Slashdot Mirror
Vertical Farming
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."
Interesting.
Could be the first step towards building arcologies...
All the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms and cockroaches.
I have to wonder what the produce would be like given the general air quality in that area. I doubt this sort of thing could be scaled large enough to actually make a positive impact on the environment so my question would be what consequences would occur in the resulting produce? Would it be carrying toxic or other unpleasant side-effects?
And even more importantly: Where will they get the illegal labor to harvest the stuff?
Finally we get flying pigs. Now when does Hell freeze over again?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
My initial reaction is yes, this would be very cool. I question the economics, however:
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.
Now this is thinking outside the box! Will be interested to see the results once a running system is producing.
Wow! After living in Brooklyn for the past 2 years, I can see the benefits this could have for the city: 1. Giant Air Filter; 2. World's Largest Compost Garden (couldn't smell worse than Coney Island :-/);
3. Fresh Squeezed OJ... Straight from the TAP!;
4. Another enormous reflector to further blind commuters from NJ;
There was an article in this month's Popular Science about this idea.
One has to wonder, though, if the electricity to run the things' lights would make it enviromentally sound. The solar footprint certainly wouldn't be enough for it.
It seems that these enviromental ideas come at a trade off of harming the enviroment elsewhere. Its all going to end up as matters of volume.
A 10 story building in NYC is still going to be way more expensive than 100 acres out in nowheresville, Kansas, isn't it?
Um...don't you need sunlight to grow (almost) anything? How exactly do you propose to get enough sunlight by going vertical! I suppose maybe some crops can get enough sunlight near sunrise and sunset...
Spherical cows, bred in a particular direction to grow great big balls of meat.
...of New Babylon -- er, York.
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.
There seem to be some practical issues with vertical farming... One being that the interior of a city isn't the best place to get sunlight from, that means the plants are going to need to have artificial lighting to keep them growing, you'll also have fairly intensive use of water. I'm not sure that city infrastructure would be ready to support a vertical farm, and that's before considering the issues of produce quality and marginal cost. As long as foreign produce is competing at price that is much lower than the price of produce produced in a vertical farm, then you've got problems. The vertical farm is almost certain bound to fail unless substancial duties are imposed on imported food.
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.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Professor Despommier has been arrested cultivation of marijuana and Opium poppies in his upper West Side apartment.
Both Professor Despommier and Columbia University were unavailable for comment.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
a concept that promises to reduce the environmental impact of farming
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)
theres an article in this months popular science about this (or something similar)
Eyeballing the Artest Drawing it seems to be about 300ft tall by 100 feet wide circuler, seporated by 7 stories.... So the total planting area is about 1 or 2 acres. So spending millions+ dollars for a building could buy Hundreds+++ of acres just a couple hundred miles north in Upstate NY (Yes Upstate NY does exist and there is farm land there). Even with the cost of shipping to NY City from Upstate NY would be cheaper then having one of those feel good but not useful buildings. Utilities my be self generating the NY City (Probably Unioned) Urban Farmers will need to be paid a heck of a lot more then Upstate Farmers. There there is the cost of distributing from the skyscraper to the city. Which will need aditional land (which is expensive in NYC) for a distribution center for the trucks. Yes it can be done, but it will cost to much then what you can get with alternative methods.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
.. when you have a solid/dirt floor above every level and buildings on all sides of it, how exactly do you plan to get sunlight into the buildig for the plants to grow? My offices has lots of windows, but when we turn the lights off, it still gets dark in the center.
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.
The article was light on details. Plants need the sun. How does light reach the bottom levels? If you use some type of fiber optics to lower levels, then you have "stolen" the light from the upper levels, and less growth occurs.
You only get as much solar output as the square footage of the structure. What am I missing?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Wouldn't it be more effective if we applied this technology to places with more space and more clean air? I would think that it would benefit out on farms, just as much as the city. Nobody wants to live in an apartment that smells like manure.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
In places where irrigation is difficult, is where this can be very successful. Water is lost to evaporation, but in an enclosed environment, that evaporation can be captured and reused. The middle east also has great sunlight for solar energy for the power needs. I also would not burn the plant waste. Too many nutrients that can be composted and put back into the soil. I like this idea a lot. Maybe not for an urban setting, though.
I love the idea of not trucking (with fossil fuel) produce into urban centers.
:-(
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
running a farm in New York? Do the tax paying Brits know about this? Is the New York Times running a look at a multi-level Pub in London?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I quit!
Did people forgot that plants are powered by sunlight?
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 artificial lighting, which is hardly efficient or ecological (since electricity for those lights has to come from somewhere).
Is this just another "stupid politician trying to look green 'cause it's fashionable while actually damaging the environment" kind of idea?
While the work the 'students' have done is interesting on an intellectual level, it is a complete farce when it comes to economics. I find it pretty doubtful that crops could even begin to contemplate competing against other land uses like offices, condos, and retail space, especially in urban areas where land costs are through the rough. On top of that, you are going to need to pay the utilities on this monster in addition to shipping in all the equipment and supplies. There is not a slim chance in hell that such a project could be economically viable.
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.
I looked at this and thought wow. This is such a great idea that it really looks like it's worth some effort to get it implemented.
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 guessing that they would need bees to grow certain crops. So, they keep bees in the building (and let's hope they stay there) or import the pollenated plants from elsewhere, which would kind of defeat the purpose.
I'm sure that these folks have done an analysis of costs along with engineering. Still, I have to wonder if a parking structure of the same size would be a greater revenue source than one of these farms.
Honestly though, I wish them luck.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I see a few problems with the premise of this idea.
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.
Ultimately, the limiting factor for productivity is solar flux. If you plant the right mix of vegetation, you're pretty much going to use up all the solar energy on a single level.
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.
1. Laborers to harvest the crops probably will have to be paid more than on a traditional farm, because they will be living in the city.
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 transportation. Also all the harvesting equipment I imagine would probably be electrical, futher reducing polution.
4. I wonder where all the dirt will come from, and how they will keep the dirt sustainable? They would have to probably bring in a lot of fertilizer and other nutrients to replace what is removed when the crops/livestock are exported. How much different will that be from the costs and polution of transporting current crops from farms to the city?
I am thinking this may not have the cost saving and polution reducing effect they want. But more importantly, it will allow us as they say to maybe return some of our farm lands to nature, at the same time increase our production ability and to go "Organic". Its a long term thing that I think will be necessary for our civilization, but it may be a hard sell to the people with money to get it done..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Transport costs are unlikely to ever be zero, you'll have to move stuff a few miles around the city to get it to stores and resturants.
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 and it makes some great wine.
