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."
arcology (Score:5, Interesting)
Could be the first step towards building arcologies [wikipedia.org]...
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Re:arcology (Score:5, Informative)
The downside is obviously the cost. However, the numbers still work out nicely. 85% of our lettuce is grown on the west coast at about 18 cents per head. This lettuce is more expensive (albeit near perfect, organic, and uberfresh), at 27 cents per head to produce. However, the cost to ship a head of lettuce from the west coast is as much as 50 cents. So you end up saving an awful lot.
As for energy usage: a semi gets 120-200 gross ton miles per gallon. Let's go with the middle, 160 ton miles/gallon. This means 320000 heads of lettuce per mile/gallon, or ~118 heads of lettuce per gallon from LA to NYC, i.e. ~0.0085 gallons per head of lettuce. That's 1.25 MJ of energy. The lettuce needs 2-3 months -- let's say 75 days. Let's say that half the light (compared to a sunny farm in SoCal) is supplimented -- perhaps 3 kWh/day. Let's say that they use diode lamps, so it's really 4 kWh/day consumed: 300 kWh total. That's 1.1 MJ. So, growing locally wins. But it gets better because you use 1/5th the fertilizer, no pesticides, and so on.
Re:arcology (Score:4, Insightful)
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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?
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Also, you could put some solar panels on the sunny side(s), on the "floor" surfaces (where there are no windows).
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It looks like from reading this that the cost of producing many little generators would incur a higher cost and make lower returns on the cost.
So building many small ones to get the power of one big one is not cost effective for them , or so it would seem.
I would like to put a small fan on a car alternator , removing the rectifier of course and see what one of these bad boys could generate for power.
Hopefully enough to power my laptop as I surf
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IE it's expecing 1k+ rpm minimum, and probably getting barely 100 rpm.
wind gennies (Score:4, Informative)
why do wind farms consist of all those huge windmills? wouldn't 100 times as many smaller windmills generate a similar amount of power?
Generally speaking large wind gennies, er mills, have lower rpms so there's less vibrations and it's thought they are less of a threat to wildlife. However because of the large blades the speed of the tips of the blades are actually faster. Some studies have shown the faster blade tips create the elusion of a solid object, however others have shown they create a strobe effect like strobe lights.
FalconRe:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I recall seeing several years ago, a show on a house that had "light fixtures" that were actually putting out natural light by, if memory serves, fiber optics that started at the outside of the house and piped the light through the building.
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:5, Interesting)
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True, but there's only so much light hitting the building. You can come up with tricks to distribute and divide the light any way you want, but at some point you aren't going to have enough luminance for plant growth (over a given amount of area).
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly, who said this has to be used for our staples? Okay, so the grains still come from the midwest. No big deal because they're a lot easier to transport without having to worry about rot. Potatoes are sort of in the same boat.
However, crops such as mushrooms, berries, tomatoes, lettuce, etc etc etc could do quite well in those greenhouse type environments. They could be harvested when they are actually ripe and delivered fresh unlike what we have now where they are picked green and allowed to ripen off the vine (in the case of things like berries and tomatoes).
Additionally, with the space saved in the midwest, farmers would be able to practice better crop rotation practices in order to let their fields rest while maintaining the same yeild.
It's a topic that I'm not completely ignorant on considering that I grew up on a farm.
Easy enough (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:5, Informative)
Did you actually read their website? There are a wide-variety of designs being proposed, not the least of which is this slanted building:
http://www.verticalfarm.com/images/design/skyfarm
If I'm not mistaken, that's one of the concepts you were just accusing them of ignoring?
Re:Emphasis on the light, please. (Score:5, Interesting)
Spending time reading the website, I'm convinced that it could very well be economical to grow food in vertical farms rather than importing it. The light issue is solved in several ways. If you look at the website, they have a design intended for Toronto that actuallys slants the building sideways to provide the maximum possible lighting to all levels during the morning hours. (It reminds me a bit of a Nintendo Wii in its cradle.)
Beyond that, you need to keep in mind that this is a controlled environment. Most natural environments can only produce crops during a single season. A controlled environment can produce crops year round. The website claims that this would result in a 4-6x increase in production per acre of farmable land. I find this number to be perfectly believable given the incredible production of areas like Hawaii, which can grow their sugarcane year round thanks to the more even climate.
The controlled environment also removes potential issues with the crops. There will be no dry seasons, no tornadoes or hurricanes, and a far lower chance of disease or pestilence in the crops. There will also be less need to genetically engineer crops for different environments and/or as great of a need to spray for pests.
The pages go on to provide more explanations, but the take away is that there is a strong chance that this could be economically viable. In many ways, it seems like a very *good* idea. I'd love to see a test building setup just to work out the kinks and see if it really is as feasible as they're suggesting.
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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, re
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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).
