Nice one, Adam; push those planners back into their boxes! Why would anyone want to see food production in the city, where we all know that "food" is manufactured in a grocery store, right?
I am not a rabid localvore; hell, I even eat at McD's once in a blue moon. But my parents raised much of our food in our suburban lawn when I was growing up (including hogs and chickens) and I learned the value of getting my hands dirty (or even bloody, when it came time to butcher our own meat).
There are blighted neighborhoods in most cities that will tend to be replaced with soon-to-be blighted neighborhoods. A little green rising up above the area might tend to inspire a different way of thinking. Schools could sponsor programs to bring in kids and teach them to be more connected to the cycle of life. But not if you have your way, right?

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Personally, rather than absurdly-priced high-rise farming, I'd prefer to see rooftop gardens, which would be used on existing structures, and are fairly simple in nature. But hey, that's just me, and nowadays, common sense need not apply...to anything, it seems.

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I actually think this is a great idea - let's produce food where food is needed... rooftop gardening would be my first choice, but this could also make sense as a closed-loop system that uses/cleans local wastewater, while providing local air quality benefits and jobs. Rooftop gardening might require a lot of retooling of roofs to accept additional loads, whereas if you designed a vertical system from the start using biomimetic design principles, who knows? It may turn out to be a great idea.

Basically, I think we need it all - decentralized (rooftop & urban gardens) mixed with some centralized solutions like this vertical farming.

Getting around the economic case in NYC is probably pretty tough, but maybe there are other cities where it could pan out, especially with a carbon tax.

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Start with those simple urban gardens that require ONLY carting some soil up to the level. That will result in a net positive, I think. Nothing fancy or fetishistic.

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Hello,
All change comes from mental revolution. Such as we have here. Yet, this is a revisit, I'm thinking to a past time when the knowledge was abundant on horto-activities. I cannot say this is a real enterprise if we have lost the key to the endevor. Growing house plants does not really equal growing food for profit, however it's designed. We've had the Bio-sphere; yet, ain't anyone building or buying 'em. An 'A' class building that has no carbon footprint, now that's something to sell and to buy. A great grade for the metal revolution; but, indeed it's a pigs fly thing.
thxs mac

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Actually, I this would work with a multiuse highrise where Stores, Busineses and Apartments/Condos are located - Think about it this way, devoting a few floors to farms/vegtable gardens could provide restaurants and residents with homegrown food, a garden type space for rest and relaxation areas, and an actual sense where food comes from. No need to devote a whole sky rise for this.

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I think in some applications this would be a solution. Especially where desertification is really taking a hold. What are we going to do west of the Mississippi when it reverts back to desert? All those millions of people living in that area are going to have to eat, right? Let's face it--not everyone is cut out to be a backyard gardener.

I think these things may have their place. It might come down to survival.

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Integrating vertical farms within housing / office / retail would be the most appropriate revision to these proposals and the most constructive criticism.

Just like Ethanol, Efficiency, Solar, Bio-mass, etc... are all components to a solution, so is the act of localized food production and self sufficiency (efficiency).

Putting ego's aside, these projects raise awareness and that is good... now lets have planners and architects integrate these ideas into real structures for real living for real people.

Segregation of land-use is what got us into this mess in the first place, let's not repeat it.

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When was "west of the Mississippi" desert? There's some obvious east-coast-centric thinking. Ever been "west" of the Mississippi?

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Forgive me for being so blunt, but there is a lot of emotion in this blog, but very little reason. Fine, we understand that you see this as a subset of fetish capital, a perversion of something perverse. But, you really don't give any reasonable arguments as to why this idea should be so unceremoniously deposited on the curb with the week's recyclings.

