BeAmazed
Dyson’s high-tech vertical farm grows 1.2 million strawberries using 1,000-pound rotating wheels to feed British consumers
Discussion
That seems quite horizontal to me.
Thank you! Glad im not the only one.
ha, I just came to ask if the picture was sideways, good grief.
See the bottom row, how it's below the one above? That's only possible in what is called a vertical farm. Hence why this one qualify.
Exactly. It’s still more total area for planting than a traditional field.
slightly, it seems. but you have to build and power it
There are rows above other rows, hence it's a vertical farm.
It's verticaller.
Ahhh remember Dyson and his Brexit antics. Forced to create a marvel of engineering because no one wants to work in farming strawberries other than those pesky immigrants.
Yeah and then after brexit happened he moved all Dyson's production out of the UK. Grade A Tosser
That's right!!!! Total wank!
Sounds like pro-brexit people's fault to me.
Aye, he was pro Brexit.
Thanks for the context. A nonce he is then.
Hang on, pro-brexit wanker I get, but how’s he a pedo?
I mean… is that not a good thing? He replaced underpaid imported labour with high tech innovation
Did he replace it for the entire country or just this one greenhouse?
isn't this the best outcome them?
- no one wants to pay for strawberries gathered by well paid people
Oooh noooo, don't automate and create high skill jobs. It's a moral imperative that we employ a transitory underclass....
You got a loicense for that snarky attitude, guv? Are yew tryink to imply that we shouldn't be importin' tons of immigrants just to pick our strawberries?? How will we prop'lee enjoy wimbledon without strawberries n' cream, freshly picked by middle-eastern 'ands?
Most of the downvotes seem not to understand sarcasm
And it'll be subsided by the British taxpayer, fail to deliver as promised, and Dyson will take all the money to the Philippines or whatever other haven he's got going on.
Debbie downer I know but let's remember who James Dyson actually is and how he behaves
You forgot to push his staff and campaign to leave the worlds largest trading bloc because that will let him keep his company in the UK, before immediately leaving the UK after he got what he wanted.
Dyson has launched a cutting-edge vertical farming operation in Lincolnshire, UK, where it grows 1.2 million strawberry plants inside a 26-acre glasshouse. Using its expertise in manufacturing, the company has designed a system featuring large rotating wheels that maximize sunlight exposure, UV robots that eliminate mold, and distributor bots that release beneficial insects to control pests. Sixteen robotic arms handle the harvesting, picking up to 200,000 strawberries per month.
The facility runs on power from an onsite anaerobic digester, which generates electricity from grain gases and provides excess heat to warm the glasshouse. Rainwater collected from the glasshouse roof is used to irrigate the plants. The system relies primarily on natural light, with minimal artificial supplementation.
By growing and distributing strawberries locally, Dyson reduces the energy needed for imports, especially during the UK's off-season. James Dyson sees this venture as a natural extension of manufacturing, aiming to boost efficiency, quality, and sustainability in food production. Dyson strawberries are already available in select Marks and Spencer stores and local farm shops across the UK.
I wonder how economical it is
Probably not so economical now, but things like this are great because once we have cheaper energy (if we ever get), growing food like this will be way cheaper and more water efficient than regular soil. That could mean local centers that grow certain crops like this can reduce transportation and labor costs (assuming some level of automation) as well as environmental and health benefits that come from not having to use crazy amounts of pesticides. Might be handy for countries like Korea where I am from where we ran out of farmers a while ago and have to resort to seasonally flown in labor to resolve our production issues.
True, there is potential there, but I think there is lack of such facilities because of high costs
For now. That's how all advancements start, too expensive until it scales up
Doesn’t sound like they are buying energy from the grid so once they’ve paid down the capital of the anaerobic digester, I’d expect this is cheap to run (especially if they feed the digester with scraps and trimmings from the strawberry plants)
Per the article They’re feeding the digester grain. And the end result from the digester is used as a field crop fertilizer
Especially since 26 acres can hold 1.17 to 1.7 mio plants if just planted traditional
Go buy strawberries in the off-season and check the price, would be pricey to set up but it would definitely pay itself off quickly with export and local sales.
Might be so. But knowing their costs and profits would be proof.
