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posted by janrinok on Friday August 07 2015, @03:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the going-up dept.

Vertical farms have appeared in the news as concepts over the last couple years. Now, one is to be built:

AeroFarms, an urban agricultural company, has big plans to turn a defunct steel mill into a 70,000 square foot vertical farm in Newark, New Jersey. The facility is projected to cost $39 million USD and will provide greens and other produce to local New York and New Jersey communities. According to the builders, it will be the largest indoor vertical farm in the world.

Vertical farms, like other types of urban farming, aim to provide fresh produce to city dwellers. They cut down on the energy demands of shipping food from the countryside to city markets, while at the same time offering an alternative to clearing ever more wilderness in the name of growing food. Vertical farms also have the potential to produce food year-round and can be more efficient in their use of water and fertilizer.

It will be interesting to see how they manage electricity costs. Can any Soylentils who've worked with hydroponics share their experiences?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @04:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @04:43PM (#219626)

    Summary claims, "They cut down on the energy demands of shipping food from the countryside to city markets."

    But, electricity for indoor growing lights will dwarf this "savings" by multiple orders of magnitude.

    One of the pot grower/retailer operations in Colorado said they can't use traditional banking since pot is illegal federally, so banks won't touch them. So, they make their power bill payments in person with cash. Their power company will only accept $5,000 in cash, so they make several of these payments per month. The little Colorado grow operation is *tiny* compared to what these folks are proposing. This is a terrible idea, unless passively lit via clear glazing. The carbon footprint of this New Jersey operation is almost certainly greater than that of the original steel mill.

    Raze the factory and put up traditional green houses at this location near the city, and you will have something.

  • (Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday August 07 2015, @05:20PM

    by gnuman (5013) on Friday August 07 2015, @05:20PM (#219635)

    The carbon footprint of this New Jersey operation is almost certainly greater than that of the original steel mill.

    No, that is completely wrong. Steel mills are not exactly low energy users.

    Keep in mind that vertical farming makes sense economically in many jurisdictions and it is happening already (for years!). How do you get millions of salads grown every day and delivered fresh? Greenhouses are actually much more expensive than vertical farming in this regard because of extra energy costs, especially in winter. Vertical farms are more energy efficient than current solutions for some crops.

    As for carbon footprint, there is nothing preventing vertical farms from operating at low light levels overnight. This allows them to be more efficient users of solar generated power. This cannot be said for greenhouses which use more energy overnight than during the day.

    Vertical farming is the future of greenhouses, especially in densely populated markets and colder climates.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @06:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @06:32PM (#219652)

      Strawman. Greenhouses do not need to operate in the winter. They serve to extend the growing season, but not necessarily make it year round. Also, they can be (and are) passively heated by solar thermal energy, industrial waste heat, and geothermal which are a zillion times more efficient than using photovoltaic power to run lamps!

      How about Google Greenhouses? Greenhouses heated by data center waste heat.

      Yes, steel mills use *tons* of energy, and emit huge amounts of greenhouse gasses. That was my point.

      Economically feasible does not mean ecologically sustainable-- tar sands are economically feasible. We would be much better off with the comparatively tiny amount of energy that goes into transport for the equivalent quantity of food than these energy suckers.

      Other alternatives are roof top gardens.

      If a solution involves increasing energy requirements over existing solutions, it is probably a bad solution.

      • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday August 08 2015, @12:59AM

        by Geotti (1146) on Saturday August 08 2015, @12:59AM (#219744) Journal

        Why do you insist on using PV as the energy source?

        Anyways... The tradeoff balance is what this is about here. More efficient land use at the expense of more energy, but it is still feasible to achieve a net gain in efficiency, e.g. by using other forms of energy generation (fusion/fission, ...) smart mirror arrangements to make the most out of the sun, same waste energy from datacenters, geothermal, etc.

        This is just another tool at our disposal to manage an ever-increasing population size (and thus demand).

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @04:30AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @04:30AM (#220140)

          Why do you insist on using PV as the energy source?

          Just responding to gnuman's statement. Ask gnuman why he suggested this. It is asinine to use photovoltaic to run grow lamps-- you would need over an order of magnitude more area for the panels than the plants-- so much for efficient land use.

          gnuman (which was parent of my post, claimed efficient use of solar [electric] power:
          https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=8857&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=improvedthreaded&pid=219626#219635 [soylentnews.org]

          Really, the Cubans already have shown the way. When the USSR stopped trade with Cuba (due to issues within the USSR), Cubans started growing food on rooftops, in small plots between buildings, anywhere and everywhere they could-- and it worked. It worked really well. Literal factory farms are not needed.

          • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:23PM

            by Geotti (1146) on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:23PM (#220442) Journal

            Hm, I actually did not understand the part referring to efficient use of solar power as PV, but just verbatim as using the power of the sun, but now that you point that out, on second reading I'm not so sure anymore exactly what gnuman was referring to.

            The trick that Cuba pulled off probably wouldn't work on a mass scale, though, because people are lazy (or have other things to do). Thus, more efficient land use is still going to become more and more important with regard to energy efficiency if our three superpowers somehow manage to avoid a full scale war - which, I hope, they will manage.

  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by tibman on Friday August 07 2015, @06:34PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 07 2015, @06:34PM (#219655)

    You might really like this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/business/marijuana-industry-in-colorado-eager-for-its-own-bank-waits-on-the-fed.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
    Not sure if there is any update to it but it would allow marijuana companies to have a legit bank. It really is an awesome story they are working on.

    Dylan Donaldson, 30, knows the hidden costs of a bank-challenged business. He has nine 1,000-pound safes bolted to the floor in the back of Karing Kind, his dispensary North Boulder. At any given time, they hold $80,000 to $100,000 in cash.

    The safes didn’t help, though, when thieves busted through the wall of an adjoining business one June night and took $250,000 in marijuana plants.

    Now he pays $100,000 a year for armed guards provided by Iron Protection Group, a business owned and operated by vets from Iraq and Afghanistan, who watch the place at night. They also deliver money to the tax office and vendors, from makers of THC concentrate to suppliers of computer paper. At present, the business has no bank account, having lost more than a dozen, Mr. Donaldson said.

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