10 ms·

Why vertical farms are a crock.

74 points by jlangenauer 16y ago

sophacles 16y ago
Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly investigate it and find some cool tech. It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get light?" is a killer question.
- quantumhobbit 16y ago
  I always assumed that the light would be artificial. And that they were relying on hypothetical cheap energy of the kind that reliable fusion would provide. This may be possible a hundred years from now but surely not in today's energy economy.
  - mhd 16y ago
    But once you've got reasonably cheap and plentiful energy, what's the big incentive for growing locally. If trucking it from Kansas to NYC doesn't pollute as much, reasons for building those towers diminish somewhat. Of course, it's slightly different if you've got plentiful energy, but no good way to transmit/store it. Lots of solar panels all over the city to power its greenhouses. Or windmills in Chicago.
- 1053r 16y ago
  Production prices for solar energy are now below $0.80 / watt (http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Earnings-Call-Transcript/36717/ http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Ear...), although skyrocketing demand has caused wholesale prices to remain much higher. It seems likely that we may in the next 10 years be in a place where we can turn sunlight into electricity, and then electricity into the exact wavelengths of light used in photosynthesis more efficiently than allowing the plants to sit in the sun. If this is the case, than we may be able to grow crops more efficiently indoors than out. But we will be replacing acres of crops with acres of solar panels. And it's unclear to me why we would want these buildings to be skyscrapers, which are much more expensive per square foot than large warehouses in the middle of nowhere.
  - ars 16y ago
    How in the world did you get +8 mod on this? That's utter nonsense! You can only get as much light as you have surface area - so now instead of fields of crops, you have fields of solar collectors! Did you think there was some magical light multiplier device that could give you more output light than you started with? Plants already use the best parts of the visible spectrum to collect light. The small amounts of infra-red you might barely be able to collect and frequency up-convert are not worthwhile - especially since you'd need to throw away all the energy from the higher frequencies in order to get it. Solar cells are terrible as far as efficiency is concerned - and not because of engineering, because that's simply how they work. (Unless you want a multijunction solar cell but those are very very expensive.) And for engineering challenges there simply doesn't exist in the world enough rare earth elements to make enough solar cells for everyone - and that's just for regular electrical usage, forget about growing plants. We do have enough silicon, but silicon based solar cells have poor efficiency.
    - DougWebb 16y ago
      I think the idea here is that plants need a narrow set of frequencies and throw the rest away. If solar cells could capture the frequencies plants don't use, convert them to energy, then convert the energy to frequencies plants like, you've increased the efficency of your light-collection area. You'll also have a garden full of black plants, which is both creepy and cool.
      - ars 16y ago
        Solar cells work the same way: they capture a narrow frequency, and throw the rest away. More accurately, below the frequency cutoff they ignore the light, above the cutoff any, extra energy is wasted as heat. And plants don't need a narrow frequency anyway.
        DougWebb 16y ago
        They don't seem to be using the green light, at least.
hugh3 16y ago
While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is. A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63 acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally, gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty sure that one is much, much, much larger than the other.
- jameskilton 16y ago
  And with that number in mind, you also see another problem with vertical farms: pure space availability. Modern farms are hundreds and even thousands of acres to grow enough food to feed the masses we have today. You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm. Frankly hydrogen vehicles are more feasible than this, but only barely.
  - alabut 16y ago
    "You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm." So what if it didn't replace one major farm and just a small local one? And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate them? I'm surprised I haven't seen the ideas brought together before, it seems more pragmatic than a dedicated building just for the farm and there's a growing movement to eat healthier at work. We order from FarmFresh at my offices, which supplies us with fruit and veggies from a local family-owned farm and we've been loving the results.
    - protomyth 16y ago
      Alternating floors would be kinda harsh on the environmental systems of a modern building (one problem: humidity). The other problem is economic. The builder will make more money on more office space than farming. Also, a lot of farmers really don't want to live in skyscraper land.
    - 16y ago
alabut 16y ago
The writer rambles on with setup and indirect arguments for a couple of paragraphs before even mentioning what he's attacking, but he raises some excellent points once he actually gets going. This bit was witty: "The only crop which could cover such costs is high-grade cannabis. But a 30-storey hydroponic skunk tower would be quite hard to conceal."
- hugh3 16y ago
  What about opium? Maybe roses or saffron?
astine 16y ago
These ideas aren't new. I doubt that they are impossible but we haven't yet solved the technical problems that would make 'vertical farms' cost effective over regular farms. If farmland became expensive enough (really expensive,) I could see them seeming more viable. If these were to happen, my entirely uneducated guess would be that it would start with rooftop farming, and that extending to storied greenhouses at the tops of skyscrapers. Depending on your crops, these both don't need artificial light and could lead to solutions for other engineering problems such farming would involve.
- ars 16y ago
