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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: 2) by Geotti on Saturday August 08 2015, @12:59AM
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
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
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.