Real Solar Punk is Smart Land Use, Not Gimmick Skyscaper Farms
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- Опубликовано: 7 июл 2024
- Farms good, suburbs bad.
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0:00 Intro
0:27 What are Vertical Farms?
2:02 Real Sustainability
3:12 Going on alittle trip
3:54 Farms vs Suburbs
5:30 Outro
5:45 ???
If y'all actually watch the video before commenting you'll realize its a land use video.
Hydroponics and aquaponics are fine and I even showed a normal greenhouse and said that its good, but thats not the point I'm making.
It helps to pre-empt that kind of obvious criticism in the video itself. Hydroponic systems are the first thing people think of when they imagine vertical farms and urban agriculture. If your rhetorical goal is to inject a shot of reality into solarpunk sustainability dreams (which I agree with btw), you need to keep in mind what the people you're trying to convince already believe.
Greetings from West Philly btw
I don’t understand, in terms of land use, vertical farms (warehouses) are more efficient, they can produce much more than a normal farm in the same size. Also it’s just for small produce. Or am I wrong?
Is that land use issue that we
a) Shouldn't be using land wastefully for livestock production and suburban housing, or
b) that we should be using urban land for other uses?
My issue is that with a) we have already damaged farm land, and do need a solution for local production. At the same time, fixing bad land uses doesn't actually clash with vertical farms. So yes we need to stop expansion of suburbs into farm land but that doesn't mean we can't grow food in cities also.
With b) my issue is we don't have a limited amount of urban land, the issue is getting people to accept upzoning, and I would bet suburbanites are more willing to accept vertical farms producing local greens and not adding human density. This may even act as a back door to changing local "neighborhood character" and comfert with larger buildings.
I do share your fear the Solar punks are going to cause single family zoning with solar roofs and geo heat pumps to be seen as sustainable, along with giant solar arrays over parking lots and other car centeric low density infrastructure.
@@oscaralejandrotorresaguila5886 all of the carbon that you sink into building a tall farm building will never pay itself off by having it located in a city. It's much better being an apartment building.
@@alanthefisher look up Bowery, their farms are warehouses just outside the city or in the suburbs, and they only produce small produce, warehouses are easier to build and less materials, vertical farms are not susceptible to the climate and season, like greenhouses. Making it more time efficient than a normal farm of its size.
Unless I’m misunderstanding and you’re talking about vertical farms in city center like a 20 story building? Like the one in the miniature
They also don’t need dirt to function making it cheaper because you don’t need materials as resistant because of the weight loss
"I wouldn't want to live in the City" - said the suburbanite office drone while the sprawl of suburbia destroys another rural community.
Until I killed them
Preach. As a young farmer, it's almost impossible to afford farmland because people are buying up everything for triple the price and paving over the most productive and fertile farmland in the world.
If only everyone could live in a house with a barn on 10 acres, 10 minutes from downtown!
@@ObsceneSuperMatt A rural village isn't a barn. it's a small community with a church, a pub, a little shop and 100-500 houses 5-10 km away from the next village. If you want to live in the city, move to the city. If you want to live in the village, live in a village 2 hours drive away from the city (get a home office job if necessary). Suburbs without commercial space a 1 hour commute away from a city centre office skyscraper are pure cancer.
@@boomerix I wish that existed.
I think this is actually more solarpunk than the vertical farms, if you look at the actual underlying beliefs of solarpunk as an ideology. The solarpunk community absolutely has an issue with greenwashing, but I don't think that's a flaw in solarpunk beliefs in themself. Solarpunk agriculture in my opinion is absolutely more centred around permaculture, decentralisation and communities producing a reasonable amount of food for themselves, if not becoming entirely self-sufficient.
ye they are in love with the idea of an arkopoly : an extremely small community that can self sustain indefinatly without inports , usually rapresented in sci-fi as a really tall building , but more realistically a sort of small town with high efficiency farming and a heavy enphasis on recicling ...
it's futurism wich i can't bring myself to hate tbh ...
This is my issue with the Solar punk community, they are essentially suburban sprawlist with better garden usage.
Solar is land intensive, and the communities your describing are basically single family homes with solar roofs, geothermal heating, EVs and solar above parking.
I prefer a heavy mix of nuclear and wind producing cheap electricity and district heating, where dense vertical farming does make sense. Idk why you would cover a field in solar pannels just to power the lights of a vertical farm.
these ideas do not run in opposition to warehouse style farming
@@Evan-pr3bf The only caveat is does farming in a warehouse, using electricity, require more area for solar panels to create that electricity then the warehouse foot print provides.
You can definitely farm in a warehouse powered by solar, it just might not save a great deal of area compared to greenhouses on site.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 Any solution which uses more energy to grow food is an unsustainable solution. That includes vertical farming or warehouse farming. Downsizing the economy and population is what will put runs on the board. We are not going to be smart teching our way out of our problems.
This is really great. So many times silicon valley types try to "innovate" problems we have created by removing trains.
The only trick they know is to throw capacity at a problem. 14 lane freeways clogging up? Build tunnels. Taxis too slow to respond? "Contract" a multitude of desperate people to sit idle and then scramble to get to you first.
Collective problems can never be addressed with individualized solutions.
