Talk:Vertical farming

Criticism

This is a great concept, but is there any criticism that can be addressed to make this article seem a bit more relevant?

I wonder if there are any current projects being done by students at Columbia which would address this.

I think this is an exciting concept and I would like to see this article grow to reflect its current progress. --Joseph.r.martinez 05:31, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I think the only downside is the cost. Grundle2600 01:12, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

There is certainly plenty to criticize, but nothing that I can find outside references for. But I'll soapbox here: first, there is no need for vertical farms. Even if 80% of Earth's arable land is in cultivation, it's not in very efficient cultivation. If the world average for crop efficiencies were brought up to the US or EU standards, production would at least double without a single additional hectare. Second, the concept as stated violates the first law of thermodynamics. Clearly, there is not enough solar energy hitting a tiny little building to feed 50,000 people, so a massive input of electricity would be needed for grow lights. The proposal is to get this from fermenting biomass, biomass produced with the energy of the grow lights! It's a perpetual motion machine.

Frankly, I have no idea how a Columbia professor can get away with this kind of nonsense. Chuao 22:14, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

When the idea was mentioned on Charlie Stross's weblog, he suggested putting a small nuclear reactor in the basement. :) --GCarty (talk) 13:46, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I have not read or seen any criticism pertaining to the obvious problem of internal city pollution affecting these crops. If a vertical farming tower is built in downtown Chicago near the river, how are all of the environmental pollutants from the atmosphere, the river, et cetera kept out of the process? These towers do not appear to be hermetically contained, and there has been no information about pollutant filtration either. Every discussion I see completely sidesteps this fundamental criticism. Anonymous 06:08, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

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Curious to know if GMO have been deemed required by the people behind vertical farming. If so, the intellectual property would increase the costs. jlam 21:30, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I can think of at least one criticism for this- it claims to be a possible solution for desertification and deforestation, but the places where this takes place, the technology level and economic situation would never support the creation of such a tower. Also, for most places normal farmland is vastly preferable, due to the cost per results, and with modern farming technology deforestation and desertification is NOT an issue in the first world. I can't think of too many places where a) Something like a farm tower could be made, and b) there's a need for a farm tower to be made. Perhaps a Mars colony. 71.126.127.21 (talk) 04:01, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Other companies making farmscrapers

Other companies that make or -have proposed- farmscrapers have not been described: See Michael Braungart's MBDC, Rafael Pizarro and finally Ken Yeang

87.64.163.98 (talk) 15:59, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

removing of vegas claim

the ip reverted with comment - "24.126.76.179 (Talk) (4,468 bytes) (Removed Las vegas claim - refuted here:http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/28654" -

yet, http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/28654 does not seem to refute that:

"The city of Las Vegas, Nevada in the United States will build the world's first 30 story vertical farm. Scheduled to be open in 2010, the $200 million dollar project would produce food for 72,000 people."

please clarify this if you feel strongly that it does. Thanks. --Emesee (talk) 21:00, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I've removed this claim again. See http://blog.businessgreen.com/2008/01/so-is-las-vegas.html for justification. There's no source to be consulted - no contractor, no architectural firm, no city planner, no nothing - and all potential sources have been negative. 24.174.69.211 (talk) 03:19, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

New York

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/07/15/eafarms115.xml Emesee (talk) 16:26, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

in NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15farm.html?_r=2&hp&oref=login&oref=slogin ... and the external links section looks like it could maybe use a bit of trimming. Emesee (talk) 05:51, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

At a recent California State Senate hearing on AB 1634, the bill that started out as mandatory spay/neuter law but has since devolved and been amended into oblivion, a Senator asked Ed Boks, the General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) and one of the bill’s chief proponents: “Mr. Boks, this bill doesn’t even pretend to be about saving animals, does it?” To which Boks responded: “No Senator, this is not about saving dogs and cats.”

Ed Boks should know. Since passage of his local version of AB 1634, impounds and killing have skyrocketed at the Los Angeles pound he oversees, exactly as concerned animal lovers feared. In fact, the increased killing was the first at LAAS in over a decade.