  No it wouldn't. The amount of usable farm space at the top of a skyscraper is so small it's a joke. You could feed 1 person for each skyscraper. And if farmland got expensive, exactly where would you get your energy to make light?
- ultrasaurus 16y ago
  I assume rooftop gardening is a completely different (and good) idea. There you have the sunlight already, just being reflected or absorbed as waste heat, it's simply a materials (weight) and cost or species issue. (also it's easier to design for one than retro-fit one on).
parfe 16y ago
Vertical farms are a crock because transport of crops is easy. Moving people is much harder. This is why economic centers are densely populated, but can still eat food shipped from 1000 miles away. There is no reason to spend millions to build vertically when you can buy cheap land and transport the products to the most profitable markets on demand.
- slapshot 16y ago
  This. People should be dense, farms should be sparse. Taking city land to grow crops is NOT carbon-efficient. The far more carbon-efficient method would be to use city land for more housing, and use suburbia for farms. Think of it this way: people commute both ways every day, but food commutes only once. I'm not even going to get into the idea that it's more carbon-efficient to grow bananas in South America and ship them to New York than it would be to heat and light a greenhouse in New York...
  - ajdecon 16y ago
    I agree with most of this post. But, a small correction: food only commutes in, but then waste commutes back out again. Unless you propose to build landfills in the city.
deleted 16y ago
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davars 16y ago
What if you covered existing skyscrapers with hydroponic trellises?
- cturner 16y ago
  Structural issues. Adds weight, in ways buildings aren't designed to take. Requires soil, and water in the soil, which is more weight. Water causes damage to building structure. Some plants will be impractical because they'll want to burrow into the structure. It's dangerous to collect the produce. There are insurance issues around stuff falling off onto people. It becomes difficult to clean or replace windows. Once plants are on it will be difficult to change damaged trellises. Change to fire risk profile of building. Security and insurance considerations from people climbing on the structures. Buildings not designed to supply water to the plants. Freehold issues from one person's plant growing into another's area. Allergies. Bees. Rats. Effect of plants growing into air-conditioning systems. Council complications over the change to the view profile of the building from sleek thing to tentacled thing.
  - stellar678 16y ago
    Tons of upvotes for a comment that says hydroponic trellises require soil? What's going on here? Hydroponics uses a fraction of the water that soil-based agriculture uses, and generally uses a very lightweight growing medium. (Vermiculite, hydroton balls, etc...)
  - jlgbecom 16y ago
    No soil.
philk 16y ago
I have to admit to being astonished that there was a need in the first place to explain that vertical farms are a crock[1]. The long list of articles from prominent news sources was actually rather sad. [1] The question how do you propose to grow over a thousand bucks worth of wheat each month in your tiny apartment? comes to mind.
- fleitz 16y ago
  If farmland is as scarce as Monbiot proposes then vertical farms could work. Most of the value of a $1000 a month apartment is in consumer surplus. Yes, a vertical farm in manhattan will probably never work, but one on some existing farm land in New Jersey probably will. Vertical farms currently won't work but any real scarcity in farmland will drive up prices until it becomes economical as the price of food is highly elastic.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Farmland isn't actually scarce, though. Right now the world has plenty of farmland for all its people, which is why food is so cheap and why we can afford to consume massively space-wasting crops. People may be starving in Africa, but it's for political reasons which have nothing to do with the amount of arable land there (significantly more than China or India which have similar populations to Africa). If the world's population ever does increase to the point where farmland is scarce, there's a lot of other things which become economical before skyscraper farms do... even if fusion energy comes along to solve the lighting problem. Switching to land-efficient crops is one thing. Irrigating the world's deserts is another. Even farms on barges out in the ocean make a lot more economic sense than skyscraper farms.
    - alex_stoddard 16y ago
      I am genuinely interested in references for available arable land in Africa vs China & India.
  - deleted 16y ago
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dflock 16y ago
Quite possibly. Here's a group who are actually building one now, in Chicago, and blogging about it: http://www.plantchicago.com/?page_id=2 http://www.plantchicago.com/?page_id=2 Be interesting to see how that works out.
ghshephard 16y ago
As important as the specific theme (Vertical Farms are a crock) was this line, "Magical thinking is a universal affliction. We see what we want to see, deny what we don’t. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, we burrow back into the darkness of our cherished beliefs. We will do almost anything – cheat, lie, stand for high office, go to war – to shut out challenges to the way we see the world." So many of the inane approaches to solving some of our economic and environmental challenges make absolutely no sense, have almost completely consensus that they violate laws of physics, and quite often result in Net-Negative results. "Local Growing", except as a hobby, is one of those insane ideas that seems to be underlying the silly "Vertical Farms" concept. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html) Ironically, if there is government funding, the fact that an idea makes no economic sense doesn't mean it won't be pursued. There may be peripheral advantages or developments in technology that take place, while we tilt at these windmills. So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we discover, do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover something else that we never even considered!
- hugh3 16y ago
