics
Speaker 1: is growing crops using a nutrient base that does not
Speaker 1: require actual soil. You don't have to plant the plants
Speaker 1: and soil. You use this nutrient base, and usually you
Speaker 1: have the plants suspended in something like they might have
Speaker 1: their roots surrounded by a kind of inert gravel or
Speaker 1: some other uh item that keeps them upright, or you
Speaker 1: could even in theory, have them suspended. As long as
Speaker 1: you were able to supply the nutrients to the the
Speaker 1: root systems, then you would be able to continue growing them.
Speaker 1: Another advantage is the idea that you don't have seasons anymore,
Speaker 1: because if you have a climate controlled vertical farm, meaning
Speaker 1: that you have control over how much light is introduced,
Speaker 1: you have the control over the actual temperature, the moisture levels,
Speaker 1: the nutrient levels. If you can control all those factors,
Speaker 1: then you could grow crops all year round. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: have a season, so you wouldn't have to worry like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to get ocrab, but it's not
Speaker 1: in season right and you don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: the expensive importing oranges from somewhere extremely far away. They're
Speaker 1: can grow them right there. So this all sounds so great,
Speaker 1: but I'm not seeing them everywhere yet. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: wonder if there are some curious challenges that we would
Speaker 1: have to overcome in order to implement something like this.
Speaker 1: There are both serious and humorous challenges to this. Uh No,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of challenges. One of the big
Speaker 1: challenges comes down to energy. How much energy do you
Speaker 1: need to be able to make a vertical farm work.
Speaker 1: Even when you're talking about conserving water by recycling it
Speaker 1: as much as possible, Even if you're talking about say
Speaker 1: co location, where you try and put other things that
Speaker 1: generate heat so that you can use that heat as
Speaker 1: part of the HVAC system. If you have a server
Speaker 1: farm next to your food farm, then you can use
Speaker 1: the heat from one to heat the other. Right, So
Speaker 1: like Google headquarters is right next to the cornfield, right,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't that wouldn't the corn towers Actually wouldn't surprise
Speaker 1: me one bit knowing the way Google works. But uh,
Speaker 1: and in fact Google does have some of the largest
Speaker 1: data farms out there. But that's you know, that's still
Speaker 1: that's still just one part of the problem. I mean,
Speaker 1: the taller you build the building, the greater your energy
Speaker 1: needs are to keep that system going. Because you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's water circulation, it's the heating and cooling, it's
Speaker 1: the artificial light. Because one of the issues you have
Speaker 1: is how do you design a tall building to take
Speaker 1: advantage of sunlight because it's not going to be the
Speaker 1: sunlight is not going to be evenly distributed across each
Speaker 1: floor for an entire day. In a horizontal farm, the
Speaker 1: sun is free and yeah, it's yeah, it becomes a
Speaker 1: whole separate problem, right, And so when you have a
Speaker 1: vertical farm. Then for it to really work, you're going
Speaker 1: to have to supplement the light that any one floor
Speaker 1: gets in some way, whether that is through moving the
Speaker 1: plants around. Because Joe, you were talking about the system
Speaker 1: that was kind of interesting. Well, one thing you've seen
Speaker 1: in a couple of prototypes is something like a ferris wheel.
Speaker 1: You load the plants up to a moving tray or
Speaker 1: card of some kind and it it cycles them through
Speaker 1: with giving them greater access to the light from the
Speaker 1: roof um as the day goes on. But of course
Speaker 1: you're still dealing with a problem there that even if
Speaker 1: you cycle them through the one they're not getting the
Speaker 1: constant actually just planted them in the middle of a field.
Speaker 1: So so really you have to supplement the light in
Speaker 1: some way, either by moving the plants or by by
Speaker 1: creating artificial sunlight. Uh. And that means that you're actually
Speaker 1: expending energy just to give them the energy they normally
Speaker 1: would get for free if it was in a horizontal farm.
Speaker 1: So that's that's something that a lot of people have
Speaker 1: pointed out as a big problem and the idea that
Speaker 1: it's not energy efficient to build these vertical farms. Even
Speaker 1: if you are talking about supplementing the energy they require.
Speaker 1: With things like solar panels or wind turbines, you're probably
Speaker 1: not going to generate the energy you need to keep
Speaker 1: that that going without it tapping into the power grid.
Speaker 1: And the question then becomes is it actually more energy
Speaker 1: efficient to operate a vertical farm versus a traditional farm?
Speaker 1: And if it's less energy efficient, then why are we
Speaker 1: doing Why are we doing it right? Especially when you're
Speaker 1: talking about artificial light, that's the big one, because you're like,
Speaker 1: this is a this is a resource that's literally free
Speaker 1: to us with the traditional setup, and it costs us
Speaker 1: in the vertical setup. So unless we can demonstrate that
Speaker 1: the benefit we get from the vertical standpoint is greater
Speaker 1: than the energy expenditure that we we get using this method,
Speaker 1: why do we do it well? So, these concerns are
Speaker 1: out there, and we know that people have had to
Speaker 1: think about them before they've invested in prototypes of vertical farms.
