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Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?
IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it's technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.
it works pretty well for some kinds of produce - bushes/lettuce, fungus, root vegetables, etc but fails for other things (tree nuts, fruit, corn/grain, etc).
the benefit is that you can use existing infrastructure like high density residential/skyscraper buildings so there's potentially less distance between farm & table
Honestly for me I think if we could grow grain vertically this would've been something we all jumped on
Love it, but it has pretty niche utility.
It's great for improving frest fruit/vegetable access in small urban communities, without massive transportation costs and preservative use.
Also very cool for small, isolated environments like ocean voyages and space, where production space is severely limited.
And extremely interesting from an ecological perspective when combined with a full circle microsystem, as in aquaculture.
But overall, it remains wildly inefficient for large scale agriculture needs.
Look’s like something you’d build in Minecraft.
Lower part of my garden receives less sunlight. So I will have to raise the bed up. My concern is not grains but vegetables and herbs. I don’t believe I can justify growing grains in the garden. What I have to experiment next season is if raising the whole table is better (more soil) or use stacking to raise the height(vertical farming).
In the picture shown here, do the roots go out of the individual baskets and into a pool of water?
it doesn't scale and it's limited in what crops it can grow.
Everything is limited in what crops it can grow, if we can maximize the productivity of space in semi urban areas then we can use the other space for crops that best suit it - grains are great for distant rural farms because they store so well, same with potato, etc where you can fill a huge truck and drive into the city once every season but stuff like greens and herbs lose so much after only a few days from being picked so you either need expensive chilling or other processing or a small lorry taking a load every few days which really isn't a great way of doing anything
I fail to see what the pillar provides over just having a bunch of plants in a wire rack or shelves, beyond automating the act of watering -- which there are already better ways to do anyway, ones that don't involve having a bizarre, potentially-maintenance-heavy solution like what the pillar presents... or you could just water your plants by hand.
As such, this pillar feels like an entirely unnecessary thing. They've reinvented shelves, with watering. Loud shelves, because that contraption must make noise. They're not even good shelves. I'll just take regular shelves, thanks, and a watering can.
OP's example is the wrong way to do it as they water plants in soil, there are plenty of hydroponic towers that you can 3d print and what they do is allow you to have hydroponics (growing plants in water) with very little space requirement so that works great in small gardens or appartment balconies.
Sure. But still, why a tower? Even at their best, towers are just shelves that require more floorspace.
A tower design like in the OP's picture allows separating the humid root-space from the general work environment which has some practical advantages and I guess also lowers the risk of fungal infections of the roots.
With drought being more common than ever and increasingly so, I believe vertical farming is necessary. It's much more water efficient than open fields. Also, we need more forest instead of fields to keep a sustainable biodiversity.
However, currently it's only possible for certain kinds of plants to grow in vertical farms.
Another interesting developing method is agrivoltiac farming. We're going to see more of that sooner than vertical farming.
Geography, geography, geography. It completely depends on where you live. Remember, climate change doesn’t just mean hot and dry. Some places will get dry, some will get wet. There will be winners and losers.
It sounds like a good idea for the crops in which it can be a solution for. I was thinking of ordering my own vertical garden for mushroom variety.
THEY EXIST FOR MUSHROOMS???? Please do send a link of the one you buy I am extremely curious to see it
A lot of mushroom farms put mushie blocks on racks, but that's because it's just kinda the best way to optimize for the limited space available in a lot of cases. After all, you have to control the humidity, temps, and possible contam vectors so that you maximize your harvest. If you're curious, look up mossy creek mushrooms on youtube, think they have a tour of their growing setup.