Lettuce crushes tomato and corn in indoor farm efficiency tests
Urban Ecology
If you've ever wondered why indoor farms sell you salad greens instead of tomatoes or corn, this study shows the reason is basic plant efficiency, not marketing.
Researchers grew corn, tomato, basil, lettuce, and arugula side by side in the exact same indoor farm setup, then measured how much edible food each one produced per square foot, per unit of electricity, and per dollar spent. Lettuce won by a landslide, producing up to 58 times more food per unit of energy than the corn and over three times more than the tomato. It's a reminder that a plant's basic shape and biology (how much of it you can actually eat versus how much energy it burns growing stalks, roots, and inedible parts) matters as much as the growing technology itself.
Key Findings
Lettuce produced the highest annual marketable yield at 73.2 kg fresh weight per square meter per year, beating arugula by 46% and basil by 35%.
Lettuce's energy use efficiency (46.7 g FW per kWh) was 3.5 times higher than dwarf tomato and 58 times higher than dwarf corn.
Lettuce also led in land-surface use efficiency (65 kg/m2/yr) and volume use efficiency (24.5 kg/m3/yr), outperforming arugula and basil by up to 1.8-fold.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A university test farm compared five crops grown indoors under identical high-tech conditions and found that lettuce vastly outproduces basil, arugula, tomato, and corn per square foot, per watt, and per dollar, showing that not all crops belong in vertical farms.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Unveiling the Productivity Potential of Vertical Farming Through Diverse Crop Cultivation: An Empirical Analysis
While vertical farming may offer high productivity per unit land area and has received increasing attention for urban food production, research has primarily focused on leafy greens and herbs. Alth...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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