Vertical farming does not save space
lowtechmagazine.com
Vertical farming does not save space
1–10 of 464 posts
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#2This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#3"Vertical Farming Does Not Save Space [when exclusively considering solar power]"
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#4This is why we have the electrical grid.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#5This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.
You can put farms in the desert. Some of the most productive farmland is in deserts. Arizona and California are both noted for producing large quantities of high-quality cotton.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#6This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.
exactly... you can have a farm in the middle of the city and a solar farm in the middle of the desert...
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#7> Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels.
This doesn't have to be the case. Plants don't use all the sunlight that hits them, because available light isn't generally the bottleneck in plant growth. Note how most plants are green, which is to say they're content with reflecting the most energy-dense range of the visible spectrum. Solar panels can in theory (and possibly in practice, I'm unsure of the current state of the art) yield more efficient utilization of solar energy than plants do. (Of course we also need to consider efficiency losses from reconverting the energy back into light, but I recall the reading that the overall system efficiency can still beat direct sunlight in theory (consider that the grow lights can be precisely tuned to only emit energy in the frequencies that plants crave).)
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#8> the sun provides free energy and the clouds free water
This is somewhat tangential to the author's point, however considering the resources from the Earth as free (not the sun) has been a disaster - environmentally, socially and economically. It's like double entry accounting but only entering on one side.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#9This is why we have the electrical grid.
Quite a lot of their pages are about doing away with the electric grid, in increasingly unpractical ways btw. This article is quite on-message actually.
Re: Vertical farming does not save space
#10It doesn't grow many crops, either. I can see it being useful for restricted spaces like balconies or roof top gardens in cities, also because unlike soil gardening the weight is much less even accounting for the hydroponic growing solution. And of course, the gem of the new "industry," the place in Jackson which is a special case, tucked away up in the mountains where it can be hard to get in and out without delays, but wealthy enough to have practically every luxury brand in the world operating a store or two.
To me though the issue with hydroponically grown produce, vertical OR horizontal, is they taste insipid. I'm not sure if anybody's done a study on, say, lycopene in tomatoes grown hydroponically vs. conventionally but I'd guess there's less of everything in the hydros. This is a known problem in the normal supermarkets and people have been complaining about bland veggies for many years.
I will admit it's useful and can make money in certain situations. And it's funny as a gag, too.