Not just trains. Look at all of the people trying to make importing fucking everything from cheap labor countries sustainable, by making CO2 neutral Cargo liners, instead of just, jk, making things in country again
The mistake is to try to keep growth as the ultimate which must NOT be touched in reaching for solutions. Growth in suburbs. Growth in the economy. Growth in population. But the first law of sustainable growth is that growth is NOT sustainable. Any growth in any quantity. That is one problem I have with these "smart tech" solutions. The other problem is that one self appointed, unelected billionaire lord over others knowing and deciding what is best for everyone else. This is Bill Gates, elbowing his way into the portfolio of global health minister. We are not subjects of corporate lords. We are suppose to be citizens in a democracy. You can ask Vandana Shiva what she thinks of Global Health Minister Gates, unelected and unaccountable to anyone, especially as it impacts on the third world.
Tech bros think they can solve anything even if they have no fucking clue how something works. At my last job, my supervisor told us she met a tech bro and was explaining to him that she does policy and research on building energy efficiency. She told us, in exact words, that he said “that’s totally cool. I have no idea what that is but I bet we can do it better.” She was like “wow, you just claimed to do my job better than me while admitting you know nothing about it.” Yep, that’s everything you need to know about tech bros.
It's because they virtually live without trains. They don't know better.
There's a lot of different perspectives on solarpunk, but in my experience at least, a lot of folks in the "movement" (including me) have been quite critical of the greenwashing and overexaggerated potential of vertical farming. Low tech solutions and DIY continue to be a pretty consistent undercurrent in solarpunk, and though you didn't mention it in this video, part of the problem with vertical farms is that they also tend to require a lotttt of energy to maintain and aren't really capable of growing much other than leafy greens. No grains or calorie-dense plants. That's why permaculture is the wave🙌🏽 Anyway, great video and I'm glad we can all agree that trains are necessary and suburbs suck.
Edit: though as some commenters have pointed out, a lot of the examples you used aren't technically vertical farms. and green exteriors on buildings do still have some benefits.
Totally agree, I wanted to keep it relatively brief, and get to the land use part, otherwise it would have included a lot of that. Love your vids too btw
"No grains or calorie-dense plants." Yet, anyways. While there are certainly issues with vertical farms, I don't believe that idealizing massive sprawling farms is a good idea either. Those farms often destroy natural topography, consume lots of land, and can't be used for much else but food production. Additionally, their massive sprawl requires extensive transit which detracts from the idea of decentralized, self-sustaining communities. Oh and love your content Andrew!
@@dominicgunderson No one should postulate that farms *should* be the sort of sprawling monoculture that they have come to be! (Corporations might.) The math is against broad use of vertical farms. The improvements and the operational costs get expensive a lot faster than the land in most places, and the water lost to EVT outdoors, where relevant, is substantially mitigatable if one is motivated.
@@dominicgunderson The issue is that you need light. If you're using direct sunlight, you can't make the farm have more floor area than the rooftop. If you're using solar panel farms, wind farms, or dams outside of the city, you're just replacing farms with industrial installations.
Cities concentrate the resources from a large area to put a bunch of people in one place. Farming is about gathering those resources, and it makes far more sense to send their products into the cities than to spread the city out to include them.
@@xanfsnark There will be no city-country dichotomy, so I'm not sure what you're on about.
My town (lots of farms) is being eaten up by development sprawling out from the nearby Hampton Roads, my solution to the problem would be to remove zoning restrictions in the already developed part of town to allow denser housing to be built and soak up the demand for housing so the sprawl is contained. But the locals don't want that, they just want to whine about development as farm field after farm field gets turned into suburb hell.
THIS. We need to keep the most fertile farmland in the world (Midwest USA) free from the waste of suburbia. Thankfully, the worst offender in my area (Columbus, Ohio) is finally pushing for high density mixed use transit centered development and will hopefully suck up the growth in the coming decades.
The answer is simple: secede from the union, fight the Yankees, and drive them from our land.
Cosmopolitanism is the work of the Yankees.
Zoning laws in the United States are pure nonsense, and are very detrimental. The fact that mixed use is illegal and small stores built in the early 1900's have a much higher property value than the new restaurant down the road is baffling.
The locals don't want denser housing, because it provides affordable housing for the lower socioeconomic classes. Everyone knows that society needs cashiers, cleaners, couriers and other low-paying jobs - but ideally out of sight.
Sounds like Suffolk.
We need to go all in on trains, have them literally everywhere, so nearly everyone has access to train transport. If that happened, I could realistically not have a car.
Add some busses or similar as well, because you need a way to get people to the train station. Not everyone is physically capable of a long journey on foot or cycle.
We used to have that type of system in nearly every major American city until the 1950s; when cars and interstate highways took over. Chicago is one of the few cities to still retain most of its original interurban rail network.
@@Cnw8701 The history behind that is well known now. Just look up the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy." Though accounts of it tend to be overblown: While GM and other car manufacturers did intentionally purchase and force closure of urban transit services, that only accounts for part of the disappearance of the street car and urban rail. There were a lot of other factors as well - most of them government policies favoring the car, as a result of lobbying by manufacturers.
Yeah right. This country was rebuilt for cars. And the billions upon billions it would take to shift that to trains is gonna come from where exactly? The government? The government that sends our money to other countries?
@@phoenixlamp2 it wasn't rebuilt for cars, it was essentially built for cars via the _horse_ surprisingly enough. Outside of the oldest cities in the US, every other city was built around the horse, which was then replaced by the car.
Add to the fact that the US has an individualism streak miles long...
