Vertical Farming 503
SolFire writes "The BBC is running a look at the potential for Vertical Farming in the Big Apple, a concept that promises to reduce the environmental impact of farming and increase the efficiency of food production by building multi-story farm complexes in urban areas. The vertical farm is envisioned as a self sustaining complex of greenhouses stacked on top of each other. More details can be found on the project web site."
Price of land? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Air quality? (Score:3, Insightful)
Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thereby freeing up arable land for more "environmentally friendly" endeavors, like factories and housing developments.
Give me a break. How about spending this money on ways to reduce the world's population growth? Lack of arable land is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
The report says most of the 3 billion people to be added to world population in the next 50 years would be born in areas where land was scarce. If the grain-land area in the world stayed the same as in 2000, the 9 billion people projected to inhabit the planet in 2050 would each be fed from less than 0.07 hectares of grain-land -- an area smaller than what is available per person today in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, which face the shortage of land..
(link [dailytimes.com.pk])
Re:Uh.. (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_sunlight [wikipedia.org]
Re:The top layer is for growing plants (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine you're being facetious, but actually, growing edible mushrooms in an urban environment makes a lot of sense - many vigourous strains of edible fungi will grow happily on substrates like discarded coffee grounds, newspaper* and cardboard. Think how much more efficient recycling of cellulose-based waste would be if you didn't have to ship it hundreds of miles to a recycling facility - in fact, you didn't really have to process it at all, except steeping it in water and doing a mild pasteurisation. Best of all, once the fungi has exhausted the substrate, it makes a great compost (most fungi don't use up the nitrogen present in such substrates) which can then be used for agriculture on higher levels! Sustainable and delicious!
*this applies to Western countries, where newspapers are now predominantly printed using soy-based non-toxic inks. This is not a good idea wherever lead-based inks are prevalent, fungi can accumulate heavy metals.
Re:Economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
The middle-east should be the first to try this (Score:2, Insightful)
Energy (Score:2, Insightful)
My problem with this is that there simply isn't enough solar energy falling on xm^2 to run a farm of 30xm^2. Doesn't matter how parabolic your solar collector is. I don't buy for a moment that you can make up any significant part of the difference burning the waste plant material. That leaves us grid power . . . which brings us back to fossil fuel.
-Peter
Re:Uh.. (Score:4, Insightful)
And with the solar panels, the energy should be enough for.... Hmmm. Lets see now... - Ah! One level! We can do away with the other stories and grow things right on the ground. What an incredible breakthrough! Mother Nature would never figure it out.
And the version for the sarcastically impaired;
Plants are more efficient than solar cells. The energy output will never exceed the input. Therefore, this is a dumb idea.
And It Pays for Undergrad Beer Money! (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a very good reason why farmers don't construct massive green houses to grow their crops year round; it is too damn expensive. The cost of constructing a green house is pittance compared to the cost of constructing a 30 story building in an urban area. What they are in effect suggesting is not only that you grow all of your food in a green house, but that you do it in a place where land costs are the highest in the world in a structure that costs a few orders of magnitude more then a green house!
The whole idea is silly. It is a cute intellectual game and if it pays beer money for a few undergrads, great, but paying for undergrad beer money is about as far as this idea is going to go.
Re:Economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Air quality? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Say what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plants need light to grow. The windows can only supply so much. So the other light has to be artificially produced (which eats energy).
The soil, the water, fertilization, etc can all be handled fairly naturally. But some of it will have to be imported. This is not "self sustained" by any means.
But the biggest factor is energy consumption. Is it cheaper to spend the energy to move crops from 100% natural light into the city or is it cheaper to spend the energy on artificial light and grow the crops inside the city?
Re:Price of land? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Air quality? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:arcology (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a farmer, but I can't help say "ROFL!" to this.
We grow thousands of acres per farmer... you couldn't fit one of us inside each greenhouse. Not to mention, how are they planning on harvesting grains, oilseeds, pulse crops, etc? I don't think a combine will fit in that building... Are we going to be doing it by hand? That would really be interesting!
If they want to do this for vegetables, fine. However, for "field" crops, this is just plain nonsense from a bunch of guys who have never even seen a farm.
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also I don't understand the exclusive-use mentality. The core (low light or north-facing depending on your hemisphere) areas could be turned over to other uses, and the whole thing could be seen as a balcony farm arrangement instead. Instead of staring out at the rest of the concrete jungle, I would be pretty happy to have a bunch of green things outside my window. This also makes it easier to pay for the building when you get to sell some office/living/retail space to go along with it.
These people don't seem to have thought very creatively about what they are up to. It seems more an idea of how to arrange a traditional horizontal farm within limited city space. They haven't really explored the vertical context at all, either in arrangement or delivery systems etc, and also very tied to fixed ideas of what exactly a farm is....