Okay, so you are concerned that the idea is not economically sound. Isn't that the one thing that will most certainly be resolved quickly? Don't you, as a representative of TerraPass, have enough faith in the modern economic marketplace's ability to at least be able to price this in sensible ways ? It might not be a great idea to put your food farm on Central Park West, but it might prove to be entirely sensible to put one in East New York. There's also another point that perhaps is worth making - I don't know exactly how much my backyard garden is going to net me, but, I know that if managed properly, it will, with certainty, provide me with three things - security, a sense of empowerment, and food. The definition of the economics of my garden includes things more than money. Human's are imminently practical, and in our competitive species, the best ideas ALWAYS win in the end (yes, even accepting the tautology).

Your principal disagreement with the idea seems to be economic (essentially, land is too expensive in the cities to make urban farms economically viable), using Brooklyn and Manhattan as your examples. The city with the most expensive real estate in the country seems like a skewed starting point. There is definitely only one New York City, and no city in the country like it. But, there are many cities in this fine country that are a lot like Cleveland, or Portland OR, with lots of space, a strong sense of community values, and an engaged populace. Hundreds of millions of dollars does not sound like a lot of money to me, and of course, these numbers don't really mean anything until you start to build for real. As someone who worked in finance for 12 years, I am fairly certain that urban farms won't launch, nor will they succeed, unless they are economically viable and environmentally sustainable. Technology, of course, could very much influence economic viability (imagine broadcasting pictures of every plant, so that any community experts can diagnose a problem before it becomes a problem), and that analysis seems like a very worthwhile thing to do.

So, you're afraid that these high-rise farms will be weird, poorly sited uses of land that would be better suited to dense, green residential and retail space. What if they weren't weird, but were unique and specific, beautiful, artistic, reflective of the community and what it stands for? What if they were co-operative, engendering a distinct sense of involvement and shared-ownership? What if they weren't that large, but were zoned, and maybe designed to be replicated in many places throughout a city, so that neighborhoods could manage their own food production while furthering a symbolic sense of community (the neighborhood food bank)? And under what circumstances is urban land always "better suited to dense, green residential and retail space?" That's like suggesting we make more Priuses because the cars we have now are inefficient.

You see, I think people are vastly more malleable and flexible than we give ourselves credit for. The reason why we are more flexible than any other species is because we make choices in an environment where co-operation has created ever-more sophisticated living arrangements. The idea marketplace that underpins that progress generates vastly more ideas than solutions, but it also means you spend a lot less time trying to turn the bad ideas into good solutions.

Finally, I would suggest that if you are going to make a broad-based appeal to all of your readers to support a particular policy approach (in this case, carbon taxes), that you provide arguments for that policy approach. What does a carbon tax give me that makes it vastly superior to the idea of high-rise urban farming? Why can't I support both ideas? From my vantage point, complex systems need complex rules, and very definite and transparent goals. A carbon tax seems like a great idea, but it doesn't seem to have the force to mitigate all of the challenges that we are beginning to confront, simply because its a simple solution to a complex problem. It might be a start, or a component, but it is hard to imagine a magic bullet slaying all of these beasts.

Similar arguments have been made, with reasonably good potency about regulation. If we had the right regulations, our bureaucracies would do the rest. Of course, even ignoring the obvious value of regulation in today's mortgage apocalypse, you don't have to go too far from the idea to see that there is an absurdity and naivete in putting our faith in our governing bodies rather than putting our faith in each other.

Again, apologies if my arguments are stated with a lack of dexterity. I mean no disrespect,

Kind regards,

Chris Biscoe
l

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I was surprised to even see the word dumb in a terrapass article - it seems unduly disrespectful toward someone who in their own way is trying to come up with a viable solution to problems that likely will compound over time.

I agree that rooftop gardens are a great idea, but what happens to them when we start losing more bees or the number of scorching hot days and.or hurricanes increase? I live in a suburb with a driveway for a yard where I container farm some blueberries and vegetables, but I have neither the knowledge or the time to invest in more than I'm doing to take care of my meager crop when/if these things occur. I have three children to tend, a job, and I spend what's left trying to work to improve my conservation efforts and volunteering. I grew up in a city where there was more than enough inexpensive space for building - some places they can barely give away - I think this is a great idea for guaranteeing food in case of any disasters that may occur from either pollution or climate change. I would be great if it integrated low-income housing and offered jobs to the people living there.

