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Singapore Builds First Vertical Vegetable Farm
kkleiner writes "Short on arable land? One solution would be to plan up. Singapore, a small country that imports most of its food, has now begun selling vegetables from its first vertical farm. And even while they're more expensive the vegetables are already selling faster than they can be grown. If the farms prove sustainable – both technologically and economically – they could provide a much desired supplement to Singapore's locally grown food and serve as a model for farming in other land-challenged areas."
Singapore Builds _Its_ First Vertical Vegetable Farm
Always reminds me of Brass Eye's Science episode
And if they can find a good, cheap way to desalinate sea water they could almost declare themselves functionally independant from Malaysia.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's finally looking a bit more like real life!
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
No matter how you align your farms, there's a finite amount of sunlight that you can't get more of. This method can increase yields, but only up to a point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
Specifically:
"The Armenian tower hydroponicums are the first built examples of a vertical farm, and is documented in Sholto Douglas' seminal text "Hydroponics: The Bengal System" first published in 1951.[5] Contemporary notions of vertical farming are predated by this early technology by more than 50 years. link"
So it's off of "THE first" by about half a century.
http://www.growingpower.org/
Sugapablo
From the article "Just 60W of power – just enough for a lightbulb – is needed to operate one tower per day."
Why is do journalist always mix-up the notions of instantaneous power and quantity of energy?
Aquaponics. Using the auto-siphon systems, you can grow just about anything in a gravel bed rather than soil. Uses 1/10 the water of traditional land-based farming. Cool stuff if you have limited resources, but not as simple as putting seeds on the ground and waiting.
I grow herbs in my living room window.
Rosemary, basil, chives, oregano, sage, thyme. They are very happy there in a nice looking scaffold sitting in front of the window.
I may grow vegetables in the future, I'll practice on herbs in the mean time.
Gah! How'd I type-o the subject line?
They may not be the first in the world to do this but any new competition should be welcome as being another team and another chance at finding techniques to improve cost effectiveness.
My first thought after seeing the headline and thinking "That's cool!" was whether or not they could stay in business and what kind of future this setup could have elsewhere. It's probably a concept very much like fuel prices: When prices rise high enough to support more expensive production methods, these fancier methods will have a better chance of gaining traction and staying in business.
The Singapore government should consider what value they put on food security for their population. If they value it highly enough, then perhaps a subsidy for the company to help them expand would be justifiable.
The value and challenges of hydroponic farming might not be obvious to those of you in the west (I live in Singapore).
First, the local vegetable market is dominated by Malaysian and Chinese imports. Both of these countries have questionable laws limiting the use of pesticides and fertilizers. I have no doubt that their products are grown unsustainably. Most people wash Chinese vegetables with soap for fear of the chemicals that may remain on them.
Those imported vegetables are incredibly cheap locally. Its possible to get all the food you need for a stir fry for a small family (with meat) at a local wet market for just a few dollars. But, as I said above, the safety of that food is dubious. Singaporeans are now rich enough (average income second only to Japan in Asia) to expect a better quality of food.
The one vegetable that we simply cannot get in quality is the tomato. Most are flown here under ripe so they do not crush in transit. Of course the carbon footprint of those tomatoes must be massive. The higher quality ones come from Japan, but apparently were shipped frozen. Tomatoes are mushy, mealy, and never taste like a proper tomato picked in southern Europe's late summer. Sky green's web page shows they are only tackling non-flowering vegetables (greens). This is probably because they are not able to farm the bees needed for tomato pollination. I've never seen a bee in Singapore and don't know what the concerns are of raising honey bees on the island.
Just a few thoughts from an American in Singapore...
So each tray gets its time in the sun while going up the tower, and in the shade going down (or vice versa). It seems this would work well only if the plants you are growing are happy getting half the sunlight available at your location. I'm sure you could get a similar effect in horizontal format with little difficulty.
If you can get friction low enough, you might be able to make the whole thing run simply by watering the plants at the top of the down part of the cycle, so the weight differential makes it go.
Scientific American had an article on vertical farms some time back (paywalled here.) As I recall, they had a much more energy intensive design (growing lights etc.) My objection was that for anything like that you could make work in a sky scraper, you could much more cheaply put the same technology out in rural areas.
The Singapore plan only works if there are areas you're happy to cast into shade (and block views from) with these towers. They can't be close together, or they'll be in each other's shade.
Incidentally, Singapore's climate has remarkably little annual variation. The hottest month has average high temperature of 31.7C, the coldest month has average high temperature of 30.0C. Rain is more variable, but still by less than a factor of two through the year. (This is not from personal experience.) If anyone knows of somewhere with less weather variability, I'd be interested to hear of it.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
"So, they're raising anencephalics to harvest for transplant organs?"
Don't give Karl Rove any more ways to "grow" the GOP voting base...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If you like hot peppers, they're an excellent crop for anyone with a sunny window. Some of the tastiest are sold as "decorative" peppers. This term doesn't mean that they're not worth eating; it comes from the fact that peppers like full sun, but many good hot peppers are from small plants that get shaded out in a garden by other, bigger plants. So you grow them in pots that can be put on any sunny level spot, like a porch or patio or window sill. When they get covered with flowers plus green, white, orange, purple and red fruit, they're very decorative. Like sweet peppers, they're edible at any color stage, though the ripest tend to be the hottest. The green or white ones are less hot, but this lets the other non-hot pepper flavors come through.
One problem in our household is that, due to my wife's allergies to most furry critters, we share the house with three small parrots. Like most birds, they love hot peppers, and strip them off the plants when we're not watching. So when we take the peppers indoors for the winter, we have to put them in a few sunny windows that the birds can't easily access.
Like tomatoes, peppers like rich soil and lots of water. So give them some compost if you can, don't let them dry out, and you'll have some very pretty, edible crops in a few months. You can use the seeds in any hot pepper that you like, but if you use a store-bought pepper's seeds, you'll have no idea how big the plant will be. So it's better to just ask for a few peppers from someone who's already growing them. Just plant a few of the seeds in each pot, put them in a sunny spot, and keep them watered.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If there is one thing that a room full of monkeys can do that isn't write the complete works of Shakespeare... It is make the fertilizer stick to the walls.
It's not really that serious. The drug laws are strict but it's actually fairly common to come across illicit substances in SG, just like everywhere else. The cases that make the news usually appear because people are stupid about it, trying to take E out to clubs or smoking weed in the street like they think they're in Amsterdam. Most people who want to don't have a problem. No, there aren't dealers on corners or people walking up to you on the street offering you drugs like back in the US, but we like it that way. Anyone who's been here more than a few years knows someone who knows someone that has drugs. We live on an island country that's only slightly bigger than Manhattan, and we have the world's busiest port. You'd be kidding yourself if you thought they'd catch everything coming in, or if you thought they prosecute every single possession case.
Porn is also illegal here, but it's silly to think no one is looking at it.
Singapore's policy with just about everything is if you can keep it to yourself they aren't interested. Keep your head down and you can smoke all the weed you want, if that's your thing.
What I find craziest of all is that in the first three years of my adult life in the US I had six, maybe seven run-ins with law enforcement. I've been in Singapore for almost four years and I've not yet ever been confronted by a single police officer. And people say Singapore is a police state?
that's teh shizzle bizzle