I think urban farming is really an important thing that we should be thinking about reviving, but if you gonna think out of the box, don't just look out....
Re:Agreed, except: (Score:3, Insightful)
roof tops (Score:2, Insightful)
plentiful at the top. It would even help with water runoff and A/C. I think europe's been doing
this for awhile.
Re:arcology (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe it is an example of a Slashdotter thinking he's smarter than everyone else once again.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that this was to be built inside an office building?
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see it working. There are three problems:
(1) Farming doesn't pay. Really. Compared to industries like money, insurance, and even publishing, farming comes out to terrible labor conditions and abject poverty. It'll be very hard to find workers or to ever get as much money as from rent on the same volume.
(2) There's no space crisis in farming, contrary to the webpage - in fact, many acres have been retired from farming and are being retired today as well.
(3) Did I mention farming really, really, really doesn't pay?
2 words: FARM BILL (Score:1, Insightful)
That's because of the ridiculous farm bill, which sends my hard-earned tax dollars to flyover states to pay farmers to grow more corn, so they can make high-fructose corn syrup to make super-cheap Coca-Cola, which is why so many of my neighbors are obese. Remember, without government farm bill subsidies, corn wouldn't be profitable at all.
All (ha!) we need is for a few people in the government to decide that Vertical Farming in Big Cities is the Next Big Thing, subsidize it out the wazoo (instead of corn in the midwest). Presto, fresh veggies in NYC instead of corn syrup in Oklahoma.
A 4 acre lot in NY, 25 stories high, is going to be TENS of MILLIONS, just for the lot and construction costs. Then you have to haul in the dirt, (or set up the hydroponic tanks), pay the hand laborers, pay the MUCH HIGHER energy costs to produce this way... Theoretically it may work. In Practice? Nope. "Energy savings" aren't going to make a difference either, sorry.
Change a few words and you could use this argument to explain why the Apollo program will never make it to the moon. If the government decides to pump a billion dollars in here and there, that trumps any short-term economic loss.
The entire farm infrastructure in America is controlled by money, and that money is channeled from taxpayers to specific places by the farm bill. New technology (this or anything else) isn't going to change farming; only the government will, simply because they've been propping up the craptacular system we have now for so long.
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:arcology (Score:3, Insightful)
A stationary combine that simply handles what is shoved into its maw would take far less room.
Also, while I'm sure you are of the age of farmers where it was no longer an issue, remember a combine is called a combine because it's actually a multi-purpose machine which harvests, threshes, and cleans all at once. This is necessary because you are in the middle of a thousand acres of grain and need to do all three before you could leave with the product. The introduction of the combine is what ENABLED you to have thousand acre fields.
This isn't an issue in a vertical farm, and it would probably save a lot of space to simply have mobile harvesters bringing the crop to a central thresher.
Lastly, a 1,000 acre field is the equivalent of 43,560,000 square feet. Assuming a 30 floor building, that is 1,452,000 sq ft per floor. One building may not completely replace a 1,000 acre field; as it would need a little over a 1,000 ft by 1,000 ft footprint to match the total square footage. However unlike your field, this space would be productive all year long, allowing for more than one harvest. And also unlike traditional multi-harvest plans (like winter wheat harvests), both crops will be growing under as close as ideal conditions as can be offered to the plant.
I don't quite think our science is yet up to the task of replacing mega-farms with veritical farms, but it isn't as unlikely as you would think.
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
Crops are sold below production, driving the prices up to sustainable levels would be a good thing for everyone (except perhaps if you're exceedingly wealthy).
Re:arcology (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:arcology (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody said you had to have a traditional combine inside your farm building. The track could also be used to send sprayers for irrigation/fertilization/etc. over your crop. A few robot arms running around doing whatever is needed.
Re:Agreed, except: (Score:3, Insightful)
4: Better alternative? No, especially not in our lifetimes. But it is still eventually necessary for the long-term survival of the human species. An extinction-level meteor impact WILL eventually happen (and has happened twice before), and even if we manage to avoid that the sun will eventually either go nova or burn out into a brown dwarf. But the fact that it's not an immediate necessity doesn't mean that we shouldn't start trying now. The time to move out of Pompey is BEFORE Vesuvius erupts... once you see the smoke, it's already too late.
5, 6, 7: You're reading your own biases into the GP post. I don't think anyone here is saying any of those things. We need to make this planet last as long as we can, so that we have time to advance far enough that we can seed other ones.
It's pointless to think about moving all of the human race to another planet; and even if it were possible, human nature is such that most people wouldn't leave even in the face of an impending catastrophe. At most we can do is provide the opportunity for a tiny percentage to migrate elsewhere and start breeding.
I could go on, but Heinlein does a better job of making this argument in several of his novels (Time Enough For Love in particular).