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The reasons these farms would never work should be obvious: they don't make any more light hit the ground. While such a vertical farm would be able to snag a bit of their neighbor's light along the walls (and the neighbors would do the same in return if their buildings were as tall), at best you could hope for no more than a several-fold increase in captured light per acre. This is simply geometry.

Three acres in Iowa are orders of magnitude cheaper than a fancy one-acre building in NYC, and always will be.

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I don't know why you're so hostile to this idea. The cost to the environment of moving the food into high density areas is huge. What if individual high rise communities set aside small "farming" areas and created more sustainable communities? It's an amenity that would attract some buyers more than a useless pool!

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Urban gardens can help reduce Urban heat Island effect and besides cooling the city, also reduce pollution and CO2 emissions as well as reduce runoff. Yeah, city property is expensive so it wont work in some cities, however, it will work in smaller cities especially in developing countries. Finally, we may start getting more birds and butterfies in cities which was once their habitat too, so i am FOR urban gardening and farming.

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"Rather than a substantive solution, vertical farms seem like a cosmetically appealing quick fix that in reality will only make the problem worse."

Here's something that separates fashionable environmentalism from real environmentalism. There are, unfortunately, a large number of so-called environmentalists who are in it more for the coolness factor than saving the earth. They memorize the environmental talking points from some website, completely ignore the issues like economics and human nature, and never bother to question their beliefs or have an original thought. Many Hollywood celebs fit this mold, with their mansions that use as much energy as a city block, their bottled water consumption, their private jets, etc. My neighbor fits this mold: he just traded in his 35mpg 2004 Toyota Corolla for a 42mpg Toyota Prius. The Prius is now a rite-to-passage among many environmentalists. My neighbor never even considered that he could have had a lot smaller footprint by keeping his "old" car. But "real footprint" is not as important to him as "perceived footprint". Yep, he's now a star among his enviro-chic friends.

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A lot of good points have been made on both sides. I think it's good -- maybe even crucial -- that we're beginning to explore these kinds of ideas now, and here's why.

I live in San Francisco, just a few hours' drive from California's Central Valley, where much of the world's produce is grown. That fertile land is very quickly being turned into housing developments and strip malls. In 20 or 30 years, where will we grow our food?

By the time the vertical farm concept is ready for prime time, we'll need it.

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I'm sorry, but we are casually wading into muddy water with nothing but flip flops and a snorkel here.

"Terrible way to reduce carbon emissions"
"Huge waste of money"
"It will always be possible to grow crops more cheaply in actual fields than in urban centers"

These are big statements, floating out there without the slightest hint of substantiation. Maybe I am missing completely some critical argument, or, your assumptions about what it means to concentrate and systematize are different from mine, but the only way that I can infer massively higher incremental costs in the cities (as opposed to factory farming in the suburbs, where high technology supports hectares of flat, sprawling product), is through the disproportionate cost of the land. Land is expensive, but urban farms become, like McDonalds, beneficiaries of the perennial trend towards real estate appreciation. In addition, if the urban farms have to compete with product from outside of the cities, the urban farm product will have to either differentiate itself on price or quality, but the market will not tolerate a lesser bargain.

Accordingly, I think you are ignoring the obvious economies of scale that can be found in building up. The benefits of being in a highly concentrated place like New York city that make it 30% more efficient (and carbon efficient) than a typical suburb is representative of the same economies of scale. And its why factories worked so well in Brooklyn, and why this idea could really work well in Cleveland or Portland. Concentrating people, and ideas, closely together creates all kinds of opportunities to do things better.