  So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we discover, do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover something else that we never even considered! You're suggesting doing something that we already know makes no damn sense in the hopes that we might learn something useful in the process. This argument could be used to justify an awful lot of things which make no sense. This is, of course, just fine, as long as you're spending your own money on doing nonsensical things, and not mine. Good luck rustling up the hundred million dollars you'll need to build a skyscraper though.
  - Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
    you could build just a two story house, glass side walls, high enough ceilings, and see what happens on the first or second floor.
jlgbecom 16y ago
Vertical farms are kind of a crock, kind of. The idea of indoor agriculture is not, however (just look at Thanet Earth), and there is an advantage of building up a few floors and using grow lights to supplement the loss of passive lighting. A series of low-rise warehouses using hydroponics in the outer rings of a city makes a lot of sense. However, the architectural games people are playing with huge spires in the center of Manhattan, those are ridiculous, and always have been.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Can you identify a single instance of economic use of grow lights for agricultural (as opposed to pharmaceutical) purposes? Green Houses (Thanet Earth) are designed to trap the Sun's energy.
  - jlgbecom 16y ago
    Using grow lights 100% of the time? No, that's definitely not going to work, unless major gains in efficiency are made. But using led grow lights to supplement passive solar and elongate the grow cycle is what I'm referring to, and designing low-rise greenhouses to capture the sun's energy for the light hours. If you capture excess solar energy, store it, and use it at night, then the energy pull from the grid for night-time grow lights is reduced, and then it's an economic question of cost of energy versus sale potential. I'm not specifically thinking about staple crops (ie, wheat, rice, etc), but supplementary crops like tomatos, lettuce, cucumbers, etc. Mostly, what Thanet Earth is growing.
  - Someone 16y ago
    Go visit the Westland in the Netherlands at night, and you will be surprised at what you see. Assisting the sun with artificial lighting is nothing special.
- rwhitman 16y ago
  I had always thought that the skyscraper version of vertical farming was more of a fantasy technology. Everything real I've seen is focused on what you mention, low-rise warehouses with racks of hydroponics and skylights - making it essentially a robotic greenhouse. I don't see how this is outlandish
jdietrich 16y ago
Farmland isn't just a place to put some plants while they grow. A farm is a giant solar power facility, one that converts solar energy, carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrate. Monbiot doesn't stress the point enough - it's all about light. When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function as solar collectors. Going vertical doesn't increase the amount of light you can gather, so it doesn't increase the amount of food you can produce. Vertical farming is only remotely feasible if we see the cost of energy fall ten-thousand fold. That's only likely if we crack nuclear fusion. Of course, such an abundance of energy would render any worries about food production moot. Unfortunately, we appear to live in a world where supposedly educated adults are unfamiliar with such advanced scientific concepts as photosynthesis.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function as solar collectors. Well, it is a bit more complicated than that. A huge problem in agriculture is the depletion of soil. For example, over time intensively irrigated soil tends to become contaminated with excess salts which destroys its fertility, yet still leaves it as flat, well-drained, and sunny as ever. I completely agree, however, that the first-order consideration in growing plants is the availability of light.
  - DennisP 16y ago
    Aquaponics actually gets you pretty close to a closed-cycle ecosystem. I read the other day about a family of four which grows all its food from an old in-ground swimming pool in their back yard. They put a greenhouse covering over it, filled a couple little ponds inside with tilapia, added vegetables and chickens. After one year they're extracting all the veggies, fish, and eggs they can eat.
    - dalke 16y ago
      Potatoes give about 6 million food calories per acre. (Wheat and most other plants yield less.) Assuming 8,000 calories per day, the family would need at least 1/2 an acre to survive. An Olympic-sized pool is 0.3 acres, so it's a bit beyond the edge of possible. I doubt their pool was that large, and since most other vegetables, to say nothing of fish and chickens, are less efficient food sources, I suspect they get a good fraction of their calories from elsewhere. To check myself, this seems like a good thread: http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11 http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=... . The strongest advocates for intensive and efficient agriculture say "less than half an acre (~ 0.2 hectares) can support a family of four" and "a vegan diet can meet calorie and protein needs from just 300 square metres using mainly potatoes. A more varied diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, grains and legumes would take about 700 square metres." Say it's 2500 square meters for a family of 4 = 0.6 acres. So, no, I don't think they get most of their food from the area of their backyard pool.
orblivion 16y ago
http://www.plantchicago.com/ http://www.plantchicago.com/ This guy sees your critique on expensive real estate, and uses an abandoned factory. Sees your argument about nutrients not just appearing, and uses aquaponics. Lighting... that I don't know. I'm curious to see how it goes.
chadmalik 16y ago
