I'm trying to find the article that was going around a month or two ago saying that vertical farms were a sham and the numbers don't make any sense when you study them. Can anyone remember the source?
Ignoring the cost of setting up the farm, water, and creating a market for (most likely) more expensive produce, this would work great.
I love the concept of vertical farming, but the only way it is going to reach commercial success is through small scale trials that pave the path for full scale deployments.
Vertical farms are a terrible idea and I am baffled as to why this isn't apparent to everyone [1].
Here's just a few of the glaring errors from this article:
Lower fossil fuel usage
This is daft, and comes from massively overestimating of the energy costs of harvesting and shipping food around[2] and massively underestimating the energy costs of growing plants under lights. When plants are out in the fields they're getting solar energy for free. When you've got twenty stories of hydroponic equipment, you're having to generate all the energy they need to grow yourself.
Organic
There's no reason that molds, fungi and pests can't grow indoors.
every idle office tower project could be bringing in $1.5 million dollars a year rather than losing money.
Only if you forget about running costs. Energy costs themselves will be staggering. [3]
[1] For one thing, I find it telling that the people who are enthusiastic about vertical farming always seem to be highly educated city dwellers and never people who actually grow food for a living.
[2] The words "food miles" are always a massive red flag.
Vertical farms make perfect sense when you rotate them 90 from the base, remove all the glass, and maximize your usable surface area. A basil garden in the windowsill is about as vertical as your going to get in any non-scifi form. Maybe having big tubes of circulating algae would work, but then you're all eating delicious Matrix Goo.
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[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] threadI love the concept of vertical farming, but the only way it is going to reach commercial success is through small scale trials that pave the path for full scale deployments.
Here's just a few of the glaring errors from this article:
Lower fossil fuel usage
This is daft, and comes from massively overestimating of the energy costs of harvesting and shipping food around[2] and massively underestimating the energy costs of growing plants under lights. When plants are out in the fields they're getting solar energy for free. When you've got twenty stories of hydroponic equipment, you're having to generate all the energy they need to grow yourself.
Organic
There's no reason that molds, fungi and pests can't grow indoors.
every idle office tower project could be bringing in $1.5 million dollars a year rather than losing money.
Only if you forget about running costs. Energy costs themselves will be staggering. [3]
[1] For one thing, I find it telling that the people who are enthusiastic about vertical farming always seem to be highly educated city dwellers and never people who actually grow food for a living.
[2] The words "food miles" are always a massive red flag.
[3] £9.82 of energy required to grow half a kilo of wheat http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/