Why vertical farms are a crock.
monbiot.com
Why vertical farms are a crock.
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#2Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly investigate it and find some cool tech.
It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get light?" is a killer question.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#3While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is.
A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63 acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally, gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty sure that one is much, much, much larger than the other.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#4Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly investigate it and find some cool tech. It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get light?" is a killer question.
I always assumed that the light would be artificial. And that they were relying on hypothetical cheap energy of the kind that reliable fusion would provide. This may be possible a hundred years from now but surely not in today's energy economy.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#5While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is. A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63 acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally, gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty s…
And with that number in mind, you also see another problem with vertical farms: pure space availability. Modern farms are hundreds and even thousands of acres to grow enough food to feed the masses we have today. You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm.
Frankly hydrogen vehicles are more feasible than this, but only barely.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#6The writer rambles on with setup and indirect arguments for a couple of paragraphs before even mentioning what he's attacking, but he raises some excellent points once he actually gets going.
This bit was witty:
"The only crop which could cover such costs is high-grade cannabis. But a 30-storey hydroponic skunk tower would be quite hard to conceal."
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#7These ideas aren't new. I doubt that they are impossible but we haven't yet solved the technical problems that would make 'vertical farms' cost effective over regular farms. If farmland became expensive enough (really expensive,) I could see them seeming more viable.
If these were to happen, my entirely uneducated guess would be that it would start with rooftop farming, and that extending to storied greenhouses at the tops of skyscrapers. Depending on your crops, these both don't need artificial light and could lead to solutions for other engineering problems such farming would involve.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#8While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is. A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63 acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally, gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty s…
And with that number in mind, you also see another problem with vertical farms: pure space availability. Modern farms are hundreds and even thousands of acres to grow enough food to feed the masses we have today. You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm. Frankly hydrogen vehicles are more feasible than this, but only barely.
"You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm."
So what if it didn't replace one major farm and just a small local one? And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate them?
I'm surprised I haven't seen the ideas brought together before, it seems more pragmatic than a dedicated building just for the farm and there's a growing movement to eat healthier at work. We order from FarmFresh at my offices, which supplies us with fruit and veggies from a local family-owned farm and we've been loving the results.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#9Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly investigate it and find some cool tech. It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get light?" is a killer question.
Production prices for solar energy are now below $0.80 / watt (http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Ear...), although skyrocketing demand has caused wholesale prices to remain much higher. It seems likely that we may in the next 10 years be in a place where we can turn sunlight into electricity, and then electricity into the exact wavelengths of light used in photosynthesis more efficiently than allowing the plants to sit in the sun.
If this is the case, than we may be able to grow crops more efficiently indoors than out. But we will be replacing acres of crops with acres of solar panels. And it's unclear to me why we would want these buildings to be skyscrapers, which are much more expensive per square foot than large warehouses in the middle of nowhere.
Re: Why vertical farms are a crock.
#10Vertical farms are a crock because transport of crops is easy. Moving people is much harder. This is why economic centers are densely populated, but can still eat food shipped from 1000 miles away. There is no reason to spend millions to build vertically when you can buy cheap land and transport the products to the most profitable markets on demand.