It's allowable to suppose that spreading water, energy, nutrients, manpower (think of collection) over a large farm is costly and labor inefficient and might be done better by an engineer in the city, refining the community garden concept to capture these economies of scale through centralized efficiencies. Using heat more effectively, using cooling more efficiently, distributing nutrients, monitoring illness...all of this can be done in a factory when the right rules and procedures are applied. And in the end, maybe ownership is placed in lot Q45475 on the 3rd floor of building B - "my food comes from my plot".

Bottom line - I don't know if this idea works, and there are certainly many ways for something like this to be a colossal failure, but equally there seems there is much more worth exploring here than your dismissive and unsubstantiated position implies. It was my hope to get you just to open your mind a little and think about "how to make it work" rather than "why its a bad idea", but getting you to articulate why you think its a bad idea seems like a reasonable start.

Regards,

Chris

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Comment #8 about desertification deserves a reply. It's a wonder you missed it. We're not all urban dwellers.

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We all need to acknowledge that the vast majority of the well-intentioned proposed solutions will be viable **somewhere** even though it may appear impractical (or even insane) to most people. Each location faces their own unique challenges which drives their own sustainable development priorities. Therefore, making any kind of firm generalized statement on what would work and wouldn't work is problematic at best.

One possibility exists that may be of interest to you all. The use of hydroponics (and aquaculture even more recently) is actually becoming a profitable business model with numerous benefits including exponentially greater harvest yield in much less time, often without use of pesticides. With aquaculture, fishes are another source of profit. However, as I understand it, the aquaculture concept has not been perfected just yet for widespread commercial implementation. It would be interesting to see if the difference in weight due to absence in soil would make it possible to implement more urban gardens on the roofs or as green islands throughout the buildings (i.e., reduce stress level of the employees). I would imagine this working well in rain-prone regions with rainwater capture technology (Seattle, perhaps?). I thought of setting up a small hydroponics garden even though I am an apartment dweller but the numbers did not add up for MY situation.

All this said, I concur with the key points made by both camps here. I especially appreciate the well-articulated points made by Chris. It is not appropriate for the TerraPass blog to criticize any proposed ideas. After all, we face a dire situation and we need all ideas on the table so we can get to the work of refining them for individual situations. We need multiple silver bullets... just one is not going to cut it.

TerraPass, please keep up the good work highlighting the promising ideas though; you are helping us get there, one idea at a time!

Sincerely,
Jesse Dubler
UC San Diego

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I really want to see this project succeed because I think this is could be a solution to are rising food shortage…I am trying to get the first working tower built: http://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/vertical-farm-in-new-york-city

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we might have to have plans like this if we keep bulldozing over the ag lands that provide our precious, vital sustainance. But, rooftop gardens/solar panels on every rooftop is a easy start I concur.

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Folks, I want to re-iterate my point from earlier. THIS PROJECT CAN NEVER WORK. NEVER EVER EVER.

Farming is all about harvesting SUNLIGHT. This building cannot make any more sunlight hit the ground. Period. Any floors except the top floor will be shaded by the one above, receiving minimal light except for right along the walls/windows. Have you ever noted how close you have to sit most houseplants to your windows, or noticed how slowly indoor plants grow? The same principle applies here.

You wouldn't get much more food out of any of the structures pictured than out of a standard greenhouse, which costs a tiny fraction of the price. And don't even think about using artificial lights, which would be powered either by fossil fuels (bad) or by about 10 acres of solar for every acre of indoor farm (assuming 10% efficiency of the panels -> grid? -> light element system).

There is a reason farms are all sprawled out: they HAVE to be, by the very nature of what they are...light harvesting machines.

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Sorry Adam, but you don't come across clearly on why you oppose this plan from an environment perspective. Maybe the plan will be a financial flop. Maybe the farming side of it is flawed. But, lets say that these two potential problems don't manifest themselves. Then, environmentally, how is it bad? Perhaps you could elucidate on your analogy of the corn ethanol.