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. Aside from looking like an unrealistic exhibit at EPCOT (Every Person Comes Out Tired), and costing a relative fortune compared to flat land, the environmental pollutants in an urban setting far exceed rural farmland. And anyone who doesn't think the food doesn't pickup what's around it simply doesn't know plants. While this would certainly improve the air quality, and even quality of life, in dense cities, the quality of the food produced would be extremely questionable IMSO (In My Slashdot Opinion).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just grow it like you would marijuana. How do you think they grow it underground in boxcars?
"I'm already surprised NASA doesn't hire them to come up with effective ways to grow things in space. "
It's called algae.
Yeah, the "environment impact of farming" on a typical farm, which is mostly covered with a stable ecosystem of plants and animals, is a lot lighter than the impact of a power-sucking, air-conditioned, steel-and-concrete skyscraper.
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 place to put the people as a problem to overcome, such as by getting off this rock before the big one hits. Try thinking that way, and tell me where it hurts.
sigs, as if you care.
Now city people can know what plants look like as well.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
How do you create an organic environment without organisms? Beyond that - how do you keep those bugs out?
"All the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms, cockroaches," and people.*
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.
I suspect what they have in mind is not the major or bulky crops, like wheat and potatoes, but rather the crops that are relatively small, fragile and generally don't ship or store well, like strawberries, blueberries, kiwifruit, and the like. These are also relatively compact plants and more subject to predation from birds and diseases, so a protected environment in limited space is practical. Berries are often grown in tiered greenhouses elsewhere (albeit a single floor with many small tiers, but the principle is the same) -- why not in NYC??
As to sunlight, some crops (including many berries) do fine with limited light, and I think if the entire non-glass surface of the building was design as a fibre collector, this would be enough light for the purpose.
Berries and the like are relatively high-priced in the retail market, and if you can cut out a whole layer of distribution/middlemen (no longer needed if you can sell directly to local markets), that could make the profit margin large enough to make this entire idea economically feasible.
BTW direct sales is not unusual for some crops as it is -- frex, Albertsons Groceries (a major western chain) buys 80% of their eggs directly from the Hutterite colonies that produce them. No middlemen involved.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Is there some lack of farmland that I am unaware of? Last I heard we had so damned much of it we were paving it and planting houses instead of soybeans. Unless there is some practical or regulatory reason not to farm on our abundant and fertile rural farmlands, I can't see how such vertical farm could ever compete.
I like the idea but if the 'crop goes bad', it would create chaos. Unless there is a good backup system.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
...has been done in Japan, where lettuce is grown in vertical panels using UV lights and hydoponics: http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Space-crunched_J apanese_farmer_goes_high_tech.html
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!
Dude, organic hydroponics. It's real, I practice it in my home to grow greens for my tortoises in the winter. The shit I grow under an old security light looks better than the stuff I buy at the grocery store! Either I'm a better farmer than the big guys, or all that transport takes a toll on the food.
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, but it's simply a matter of scale.
Hey, when gas goes to $7.00 a gallon, the cost to work the land and transport the goods to market will be HUGE and this idea might not look so bad anymore. Comparing your chemical-fed and chemical-protected family farm to a closed-system all-organic greenhouse on cost of structure alone isn't really fair.
Blar.
The economic feasibility of urban farming is not really in doubt. Other countries run successful, organic farms in cities.
c le1217550.ece
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/arti
The only thing new here is the high-technology used. Sadly, it may turn out that urban farming that does not use available space, but instead uses dedicated space, is not feasible. If high-tech does not change that equation (and it is unlikely it would), it is likely the backing of this project would vanish, and with it urban farming in the US.
Too bad, because if we don't over-engineer it, there are several good examples to choose from, most from countries we'd rather not acknowledge (which is probably our problem).
Lies about crimes
Politics and regulations are another. NYC is a patchwork quilt of NY state legislators, city councilmen, district leaders, party bosses, community boards, and vested interests like the Teamsters and others. You need powerful and savvy developer backing to align them in your favor.
And history says that the cost/benefit ratio has to be hugely on your side. It took the city more than 50 years of gridlock, economic stagnation, and incredible frustration before they were able to overcome the opposition of the omnibus lobby (horse-drawn doubledecker buses) and build the subway. NYC politicians don't understand the concept of common good, so you have to grease the palm of every little two-bit hustler to get your way.
So while it's a nice idea to have urban agriculture, and it makes a lot of sense on a lot of levels, it would take a lot to make it a reality.
That said, it would be excellent to have a regulatory environment to make this idea possible. I attended a presentation on aquaculture on Governor's Island by a professor at Brooklyn College last year. He grew scads of tilapia and salmon in big PVC garbage bins in the basement of his lab and couldn't sell it even at cost because of aforementioned politics and regulations. But he certainly proved that one guy with four climate-controlled bins in a basement can grow and give away so much fish that the entire faculty of Brooklyn College can't even bear to look at tilapia or salmon anymore.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
to simply make the top floor/roof of existing buildings into greenhouses? I'm sure some already are.
This is a fascinating concept.
Theoretically it could bring about savings in cost for certain types of food.
Closer to a store means less fuel for shipping, less electricity for refrigeration, etc.
The issue with sun light in a multi tiered structure is not insurmountable.
Perhaps solar collectors on the roof with fiber optics feeding sun light directly into the areas that need the light.
The areas can be enclosed to keep harmful insects out. Result: less pesticides.
You can keep honey bees in each section to help with pollination and also keep the bees safe as they have been disappearing as of late.
Much good can come from this.
However, I expect resistance from various lobbying groups.
Shipping industry, chemical manufacturers, other farmers who like getting subsidies, etc. Anyone whose piece of the pie might be at risk with this kind of endeavor.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Anyone who's worked in even the most windowed office building knows that only the spaces next to the windows get the light.
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?
The problem with vertical farming is that it has to compete with other uses for that space. A lot of the standard food crops (at least in the US) earn on the order of hundreds of dollars per hectare per year, I think. In comparison, my impression is that revenue in US cities (per hectare per year) is roughly 1 to 2 orders of magnitude greater than that and one probably sees similar differences in revenue anywhere in the world between average urban and farming revenue density. Certain high value crops would be far more likely to thrive in a city. For example, marijuana is the most common urban cash crop in the US. I assume other recreational drug sources like poppies and coca plants (from which opium and cocaine are derived respectively) would be profitable too if the processing capability existed in the US. Rare or difficult to harvest spices like saffron might be very good since a completely contained environment can often mitigate some of the factors (saffron's short day long harvesting window can be dealt with by staggering crops under controlled lighting) that make the crops difficult to economically grow in a more natural environment.