Maybe vertical farms are a crock but at least people are starting to realize that local food production is a better idea than shipping factory farm food thousands of miles. Eating local, seasonal food is how it has been done for 99.99% of human history. We waste hydrocarbons in a criminal fashion and our ancestors will absolutely hate our guts for it. Why should we burn up billions of years of oil inside of ~200 years just so that we can eat strawberries in NYC during winter? It is INSANE. The decision-making process we use is only what will make money in the short term. The issue of cost externalization by companies is well documented by economists. Just because it appears "cheap" to use factory farm methods, N-P-K based fertilizers, etc., doesn't mean the long term effects already showing up are not going to severely impact the food chain inside of our lifetimes. Ultimately though agriculture itself is a non-sustainable process. That is why the fertile crescent, cradle of civilization, is now a desert. We should start creating food forests, this is a very promising sustainable way to feed people and all of the unemployment we experience can be solved by transitioning a larger % of our population to food production as a job, just like our grandparents used to do it. The desertification caused by agriculture and our increasingly desperate use of technology to cover up the fundamental flaws in how we feed ourselves is increasing rapidly. The water table in many places around the planet is being depleted faster than it can restore itself. These issues are NOT going away and they are far more important than coupons for cupcakes and the like.
- mattmcknight 16y ago
  The local food movement is quite silly. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/ 99% of human history pretty much sucked. http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-life-o.html http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-life-o.h...
  - chadmalik 16y ago
    Saying "it sucked" doesn't address ANY of the points I made. Wake me up when you can make a serious rebuttal.
    - 16y ago
eogas 16y ago
This is what I hate about the times we live in. When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it. In other words, if some guy thinks a vertical farm would be a good idea and a possible solution to a problem, then why the hell doesn't he just, you know, make a vertical farm and see what happens? If it works, then that's fuckin' awesome, we've got vertical farms! If it doesn't work, well then hey, no biggie. Let's try something else. Of course some problems have very expensive solutions that are not feasible to just "try out", but I don't think it would cost a ton to make a small scale version of a vertical farm. Even if it was only like 10ft by 10ft and as tall as a two story house, you have to start somewhere. But I guess we'd rather just talk about the possibility, and never take it any farther than that.
- hugh3 16y ago
  When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it. That's not really true. An awful lot of the time, someone comes up with a solution to a problem, tries it, and it works. In cases like this, though, it never gets beyond the discussion stage because the idea is a complete useless crock of shit and the major flaws in it are so obvious that a nine-year-old (or even George Monbiot) can see right through it. And yet the discussion goes on, because the guy who has the idea (and a number of hangers on) is religiously wedded to it refuses to acknowledge that "wait, actually, yes, this makes no sense on the grounds of physics or economics", so I suspect we'll continue to see this idea pop up from time to time. In conclusion, sane and workable ideas get implemented. Stupid unworkable ideas with horrendous flaws get endlessly discussed.
- lsc 16y ago
  well, if the guy wants to put up his own money to build a vertical farm, I don't think anyone is going to stop him. The problem is that the guy is asking other people to fund his idea, so it makes sense for other people, who know more about the subject, to weigh in and point out ways in which it is a good or bad idea.
nitrogen 16y ago
What about using vertical farms just for semi-exotic plants that fetch a higher price? Instead of expecting to feed a city of 15 million on skyscraper farms, just grow things that have to be 100% fresh in order to be tasty, and sell them to upscale restaurants and gourmet markets.
Misha_B 16y ago
I've seen this nonsense for a few years now in all kinds Architectural publications. One such example: http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/research/181pigcity http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/research/181pigcity. Unfortunately, many architects and architecture students would buy any green (or otherwise hyped) BS thrown at them without questioning it. I think the most prohibitive aspect of the "vertical farming" is the enormous cost (in materials, labor and energy) of building highrises or even buildings of more moderate heights, compared to the cost of growing any legal kind of crop on farmland and shipping it. Structure will have to be significantlly more massive to carry the loads of some soil and water. And not a word about competing land uses in Manhattan... But let's assume we can afford to ship the crop 10 or 30 miles into the city from a place with cheaper land, rather than a 1000 from far far away. Otherwise, I actually believe the problem of lighting is solvable - for crops that require perhaps 3-10 times as little light as available in an open field on a certain location. Light can penetrate from the sides of the building. A structure shallow ebough compared to the floor height might suffice, say 10-15 meters for a floor 3 meters high. Close to the equator sunlight is abundant so even having less light by an order of magnitude is probably enough for some crops. Further away from the equator it's trickier: the sun is much lower in the south and so more direct sunlight is gained so perhaps only two thirds of it are lost compared to an open field. But then, the structure casts very long shadows which may prevent the land "behind" it from being used for farming (vertical or otherwise).
Jsw32 16y ago
It seems that many people here are making conjecture based upon little research. Vertical farms are very much possible and actually relatively efficient . The EPA has been funding small scale pilot farms to test the concept. The engineering hurdles which people are describing have mostly been dealt with. Food from these farms may cost more but it is fresh, local and organic instead of ethelyne ripened and full of pesticides. Take a walk to whole foods and you'll see that people are willing to pay for that.

