Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?
IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it’s technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.
I have gone back and forth on vertical farming. There are scams in the field, but there are also some merits (most of them apply to urban farming in general).
The main issue you have with vertical farming is that there is only so much stacking you can do before you get out of light. A pillar like in the illustration projects a shadow, in which you can’t really put plants.
However right now sunlight is not the limiting factor for plants growth. IIRC depending on the plant it is either water or CO2 so you can do some amount of vertical farming. To me, the interest is not to come as a replacement for regular farming (so growing grains is not the issue, you will have a hard time beating the efficiency of a flat field + tractor), the interests are:
- freshness. Having herbs that you can cut as you need them is really a taste changer.
- air cleaning. Some plants do have the ability to fixate some VOCs.
- less transportation. Having the plants grown in the same building block means that the CO2 footprint will be much lower
- more efficient water usage. Careful with this one, in some places water will be more scarce in city than countryside, but water consumption of such systems is generally lower.
- less refrigeration. If the food has less transportation it also requires less refrigeration
- local fruits all year long. Assuming they are put in a controlled environment like a greenhouse, getting food that normally requires a lot of transportation locally becomes possible.
So to sum up, it is less of a solution to make regular agriculture sustainable and more to make sustainable agriculture more enjoyable. Actually one does not need tasty herbs and exotic fruits, but the ability t have them without poisoning the planet is nice and, well, solarpunk.
That is a very interesting perspective, thank you for making me think of things in a slightly different light. But yes I agree any type of advancement in farming from this point in human history and onwards should be attempting to achieve 2 things:
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Dont poison the planet (we kind of need it)
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Make food preferably with some variety
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There’s an organic produce company in Manhattan that uses vertical grow chambers and they get around the lighting problem by illuminating from the center of the cluster and rotating the plant pods occasionally.
They get around energy usage by charging a premium and taking advantage of state agricultural grants.
It’s expensive but you can get city grown butter lettuce year round.
Normally that would be a bit of an heresy, but fun thing: with the good LEDs at the good frequency, you can make a solar panel + LED setup that is actually efficient enough to provide more light to the plant than it would normally receive.