
Old New Jersey Factory to House Earth’s Largest Vertical Farm - adamnemecek
http://weburbanist.com/2015/04/21/old-new-jersey-factory-to-house-earths-largest-vertical-farm/
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jfb
"The people who designed these places, maybe eighty, a hundred years ago, they
had the idea they'd make 'em as self-sufficient as possible. Make 'em grow
food. Make 'em heat themselves, generate power, whatever. Now this one, you
drill far enough down, is sitting on top of a lot of geothermal water. It's
real hot down there, but not hot enough to run an engine, so it wasn't gonna
give em any power. They made a stab at power, up on the roof, with about a
hundred Darrieus rotors, what they call eggbeaters. Had themselves a wind
farm, see? Today they get most of their watts off the Fission Authority, like
anybody else. But that geothermal water, they pump that up to a heat
exchanger. It's too salty to drink, so in the exchanger it just heats up your
standard Jersey tap water, which a lot of people figure isn't worth drinking
anyway."

Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow
pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf
trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic
fluid.

"Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow
real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up
here, to keep this place warm. That's what this level was for, to grow 'ponic
amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish
tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes
around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn't figure
anybody'd go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room
for a mosque, and they didn't figure a lot of other changes either So we wound
up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the
Projects ... Catfish, too."

\-- _Count Zero_ , William Gibson

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Animats
There's a well-known vertical farm in Japan which produces 10,000 heads of
lettuce a day. But even with LED lighting, they need subsidies on power costs.

There are some special situations where this is a big win. Places with poor
growing climates and difficult shipping, such as Alaska, where a big indoor
farm is starting up. Indoor farms have been big in Saudi Arabia for decades.
But for places within trucking range of good farming land, this probably will
be limited to a few high-value crops.

Amusingly, vegetables grown under totally artificial conditions can be labeled
as "organic", because they don't need pesticides. Probably "kosher" too.[1]
The lettuce plant in Japan runs their employees through a shower and has them
wear clean-room bunny suits, so as not to transmit some disease into their
high-density farming operation.

[1]
[http://www.kashrut.com/articles/Bugs_in_Lettuce/](http://www.kashrut.com/articles/Bugs_in_Lettuce/)

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mlakewood
There was an article I read a little while ago about urban/vertical farming in
Detroit. It was saying that traditionally, like you say the economics of cost
of transport vs cost of land has meant that farms are placed further out where
land is cheaper. In Detroit, apparently the land in inexpensive enough in the
inner city that the economics dont work out that way. I think its interesting
to think in a macro scale what a might higher prices of oil will do to those
economies.

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AJ007
I wonder how much marijuana is grown indoors in the US? Perhaps there are some
parallels not so much with cost of land but cost of transport with that one.

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thret
The cost of discovery is what drives marijuana plantations indoors.

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vfrogger
I just finished the book "abundance" by Stephen H. Diamandis and Steven
Kotler. They discuss Vertical Farms at length, and many other future
technologies that show immense promise at revolutionizing the world. Great
Read. Highly Recommend.

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Adam_O
Agreed, it was a really motivating read. I enjoyed the optimistic (and not too
preachy) outlook he has regarding technology just on the horizon, especially
in medicine/biotech.

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sboak
This is the best thing to come out of New Jersey since Jon Stewart

