
This is what farms will look like in the future - protomyth
http://io9.com/this-is-what-farms-will-look-like-in-the-future-453541462
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jdietrich
No, no they won't, anyone who says they will lacks a grade-school
understanding of plant biology.

Plants eat sunlight. With adequate irrigation, light is the key limiting
factor on plant growth. Stacking plants vertically is a very expensive waste
of time, because you're not gathering any more solar energy than if you just
planted them at ground-level. You're just spreading the same amount of light
between more plants - plants that are housed in a very expensive building and
that are impossible to tend or harvest in an efficient manner.

The future of farming already exists. It's in southern Spain, around towns
like El Ejido and Almeria. These areas look white in satellite images, not
because of any geological feature but because they're absolutely covered in
polytunnels - hundreds of thousands of greenhouses, creating a humid
microclimate in an arid but sunny region, to supply salad vegetables to Europe
year-round.

<http://goo.gl/maps/WrZ5j>

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ChuckMcM
have to vote you up just for the cool link. The 'contest' was really about
visualization and design. Not really about actual usability :-) That said,
there is a growing aquaponics movement in California which seeks to create
nearly water neutral farms. I keep hoping to find one of those scaled up to
something like the Spaniards have done but in Calfornia's central valley.

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showerst
Something I've never understood about those cool looking vertical farm
concepts is water management. Doesn't it take a TON of energy to pump enough
water to irrigate a field up 50 stories?

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ChuckMcM
One wonders if you can vaporize it at the bottom and condense it out of the
air at the top, but yes there clearly would have to be some sort of energy
input to move water. One could imagine a sort of bucket brigade kind of thing
where water heading down, was collecting in buckets which were lifting a
slightly lower mass of water up (or equivalent mass with a an energy injection
to cover the difference). But I don't think anyone submitted these designs as
_practical_ farms, more like Farms that look futuristic at the expense of
being implementable :-).

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protomyth
California needs to put some effort behind desalination plants or else they
will lose some of the most productive farms in the country and a whole wine
industry.

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bobwaycott
I seriously doubt our food-producing future will look all kinds of
architectural sexy.

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galago
Is the author suggesting that food is going to get really expensive?

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mapt
This is literally among the dumbest environmentalist ideas out there. It's a
_tragedy_ it gets so much attention because that enthusiasm could be oriented
towards advocacy of things which _actually make a difference_.

A napkin calculation a while back factoring in the cost of farmland, light,
land, and skyscraper construction showed approximately a _60,000x cost
difference_ per pound of crops between purpose-build skyscraper-type vertical
farming startup costs, and prime Iowa farmland. I'm not exaggerating.

Compare irrigated desert land under intensive greenhouse cultivation with
skyscrapers, and you're _still_ at hundreds or thousands of times more
expensive.

The most sizable vertical farm at present is either a natural-light "bookshelf
style" setup in Singapore which does absolutely nothing for land use by
shading other land, and grows a trivial amount of crops, or a artificially-lit
30x30m area on Chiba University operated purely for research purposes, which
sells its products on the side.

When someone says "X is planned for Chicago", that actually means something to
some of us, something other than "An undergrad design student asked for
creative solutions to save the world came up with a pretty render that any
architect, engineer, farmer, or businessman would laugh at on close
examination". I would ask the green energy sites to stop lying to our faces on
this topic, necessitating stories like this [1].

The only way this kind of solution is remotely feasible is when your product
is marijuana, and it costs $1000/lb. Expensive niche herbs like basil and
wasabi may be able to grow economically in a climate controlled hydroponic
system... but they can only pay warehouse rent if that, not skyscraper rent.

We owe the promotion of this concept to Dickson Despommier [2], a tenured
professor of public health / environmental health sciences at Columbia
University in Manhattan. Take one of the two most geographically and
economically scarce land markets in the country, and apply "locavore"
principles, and this stupidity is what you get.

To the people believing because a render was created and it was "planned" that
this means they can absolve their share of environmental white guilt for
living in a neighborhood without any trees or permeable surfaces... Stop
promoting this, please. Tens of square miles of city displaces thousands of
square miles of suburb, and you're living at 1/10th the resource intensity of
the rest of the country by not driving everywhere. Farmland is not this
scarce, and transportation for food is not this expensive.

The breathless enthusiasm of the green bloggers which are paid per post and
have no formal science training past middle school has brought this concept to
the forefront again and again. I've been shouting at my computer for nigh on
ten years now and it _will not die_.

[1] [http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/james-blog/1810325/so-las-
ve...](http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/james-blog/1810325/so-las-vegas-
getting-vertical-farm)

[2] <http://www.verticalfarm.com/>

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protomyth
In the USA, the main reason it won't go anywhere is the efficiency of the food
chain from farm to elevator to processing to destination. The USA really does
a good rail system for transporting goods and our trucking is excellent.

// yes, I posted an article I don't believe, but the architecture quest is
amazing