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Humanure is actually the best fertilizer around, it's just that you have to process it before it can be used. Failure t
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Re:arcology (Score:4, Funny)
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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 bunc
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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, thresh
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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.
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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?
Air quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
And even more importantly: Where will they get the illegal labor to harvest the stuff?
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Re:Air quality? (Score:4, Informative)
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-matthew
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Still, with the increasing prices of liquid hydrocarbons and increases in heating/lighting efficiency, the equations may have changed, especially if we get creative and do something like use heatpumps to transfer heat from the office/living areas(which for buildings of sufficient size ALWAYS need c
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Since adding extra CO2 would be beneficial to yields, etc, we could use this sort of cultivation as a way to dispose of extra CO2 captured by carbo
Yay! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Cost/benefit in terms of land and construction. It'd be *expensive* to build (and keep up) such custom, fragile, and constraint-ridden structures in high-rent NYC.
2. Competition with more conventional year-round greenhouses in NYC's 'burbs.
It's hard to know how these factors would shake out. I wish the scientists all the luck in finding funding, though I think there are other worthy (and competing) ideas that deserve funding just as much as this.
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Real Estate (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that, this isn't going to be in a downtown area. Costs will mean it's much more likely to be in a depressed ex-industrial region - real estate will cost many times less and there will be a marginal transportation incerase.
I wonder how pollution will affect the quality of the produce. I do know there's a vineyard in Commerce City, Co in the shadow of a huge oil refinery
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Actually, I would hazard a guess that agricultural wastes would be a larger problem: Out here in the country, it's simply a matter of run off. A luxury you do not have in the city.
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Re:Economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tractor?!?! LOL!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Plants might not do as well, but then we don't have to spend energy transporting food 1000 miles from BFE. We also reduce the infrastructure load on NYC and surrounding areas.
Ventilation will be a problem,
Re:Tractor?!?! LOL!! (Score:4, Informative)
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You are growing "Greens" indoors, using hydroponics, under a security light... for your turtle
Riiiight... turtle, sure... enjoy your "greens"
Good idea! (Score:2)
Price of land? (Score:4, Insightful)
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But I think New Yorkers are willing to pay whatever it takes to cut off any ties with the rest of the country.
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I seriously doubt anyone thinks this is economically viable today. But what I assume they want to do is figure out how to make it work
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At that point, large, self-contained farms that use a comparatively miniscule amount of water will look like a MUCH better idea.
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First, buy a calculator and learn how to use it.
Here's a simple calculation to start with: it costs about $1 to move a ton of produce 20 miles. If gasoline was $20 a gallon, then that number would be $6 per ton for the same 20 miles. Even if we accept your ridiculous premise of $20 a gallon gas, and your outside estimate of "thousands of miles", we are still talking about less than $600 to move a ton of food 2000 miles. If you think that's a lot, consider that the market is alread
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T.
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Uh.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_sunlight [wikipedia.org]
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.
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If they absorbed green light, they wouldn't be... (Score:3, Informative)
If plants absorbed green light, then they wouldn't be green. :)
Objects are the colors they are because those are the colors they don't absorb. Other than that, you're spot on, though.
Hmm, the Hanging Gardens... (Score:2)
Finally... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm already surprised NASA doesn't hire them to come up with effective ways to grow things in space. If you want revolutionary science, send a group of them to the space station with a few seeds, some PVC pipe, and a light bulb. The place will look like the Amazon freakin' jungle before the next resupply shuttle docks.
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Issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, then you have a host of follow up issues such as the effect on increased food prices on the poor, and the distorting effect those prices may have on eating patterns and subsequently the health of the population...
Still it's an interesting idea.
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You have a more or less closed system - the water can be recovered from the air conditioning/drainage.
i>One being that the interior of a city isn't the best place to get sunlight from
Light can be brought into the lower levels of a building using light pipes, or through arrangement of the buildings levels (London Gherkin [wikipedia.org])
If pot plants (the office kind) can grow in an office environment, crops shouldn't be too difficult.
Perhaps this is a UK thing, but plenty o
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])
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I was thinking virtually the exact same thing, actually. Farming having an undesirable environmental impact? Really, it only limits the availability of land that might be used for other reasons (most of which are far more detrimental to the environment than farming). So, since when is impeding urban sprawl consider
Agreed, except: (Score:2)
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.
Population growth is only a problem if your basis vectors are skewed. I look at population growth as the goal, and the lack of p
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Trashing our home in the hopes we can get off this rock before the big one hits makes several paranoid and dangerous assumptions. Are you a military man by chance?
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4: Better alternative? No, e
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May not be economicaly feasable. (Score:2)
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Yes... but (Score:4, Interesting)
And as for "All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs":
I suppose that it would be true until a few bugs hitch a ride on the back of some freight. 'Nature finds a way'. Heck, I wouldn't be surpised if we've had a few ants on the space station by now.
Questions (Score:2)
You only get as much solar output as the square footage of the structure. What am I missing?
