Authors:
- Charles Nicholson and Miguel Gómez
Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University - Kale Harbick and Neil S. Mattson
School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University
Summary of a forthcoming book chapter in the Dyson Schools’s Smart Marketing Newsletter:
The production of vegetables and fruits using controlled environment agriculture (CEA) in or near urban areas has received a good deal of media attention in recent years—and has also attracted a considerable sum of investment dollars. CEA operations (greenhouses, vertical farms and plant factories) enable year-round intensive production of vegetables by creating controlled environments that supply a balance of light, heat, CO2 and water to optimize plant growth. The potential benefits of metro CEA include lower transportation costs, reduced product waste, and job creation but should also be weighed against potentially higher land, labor, water, and energy costs and compared with field-based production. CEA as an urban food production method, contributor to local food systems, and municipal investment strategy is yet to be fully assessed. Examples exist of commercially viable soil-based metro farms and apparently-successful metrobased greenhouse operations, but the financial feasibility of individual metro-based CEA enterprises (particularly plant factories), has not been systematically addressed by previous research. In a broader sense, the extent to which a city’s demand for vegetables can be produced within its boundaries using CEA systems (that is, its scalability) is unanswered. To understand the potential of metro CEA, assessment of its likely economic, environmental and social outcomes is relevant. As a starting point, a supply-chain approach can be used compare the economic and environmental outcomes for conventional field-based and metro-based CEA production.