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Whereas the number of people living in cities worldwide is continually growing, the already scarce area used for growing food and resources has been steadily shrinking.
This disparity, however, can be partly bridged by urban farming, the practice of growing food in cities and urban areas. Fraunhofer IAO has published a study investigating how cities could benefit from locally grown food and resources, looking at indoor plant and microalgae cultivation.
Safeguarding the long-term supply of food and resources to urban areas is a growing challenge – particularly in densely populated cities with limited access to surrounding agricultural land. Furthermore, intensive farming practices and heavy use of chemicals are putting increasing pressure on natural resources and land.
Algae farming is tough sledding.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @03:05AM (2 children)
Land and labor cost a lot more in urban areas. Guess what farming needs a lot of?
Before you can start to think about growing urban food, you need construction costs to drop a lot, so you can afford to devote lots of indoor area to farming. Then you need an enormous amount of power, so you can afford artificial lights for all those plants. And you also need all the industry that surrounds agriculture, canning and meat packing and all that. None of this particularly benefits from being in a city.
Once you have basically unlimited space and basically unlimited power, plus probably a lot of robots to do the menial parts, you can start thinking about growing food in cities. When you have this, you have an arcology, a more or less self-contained building or set of buildings. Which, if you think about it, is really a good way to practice living in space. You can practice everything without having to actually do the hard things about going to space.
Since buildings are mostly limited by how quickly people and things can get in and out of them, arcologies have more uses than just practice for space. Those gigantic towers you see in sci-fi probably have some elements of this even if they weren't designed for it.
But the people who propose this sort of nonsense are almost never thinking about it in useful terms. Their thought process usually just amounts to "I want to live in a city, and I like to look down on everyone who isn't exactly like me, but I also need food, so I need some way to pretend that farmers would be better if they were more like me."
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday September 06 2018, @04:48AM
Look mate, it's Europe.
A strange land, where the "peasants" have PhD-es in applied agriculture, no matter if they are working outdoor, in the glasshouse or in indoor labs, with little differences in wages between urban or countryside.
(I'm almost not joking)
If there's not much of a difference between the prices in the city and at "countryside", the level of cost is irrelevant.
Zoom in [google.com] Do you see many plots over 2-3 acres? This will tell you the "rural" land is expensive, the people can afford the ownership of only small plots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by r_a_trip on Thursday September 06 2018, @10:33AM
You are forgetting that indoor farms are stacked. One floor can house multiple layers of produce. With LED lighting, the power consumption goes down considerably in comparison to incandescent. Also, plants do not require the same heating as humans. This brings further savings. Combine that with minimal contaminants on the produce, far less need for pesticides and no need for soil and significantly less water than field agricultulture and it might be that it brings equal profit with less intensive methods.