Vertical farms are not used for heavy or big produce, they’re often for tomato cherry, lettuce […], they’re not 20 stories tall, they’re either 2-3 stories and most are just a warehouses, the nature of vertical farming reduces the water amount, there are VF that don’t even use dirt and the nutrients are carried in tubes, sometimes sprayed, and are better for the environment in terms of energy use, land use and water. It is not a replacement for normal farms, it is for new farms. Vertical farms are also not made out of concrete. And the verticality, the space between one and other crop is just 30-50cm above, depending on the produce.
i mean the main problem they have atm is that they are a really young technology : we can't really say anything about them that will likely stay consistent in the future ...
but tbh i think it's good , it's essentially bruteforcing food production wich is a way i guess , and i could see many ways in wich they may evolve : i could see containers getting repurposed with led , scaffolding and water/nutrient pipes , getting loaded on trains and being basically mobile farms ...
but tbh it's futurism
@@zUJ7EjVD they aren't mutually exclusive...
Vertical farms means sucking energy and resources from elsewhere in the world, usually from the third world to enrich the first. Same old colonialism. Why vertical? To house more people. There in lays the rub. Everything to support those extra people other then food (in theory) has to be via a vacuum cleaner on to the wider world. There are no rare earth elements in a vertical tower, and needed in a vertical tower, other then those imported from else where in the world. Where do the materials needed for your phone come from? Not from the crops in the vertical tower. The more people that can be accommodated in vertical towers, the greater the need for a vacuum hose.
Our aim needs to be to reduce the collective footprint on the planet by downsizing the economy and population.
Holy cope. You considering 2-3 story buildings "vertical farms" is obviously just you clinging to the concept. It's not the original philosophy of VFs at all, which is about highrises. These are just 2-3 story greenhouses, and greenhouses are an old and unglamorous concept, despite what Solarglam is trying to make you believe.
@@ekszentrik well, there’s almost no difference between a greenhouse and a vertical farm except the irrigation and how the nutrients are supplied, 2-3 story VF are not crazy either, they’re just warehouses with multiple “floors” made out of steel, like a mesh or something.
Shout-out to a Chinese city that actually replicated those concept images of concrete apartments and greenery. Unfortunately for them, most of the towers ended up being cleared out and abandoned, just from the sheer density of mosquitoes alone. Didn't realize it would also have impacts when it comes to structural safety aswell.
Because it takes more effort than a pathetic attempt at sticking plants and dirt into a poorly designed building and expecting it to work. You have to take into consideration the local flora and fauna and thus pick the plants that will work. It just takes more time to make this a possibility, and this is a new era. As long as there's more research and development of this concept, it will eventually work.
@@Shvetsario lol no
@@Shvetsario mosquitos*
Doesn't mention any effort to reduce their breeding grounds or introducing plants that would naturally eat them and other insects.
@@anomitas Lol what? Respond with constructive criticism not a simple yes or no
@@dandywaysofliving I literally said take into consideration the local flora and fauna, the local animals and their habitats. How they will interact with the plant environment you create.
I live in (what was) rural central Pennsylvania. We're getting eaten by suburbs out here; for us it's coming from Baltimore and York. Now all the farms are getting turned into overpriced, inefficient suburban housing. It's disgusting.
I cant tell you how many of my coworkers live in pittsburgh and drive to baltimore, like do they have an addiction to driving and traffic?
1. Skyscrapers represent unprecedented growth. Solarpunk is about degrowth and decentralization. The two don't mix.
2. Vertical farming exists in a single-storey building. Most of "vertical forests," as stupid as it sounds, would never allow fruit-bearing plants. I don't even think they'd allow unit-owners to plant their own as it will "ruin the aesthetics." Therefore, I don't think you should discuss vertical farming and then show these "green towers."
I'm not an expert but I think true vertical farming has a place in a Solarpunk reality. Like why would you compete for limited farming land when a wall in your house is more than enough for certain produce.
Edit: I still like this video because TRAINS.
True vertical farming would be able to be incorporated into urban areas in a grittier fashion. Think taking a cleared-out 5-story walk-up or maybe even a smaller, outmoded parking structure and reapplying it for hydroponic farms. You'd already have a light source ready to go in both and all you'd need for true energy efficiency is LED light bulbs and something to disperse the light evenly. Then, build the rigs for the farming itself, and it's plug and play at that point. The green towers, solar punk phenomena will never happen in our lifetimes, so it's just best to keep vertical farming as close to the ground as possible.
I agree 100% on the critique of “green walls” as well as suburbia/urban sprawl HOWEVER i think you miss some of the potential of Controlled Environment Agriculture / Plant Factories / Vertical Farming
Mainly:
- Since the environment is controlled (even more than a conventional greenhouse) there is no risk of plague or weather impacting things; as long as there is power (and water + POTENTIALLY nutrients depending on how “closed” the loop is) , there is food.
