vertical farming
STREAMLINED MAINTENANCE OF THE VERTICAL PLANE
Vertical plane growing also streamlines the maintenance process . In vertical plane farms , workers can see and identify problems easier than with horizontal plane production . Workers can also physically access and treat problems easier with vertical plane production . It ’ s important that your workers are enabled to easily interact with the plants because workflows and ease of labor affect product quality and , ultimately , profit . This introduces “ opportunity costs ”— the costs of the tasks not done . For example , if a worker skips monitoring the top levels of a vertical farm , a fungal pathogen may go unnoticed for longer . This causes crop losses , and inventory is lost . Any business owner , manager , employee , etc . knows that when a task is very inconvenient , corners are cut . If it ’ s difficult for people to do things , they won ’ t do them , and quality suffers as a result . This friction makes labor quality a product quality issue .
FACTOR # 3 : PROFITABILITY
A false assumption prevalent in the vertical farming industry is that more volume equals more profit . In reality , more volume is not always better . Filling a volume of space with growing equipment is a more complex goal than just getting as much equipment in there as possible . How you fill your space dictates labor costs . If done poorly , then more volume could represent costs rather than profit . Vertical plane production sets fewer limitations on the ability to fill up a volume of space , as a function of labor use . Most commercial horizontal plane growers use six to seven tiers , but horizontal plane production typically breaks even around the fourth tier , with each additional tier losing money as costs accumulate . This is not because building tiers higher costs more ; the reason for this is that the cost of labor for taking care of those higher tiers increases with each tier . In other words , capital expense might not change much with more tiers , but operational expense does .
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