591
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
591 points (99.3% liked)
News
36344 readers
608 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The hard part will be water lines for so much active water use. A sink and a few toilets is one thing but rigging an irrigation system that also has drainage for leaks or overflows requires space and lots of upfront renovation costs that will be paid back over a very long time. It's a difficult financial proposition.
You’re not running showers out whatever that needs fresh water and the goal would be to reuse that water over and over. You only need to get the water in there to begin with, then your pumps will move it around.
The problem is a constant fight against gravity. You've still got to pump the water effectively to the top of the building every day. And there's still the issue of getting sunlight to the plants.
The question really becomes whether it's more economical to just use traditional irrigation techniques upstream and ship the produce in vs converting a skyscraper into a very inefficient farm space.
Vertical farming usually uses LED lighting, not direct sunlight. And I think the idea is that once the water is present on a given level it gets recirculated and reprocessed there, so it wouldn't need much additional pumping.
That's one method of bringing"sunlight" to plants. Another would be to grow them outside.
Even if all you do is pump all the water from the floor of each level to the ceiling of the respective level, you've done the exact same amount of work as pumping all the water for the top floor back to the roof in the first place. Only you've done it with a hundred pumps and a hundred times the points of failure and repair rate as a single pump for the entire building.
You'd be so much farther ahead to just install a reservoir on the roof that gets filled by a single pump and let gravity feed the lower floors. Much the way we already do for flat farming.
And then you've got to make up for the inefficiencies lost in planting and harvesting. Vertical farming brings nothing to the table except a smaller footprint in a world where that's not a real advantage.
A far better use of empty office buildings would be to convert much of the space into full-time living space.
I think you'd be surprised to learn that vertical farms do actually exist already. The problems you're imagining have all already been overcome. Having a hundred pumps actually isn't a big obstacle to having the system function well.
I'm not imagining any problems. The difficulties I've outlined are genuine issues that have to be addressed. I think you'd be surprised to learn how much difference there is between a thing existing and it actually operating efficiently.
“Based on an analysis we did for a large private-equity firm, we don’t actually see a scenario where in the next 10 years vertical farming will compete with field-grown at scale in North America,”
I really don't see much beyond "it doesn't look perfect to me so it's a bad idea and we shouldn't even try" in your arguments.
Great way to grow local and buy local with next to no pesticides.