A lot of investment went into vertical farming warehouses etc. before and during the pandemic. It didn't go as well as they hoped as it's expensive and the markets are very local and finite compared to most other startup opportunities.
Luckily Dyson’s annual revenue last year was £7.1bn with a profit of over £1bn
They can afford the cost of innovating these newer approaches, hopefully refining the tech/process to a point of broader profitability
Perfectly said, I should of added something like this, a huge corporation like Dyson setting this up, they won't go bust, if a small mum n pop shop tried it, it may be different and a bit slower for the first few years.
Many of these have failed because of high energy and overhead costs, one of the issues in relocation growing produce to city centers to reduce the transport emissions is obviously city real estate is more expensive than farmland in the middle of nowhere. IMO they should be repurposing and adding rail to bring and distribute from farmland to cut down on all the trucks. I work in this industry and there is so much unnecessary transit.
https://www.trolley.co.uk/product/dyson-farming-own-strawberries/YKZ958 - Dyson strawberries (250g), £14/kg
https://zoom.ocado.com/m-s-british-strawberries-227g-518303011 M&S strawberries (300g), £7.67/kg
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/287529333 Tesco strawberries (400g), £6.25/kg
So based on retail price, about twice as expensive as regular strawberries.
but idk how much strawberries go up in price when they are off season, nor how much of that price is a premium price based not on economics but purely on the willingness of people to pay for something of a novelty/new tech.
You'll get return on your investment is just 100 years!
I think this is more about research and development, the lessons learnt from creating this will drive all future farming techniques.
Good point. Not so much when it’s partly a marketing event by Dyson but still after a few years of no people fussing around the delicate crops and maybe with a less ostentatious business -those savings start to look attractive against the life of the machinery.
But the technologies and principles that it takes is about scalability and sustainability.
I guess time will tell. "Factory farming" would reduce demands on land, and might be more ecological, but this is yet to be determined.
Compared to poly tunnels, not at all. The whole vertical farm idea is a scam by rich people to feel important.
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Should I have my AI read and respond to your AI or nah?
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Maybe you should try to shorten your stuff down and not have it formatted like a long AI ramble like you see everyone pasting in these days, contributing to general enshittification of all social media? I mean, if you actually typed all that manually then good for you I guess, but did you really expect people to be interested enough to read it all?
Those who are interested in the topic would read it. I would probably. And now I can't.
There are folks out there who are not scared of walls of text.
I'm usually one of those, but when the formatting reeks of AI I'm not reading it. I pointed that out, and the poster got butthurt about it and deleted. That's on them.
Nice formatting also may reek of an effort made by the poster. Just saying.
I'm as annoyed by enshittification as the next guy, don't get me wrong.
What's sad is that AI crap is now so spread out that we stopped wondering if something is generated by AI. We assume it is.
Kind of reverse Turing test. Instead of AI trying to be indistinguishable from people, now people have to prove they're not bots.
Good point about the reverse Turing. And i think people should keep this in mind if they spend time writing stuff they want others to read; don't prettify your stuff, it will be indistinguishable from AI slop. If you want people to read, skip the dividers, buttet points and weird long hyphens and write like a normal person.
Ironically, in my language the semicolon is quite normal, so even if many people see that as a sign of AI i still cannot stop using it out of sheer habit. But i try to have some errors in the text so people will know im not a bot.
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repost the thing i wanna read it
I think you should work on not letting randoms affect you so much. Maybe take a little internet break and go outside for a moment? If I can have such detrimental influence on your life from this little exchange I think you need to work on gettkng more emotionally robust, it will ve beneficial in the long run.
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I didnt accuse you of enshittification. I accused people that use AI to respond to questions for enshittification. If that's not you then I havent accused you of anything.
As for the rest. Well. Yeah... No comment.
The energy needed for things is shockingly deceptive...
For instance, as counterintuitive as it sounds, it's actually better for someone in the UK to buy imported lamb from New Zealand than it is to buy locally farmed lamb.
https://academic.oup.com/af/article/1/1/40/4638598
How on Earth would all of the manufacturing necessary to create such a (admittedly cool) strawberry farm offset the small carbon cost of import from a place that grows strawberries on the ground under the sun 🤷🏼♀️
Dyson only has expertise in manufacturing fan based items though (vacuum cleaner, fan, hair dryer, air purifier, that horrendous fan based face mask). And it takes them like a decade+ to come up with the next one of them. Almost every product that is not fan based that he has tried has failed (batteries, AI, car, washing machine). The only exception is some lights with a remote control, which aren't complex.
