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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...
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?
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.
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
.. 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.
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.
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.
T.
My other sig is Funny.
"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.
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.
This goes right along with my thought up above that such a structure would work well for small fragile crops that don't ship or store well, like berries. Edible fungi are right in the same class -- they don't need anything but a controlled environment and the appropriate influx of "garbage" as the old stuff gets broken down. And they don't keep well once picked, so the closer you are to market, the better.
:)
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Water is really more of an issue. At some point it will cease to be economical to farm large sections of the midwest, just because it will become so expensive to irrigate without a plentiful source of local water.
At that point, large, self-contained farms that use a comparatively miniscule amount of water will look like a MUCH better idea.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Anyone who's worked in even the most windowed office building knows that only the spaces next to the windows get the light.
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.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I think you're referring to a product called Solatube (or equivalent) http://www.solatube.com/
Self awareness - try it!
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.
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).
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
Not all plants require a great deal of light. For example, berries tend to do better in the shade. Some of our foodstuffs don't even require light at all - like mushrooms.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Be careful here, I wouldn't bother spending too much on the alternator. From what I understand they're actually not very efficient, especially at the rotation rates a wind turbine will produce without enough gearing to seriously cut into efficiency.
IE it's expecing 1k+ rpm minimum, and probably getting barely 100 rpm.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
Humanure is actually the best fertilizer around, it's just that you have to process it before it can be used. Failure to do this can actually lead to contamination at the store. But consider what we do with poop today; barring your own septic, it gets flushed into pipes and carried to a treatment plant. It's then pumped into a pond or tank (depending on how much money they spent on the place) and it's allowed to just sit for a while, digesting itself. The crap contains all the necessary decay organisms already, so all you have to do is age it. But then we generally either landfill the solid waste, or we thin it down with water and pump it into the ocean, or a river. Whee! It's safe at this point and so we could as easily be mixing it with irrigation water and spraying it on crops ("fertigation").
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hydroponic is most certainly not sustainable in the way you suggest. In hydroponics, water is merely the medium. Nutrients must be added to the system for anything to grow at all. Not even remotely holistic. Read up a bit and you'll find this out. There is no growing method that requires more nutrients to work.
No Comment.
First off, you mean staple crops. Stables are what you keep horses in.
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.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.