I hope you mean permaculture. Vertical farming is a kind of accounting scam where you optimize the land usage parameter and conveniently leave out the giant amount of energy required to replace the sun's light indoors for each plant.
There's nothing wrong with rooftop gardens, or window gardening, or infill horticulture. Panels of algae will probably do the job too if you're willing to eat it. But growing plants without the sun only makes sense if they're plants you need to hide.
You could do vertical farming in an open-air structure (if the area has good weather) or one with windows that don't block UV rays if you wanted more climate control. I don't think it makes sense for everything but it could be a part of the urban landscape.
Right, but the claims of "this practice will revolutionize agriculture" are basically converting office space in skyscrapers to hydroponics and stuff. To get enough sunlight to grow, you'd need each story's height to be greater than one of the horizontal dimensions, and even then you wouldn't get optimal sunlight. In other words, you really can't do it in a compact building; you either need an incredibly skinny structure that has a high ratio of building materials to square footage, or to restrict use to roofs and equator-facing walls.
The good news is that with polycultures (which are harder to mechanize and somewhat labor-intensive), rooftop farming, window gardening, and mandated density, you can probably feed a temperate city of 200,000 with just the land within the radius of a bike commute from it (5-10 miles beyond city limits). So the wilderness would be a lot closer than that 30-minute train ride.
I hope you mean permaculture. Vertical farming is a kind of accounting scam where you optimize the land usage parameter and conveniently leave out the giant amount of energy required to replace the sun's light indoors for each plant.
There's nothing wrong with rooftop gardens, or window gardening, or infill horticulture. Panels of algae will probably do the job too if you're willing to eat it. But growing plants without the sun only makes sense if they're plants you need to hide.
You could do vertical farming in an open-air structure (if the area has good weather) or one with windows that don't block UV rays if you wanted more climate control. I don't think it makes sense for everything but it could be a part of the urban landscape.
Right, but the claims of "this practice will revolutionize agriculture" are basically converting office space in skyscrapers to hydroponics and stuff. To get enough sunlight to grow, you'd need each story's height to be greater than one of the horizontal dimensions, and even then you wouldn't get optimal sunlight. In other words, you really can't do it in a compact building; you either need an incredibly skinny structure that has a high ratio of building materials to square footage, or to restrict use to roofs and equator-facing walls.
The good news is that with polycultures (which are harder to mechanize and somewhat labor-intensive), rooftop farming, window gardening, and mandated density, you can probably feed a temperate city of 200,000 with just the land within the radius of a bike commute from it (5-10 miles beyond city limits). So the wilderness would be a lot closer than that 30-minute train ride.
Unfortunately, all I can do is fantasize about such a wonderful future.