- Growth Rate/Efficiency (Because the environment is controlled and tweaked to the absolute optimal, and grow lights are used, and CO2 enriched atmospheres can be used, and hydro/aero/fogo-ponics can be used, you can get insane growth rates making the system more efficient than soil based agriculture
- Less “Food Miles”, especially with perishable produce, long transport is energy intensive not only in the transport from often far away regions, but also it requires refrigeration and even controlled atmospheres sometimes to prevent premature ripening, growing and eating locally massively reduces this
- Genetic Engineering Development Speed (Plant Factories lend themselves to being a perfect place to test new crop variants due to the rapid cycling
- Land Use Change ( *If huge fields can be replaced with a few warehouses, and those fields are then REWILDED, the land use change would be a HUGE plus* )
(Edit: Typos)
I think the main critiques of Controlled Environment Agriculture / Vertical Farming etc are:
- Impact of the Inherent Automation it Uses / Just Transition for Existing Agricultural Workers
- The Amount of Technology Used, and who will “own” that; Will it be Open Source and collectively owned, or be a monopoly that erases any remaining small farms and ensures more horrible practices by Monsanto etc?
- Energy Use (Lots of Grow Lights + Subsystems of the Site in General, where are they powered from, and is the power “green” ?)
- - Between “adsorbing” overproduction during the day, as well as using some former, yet non-(fully) rewilded land for energy production i think this point is moot
- Nutrient Use (Via Nitrogen Foxation Gene Mods, as well as systems like Aquaponics or “Azollaponocs” or even something Power-to-X and/or Bioreactor based, i think nitrogen is solvable. Main concern would be phosphorus, but if networked with Waste Water Treatment the circle could be “looped” perhaps?, also conventional agriculture faces the same phosphorus issue. Also CEA DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO TOPSOIL EROSION/NUTRIENT DEPLETION!
- Counterpoint to that last bit; i don’t know if regenerative agriculture is more effective at building topsoil than rewilding, although that process could include prior-rewilding regenerative agriculture
(Edit: Typos)
So you use a whole lot of energy to pump it into the metabolism of the plants rather than getting energy from the Sun
@@personzorz You can get that energy from the sun still via Photovoltaic or Solar Thermal Plants. Also the sun doesn’t shine 24/7, but grow lights can.
As i stated, energy use *is* one of the concerns, but Land Use Reduction + Rewilding is the Goal, not necessarily “most efficient per plant”, it’s most plants per km, and time per fully grown plant etc
Also i forgot to state this as well, but since the plants are grown in a sterile (or near sterile, i need to read up on the literature and see if they include beneficial microorganisms etc) environment, the should spoil less once packaged (if done in a sterile manner as well)
Granted Food Irradiation makes this advantage moot (if people weren’t too afraid to allow it lol)
i think they currently have a main problem : they aren't really mature as far as tech goes , it's really unextablished and new ,
they may be the google glasses of farming , they may be the smartphone of farming , allowing everyone with enough disposable income to get a container with it's hown little farm ...
So there are a few legitimate niches for vertical farms, yes. Strategic Independence in small Citystates like Singapore. How much of the world does that cover?
A few legit nice public housing apartment towers in Milano, iirc, with sort of balconies attached that house young trees, only acting as Nurseries for said trees for city use as operator of the tower.
Just minor exceptions proving the rule.
Spot on. single level greenhouses are almost always a better option than vertical farming.
@@StuartChignell
Not in term of productivity. One advantage even current versions (which are nothing more than converted warehouses rather than multiple story production plants) of vertical they can produce far more with same plot of land.
@@remliqa And vertical farms can be built in cities with good flooding infrastructure, on high rise buildings engineered to last. I suspect the typical greenhouse has a similar strategy to suburban homes, designed to be destroyed and cheaply replaced during a natural disaster, rather than to hunker down and withstand the full force of potential hazards
is delivering non-regional or out of season fruits without having to transport and artificially ripen them and without pesticides really just a niche though? As long as electricity prices eventually decrease due to cheap renewables, vertical farms will become common simply due to market forces. They will just be boring warehouses, not pretty skyscrapers.
@@majorfallacy5926
Even if they made multiple storey vertical farms in the future, I'm sure it would be just as boring as the current warehouse too.
There's a problem with "returning suburbs to farmland" that is easy to overlook if you're not an expert on soils.
Basically: Soils are very delicate things that evolve in a combination of climate, hydrological conditions (precipitation, evapotranspiration, groundwater etc.), original rock at the site (a carbonate rock will develop a different soil from a granite rock), micro- and macroorganismis (including fungi), plants and most importantly: time.
Yes, soils "grow" faster than fossil hydrocarbons - peat formation is basically the first step in coal formation and it is in essence a soil formation process that occurs in bogs (if we let it) - it is one of the best biogenic carbon fixing processes out there, so destroying peat bogs or burning peat (guess how they get it?) is *extremely* bad for the climate mid to long term...
But if you destroy a soil - be it through erosion, be it through covering it with concrete and asphalt (which will kill most of the organisms in the soil) be it through myriad other things - it takes ages before it returns to a usable state.
Remember when you learned about the "Dust Bowl" in school? That was when harebrained farming practices - on land the indigenous peoples had used for centuries *without* destroying it, by the by - caused some of the most fertile soils in the U.S, to literally disappear into, well, dust. Those soils *still* haven't recovered and this stuff happened back when Americans actually embraced socialism (kinda).
There have been attempts to reclaim land that used to be covered by buildings for agriculture. It by and large did not work and it *never* reached the yields of the before-times. Which is why being economic with land is *extremely* important and which is why there should be some sort of incentive to redevelop brownfield land rather than destroying ever more former farmland.
There are some things that humans can do to make soils better and indeed those have been done for centuries by our forebears in the absence of mineral fertilizers. But the issue is that those are either only a short term fix, involve enormous amounts of energy/labor/resources, are damaging to the environment or some combination of those. The main reason those things are no longer done is however economical - it's just cheaper to use mineral fertilizer.
