How vertical farming could have changed war logistics.

Written by Mykola Babiy, reviewed by Garry Tiscovschi and Callum McDonnell.

“Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.” - Robert Hilliard Barrow (U.S. Marine Corps four-star-general)

Figure 1. (Growcer, 2020)

What a different world we would be living in if Alexander the Great (ATG) had electricity at his disposal. It’s evident that if he did, he would’ve used this extensively to reach his goals of global domination. How successfully, I guess we’ll never know.

Let us begin our investigation into how ATG could have used vertical farming as a source of food and as a stress reliever with regards to starvation and dehydration.

Vertical farming is a process where you grow food indoors with the help of various technologies rather than outside in fields. Vertical farms would have brought ATG and his army not only much more success in their arduous and lengthy conquest of Persia, but also much more nutrients. Significantly reducing soldiers being governed by empty stomachs. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler (2020) propose a good way to picture the possible scale and vastness of the food growing technology: imagine a skyscraper, but instead of it being used as an office space, it’s used to feed thousands of people with the use of vertical farms.

Who’s better at managing food supply levels, humans or AI?

Having to plow through unfamiliar terrain and eat unfamiliar foods may have not been on the top of soldier’s menus, including ATG himself. At every moment during the army’s march across the Persian lands ATG would have needed to take into account how he would feed his army and be up to date on all the food supply chains. I’m sure he entrusted a general to take command of the food supplies, let’s refer to him as Chief Food Officer (CFO). The CFO would ride up to ATG on his horse at some part of the march and have to tell him that food supplies are running low. Depending on what sort of a mood ATG was in, his response would either be:

1. Listen to his advice and stop to sort out the food shortage.
2. Listen to his advice, have the CFO hung for running low on food, and then stop to sort out the food shortage. This is assuming that there had already been tensions between ATG and the CFO. ATG was known to be decent to his companions, unless he had reason not to be. I personally think that running out of food would fall into this ‘reasoning to be hung’, but that’s only my opinion.
3. Avoid the CFO’s advice, conquer the nearest city or village, and plunder all their food once all the farms are seized.

It would be a shame that a CFO would have to put his life and reputation on the line simply for running low on food. Vertical farming enables better understanding of food supplies and production that anyone with access to the data can access and understand. ATG could simply get a notification on his handheld device indicating that supplies are low alongside a stock-take of supplies and supplies in production. We’ll return to what exactly enables such an advanced operation further on in this blog.

Farms that you can place wherever you like and move around constantly based on what your needs may be.

Where vertical farming really trumps traditional farming is in the fact that it is not fixed to any one location. It can be transported (Figure 1.) without having to have it on a patch of land in the ground. Another point worth mentioning is that it can be stacked upwards, hence the “vertical” in vertical farming. What this means is that the returns of a small area of land can be multiplied, this is particularly useful when you’re trying to feed a whole army and when good farming land is hard to come by, which I can imagine was the case when crossing the Gedrosian Desert.

I now propose the motion that the time it took ATG to conquer all the Persian armies and lands could have been significantly reduced if he didn’t have to wait as long for food to grow and for food supply chains.

The first point being that vertical farms can boost yields 4 to 6 times by being able to produce crops all year round without relying on the weather and the sun (Desjardins, 2016) Secondly, the transportable element to vertical farms, an example being Freight Farms (see Figure 2.), this addresses the issue of an army always needing to be on their toes and keep moving along with their conquest. Although the transportation of such a heavy freight would have been difficult, it could have been figured out, provided that there was enough well-fed manpower to address the problem.

Such a farming system could also give ATG confidence in his conquests, as he would be able to check food supplies that are available and when next batches are due through well-developed and advanced IoT communications. What this means is that by using cameras, sensors, and big data machine learning, enough data can be generated to have a deep analysis of how the system is doing. All the independent points of information would then communicate with each other, transferring the relevant data between each other, hence operating as an IoT system. All ATG would need to do then is open an app on his phone, which would give him “full visibility into [his] growing operation — anywhere, anytime.” (Freight Farms, 2021). Generating food data and optimising the whole food growing process may be the missing key to making sure your whole army is fed in a war, especially when farm to farm supply chains can be cut off by the enemy in an attempt to starve you out.

Figure 2. (Kickstarter, 2012)

Conquering without limits.

In the past an ATG’s army could only go where there were supplies to feed them, otherwise they would starve. However, with such a vertical farming system, a well-trained CFO, and a farming team, I doubt food supplies would be an issue. Unless we’re talking about getting a freight up a cliff, in which we would recommend that ATG chooses to go “the long way”, or alternatively have the Freight Farm helicoptered in waiting for them at the top of the cliff.

Interestingly, ATG’s army was known for its lightweight qualities and ability to cover a lot of ground quickly, this deconstructs my argument for their ability to use such heavy freight farms. Although they could have used innovation (a lot of wheels, or thinner steel) to move these vertical farm containers, essentially creating a moving 24/7 growing farm. 24/7 because the vertical farms don’t rely on the sun, hence the ability to grow even during the night, which isn’t the case with plants that rely on sunlight. There are also various other systems (Figure 2.) that are lightweight and take less than 30 minutes to assemble (Farmony, 2020a), all that would be needed would be an indoor environment.

Figure 3. (Farmony, 2021b)

It would also save a huge amount of water as it would take 1 litre of water to grow a kg of lettuce instead of 250 litres of water in an open field to grow the same kg of lettuce in this case (see Appendix 1).

With such transportable high yielding farms ATG’s army would be able to sustain itself and continue their conquests, rather than being ruled by their own empty stomachs. This blog goes to show how something as trivial as food is sometimes overlooked in importance when it comes to big strategic maneuvers such as conquering whole civilisations. Good management and information systems of food would have given a significant upper edge to those who incorporate such systems into their plans.

Further reading you may be interested in:

• https://www.scmglobe.com/alexander-the-great-needed-great-supply-chains/
• https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/15/army

Bibliography

Desjardins, J. (2016) Infographic: How Vertical Farming Works [Online]. Visual Capitalist. URL: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-vertical-farming-works/ (Accessed 23 February 2021)

Diamandis, P. and Kotler, S. (2020) The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives. Simon & Schuster; New York. [eBook] pp.224/430

Farmony (2021a) Radix Product Sheet. URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cab9c627d0c914eddf9cf64/t/5ec99d733bbee218ed876ce4/1590271373069/Draft+Poduct+Sheet+Farmony+Growing+Platform+01012020+.pdf (Accessed 23 February 2021)

Farmony (2021b) Homepage [Online]. URL: https://farmony.ie (Accessed 23rd January 2021)

Freight Farms (2021) Farmhand IoT Software [Online]. URL: https://www.freightfarms.com/farmhand (Accessed 18 February 2021)

Growcer (2020) Why we don’t use Containers on our Farm [Online]. URL: https://growcer.com/why-we-dont-use-containers-on-our-farm/ (Accessed 1 March 2021)

Kickstarter (2012) Freight Farms: Grow Fresh Food in Any Environment [Online]. URL: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/488253196/freight-farms-grow-fresh-food-in-any-environment (Accessed 18 February 2021)

Appendix

Appendix 1.

Nott, G. (2021) How vertical farming is taking off [Online]. The Grocer. URL: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/environment/how-vertical-farming-is-taking-off/652820.article (Accessed 21 February 2021)