>having it serve local schools and resteraunts
You're going to need some employees if you want to work a farm of that scale. Automation helps, but that at that scale it's not really a 1 man job any more.
These things were popular globally about 10 years ago and half of them closed down and the rest are struggling iirc or had to grow niche things and get a strangle hold on contracts.
It actually wouldn't take much money to do, led battens are cheap, you wouldn't need specific high price grow lamps for most crops, few thousand on water parameter control, PH, EC, disinfection, temperature control. The thing you need to think about the most is staffing, then harvesting and the logistics of packing and shipping out the crop. That's the hard part to do well.
For restaurant and local school scale farming, you're talking millions of dollars. Also few schools (in America) would be willing to pay enough for local produce to make it profitable when government subsidized slop is an option.
I think your killer is electricity for lighting more than anything else.
Look at LED setups, 450 watts in LED can do what 600 watts high pressure sodium or metal halide can.
After that consider air flow, those lights get hot.
Finally, assuming this is for food, you need to be up on the food safety standards in your area.
>having it serve local schools and resteraunts
You're going to need some employees if you want to work a farm of that scale. Automation helps, but that at that scale it's not really a 1 man job any more.
I got large family
I think your killer is electricity for lighting more than anything else.
Look at LED setups, 450 watts in LED can do what 600 watts high pressure sodium or metal halide can.
After that consider air flow, those lights get hot.
Finally, assuming this is for food, you need to be up on the food safety standards in your area.
>solar panels? >what about nutrients and how stringent are food standards
>sun provides energy to plants for free >frick that, i'll replace the sun with electricity
will never be viable in a free market vs naturally grown food
>NOoooOOO! Not the heckin sunlight!
So how do you explain currently existing hydroponic operations that have been using electric lighting (at least as supplemental) for years? Pic related, you dumb prostitute
https://i.imgur.com/VSSqoNk.jpg
how feasible is large hydroponic farms and what would it take to implement this?
OP, this seems like a business where how profitable it can be depends more on your marketing skills than it does on your production skills. It's a similar situation with mushroom farming.
It's not especially hard or expensive to get into hydroponic growing, and it doesn't get that much cheaper at large scales unlike a lot of other agricultural operations. And yet there's a reason that everyone with a large backyard isn't putting in a greenhouse and making $50K a year doing it. https://aggie-hort.tamu.edu/greenhouse/hydroponics/economics.html
If your labor is basically free and you have the financial means to build and operate the thing for a year or two then you can gamble on the operation and maybe you'll be able to market your products.
now compare that to op's image which is what he's asking advice about and ask yourself why you're being so obtuse.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I didn't see the part where OP specified exclusively artifical lighting. Maybe you can quote it for me?
Regardless, hydroponic operations that use exclusively artificial lighting (microgreens and weed, for example) already exist on the free market.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>hydroponic operations that use exclusively artificial lighting (microgreens and weed, for example) already exist on the free market.
no they don't.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>no they don't.
Yes they do.
5 months ago
Anonymous
prove it.
5 months ago
Anonymous
prove that indoor microgreens and weed operations exist? You're one google image search away you dumb homosexual
>sun provides energy to plants for free >frick that, i'll replace the sun with electricity
will never be viable in a free market vs naturally grown food
in pic would probably take forever but is also way more than you really need
could probably try doing a set up in a greenhouse or similar to save money on lighting costs by using the sun when it's available, partially bury it to save a bit on heating in the winter. Lighting equivalent to the sun is expensive to run, so using the sun could let you save money and get a larger setup. Just do what you can and expand when you want
I was researching this last night, it seems most hydroponic grows are experimental / research funded. Some are VC - this screams low viability to me...
I am also interested, perhaps in doing a blend of indoor & outdoor (soil, not hydro - using LEDs) depending on season (UK).
It's tricky, especially with energy costs where they are.
I'm less interested in growing food and more interested in starting an all-year nursery
it's a fricking scam like ev trucks
you have to put much more energy into planting anything that can be sold for profit than you would by doing ground planting, so you will have stupid high expenses
on top of that, you are still going to pollute just as bad as ground farming but in other forms
Just need money, plants will do what plants do, just grow.
But we have 2 hemispheres with warm weather all year long in some region, and a global trade economy that makes shipping food thousands of miles cheaper than growing it indoors. It's hard to profit from indoor food production, but people are trying, look up backyard farms in Maine they grow tomatoes year round.