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How about a small step in a green direction? There are plenty of office buildings - high-rise and not so high - that contain plants. Why not encourage businesses and individuals to throw out the ficus and bring in tomatoes? It sends the message that we can move beyond decorative to making a difference one small step at a time. Lots of people feel little or no connection to "farming" and a nudge in the direction of tending a useful plant could begin to turn things around. It would help people discover their inner farmer. The vertical farms will come later - perhaps - but we can make a start right where we are. *Judging by the blender video, you boys could use some green in your office!*

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Question: So a apparently buildings are responsible for 40% of green house emissions, and livestock are responsible for 50% of emissions (according to a post in the previous story). So I guess everything else: cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, factories, power plants, etc. account for the other 10%. Or have green house gases now passed the 100% mark?

Come on, folks. I don't mean to be hard on you, but let's get our statistics in order. Is there a good resource that breaks down all the emissions and their percent contribution? I hope there is, since there are a lot of climate models depending on that sort of data.

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I saw one of the people that on colbert.

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As a green building professional in NYC, I have to say that I agree completely with this column. The NY Times has done a good job reporting on the new interest in CSAs, which I find are immensely more economical and environmentally friendly. I get a box of fresh, organic veggies each week from a small farm on Long Island, and I love it.

Community gardens and green roofs are great, but they're not a solution to our country's eating disorder or to climate change. Furthermore, no developer is going to spend $200M on a vertical farm and site it in an area that needs revitalization. It is money that could have far greater impact if spent on something else.

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Just to follow-up on the sunlight issue, it takes about 1.2 acres of arable land per person to maintain the current American dietary standards (http://dieoff.org/page40.htm). If we take the case of Lincoln Nebraska, the current population density is about 5 people per acre. While sunlight is not the only limiting factor, it is by far the largest. Building vertically does not improve your light capture by much. Even if we reduce our footprint (eat less meat, etc.) there just isn't enough area in a city to capture enough sunlight to feed its population.

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Perhaps we can invert the question and get a richer understanding as to why this idea polarizes so much. What if we ask the question like this:

If Urban farming was something that human beings felt that they "had" to do (for whatever reason), how could we make it work?

Before we got to that point, we would have to drill deeper - why would anyone do it? If there was no valid answer to "why?", you can probably dismiss it. But there probably will be "why's" compelling this decision that go far beyond the presumed moral greenwashing from which many people understandably recoil. Our cities might become sanctuaries, resources strained to the point where localization becomes a requirement; or we might find our former heartlands are no longer able to produce the bounty they once could (just think - drought, dust bowls, pestilence - that stuff is not just science fiction). It's easy to imagine why's...

And answering why also dramatically changes the economics. Under today's conditions, and compared to modern farming, High-Rise farming seems almost silly, or futopian in a quaint way - it probably doesn't make sense to expend enormous resources converting our agriculture to be more urban - right now. But if something, say, severe weather shifts, exposed a heretofore non-existent risk to our food cycle, affecting the fertility of the grain belt, for example, we have a very different set of motivations (and a profound shift in price and cost).

some reasons for doing it:
community - we humans have an instinct to congeal, to break into groups, as a way of solving problems. that has the potential to be a very unappealing solution (like a walled feudal city to keep out the barbarians), or a really interesting and cool thing (like a kibbutz, utopian farm, whatever). Cities are just modern manifestations of that need to come together. If conditions become strained in society, people will congeal in ways that beg for new solutions to critical problems (water, food, sewage)

efficiency - Steven Johnson points out eruditely in Ghost Map, human excrement has tremendous value as fertilizer. Combining the idea of waste utilization with urban farming and applying that to a city context opens up some interesting possibilities

security - farms are huge and require enormous resources to maintain. They are vulnerable to weather, to vandals and terrorists, to pests, and they are subject to the vicissitudes of the price of oil, of steel, of the availabilty fertilizer, the supply of migrant workers, to say nothing of the risk of frost, wind, fire, flooding

connections - our food model has worked because of oil. But that model is also pushing us dangerously close to global calamity, suffering, instability and challenges that are all going to require a rethink in how we live.

