Vertical farming, anyone?

Great idea to me, the nay sayers. who think the worlds over populated and we can feed ourself. When will people learn we are great at solving every problem thrown at us. No reason the food grown would be any worse than natural, organic farm grown. However think how fast you could get product to the shop. Virtually no travel miles. In door farming also means anything could be grown anywhere.
 
How is it gonna work for livestock? And where is the soil and resources going to come from to set it up? Big topsoil mines?

Sticking loads of soil and water and cows in a tower block, cant see that going down well, the weight of it all too!
 
Berger said:
How is it gonna work for livestock? And where is the soil and resources going to come from to set it up? Big topsoil mines?

Sticking loads of soil and water and cows in a tower block, cant see that going down well, the weight of it all too!
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weight isn't an issue, if the buildings designed to take it. Compost can be manufactured from waste. Water thats not a problem, there's a few trillion trillion gallons in the sea.
 
Has nobody here thought of the smell? Organic you say? Mmmm great. Nothing like a big waft of manure coming into my apartment window. :/
 
Heofz said:
Has nobody here thought of the smell? Organic you say? Mmmm great. Nothing like a big waft of manure coming into my apartment window. :/
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for veg why would you have manure?
Also it's likely they will be fully climate controlled, to insure correct growing temperatures and moister. Smell can then be easily removed.
 
AcidHell2 said:
for veg why would you have manure?
Also it's likely they will be fully climate controlled, to insure correct growing temperatures and moister. Smell can then be easily removed.
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If so, then fantastique! :cool:

Just had a thought, why not have everything automated, including the harvesting, and also include a food processing & packaging factory in the same building, selling the produce in its packaged form directly to the consumer. It could act like a huge self-contained, unlimited-supply vending machine but for groceries :D

Now that would be cool. Plus it would be really cheap as it comes straight from a industry straight to tertiary ;)
 
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AcidHell2 said:
weight isn't an issue, if the buildings designed to take it. Compost can be manufactured from waste. Water thats not a problem, there's a few trillion trillion gallons in the sea.
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I wouldn't advise using sea-water to fertilize your crops. I hear they're not too fond of salt nowadays.
 
Just imagine of all the immigrants you could have working in that one building, on the side. :eek::D:cool:
 
it will never work for livestock, plus it would never work organically, they're going to need loads of chemicals to keep the environment and soil under control.

There will also be the problem of cost and location.

Why build a farm when you could build a tower block of flats/offices? True its profit making, but the profit will be greater on cheaper land in other areas.... not prime real estate.

Farms also complement each other... food/waste from crops is used to feed livestock etc, if theres no livestock theres either loads of waste or loads of transporting goods from one place to another, likewise with manure and cattle used to fertilise resting fields... with the two possibly so far apart they are going to need to move a lot of goods around or ship in a load of raw materials
 
kibblerok said:
it will never work for livestock, plus it would never work organically, they're going to need loads of chemicals to keep the environment and soil under control.
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Why won't it work for live stock?
Of course it can, you wouldn't need any more chemicals than normall farms, it;s just a matter off using organic compost instead of fertilisers. There's also a much reduced risk of insect and disease
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kibblerok said:
There will also be the problem of cost and location.
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True at the moment, how about in a 100 years time when the population is exponentially higher than it is know. Land will become one of the most sort after resources.

kibblerok said:
Why build a farm when you could build a tower block of flats/offices? True its profit making, but the profit will be greater on cheaper land in other areas.... not prime real estate.
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Again, in the short term you're right, in the longterm..
 
So I've been thinking more about these vertical farms. According to an overview article in Business 2.0, a single vertical farm that can feed about 45,000 people a year would cost about $84 million to build, and then about $5 million to operate (pretty amazing that you can feed a person for not much over $100 a year, isn't it?). I was thinking about taxation, and what's considered a "right" and thus paid for communally by taxes. For example, most nations consider healthcare a right, education a right, many consider access to fresh water a right, and most consider "national defense" to some extent a group responsibility as well.

I was wondering what would happen if we made the statement that healthy food is a fundamental right. It seems reasonable to me that an advanced and stable society should be able to feed all of its members... Anyway, there are a few ways it could be done. One interesting approach might be to tax junk food — a one cent "jund food tax" per can of sada would generate $1.5 billion per year. That would build eighteen vertical farms (and that's assuming the price doesn't go down by building lots) capable of feeding about 800,000 people a year. Expand the junk food tax to the full swath of junk food and you're looking at about $10 billion in revenues, or enough to build 120 vertical farms which would feed about five and a half million people a year.

Let's say the public decided it was a bit more important to not spend quite as much on military airplanes... Let's strike the five of each of the following planes out of the budget: F-15E ($215 million), F/A-18F ($295 million), F-22 Raptor ($690 million), B-2 Spirit ($10 billion), B-52H Stratofortress ($265 million), C-130 Hercules ($335 million), KC-10 Extender ($440 million), and the RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV ($170 million). That would still leave tons of planes in the fleet, and save a total of $12.5 billion — or another 150 vertical farms bringing the total feeding capacity to about twelve and a half million people.

As I write this, the Iraq war has cost about $450 billion so far. Since that's turned out to be a totally pointless war, let's rewind for a moment and pretend that money was spent on building vertical farms as well. That money would add 5,500 vertical farms.
Now the total number of vertical farms would be able to provide every single American with high-quality organic food. I'm not talking just about veggies by the way — I'm talking about a complete diet since these vertical farms produce not just fruit and vegetables, but also poultry and fish... All year round, fresh and healthy, pesticide free food, with major environmental benefits over traditional farming.

Oh, and as a point of trivia, if the US Defense budget was cut by 5% and that money was put to funding the farms (about $29 billion a year), every person in America would eat a full healthy diet for free.

Well, priorities...

...and don't get me started on what you could do if you slashed the defense budget by, say, 25% — what do you think about "free" (as in requiring no additional taxes) healthcare for every American, free education up to university, and more? Seems to me it would be a better way to spend the money than bombs, but hey, what do I know...
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*n
 
an interesting idea, and i dont really see many negatives to it, why are people so cut up about the traffic it would produce :confused: say it provides produce for 45,000. in london that's not going to cover much geographic area, combined with that produce could be taken to retail at the quietest traffic times (middle of the night/very early morning - as happens anyway (how do you think produce gets to supermarkets at the moment?)) it could be used to great effect and if the government went about it in the right way could lead to big savings, the level that they subsidise some business farmers around cambridge is disgusting, the ones who have never needed subsidising but know how to play the game
 
The biggest problem i see with this sort of arrangment would be security issues.

Moving the majority of a locations food supply into one building seems like opening the door to food shortages should their be a problem/terrorist attack on or with the building involved.
 
Malt_Vinegar said:
The biggest problem i see with this sort of arrangment would be security issues.

Moving the majority of a locations food supply into one building seems like opening the door to food shortages should their be a problem/terrorist attack on or with the building involved.
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Surely a similar problem already exists with the massive distribution centres the big supermarkets have?
 
If everyone started using condoms or other methods of birth control and stopped having so many children this wouldn't be a problem.

Over crowding is the issue not the lack of food.
Quite frankly the rate of population growth is scary, india and china aren't exactly helping matters either!
 
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