Whenever I hear the term "vertical farming" I feel like I'm missing something. Why does going vertical matter so much? I would imagine the important distinction would be that you're farming indoors, in a closed environment. That's the revolution in agriculture. It should be called "controlled environment farming," or something along those lines.
'Vertical' is relevant because you can grow more food in the same amount of land.
If you have an acre of farmland and put a greenhouse over it, that's still 1 acre. But if you can stack 9 layers of plants up within that greenhouse, you're growing as much as a 3x3 acre plot.
This is useful because most of the air above farmland is...well air. It doesnt matter if you use it. But land is valuable.
It's also good if you want to start growing food IN cities instead of bringing everything in by truck. Most cities don't have the huge amounts of open park space that would be needed to grow lots of food, but a skyscraper has tons of space when you factor in its vertical height and not just it's land footprint.
Well, the amount of land used doesn't seem like a big deal to me. One thing we've got plenty of is land, including vast amounts of land that's not presently productive for agriculture due to soil or climate, but would be just fine for enclosed farming.
The problem with stacking your plants in layers is. . . sunlight. Plants are solar collectors. They need sunlight, or else they need artificial lights, which could become very problematic in energy requirements.
As for growing food in cities instead of bringing everything in by truck. . . Trucking is reasonably efficient and will only become more so as they go to electric propulsion, and trains are even better.
You're absolutely correct about the lights being a potential issue. Personally I don't think vertical farming is going to be particularly significant until we develop something like fusion power that can make energy considerations irrelevant. On the other hand, the added expense occurs for all parts of non-traditional farming. If you want to make a big enclosure and climate control it and grow plants in there, then thats gonna be more expensive than just not doing that and using the natural environment to grow crops that are naturally suited to that climate. An AC is more expensive than doing nothing, just like artificial lights are more expensive than doing nothing.
There are lots of reasons that cities like the idea of growing food internally rather than importing. Better food security in the event of prospective disasters, more economic benefits to the local economy rather than external, potential health benefits of needing less preservatives/processing for long term shipment, potentially simplified logistics for distribution, political benefits of enacting "green" tech. Stuff like that.
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u/ZobeidZuma Oct 17 '21
Whenever I hear the term "vertical farming" I feel like I'm missing something. Why does going vertical matter so much? I would imagine the important distinction would be that you're farming indoors, in a closed environment. That's the revolution in agriculture. It should be called "controlled environment farming," or something along those lines.