Other arguments
The sun argument has merit, but it can be counter-balanced. Where we get the sun we need for farming is somewhat irrelevant, we just need the light. Of course, replicating the sun would have to be roughly equivalent in cost to farming, and the present efficiencies of solar panels are inhibiting, but solar costs, and solar efficiencies are seeing more vitality than they have in twenty or thirty years. However, assuming higher solar yields from photovoltaics (and they are coming), than concentrating the high-labor intensity food farming into smaller areas and spreading out the low labor intensity solar farming might make sense.

Don't forget, farms are expensive too. There is a reason why big ag is one of the nations largest industries - modern farming requires massive economies of scale, and a very vertical business model that allows price efficiencies throughout the food lifecycle to translate to dirt cheap food. This requirement for concentration and extreme economies of scale, leads to the agriculture industry being one of the largest single influencers to government policy. People might decide one day that they want that to change...

Finally, Urban farms don't necessarily have to be new buildings! Maybe you just retrofit an existing building.

The overall point that I want to make is that to be flippant and dismissive of these types of ideas is to suffer a severe paucity of imagination. There simply might be reasons for doing something like an urban farm outside of the feel good factor:

people might need to commune like this because disease, war or pestilence threatens them from many sides
people might choose to do so as a way of connecting themselves to their lifestyles in much more immediate ways
as we Rethink how we live, we might find manifold benefits to growing our food closer to us

And there are some clearly interesting substantiating arguments for urban farms. A farm in a building would be :
Capable of growing 24 hours and ensuring consistent and appropriate light
Protected from wind and rain, from most pestilence (but, of course, not all), and therefore, require much less pesticides
All-season (capable of working through winter)
much easier to protect from theft or terrorism
a profound source of clean and filtered air!
easy to access for employees (they don't have to drive very far to get there).
easier to control, maintain, and harvest, because everything would be concentrated and systematized

Of course, there are excellent reasons for us to pause before funding this type of project, and everyone on this thread are right to point out the concerns. However, I hope at least a cogent enough of an argument to suggest to everyone that there are ideas worth exploring here, if only as an interesting thought experiment. I struggle to understand why there is such a visceral reaction to something that has so many obvious merits, and as this thread demonstrates, at least a plurality of interest from us

Chris Biscoe

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Although it was so long that I have to confess to only skimming it, I think that Chris Briscoe's response just above asks a critical question that also hints at what I was trying to hint at in my earlier post: unless something changes, we will HAVE to consider any and all possibilities for food production, regardless of how ridiculous they seem now.

Why?

Because the biggest barrier to sustainability is the one that no one wants to talk about because there aren't any politically correct ways to address it.

Population.

Our population is growing wildly out of control, and will continue to do so until we either expand beyond earth or choke and die on our own waste. Our belief that we all have the right to reproduce as much as we want is going to be our downfall.

I know this is going to be an unpopular statement, but if you try to look at it from a scientific perspective, our current population and its growth are pretty scary.

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Well, I was wondering how long it would take someone to metaphorically "punch" someone else in the nose.

I'll take that punch in the nose, because clearly the idea can be reframed in ways that make it illuminating, interesting, sensible and worth discussing.

Your ad hominem attack serves to illustrate a point I made in the first post. Your emotions are coloring your ability to see the other side's views. Its as if you "hate" this idea, because you think it "makes no sense", and therefore, you "hate" the idea that others might find it compelling.

I don't know if the idea works - however, I think it is really interesting idea (maybe its just little ol' uninterestin' me). The prism through which I look says that there are very real and practical concerns that raise legitimate concerns about the viability of this idea, but there are enough interesting arguments there (see other posts) to discuss how to make this work using economics, markets, ingenuity and creativity.

I guess as a blogger, you would rather not have that type of discussion, so distracting it would be from your ability to impose upon the world how right you are.

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I think Chris does make some interesting points. Filtering through his arguments, the points about use of human excrement as fertilizers and employee accessibility are pertinent from an environment perspective. Question is: Are they cogent enough?

