the only two with the resources and insanity to pull this off that come to mind are the UAE (which won’t really NEED it), and china, who might at that point be forced to care about farming again. or humans for that matter.

energetically, i don’t know if it could work. likely no one here does. but it does make some sense to integrate food production into human settlements.

and, to seemingly contradict myself, I once worried over permaculture/organic-agriculture because of the man-power required. an environmental science colleague said, “don’t worry about that, man. the farmers WANT their jobs back.” and I felt better.

a) Much less ‘land’ is required when you have multiple floors!
b) With arable land becoming less and less available and the population getting larger and larger, it is only a matter of time before enough land for farming purposes will be far more expensive than the footprint of one skyscraper.
c) What does the price of food today have to do with possibilities for sustainable farming in the future? That’s like saying, electric cars are stupid because petrol was cheap as hell in 1970.

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I really don’t understand why people would shut these ideas down so quickly. Technology does have the habit of getting better through necessity or profit. We just need a wealthy government with the balls to see the benefit of investing heavily in this sort of thing (like the U.S. Government saw the benefit of investing heavily in NASA creating and building upon many technologies that are now part of everyday life).

I also suggested this last time one of these posts was up. One way to help battle the lighting issue would be to build some well placed mirror systems in the surrounding skyscrapers, this could also help with heating the building during colder months. Obviously this would mean building lots of buildings at once with the intention of making them all work together, but really that should happen anyway.

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/35571/icode/

Office skyscrapers didn’t spring onto the scene out of nowhere either- architects had decades to learn how to build progressively larger buildings and gained a lot of valuable knowledge along the way about what worked and what didn’t.

You only get so much sunlight per unit of area, period. Around a kilowatt per square meter of solar energy. Sure, you can put up mirrors and lay out your vertical farm to catch more light – by taking it from OTHER places.

And if the gains from having controlled conditions were really so great, it’d still be a heck of a lot cheaper to put covers over big stretches of flat land where you wouldn’t need to build huge structures and could still operate tractors.

Energy-wise, this feels like the “can you make a wind-powered vehicle go downwind faster than the wind” debates. Sure, you can fudge the numbers in the short term, but there’s still only so much energy available in the system.

Even if the energy was free and you had all the artificial light you could want – well, look at it this way: how many 100-story factories have you seen? Getting heavy equipment up there just isn’t practical, and it just plain isn’t going to happen unless this planet winds up looking like Trantor or Coruscant or something.

Last I heard, current projections have the population peaking somewhere over 9 billion. Even if it winds up being twice that, that’s no planet-spanning metropolis.

Rooftop gardens are cool. They’re pretty, maybe they help the air quality a bit, and they give you some vegetables. But vertical farming is a bunch of BS.

Detroit – OCP is there!

Better yet, let’s modify OURSELVES to be photosynthetic.

traditional farming needs all kinds of poisson to grow enough for the farmer to make a decent living. indoor-farming means you don’t have to worry all that much about rabbits or fungi eating your plants (just practise extreme hygiene rules).

the reason today’s intensive farms are famous for spreading MRSA and other nastiness is because the cows and pigs are given loads of anti-biotics to keep them ‘healthy’ despite lack of space or sunlight or normal natural food or healthy social interaction with other animals. some farmers have managed to cut down dramatically on their anti-biotics use by implementing strict hygiene-rules for workers and visitors.

though we do not really NEED urban farms. today’s farms produce more then enough, even for all starving african children, even if all farms would turn to organic farming.
all it takes are some social changes: not throwing half of what’s produced away because shops only buy carrots that are straight or appels that are round, eating a little less meat, and bringing back local crop-species will help a lot.

i do not think those social changes will happen all by thenmselves, so building these agro-towers might help urbanites to realise how difficult it is to grow food. that it’s not normal to order a ‘bottom-less cup’ and then throw half of it away.
and it will give farmers some real competition, so if they want to sell their produce they better come up with decent quality food. hopefully force them out of the idea that agriculture has to be done a certain way, just because everyone else is doing it that way, and things like organic farming and animal-walfare are only for sissi city-boys.

Elois are not “Primary Producers,” that is, not getting energy from the Sun. So they’re not ‘crops,’ they’re food animals. So unless we make them photosynthetic (as long as they’re still yummy!), they would compete for crop space.

However, should land become some valuable as to force people to build farming skyscrapers, I imagine by that point we would have a better means of generating energy or having genetically altered plants to require less light.

Farming does favor flat land for a reason.

You’re right that the world isn’t predicting a planet spanning metrololis. However there are plenty of countries where there is virtually no arable land left as it is.

The “conceptualists” who continue to suggest such ideas really need to look at:

a) How much land is require to grow food crops.
b) How much it costs to build/rent/lease space in “the heart of the world’s urban centers”.
c) The current cost to produce food.

Until people are willing/forced to pay $500 for a head of lettuce, this idea is beyond ludicrous.

“That’s good news for those who love marinara sauce.”
Ha!

Aeropnics is pretty awesome stuff though.

On the other hand, I dislike the fact that the man seems to be deliberately misrepresenting facts. Population growth is not skyrocketing, it’s flattening out. We have plenty of farm land left, it’s just that Argentina wants to keep feeding cattle, Americans like their suburbs, and well, Africa is a political mess. It’s entirely possible for us to feed everyone in the world, with or without vertical farms, but the killer app for vertical farming isn’t that it’s going to feed the needy.

Instead, it’s going to be one of the features that keep people in cities. Let’s face it, the more stuff a city can offer, the more likely people will want to live there. At one point it was shopping. Then it was the arts. Then it was an artisan sensibility. If what keeps people in (name Manhattan neighborhood) is that you can live there, have the advantages of city living, plus being able to tend a garden, have a little green space, and generally have it over zoning-regulated, square-shaped suburbanites, then they’re just going to flock there, economy or no.