If you are curious as to what you can do with not-great soils to improve their yields, I can give some examples downthread, but this comment is already long enough as is.
just curious what you meant about socialism? did you mean the liberal movements? socialists at the time while yeah existed wasnt powerful or as big as liberal movements were
@@charlestonianbuilder344 The New Deal was the "American acceptable alternative" to a major groundswell of socialist and even outright communist organizing - the membership of "reds" of various stripes reached in the millions in this era. It's no coincidence that the "Business Plot" tried to overthrow FDR and replace him with a fascist regime...
What can be done with not-great soils? I would like to know since one of the first planets we should terraform should probably be Earth.
Can i also know what to do with not great soil?
suburbs should just be returned to nature in general, let the wild figure out how to reclaim the sprawl. we need to centralize and densify as much as possible. vertical farms are not that energy efficient since they need grow lights to replace the sun, but they provide a high level of food security - very important in an age of supply chain issues and crop failures. Even suburban farms with conventional greenhouses would fail to provide as much food security if there is a high risk of flood or wind damage to the greenhouse.
What if we use the most valuable land, not to house people, but to house lettuce?
This and other genius ideas (no, I am not going to 'let it mellow' if it is yellow), brought to you by people hyper-focused on small environmental issues, while accepting the status quo for the big ones.
Thank god we have corporations to save us!
Oh wait they're just going to appease us with half measures?
Nah they can't even do that, they're just going to keep grifting I guess...
Not necessarily, you could still make Plant Factories/Vertical Farms/Whatever you want to call them in Rural Areas
In fact that is their main advantage, unlike conventional agriculture, as long as they have power, they can run. So even in space!
*Also* Most of the Sites (At least in Asia), are made using old Semiconductor Factories that have since shutdown (due to existing cleanroom infrastructure)
This is *brownfield development* so actually takes unused land, and revives it into a new use case.
Also reducing shipping of perishable produce, especially to areas with little domestic capacity such as islands should significantly reduce GHG emissions, especially since most ships use Heavy Fuel Oil / Bunker Fuel
@@ericlotze7724 You have a 0% grasp on reality, so STFU.
But if you focus on tiny things, you can be better than everyone else without having to actually do anything!
I still think how about “The Neck” in south Philly was all farmland till the city filled it up. You used to be able to walk from nice dense neighborhoods to truck farms!
There’s a bit of a critical error with your assumption: large quantities of food are already shipped by train across the country.
Even then, farmers were still reliant on personal transportation (wagons) as a means of getting their goods to the station to then be shipped elsewhere. A large number of roads in rural areas existed for the explicit reason of transporting farming goods from the farm towards the city for sale there or to be transported elsewhere.
This is also why farmers prefer to have a pickup truck to this day: they still need to transport their goods from their farm to town, which could be upwards of twenty miles or more away. As a result, trucks (and, for the ambitious, tractors) will still be required to get them to town for transport elsewhere.
Ultimately, you’ll not be able to phase out the truck, especially if they’re a small-time farmer taking their goods to market. They’ll use the truck to take their produce to market and sell it.
I don't hate solarpunk, but they definitely need to be poked more. Especially considering how much greenwashing they embrace.
yeah , sometimes they just take the concept of DIY too seriusly , i saw one of them once proposing basically a clay swamp cooler as a solution for cooling , wich ,
we have a swamp cooler on our skin by default , and they can be improvized with towels and a bucket , they didn't invent anythign new , and they don't work outside really dry climates ,
in general heat pumps , fans and furnaces are the best climate control we have atm ...
I mean, to be honest, almost all of the X'punks' have been safely diluted to nothing but an aesthetic. I don't fault people for falling into that, because aesthetics are powerful. But it does need to be understood and counteracted.
Basically, nothing about this is about vertical farms, mostly because what is criticized is not vertical farms, but buildings with plants on them as an aesthtic. This is more about the somewhat half-baked purely aesthetic images of solarpunk and about urban sprawl. That said, rural farming does take up a lot of landand verticality is a possible solution to this. I think this takes it too much as a given that covering huge areas of land, that could instead be wilderness, in produce is somehow sustainable. That said, solarpunk does have a serious sprawl problem it fails to adress.
But think of it in a rural, farm-growing sense, not an urban sense. First of all, "Urban sprawl" is kind of an oxymoron. The point of urban development is increased density, not sprawl. It's how to make denser living sustainable, livable, enjoyable, and accessible.
Farming is supposed to take up a lot of land; it's farming; it's naturally rural. I get your point as to not overwhelming the land we have with harvestable goods, but how can we make farming more efficient in the rural environment? Rural farms won't go away for centuries at this point, but to have more rapidly produced and farmable crops and, maybe, densifying hydroponic farms or increasing yield will help.
Vertical farms (as currently depicted) won't be the answer because it's inherently unsustainable, but considering this "half-baked" is a little dismissive, because farmland is not inherently bad, but we do need more efficient ways to farm for the long term, and increase yield as the world population grows.
