Atlas City Project

www.verticalfarm.com/

We could also put residential units on one of the levels so a vertical farm could be the first building. Later when other residential buildings are build we could change that level back for farming.

He said to feed 50,000 people would require 5 acres of land 30 stories tall, this is based on each person eating 2,000 calories of food each day.

So 10 acres 15 stories tall if we do not want a huge skyscraper.

5,000 people 5 acres 3 stories tall.

10,000 people 5 acres 6 stories tall

Maybe this guy would donate his time to help us get one built, we could name the building after him.

When you are on that site there is a video on the bottom right titled Dickson Despommier on BigThink

When you click on it it will take you to another site with the video on it. Under the video are links to other great videos, please watch them all they are excellent.

www.verticalfarm.com/blog?135

This design seems best:

www.verticalfarm.com/designs?folder=a150915e-a6c5-41fa-b69a-49844c84e9a2

We could have a restaurant on 1st floor along with an area for people to pick up their free food to take home. Along with some residential units.

My first reaction to vertical farming is one of what a waste of building resources. We have land and so why not just use that.
In order for Vertical farming to make sense, you must see the shortcomings of the existing land based farming. Land farming has nothing wrong with it as long as you employ Permaculture style ideas to ensure sustainability. But thee is no incentive to do that financially at the moment.
But land farming does NOT use the correct methodology, and so vertical farming is used as a model to do it correctly. i say why not just do it correctly on land.
We are starting to see this as soil re-energising projects are happening in Australia for example. They destroyed the soil over years of abuse to the point that water would not hold in the soil and just go straight down to the water table.

Essentially we need to think like Terraforming. whatever farming we do must be a positive effect and not negative. Permaculture again can help.


For Vert farming i see 2 mistakes in logic:
1. It assumes a closed cycle loop. Bio generators are used to power it. That is the food scarps left over and human excretion. Well you wont get much energy out of the typically food waste coming from a vertical farm. Not enough hydrocarbons. If it was cattle then yes you would, but cattle consume huge amount of food.

2. The infrastructure start up for it is very high.
This can be solved however, but i dont see if happing for a long long time.

I prefer the logic of :
1. You build away from cities where land is very cheap . Probably in an agriculture area, where you can get rights to build. This is typically very hard in any country. But there are ways around it depending on the ordinance laws for each state, etc
2. You use land farming with permaculture.
3. You use robotics. This is of course a key to ramping up production synergistically with Perma-culture. If robot can do 90% of the dirty work it will be sustainable. There are ways to do this that peopel are working on

Vertical farming to me seems to be a smart thing for high density cities and places to far off the the equator to get enough sun energy. But its so energy intensive to build.

Either wya the whole idea is to close the enegy loop. you can do that by having the farming done close to thwere you live. But we can do that already.

I think when you step back from this you see the root of the whole problem.
The money system has forced the world population off the land and into big cities where you become dependent on the system. There are many reasons for this that are too time consuming to go into here. But its caused the supply chain loop of your existence to be externalised essentially. Bat at the end of the day its basically that we moved to a service based economy, and we needed to be where the jobs were, and so we all moved into the big cities and suburbs.

If you can close this supply chain loop down to be smaller and closer to you, you also save money. the reason you save money is because your saving energy.

Spreading the population back to the land with smaller satellite cities achieve this aim.

i just wanted to add to this train of logic.

Vertical farming is a solution to the symptom NOT the cause. The symptom being the high density living we are in, and a attempt to close the supply chain / energy loop to be local to where you live.
We are stuck with high density cities for 70% of the population, and its only increasing and so vertical farming IS a solution to that. But its going to be very expensive. The price of that land is astronomical to the commercial value it has. It just wont fly in todays money world. Its impossible.

The solution to the cause is to move out from cities and be sustainable about the way you farm. In China this is not possible because the land to person ratio.
But thats why the population of china needs to spread to the location where its is the opposite. That the actual solution , rather than just treating the symptoms.
Nationality and borders and immigration laws are the problem. The pressure on the economic model is already forcing this to happen. Gloabalisation is forcing stratification of populations. As the energy to GDP problem gets worse the population stratification will increase. It will be a tipping point of people "evacuating" out of cities i believe.

Atlas project can get cheap land away from urban cities and do smart sustainable farming. It wil be ahead of the curve !!

I know I posted this somewhere else, but take a look as some unique designs. These people just want it to happen, as we do with Atlas. There is great potential to get backing from them, plus financial backing is we rent out some space for producing company needs for a set amount of time.

I still don't think its financially or energy viable when compared to greenhouses or traditional crop rotations.
Let alone that the embodied energy of the famr is way too high.

Chase You bring up a good idea for income for the City, renting out space to companies. Here is an idea, we get companies like solar and wind to rent manufacturing space in Atlas. We give them free labor and in return Atlas also gets all the wind towers and solar panels and solar glass needed to run the City for free.

We can charge them less rent than anyone else would and they get free labor.

Another idea, instead of charging them rent for the land they use, they get it rent free, they have to build their own plant subject to our approvals, in return they must pay for the building of our vertical farm and/or a certain number of residential units. They must pay the property taxes for their building and land they are using. At the end of "lease" usually 20-30 years if they want to leave we get their building for free.

Or a combination of both - they pay some rent plus pay for some of our buildings etc.

As far as vertical farming main benefit is using less land, a 5 acre site 10 stories tall = 50 acres. Also less problems from bugs, weather, outsiders messing with crops, can have light 24 hours a day,mechanization.

Can still have permaculture outside. To start we may not be able to build vertical farms but definitely something to work towards.

Michael,

Interesting approach and creative.
Renting space to companies in order to allow them to build the cells with our labour.
But if i was a business man i would not let you have some of the solar cells unless the free rent and cells were of higher value than what rent and labour i already pay for.
It just would not make sense. A company thinks purely in terms of ROI.
But maybe it woudl work !! I am not sure though..


Vertical farm financial model .. thats a very smart idea.
SO they are getting the land for free, and paying for everything else.
I stiöl dont think from a ROi point of view they would go for it.

I think you need to layout whats in it for them !!!