74 points by jlangenauer 16y ago

Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly investigate it and find some cool tech. It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get light?" is a killer question.

quantumhobbit 16y ago
I always assumed that the light would be artificial. And that they were relying on hypothetical cheap energy of the kind that reliable fusion would provide. This may be possible a hundred years from now but surely not in today's energy economy.
- mhd 16y ago
  But once you've got reasonably cheap and plentiful energy, what's the big incentive for growing locally. If trucking it from Kansas to NYC doesn't pollute as much, reasons for building those towers diminish somewhat. Of course, it's slightly different if you've got plentiful energy, but no good way to transmit/store it. Lots of solar panels all over the city to power its greenhouses. Or windmills in Chicago.
1053r 16y ago
Production prices for solar energy are now below $0.80 / watt (http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Earnings-Call-Transcript/36717/ http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Ear...), although skyrocketing demand has caused wholesale prices to remain much higher. It seems likely that we may in the next 10 years be in a place where we can turn sunlight into electricity, and then electricity into the exact wavelengths of light used in photosynthesis more efficiently than allowing the plants to sit in the sun. If this is the case, than we may be able to grow crops more efficiently indoors than out. But we will be replacing acres of crops with acres of solar panels. And it's unclear to me why we would want these buildings to be skyscrapers, which are much more expensive per square foot than large warehouses in the middle of nowhere.
- ars 16y ago
  How in the world did you get +8 mod on this? That's utter nonsense! You can only get as much light as you have surface area - so now instead of fields of crops, you have fields of solar collectors! Did you think there was some magical light multiplier device that could give you more output light than you started with? Plants already use the best parts of the visible spectrum to collect light. The small amounts of infra-red you might barely be able to collect and frequency up-convert are not worthwhile - especially since you'd need to throw away all the energy from the higher frequencies in order to get it. Solar cells are terrible as far as efficiency is concerned - and not because of engineering, because that's simply how they work. (Unless you want a multijunction solar cell but those are very very expensive.) And for engineering challenges there simply doesn't exist in the world enough rare earth elements to make enough solar cells for everyone - and that's just for regular electrical usage, forget about growing plants. We do have enough silicon, but silicon based solar cells have poor efficiency.
  - DougWebb 16y ago
    I think the idea here is that plants need a narrow set of frequencies and throw the rest away. If solar cells could capture the frequencies plants don't use, convert them to energy, then convert the energy to frequencies plants like, you've increased the efficency of your light-collection area. You'll also have a garden full of black plants, which is both creepy and cool.
    - ars 16y ago
      Solar cells work the same way: they capture a narrow frequency, and throw the rest away. More accurately, below the frequency cutoff they ignore the light, above the cutoff any, extra energy is wasted as heat. And plants don't need a narrow frequency anyway.
      - DougWebb 16y ago
        They don't seem to be using the green light, at least.

hugh3 16y ago

While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is. A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63 acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally, gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty sure that one is much, much, much larger than the other.

jameskilton 16y ago
And with that number in mind, you also see another problem with vertical farms: pure space availability. Modern farms are hundreds and even thousands of acres to grow enough food to feed the masses we have today. You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm. Frankly hydrogen vehicles are more feasible than this, but only barely.
- alabut 16y ago
  "You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm." So what if it didn't replace one major farm and just a small local one? And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate them? I'm surprised I haven't seen the ideas brought together before, it seems more pragmatic than a dedicated building just for the farm and there's a growing movement to eat healthier at work. We order from FarmFresh at my offices, which supplies us with fruit and veggies from a local family-owned farm and we've been loving the results.
  - protomyth 16y ago
    Alternating floors would be kinda harsh on the environmental systems of a modern building (one problem: humidity). The other problem is economic. The builder will make more money on more office space than farming. Also, a lot of farmers really don't want to live in skyscraper land.
  - 16y ago

alabut 16y ago

The writer rambles on with setup and indirect arguments for a couple of paragraphs before even mentioning what he's attacking, but he raises some excellent points once he actually gets going. This bit was witty: "The only crop which could cover such costs is high-grade cannabis. But a 30-storey hydroponic skunk tower would be quite hard to conceal."

hugh3 16y ago
What about opium? Maybe roses or saffron?

astine 16y ago

These ideas aren't new. I doubt that they are impossible but we haven't yet solved the technical problems that would make 'vertical farms' cost effective over regular farms. If farmland became expensive enough (really expensive,) I could see them seeming more viable. If these were to happen, my entirely uneducated guess would be that it would start with rooftop farming, and that extending to storied greenhouses at the tops of skyscrapers. Depending on your crops, these both don't need artificial light and could lead to solutions for other engineering problems such farming would involve.