The actual solution is to stop overpopulation. That is what will cause major problems to humanity in the future
Stop the fkn third world races from breeding like rabbits
@@TheHomerowKeys inherently unsustainable? How? Prove it. Normal farming is unsustainable. Uses too much water, too much land, too much pesticide. Don't have these issues with vertical farms, you only need either tons of sunlight, or tons of electricity, and suggesting that merely a high electrical cost is somehow immediate grounds for dismissing the concept, then I'd like to see the reasoning
@@Novashadow115 Upkeep of buildings that can sustain long-term propagation of crops?! Do you realize how hard that upkeep is? How expensive it is? At least using the land is easy and easily upkept. I'm not dismissing vertical farming, but it's not a feasible source of food or textiles. If you can manufacture field-yield with vertical hydroponics, great! But we can't.
@@TheHomerowKeys Depends on what you mean by upkeep. Vertical farming is energy intensive due to climate control and artificially creating UV/visible/IR radiation for crops.
However it uses far less land, water, and pesticides. While I enjoy Alan Fisher's video, I think it is disingenuous to show rotting and molded concrete structures as evidence that vertical farming is bad.
It is all about the design. An interior climate controlled chamber would be used in any real design (not the stupid concept art random scam companies put up) which would use materials less prone to humidity like glass. And Y'know sauna is a thing too right? It's not impossible to design for this issue. The outer structure can be made with traditional concrete and steel for structural integrity, but it doesn't mean the hydroponics need to be right up against these materials.
These structures will have a higher upfront cost as do any higher density building and the maintenance do scale up with size, yes. But it isn't going to be because of humidity.
Transportation also isn't a problem. You can literally have a train line run next to or under these structures just like traditional farms. And space taken up by the elevator is less than the roads needed for tractors to move around the farm. The main limitation with hydroponics(which is needed for vertical farming) is the lack of crop variety. It can only plant leafy vegetables.
U kinda misconstrued what vertical farms are and what they're used for. Vertical farms do make sense in large urban areas with limited land (they're used & are profitable in cities like Tokyo, Singapore etc.). They usually produce things like lettuce and other plants usually more expensive, not crops, and they are sometimes paired with fishy bois for extra efficiency. Future prospects look promising too when genetic engineering is considered. They ofc won't be one of the main ways of agricultural improvement but I think they still have their place
True. Those greenwashing highrise towers make no sense. Buildings designated to be vertical farms can be effective, if done correctly.
@@simon7762 Especially if designed to let natural light disperse throughout the building, reducing the need for artificial lights somewhat.
Houston used to be farms. The organics rich, heavy clay basin is excellent for growing crops.. and completely terrible for erecting structures and transit infrastructure.
Plants have half a billion years of practice with farming the soil in which they are planted. They are so good at this that most farmers only need to manage two of the seventeen nutrients they require. Indoor agriculture ensures that managers will need to source and manage every input from major polluting fertilizer refineries.
This is exactly how do it here in India. Nearby villages gather veggies and transport them to nearby town or small city to sell them
If you are thinking about replacing *all* farm produce on residential towers, Alan's argument is of course correct.
However green exteriors can have a role in providing fruit and veg for the residents of the imagined tower (much as gardens, allotments and even window boxes do now).
They can also play a vital role in cooling buildings & streets and in removing some air pollution.
Yes but it’s not a substitute for actual farms that we’re destroying with suburban sprawl
Alan is being unnecessarily narrow in his definition if what a vertical farm is.
Putting plants on a building does two things: it increases the material needed to build it to support the extra weight of the dirt, pants and water and reduces the durability of the building. Thats not sustainable. Specially when most of these projects have plants on cantilevers and balconies, wich already require lots of maintenance so they dont fall after a few decades
@@goncalodias6402 I don’t know how to explain to you that these buildings already exist and have already found solutions to your very well known problems
@@goncalodias6402 Why add plants to a building that wasn't designed for it? Obviously it won't work. Design a specialized vertical farm skyscraper after conducting experiments and tests to see what would be the most sturdiest design.
Walkable cities with _houses_ (not only apartments - some people like to have a lawn) could benefit from having mini-farmland city blocks. Doesn't have to be some solarpunk fantasy 3D render.
This is probably one of the better ideas I've seen in this comment section. Verticle farms seemed like a good idea for a while, but in practice it could be a nightmare. But converting most of the suburbs back into miles and miles of farmland doesn't seem like the right answer, either.
The suburbs are here, now. I don't think it making people more out of the suburbs to convert back to farm land would work out. But we can alter the suburbs to be more sustainable.
@@locsoluv94 yes, also there's the "benefit" that every f*ing house is the same in a suburb, so relocating a few people to buy up a block shouldn't be too hard. Also for local commerce and cultural spaces.
@@4.0.4 Most likely a lot of people in any suburb only live there because they haven't had the option to buy anything else and would love to live in a less maintenance-heavy apartment
@@locsoluv94 In Vancouver, City Beet Farm grows vegetable crops in front lawns and backyards. The homeowners who participate get a box of vegetables in exchange for City Beet Farm using their lawns for agriculture.
About Here has an excellent video on it!
ruclips.net/video/9YspRX7bbTM/видео.html
Exactly
Alan,
Did you guys shoot this videos a couple weeks ago? I was working at 30th street station and thought I recognized your voice on the platform. If it was you I wanted to thank you for all that you do to help point out the positives of mass transit. We work hard to keep the system running
Yeeeees, more WTYP coops? Love that cheeky outro
Surprise roz cameo is best cameo.