So I have doubts.
1 strawberry plant should be able to produce about 1kg if berries (about 30) in 3 or so months. The figure of picking 200,000 strawberries per month seems extremely low - it would fit better if they were picking 200,000 berries per day.
I'm american and the best strawberries I've ever tasted in my life were in the UK last summer.
They're so good I don't even know if we should call them strawberries here.
Damn, now I want some.
What about the actual output in kilos? Since when we are counting fruits and berries? 26 acres is huge. 10.5 hectares. Stats show that on average 1 ha plant gives the output of 20-30 tons. That’s 650 tons on average for this area. One strawberry is on avg 16gr, 1.2m makes it 19 tons. It can rerun cycle quicker than the farm, but then again, not 34 times quicker.
That seems very few strawberries.
Here in The Netherlands we made a test greenhouse to produce strawberries year round essentially low emmission: https://www.kasalsenergiebron.nl/nieuws/aardbei-fossielvrij-en-emissieloos-te-telen-in-kas2030/
They got 25 kg's of strawberries per year per square meter.
Now let's compare this to these wheels.
26 acre glasshouse is roughly 105.000 square meters of glasshouse.
1kg of strawberries is anywhere from 25-50 strawberries, so let's take 30 for demonstration's sake.
25 kg's of strawberries per square meter per year * 30 strawberries is 750 strawberries per square meter per year.
750 strawberries per square meters per year * 105.000 square meters of glasshouse is 78.750.000 strawberries per year.
A normal energy scarce low emission glasshouse of 26 acres can produce 65 times more strawberries than these high tech vertical farms in the same area.
It's a fun gimmick, but doesn't even come close to simply further improving the design of traditional glasshouses.
a fun gimmick, but doesn't even come close to simply further improving the design of traditional....
You could insert other words like vacuum cleaner, fan, haridryer etc here.
Well it seems to do more than just grow. It’s has other automation features.
Main Feature: It's a Dyson! 🤑
Those things run at double speed during Wimbledon ;)
I saw these like 15 years ago, they were used to grow weed. The owner told me it wouldnt be economically viable to grow anything else, since it is so expensive. Maybe it would be worth it in a bunker with little space.
We 'll do all this to realize we never had too..
It says the farm will produce up to 200k strawberries per month. The interwebs say that there are 50 strawberries in 1kg, and again interwebs say that the wholesale price of strawberries is around US$5,000 per ton. So at its peak, the farm will generate $20K revenue per month, which is nothing for all that investment and overheads. It’s a good start and hope it will be successful one day. But for now it’s just a research project for the technology to be developed. It’s not viable.
I dont't get it. Why would you move the heavy dirt & plants around instead of just moving the red light? Just have a bunch of rows of plants with a beam that moves over the top of it.
£41m to build and that doesn't include what was spent on the AI software (had a £110m budget).
Not really sure this is feasible for farmers. He also only sells his strawberries in Waitrose & M&S so he must have quite a mark up on them compared to what you would get in other supermarkets.
Finally we can lay down millions of pounds of concrete and steel so we can finally live green with our agriculture.
What an incredible piece of industrial engineering! Yet it is such a simple concept? Would love to hear more of that engineer's/designer's thoughts.
Dyson’s invented a few things, but his biggest one is the bagless vacuum cleaner. He marketed his invention under his own name, and is now a bit of a household name in the UK.
Though he didn’t invent the process of extracting the dirt using cyclones. It had been done in mining and sawmills for decades.
His air blade hand dryer seems to be everywhere now too
His vacuum is good but very fragile. Lots of people have one, they are all coming apart.
Mine has lasted me 20 years so far and I have no complaints!
The Vax that preceded it only lasted one year. Absolute crap.
I guess law of averages means there are some good ones out there! My wife was a cleaner and she said they are just not as durable as others. Customers ones always had bits falling off. Be glad yours is OK!