OTOH, many cities have deliberately zoned farms or recreational areas (both are relatively dead areas from an economic point of view) into the city without notable harm. So it is possible to do. We should keep in mind that there will be some degree of economic impairment associated with this scheme. If that is acceptable, then I see no objection on this point.
Another closely related problem is infrastructure support for a vertical farm. It would need water, air, light, transportation (to move the produce and waste products from the site to ground level and then into the streets), and some means to handle accidents (fires, pesticide spills, floods, etc). There can be a number of products in use (pesticides, fertilizer, animal manure, etc) that make the farm a poor fit for being near residential or commercial areas. Increased traffic from transport vehicles may impose on the neighborhood.I'm trying to remember how many years I've already known about this for. A couple, at least.
Although it's a good thing that it's finally being given attention on Slashdot. I think this is one project that should have large amounts of money thrown at it...it could be extremely beneficial for many, many people.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sqP1SC5Tr7U
While vertical factory farms would be pretty nifty, how useful would they really be?
Ultimately, if you want to reduce transport costs (money, fuel, etc.) the people need to be closer to the food production. This seems like an idea better suited to lower-density, urban sprawl (where you can grab relatively large areas without consuming a large percentage of the available space) rather than in the middle of compact urban areas.
Ever heard of "sink populations" and "source populations"?
Who is feeding everybody in New York presently?
Local, organic food production has to become the norm at some point.
This is probably a good start at reducing the environmental impact of cities.
In The Netherlands, frequently a marijuana growing area is discovered and found to be indoors in the middle of the city.
Most of the times it was discovered due to the huge energy consumption for the lights the plants need. It is not that the growers do not pay their bill (growing M. is very profitable, even at 2 Euro/gram), but the electric companies tipped the police (fascists).
With cropland going for $1-$2000/acre in South Dakota there's absolutely no F'ing way some monstrosity in the middle of the city can compete on a cost basis, even with transportation factored in. The opportunity cost of putting your money elsewhere rather than into a $1bln skyscraper will vastly exceed the savings in transportation. However, for those who have houses from before the standard lot included a 8' by 30' paved back yard one could supply a considerable quantity of the household's veggies from the yard - which is even closer to most than something in the city surrounded by offices. The best place to grow food is adjacent to processing plants that make it into the items in in grocery store. Those happen to be in the countryside, by the farms. Or were they planning on handing New Yorkers whole live chickens?
have been doing that in urban areas for many years already...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Secondarily, I wonder about the sunlight question -- a 4 acre farm gets 4 acres of sunlight -- their proverbial building gets that much less. I have yet to see a viable method of transporting sunlight around, and while the full spectrum lights may do pretty well for some things, I don't think they approach the benefits of sunlight -- such as the fact that the UV rays in solar insolation are nicely anti-microbial, etc.
Other thoughts on other difficulties or solutions to my named problems, anyone?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I can promise you with complete certainty, that it would be a hell of a lot cheaper to grow berries 100 miles outside of NYC where the land is plentiful and utilities cheaper will be FAR more economically then throwing up a multi-story building in down town NYC. Whatever you save in moving the food 100 miles less will be pocket change to the amount you would need to spend on the land... to say absolutely nothing about the cost of utilities, labor (yeah, try paying minimum wage for labor down town), and the cost of actually building such a monstrosity. There is not a slim chance in hell that a flimsy green house on cheap land 100 miles away from NYC is going to cost more then a multi-story high tech farm in the downtown.
The idea is completely trash. It comes from some professor who can't balance his check book or likes to think up fruity ideas that are not even a little bit feasible so that he can proudly display his completely bull shit "green" credentials.
Nutrient film techniques (txt)
Hyperaccumulators bibliography
Hydroponic farm plan (aquafarm)
Aquaculture bibliography
Why is the food outlook gloomy? (txt)
Setting up a hydroponic herb garden
Spider: the future of farming
Artificial meat production-- ah, this looks useful:
Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?
Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,
Farmers make money by selling in volume. I don't recall a farmer ever trying to make all their money selling "1 perfect strawberry." How many tomatoes do I need to sell to make this building profitable?
Do I need to pollinate by hand or only grow 'self pollinating plants'?
Lastly, what is the environmental impact of this building? (steel/concrete etc..). Similar to buying a brand new hybrid car vs a 2yr old gas powered Civic. They gas savings (environmental impact) of the hybrid is far outweighed by the amount of energy and environmental impact that went into making it.
Didn't they have these in SimCity 2000?
I, for one, welcome our new horticultural overlords.
Bearded Dragon
This could make for an interesting social change if it worked. Imagine if the blue states no longer needed to rely on the red states for food...
Ok, so the first question is, how do you get light down to the lower levels? Answer, you don't, not without taking light from upper levels, or you just end up using more land area to reflect light. Generating it is...expensive... So that's a non starter. The next problem is land cost. Cities are expensive, there's a reason farms are in the middle of nowhere....
Instead, what about roof gardens. Simply top buildings with greenhouses on the flat roofs. They'd only be useful for expensive produce but might be workable.
Deleted
You can't take the sky from me...
problem.
Not trying to troll or anything but I feel this needs to be said.....
[rant]
Ok, again I have to point out the painfully obvious point that seems to be alluding those who propose this solution to world hunger. The human animal has a particular reproduction cycle because life expectancy is not supposed to be anywhere near the level it is now. Since we as a race have artificially extended our life expectancy but have done nothing to limit reproduction, we are sealing our own fates when it comes to overpopulation and mass starvation. These greenhouses are treating the symptom, but are doing nothing to fix the problem.
[/rant]
Not only are these vertical greenhouses not practical but if they could create the amounts of food that are being touted (sic?) on their website you could have major social and environmental disasters occur if even 1 of these where to say burn down or otherwise be destroyed. You're talking the equivalent of destroying 6 to 7x the amount of agricultural production of a typical terra based farm in one shot. Forget terrorism as we know it... do you not think that if your enemy could wipe out 20-30% of a nations food source with minimal effort, that wouldn't become the most enticing target of opportunity known to man????
Since the cost of these buildings would be extremely high for maintainence and construction, who would they really help? Most nations where starvation will come the quickest will not be in the 1st or 2nd world countries that could afford this food magic wand, but in areas where there are already food shortages currently. Also, if you were to start building these in those areas they would become focal points for all of the negative elements in the region to rally to. Whoever controls the food, controls the country. Imagine some 3rd world dictator who so graciously excepts this gift of a tower of endless food supply. You've now handed this person the ultimate weapon to use against his own people.