Agriculture is unique in that increasing the lateral size of the land also increases the yield per square metre of land, this is mainly because all tractors can be operated by just 1 person, regardless of whether it has 55 horsepower or 550 horsepower, so on larger land the same person can use a larger tractor with much larger equipment to work a lot more area than if they were on a small plot of land where they'd be limited to much smaller equipment
there is a point to be made about vertical farming in sun-intense areas like mid-northern africa.
where there is too much sun that dries out any crop you plant and greenhouses only exacerbate this, having a tower with mirrors that split the light instead of focusing it could enable those regions to be food-autonomous.
So many people have the idea that Green city building are actually green. You could paint the city green and people would think it was more enviromentally friendly. I'm pretty convinced thats' where these ideas come that.
That said, urban greenery (at street level) is pretty great and something we need to be investing a lot more in generally. Doesn't have to be food, but tree lined streets are amazing for cooling, filtering polution, dampening noise and a whole bunch of other issues cities face. I'd love to see more energy in just planting more trees than thinking about ivy but more expensive
''You could paint the city green and people would think it was more enviromentally friendly''
Feels like when they switch the packaging of products for brown paper/cardboard with green text
Granted there is some reduction in environmental impact by not bleaching the pulp for those materials, but for the most part I think it just makes packaging and printing cheaper. I doubt most of those are recycled paper as many claim to be,
@@MisterTalkingMachine IIRC, you have to read the labeling carefully. My understanding is that deceptive wording is allowed, but if they just flat out say 'this product is made from 100% recycled paper' then it's probably telling the truth.
@@Bustermachine Yeah that's probably correct, at least in all places where you can expect legislation for that to exist
Everytime you post a video I actually learn something plus you don’t stretch out your videos so they’re always on point without any airspace. One of my favorite content creators out here!
I don't think vertical farms are actually totally unrealistic or bad but what the greenwashed drawings miss is that they'd be actually somewhat practical as ugly warehouses housing aeroponic rafts and their increased energy usage can be justified with the higher yield but not for most plants yet.
Teraced vertical farms are a bogus idea tho.
Yes, and they will be still a niche application like by small city states like Singapore for strategic independence, rather than all too widespread.
@@1121494 I was just about to say that !
I made an internship at a crop research institute. I can assure you that the amount (at least of salad) you can produce in those climate chamber hydro beds is insane and tweaking stuff like the right light frequencies can double even that. What takes at least 2 month outside is easily reached in 3 weeks inside. Year round. Ice or heat desert outside does not matter.
Using that in an agrarian landscape or on the outside of towers is stupid, but in desert areas or megacities like Tokyo is a different matter.
Those plant hung towers made of renderite are to actual farms what Willy Wonkas Chocolate factory is to a real factory
I suppose it could work in Europe - our cities are generally more rail focused. They could either be as greenhouses on top of existing buildings, or at freight yards in the outskirts, on top of large distribution centres maybe. if absolutely necessary I suppose a highrise one by a railway station or freight yard could work.
A lot of European cities aren't really all that sprawly either, much of it on purpose in order to not eat up all the farm land. Sure, there's some that didn't heed that warning at all , but for example Amsterdam ,Rotterdam and Copenhagen have farms pretty close to the city. And I do mean close, suddenly you'll have city blocks of buildings at 3-4 floors, and then farmland. :P
Rungis is a good exemple of this, there is a dedicated train to transport produce to this really big market around Paris. And Paris sprawl like hell.
actually freight and passenger trains have reversed roles in eu and na.
our freight network sucks and needs more investment.
@@NooobLP it does, but depending on the country. It is improving in some countries, freight by rail's increased a lot in Norway at least, and I'm sure we'll see a massive shift to this thanks to all the issues caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, having to rely less on oil and gas from them from now on.
@@Glenni91N Adding a story ontop of another building for even a single level greenhouse doesn't make a lot of sense. The extra capital and resources required are vast relative to having a dedicated greenhouse on the ground outside of the urban area.
and how's that lack of sprawl going for the cost of living in Europe?
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the use of vertical farms in places that don't have the amount of land that the USA does. Singapore for instance is doing a lot of work and research into vertical farms and it is out of necessity. I typically role my eyes at the obsession our world has with the use of technology to try and solve our problems when older superior options exists, but that doesn't mean that all instances of it are a bad thing, and many of the issues your pointed out with vertical farms are not ones that can't be overcome with clever engineering.
I mean of course Singapore pours tons of money into vertical farming paranoid that some major power shut down the food pipeline and starve the city.
Singapore is the exception but even there its cheaper, less resource intensive to import food rather than grow it locally. It makes sense maybe from a strategic point of view but not really because the investment required for singapore to be self sufficient in food would be huge.
@@StuartChignell What I wrote here was based on a wrong calculation, so I removed the old comment. If Singapore was to become self-sufficient on feeding their people through vertical farms, they would need to import a huge amount of electricity. So they just replace one dependency with another.
@@ehtuanK yep. Last I checked (which was a while ago, panel efficiency has improved a bit) with solar panels you can sipply light to three times the number of plants than you could with natural light. BUT that's only considering light, not climate control, desalination plant and everything else.
@@StuartChignell My first comment was based on a false calculation, so I changed it. The only way to achieve a three times efficiency increase compared to direct light is to optimize the light's frequency and intensity and use currently experimental concentrated PV under very special conditions. I don't really think it's worth the effort.
I never expected Alan to make these, it's more Adam's thing. But nice to hear from you again
unfortunately this style is quite poorly researched.
@@Aconspiracyofravens1 why so ?
