by frog
Green Upgrader has an interesting analysis of the sustainability of vertical farms. A vertical farm is kind of like a big tall building where each floor is a field or paddock rather than office space. Check out this picture:
Obviously by stacking your farm fields one on top of another you save space that might otherwise be used to grow forests or house people. It makes it much easier to put farms and food production systems in cities and towns close to where people will be eating the food, thus reducing carbon emissions and food miles.
And the article suggests that vertical farms have the potential at least to use less water, less fertilizer and fewer pesticides. They also have the potential to be enclosed units where contaminants can’t just wash away on the neighbouring land.
To me the big question is (and Green UpGrader poses this question too) how much energy needs to go into a vertical farm to make it work? The benefits of normal horizontal farms are that you don’t need to construct them out of steel girders, and once they are up and running they are mostly powered by sunlight (to make all the veges, trees and grasses grow). A vertical farm would either need an alternative energy source to sunlight to power it or some very clever design to get sun into all its nooks and crannies.
It’s potentially a clever idea but I am fairly convinced that it might just be easier, especially here in New Zealand, to use the farming space we already have more efficiently by promoting more diverse organic and local farming that has been shown to be more productive than large scale monoculture farming. Sometimes we don’t need to invent new solutions, we just need to actually use the ones we already have available to us.
Photo Credit: Vertical Farm
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Wed, June 18th, 2008
Tags: energy, farming, Food, sunlight, vertical farms
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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this could be perfect for cities..
and i’ve been eyeing office buildings in this light for some time..
..when all those financial services people/companies are swept away..
these buildings will/can revert to residential/greenhouses..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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It looks like hydroponics, but with dirt.
Great idea, but it looks like more thought went into making the picture than how practical it is.
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It’s an interesting idea that’s been kicking around a while, however I’d like to see the economics, as I can’t see them working.
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More to the point ,in order to cope with wellingtons future population growth, more infill is proposed for Newtown.
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ONly 1.5% of New Zealand’s land area is urbanised so we have no shortage of land area.
Our biggest waste of land is forcing people who want to live in the countryside (for all manner of reasons) to live on lots (4ha or more) which are far bigger than they need and are impossible to manage without large grazing animals or massive investments in machinery and outside labour. 100 households on one acre lots use 100 acres of land. The same 100 households on 10 acre lots use 1,000 acres of land. Go figure.
Such vertical farms may be an interesting computer game but in NZ with our wonderfully benign climate they make no sense whatever – except for those who have yearnings for catastrophe and love extreme “solutions”.
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“100 households on one acre lots use 100 acres of land.”
But if the average household has 4 people in it, then your 100 households actually use about 1232 ha.
It’s called an ecological footprint.
The average NZ ecological footprint is about 3.08 ha
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The average NZ ecological footprint is about 3.08 ha
and when you divide the total usable land available in New Zealand ( total land area excluding national parks, forest parks, reserves and non-productive land) of 17,783,949 ha. by 3.08, you get around 5.7 million people, so vertical farms are unlikely to become viable in NZ until we grow a whole lot more people.
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ONly 1.5% of New Zealand’s land area is urbanised so we have no shortage of land area.
That’s a fairly meaningless statistic on it’s own.
When individuals each pursue there own objective the overall results can have bad consequences as people want more and more. John Travolta has 5 (?)jet planes (or example). Everyone wants a car and so we have sprawl and congestion.
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Lately I have become a little more optimistic that there are alternatives to the present automobile fleet for example there’s this:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/dynamic-displacement-technology.php
and this:
“We are developing a six-kw power supply that is non-polluting, and uses no fossil fuels or nuclear fuels. In production it will cost about the same as present gasoline powered six-kw power supplies, but will run for a year continuously on about a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of hydrogen and boron, compared to 7300 gallons of gasoline. It can be scaled up into a larger generating plant where it will produce electricity for about $0.0005 per kw-hr, compared to $0.05 per kw-hr today. This white paper describes a three-year project to build a prototype 6-kw power supply.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Electron_Power_Systems%2C_Inc.
(among other things).
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“For a long time, Toronto ran counter to events in the United States; in the last 40 years there has been a dramatic switch where the rich live in the centre, and the poor have moved to the suburbs. The downtown rapidly gentrifies, while the new suburbanites have fewer social services, lousy transit and lots of cars.
