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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?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Zinho on Friday August 07 2015, @05:16PM
I mean, many of us are old enough to know the Internet as the place where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents; you really expect an answer?
Lol! So true. And yet, if the FBI wants to swing by and check out the Swiss Chard growing in my gravel bed I'll happily share a salad with them. I've even got it positioned outside so they can take a picture from space and avoid the trip.
I've been experimenting with aquaponics lately, which is basically hydroponics using a fish tank as the source of nutrient water instead of buying it as an industrial formula. When I've got things going well my worm and grub bins for compost provide my fish food and the system is pretty much closed-loop; I only need to replace evaporated water, make sure it's got enough sun, and keep the bubbler & pump running. I favor a constant-height-one-pump (CHOP) system for its simplicity. I'm hoping to soon power my pump with the air from the bubbler so I have one fewer component to break.
My biggest problem with the system is that I'm a horrible fish owner and I keep killing them off. I can imagine that a commercial vertical farm may want to go with the better predictability of a standard hydroponic solution they can buy from a supplier.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 4, Informative) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday August 07 2015, @07:31PM
My biggest problem with the system is that I'm a horrible fish owner and I keep killing them off.
Fish can be tricky because they are sensitive to what you put in their mostly-closed environment. If you have time, have you thought about starting with a tank of something simple (like guppies) to get a general feel for it? I can only really give solid advice for the home aquarium—I imagine the same goes for fish farming—but you don't want to subject the system to any sudden shocks. Anything you add to or take out of the aquarium (fish, plants, filters, etc.) messes with the steady-state biosphere (I refer especially to microbes) and can lead to sudden and unexpected sickness and deaths amongst your fish. For example when adding fish to a new tank, it is advisable to let the tank run without them for a while, then introduce just a few fish, let it run for a week or so, then introduce a larger number of fish, until you are close to the number you want to keep in there.
If you're new to keeping fish, keep a close eye on the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate content of the water. You may be doing something wrong so that your aquaponics system isn't removing them efficiently. And while I don't want to insult you with the very basics, beware the chlorine in tap water if you use that. Especially deadly combined with ammonia.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday August 07 2015, @08:18PM
You guessed it! Things I did wrong that you listed:
* introducing too many fish at once
* insufficient monitoring of water content
* random changes to environment (new plants/filters/etc)
I did manage to get the tap water thing right, and used collected rainwater to start. For topping off (especially during dry spells) I occasionally use tap water and a tank chemical designed to remove the chlorine, but I don't really trust it.
Another thing I did wrong that you didn't list was not waiting long enough for my silicone caulking to cure before filling the tank - I suspect that may have left some residual curing agents in the water. I tried starting out with 100 channel catfish at once, and had no idea if my gravel bed had enough bioavailable surface area (it didn't); they all got sick and died. I've scaled down to a handful of goldfish now while i figure out how to get a biofilter system in place. lots of plumbing to do on that...
Don't worry about offending me by asking basic questions; I still feel new at this, and I've done phone tech support before on computers. I expect that there are a lot of things I'm doing wrong at the level of "is the modem connected to the phone jack?" and I'm happy for the help.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hyperturtle on Friday August 07 2015, @08:42PM
What I did wrong was:
Let white flies colonize my plants and everything died.
Let aphids colonize my plants and everything died.
Let spider mites colonize my plants and everything died.
Have no predatory insects (this is my house not the outdoors! [everything non-plant related lived])
Bug spray drips into water solution (all bugs died, then plants died)
X10 system of lighting and timer was not Y2K compliant (everything died)
Heater used to maintain water temperature was kicked by significant other and rocketed to 120 degrees and some tropical plants were REALLY COOL LOOKING (they became giants overnight!) for like a day until I realized what happened and then everything died even though I fixed the temperature. The heating element actually cracked and I had to replace it.
I was able to get a few crops of haberneros and some other peppers; they all grew to mature plants that provided berries as opposed to peppers--like malformed mature fruits that ripened properly, and only occasionally had a few seeds inside -- not the typical "heart" chamber inside of peppers.
I also grew wormwood and similar (absinthe related plants), and those did OK--the wormwood itself did NOT get bothered by plants. But the plants I put in with it? They died. It was later that I learned that wormwood will poison the soil near it to discourage other plants. Being in a shared hydroponic environment -- everything else died.
I retired from the experiment a while back, and recently picked up a clearance aerogarden and have been playing with that. So far, nothing has died... but give me time and I will find a way for the basil to bolt and then die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @02:02AM
I thought a lot of the details for closed-cycle fish/plant culture was worked out by New Alchemy Institute in the 1970s and 80s? Overview here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alchemy_Institute [wikipedia.org]
Since they were serious scientists (despite the hippie name), I believe their work was documented in a variety of papers.
When I visited they had translucent tanks of plants and tilapia sitting outside in the sun...producing fish year round on Cape Cod.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @08:40PM
agile development heh... :)