How A Company Fits Five Acres Of Farmland Into Shipping Containers 

Agreed. Best set of comparison figures I have seen is Broadacre - 1 lettuce per sq ft, 3x per year. Indoor - 4 lettuce per sq ft, 12 x per year. = 16 times the productivity by area. I guess you can stack containers 5 high as well. That could get to 80 times. The numbers for intensive indoor production are impressive, but massively overstating them with no explanation does no one any good.

Container cultivation aside. It's small fry compared to what's out there. The really big players in hydroponics who use semi-automated operations get amazing figures. The best numbers I've found is something called the Finnish Gutter system than can produce 900 crops (heads) of lettuce per square meter per year. These are big conveyor style operations and the area calculation is essentially averaged over the size of the entire installation. The crops are not stationary. Only 4 workers are needed in the entire production line. I think the type of crop produced in these highly controlled container environments will be of a superior quality though. And therefore be of a higher value. I say if they can do it profitably then by all means.

2bczar4u, great questions. They probably cannot pollinate. But for true food Desserts like Canada’s North they might be able to grow micro greens. Which would be a massive step up for the locals. Who get nothing now.

You can cultivate leaf Greens only, no root vegetables...no polination involved. Is a great system. Only suitable for leaf greens.

Carbon footprint? What kind of stupid question is that? Green plants consume CO2 to grow...they produce Oxigen. You may have to supply them with CO2 or they will not grow...have you ever read Photosynthesis?

those CO2 from electricity consumption, shipping container manufacturing, stacks, HVAC.

And not to mention the price lol

Why I love math...great comment Channel Scottify

this is basically a weed farm ad, who the fuck want to grow lettuce in a $50k container

damarh now that. THAT is some truth.

ok my innocent mind is mindblowned

damarh Don’t be daft. Not something you would be able to sell to a covert grower at all. Look at the thing!!!!! The buyers of these don’t need them secret, so they can grow whatever, the adverts targeted at that audience from the same company will no doubt be around too. I doubt you would build this and only target a salad grower while there are open cannabis cultivation laws in place now. I also would say they don’t cost 50G $. Not sure what a dollar is worth to a pound at the moment but I could build this for close to 10/12,000 £. But I valued the old container only at 3k. They sell from 1500-7k depending on condition.

@Grant Peace As a commercial hydro grower myself, I can assure this ad makes several exaggerations. 40' container, even if stacked with 10 shelves, cannot produce a 5 acre equivalent of field produce. Maximum their container makes 1.3 acres which is still great. Also, these system are much more energy intensive. End product for consumer costs significantly more than field grown crops which is why these guys can only sell this produce at premium prices to specialty restaurants, not to grocery distributor networks. And yes, these containers DO cost around $50k or more. It's not a standard container that costs ~$14,000. These have insulated walls, HVAC, plumbing, atmosphere control, vents, electrical circuits, and automation equipment, as well as various pumps, dosers, fans, and dehumidifiers.

I agree but I think they probably mean 5 acres worth of product in a 10 year span. Lol Still a really cool idea

What this simply means is that you can get same quantity of vegetables that such land can produce.

Yeppers there caption jack . Do your research. 😂

Why not ask them ? www.squarerootsgrow.com/ I also think this is possibly a great opportunity to change the way food is grown. Given the right numbers....people would definitely join in ... if the cost was prohibitive. Stay ungreedy and this could go big Square Roots.

Me too

Don't forget it, they grow 24 hours nonstop... it double the productivity. still.. it has to be 25 stacks of Hydroponic

Yea, I think they are factoring in the 24/7/365 growth as compared to a 5 acre field with 4 seasons and natural daily seasonal solar cycles. IE: the total output for a year between this and 5 acres may be similar... wonder what the total energy consumption is...

rronmar well if they did solar it could be very little

bel pet i think you will find that these things consume a large amount of energy. Solar panels are: 1. Very VERY expensive. 2. Only in the teens for percent efficiency. 3 to make a meaningful dent in this things energy consumption during the day would require a VERY large array and a place with clear skyview to place it. Couple of those go against the principal behind this thing...

Yes.

It works, growing lettuce and bean sprouts, not even a complete salad!

@@kylekuntz5302 Did you go and see how the Dutch are doing it? I doubt it if you think it's only lettuce and bean sprouts. Israel can also be checked out. They are, if anything, even more sophisticated in these methods.

Some simple back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me for lettuce maybe, depending on electricity and sell price of lettuce. For other produce not so much.

I don't get why they don't have clear roofs to use direct or even reflected sunlight to reduce cost.

Better check reality, it would take a city of buildings larger than the city you were trying to feed!

