Agriculture

Let's Make This Clear: Vertical Farms Don't Make Sense

Philip Proefrock and Hank Green

verticalfarms

The inside of a skyscraper is, literally, the most expensive "land" in the world. So it probably isn't the best place to grow our food.

The idea of vertical farming (growing food in high-rise buildings in the middle of cities instead of out on farms) has been gaining a lot of interest lately. Most recetly, it showed up on BoingBoing, one of our favorite blogs. We've seen a few of these proposals, and we've been following the concept for some time. It seems EcoGeeky enough, but a quick glance at the actual economics of farming shows that this isn't ever going to work.

At first, it seems to make all the sense in the world. Moving production of food into population centers to eliminate shipping. Creating highly efficient "food factories" that allow land elsewhere to be freed from cultivation. But when you look at some of the practicalities behind constructing buildings like these, vertical farms make no sense. As the Vertical farm Project itself notes: "The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate)." And a vertical farm is the opposite of efficiency.

A farmer can expect his land to be worth roughly $1 per square foot...if it's good, fertile land. The owner of a skyscraper, on the other hand, can expect to pay more than 200 times that per square foot of his building. And that's just the cost of construction. Factor in the costs of electricity to pump water throughout the thing and keep the plants bathed in artificial sunlight all day, and you've got an inefficient mess.

Just looking at those numbers, you need two things to happen in order for vertical farms to make sense. You need the price of food to increase 100 fold over today's prices, and you need the productivity of vertical farms to increase 100 fold over traditional farms. Neither of those things will ever happen. And as much as I hate to burst bubbles, the main claim to the efficiency of vertical farms (the elimination of transportation costs) is not vaild. Even if most of the calories we consume were to be grown inside of cities, almost all of it would be shipped out for processing (most of the food we eat isn't fresh veggies...you may have noticed.)

None of this is to say that we think farming will remain forever as it is today. EcoGeek is glad that there are many changes coming to agriculture, some of which will increase yields enough to keep prices low while feeding the 10 billion people the Earth will house by 2050. And with the right technologies, we should be able to do this without harming the Earth too much.

We're not even saying that farms will remain outside. Building multi-level (not necessarily muti-story) automated farming units on inexpensive land within 100 km of food processing plants, for example, might make a lot of sense. But if you're going to make farming more efficient, you aren't going to do it by moving it into the most expensive land in the world.

Science-fiction author (and former EcoGeek of the Week interviewee) Tobias Buckell also saw the article and offered his own comments on the topic, as well.

'Vertical farm' articles on EcoGeek

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Fungus Yields Insulation and Packaging Material

Yoni Levinson

The folks at Ecovative Design have spun out two interesting materials, both of which are made in the same way. According to the company’s website, the two founders “were fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips, and observing how the fungal mycelium strongly bonded the wood chips together.”

In other words, they make materials by growing fungus in various types of discarded agricultural waste, such as husks, hulls, and other things that are largely made out of lignin – a complex polymer that gives fibrous strength to plants. The fungus digests the lignin, resulting in a (presumably gooey or wet) mixture which can be poured into a mold and dried out in shapes.

Ecovative currently makes two products: “Greensulate” (for insulation) and “Acorn” (for packaging). The insulation seems somewhat unimpressive. The insulating capacity of a piece of insulation is measured by its R-value. Greensulate has an R-value of 3, as opposed to materials such as polyurethane and polystyrene - which are bad for the environment, but have R-values of around 6 or 7.

And honestly, even if the R-value were higher, I think a lot of people would be skeptical about using an experimental material for insulation. Insulation is really important – it keeps you warm, keeps you cool and, most importantly, keeps your bills low. I’m not sure I’d want to mess around with an experimental new bio-based material.

What I often don’t care about, though, is packaging; especially when I receive items with way more of it than they require. I therefore think that Acorn is a great idea. It’s a great use for otherwise useless waste, and – unlike syrofoam – won’t stay in the ground for a millennium if you throw it away.

Via Green Inc.

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Water Your Lawn With Your ahem Waste

Hank Green

I've been to a fair share of parties where some folks don't make it from the back yard to the bathroom, but that certainly isn't the ideal method of lawn care. In general, we humans ship our wastewater off to treatment plants, a land and energy intensive process. And to make it all worse, a great deal of America's vital drinking water gets poured onto its lawns...about 15,000 gallons PER HOME!