ars 16y ago
No it wouldn't. The amount of usable farm space at the top of a skyscraper is so small it's a joke. You could feed 1 person for each skyscraper. And if farmland got expensive, exactly where would you get your energy to make light?
ultrasaurus 16y ago
I assume rooftop gardening is a completely different (and good) idea. There you have the sunlight already, just being reflected or absorbed as waste heat, it's simply a materials (weight) and cost or species issue. (also it's easier to design for one than retro-fit one on).

parfe 16y ago

Vertical farms are a crock because transport of crops is easy. Moving people is much harder. This is why economic centers are densely populated, but can still eat food shipped from 1000 miles away. There is no reason to spend millions to build vertically when you can buy cheap land and transport the products to the most profitable markets on demand.

slapshot 16y ago
This. People should be dense, farms should be sparse. Taking city land to grow crops is NOT carbon-efficient. The far more carbon-efficient method would be to use city land for more housing, and use suburbia for farms. Think of it this way: people commute both ways every day, but food commutes only once. I'm not even going to get into the idea that it's more carbon-efficient to grow bananas in South America and ship them to New York than it would be to heat and light a greenhouse in New York...
- ajdecon 16y ago
  I agree with most of this post. But, a small correction: food only commutes in, but then waste commutes back out again. Unless you propose to build landfills in the city.

deleted 16y ago

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davars 16y ago

What if you covered existing skyscrapers with hydroponic trellises?

cturner 16y ago
Structural issues. Adds weight, in ways buildings aren't designed to take. Requires soil, and water in the soil, which is more weight. Water causes damage to building structure. Some plants will be impractical because they'll want to burrow into the structure. It's dangerous to collect the produce. There are insurance issues around stuff falling off onto people. It becomes difficult to clean or replace windows. Once plants are on it will be difficult to change damaged trellises. Change to fire risk profile of building. Security and insurance considerations from people climbing on the structures. Buildings not designed to supply water to the plants. Freehold issues from one person's plant growing into another's area. Allergies. Bees. Rats. Effect of plants growing into air-conditioning systems. Council complications over the change to the view profile of the building from sleek thing to tentacled thing.
- stellar678 16y ago
  Tons of upvotes for a comment that says hydroponic trellises require soil? What's going on here? Hydroponics uses a fraction of the water that soil-based agriculture uses, and generally uses a very lightweight growing medium. (Vermiculite, hydroton balls, etc...)
- jlgbecom 16y ago
  No soil.

philk 16y ago

I have to admit to being astonished that there was a need in the first place to explain that vertical farms are a crock[1]. The long list of articles from prominent news sources was actually rather sad. [1] The question how do you propose to grow over a thousand bucks worth of wheat each month in your tiny apartment? comes to mind.

fleitz 16y ago
If farmland is as scarce as Monbiot proposes then vertical farms could work. Most of the value of a $1000 a month apartment is in consumer surplus. Yes, a vertical farm in manhattan will probably never work, but one on some existing farm land in New Jersey probably will. Vertical farms currently won't work but any real scarcity in farmland will drive up prices until it becomes economical as the price of food is highly elastic.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Farmland isn't actually scarce, though. Right now the world has plenty of farmland for all its people, which is why food is so cheap and why we can afford to consume massively space-wasting crops. People may be starving in Africa, but it's for political reasons which have nothing to do with the amount of arable land there (significantly more than China or India which have similar populations to Africa). If the world's population ever does increase to the point where farmland is scarce, there's a lot of other things which become economical before skyscraper farms do... even if fusion energy comes along to solve the lighting problem. Switching to land-efficient crops is one thing. Irrigating the world's deserts is another. Even farms on barges out in the ocean make a lot more economic sense than skyscraper farms.
  - alex_stoddard 16y ago
    I am genuinely interested in references for available arable land in Africa vs China & India.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

dflock 16y ago

Quite possibly. Here's a group who are actually building one now, in Chicago, and blogging about it: http://www.plantchicago.com/?page_id=2 http://www.plantchicago.com/?page_id=2 Be interesting to see how that works out.

ghshephard 16y ago

As important as the specific theme (Vertical Farms are a crock) was this line, "Magical thinking is a universal affliction. We see what we want to see, deny what we don’t. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, we burrow back into the darkness of our cherished beliefs. We will do almost anything – cheat, lie, stand for high office, go to war – to shut out challenges to the way we see the world." So many of the inane approaches to solving some of our economic and environmental challenges make absolutely no sense, have almost completely consensus that they violate laws of physics, and quite often result in Net-Negative results. "Local Growing", except as a hobby, is one of those insane ideas that seems to be underlying the silly "Vertical Farms" concept. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html) Ironically, if there is government funding, the fact that an idea makes no economic sense doesn't mean it won't be pursued. There may be peripheral advantages or developments in technology that take place, while we tilt at these windmills. So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we discover, do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover something else that we never even considered!