As seen time and time again, mandatory sterilization laws are largely a distraction, increasing the power of animal control to impound and kill yet more animals, while they divert resources from programs that do work so that agencies can hire yet more officers to write yet more tickets and impound more animals—or threaten to do so—to no avail. So if it is not about saving dogs and cats, what is it about?

While some supporters desperately want to believe that mandatory sterilization laws are about saving lives, the facts tragically (in Los Angeles and elsewhere) have proved otherwise. And while people are free to believe whatever they want in a democracy, simply believing something doesn’t necessarily make it so, and never will. Meanwhile, animals continue to be killed in appalling numbers and reform efforts are squandered on an agenda that has no hope of achieving success. Moreover, the animals are paying the ultimate price for the false beliefs of animal activists. They are the ones being slaughtered en masse because of it. With animals being killed every day in California shelters because shelter leadership has not embraced the lifesaving culture of the No Kill philosophy and the comprehensive programs and services which make it possible, activists must move beyond the empty hope that mandatory spay/neuter will ever be anything but a failure.

But the motivation for shelter directors who are mired in killing is entirely different. Since “this is not about saving dogs and cats,” what is it about? It is about taking the pressure off of their own failures. As the chorus of voices about the killing in California shelters and their own inability or unwillingness to do anything substantive about it grows, so do their attempts to divert attention elsewhere. For a diversion to work, you need someone to blame. And blame needs a boogeyman to be effective. The boogeyman here is that the shelter is merely doing the dirty work of an “irresponsible public” and all those who stand in their way are labeled animal haters.

This approach takes its cues from Karl Rove’s post 9/11 three-step strategy:

Invoke 9/11 Do whatever you want Silence concerned critics by claiming they don’t care about protecting Americans The proponents of AB 1634 have tried to sell it in much the same way:

Invoke 9/11 pet overpopulation Do whatever you want Silence concerned critics by claiming they don’t care about protecting Americans animals The motivation of shelter directors notwithstanding, what’s in it for others? Once again, if it is not about saving lives, what is it about?

I believe it is about darker impulses. These are the people who obstinately ignore facts, experience, and history and continue to push these types of laws. They will do what they have always done—facts, logic, and history be damned. They will continue to blame the public and they will continue to fight for more and tougher laws. They will argue that their community is different, that their situation is unique, that citizens in their community are particularly—or peculiarly—irresponsible. None of this is true, but they do not care. They will ignore the failures of dysfunctional animal control shelters and its equally inept and uncaring leadership. They will ignore that many shelter directors find killing easier than doing what is necessary to stop it and so kill rather than take advantage of readily available lifesaving alternatives to killing. They will stand side-by-side with these perpetrators.

While they claim to be motivated by saving lives, there is something much more powerful driving them: the desire to punish. An activist truly focused on lifesaving, who subsequently learns that punitive legislation is not only a dismal failure, but that it has the opposite results (more impounds, more killing), would end their support of such methods and begin to push for more compassionate leadership at animal control or the programs and services of the No Kill Equation.

By contrast, those who are intent on punishing the public are being driven by other imperatives. In the end, they so want to punish the public for not taking care of their pets as much as they think they should, they are willing to ignore all the evidence about legislation’s true results or about how to truly save lives, and instead empower animal control to kill animals in the process. Unfortunately, animal control is generally more than willing to oblige and do just that. Their motto: if we deem you irresponsible, we have the power to kill your pet. In the end, these activists become that which they claim to most despise—people whose actions result in the impound and killing of animals. They become the “irresponsible public.”

But regardless of underlying beliefs and motivations, the end game is the same: power to kill increases and animals die. That is why true animal lovers should dedicate themselves to restricting the state’s killing apparatus, reducing the power of the pounds to involuntarily (or under the threat of citation) take in—and potentially kill—animals when those animals are not being neglected or subject to cruelty. They should not seek to increase that power at the expense of the lives of animals.