"When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders." I can't think of what's wrong with the ideas Dickson D. Despommier writes about in his New York Times op-ed either. (I definitely can't think of anything wrong with his name. It's like a character from a porn Three Musketeers-which does, of course, exist.) So now, sites like Weburbanist and Trendhunter offer cool round-ups of design proposals that let us see what urban vertical farms-"skyfarms" is a sexier name-could look like.
The honeycomb exoskeletons above are awesome, the only drawback being the lethal swarms of giant wasps they'd surely attract.
The "Plantagon," meanwhile, below, is perfect except that it snows whenever a heavy truck drives by.
Here is to things that will never be built.
Bees are cold-blooded creatures, and stick to the ground where it's warm adn there's food. Expending energy fighting wind currents while trying to stay warm while pollinating on the 50th floor of some "farm" doesn't seem practical. So, how will agriculture in these vertical farms be pollinated?
If you enclose the farm in a domeâ€"as pictured aboveâ€"you loose a major construction motivation (cleaning the air).
The vertical farm an interesting theory, but not practical with current technology.
I would like to see the NIMBY argument though. If buildings create "shadows," and plants/trees create "shade," what is a building made entirely of plants/trees?
Not all agriculture requires bee pollination; quite a lot doesn't! The purpose of farmland in general is not to "clean the air", though vertical farms could conceivably be cleaner than other similarly-sized structures. And the vertical farm is actually practical with current technology.
Er, okay. Maybe I'm misremembering my not-so-recent youth on the family farm, but:
Corn is a wind-pollinated crop. After subsidizing corn growers in the Midwest to the point of completely fucking insane (in order to feed the fat American's obesity problem), is more corn what we really need?
Aside from corn: popular fruits and vegetables, soybeans, and cotton are insect-pollinated. Even if CCD can be addressed, major pollination issues remain.
The Times piece did indeed highlight the benefits of vertical farms as an air cleaner--and politically, that's the only way it'd have a chance of being built in most US cities.
Having grown up in the middle of old-order Amish agriculture (some of the most responsible, inventive, and careful stewards in preserving the earth in order to make a buck so as to protect their isolationist lifestyle), I don't see how a vertical farm, at the level of today's technology, is any better than an extended family of Mushkie's taking over a factory farms in the Midwest and running it properly.
Also,the cost of real estate in urban areas makes urban farming prohibitively expensive. Sure, you could build a 50 story farm, but you'd make more money building 50 story office tower.
This simply makes no sense. Does every block in, say, New York city support a 50 story office tower? Of course not. People do build things other than 50 story office towers, even in NYC. Is it prohibitively expensive to build anything but a 50 story office tower in the city? Of course not; it might be easier in some areas, under some zoning laws, to make more money from a 50 story office tower, but in many urban spots, a vertical farm would be a better economic venture. It may produce more local jobs than an office tower and a lot more local edible products (office workers taste like chicken, no matter how much thai basil you add).
Stuff like this just makes me a little embarrassed for my profession.
Killer green could well be involved, but renderings like this take an insane amount of time and surely at some point in the process one's mind would clear.
Perhaps by then though it's too late: you're already committed to your Quixotic idea and have to see it through