hugh3 16y ago
So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we discover, do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover something else that we never even considered! You're suggesting doing something that we already know makes no damn sense in the hopes that we might learn something useful in the process. This argument could be used to justify an awful lot of things which make no sense. This is, of course, just fine, as long as you're spending your own money on doing nonsensical things, and not mine. Good luck rustling up the hundred million dollars you'll need to build a skyscraper though.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
  you could build just a two story house, glass side walls, high enough ceilings, and see what happens on the first or second floor.

jlgbecom 16y ago

Vertical farms are kind of a crock, kind of. The idea of indoor agriculture is not, however (just look at Thanet Earth), and there is an advantage of building up a few floors and using grow lights to supplement the loss of passive lighting. A series of low-rise warehouses using hydroponics in the outer rings of a city makes a lot of sense. However, the architectural games people are playing with huge spires in the center of Manhattan, those are ridiculous, and always have been.

ghshephard 16y ago
Can you identify a single instance of economic use of grow lights for agricultural (as opposed to pharmaceutical) purposes? Green Houses (Thanet Earth) are designed to trap the Sun's energy.
- jlgbecom 16y ago
  Using grow lights 100% of the time? No, that's definitely not going to work, unless major gains in efficiency are made. But using led grow lights to supplement passive solar and elongate the grow cycle is what I'm referring to, and designing low-rise greenhouses to capture the sun's energy for the light hours. If you capture excess solar energy, store it, and use it at night, then the energy pull from the grid for night-time grow lights is reduced, and then it's an economic question of cost of energy versus sale potential. I'm not specifically thinking about staple crops (ie, wheat, rice, etc), but supplementary crops like tomatos, lettuce, cucumbers, etc. Mostly, what Thanet Earth is growing.
- Someone 16y ago
  Go visit the Westland in the Netherlands at night, and you will be surprised at what you see. Assisting the sun with artificial lighting is nothing special.
rwhitman 16y ago
I had always thought that the skyscraper version of vertical farming was more of a fantasy technology. Everything real I've seen is focused on what you mention, low-rise warehouses with racks of hydroponics and skylights - making it essentially a robotic greenhouse. I don't see how this is outlandish

jdietrich 16y ago

Farmland isn't just a place to put some plants while they grow. A farm is a giant solar power facility, one that converts solar energy, carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrate. Monbiot doesn't stress the point enough - it's all about light. When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function as solar collectors. Going vertical doesn't increase the amount of light you can gather, so it doesn't increase the amount of food you can produce. Vertical farming is only remotely feasible if we see the cost of energy fall ten-thousand fold. That's only likely if we crack nuclear fusion. Of course, such an abundance of energy would render any worries about food production moot. Unfortunately, we appear to live in a world where supposedly educated adults are unfamiliar with such advanced scientific concepts as photosynthesis.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function as solar collectors. Well, it is a bit more complicated than that. A huge problem in agriculture is the depletion of soil. For example, over time intensively irrigated soil tends to become contaminated with excess salts which destroys its fertility, yet still leaves it as flat, well-drained, and sunny as ever. I completely agree, however, that the first-order consideration in growing plants is the availability of light.
- DennisP 16y ago
  Aquaponics actually gets you pretty close to a closed-cycle ecosystem. I read the other day about a family of four which grows all its food from an old in-ground swimming pool in their back yard. They put a greenhouse covering over it, filled a couple little ponds inside with tilapia, added vegetables and chickens. After one year they're extracting all the veggies, fish, and eggs they can eat.
  - dalke 16y ago
    Potatoes give about 6 million food calories per acre. (Wheat and most other plants yield less.) Assuming 8,000 calories per day, the family would need at least 1/2 an acre to survive. An Olympic-sized pool is 0.3 acres, so it's a bit beyond the edge of possible. I doubt their pool was that large, and since most other vegetables, to say nothing of fish and chickens, are less efficient food sources, I suspect they get a good fraction of their calories from elsewhere. To check myself, this seems like a good thread: http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11 http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=... . The strongest advocates for intensive and efficient agriculture say "less than half an acre (~ 0.2 hectares) can support a family of four" and "a vegan diet can meet calorie and protein needs from just 300 square metres using mainly potatoes. A more varied diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, grains and legumes would take about 700 square metres." Say it's 2500 square meters for a family of 4 = 0.6 acres. So, no, I don't think they get most of their food from the area of their backyard pool.

orblivion 16y ago

http://www.plantchicago.com/ http://www.plantchicago.com/ This guy sees your critique on expensive real estate, and uses an abandoned factory. Sees your argument about nutrients not just appearing, and uses aquaponics. Lighting... that I don't know. I'm curious to see how it goes.

