It's a shame that they didn't mention the negative effects of pesticides on the soil and environment.

For example there are pesticides that damage the soil and earthworms so badly that the soil becomes infertile.

I really want to see a serious commitment from developed nations on vertical farming though. You can eliminate so many issues, from water use, land use, and most of the transport problems - the office building next door could be a farm....and of course you don't need pesticides if you are growing things in a controlled environment.

We could give so much land back to mother nature. And perhaps we would stop losing 200 species of plants/animals each day.

At least they acknowledged that eating plants of any kind is more environmental than eating animal products. That's something we can all strive for ourselves. But it will require some government intervention or some really good start ups to start vertical farming. Where are my Tesla potato farms? :-)

I think corn would be doable, but the advantages would be less efficient compared to short plants.

At some level of efficiency, there is a break even point (which can also take into consideration shipping costs and fossil fuel usage to major metro areas). I'm pretty convinced that vertical farming could be a significantly good / efficient idea for those plants that it is best suited for, but I do think there would be some early-adoption issues that would make it less practical for tall stuff like corn. At least until it has been done enough to work out the kinks and economy of scale kicks in.

So at least for the time being, I think we'll see it first be applied to leafy plants and tuber / root plants. But I could definitely be a biased opinion since my family revolves around conventional corn farming on irrigated fields...

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

China's selective pregnancy policy and the Holocaust are why people tend to want to dispel hype about overpopulation.

You either have to force 7 billion people to stop fucking.. [good luck]
Or murder like 6 billion people.. every 300 years.

Notice how I said carrying capacity is "at least" 10 billion.
Its maximum is probably closer to 16-20 billion. Maybe even 40 billion.

This last billion took a year long to reach than the billion before which means population is leveling off as we discuss this. It may even decline below 7 billion in another 300 - 600 years.

TL;DR

Overpopulation hype = Dec 21 2012 hype. Humans well within carrying capacity.

Stop driving Hummers, watering golf courses, and eating fast food and everyone will be healthy and happy.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

Fuck, as a matter of fact Genji, you're right. We could probably get that number up to a hundred-billion if we just covered the entire surface of the Earth with vertical farms and thorium reactors.

Fuck, as a matter of fact Genji, you're right. We could probably get that number up to a hundred-billion if we just covered the entire surface of the Earth with vertical farms and thorium reactors.

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/criticalthud" title="member since February 15th, 2010" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#008800">criticalthud You might check out what level of Vertical farming you can integrate. Seems like a great use of land resource, though would tend to seem more backbreaking. I also haven't read how feasible a world wide solution this is, as there is only so much soil that is farm worthy. That said, if we could make crappy soil good soil with exposure to the sun, perhaps there is something to it...beyond my knowledge though(I only know how to keep good soil from going bad, no get bad soil good).


cool! yes and we are looking at farms like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng

@criticalthud You might check out what level of Vertical farming you can integrate. Seems like a great use of land resource, though would tend to seem more backbreaking. I also haven't read how feasible a world wide solution this is, as there is only so much soil that is farm worthy. That said, if we could make crappy soil good soil with exposure to the sun, perhaps there is something to it...beyond my knowledge though(I only know how to keep good soil from going bad, no get bad soil good).

@Sniper007

Eating locally won't help you when you have a local disaster. You missed the point. If everyone is using the maximum available land, nobody has extra food to help when someone else has a shortage.

As to deforestation, and climate change, the whole planet's system is self balancing. More CO2, means faster and stronger the vegetation growth which in turn produces more O2 at a faster rate. More CO2 for humans means shorter life spans, which means less population growth. There is no ability for human intervention to change this global balancing act.


CO2 has more than one effect on the planet. Even if you assume that plants grow faster and stronger with more CO2 (which is bullshit since they need nutrient food in the soil as well...CO2 is just one part of photosynthesis), CO2 is still a greenhouse gas. Furthermore, when the atmosphere is heavy in CO2, it also causes the ocean to become more acidic, which affects all sorts of ocean life, and therefore the food chains which we rely on. You're right to say that the world is self-balancing, but wrong to assume that human survival is automatic no matter what we do.

Maybe the world's limit is 30 billion if people are, as you say, crammed into cities, and the rest of the world is farmed. MAYBE, just MAYBE, that's NOT the most efficient way of living! Maybe people have minds of their own, that they can put to good use to produce their own food on their own land with their own hands as they desire.