Speaker 1: But so one thing it might help to do is
Speaker 1: to look at where people have tried to build these
Speaker 1: things and and see what reasons might have motivated them.
Speaker 1: One thing I think we all read about it, of course,
Speaker 1: is an NPR piece about the sky greens farm right
Speaker 1: in Singapore. Of course, Singapore seems like an ideal location
Speaker 1: for vertical farm because I mean real estate values there.
Speaker 1: It's densely populated places on Earth, is sure, yes, um,
Speaker 1: And so obviously there's no room in Singapore to really
Speaker 1: go out and lay out a unless you're going to
Speaker 1: raise a few buildings. Then yeah, you're not going to
Speaker 1: build any farms out there. So it may be an
Speaker 1: issue of there's an economic conflict here. Um, there are
Speaker 1: great costs to investing in something like this, but in
Speaker 1: tight enough circumstances it might pay off. Right. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: certain countries where you either have very little farmable land
Speaker 1: that's that's available, or the seasons just don't don't really
Speaker 1: um fall in such a way that makes it easy
Speaker 1: for you to to grow anything, it might actually make
Speaker 1: a lot of sense to do vertical farms, although a
Speaker 1: lot of people have argued that perhaps the greenhouse route
Speaker 1: would be as efficient or perhaps more efficient. So apart
Speaker 1: from the energy barriers that we have here with vertical farms,
Speaker 1: there may all so be economic barriers. First of all,
Speaker 1: just building a vertical farm would require a pretty enormous
Speaker 1: initial investment, so that asking for that can be difficult.
Speaker 1: And also if it's you'd be taking a risk too,
Speaker 1: because it's somewhat unproven. Sure, and uh, if you are
Speaker 1: spending all this money, that also may mean that in
Speaker 1: order to recapture those costs, that you end up having
Speaker 1: to charge more for the produce you produce in your
Speaker 1: produce you produce within the vertical farm, right, right, although
Speaker 1: you know, at a certain point, is it worth it
Speaker 1: if you can get a tomato that is incredibly delicious
Speaker 1: and only have to go upstairs to get it, is
Speaker 1: you know, would people pay for them? Right? I mean,
Speaker 1: if you buy greens that are picked today, people would
Speaker 1: pay up for that? I think, well, yeah, that some
Speaker 1: people would. They say in that same piece we were
Speaker 1: talking about, they said, in Singapore, the greens from that
Speaker 1: vertical farm there costs five to more than standard greens
Speaker 1: at the grocery store where people were buying them. Well,
Speaker 1: it's not bad. I mean, you know, a five increase
Speaker 1: is you know? Yeah, I was thinking of some kind
Speaker 1: of outrageous like fifty kind of increase in food coast
Speaker 1: it was it might and so and so the vertical
Speaker 1: farms may make a lot more sense in particular communities
Speaker 1: you know, where we have these pre existing conditions, like
Speaker 1: for example, there are islands in the Caribbean where they
Speaker 1: have really no agriculture whatsoever, so they import everything or
Speaker 1: their communities, say in Alaska that have to or Hawaii
Speaker 1: that have to import a lot of the stuff they use. Uh,
Speaker 1: and those expenses get pretty high because they're they're in
Speaker 1: fairly remote areas. That's you know, it's a challenge to
Speaker 1: get stuff there in a way that's efficient and economically feasible.
Speaker 1: So it may make perfect sense there. It might actually
Speaker 1: offset some of the prices that they're spending on certain
Speaker 1: items right now. Right if you even if you live
Speaker 1: in a place like New York or something like there,
Speaker 1: or even in Atlanta, it might make sense to target
Speaker 1: certain crops for vertical farming, right um to say, you know, well,
Speaker 1: we have fairly close access to the corn and the
Speaker 1: all these other things we teach, but we really you know,
Speaker 1: we've got to fly vegetables in from Europe or from
Speaker 1: South America if we want this special fruit or something
Speaker 1: like that. So if I want my wassabi, I have
Speaker 1: to fly in either from one place in Hawaii or Japan.
