Just stumbled on your channel. Great quality! I have one request though: PLEASE list sources from which you take the numbers / on which you base your analysis! This is absolutely imperative for any analytic/popsci/science journalism channel.

Also, make a patreon account or smth.

Exa Cognition I find this channel amazing the amount of research and time you spend to make such a detailed, educated, and good understanding of these concepts I really love all of it. It doesn't matter how long ur videos upload these videos are very interesting

I just discovered this channel today. Looking at things like subscriber count and video watched I think your first vertical farm video either is trending or is close to being trending among people who watch science videos. I think you are doing a great job. Hope to see some activity soon. Good luck.

your energy math would have been enormously favorable if you had used nuclear energy instead of solar. just saying. if Fusion becomes a thing between 2030 & 2040, more than half of this video will be pointless.

I'm glad you like it! I feel I've got a long way to go, but I've spent quite a lot of time trying to improve the quality of the videos, so it's good that it's worked.

@@ExaCognition hi. I loved this video. I was wandering this days if vertical farming combined with insect agriculture could solve the world demand for health food(proteins, fats and carbs) without doing the damage that the current agribusiness is doing to the world. Could you make a series about insect agriculture. I think it would fit with this topic. Thanks for reading(if you read it)

@@ExaCognition you makes superb videos

@@ExaCognition You seem to know alot about vertical farming and answer the right questions. I'd like to ask you some additional questions regarding vertical farming. Do you have an email adress or other social media where I can pm you?

Thanks, that would be pretty remarkable!

The world isn't ready for this channel yet!

Good job youtube algorithm

Yukon Cacao would be the brand. One of their fancy products is Gold Rush chocolate bar: golden milk chocolate (with turmeric). Sell that at Whole Foods. You're welcome, but I want royalties.

Sources are understandably highly requested, I was initially intending to release them with the video but the calculations and data sheets were a mess, so wanted tidy them up first that that it was easier to follow. I never got round to actually updating it though. Given this series has had a fair bit of traction recently, I think it's important for me to get it fixed even though I'm fairly short on time. I might start with some of the key stuff and try and add a few things to it daily, so at least the most useful stuff is available soon. Otherwise it could be months before I get the time to actually work through it all.

@@ExaCognition That sounds reasonable, especially i you're pushed for time. I imagine the series will continue to gain traction given the relative quality of the videos on this topic to others on YT. Both the data sheets and sources would solidify the professionalism of your content. Keep up the good work!

I simplified the energy section for this video, my next video series is on the future of energy and I will be looking at nuclear as part of that series. I focused on solar for this video because the scope of the analysis is very specific, looking at the first viable circumstances. If we are allowed to chose our location, then solar is almost certainly going to be the cheapest source of electricity, since we can chose an relatively equatorial location with high solar irradiance and low seasonal variance. This minimizes the storage challenge and produces the cheapest possible energy. With that said, if we are talking about general energy solutions for plant factories using electricity grids worldwide, then we can't necessarily look to solar as a cheap an effective solution. Nuclear energy has a lot of benefits from a grid perspective, clean, stable, relatively cheap, works more or less anywhere. So I expect many plant factories to be at least partially supplied by nuclear energy (some already are).

@@ExaCognition That makes a lot of sense solar definitely is a useful in many circumstances. I love how well researched all your videos have been so far and am exited for the future of the channel. Its really refreshing to see a video on vertical farming that sticks to the facts

I recently watched a cool video about nuclear. The costs of building a safe nuclear power plant are very high up front, and have to be made up over a long period of time. You go into a lot of debt to get it going. Natural gas ones are cheaper to build so are getting built more. whether thats good or bad i cant say, but i never knew the staggering cost to get a plant up and running, and it can take up to 5-6 years to complete one.

@@ExaCognition solar farms are massive failures.

@@carlvonfuckwits2934 no, they are not

Thanks! Sources and calculations are a common and understandable request. I wanted to tidy up the source and calculation doc so that it's easier to understand, I said I'd post it with my next Vertical Farming Video. It would be pretty easy to post them as articles as I essentially have the scripts. The main issue is that I haven't posted a video in months because I have to sort out my finances before I can carry on making videos. I hope to get back to it as soon as possible.

Thanks! Hopefully I can keep the videos at a regular schedule. Are there any particular innovations you are interested in?

@@ExaCognition I am interrested about carbon capture tech, as well as some biofuels based on algea. Some very cool advancements in microbiological plastic recycling are still too early to make a detailled review of it but I am curious to see :)

My next major series is on the future of energy and sustainable energy source will definitely feature. That said, I'm keen do a series on specific sustainable technologies, so things like carbon capture tech are ideal. I'm happy to cover early stage technologies with a more "can this work" approach.

good point, but i think we got so good at using these 'staple crops' that it could well be a generational project to get people to let go of them.