chadmalik 16y ago

Maybe vertical farms are a crock but at least people are starting to realize that local food production is a better idea than shipping factory farm food thousands of miles. Eating local, seasonal food is how it has been done for 99.99% of human history. We waste hydrocarbons in a criminal fashion and our ancestors will absolutely hate our guts for it. Why should we burn up billions of years of oil inside of ~200 years just so that we can eat strawberries in NYC during winter? It is INSANE. The decision-making process we use is only what will make money in the short term. The issue of cost externalization by companies is well documented by economists. Just because it appears "cheap" to use factory farm methods, N-P-K based fertilizers, etc., doesn't mean the long term effects already showing up are not going to severely impact the food chain inside of our lifetimes. Ultimately though agriculture itself is a non-sustainable process. That is why the fertile crescent, cradle of civilization, is now a desert. We should start creating food forests, this is a very promising sustainable way to feed people and all of the unemployment we experience can be solved by transitioning a larger % of our population to food production as a job, just like our grandparents used to do it. The desertification caused by agriculture and our increasingly desperate use of technology to cover up the fundamental flaws in how we feed ourselves is increasing rapidly. The water table in many places around the planet is being depleted faster than it can restore itself. These issues are NOT going away and they are far more important than coupons for cupcakes and the like.

mattmcknight 16y ago
The local food movement is quite silly. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/ 99% of human history pretty much sucked. http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-life-o.html http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-life-o.h...
- chadmalik 16y ago
  Saying "it sucked" doesn't address ANY of the points I made. Wake me up when you can make a serious rebuttal.
  - 16y ago

eogas 16y ago

This is what I hate about the times we live in. When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it. In other words, if some guy thinks a vertical farm would be a good idea and a possible solution to a problem, then why the hell doesn't he just, you know, make a vertical farm and see what happens? If it works, then that's fuckin' awesome, we've got vertical farms! If it doesn't work, well then hey, no biggie. Let's try something else. Of course some problems have very expensive solutions that are not feasible to just "try out", but I don't think it would cost a ton to make a small scale version of a vertical farm. Even if it was only like 10ft by 10ft and as tall as a two story house, you have to start somewhere. But I guess we'd rather just talk about the possibility, and never take it any farther than that.

hugh3 16y ago
When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it. That's not really true. An awful lot of the time, someone comes up with a solution to a problem, tries it, and it works. In cases like this, though, it never gets beyond the discussion stage because the idea is a complete useless crock of shit and the major flaws in it are so obvious that a nine-year-old (or even George Monbiot) can see right through it. And yet the discussion goes on, because the guy who has the idea (and a number of hangers on) is religiously wedded to it refuses to acknowledge that "wait, actually, yes, this makes no sense on the grounds of physics or economics", so I suspect we'll continue to see this idea pop up from time to time. In conclusion, sane and workable ideas get implemented. Stupid unworkable ideas with horrendous flaws get endlessly discussed.
lsc 16y ago
well, if the guy wants to put up his own money to build a vertical farm, I don't think anyone is going to stop him. The problem is that the guy is asking other people to fund his idea, so it makes sense for other people, who know more about the subject, to weigh in and point out ways in which it is a good or bad idea.

nitrogen 16y ago

What about using vertical farms just for semi-exotic plants that fetch a higher price? Instead of expecting to feed a city of 15 million on skyscraper farms, just grow things that have to be 100% fresh in order to be tasty, and sell them to upscale restaurants and gourmet markets.

Misha_B 16y ago

I've seen this nonsense for a few years now in all kinds Architectural publications. One such example: http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/research/181pigcity http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/research/181pigcity. Unfortunately, many architects and architecture students would buy any green (or otherwise hyped) BS thrown at them without questioning it. I think the most prohibitive aspect of the "vertical farming" is the enormous cost (in materials, labor and energy) of building highrises or even buildings of more moderate heights, compared to the cost of growing any legal kind of crop on farmland and shipping it. Structure will have to be significantlly more massive to carry the loads of some soil and water. And not a word about competing land uses in Manhattan... But let's assume we can afford to ship the crop 10 or 30 miles into the city from a place with cheaper land, rather than a 1000 from far far away. Otherwise, I actually believe the problem of lighting is solvable - for crops that require perhaps 3-10 times as little light as available in an open field on a certain location. Light can penetrate from the sides of the building. A structure shallow ebough compared to the floor height might suffice, say 10-15 meters for a floor 3 meters high. Close to the equator sunlight is abundant so even having less light by an order of magnitude is probably enough for some crops. Further away from the equator it's trickier: the sun is much lower in the south and so more direct sunlight is gained so perhaps only two thirds of it are lost compared to an open field. But then, the structure casts very long shadows which may prevent the land "behind" it from being used for farming (vertical or otherwise).

Jsw32 16y ago

It seems that many people here are making conjecture based upon little research. Vertical farms are very much possible and actually relatively efficient . The EPA has been funding small scale pilot farms to test the concept. The engineering hurdles which people are describing have mostly been dealt with. Food from these farms may cost more but it is fresh, local and organic instead of ethelyne ripened and full of pesticides. Take a walk to whole foods and you'll see that people are willing to pay for that.