While I'm not sure about going full-on microbiotic environment control, the contained structure does help reduce the risk of the modified plants themselves escaping into the local ecosystem and becoming invasive species. Which itself is a concern, especially in more fragile/susceptible areas.
That's just being pedantic now and not really proving anything. e.g. perhaps there's 80% less pump pressure needed this way, which would be in line with the claim. e.g. there wasn't any claim that the entire company was "pump free" was there? Just that the way that each tower disperse the nutrients is by gravity, with removes the need for pumps.
I kinda feel like this is needlessly aggressive... The wording is a bit ambiguous and could easily be interpreted to mean "no pumps at all", and as with all "groundbreaking" startups, it's healthy to have a fair dose of skepticism before they've actually broken any ground. Hell, Kickstarter should be a great example of this... "Our system is unique in that it completely solves and avoids these common problems met by our competitors", and then slightly later "turns out we actually ran into the same problems, because we couldn't figure out a solution like we thought we'd be able to by now".
Then again, it's Vox, so I wouldn't necessarily place the blame for miscommunication on the actual startup.
Sorry if that came across as aggressive, but let me clarify my point.
I think the context is important however. Clearly, if you've got the nutrients into the building, that's involved effort. The effort to raise the nutrients 20 feet at that point is a minimal part of the process.
What's important is what the method was being
compared against - which was vertical farming systems that use stacks of horizontal shelves. e.g. when you use horizontal shelves, then you need pressurized pumps on each shelf that pump the nutrients across each level to ensure that all plants receive nutrients. Whereas, when the plants are jutting out sideways from a vertical structure, gravity does that for you. Pointing out that energy is needed to raise the nutrients up the tower is missing the point being made - the horizontal shelves method also needs energy to raise the nutrients up to the level of each shelf, then needs pressurized pumps to spread it horizontally.
e.g. the
vertical nature of the towers was being compared to
horizontal shelving, e.g. it's pointing out what's different about this method of vertical farming vs previous methods of vertical farming. In each case, you needed energy to get the nutrients into the right location to start with, an extra couple of feet isn't a deal-breaker and isn't really cogent with the claim being made, which was pretty straightforward.
and if the farm is multi-level you don't need ladders and buckets (which is sort of an appeal to ridicule, since the whole point of
vertical farming is that it scales
vertically whereas needing ladders implies you're operating on a single level). Less pumps is less moving parts, less that can break down, less that needs servicing, and less energy needed. If you have
employees on the level above, already, it's trivial to get them to top up some nutrient tanks manually for the level below - hey you expended energy getting the employees up there already so if they carry some stuff up the stairs or it goes up in the service lift with them, then that's a minimal expenditure of energy and much less flaky than trying to pump it up.
This is why I said it was being overly pedantic - a counter-argument can be
so pedantic that it actually loses sight of important contextual information about the point being made: pointing out that theoretically it needs energy to raise anything, anywhere ... misses the point that the article was contrasting vertical plant shelving vs horizontal plant shelving - and this is clear from
context since it was the vertical shelving concept itself (and not vertical farming in general) which was being referenced in the quote you disputed.
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