Speaker 1: So in those cases it might make sense to invest
Speaker 1: in uh, urban farming solutions for for yeah, things like
Speaker 1: like grapes that don't grow very well here in this particular. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a terrible example, because we totally have wine country
Speaker 1: in the Georgia Hills. There's a wine in them their
Speaker 1: hills even even so there, but the point at the
Speaker 1: point being that depending upon where in the world you are,
Speaker 1: you may not have access to certain kinds of of foods,
Speaker 1: and so if you were to design vertical farms that
Speaker 1: specifically targeted that, then that would be a reason to
Speaker 1: do so, right, And this also I wanted to mention
Speaker 1: might kind of go along with I think what is
Speaker 1: going to need to happen, which is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a change in in perception of food because we're
Speaker 1: also used to being able to get whatever we want
Speaker 1: whenever we want it, and if we really want to
Speaker 1: live in a more energy conservative way, um, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not always going to have access to green globe
Speaker 1: grapes that we can just run down to the store
Speaker 1: and grab. Um we might need to future is dark
Speaker 1: and frightening, well, but you know, but it's but it's
Speaker 1: not a terrible thing to to to think more about
Speaker 1: eating seasonally and and appreciating really good strawberries when you
Speaker 1: get them, versus having terrible cardboard strawberries six months out
Speaker 1: of the year that cost you five times more than
Speaker 1: they otherwise would. Well, and also another solution that people
Speaker 1: could look at for these these problems that we're talking
Speaker 1: about with these vertical farms, some of them involved just
Speaker 1: designing buildings differently instead of we all have kind of
Speaker 1: a stock image in our minds of what a skyscraper
Speaker 1: looks like, but some of these vertical farms look a
Speaker 1: lot different from that image. For example, there are some
Speaker 1: designs that are heard in a way so that each
Speaker 1: level is slightly smaller than the level below it, which
Speaker 1: increases the amount of sunlight the lower levels can receive
Speaker 1: on any given day. And you know, you orient that
Speaker 1: building when you build it to such a way so
Speaker 1: that you get as much sunlight throughout a typical day
Speaker 1: as you possibly can, and you lower the need for
Speaker 1: things like that artificial sunlight we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: Of course, then it becomes less like the skyscraper, right,
Speaker 1: but it's still a vertical farm, it's just not in
Speaker 1: the form. It's not necessarily a vertical Yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: like a it's not like a multi use building where
Speaker 1: you know, floors one through fifteen or residential sixteen through
Speaker 1: thirty our offices, and thirty one through fifty are farms.
Speaker 1: It's it's not like that. But but it would still
Speaker 1: be a vertical farm. It just might not it might
Speaker 1: not stretch up thirty stories. It may be more like fifteen,
Speaker 1: but uh, diagonal farm. Yeah, still vertical. Yeah, I believe you.
Speaker 1: I can show you pictures. Uh non audio podcast unfortunately,
Speaker 1: but these are you know, these are the possible solutions
Speaker 1: we're looking at. And beyond that, there are alternatives there.
Speaker 1: You know, we have people work living in urban areas
Speaker 1: today who are looking at and or even creating uh,
Speaker 1: gardening spaces and farming spaces within the city limits. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's you know, lots of park space that is certainly gorgeous,
Speaker 1: but it can be gorgeous and also have apple trees.
Speaker 1: You know, it doesn't these things don't. Food does not
Speaker 1: have to be mutually exclusive with urban beauty. And also
Speaker 1: just just roof rooftop gardens are small personal gardens on
Speaker 1: a porch are all terrific ways to get a little
Speaker 1: bit extra food. There's actually quite a few community gardens
Speaker 1: in the Atlanta area in particular. In fact, I know
Speaker 1: of three or four that are pretty close to where
Speaker 1: I live now. That can be complicated because depending upon
Speaker 1: what city you live in, there may be very strict
Speaker 1: rules as to what you can and cannot grow. But
Speaker 1: but that's one of those things that could help offset
Speaker 1: the need for going outside the city limits to get
Speaker 1: your food. Those uh, those rooftop gardens have a lot
Speaker 1: of advantages, don't they don't They say that they like
Speaker 1: cut down on that urban heat island defects. Sure, yeah.
Speaker 1: They also, of course all plants take in carbon dioxide,
Speaker 1: so there's that there's a as long as we've got
Speaker 1: cars is a pretty excellent thing, right, it's a carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide sink. It may not offset that. That's actually that
Speaker 1: brings up another criticism I've read about vertical farms, in
Speaker 1: the idea that in in greenhouses and in these vertical
Speaker 1: farm models, often you would want to uh pump in
Speaker 1: more carbon dioxide than would normally be in a regular
Speaker 1: mixture of of atmosphere in an attempt to essentially are
Speaker 1: feeding the plants. Right, It's like it would be like
Speaker 1: an oxygen rich environment for us, right, so would be
Speaker 1: a carbon dioxide rich environment for them. And I've said,
Speaker 1: I've read some some criticisms that say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: how do you get the carbon dioxide, And one of
Speaker 1: the common ways is through combustion, you burn something in
Speaker 1: common box side is but that just ends up releasing
Speaker 1: other elements. Yeah, so so there so there again more
Speaker 1: problems here, but it's not all all bad and um.