Feasibility, in the financial sense, given the alternatives, would require either functional fusion power generation leading to post-scarcity electricity or a world population of over 100 billion.
Agriculture is a giant pool of options with the best few selected based on the prices of assorted inputs. Hydroponics is primarily energy-hungry and acre-cheap: it technically has a niche but it is way out of whack with the current situation.
Similarly, doing fancy companion gardening stuff can allow you to exceed big aggs yield per acre, but the increased manual labor from things not being mechanizable stops it from being done outside of research and schizoids.
Afaik the only really viable hydro farms right now make greens like kale, lettuce, basil etc, and in places where the climate or space isn’t suitable for farming them outdoors.
Almost all vegetables in my country are domestic greenhouse farmed with additional light and gas heating (they run big gas generators that provide both electricity and heat), a lot of them are for export too. But we have expensive land, cold weather and cheap natural gas.
You could also do flowers like orchids and tulips. Not hydroponically but easier to start off small scale (because they’re more expensive).
Microgreens are becoming more popular, are very easy with very low investment, but maybe it’s a hype that will blow over. Also there is a huge shortage of hops in pretty much the entire world so you could look at those too, many indoor hop growing start-ups seem to have survived their first 5 years. I’d probably start with a small setup with either herbs or microgreens. The good part about herbs is that you can dry them for longer shelf life while you look for a buyer.
Don’t go into chillies, they take long, are very niche and very cheaply grown abroad
I forgot to add don’t try to compete with big aggriculture on 100k. Make it niche organic bio dynamic vegan artisanal blah blah unless you have a million or two to invest
like let's just ignore naturally available resources like sunlight and organic fertilizer and fun shit like weeding and composting and instead you're going to rely on somebody else to meter you out a little bit of electricity and sell you some fertilizer.. to produce freak mutant bastard crops under artificial light? wew
You're moronic, the foundational point of hydroponics is under greenhouse, using organic fertiliser in the water column, and composting after harvesting. It's primarily about saving water and using the sun.
Lots of money.
i have 20k and can probably get 100k on a loan would that be enough would it be profitable as well?
i was thinking of automating and having it serve local schools and resteraunts mayve even add a fish farm but im a bit nervous on details
>having it serve local schools and resteraunts
You're going to need some employees if you want to work a farm of that scale. Automation helps, but that at that scale it's not really a 1 man job any more.
>i have 20k and can probably get 100k on a loan would that be enough
Not even close.
These things were popular globally about 10 years ago and half of them closed down and the rest are struggling iirc or had to grow niche things and get a strangle hold on contracts.
It actually wouldn't take much money to do, led battens are cheap, you wouldn't need specific high price grow lamps for most crops, few thousand on water parameter control, PH, EC, disinfection, temperature control. The thing you need to think about the most is staffing, then harvesting and the logistics of packing and shipping out the crop. That's the hard part to do well.
For restaurant and local school scale farming, you're talking millions of dollars. Also few schools (in America) would be willing to pay enough for local produce to make it profitable when government subsidized slop is an option.
this
schools are notorious poorgays and can't afford your bougie organic greens
I think your killer is electricity for lighting more than anything else.
Look at LED setups, 450 watts in LED can do what 600 watts high pressure sodium or metal halide can.
After that consider air flow, those lights get hot.
Finally, assuming this is for food, you need to be up on the food safety standards in your area.
are you trying to grow pot?
No Ive never done drugs in my life or had sex
I got large family
>solar panels?
>what about nutrients and how stringent are food standards
>Ive never done drugs in my life or had sex
based
>NOoooOOO! Not the heckin sunlight!
So how do you explain currently existing hydroponic operations that have been using electric lighting (at least as supplemental) for years? Pic related, you dumb prostitute
OP, this seems like a business where how profitable it can be depends more on your marketing skills than it does on your production skills. It's a similar situation with mushroom farming.
It's not especially hard or expensive to get into hydroponic growing, and it doesn't get that much cheaper at large scales unlike a lot of other agricultural operations. And yet there's a reason that everyone with a large backyard isn't putting in a greenhouse and making $50K a year doing it. https://aggie-hort.tamu.edu/greenhouse/hydroponics/economics.html
If your labor is basically free and you have the financial means to build and operate the thing for a year or two then you can gamble on the operation and maybe you'll be able to market your products.