Now it is happening, rapidly, in American cities as well. Lara Farrar writes for CNN a depressing article titled Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/is-the-suburban-dream-collapsing.php
If when had a Henry George system of land tenure/ taxation we could make a decent job of urban renewal (ie) at a point in time we could knock over a whole neighborhood and rebuild it rather than in our present itsy- bitsy fashion.
Near wher I live they are building penshioner flats with 3 houslets 1.8m from the north fence and there is an existing house to the north hugging its south fence so little sun for the oldies of the future.
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“Everyone wants a car and so we have sprawl and congestion.”
jh, sprawl did not begin because of the car. Urban sprawl began in the 19th Century when, you guessed it, the railway was invented and began to see greater usage – that was later cemented in the early 20th Century with tram systems. In fact, it is far easier to get urban sprawl with a good railway system than with a motorway system; I don’t think someone that lives in Gympie, north of Brisbane, would be too keen to commute to work by car (a 2hr-3hr drive in each direction), but they do have a railway option that they would be willing to take. People are willing to spend more time on a train to get to work than in a car.
Also, are you really that keen for urban renewal to go ahead jh? Remember that Freemans Bay was slated for “urban renewal” in the 1950s and 1960s, and that would have seen beautiful old houses demolished and replaced with ugly flats. Urban renewal belongs in some quarters, but demolishing most pre 1940 houses is sacreliege in my opinion.
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Glad to see someone reminding us of what nearly happened to Freeman’s Bay.
The government and Robbie had decided that Freemans Bay was a slum and began a slum clearance programme. Naturally once declared a slum it began to become one. I was one of a team employed by Mayor McElroy to look into such programmes and we soon found that the only reason for the decline was a rule that said you not build or rebuild on a lot less than 24 perches. Most of the lost were 10 to 12 perches. So you could not insure and could not raise a mortgage.
We changed the rules to allow building on small lots, and used the cleared land at the base to build a whole variety of medium density houses according to codes which we developed. I invented the word “Town house” along the way.
We built a few examples of “infill housing” on existing vacant small lots as demonstrations but did not really need to. I bought a house in Hepburn St myself and soon the whole place was thriving. Now the regulators have declared what was once a slum is now a Heritage Zone which means it will probably once again go into decline. They never learn.
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I don’t think that Freemans Bay will go back into decline Owen McShane; the gentrification process has not been reversed in any of the centres in which it has occurred over the last fifty years, and Freemans Bay completely falls in the category of a gentrified suburb.
Also, remember that Freemans Bay is close to the CBD – that would make it popular with commuters for whom time is extremely valuable.
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I can see rich corporates probably partially adapting this design in future buildings – perhaps around the edges, or just the ‘conventional’ roof-top design, but not the whole shebang.
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Is that…Amartya Sen frog? not sure
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One word. Light.
Plants need light. Shading from the floor above prevents light, prevents growth. End of Story.
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When I bought my house in Freemans Bay in 1972 it was essentially uninhabitable. I gutted the interior wet areas and built a new kitchen, bathroom and laundry and put storage in a mezzanine and added decks at the back. I went to the demolition yard and bought new fineals and fretwork etc.
Recently it has been declared a historic building. Goes right back to 1972.
The present heritage zoning means that if you buy a house there today you have to go through all sorts of handsprings to make ANY changes. Given that compliance costs are so high and even permits cost more now than it used to cost to build, why would you ‘invest’ in an old house in Freeman’s day.
I would never repeat what I did in 1972. I, like many, look for districts where I can buy a property and it still remains my own.
Costs have consequences.
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Owen How do we avoid the type of infill we have in Christchurch: 1960′s bungalow, paling fine and townhouse at the back. Or (for example) 6 small houses on a 1/2acre? site for pensioners so they get very little sun (1.8m from the north fence). While some say you shouldn’t try to pick winners the developers are providing the (only) choice here and it is based on ignoring the lack of sun and gaining on the extra unit. When we build these sort of places we are guaranteeing a sort of poverty. If one developer owned (by chance) the whole block, knocked down all the buildings then we could have some better outcome and if we ensured wise input from a state private sector partnership we could (perhaps) get the same result.
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Sadly, Christchurch, which used to be called the Garden city, has adopted the dense thinking policies of Smart Growth and hence has enabled a process which destroys their gardens.