Hey! No recursing!
just mandate that the out 20' of every floor in in every building over the 5th floor has to be used for this.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Step 1) grow cities outward with urban sprawl until all arable farm land is consumed.
Step 2) build multi-level farms in the cities.
Step 3) profit
How about skipping the middle-man and making housing denser, not farming?
Already some tomatoes are 80% fiber since it helps them to ship well.
They are basically useless as food- but hey, they look good.
They need to form a baseline of nutrients and measure them. that way producers will have an incentive to make food that is actually useful to eat.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"VF could reduce the incidence of armed conflict over natural resources, such as water and land for agriculture."
No, your just building them nicer and newer targets. Gosh, the idea feels really good though. Run with it, I'll just watch.
scot
You raise a valid point with the transportation. While the idea focuses on urban production of food, it does leave quite a bit out on the processing of this food. People forget that it is rare for farmed products to end up directly on grocery shelves, even natural and organic products. Most foodstuffs have to go through some type of processing, if not a wholesaler of some kind.
So, some additional questions to raise are:
I guess I look at this and think of Biosphere II in some respect. It taught us that there's a lot more things to consider besides water and sunlight to keep things somewhat balanced out in order to work properly. Looks like a lot of imagination and creativity on the part of the architectural folks, but a bit light on input from the agricultural and food industry people, at least at this point.
I've been reading Slashdot for many years and I've seen a lot of ridiculous stories, but this one takes the cake. I don't know if global warming is predominately man-made or not, but stories like this make the global warming crowd look like a bunch of raving crackpots. There may be a real issue there that I should be concerned about, but when the message comes from people who want to convert one of the most expensive places on earth into a tiny bit of farmland and then convert the farms into treeland, there's no way I'm taking them seriously. How could they say, with a straight face, that farming in a climate controlled environment would produce less emissions than simply throwing the produce on a truck (which they'd ultimately have to do anyway)? And what farm workers can afford to live in or commute to NYC? This is right up there with the crowd that seems to believe that ethanol is "free energy." Professor Despommier shouldn't be teaching at a community college, much less Columbia, for this "brainchild."
Okay, plants convert 1%-2% into energy, solar panels 6% - 16%, wahoo, science beats nature/God, you're happy... except for one thing...
:)
You STILL need to give the plans the light to turn into energy, unless you figured out how to wire them with a low voltage line...
So, you collect 500 Watts of sunlight-based energy on a panel, that would give the plant 10 watts, instead your panels got 100 watts (assuming 20% efficient panels by the time you finished building this thing)... Okay, now I can throw off 100 Watts of light to the plants... Unless I figure out how to "plug the plants in" I now have 1/5th the light powered by the panels as I collected... The plants still need 100 Watts, even if they only get 2% of the energy.
Now, let's assume that incandescent waste most of the energy, and we can get 5x throughput by only giving plants the part of the spectrum that we think that they need. Now our 500 Watt-equivalent sunlight is turned into 100 Watts of power, which gives the equivalent amount of light as the original 500-Watts of energy.
I STILL only have enough light for 1 floor. Perhaps windows cover 50% of the needs (on the peripheral), so we can get 2 floors out of it... still not impressed.
This is a neat project, and conceptually an option for some buildings... 2-4 floors on top of the building might be viable. Maybe using something like a Solar Tube to bring natural light in will help... Maybe plants that need less than 100% light will work...
However, solar panels -> energy -> lights -> plants is unlikely to gain you ANY energy gain, before focusing on the energy to create the panels and setup this system.
However, roof-top gardens are popular with some, and maybe some buildings like college dorms with workstudy labor MIGHT get college students tastier foods. I think that drying to grow wheat/corn like this is absurd, but for vegetables, who knows.
It may not be entirely profitable, or necessary, at the moment, but imagine a city the size of NYC screwed due to oil flow issues. Most of our agriculture is so dependent upon oil, that functioning in the event of restrictions, or continuing in the event of permanent problems could pose enormous problems.
I have been looking at these issues in Chicago, and am busy working on and ecological urban center, and community, focusing on exploring issues like these. I group it under manufacturing as opposed to simply agriculture. Making stuff in the city/urban areas, and training people to do so, will become incredibly important in the future, IMHO...
This is not going to work. Have you ever stood under a tall tree and wondered... "Hmm, why aren't there many leaves on the inside?" or "Why do golf balls have a good chance of going through a tree or hit only one or two branches?"
Sunlight is required for plant growth and they are nearly 100% efficient in its use. But you have to be in direct sunlight for it to work. So trees have evolved to produce a "Canopy". That is, all the leaves are on the outside. Almost every leaf in a tree has access to direct sunlight. and thus the tree works well. The tree wastes as little energy as possible on the interior "volume" as is required to produce a stable and large surface area on the canopy. Thus no leaves on the inside and as few branches as possible.
This vertical farm concept won't work. why? The volume of the building may be impressive, like the voluminous office space provided in the Manhattan skyscapers that will surround it. The problem is two fold: 1) only the surface area of the vertical farm will be able to receive direct sunlight; vastly diminishing the productivity of the farm (N^2 vs N^3). 2) Only the top will probably receive any light since the surrounding skyscapers will eclipse the sides of the vertical farm. Further diminishing the productivity to the footprint of the building. And in Manhattan you're not going to be able to afford anything but the tiniest of footprints.
But wait theres more. The environmental "savings" spoken of won't materialize due to the inefficiency of the vertical farm. California has a huge agricultural business because it receives tons of sunlight. WAAAAY more than New York can dream of (I grew up in Buffalo). So California can grow crops year round and efficiently; New York can't produce squat in the winter and very little during fall and spring. Oh? You say: "but the crops will grow indoors, sheltered during the winter." Won't matter, the length of the day (and thus sunlight) in New York is significantly shorter than in California, and all other agricultural areas closer to the equator, where they currently ship their food from. During the whole year in fact, this building will be less efficient than the places they currently ship their food from. That loss in efficiency will waste any "savings" they are touting.
Sorry, farming is a matter of surface area and sunlight. New York city has neither to spare. Unless you convert Central Park; and nobody's gonna due that just to grow food they can import inexpensively from other locations.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
The average life expectancy has gone up primarily do to reduction in infant mortality.
If you look at life expectancy starting at when someone is 5, it has only gone up marginally. 5-6 years.
we're not close to starving or overpopulation.When we run out of places for food, are population will level off. The ONLY reason anyone in the world starve is political and social, not because we don't have enough food globally.
Where people are starving is because at that location food can't be grown. From a non emotional view point, maybe we should move those people instead of send them food. Possible remove the politics in the way of the people sustaining themselves. Perhaps even cut off all outside food support.
