Vertical farms solve land problem

6 Comments on "Vertical farms solve land problem"

econ101 on Mon, 31st Dec 2012 8:17 pm 



This is also occurring in the USA. It will help increase ag production and provide more food. A lot of herbs and tomatoes we have in central Minnesota are produced in large hydroponic gardens near Paynesville. It has a similar effect on ag production as fracking has on oil production. Because this innovation helps relieve stresses in the system it must be bad just as fracking is now being demonized. Certainly we can’t solve these problems so easily without a central government gaining more taxing power and control over our individual rights and liberties in the name of climate or energy.

GregT on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 1:41 am 



It is also occurring in Canada, and is an excellent way to grow leaf vegetables like lettuce. Staples, such as grains, or corn, not so much.

Somewhere between 1 and 1.5 acres of land are generally agreed upon as the amount of land needed to keep one person alive for a year, or between 40,000 to 60,000 square feet. An average apartment in the downtown core of my city is around 1000 square feet, and the average number of occupants is 1.8. This means that for every 1 high-rise occupied as a residence, 72 to 108 high-rises would need to be converted into food production.

Seeing as the city is already close to maximum occupancy, this means that we would need to construct 72 to 108 entire city centres to grow food for every city centre in existence.

The math is not exact, but close enough to understand that this will not even come remotely close to solving our current and future food shortages.

BillT on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 3:01 am 



This is nothing more than another techie dream. Sorry. Can you imagine the cost of those veggies when oil and NG is 2 or 3 or more times today’s costs? And I live in a city. Just to feed the 1,000 people who live in my 32 story condo tower would require 500 acres of surface, minimum. The city holds 15,000,000 people. That requires 8,000,000+ acres or 1,200+ square miles of surface at a minimum.

Dream on techies. Many small systems cannot be scaled up to a useful level.

DC on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 6:26 am 



Unfortunately vertical farms are just as, if not more energy and resource intense as ‘conventional'(factory farming). While some forms of urban-ag are no doubt, possible, vertical farming as its currently promoted, is far too land, energy and material intensive to be remotely viable. Even if it were to cut down on the food-miles problem we have now, its energy and water footprint alone would make any food coming out of one very expensive indeed.

Better to just use the(future) abandoned ‘freeways’ and decrepit car-dealerships and mega-malls to grow food. O wait, except we wont be able to do that either since any land or facility remotely connected with car-dependency will also be hopelessly contaminated as well, and thus useless even for the modest goal of trying to reclaim farmland for ‘old-fashioned’-ag.

Owell…

SOS on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 1:00 pm 



It’s not Owell, it’s Orwillian.

Large scales are hard to comprehend. For instance, the crack pot that proposed peak oil was wrong about reserves. Not wrong, clueless He had no comprehension what was out there but made judgments and drew conclusions from his own, very limited perspective.

GregT on Tue, 1st Jan 2013 2:38 pm 



Sos,

The “crackpot” that proposed peak oil, lived on a finite planet, with finite resources.

What planet are you from?