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
Why is the BBC (Score:2)
Inquiring minds want to know.
Enjoy,
It's a joke (Score:2)
Plants are powered by sunlight (Score:2)
Unless we're talking rainforest style vertical farming here (top floor - tree tops, middle floor - monkeys and assorted fruit eating birds, bottom floor - weeds, dead leafs and mushrooms) then the expected result is, as an insightful AC already pointed out - "The top layer is for growing plants, all the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms and cockroaches".
The only viable way of raising any kind of green plants below the top levels is by using artific
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.
Practical for fragile high-profit crops (berries) (Score:2)
Great idea, but some unanswered questions. (Score:2)
Then I thought about what it would cost to devote that kind of prime real-estate in Manhattan to farming. Either the financial return on the crop needs to be very good indeed, or fuel costs for transporting food from conventional farms would have to be high enough to make "skyscraper farms" an attractive alternative.
And what about pollenation? I'm not a botanist, but I'm gues
Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
First off - you don't need a skyscraper and certainly you don't need to occupy an entire building. Nobody is going to use an entire building in a place like New York for farming.
Second - existing farms will not be converted back to forest land. Farms that don't produce crops get subsidized. If it's not a farm, the farmer doesn't make money.
Third - A professor from a school like Columbia is as likely to revolutionize the farming industry as a professor from the University of Montana is to revolutionize skyscraper architecture.
If you want to see the future of farming, take a look at what marijuana growers are doing. They seem to be the only farmers truly interested in maximizing output in small spaces in less than ideal conditions.
silly (Score:2)
So, rooftop gardens are probably a great idea for NYC and other cities, but multi-level gardens don't make much sense unless you put a nuclear power plant somewhere nearby to supply power for artificial lighting.
a few things come to mind.. (Score:2)
2. It wouldn't be an advantage to the envirionment of the city in terms of adding more biomass to product more oxygen, etc, since the building would have to be sealed off. It would need pretty stringent controls, like a clean-room.. airlocks, filters, etc, to keep insects and other baddies out.
3. I like the idea of cutting polution and costs by largely eliminating transpor
Low energy efficiency, high cost (Score:4, Informative)
I once did see something like this that was actually useful. One year, California had a serious drought, and alfalfa for horses was hard to get. So one company sold a hydroponic grass factory. This was a shipping container with a stack of trays and grow lights. Each day you removed and "mowed" one tray, did some maintenance on it, and put it back in the stack to grow new grass. The grow cycle was about three weeks. Not very energy efficient, but needed little water, which was what mattered that year.
You see smaller trays like that full of alfalfa sprouts at Jamba Juice outlets. Same concept, smaller scale.
There are some huge indoor farms in Saudi Arabia, where they have sun, space, energy, and money, but limited water and poor soil.
There's some grumbling in the "eco" community about the "3000 mile salad", and how much energy is used shipping produce around. But in fact, the biggest transportation fuel cost is the SUV trip to the grocery store. If the customer drives further, to the farmer's market, it's even worse. What's actually happening in transportation is that railroads are making a comeback, simply because their energy costs are lower.
I wouldn't want it (Score:2)
Oh Neat-o! (Score:2, Funny)
Huge amounts of power and heat! (Score:3, Interesting)
Going from one of the earlier postings of the building looking like it's about 100 feet in diameter, that's 7,850 sq. ft. per story, or 123 kilowatts per story. If the building is 30 stories tall, we're talking 3.6 megawatts just to run the lights!
You probably won't have to heat the building, ever, but the air conditioning bill in the summer time would be astronomical.
Ignoring that whole air conditioning thing, if you were able to get 80 watts per square meter 8 hours a day from solar cells (you wouldn't in NY, but even if you could), you'd need... 17 acres of land covered with solar cells to power the lights!
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:The top layer is for growing plants (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the retail cost of these fragile crops, outside of the initial labour for pickers, is actually in the special handling they need to ship and store well, as they are very easily destroyed by any mishandling or unexpected storage conditions. If you don't need to ship them any further than the market down the street, and don't need to store any quantity beyond what you'll sell that market tomorrow, that's a heap of costs you don't have, and a bunch of middlemen you don't need to pay. That alone likely would cover the operating costs.
Further, as some point out above, it doesn't make sense to put such structures on ground that would be more profitable for parking garages and condos. But what about putting smaller units on the otherwise-unused roofs of various buildings? Such as parking garages and condos.
and the bottom layers (Score:4, Interesting)
Just as the public really isn't welcomed to come out and recreate in existing farms, I doubt the new vertical farms will welcome the public.
Add to this a desire to cover urban landscape with solar panels, and we will probably quickly see a situation where access to sunlight is a commodity that is out of the reach of your standard urban dweller. While it will be great for people to make better use of solar resources hitting an urban area, these solar resources are still quite limited. A vertical farm works by blocking sun from the plebians in the tower's shadow.