On the whole, I think I side with Adam because considering all possibilities and options, this plan of vertical farms doesn't seem to be an answer to the specific problem of 'food' carbon print. It may however, solve some future problems (food productivity, security and all). At the moment though, to me, the issue really is this: In a world that's still warming up to the idea of global warming intruding into every aspect of personal well-being -food included- perhaps it's too early to worry about the more peripheral problems that vertical farms address, especially when we're still far from reaching a sustainable food-environment paradigm.

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Hello,
Comments 23 and 32 are valid; yet, many minds speak many truths. New York has a large green belt. Put the family farms there, if you chose, roof top as well; but an 'A' class building that has no footprint now that's engineering. How many of you Citizens have gardens, grow corn on your balcony; it's about what can be done at an arm's reach-isn't really? Huge capital investments require return or why do it? The design is a beauty, maybe the middle east, you know were they have those wonderful islands shaped like the world. Pressing issues excluded in this 'growing food' for the masses dialog; is the seed and enslavement circle the seed producers have on current farming operations. If the vertical farms fail do the buildings belong to seed producers? A crop duster trying to provide service could fun to watch (only joking). Change comes from the small steps to the market. Engage a small plot of your own. If none are avaiable ask your elected officials why. Before there is grass there is the roots. Great looking buildings and we do need great buildings to look at.
thxs mac

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I find Chris' posts very objective and stimulating. While I agree with Adam that vertical farming does seem to be quite a fanciful solution at this point in time, I also agree with Chris (and other posters) that our climate could drastically change someday. If our planet's climate does become extremely inhospitable (I can't help but picture the world of the film "Soylent Green"), then healthy, productive farmland could someday reach a higher price than climate-controlled, indoor farm buildings. Yes, this proposal sounds like science-fiction and will probably not occur in our lifetime. However, if the designers of vertical farms continue to tweak and perfect their ideas, their research and conclusions may be relevant to a future generation. At worst, vertical farms are an interesting thought-experiment; at best, they represent an acknowledgement of, and potential solution for, human overpopulation in a changing, unpredictable climate.

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Fran, vertical farms will probably help alleviate farming issues when the drastic climate changes you talked about materialize.

I think Adam's arguments are made with the assumption that at this of time, we are predominantly focussed on preventing those very climate changes from occurring, or atleast on mitigating whatever damage is being done. And vertical farms are definitely not the best approach in that regard; although like Chris mentioned, they would probably come into the picture if Soylent Green does become reality, which cannot be ruled out of course.

Nobody is complaining if this novel concept remains a matter of research and experimentation presently. What is not congenial is for it to take centre-stage as a means of reducing carbon emissions relating to agriculture.

(Personally, I think if one really cares about the environment, he/she ought to go Vegan; seeing how animal agriculture is so harmful to the environment in myriad ways, and that our body needs no animal products for healthful sustenance. In a Vegan world, the subject of this post would be redundant for a good while atleast, and we would buy us a lot more time to save this planet.)

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As a design professional with a close involvement with urban land-use issues I agree with Adam 100%. Urban agriculture - good. Low-impact horizontal open space that refreshes the soul as it feeds the belly. Vertical farms, on the other hand - ridiculous. Sorry guys but the king is wearing no clothes. You can't grow healthy food in a parking garage for vegetables.

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Your analogy is stupid. Corn ethanol is inherently bad for the environment and there exist much better solutions to transportation. Vertical farms can be made efficient. You have to separate cost from efficiency. Vertical farms may be costly but they are not necessarily inefficient. Vertical farms have a high upfront cost but they save money in the long term by reducing the cost of transportation and wasting of water and nutrients.

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Adam Stein
I am appalled. Not because of your opinion (which is valid), but because it is poorly argued and not substantiated by fact. I would expect anyone who writes something for others to read to present a rational, logical argument. The internet is not a dumping ground for uneducated rants (or it least it shouldn't be) especially on a legitimate and supposedly professional website.

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