AS a human being I just want the people to be able to eat and live and be happy and go about their business. Which is really what we all want.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They also "hope" it will generate enough heat to keep itself warm during the winter (what about summer cooling?). Did anyone notice an estimate of how many workers this 20-50 story building will need and how many cafeterias and toilets?
maybe you should recheck your numbers... US life expectancy for all races/both sexes 1930 59.7 years. 2004 77.9. Similar increases probably occur in most industrialized nations.
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.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Seriously...
Roughly 50,000 square feet of spinach yields about 100 pounds per day, which would cost about $80k/month in rents, not including the necessary utilities. If people are willing to pay $20/lb for spinach, this will work. Until then, when you can BUY an acre of land for $1/sq.ft. and truck your produce in by the ton for pennies a pound...this ain't gonna work unless you're growing heroin.
From http://www.infoforhealth.org/pr/m14/m14chap2_2.sh
Just think - Oliver Wendell Douglass would have never had to move to Hooterville if he'd had this.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
News is many people refused to work on the vertical farms after hearing that it would make them uphill gardeners.
Does anyone else smell Biosphere III?
Wouldn't it make more sense to add a little greenhouse on the roofs of existing buildings??? Light is
plentiful at the top. It would even help with water runoff and A/C. I think europe's been doing
this for awhile.
Excluding infant mortality numbers when commenting on my argument is fairly naive. Large birth rates throughout nature are meant to offset infant mortality. That's nature, plain and simple. Just because humans only tend to have multiple births in 2-3% of all births does not mean that you should proclude infant mortality numbers when talking about population growth. Most animals do not have a reproductive capacity of 20 years (approx) like humans do. So the need for multiple births to continue the species is nominal, because a person could theoretically have 20-25 children if necessary.
Their whole project is based on Malthusian predictions. Since 1798, we've been on the verge of out-stripping our food supply. After 200 years "on the verge," I'm not convinced that we need projects like this.
I'm sure you're right that buying the land at street level in real-estate-strapped NYC would be absurdly expensive -- it'd be cheaper to float it on old cargo barges out in the near Atlantic.
But every building has a roof, and a lot of those roofs could be adapted as greenhouse space, and there's no reason it can't be designed to be modernly efficient. ISTM that if someone could get startup capital and get even one good working prototype going, say on the roof of a parking garage or mall, or better yet above the grocery store it intends to serve -- the idea could catch on and become economically viable.
But building it from scratch at street level in NYC -- I agree with you there, that's a fantasy best reserved for folks who regularly smoke rolls of $1000 bills. The only distant possibility might be some sort of collaboration with the Parks Dept. or with some university, and even there, it's not like parks are in surplus.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
will this be viable in cities where there is a lot of air polution?
This is old news... Indoor marijuana growers do this all the time. Just rent an apartment you have no intention of living in, and fill it with all the plants and irrigation equipment you can fit!
:)
What I said was actually more relevant to solar panels than vertical farms. A vertical farm, after all, is really a solar panel made of biological material.
As people start seeing more economic value in sunshine, there will be a desire to exploit sunshine as a resource. Once this trend is in high gear, there will also start being a backlash to sun harvesting projects as people start debating the extent to which sunshine is a public good.
From a human perspective, I think that covering an area with greenery is preferable to covering it with silicon panels. There is still an access problem.
On average, office space in mid-town Manhattan goes for approximately $50 / square foot / year.
An acre of space is 43,000 square feet.
Therefore, an acre of farm space in a Manhattan vertical farm is worth, roughly, $2,000,000 per year. That's 50 times the price of vineyard land in Napa Valley which is quite probably the most expensive agricultural land in the USA.
Normal farm land in the mid-west is $2,000 per acre, so the Manhattan farm is more like 1,000 times as expensive to rent for one year as it would be to buy in the Midwest.
Forget light, water, operating costs, and fuel costs. The money that could be made from putting the same space to another use causes the whole thing to fall apart from a cost perspective. Food prices in Manhattan are high and gas prices are going up, but for this to work, gasoline would have to go from $3 per gallon to $300,000 per gallon.
Those are excellent points about the pest control. I disagree about the 'poop' though. Human excrement is VERY dangerous and VERY unhealthy to use as a fertilizer for human food (cholera, typhoid, hep A, etc...). Though it is used to fertilize food for animals and in turn their excrement is used for fertilizer. It's just another part of the heterogeneous environment you were talking about.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
The article mentions that veritcal farming would allow some farmland to becomre forests (again?).
I'm from New Jersey, where NYC gets some of its food. I can tell you the newly fallow farmland here would not become forests.
They would become farmland for a different kind of produce: McMansions!
Please note that I took many of the numbers from earlier posters.
Farm:
Effective Acres: 100
Bushels/acre/year: 180
$per bushel: 5
Transport: $0.10
Land Cost per Acre: $4,500
Gross Income: $90,000
Transport Costs: $1,800
Net: $88,200
Capital Cost @10%: $45,000
Remainder: $45,000
Capital Cost @5%: $22,500
Remainder: $67,500
Multistory building greenhouse:
Effective Acres: 100
Bushels/acre/year: 540
$per bushel: $10 (organic/fresh/local: Double value price premium)
Transport: $0.05 (It's local, but still has to be moved)
Land Cost per Acre: $1,000,000
Gross Income: $540,000
Transport Costs: $2,700
Net: $537,300
Capital Cost @10%: $10,000,000
Remainder: $-9,460,000
Capital Cost @5%: $5,000,000
Remainder: $-4,460,000
I played around with the numbers a bit, it doesn't make sense until the price per effective acre(at triple production per acre and double the price!) drops to $100k(at the 5% discount). This is without factoring increased hand labor(it's the city, labor's expensive), increased equipment costs*, power, whatever. Substantially increase transport costs or increase the 'fresh local produce' premium even more. Maybe open a greengrocer advertising *fresh* produce, and fold the cost of the greenhouse into the store's expenses. Farmers tend to get paid the barest fraction for their produce anyways.
These numbers could be improved if somebody happens to know the average construction cost per square foot of highrise in NYC, as well as more information on typical farm operating costs. We can pretend that they manage to get a deal with the city/state/feds so that subsidies equal taxes.
*Personally, I tend to think that this wouldn't actually be that bad, you could do a lot with some specialized equipment, like an electric tractor powered by a heavy duty extension cord on a boom near the ceiling. Or even a tow line where you can attach various parts to.
I don't read AC A human right
A better idea would be to let the building owners sublet out their rooves so that they could have a greenhouse on each building. The roof gets the most sunshine and is generally underused. Construction costs would be diffused out on a building by building basis instead of building a dedicated building. Make it so that looking down from the Empire State you see vegetation ontop of everything.
