Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironduke
For all practical purposes, this building is just a very tall greenhouse. I don't see how it would be expensive, after all, it's not like it would have the costs associated with an office building or residential high-rise.
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And therein lies the rub. It's a very tall greenhouse. Thus, it likely won't be any more effective at growing staples than greenhouses. When's the last time you ate bread made from greenhouse grown wheat?
At the same time, it will have significantly increased building costs compared to single story greenhouses. Multi-story buildings are not cheap to build, especially when they must be strong enough to hold thousands of gallons of water, plants, soil, harvesting machinery, etc. I expect it would be just as or more expensive to build a multi-story greenhouse as to build an office building of the same size.
The site claims that the farms will be completely organic. Fat chance. Greenhouses tend to be heavy pesticide users. No birds to eat bugs, not many predator bugs either, so it's harder to practice organic pest control. I don't really see how they could not use fertilizer, either. Organic grown produce is nice, I eat a good bit of it, but it's still quite expensive. Perhaps in the future it will be a viable way to mass produce food, but not now, especially compounded with inherent difficulties of greenhouse production.
Also, the farms will not be subject to economy of scale. I assume they will depend on sunlight, thus the buildings cannot be terribly wide, or the plants in the middle will be shaded out. There's a limit to how high you can build for a given footprint, so they can't be too tall, either.