I came across a fairly interesting post on the Daily Mail (UK), which talked a little about how we could potentially build “Skyscraper farms”. Basically, they’d look something like this:
The idea is to harness as little land as possible, while maximizing food production. It’s an idea that makes sense, if you consider the reports that we’re running out of arable land, and will need to find alternate ways to produce food soon. Some of the obvious benefits of erecting a few hundred of these could be:
- More food (err … lol)
- Efficient use of land in ideal climate conditions (1 tower = approx. 590 acres of farmland)
- Transport costs reduced
- More control = less chance of crop failure
- The towers themselves could house the farmers
- Cleaner air (these are plants after all).
There are just a few problems with this. The first would be the cost - an estimated R679 million to construct, and R41 million/year to run. For some perspective: The entire “Water and Agriculture” budget in SA (R31.4bn in 2008) could build and maintain 43 of these per year, and not spend a cent on anything else. 43 skyscrapers = 25′370 acres of productive land. SA currently spends that R31bn on maintaining our 34.6 million acres of arable land.
Bottom line: It’s 1400 times more expensive, acre for acre, than traditional agriculture.
Secondly - location. These things are supposed to be constructed in limited space, and the only place that you’d find that necessity is inner cities. Inner cities are also incredibly polluted. The wind doesn’t blow in CT for one day, and you can see that ugly haze hanging over the city.
Imagine trying to grow crops in that. One of the reasons farms find themselves so far away from cities is because the air is cleaner (and the land is cheaper). And any sort of filtration system will need to constantly cycle the air, to introduce new carbon dioxide (so that the plants can actually grow) - might as well just have farms, you know.
Currently, we’re not using all our available arable land, and the land that we’re using, we’re using inefficiently. When we run out of that, there’s always hydroponics (growing plants in water). And when we run out of space for either, there’s a massive ocean out there.
Launch a fleet of barges powered by solar/wave power, give ‘em desalinization plants, hydroponic bays, and let them grow food. 0% land use, far from pollution, automated, as green as possible. That’s the sort of solution we should be looking for - not building fancy multi-million dollar skyscrapers in already-crowded cities that’ll only be massive drains on the local power and water grids.
That’s my idea, anyway. Generally, most people have ideas on how to solve world hunger/disease/Sarah Palin - I’d love to hear them ;)