No, look. Of course people have minds of their own. I don't see anyone saying anything to the contrary. You talked about it taking 1/5 of an acre earlier to support a family with a vegetarian diet. It's more like 1/2 acre per PERSON. Some land is not suitable for farming, but is suitable for livestock pastures.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm

So, say we supplement our vegetarian diet with some dairy and a little meat to efficiently use all the available land to feed more people. Check out the math:

http://one-simple-idea.com/Environment1.htm

It doesn't work out. There isn't enough land to support a trillion people...not even close. Not even 1/10th of a trillion. Even your revised number is laughable with current practices. So, say we throw in some urban farming...vertical farming in the form of skyscrapers that produce food. Cool...we've got a shitload of people now. Who even says that's a worthy goal? How can you morally argue that more people is always better? You've said a bunch of stuff indicating that's what you believe, but you haven't provided any reasons other than something to the effect of "human brains are amazing and can figure stuff out".

I don't think the speaker in the video is advocating global planning...at least not in the form of a world government. I don't think he's assuming that he's smart enough to know how to plan everyone's lives, nor do I think I am.

What he's pointing out is that populations naturally slow their growth as education and health increase. When you're pretty sure your children will survive, you don't feel the need to have 6-8 in order to have 2 that survive. When conditions are good enough to allow the survival of 80-90% of children born, parents also feel like they can provide a better life for their kids if they're dividing their resources between 1-2 instead of 6-8.

So, you don't need a global government to reduce population growth, you simply need to assist people in improving their health and education levels. Charities and individual countries can do this on their own. So what if they organize their efforts? It doesn't have to be central planning on a global level.

Personally, I think it's better to live within our means. Even if we could grow to the trillions on our little planet, why not do it slowly and carefully? Why do we need a giant population? Why do we all need to be "blessed" with giant families? Why can't we enjoy other peoples' families? As a country, we don't even need large populations for wars anymore. Nuclear weapons and conventional weapon technology ensure that future wars will be fought with very small numbers of people compared to the masses needed in the past.



If you didn't read all that, just answer this: What's the overall purpose of a huge world population? How does it benefit me or anyone else to be born into a crowded world?

Vertical farming is the answer. Skyscrapers filled with hydroponics, using all kinds of light and surface area tricks (stuff growing on every surface, four seasons in every building). Requires far less energy and water than conventional soil based agriculture.

And as for fresh water, you can kill two birds and get "free" energy plus fresh water through the use of hybrid solar steam engine\distiller fields. The dominant vertical farming concept will probably incorporate these two functions as well, meaning they will generate their own power and gather\convert their own fresh water.

Thanks

In reply to this comment by radx:
*promote

The "problem" of overpopulation is more a problem of economics, poverty, and pre-industrialization economies adapting. For instance, the population density of the Vatican is one of the highest in the world but there are none of the problems normally associated with overpopulation. Technology has always increased the ability for populations to be crammed into any given space (and usually increase standard of living at the same time). Trucking, shipping, flight, preservative, and refrigeration technologies have allowed for food to be shipped from any one place on the entire frapping planet to any other place.

The problems that India and China face are much more a result of poverty then any REAL limit for the habitat to support their population. There is no meaningful calculate-able limit for the population as far as I have been educated on. And limits I have heard don't take into consideration vertical farming, ocean farming, or newly emergent food technologies (like growing food in vats), or even more broadly that things can be moved from one area of high resource to another area (IE Japan has no oil but lots of oil based technology). With more than 70% of the world being ocean, I would think the potential for ocean bound farming technology would provide more food for us then we would ever have population to consume. There doesn't seem to be a limit in any of the links that you provided, just the real issue of poverty of adjusting economies from trial agrarian to industrialized.

EDIT: In other words, every single city in the world is "overpopulated" in the sense that they have no food production in them, they are completely reliant on outside sources for food and to a smaller extent water. However, this abuse of the word doesn't factor in the reality of the situation, it is an oversimplified model. The reality is that the amount of population this planet can support is an unknown value. Just using the total amount of current farm land would be naive to the emergent technologies in the field of food. Soon, all food could be grown in a labs. If that is the case, then the idea of there not being enough land is meaningless as we could cram them into skyscrapers pumping out tons of food for the world. The real problem is poverty...and that is a really tragic and unfortunate thing, and luckily one we can participate it doing something about.

I personally love hearing about insane ideas like this, I dont know much about Vertical farming, so I started collecting links.