The have strangled the city behind a Metropolitan Urban Limit and forced the kind of infill housing you describe rather than enforce reasonable site coverage rules. (This infill housing is driven by density goals – and has nothing to do with the goals we had when we developed infill housing formats for Freeman’s Bay. Density should never be a goal – just a measure.)
They are also encouraging developments of new tiny lots which cannot provide for the granny flats of old even though they are a great solution to the growing need for families to look after their aging parents. If I had my way all residential lots for single family houses would have sufficient space mapped out for a minor household unit. I actually spent much of my young adulthood in one for the same reasons as many grandparents now live in one – my parents had me nearby but not underfoot and I kept my jazz music and practise (drummer and base player) to myself.
The desire to clear blocks can lead down some unpleasant pathways. We have read with some discomfort how some of England’s town planners found the Blitz to be quite exhilerating. Hitler was their urban renewal agency.
And I learned in Houston that one of the great obstacles to the rehousing of the folk who lost their homes in New Orleans was that the planners insisted on setting new urbanist plans in place to replace the chaos (charm) of the old neighbourhoods. They actually went through five plans until the communities took control and decided they would rebuild. On the other hand 130,000 households migrated to nearby Houston which absorbed them all quicker than they rebuild in their own neighbourhoods. We often grant people powers to “do good” but such power is easily corrupting.
Oh, and dougT, it is a long time since the average household had 4 people. In these areas we are talking about it is closer to 2.2 or so.
And I do not understand how ecological footprint rises as section sizes shrink from 4 ha to 4000 sq metres. In fact because the 4ha needs to mowed with large tractor mowers etc, and because one spends too much at that to grow a decent garden I am sure that the one acre lot would have a smaller footprint.
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Freeman’s Bay isn’t entirely uniques. Te Aro Flat was also declared a slum after WWII. Fortunately the Ministry of Works decided it would have more chance of getting money for a motorway than for tower blocks so it designated the land as a motorway corridor. By the time it became obvious it wasn’t going to get the money for a motorway (in the ’70s) tower blocks had gone out of fashion and there wasn’t any money for them anyway either, so they old “slum” housing was never demolished.
Which led to the supreme irony of the anti-bypass campaign forcing motorists to pay a small fortune to preserve historic buildings that only existed because the motorway designation had protected them from ’50s & ’60s social planning.
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Owen, Christchurch’s Metropolitan Urban Limit (or green belt) is frequently mentioned in the 1963 Master Transport Plan. I’m surprised that the green belt only triggered infill housing after the final vestiges of the Master Transport Plan were cancelled when Transit was confronted with the RMA. In fact the St Albans Motorway corridor is now filled with townhouses. The land alongside the expressway that the Council built to relieve the traffic stress created by Transit’s actions is all being subdivided, albeit slowly as tthe areas is named Marshlands for a reason!
Far from the problem being caused by a restricted supply of land it is actually being caused by a restricted supply of roads. Without convenient connections between commercial/industrial areas and residential areas the tyranny of distance becomes a major factor in development decisions.
The Council’s deregulation of lot sizes has merely allowed the market to fulfil a need.
The solution to Christchurch’s in-fill “problem” isn’t to lift the cap on available land on the city fringes but simply to abolish the 66% cap on petrol taxes. It seems to be working in Auckland where the 85% cap was abolished in the mid-90s. Since then Auckland’s share of the petrol taxes it pays has risen from 80% to 150%. By constrast Canterbury’s share of it’s contributions to the Land Transport Fund has fallen from the 20th century average of 66% down to 45% for the next ten years. Cullen’s latest budget has essentially made this a legally binding maximum.
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The infill “problem” is two bungalows on a 1/4 acre (or less); old house +plus new house on the back. A poor result except for the builder who puts his daughter in it for 6 months and then sells it (I forget the rationale for that).
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I forgot the garage on the lawn.
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jh, If you don’t like it don’t buy it. Just be greatful that in the future the cost of replacing/quakeproofing your clapped out roads and watermains and sewers will be shared with up to twice as naby other ratepayers.
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“If you don’t like it don’t buy it.” The problem is that when decisions are made by the rule of the lowest common denominator (minimum in maximum out) the general tone of housing is lowered and with it choice. Up on the hill suburbs of Christchurch (for instance) the proportion of butchered properties is high (enjoy the view of the nieghbours dining room.. “ohh lovely..”).
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