>Pic related
the picture you just posted of a single layer of plants all being provided sunlight through a giant translucent roof?
now compare that to op's image which is what he's asking advice about and ask yourself why you're being so obtuse.
I didn't see the part where OP specified exclusively artifical lighting. Maybe you can quote it for me?
Regardless, hydroponic operations that use exclusively artificial lighting (microgreens and weed, for example) already exist on the free market.
>hydroponic operations that use exclusively artificial lighting (microgreens and weed, for example) already exist on the free market.
no they don't.
>no they don't.
Yes they do.
prove it.
prove that indoor microgreens and weed operations exist? You're one google image search away you dumb homosexual
>never done drugs in my life or had sex
You should try both.
If it's a greenhouse up north heated by compost then it's feasible. You can use prism treatments to get more light and light deeper in.
The point is to maximize & maximally utilize what you get for free. So greenhouse above a fish + duck/goose pond
>sun provides energy to plants for free
>frick that, i'll replace the sun with electricity
will never be viable in a free market vs naturally grown food
in pic would probably take forever but is also way more than you really need
could probably try doing a set up in a greenhouse or similar to save money on lighting costs by using the sun when it's available, partially bury it to save a bit on heating in the winter. Lighting equivalent to the sun is expensive to run, so using the sun could let you save money and get a larger setup. Just do what you can and expand when you want
I was researching this last night, it seems most hydroponic grows are experimental / research funded. Some are VC - this screams low viability to me...
I am also interested, perhaps in doing a blend of indoor & outdoor (soil, not hydro - using LEDs) depending on season (UK).
It's tricky, especially with energy costs where they are.
I'm less interested in growing food and more interested in starting an all-year nursery
it's a fricking scam like ev trucks
you have to put much more energy into planting anything that can be sold for profit than you would by doing ground planting, so you will have stupid high expenses
on top of that, you are still going to pollute just as bad as ground farming but in other forms
Just need money, plants will do what plants do, just grow.
But we have 2 hemispheres with warm weather all year long in some region, and a global trade economy that makes shipping food thousands of miles cheaper than growing it indoors. It's hard to profit from indoor food production, but people are trying, look up backyard farms in Maine they grow tomatoes year round.
Feasibility, in the financial sense, given the alternatives, would require either functional fusion power generation leading to post-scarcity electricity or a world population of over 100 billion.
Agriculture is a giant pool of options with the best few selected based on the prices of assorted inputs. Hydroponics is primarily energy-hungry and acre-cheap: it technically has a niche but it is way out of whack with the current situation.
Similarly, doing fancy companion gardening stuff can allow you to exceed big aggs yield per acre, but the increased manual labor from things not being mechanizable stops it from being done outside of research and schizoids.
Afaik the only really viable hydro farms right now make greens like kale, lettuce, basil etc, and in places where the climate or space isn’t suitable for farming them outdoors.
Almost all vegetables in my country are domestic greenhouse farmed with additional light and gas heating (they run big gas generators that provide both electricity and heat), a lot of them are for export too. But we have expensive land, cold weather and cheap natural gas.
You could also do flowers like orchids and tulips. Not hydroponically but easier to start off small scale (because they’re more expensive).
Microgreens are becoming more popular, are very easy with very low investment, but maybe it’s a hype that will blow over. Also there is a huge shortage of hops in pretty much the entire world so you could look at those too, many indoor hop growing start-ups seem to have survived their first 5 years. I’d probably start with a small setup with either herbs or microgreens. The good part about herbs is that you can dry them for longer shelf life while you look for a buyer.
Don’t go into chillies, they take long, are very niche and very cheaply grown abroad
I forgot to add don’t try to compete with big aggriculture on 100k. Make it niche organic bio dynamic vegan artisanal blah blah unless you have a million or two to invest
Soaring electricity prices are killing the hot house industry around here. Even LED lighting could not save them.
hydroponics are so frickin stupid
like let's just ignore naturally available resources like sunlight and organic fertilizer and fun shit like weeding and composting and instead you're going to rely on somebody else to meter you out a little bit of electricity and sell you some fertilizer.. to produce freak mutant bastard crops under artificial light? wew
>fun
>weeding
yea sure
also you can (and do) still utilize sunlight and fertilizer with hydroponics. Aquaponics can even be used to help with fertilizer
You're moronic, the foundational point of hydroponics is under greenhouse, using organic fertiliser in the water column, and composting after harvesting. It's primarily about saving water and using the sun.