Try the March 7, 2006 episode of Dirty Jobs.
In that episode, the host spends a day working as a mushroom farm laborer in a coverted factory building near an urban area. Interesting, albeit smelly, stuff. Apparently, it's already quite profitable to grow some crops indoors with manual labor.
Humans run at about 100 watts. Solar flux PEAK is about 1000 watts per square meter during peak sun, or about 100 watts average. In theory, you can feed a person on one square meter of solar flux. So maybe, just maybe, you can pull off these "vertical gardens" in urban areas if you carpet the tops of all the buildings with gardens. Stacking greenhouses doesn't really help. Now, here's the rub: Where are you going to get energy conversion efficiency that high?
Seastead this.
Did no one else think of Soylent Green when the originally read the headline?
Eloquent words can mask much mischief. Judge Mayer
I've always been a fan of roof gardens, though more of for personal enjoyment and the like than for actual sustenance, but that seems preferable and more importantly simpler than a skyscraper-style greenhouse. It doesn't create much of a shadow, and it gives the residents of a high-rise apartment building a safe park to play in, without dangers of violence, beggars, or solicitors. A roof garden optimized to supplement the food supply for the residence's occupants seems far more realizable a goal than the far-fetched "arcology" proposed here. Maybe a few stories of greenhouse atop a building would work, but an entire 30-story building seems impractical.
As to larger-scale implementations ... the value of land within cities will likely always exceed the cost of shipping in produce from a somewhat nearby location; a vertical greenhouse would have exceptionally high costs in addition to the building's footprint, as well stated in other comments for this article. I think we're better off looking elsewhere for that; irrigate deserts, terrace mountains, or equip barges in the ocean for farming.
Barges for farming (and possibly other things, like a tiny mobile island) seem obvious to me for a (distant) future resource ... there's a LOT of space for them, after all. However, they are completely useless until we improve the desalination technologies to a level that makes them more efficient and portable (actually, desalination units already exist on boats ...).
Alternates like barges, irrigated deserts, terraced mountains, and even high-rise greenhouses will *not* be economically viable at all until we have exhausted all other methods. Until then, the only way to advance the technology is by introducing them as novelties, with advantages that peak the interest of those buyers willing to pay extra money. This could utilize the controlled aspects of the vertical farm, or use some sort of over-regulated farming practice while in international waters, but I think the best option remains the novelty of a roof garden that doubles as a park.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Generally speaking, indoor marijuana growers in the U.S. tend to bypass the meter and hook directly to the mains so that they can steal their electricity. You can then bribe the meter reader, if necessary, to skip your house. More often, though, the growers simply never deal with the power company; power company records would indicate the house was vacant.
Oftentimes they are caught when the police do helicopter fly-arounds with IR equipment and find that a particular house is incredibly hot. That leads to basement growers and elaborate systems to circulate cold air though the interstitial spaces around the growing area, thus hiding the heat signature of the building.
But why bother with all this, anyway? Their are lots of wild, isolated places in lots of cities where a small patch of marijuana will go unnoticed. Near my house, via google maps, check out this triangular area. It used to be a weed patch that's been harvested. The previous maps of that area had lots of little weed patches but they seem to be gone, now. Interesting; maybe the current photos were taken "out of season," so to speak. In any event, the little creek nearby is known for flooding (so there's no development at creekside) and the presence of lots of curiously serious recreational ATV riders who don't seem to appreciate outsiders poking around.
To give you an idea of the profits, my families most profitable crop is corn.
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.
You missed the point that the supposedly sub-par food grown in greenhouses and under lights can in fact be better tasting and contain more nutrients because it is harvest at peak ripeness and didn't spend days packed up in a tractor trailer.
The point is not to dismiss the economies of scale, but to point out the benefits gained when growing food very close to the source. Gains that go beyond mere cost.
Americans focusing on 'cost' over other issues related to consumption are driving jobs out of the country and to China, just so the companies can provide that coveted 'lowest price'.
Blar.
We could use this as an infinite power source!
1. Grow plants using artificial light from light bulbs
2. Harvest the plants for energy
3. Use the energy to power the light bul.. oops!
how well a John Deere combine fits into one of those things...
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Sorry, but it was one of the few times when it was actually appropriate.
Farmers lobbyists are some of the most powerful lobbyists in the United States. They're basically the only real reason why we still have an embargo against Cuba. They're also one of the major groups that pushed E85 and are pushing biodiesel. I can't really see this happening as long as the farmers still have their lobbyists.
Did anyone else think of a huge number of WOW players standing on each other's heads fighting a wall of rabbits ? The new great wall of China anyone ?
Urban areas have some efficiencies, but access to sunlight is not one of them. Sunlight is a function of square footage, and urban areas by definition have more people/square foot.
Rural areas put land to use. But our tracts of suburbs, while I love living in one, are the worst use of space ecologically, a situation that could/should be rectified. Suburbs have relatively low people density, so you don't get the urban advantages of mass transit, centralized heating, etc., but use decent amounts of land inefficiently. Gardening may be a fun hobby, but individuals each have 1/8 - 1/2 an acre of lawn/gardening that are generally over-watered uses a lot of our available water supplies for personal vanity. Farms may use much more water, but its creating food. While I love having a vegetable/herb garden, it's more vanity than efficient use of resources. Lawns are similarly problematic.
However, with the right tax incentives, perhaps some of this can be changed. Suburban ranch houses have lots of roof:person ratios. Imagine if every new roof (so 30-50 years until they all change over) had one of the solar panel roofs. During the day, they generate more power than use, and with the right incentives, could generate more than used at night as well. Generally because of how net metering works (and some states you get paid back the wholesale rate on your surplus power, and pay the retail rate when you use power), you under-power your solar grids because there is no advantage to being a net producer of energy. However, if every house in the suburbs was a net producer of energy, we would drastically reduce our power usage.
Sure, we'd still have power plants, factories, office buildings, etc., use power and can't easily generate it on site, and we still need power at night when the solar panels are not available, but we could conceivably drastically cut down on our energy needs, reduce the need for more plants, and let the power companies decommission their old and inefficient plants.
One of the reasons for tiered power is that inexpensive and cheap plants (particularly cheap variable costs) run 24/7, but older and inefficient plants are only operated when there is a need for the energy. Reduce our energy needs, and you don't use those wasteful plants.