I don't think so. You're not going to overturn millenia of culinary preferences & traditions simply because you announce to everyone "We're growing vegetables now! Wheat is too hard." The solution is to innovate & make it profitable to grow wheat in vertical farms. Simple as that.

Wow, thank you!

Glad you liked it!

Glad you enjoy it!

Glad you think so!

Glad you liked it!

Thanks a lot!

I'm glad you liked it! It's a lot of content crammed into a relatively short video, so some of the videos require a few watches for those who really want to dive into the details!

Great to hear! It's easy to look at the current state from a static perspective, but technology is generally very dynamic, so it's important to factor in foreseeable changes as best as we can. With so many different branches of technology that are improving and could have a potential impact, it's certainly a challenging thing to do.

@@ExaCognition i dont know how interested you would be in further discussion, id like tp zoom out from history and do what you didwith the vertical farming episode toshow how interdependent innovations exponentially support further innovations. I just want to show people that the world isnt ending, it dramatically improving and that it doesnt happen automatically, it happens when people work their ass off and collaborate selflessly. Iwant to use history as a guide to show that todays events are not new but part of an ever turning cycle of tension leading to improvement and progress. Forged in fire.

You're very welcome!

Thank you very much!

Awesome, thank you!

I want to do a follow up video at the end of the year, to see how things have progressed, since I made this series.

Glad you like it!

Glad you enjoyed it!

You're welcome

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Great to hear! I've still got a lot of improvement to go but I feel it's getting better.

I will be. I had to take a break for financial reasons but I will be back to posting videos soon.

Hope your situation improves. Have you considered a patreon for your channel? Every little bit helps.

Thanks very much!

Our government should focus on vertical farming rather than forcing laws onto farmers. Vertical farming is the future.

I appreciate that!

I hope so too

Thanks! I have definitely thought about Patreon, it would help with the sustainability of the channel, but I need to be posting regular videos before I launch it. Once I'm back from my break of videos I'll look into it.

I'm definitely going to be looking at transport and travel in upcoming videos.

I will be making the appendix video and I will cover a few other Vertical Farming topics in other videos too, since this series seems to be quite popular and there is plenty more to talk about.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's easy to get overfaced with the problems we are up against, but these solutions are definitely making progress.

@@ExaCognition thanks man!

Thanks a lot, I'm glad you like this.

Glad it was helpful!

A few people have talked about this in the comments section and it's certain a topic that warrants investigation. I'm intrigued by the parallels from other industries. Power generation in the modern age has largely been large scale, regional level generation and little local generation. That landscape is changing somewhat, with local generation and storage becoming more prevalent. There are a number of factors at play that determine which is the most efficient. Larger scale is generally more efficient, but it comes at the cost of locality and flexibility, both of which can be significant efficiency losses. Which is more efficient is complicated and is often a combination of the two. Even with solar itself, a large scale solar farm next to a town is more efficient than the same town full of solar panels, though each individual has less control over their supply own and risk exposure to artificially high prices. Also, if the solar farm is far away, then the transmission losses are higher and control over supply is even more of an issue. Computing also highlights similar trends. Computers used to be big and centralized, you used to have to go to the computer. Then people got computers in their home and nearly everyone had one. Now, you also the cloud which gives you access to cheap computing on a massive scale computer warehouse (granted they are distributed). The cloud give you cheaper computing than you can manage locally, but it comes with certain drawbacks and leaves you at risk of artificially high prices. What seems to be common across technology centralized vs locality paradigms, is there is a balance of pros and cons. Locality generally gives you more options and control for reduced risk, but generally you pay a premium for the lack of scale. The monolithic cost of scale you mention are largely present when extreme capital requirements create large barriers to entry. With such barriers, few can enter, competition is low and prices end up inflated. Food is generally less exposed to this effect, since the barrier to entry of generating it is fairly low. Additionally, if you have the option of competing yourself with your own local production, large scale necessarily must become more competitive. Generally speaking, large automated plant factories have the potential to be more cost efficient than smaller ones. Still, the option of locality gives each individual the option to chose what they prefer, or leverage a bit of both. You can have solar and storage but still use some grid energy. You can have a computer at home but still use the cloud when you need it. The technological progress enables local capability, more choice and increased competition for any centralized technology. In principle, that should make things better. I would imagine home food production would follow a similar pattern. I wouldn't expect it to replace the majority of food production, there is a clear scale advantage (and energy efficiency advantage) for plant factories. That said, if there is an option for high density local growing, it wouldn't be surprising to see a fair amount of people producing decent quantities in the home . It's currently pretty hard to produce significant quantities of food at home, but if that becomes an option, it may well shape the industry.

