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Author Topic: Vertical Farming  (Read 5493 times)

Ochita

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #45 on: March 21, 2011, 08:35:44 pm »

Corusant ahoy!
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DJ

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #46 on: March 21, 2011, 08:53:11 pm »

You only get so much sunlight per square meter.
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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #47 on: March 21, 2011, 08:59:01 pm »

You only get so much sunlight per square meter.

Thats easy, we will just build a second sun.
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Lagslayer

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #48 on: March 21, 2011, 09:04:49 pm »

This is the future (how soon is difficult to tell). Sooner if we don't start using plant steroids to make them grow faster.

Akura

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #49 on: March 21, 2011, 10:25:00 pm »

This is the future (how soon is difficult to tell). Sooner if we don't start using plant steroids to make them grow faster.
Don't we do that already?


Also, what about aquaculture? Technically that's vertical, since you can grow stuff at different depths. Mostly algae, but also raise fish as well.
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Jopax

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #50 on: March 22, 2011, 04:49:00 am »

Did anyone think of making floating farms?
Since skyscrapers don't seem like a great idea because it's rather hard to get light to anywhere but the top floor.
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GlyphGryph

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #51 on: March 22, 2011, 09:43:37 am »

Instead of building farms up, why don't we just build all our normal structures underground instead?

Then we can have a bunch of farmland or parks or whatever!

And we are DF fans, after all, right?
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Levi

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #52 on: March 22, 2011, 02:46:02 pm »

Instead of building farms up, why don't we just build all our normal structures underground instead?

Then we can have a bunch of farmland or parks or whatever!

And we are DF fans, after all, right?

I'd love this, but I think in most places its really expensive to dig big holes.
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AntiAntiMatter

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #53 on: March 22, 2011, 02:48:57 pm »

Instead of building farms up, why don't we just build all our normal structures underground instead?

Then we can have a bunch of farmland or parks or whatever!

And we are DF fans, after all, right?
That's neat, but wildly impractical.
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Nikov

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #54 on: March 22, 2011, 06:04:46 pm »

A former coal mine (or was it a limestone quarry) around here is now an underground paintball arena. Additionally China has some sprawling urban tunnel complexes built during the cold war.
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nenjin

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #55 on: March 22, 2011, 06:52:42 pm »

The Cappodocians dug underground cities that covered a few square miles back in ye olden times, out in the middle of a desert. People are still living there today.
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Soadreqm

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #56 on: March 22, 2011, 07:42:25 pm »

Finland was sanded clean by a glacier some twenty thousand years ago, leaving it with shallow bedrock made of sturdy granite. Helsinki has quite a bit of underground development, with more planned. I didn't even know about it until I saw this video here. Also found someone's blog post about it while trying to find the video.

Tunnels are so cool.
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Flare

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #57 on: March 22, 2011, 08:08:50 pm »

http://www.verticalfarm.com/more

Is it even feasible in terms of soil availability, and all the nutrients you need in the soil to be able to produce crops? As for putting farms in buildings, the main reason they're outside is because doing it without walls and a roof makes it dirt cheap. Unless people can put up with a major spike in staple foods it's not economically viable.

An average western family needs around 5000 square feet (I have the source if someone wants it) of garden to feed themselves solely on vegetables all year round. You could decrease this amount of space considerably with advanced but highly time intensive agricultural techniques, but the land needed to feed a small neighborhood is still beyond the scope of some of the largest buildings in most cities.

Even as food prices as they are, it's unlikely that this would be even feasible in terms of how costly making a multi-level automated building can be. The difference of maintenance costs between a standard outdoor farm and one that needs to be supported within a building is going to be significant. I find one of the boasts in the web sit: "VF creates sustainable environments for urban centers " to be exceedingly expensive to the tasks they are trying to perform. I don't think they have considered just how expensive land in urban centres are, and even land in towns compared to the sparsely populated country side. The amount of room you need, and the amount of buildings required to feed the a city entirely would likely take up a vast portion of the city itself. Then we have to consider that the website states that this should be a viable alternative when 80% of the earth's population is living in the cities themselves, can you imagine the property taxes alone, let alone the competition for the land inside of these cities.
Green houses do exist, and their yield per feet of ground is more than the average farm, but not astronomically more that on can take up the production of two or more normal farms. They're also usually one level due to the costs of building a multistory buildings. They're also built in the country side or away from agricultural centres due to the cost of land there.

You'd probably have more success relying on the techniques being developed right now, bioengineered crops will likely play a big role in the future. Improvement of aquaculture and already existing farming facilities would likely be a much cheaper and more feasible choice rather than devoting entire multistory buildings to this purpose. There are vast fields of parks that can be converted to farmland if need be. A great deal of the nations on this earth are also surrounded by vast coastlines, and though not every area is going to be suitable to aquaculture, there is a great deal of area that can be exploited here.
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justinlee999

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #58 on: March 22, 2011, 09:34:07 pm »

I've thought of this many years ago, good  to see that they've finally put this into action
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Soadreqm

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Re: Vertical Farming
« Reply #59 on: March 22, 2011, 09:57:22 pm »

Is it even feasible in terms of soil availability, and all the nutrients you need in the soil to be able to produce crops?

Hydroponic farming is definitely possible, and I don't think its even all that difficult. You can grow stuff in a tank if you feel like it. There's usually not much of a point, since growing it on the ground is so much cheaper, but if you have sunlight and can front the cost of the growing container and the waterworks, soil isn't going to be a huge issue.

As for the rest of your post, yeah, it certainly doesn't sound all that great compared to old-fashioned outdoor farming. Maybe the point is more making the most of urban development and slapping a little greenhouse on every building? I really don't know. Maybe it could be cost-effective if you built a whole city with food production in mind. I really don't see how it could replace outdoor farming, though.

Why wouldn't outdoor farming be sustainable, anyway? Don't they have, like, crop rotation and shit? I don't really know much about farming, but I haven't really heard of any blasted wastelands that have both sunlight and water but don't grow anything because the soil's gone bad. Does that really happen?
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