Speaker 1: And of course, even if we reach the ideal vertical
Speaker 1: farm world where it makes perfect sense, maybe we have
Speaker 1: some energy surplus for some reason, we've we've cracked that
Speaker 1: nut and the energy isn't an issue anymore, so we
Speaker 1: can we can, depending upon your point of view, invest
Speaker 1: or waste energy on these vertical fusion reactors online. We've
Speaker 1: we've harnessed the power of the galaxy itself and now
Speaker 1: we're gonna have our vertical farms. Gosh darn it. But
Speaker 1: even if we do that, uh, the numbers really don't
Speaker 1: add up, you don't. It's really hard to envision a
Speaker 1: world where we have enough vertical farms to offset the
Speaker 1: need for our food. So it looks like it's not
Speaker 1: just hard, it's kind of impossible. Right, There's just a
Speaker 1: scale problem. We we we would essentially have to replace all
Speaker 1: of our buildings with vertical farms. Even then that wouldn't work, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, what the vertical farming future, if it is
Speaker 1: a feasible possibility, it's supplemental. It's not to replace all
Speaker 1: of the farms culture. It can't, It can't possibly, right, So, really,
Speaker 1: what we're looking at is a way to kind of
Speaker 1: offset it a little bit, to reduce our reliance upon
Speaker 1: traditional horizontal farms and thus reduce the impact that we
Speaker 1: make either through the whole the production process the environmental
Speaker 1: impact of just clearing out land to make a farm.
Speaker 1: We can we can definitely take a chunk of that out,
Speaker 1: which is an important part of conservation and sustainability, especially
Speaker 1: if we do things like Lauren you were mentioning when
Speaker 1: we were meeting about this earlier. You know, if if
Speaker 1: we were to to shift our diets to be more
Speaker 1: of vegetable and fruit heavy diet as opposed to eating
Speaker 1: lots and lots of meat, then yeah, yeah, it takes
Speaker 1: something like six liters of water to raise a two
Speaker 1: pound steak. Um, not even not even a two pound cow.
Speaker 1: I mean like a yeah, two pound steak just just
Speaker 1: nurturing a two pound steak. How many big gulps of water?
Speaker 1: Is that? That's a lot. It's a lot of big gulps. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that. I mean obviously, if we were to shift
Speaker 1: to a more vegetarian type of diet, not necessarily strictly vegetarian,
Speaker 1: but but more so, then we would, uh, we would
Speaker 1: really a lot of the need for that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. And also, yeah, there's probably a lot of
Speaker 1: crops that are a lot more I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: a watermelon is a lot more difficult to grow, for
Speaker 1: example than uh. I don't have a good counter example,
Speaker 1: but watermelons man lots of water enough. Seriously, it's right
Speaker 1: there in the name. Uh, I would imagine more so
Speaker 1: than say a cucumber. Um. But anyway, Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's an interesting idea and it's definitely one of those
Speaker 1: things where you can look at it and you you
Speaker 1: see like an artist rendering of what a vertical farm
Speaker 1: could look like, and you're like, wow, that's a super
Speaker 1: cool building of the future. And also these are the
Speaker 1: same sort of uh techniques that we're looking at as
Speaker 1: possible ways of helping us get from Earth to some
Speaker 1: distant planet. I mean, these are these growing techniques, These
Speaker 1: these things that we have to take into consideration just
Speaker 1: to grow plants here on Earth and urban settings could
Speaker 1: eventually inform us in our quest to get off this
Speaker 1: rock and visit other planets. Uh So, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's definitely God's use. And we don't mean to downplay
Speaker 1: the importance of vertical farms. That may very well be
Speaker 1: that one day they are a common sight in any
Speaker 1: major metropolitan area. But but there are issues that we
Speaker 1: definitely need to take into consideration and acknowledge before we
Speaker 1: jump it in. Well, we know it's not a sure
Speaker 1: thing yet, but that doesn't mean it's not a good
Speaker 1: idea to keep trying. Definitely, Yeah, trying at things that
Speaker 1: are hard or even seem impossible is how we make improvements. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And if nothing else, even if we eventually get to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that vertical farms are not not a viable
Speaker 1: way to go, we could learn that there are other
Speaker 1: through that process, we could learn other things that improve
Speaker 1: growing in uh in in traditional farms. Or even if
Speaker 1: we just say, okay, maybe we don't make vertical farms,
Speaker 1: but we do make more greenhouses within urban areas to
Speaker 1: help with this issue. Uh, you know, no matter what
Speaker 1: we learned through that process, So, like like you were saying, Joe,
Speaker 1: it's definitely a positive thing in the long run, it
Speaker 1: just might be a little longer than what everyone was
Speaker 1: hoping for. That's okay, that's what the future is for
Speaker 1: nothing but the future. The future is everywhere. It is
Speaker 1: so way guys, thank you so much for listening. I
Speaker 1: hope you are enjoying the podcast the video series. Remember,
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