Well, my next main series is going to be on the state and future of energy. I will tie that to existing global challenges. I had to take a bit of a break from video production, but I'm hoping to get back to it soon, and kick off more series.

@@ExaCognition Great i'll stay tuned for that! Hope you do, love these kinds of videos!

I spent far too long trying to do that but I'm glad you liked it. I created a relative value for the viability of a vertical farm based on in % domestic production (how much you need to import food) and electricity cost per country. That put every country on a scale of 0 - 1. I put those into a google chart graph and segmented it into groups: Red countries 0.8-1, Orange countries 0.6-0.8 etc. I used the Video Copilot "Orb" earth tutorial to build a 3D earth in after effects. Then I created the colored countries using Video Copilots "Saber" plugin, by creating masks around the red, orange etc. countries charts. It was a bit of a pain because the google charts are mercator projections (since you can't perfectly map a 3D sphere onto 2D rectangle without distortion), so I had to run the reverse transformation on my chart masks so that I could project it back onto a 3D sphere without the 2D distortions. Then it's a case of projecting the your spherical countries at the same radius as your earth model and trying to balance the glow and reflection (also trimming the alpha of the could layers etc. overall I think it worked pretty well, thought there are things I would do differently in hindsight. It took a lot to learn what I needed and then figure out how to put it all together. My old graphics card could barely handle it, but I learned quite a bit so I'm glad I tried it.

That's pretty interesting. I didn't really look into mushrooms, but I'd imagine their low light requirement makes them an intriguing case. I don't think the system is dependent on cheap energy for leafy greens, as it's viable already. Though, certainly the more difficult produce is very much dependent in progress in technology. The question is, how quickly can the technology move forward?

Thanks! I have another video coming out in a few weeks. I had to take a break for a bit, but I intend to get back to making more videos and acceleration the rate that I can produce them.

I completely agree, I didn't really talk about the many things that can be done (and sometimes is already) with exsiting agriculture. A lot of the traditional agriculture figures are based on averages of the current state, but if best practices were adopted across exisitng agriculture the impact would be significant.

@@ExaCognition Thanks for the response. I don't think you really addressed my point though. I'm NOT claiming that you were making an unfair comparison between future high-tech vertical farms and current best-practices in tradition agriculture. But rather, that the projections about vertical farming weren't compared to projections about traditional farming. If all of the improvements you mentioned took place in the vertical farming space... that would only make it competitive with traditional farming as it exists today. And if that average isn't even taking into account the best-practices but rather just the average of traditional farming... your projections for when vertical farming makes economic sense will likely get pushed years farther into the future, no?

I'm glad you enjoyed the series.Lab grown meat is going to be one of my next videos, it's certainly a n interesting area.

It's a very interesting area. A lot of work is going into the most efficient wavelength mix (at the right growth phase of the plant). The 2nd point is also an area that gets quite a bit of focus, LED's can have more or less focus depending on the application, and can be placed closer to the plant to reduce light bleed. The 3rd point is something I still think is underutilized in a lot of vertical farms today. I’d suggest solar recapture is probably over engineered, but mirror like reflection throughout a bay can indeed save a surprising amount of energy according to the farms that do this. Of course, making bays reflective adds cost, it make temperature and airflow control more of a challenge, and greater cleaning requirements if you want to keep optimal reflection. My video “How Vertical Farming Can Improve” goes through a few of these points if you are interested.

*small

I still think I have a lot of improvements I can make regarding quality, but thanks for the kind words!

There's a book called "The Plant Factory" by T Kozei. It's a dense read, but it's got a lot of useful information in it.

@@ExaCognition thank you so much! I ask because I want to be a vertical farmer, so your videos are very helpful

Thanks! Lab grown meat is actually 3 videos away. So hopefully I can make it relatively soon.

@@ExaCognition I was actually just thinking about this topic. In your future video on lab-grown meat, could you run a hypothetical mathematical model on how much energy and water the world could save if there was a mass transition to both Plant Factories and Lab-grown meat?

Thanks, it's something I've been looking into making a short about at some point.

You are absolutely right. The source documentation needs to be posted, I endevour to post the series source docs/calcs and data sheets with the appendix video. I actually wanted to post it with initial series but it's quite a mess and a challenge to follow. I wanted to tidy it up first but it's quite a job. I think it's important to post these live for my series going forward. Frankly, this videos series has got a lot more traction than I was expecting, so I've got a bit of catching up to do!