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> The future will be something like, or at least based on, vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems) automated farms. nope. because vertical
by KaiserPro 4y ago
> The future will be something like, or at least based on, vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems) automated farms.
nope.
because vertical farms require a fucktonne of power and infrastructure. Moreover they are only really useful for certain types of crops (ie salad)
Your stables (rice, cereals and root crops) don't work well in vertical farms.
What you're actually trying to make is a greenhouse, and the dutch have solved that pretty much already (apart from the massive monoculture bit)
I suspect the future is actually in dense mixed crop fields. If tilling, cropping and tending can be automated then making sure a plant grows in it's allotted space become simple and cheap. It reduces the risk of total crop wipeout, can keep a field productive all year, and if done properly can improve soil quality.
- z9znz 4y agoIf we want to talk about ideal, then the "food forest" concept is about as ideal as it gets. Once built, assuming your local climate doesn't shift radically (difficult assumption now), you can get a lot of edible material out of a relatively small space with remarkably little human intervention. Ideally we would work to develop food forests everywhere in and around our population centers. However, that's much harder for a multinational company to make money doing, so it's not going to happen. Likewise, with city land becoming increasingly expensive, reverting blocks or spaces to be used to develop food forests is not likely. Maybe our best bet is to learn how to eat money.