All that needs to happen is that the costs of the solar roofs not be much more than the cost of a replacement roof, and proper setups so that the power companies don't get screwed. If they had to pay solar net-producers at the rate of their most inefficient plant that operates, they'd find it a win, because they would actually find their power costs going down, because they'd stop bringing those plants online, and they'd still collect the markups. The need to operate power plants during the day would drastically diminish, though I wonder how the employees would like their jobs to mostly be night jobs.
However, how neat would it be if the only plants running during the day were nuclear plants that you can't start/stop, with clean-coal technology running at night. That would reduce our use of oil (oil plants would no doubt shut down), and we would drastically reduce our energy usage. The power companies would still make money... and if structured correctly, more money, so they'd be on board (sorry anti-capitalist environmentalists, you'll have to choose between the environment and Marxism), with less money tied up in power plants.
And it would, in the long run, drastically reduce energy costs, as solar panels/tiles would no doubt come down in price or increase in efficiency, as opposed to our current usage of increasingly expensive energy commodities, and it could largely be done without turning massive pieces of land into solar/wind farms, because it's already in used space.
What percentage of our power usage could we avoid, 10%, 20%? Given that 2%-3% swings in energy usage can have 10%-20% price swings, that seems like a net win to me.
they use concentrators and trackers, and can pipe natural sunlight via fiber optics around to anyplace inside a building. Here is a DOE link on the tech albeit used in conjunction with regular lighting Hybrid solar lighting
The shiny tube guys are in use also, and are cheaper, but require a large diameter pipe to function well.
Very generally speaking, the height of the blades makes for more efficiency, the wind is stronger/steadier and less ground effects way up high.
As to the little windchargers, some new buildings in dubai will have them between floors.
http://www.24dash.com/environment/21067.htm
Can we start calling them Agridomes, please? :P
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.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Excuse me? An arcology would be a very bad place to put a vertical farm. The structure of the arcology would cut the farm off from wind and sun, its two main sources of energy.
Anyway, the point of an arcology is to minimize the "footprint" of urban zones, not to create totally self-sufficient entities.
I prefer to think that New York is considering vertical farms because they're getting ready to install a spindizzy.
organic farming cannot supply enough food to feed the world
Oh but organic farming can feed the world, however it either requires the elimination of these mega cities like Mexico City, Rio, and the ones sprouting up like mushrooms in China, with a population of millions, or it requires city farms.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Most natural environments can only produce crops during a single season.
It really depends on what the crop is. I used to live in Florida and I love to garden. At this tyme of the year I'd be readying to plant a second crop if I hadn't already, when I lived there. For some things I was able to get three plantings in a year.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Human excrement is VERY dangerous and VERY unhealthy to use as a fertilizer for human food (cholera, typhoid, hep A, etc...).
It is only if not properly and thoroughly composted. Thoroughly composting manure, humanure or not, will make a compost pile hot enough to distroy most any pathogens. See Temperature.
FalconShould there be a Law?
What do you think tilling is for?
There's a problem with tilling though. The act of tilling soil breaks down the soil into smaller and smaller particles and these particles get washed away easier as well as don't hold as much moisture. Eventually it becomes dust.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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?
Exactly. Running hundreds of 1000W bulbs adds up fast. Few city folks realize just how much light crops need. In winter months, that extra light will cost Big Buck$. And let's factor in the cost of the real estate... lemme see, urban hi-rise real estate vs. a mudpatch in podunk... Urban real estate itself is expensive enough without factoring in the cost of building the high rise itself. It's hard enough to make farming a podunk mudpatch profitable. All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs
That's hilarious. I wonder how much extra money they budgeted in for the 100% sterile cleanroom and access facilities and HEPA air filtration systems for the entire building. All it takes is one little pregnant bug getting in. Not all agricultural pests are bugs anyway; fungal spores in regular air are counted in millions per cubic inch. 'Course they need a warm, moist environment like a greenhouse to thrive, oh wait...
I suspect this proposal was dreamed up by some guys while they were sitting around smoking the product of their own urban greenhouse.
Anyway, they're solving a problem that doesn't really exist. We're growing far, far more food now than we actually eat if you look at corn and soybean production. Most of it goes into energy inefficient processes like industrial meat production. If we weren't artificially keeping the price of meat low through corn & soybean subsidies, feeding corn to cattle (which is very unhealthy for them, but marbles the beef nicely), and industrial cattle processing, people would be eating a lot less meat because it would be very expensive, like it used to be.
If cows were eating grass again and farmers were growing other crops besides corn and soybeans again, we would get a lot more people-food from the farmland we have. Less meat, but far more vegetables. Kind of like what's recommended by nutritional experts... might fix that obesity problem too.
include $sig;
1;
http://www.garbledonline.net/Brasseye.html Brasseye, the science episode with spherical cows and vertical farms
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.) After reviewing the site, I am not sure that VF meets all the promises they suggest.
The light issue pretty much requires artificial light as a large part of the solution (compare the amount of natural light hitting a building to what would hit the equivalent square footage of natural farmland). There is no way around making up the difference using energy to provide artificial light.
How much energy? More than farm equipment uses? More than it takes to transport the ripe crops to the city centers? I don't know. I haven't done the math but it seems suspect on the surface.
Now that I have said this, the web site hypes the idea that vertical farms could actually be net energy producers (giving electricity back to the grid). Personally I do not believe that this is likely at all. Given the lack of natural light, that would certainly qualify as a perpetual motion device. Since that is overhyped, what else is? 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. Sure, at the expense of energy. Certainly it becomes quite a bit more expensive to grow food in the winter because you get less natural light. This means lights have to be brighter and more lights have to be on more of the time. 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. Right. Not as if a disruption in the electrical grid from a hurricane or a large wind storm (like we saw in the North-west will harm production... [/sarcasm] 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. I suspect that it would all be quite feasible with the development of new nuclear power plants to supply the added energy requirements. Worth it? I don't know. At the moment I am not clear that I would say "yes" or "no." It certainly is a complex tradeoff and the energy side of it is certainly troubling...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Earlier this summer I got a chance to check out the New York Sunworks' Science Barge which is an experiment in creating a "a sustainable urban farm". It's currently docked on the West Side of Manhattan on 43rd street and you can go aboard for a tour.
The farm is off the grid in every way - energy comes from solar arrays which passively follow the sun's trajectory and can be supplemented by a biofuel-driven generator when needed. The water comes from stored rainwater and IIRC they have a system for purifying the water from the river as well. There's also no polution/emissions/runoff.
The farm itself is purely hydroponic - the plans live in nutient free matter and all nutrients is delivered to the roots via flowing water enriched with whatever the plants require. One of the coolest things is they have a fishtank where telapia are growing - the 'dirty' water from the fish is routed to the hydroponic system where fish waste becomes nutrition for the plants. The plants act to purify the water by extracting the waste, and it's eventually recycled back into the fishtank, closing a "waste loop."
