Vertical farming is cool stuff

It's a concept whose time has not yet come. The upfront costs are still far too high compared with traditional farming. Even rooftop farming only works with subsidies or in places where people are willing to spend the extra money.
 
Yup.

What are subsidies? I see it before, know I could look it up (probably will) but explain it if you can.

And also, unless someone builds VF then the problems will not be resolved keeping the costs high. That's usually how all new things work.
 
Step #1: Pass legislation forcing everyone between 128 and 495 to move into a city.

Step #2: Demolish sprawl and make way for vertical farming.

Step #3: Preserve forests and undeveloped land. No need for that horizontal farming hogging up our nature!



...what? ...too extreme? :eek:
 
You'd need more resources to make vertical farming work - to power elevators, pumps, etc., and just to build the damn things. Not necessarily clear they'd be less environmentally harmful than horizontal farms.
 
I do not understand why we would need to force people into cities and demolish sprawl?
And we currently already do preserve undeveloped land.

And czsz, do you know this for a fact that more resources would be used to power the structure than would be practical, making it more environmentally friendly for standard horizontal farming? You do understand that energy/power is not the only concern of farming. Space, chemicals, water pollution, and proximity are all taken into account.

Using an outside power source is tough to talk about. Similar to electric cars. are they goo or bad? We still need to charge them and our current way of producing electricity is not so great. However eliminating polluting cars would then allow humans to not need to worry about them and can focus directly on electrical power plants.
 
It would be better to get rid of auto-centric suburbia and return to a pattern of dense cities surrounded by real 'streetcar' suburbs and restore former rural areas to productive farmland. Bedroom communities are ruining the country on so many levels it isn't even funny.
 
Here in New England, a lot of formerly productive farmland reverted to forest once areas further west were settled, which had better growing seasons or soils.
 
The only situation where these things would work would be in some massive, polluted Blade Runner-esque dystopia void of arable land. It's hard enough to grow food on flat land using underpaid migrant labor without the huge amount of capital required to do it vertically. "Urban Farming" works where there are interstitial spaces and low value vacant lots to be taken advantage of by those with enough time to dedicate to working them. It amuses me when I see arch. school renderings of agricultural skyscrapers in manhattan with photoshopped yuppie hobby farmers instead of jamaicans on work visas.

That being said, This dude is pretty cool.

South Asian cities, I believe specifically Dhaka has an interesting urban fabric composed of extremely dense slums chequered with plots of high intensity farmland.
 
isn't Detroit experimenting with reverting large vacant lots to commercial farming? Seems like a reasonable thing for a shrinking city to try.
 
Detroit isn't doing much except decaying and trying to pocket government handouts.

Heavily contaminated industrial land isn't good for farming. Neither are former residential areas loaded with lead paint, oil tanks, coal ash, illegal dumping, and all sorts of leaky decaying utility lines.

Anyone trying to claim that farming will remediate the soil is an idiot. None of the food could be safely eaten. Gardening over time to restore the soil, eventually over a century yes, farming for edible food right now or in the near future, no.
 
Hey, it all begins with wishful thinking. I guess if someone wanted to put up the initial cost (someone who is loaded) and get the ball rolling on more creative forms of urban farming, having suburbs would not prevent it from working, however if cities were all we had, the environment would benefit greatly from this.
 
When people start getting cancer left and right from benzine contaminated food grown in Detroit, I'm sure the whole urban farming thing is going to go over really well. Kidney and brain disorders from eating lead leeching vegetables is going to make the whole afraid of toxic shower curtains crowd so happy they fed their kids 'organically' grown stuff from a former urban area too.

I mean the climate and soil was absolutely the best and most efficient farmland to begin with. Not a fantasy land money pit for unproductive public subsidies in the slightest. Farming is just so easy and all, any unskilled laborer can do it.......

(actually real "organic" farming is highly skilled back breaking labor requiring four times the acreage for the same yield as factory farming undertaken with mechanized equipment and chemicals. As an orphan in the Ukraine I had plenty of patriotic duty in the fields, believe me it sucked. But it's about feeling good not actually producing food to the granola set!)
 
Lurker said:
When people start getting cancer left and right from benzine contaminated food grown in Detroit, I'm sure the whole urban farming thing is going to go over really well. Kidney and brain disorders from eating lead leeching vegetables is going to make the whole afraid of toxic shower curtains crowd so happy they fed their kids 'organically' grown stuff from a former urban area too.
Click to expand...

Clearly there is no middle ground between growing food on former coal gassification plant sites and industrial scale mechanized agriculture. Like performing soil contamination tests to determine what parcels are appropriate for growing crops fit for consumption or using alternative methods that do not rely planting in existing soil.
 
The problem is that clearing large acreages of debris, on an appropriate grade and water table to avoid leeching of contaminates into new topsoil, then sufficiently covering acreage with new topsoil, is so expensive that it doesn't make sense in a country which has plenty of good quality farmland in better climates elsewhere. Are we really going to, as a nation, pour more money into a failed city, which has already been a money pit, in order to have relatively poor farmland?

Honestly it would be cheaper and agriculturally more productive to transport Detroit residents interested in farming to other parts of the country. Essentially terraforming, probably the largest super-fund site ever, into arable land just because a failed city needs a new industry seems ridiculous.
 
Let's be clear: even if urban farming is successful in Detroit, it won't have "saved" it; it will have made it disappear as a city, completely.

Why? Because there's no such thing as "urban" farming on such a large scale. That land will be rural all over again.
 
I have to disagree with this. Large scale urban farming could be all hydroponics in a building. I do not think this is what Hantz is referring. But imagine if he is successful, many farms on use to be vacant lots. The workers may live in the city and the city would then possibly also have distribution centers for the produce. It may be a produce city. It wouldn't be your standard urban city with concrete and tall skyscrapers, but maybe more residential buildings vs. office buildings since many of the residence work farms and other food related jobs. I could see train companies as well that deliver via freight to other parts of the country.

To appeal to the residents as well as people who come to view the large scale farming, there would be regular retail, shopping, and dining. However much of the local non chain restaurant may decide to serve local grown produce from the cities farms.

But I could also see the farms taking over and the city becoming primarily a farming community. But this is up to how the farms are run, made, and how the city's citizens and leadership reacts to the new farms.
 
Lurker said:
The problem is that clearing large acreages of debris, on an appropriate grade and water table to avoid leeching of contaminates into new topsoil, then sufficiently covering acreage with new topsoil, is so expensive that it doesn't make sense in a country which has plenty of good quality farmland in better climates elsewhere. Are we really going to, as a nation, pour more money into a failed city, which has already been a money pit, in order to have relatively poor farmland?

Honestly it would be cheaper and agriculturally more productive to transport Detroit residents interested in farming to other parts of the country. Essentially terraforming, probably the largest super-fund site ever, into arable land just because a failed city needs a new industry seems ridiculous.
Click to expand...

I agree, I should have included "on an intermediate scale, oriented towards local consumption and not specifically in Detriot". The largest conceivable operation would be managed by a CSA or a similar organization where remediation would be on a managable scale or fragmentation of land wouldn't be an issue. Anything larger or the idea that a city would be self sufficient is a pipe dream requiring too high of an investment. It doesn't exactly jive with the whole ground-up localization rhetoric associated with the urban farming movement to begin with.

The easiest and cheapest way to deal with contamination in the near term would be to create a database of usable parcels. Pretty sure there are universities working to help set that up already in different places as well as formulating best practices. Raised planting beds seem to be effective in places that are not heavily contaminated, the hardest problem to deal with is probably atmospheric pollution.
 
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