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Spiraling Skyscraper Farms For a Future Manhattan
Mike writes "One of three finalists in this year's Evolo Skyscraper Competition, Eric Vergne's Dystopian Farm project envisions a future New York City interspersed with elegantly spiraling skyscraper farms. The biomorphic structures harness cutting-edge technology to provide the city with its own self-sustaining food source while dynamically altering the fabric of city life."
Apparently you have never been to the Living Earth at Epcot. They have plants growing quite successfully with absolutely zero soil. In the air. On rotating armatures.
For a closer to home example, go two houses down and ask the indoor pot growers how many plants they have going in that converted home.
Also, look into biofilm farming technology.
Or, better yet, you could ACTUALLY research some of your points before you jump on the "this could never happen, just destroy the communities outside NYC" rant train.
It is all technologically feasible, if not likely in the way the entrant envisions. If you believe half of the futurists in the country, it's almost inevitable unless someone finds a way to regulate the human birth rate.
In short: STFU, read more dystopian novels, and think outside of your cube.
And even if they could solve all the engineering problems, there is no way it will ever be economically viable to use prime real estate in the middle of Manhattan for farming. It will always cost more to farm in a sky scraper than on the ground, so they won't be able to compete in the global market against traditional farms. Furthermore, using it locally won't matter either. New York is a major shipping hub, and has more fresh food passing through it than the vast majority of the country, and as a consequence has lower grocery prices than many parts of the country.
The only point at which something like this would make sense is if we've transformed the vast majority of the planet into a giant city, like Tantor.
hmmm..that has been accomplished if you want to go check it out. The north eastern states have just huge amounts of forests. Go out in the woods there where the big trees live and go for a hike. Every once in awhile you'll find still intact but usually quite overgrown huge long stone walls, some ten feet high even with trees growing from the tops of them. Some are hard to see because they have been so long overgrown, but you can see the lines of them easily. There are thousands of miles of them still to see.
All those stone walls came from back in the 1800s and earlier when all that land was cleared. With the advent of tractors and cars and so on, the need for draft animals diminished greatly and all those carefully cut and cleared and de-rocked by man power and oxen power pastures were allowed to grow back to forests again. Now there was a *second* big forest clearing effort during world war two in new England. Huge amounts of trees were cut and burned in huge pits for the woodash, the ash was shipped to England by the shipload to use for fertilizer there so they wouldn't starve, although it did get close and it took their agricultural base to well into the 50s to get back to somewhat normal. But even most of those areas have grown back already.
You leave a cleared area untended, within ten years it is covered in trees again, at least east of the Mississippi where you get more normal and adequate rainfall. You don't have to do a thing either, just let it grow up. I know I spend a lot of time keeping our pastures cleared of baby trees every year. Luckily though where I live we don't "grow rocks" like New England does. Every spring you have to go around your fields and pick the newly heaved up rocks out of the fields, man, it gets to be a lot like work sometimes.. it also pushes wooden fence poles out of the ground as well.(farmed in new england as well as where I live now, and some other places)(and the rocks, cold weather and thin soil and too many baby mountains is why so many farmers moved west from there back during our pioneering days)