In my web wanderings today I ran across this eco-utopian plan to create skyscraper farms.
I wanted to talk about this because, like most environmental schemes, this has been dreamed up by city-slickers who have no more idea of basic realities than Marie Antoinette.
Firstly, do you know why we grow our crops in fields instead of inside buildings? There are several reasons:
1.) Fields have dirt. Soil that can support crops is not free. To put it in skyscrapers you would have to get it from someplace else. That means transportation costs and the stripping of otherwise arable land. The alternatives are composting, which cannot be done at scale (you’d be lucky to poop out five square feet of compost in a year), or hydroponics, which cannot be done at scales exceeding a broom-closet pot plant.
2.) Fields are cheap. The cost for a square foot of building in New York is hundreds of dollars. The cost of a square foot of field in Nebraska is mere pennies. Building a skyscraper in an urban area for the express purpose of producing food crops is about as cost-effective as composting hundred dollar bills for a patch of beans.
3.)Fields are flat. Mother nature has built her good earth to the orientation that’s most effective for catching sunlight: Flat. Creating a vertical surface does not increase the amount of sunlight that plants receive. It divides the amount of sunlight and shadows the ground that would otherwise catch that light. There’s only so much light to go around, and crops need all of it to produce to capacity.
4.) People need a lot of food to survive. It’s hard to make accurate calculations about how much actual land space a person needs to get their annual nutritional needs met, but it’s probably on the order of 1.5 acres at a minimum. If you had a penthouse apartment that was 250 feet to a side, you tore off the roof, filled all the rooms with a foot of dirt, and planted a variety of cereal crops and green veggies, you might just survive off your urban skyscraper farm.
Now, that’s not to say that I discourage "victory gardening" or putting a pot of tomatoes on your balcony. Growing boutique or high-yield vegetables in small areas are generally worth the effort, although counting in labor and material costs there’s a pretty slim profit margin. It’s a rare balcony gardener who can get a potted plant to produce enough food to make a significant impact on the food budget, and certainly they could never scratch their daily caloric needs.
Here’s a graphic wheel that the vertical farming site drew up to make their impractical dreamy mooning seem scientific:
They couldn’t just say that an integration of urban areas and food-production would take pressure off our straining agricultural industry. They had to claim that it would empower women and cure AIDS.
Goddamn retard hippies.
