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Vertical Farms Have Advantages
In his book The Vertical Farm, Dr. Dickson Despommier describes the many advantages of urban, vertical farming:
(vertical farm prototype design)
1. It allows year-round crop production.
2. It provides food to areas lacking arable land.
3. It’s immune to weather-related crop failure. Vert2
4. It re-uses the water by collecting it through de-humidification.
5. It has no need for the use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides, and as such makes for healthier, clean food (even more so than today’s organic food which is prone to the bacteria occurring in for instance manure).
6. It drastically reduces dependence on fossil fuels, as the food needn’t be shipped to the city (because it’s there already).
7. There is no crop loss due to shipping or storage.
8. Reduced food costs as a consequence of reduced distance between producer and consumer.
9. Urban farms would create a cadre of related businesses in its vicinity, such as bakers, produce stores etc.
10. It would employ a lot of both skilled and unskilled labor.
11. Vertical farms would be entirely carbon free, and run on wind, solar, tidal or geothermal energy.
Pohl and Kornbluth's 1952 classic The Space Merchants described a kind of vertical farm; the "Chlorella plantations" was used to grow greenery for food.
…the Chlorella plantation, a towering eighty-story structure like the office "In-and-Out" baskets stacked up to the sky. There were mirrored louvers at each tier. Surrounding the big building were acres of eye-stabbing glare. I realized that this was more mirrored louvers to catch the sun, bounce it off more mirrors inside the tiers, and onto the photosynthesis tanks. It was a spectacular, though not uncommon, sight from the air.
See these other examples of vertical farms.
Via I Look Forward To and The Vertical Farm.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/11/2014)
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