I am not sure what, if any, the relationship between the project in this story and Sunworks is (sounds like there may not be any) but the Science Barge is a pretty impressive proof of concept for this kind of thing.
The bottom line is that the barge is a self-contained farm whose total surface area is far smaller than that of most buildings in NYC. They're not trying to argue for the vertical farm concept per se, they're just showing that productive, sustainable urban farming can be done with today's technology and today's real-estate reality. The vertical farm concept seems to take it one step further and is not that far-fetched.
And if you're in NYC, check out the Science Barge if you like this sort of thing. It's currently docked on 43rd St. in the Hudson, as mentioned earlier - and I believe will be towed further uptown sometime during the summer. It's a cool experience.
http://ed.markovich.googlepages.com
The problem I see with this is that they've actually done studies for greenhouses and hydroponics and found the energy requirements higher for the 'local grow' solution than shipping from south america to the USA.
"The Economist" magazine had an article on this which said in some circumstances flying a crop half way around the world is more energy efficient than a local farmer growing it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There should be more than enough immigrants available to satisfy food demand. The management company, Soylent, Inc., always has plenty of people on hand for harvesting and processing.
Soylent? Soylent Green? Green chips anyone?
FalconShould there be a Law?
There are already laws on the books in a number of states that can help to protect landowner's rights to solar energy access. In NYC, local zoning is controlling: http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/tabsrch.c fm?state=NY&type=Access&back=regtab&Sector=S&Curre ntPageID=7&EE=1&RE=1
Most solar access laws were passed after the oil shocks of the seventies.
s tory?id=47928
s -selling-solar.html
Senator Menendez of NJ has introduced federal legislation to ensure access rights: http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/partner/
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Rent solar power with no installation cost: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Ick. More factory farming with all the teaming problems that represents. No thanks.
The only reason we would need to reduce the space footprint of farm land is to support our ever increasing population. If we as humans care enough and want to think far enough in the future to worry about the continuation of our species we have to get off this rock. Yes Earth is nice and all but it won't last forever.
We should curb population growth or look for more places to inhabit. If you could make this into one section of a space station. Not like the pathetic little one we have now then you would have something. It could be part of a larger movement to colonize space itself. This would eliminate our reliance on planets all together. This is a lofty goal and I think baby steps would be better so instead of making it a space station build it somewhere useful like Mars. Make it part of a larger effort to transform the next most inhabitable planet we know of into one that can support life. If we can ever do this once then the expansion of the human species could be exponential throughout the universe.
We are Humans of Earth resistance is futile!
Nick Powers
p.s. If we ever do find any complex life forms on other planets lets hope they are not very smart and taste like chicken.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Think about that a bit longer. You pick up maybe 100kg of groceries in the car, often less. A truck will deliver at least 100 times that. How does the fuel usage of a truck (travelling perhaps a few hundred km's along the highways) compare to that of a *hundred* typical cars each shuttling to the shops individually (totalling several hundred city km's)?
It isn't completely obvious how significant the long-distance transport costs are overall.
But, like with office workers, the plan is for the farmers to also employ additional techniques in order to boost the growth, namely achievement awards and "Vegetable of the Month" plaques.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
When I saw "Vertical Farming" I was thinking of cows, pigs, and chickens roaming up and down the outside walls of the skyscrapers of NY. Holding an investor meeting on floor 37 and there goes a cow just clomping up the window.... neat.
I guess we need that anti-grav stuff first,though.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Apart from nuclear and geothermal power, all our energy comes from the Sun. Building vertically isn't going to give us more light. Even if the rays doesn't come directly from above, they will just overshadow land behind it. And artificial lightening requires power.
Mushrooms gets their energy from decomposing materials build from sunlight, so that won't contribute anything new, but may help make more efficient use of the light.
Instead of building vertically, find a way to utilize the light wasted on deserts and the oceans. That will matter.
My grandparents were vegtable farmers in N.C. The profit margin on vegtables is very narrow, and this is using cheap land out in the middle of nowhere. Even the cost of basic farm equipment such as tractors and plows really cut into what you make. The cost of premium real-estate in Manhattan or any large city would make it impossible to not lose money unless you were growing opium poppies. The only way this idea seems feasible to me is in a food-crisis situation in a dense urbanized area like Japan, where it was funded by the government and profit margins were not of concern.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
On the one hand, I think this is a great idea...on the other hand, I wonder if this will provide a perfect excuse to pave over and develop miles and miles of prime farmland.
My folks bought two of these several years ago--they have more-than paid for themselves by allowing in natural light while allowing my parents to not need lightbulbs or electricity to get light in previously-darker parts of their house. The insides of the tubes are highly-polished to reflect light and they do not leak water (like many skylights can). The top of the tube is a rounded hump that sits on their rooftop to collect the light, which is then reflected onto a white translucent piece of glass (??-maybe it's plastic?) mounted on their ceilings at the bottom of the tube (which resembles a traditional light fixture). The tubes they have are roughly 12" in diameter and allow in enough light for an entire "house-sized room" (they use theirs in their kitchen and in a formerly-darker hallway).
Kudos to this company! (And, no, I do not work for them, but, am posting AC as a long-time Slashdot lurker, I have yet to register for this site, nor pay the subscription fee, "1-2-3 profit," deal with hot grits on Ms. Portman, or "In Soviet Russia" something, etc. I probably should register sometime to better support this site...)
I remember a post here about a British company being contracted to build a few self sustaining cities. At the very least only good R&D data can come from this; Which could be applied to facilities in _outerspace_. I could only imagine this as a profitable investment given that restaurants, of a higher class, would be fighting over this produce!
My saying that a force exists does not mean there are not countervailing forces. Zoning boards are such a force.
The real question with zoning boards is if they will effectively protect the poor.
My personal experience with zoning boards is that the boards are filled with rich powerful people with connections to other rich powerful people. In general, they tend to favor rich powerful people to poor, disenfranchised people.
Let's say there is a very strong demand for solar energy with a countering political force to keep spaces open. The effect of zoning boards is likely to lead to a situation where there are some solar panels in the rich hoods. The bulk of the energy producing boards will be in poor, disenfranchised neighborhoods.
On the whole, the NIMBY mantality of zoning boards will be a countervailing force to minimuze the impact of solar energy. Since zoning boards are pretty much designed to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful, their effect will be simply to concentrate any negative effects of the technology onto poorer neighborhoods.
They acutally have a tiny vineyard and produce a few "Denver" wines - most of their grapes do come from the western slope