But what if we could close the loop. What if our wastewater could be processed on-site and then pumped back out to make our gardens grow? Whether it sounds disgusting or exciting to you is, I suppose, a matter of perspective. But it looks like it's right on the horizon.

Biokube, a Danish company, is bringing the BioKube Venus to America. The Venus is a septic tank advanced enough that it can make your waste water clean enough for use in agriculture (i.e. watering your lanw.) The device would produce more than the 15,000 gallons used by most households. The excess would just be released into groundwater like current septic systems. But, I suppose you'd want to limit the amount of frolicking in the sprinklers your kids were doing.

So-called gray water has been used for irrigation for a long time. Simply pumping processed waste-water to nearby land for irrigation is a great way to prevent drinking water being dumped on lawns across the world. But those systems require laying twice as much pipe for water delivery...one for clean water, and one for gray water.

The Venus works by passing the wastewater through membranes tightly packed with cleansing bacteria. The device is about six feet tall and four feet wide and can clean about 7.5 liters of water every 15 minutes.

The Venus will make it's debut in California, where the government is cracking down on dirty old septic systems AND wasted drinking water. It's a perfect storm for the Venus, which could solve both of those problems at the same time.

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New Zealand Company Locks Away CO2 in Charcoal

Peg Fong

Carbonscape, a company based in Marlborough, New Zealand, has found a new use for microwaves – sequestering carbon dioxide. They have recently developed a way to nuke things like wood chips (and other useless biological wastes) into charcoal. By doing so, carbon dioxide that would otherwise leak into the atmosphere is effectively locked into the charcoal. This charcoal, or “biochar”, is then buried into soil. The benefits of biochar-infused soil include improved soil fertility, fewer soil emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, and the improved ability of soil-dwelling microbes to extract carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbonscape has tested its technology, and is moving to initial batch scale production at its South Island, NZ facility. Once fed with wood debris, each oven can turn 40-50% of it into charcoal, or one ton of charcoal per day, says the company. Of course, the microwave ovens themselves require electricity… which in turn has a carbon dioxide price tag. But Carbonscape claims that, given the amount of carbon sequestered in the charcoal, the overall balance is carbon-negative.

“The application of microwaves to charcoal making is new,” Tim Flannery of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia - an expert on climate change who is not associated with the company - told New Scientist. “If it increases efficiency in the charcoal-making process it could prove to be a real winner.”

Via New Scientists, New Zealand Herald
Image via Carbonscape

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Farming Soils for CO2 Storage

Jaymi Heimbuch

We’ve heard of storing carbon in old mines, in deep-down porous rock formations, under the ocean, even in concrete or nanomaterial. But here is one I hadn’t heard before…storing it in dirt – particularly, farming dirt specifically for CO2 storage. A new type of farming is being explored by scientists at the US Geological Survey and UC Davis, a type of farming that will produce soils that can store carbon dioxide.

Really, it isn’t so much farming as restoring native environments that naturally like to store CO2 – wetlands with peat soils. The notion actually takes a lot of the high-tech out of the equation, and helps us store CO2 by bringing us back to our roots, literally.

The scientists started a pilot project a few years ago in the San Joaquin Valley River Delta that included planting up a bunch of wetland plants in 1997. By 2005, 10 inches of peat soil was produced through the plants growing, dying, composting, and regrowing. The scientists’ experiment has shown that up to 25 metric tons of CO2 annually can be stored in an acre of peat. It would take a whole lot of acreage, but the scientists say that if California restored all the subsided lands in the Delta and made them “carbon farms,” the lands could store enough carbon to equate trading all the SUVs in the state for hybrids.

While that might sound attractive, there are some serious issues. The wetlands could release nitrous oxide, which is worse that carbon dioxide, as well as methylmercury, which is basically poison for mammals. Measurements of released methane varied widely during the pilot project, and they didn’t measure release of nitrous oxide at all. So the project could set us back, rather than launch us forward.

Despite the risks, the scientists have been awarded over $12 million to test the research on 400 acres in the Delta.

I dig the idea of restoring the landscape to what it once was, and benefiting from the natural occurances. Yet the possibilities of mucking things up worse than they are is not such an attractive notion. While California needs to cut emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020, this potentially a risky way of doing it, instead of, say, actually swapping all the SUVs in the state for fuel efficient vehicles… The concept definitely has some pros and cons to be carefully weighed as the experiment progresses.

Via Cleantechnica; ENS newswire; photo via kacey

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