
Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s - bootload
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-farming.html
======
olau
I find the Chinese greenhouses described in the follow up intriguing:
[http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-
green...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-
greenhouse.html)

------
yourapostasy
This is a good era to revisit fruit walls because if you can make a robot that
automatically cultivates and harvests the fruit walls, it makes them a viable
urban agriculture option again because the primary issue with them today is
the high labor input required.

~~~
gmisra
The "if you can make a robot" problem for this use-case is quickly becoming
"when you can make a robot" that. See, e.g., these (mostly) roboticized
lettuce farms: [http://www.fastcoexist.com/3050750/this-robot-run-indoor-
far...](http://www.fastcoexist.com/3050750/this-robot-run-indoor-farm-can-
grow-10-million-heads-of-lettuce-a-year)

------
pavel_lishin
Interesting, I thought that one of the reasons for building greenhouses was
that they trapped heat.

------
pm24601
What I think is fascinating about this. Is that as humans we ignored
opportunities to use the passive technology. For example, why don't today's
greenhouses have brick floors or a brick north wall (even a small wall to
increase the thermal mass)

~~~
ashark
Takes too long to recover costs? Requires larger footprint (shadow behind the
wall unusable)?

The pessimist in me says "because these things would last centuries with a
little upkeep, and we don't build that kind of thing anymore". Too hard to
take advantage of short-term opportunities to repurpose or sell the land if
you've put expensive, permanent(-ish) infrastructure on it.

~~~
cfcef
> The pessimist in me says "because these things would last centuries with a
> little upkeep, and we don't build that kind of thing anymore".

They wouldn't. You're building miles of thick stone walls exposed to the
elements, which you are deliberately forcing plants to cover as much of them
as possible. The article and the followup hint at the repair and labor costs
(note that the article is set in _China_ ):

> The decline of the European fruit wall started in the late nineteenth
> century. Maintaining a fruit wall was a labour-intensive work that required
> a lot of craftsmanship in pruning, thinning, removing leaves, etcetera. The
> extension of the railways favoured the import of produce from the south,
> which was less labour-intensive and thus cheaper to produce. Artificially
> heated glasshouses could also produce similar or larger yields with much
> less skilled labour involved.

This should not be surprising, since if fruit-walls were strictly superior,
why were they ever obsolesced? In general, when reading sustainability fetish
material like this, you should remember that these sorts of things are like
code-golfing or min-maxing: schemes which place unrealistic value on just one
dimension, and which can be highly interesting in how one maximizes that
dimension, but are only rarely optimal under a more realistic set of
tradeoffs. In this case, the fetish is for energy use while running, and
mostly ignoring capital, repair, space, and labor costs.

~~~
pm24601
That was with the materials back then.

Here are some of the current materials that we have that they didn't:

1\. Concrete ( reinforced ) - much more durable than brick and mortar.

2\. Mechanized vehicles like backhoes and the such to build walls

3\. Better materials to trap and retain heat.

Probably others as well.

We also now have a global warming problem and other externalities that make
greenhouses' energy inefficiency bad for society.

You know that "energy fetish"

------
ilaksh
I have some concepts integrating different ideas for sustainability which is
related to this idea of fruit walls. In my concept, each group of residents
has 1/3 of the property dedicated to insulated buildings that are full of
agricultural production. They have large windows but are also supplemented
with LED light. The materials and vegetation inside are the heat sink. I
believe this is a more efficient way to produce food than a standard
greenhouse because of the insulation and overall better temperature control.

[https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

------
SixSigma
> In the Netherlands, which is the world's largest producer of glasshouse
> grown crops, some 10,500 hectares of greenhouses used 120 petajoules (PJ) of
> natural gas in 2013

On a recent tour of hydroponic growers in Almeria, Spain, I was told that
province alone had 30,000 hectares in commercial greenhouses.