The pot farmers are the pioneers of this system

I have 35 acres of land, No way one container can grow that much, even putting the shelves 1 foot apart going up. growing 5 crops a year. Year round, there is no way it can grow the equal that of 5 acres. It can go a long way of providing food for a family in the city or a couple of families but I would want potatoes, carrots collard greens and other veggies as well.. All I see these people grow on these videos is Lettuce

No, it's that it doesn't happen. I've seen the numbers. I've seen the math. One of these isn't close to producing one single acre of land.

I'm shocked that you are even asking that. It's common sense. Go look at a container then go physically mark or walk 1 acre, not 5. If you can't walk it then mark it out on google earth. No way in hell are you going to get 1 acre of crops out of one box, things need room to grow. I have a large aquaponics system that takes up an entire room in my house and in no way would I claim crazy numbers like that. It's just a sales speech. There's a ton of legitimate articles if you just look. Here's a video from Dr. Nate Storey ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QXXZ1GUmgcI.html

I'm shocked because it seemed like your first post was an opinion in agreeing with this video and you didn't want to believe the other posts on here before now claiming this was wrong and yet you couldn't go look up information on your own.

You commented on my original comment. Go find a safe spot and a teddy bear.

Uh, never!

Just must also take into account that Vertical indoor farming can work year round, not just in seasons, maximizing productivity.

This ain't nothing new, could hardly be called plagiarism.

The minerals are added to the water which the plants absorb.

Since the environment inside the container is controlled, I assume that this could be used in Nepal. The only problem would be the lower pressure at Nepal's altitude, but maybe the plants dont care about that. You could make a higher pressure atmosphere inside a container though. But those containers above are probably not made for that. A specially made container could work everywhere. They even grow leafy greens inside special capsules on the international space station which is in space

There is one company in Yukon that sells this system. Forgot the name though.

Gotta hide the weed somehow

altha 2014 solar BABY

#TESLA

that fact was probably calculated as per year, or month or something. Because in around the clock monitored conditions you could get many more harvests on the same amount of time. So, all around the year and under monitored conditions this might be able to produce what a normal plantation could on 5 acres per year. They didnt say that the trays on the container actually cover 5 acres if you spread them out.

Mr30friends it is still called misleading.you can do the math on square meter on that container. Beside your idea would be best suited for genetic modified food but are you sure it will sell?. Simply said be honest and I'm sure some investor will invest. This surely will be good idea in certain situation.

Sherah Stevens you can grow weed in a closet.

that fact was probably calculated as per year, or month or something. Because in around the clock monitored conditions you could get many more harvests on the same amount of time. So, all around the year and under monitored conditions this might be able to produce what a normal plantation could on 5 acres per year. They didnt say that the trays on the container actually cover 5 acres if you spread them out.

See ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QXXZ1GUmgcI.html I doubt it is making 24tn/yr. However w/24hr growing I could see this making maybe half of one acre worth of production a year at a full pace.

My thoughts exactly. No way they can grow 5 acres in a container. Not even if u grew sprouts

The containers stack on top of each other. So that .1 acre container with 3 other containers stacked on top uses way less of a foot print, and produces more food.

Another video took some yield data and estimated about .5 acre per container to soil farming, which is about ×10 the yeild as soil. Edit: that is the equivilant yield over a one year period.

Container Farms work best for herbs or leafy greens. Micro Greens are the best. They're not good for other types of crop apparently.

i don't think the point is to grow "everything" in them, just that you can use them to increase the amount of food grown in any given space and if the 5 acres thing was correct (i can not say it isn't, but i highly doubt it) it would be a HUGE difference in the yield of land with cabbage we can go from 57,300 acres down to 11,460(ish) or if it can grow lettuce we could go from 166,800 acres to around 33,400 spinach could go from 46,640 down to 9,328 acres (even if these took up an entire acre, which they do not) you'd gain 179,000 acres before anything such as stacking or platforms for them occurs from just lettuce and cabbage from those 3 crops you can almost put another NYC somewhere (nyc is 197, you'd end up with 188+ but yeah..i suppose drastically reeducing the amount of land needed when populations keep increasing and maximizing the amount of crops grown on a plot of land has been something farmer have tried doing for centuries because it' not the "right" foods like corn...where 40% has nothing to do with food and another 13% is exported the same logic could be applied to greenhouses aswell, no one in their right mind would consider you more than a loon for it though the basic freight farm idea is a sound one, and has already been proven to work, for industrial or even small scale farms these allow them to allocate less land for vastly more production not only does it cover it's own cost (if used properly) but that free land allows you to grow more of other crops or livestock increasing profits even more granted their numbers are likely BS and they're a waste of money, but they could have niches uses, esp as food scarcity increases due to population growth

Is the glass half full or half empty?

josh spradling An acre is almost 45,000 square feet. A large shipping container is 320 square feet. So according to this video this method is about a 700 times more efficient use of space if it replicates 5 acres.

Man u are narrow minded person, do you know how much energy we use for sending your food from farmer to your loveable supermarket?