Just surprised me a little as it wasn’t a stereotype I’ve heard.
My cleaner friends swear by Henry hoovers, as when you’re doing it for a job, bagless isn’t as much of a benefit.
Yeah those things are bullet proof, that's the reason builders are fond of them too!
Interesting! Did not know that was the same person. Makes me want to read up on him.
Apart from the huge rotating cylinders, which is not a brand new idea, what else is new?
automated picking
Again, whats new?
From 2022 https://strawberryplants.org/strawberry-picking-robot/
Plus Dyson claims his 16 robots can pick 200,000 a month, thats 415 per robot day., not much compared to others that can do 200kg a day https://dogtooth.tech/robots/
With global warming making traditional farming more and more of a gamble, I wonder at what point we’ll be switching to this kind thing of solution for most produce.
If global warming is your main concern, you can forget about this. This type of farming uses crazy amounts of electricity and hence is bad for the environment. Why do you think it's not popping everywhere by now. One thing I know about farmers is anything to increase revenue and profits, if this was profitable, it would already be our main farming method.
Place your bets on optimization of conventional farming, mainly by genetic editing and robot use. Until the world is totally powered by renewables, vertical farming will be nowhere to be seen.
That was actually pretty amazing.
I’m curious how tightly it’s tied to British weather vs growing strawberries(and others) anywhere and everywhere.
I used to work there. The premis is to sell them out of season as this way of growing strawberries in the UK isn't season dependant.
This means he doesn't impact local farmers
The issue is they're very expensive meaning they get out competeted by imported fruit from near the equator during the winter months. Only higher end supermarkets seem to stock them consistently.
I'm not keen on supporting Dyson in any form or fashion.
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Why cant rich people invest in useful things?
James Dyson, the inventor behind this, has a net worth of approximately £23 billion.
He made his fortune from inventing a new type of hoover.
Unit cost is everything in agri, so what is the unit cost for that strawberry, taken a 10 year horizon to pay off the capital incest? That's a generous timeline
why not dyson sphere, missed opportunity.
Do they constantly rotate for sunlight, or is that just when a human needs to reach a certain shelf?
If I wanted to get into some kind of career regarding innovations and tech in farming what would I need to study?
There is a reason that nearly every ‘vertical’ farming company ends up growing lettuce in the end. It’s the only thing they can sell at a price that customers can stomach while still being profitable.
These strawberries are a marketing thing and they will need to sell for 10-15£ per punnet if they are to make money.
Ah strawberries ! An absolute essential food and so cheap at £15 ! /s
Approximately how many 1,000 pound rotating wheels does a British consumer eat?
The engineering here is undeniably impressive, but it's wild how this feels like a futuristic solution to a problem that wouldn't exist without political shortsightedness. Those rotating wheels are cool as hell, though, imagine explaining this setup to a farmer from 50 years ago. Still, kinda ironic that a company known for vacuums is now tackling food scarcity. Makes you wonder what other "impossible" problems could be solved with enough tech and desperation.
Say what you want about the cost of Dyson Vacuums but hes used his money to research and build many useful inventions
If this means less strawberries that start to go off after one day in the fridge then great; my mum's favourite fruits are strawberries and cherries and she keeps rotating stores looking for somewhere to have fresh ones with her yoghurt.
To what cost?
Living with the land?
Dyson
"That'll be £900 trillion, please."
NotTheOnion candidate.
i feel like if you rolled those out, it would mean 20% more strawberries but they need 10 times the ressources
Dear Mr. Dyson,
Why don't you try and do this with carbs instead of a luxury most people globally don't give a fuck about?
Sincerely, Everyone.
Don't buy Dyson, buy Numatic
🤔 Dyson = over-engineered, over-priced, over-marketed and waaaay overrated🤷♂️
This project has a distinctly Musky odor.
This is pretty cool all round, mad props to Dyson for just giving this a shot, glad some of my vacuum cleaner profit went to such as innovative project as this. Nice work Jimmy and team!!
No such thing as a good billionaire. Eat the rich.
Are you winning dy-son?
Dyson be dysoning!
Wow, this is ingenuity that I love to see.
I designed something like this on a notebook when I was about 10 in school
Top dawg
Clever engineering but results in pretty tasteless produce
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