Adam Something is too busy defending Nazis and nuclear holocaust recently to make urban planning videos
@@formaldehyde_face ah yes another putler dissatisfied tankie 😂
Get a life
@@formaldehyde_face yeah , tbf he always was such a western chovenist i just stopped following him afther a while , just another strong men around wich liberals flock like flies
Vertical farms aren't meant just to grow plants indoors like greenhouses. Vertical farms are meant to cut costs of farming by enabling the growing a lot of plants in a small amount of horizontal space by going vertical. So a square mile vertical farm with 20 floors is 20 square miles of growing space or more.
They are meant to be green energy powered closed systems that limit disease spread, herbicide and pesticide use and runoff, reuse water, seeds, electricity and waste. They are also supposed to save on transportation costs and cut vehicle pollution by having the farms close to population centres.
Vertical farms are also capable of growing off season or crops that can't be grown in specific regions due to climate by artificial simulation of conditions.
Those images with plants on skyscrapers are not vertical farms just a bunch of potted plants in buildings for aesthetic reasons.
I mostly agree, you do save more space per kilometer if you go up however the efficiencies are uncertain. We do need more depictions of actual vertical greenhouses though.
@@mxdanger only uncertain because it doesn't have enough momentum to be ubiquitous yet. If suddenly we had to stop relying on imports for out of season produce, people would be much more likely to start growing in the city instead
I would love a video that covered the "what if" and even the "how to" of slowly getting rid of the suburbs. Walkable cities surrounded by easily accessible farmlands and nature sounds like the actual best of both worlds that the suburbs pretend to be.
First step.
Build an above ground metrolink/bikepath.
.
It had to be 100ft in the air so it's not at street level.
.
The bikepath above the metrolink gives cyclist and eriders their own lane seperate from car traffic.
the biggest question is how your "walkable city" will survive what will be it's economy based on?
i suspect that everyone in that city will work in the service industry servicing each other with nobody doing any useful work
to keep it economically balanced some people woud be required to drive outside from the city to work on the fields and other resource extraction and conversion while 90% of the city population should be servicing those 10% who provide everything the city requires to function.
@@deltaxcd i would recommend you watch Climate Town’s video “the suburbs are bleeding America dry” it addresses all your economic concerns about walkable cities
@@emilyb3875 judging by the title of that video it looks like it is not going to say anything relevant to my arguments
The basic problem is that cities are unsustainable in principle. City people are like parasites who can't live on their own
Keep skyscrapers and high rises, I'm tired living with people all around me in a small apartment
Real vertical farms, a few of which have been built, use UV light and dip the roots in a solution with no actual ground.
This solves the problem of having to transport a lot of stuff as really the only thing you need is the solution, easily delivered with pipes (perhaps reused gas pipes). It also has more efficient water usage, space usage (duh) and and can work full year and everywhere, as it does not really on the sun, soil, rain or anything else.
The cons are it has huge upfront costs, the water damage problem you mentioned(although the tubing can make things more managable) and energy usage for the UV lights.
It also only works with some specific plants only, so at best we can construct them as side projects.
The reason it might not appear on drawings is it looks boring. You do not even need windows to let the light in, so it could even be in the center of a normal house.
Just have a think has a video on them.
I’m a small scale farmer, this hits home, suburbs are a real luxury for society, and Trains are so underrated. I moved out of the city and every time I come back I’m flabbergasted by the amount of truck traffic on the roads, it’s brutal.
This won't stop me from building my global empire of vertical cannabis farms
"one day we might knock down these suburbs and return them to farms" dont give me hope
There's a greenhouse in Singapore that produces food using a vertical conveyor belt in a tall greenhouse with hydroponics, allowing the plants to share the sunlight as they rotate around the belt. Sure its less efficient but its way less energy intensive and works extremely well in practice.
You're vision of vertical farming is wrong. There are greenhouses and buildings that are designed to contain plants. We can easily scale them up in size to accommodate a larger vertical space. And in the future when energy becomes a commodity through more use of tidal power, nuclear and other renewables we can transition to led powered sunlight for plants in vertical farms easily to boost efficiency of growing.
Ultimately growing food next to its intended destination will always be the best. We need a way to combat climate change and the changing variability of water available in agricultural fields. Vertical farming solves that. Makes it accessible for any location to grow food effectively and efficiently. We can then better use the fields from agriculture for other things such as rewilding and bring nature back. There's so much potential to vertical farming and you can't just say that because growing food in buildings is inherently difficult due to mold etc then you're wrong. We can solve that with new materials such as mycelium, greenhouses and other rooftop gardens which put plant growth directly inside cities where it is best used and most accessible for the biggest proportion of citizens.
We can do this, we just need regulation to make it easy for everyone to start.
Vertical farms have some of the problems you mentioned but the researchers and farmers embracing vertical farming techniques (multistory but not skyscraper racks) have a significantly higher yield per acre of land than traditional farming, greater control over humidity and temperature, less problems and loss due to insect activity, lower use of pesticides, etc. The crops are locally produced where the consumption happens thus saving a ton of transport costs - and nearly any crop can be grown (usually at a higher efficiency than transporting those out-of-season or out of region crops). They can use waste heat of urban buildings to grow crops year round. Vertical farming isn't right for every situation - where land is plentiful and you have a long growing season you will not be competitive with vertical farms - but where that isn't the case they do offer new solutions that actually do work and move us toward sustainability. Agree that 'green skycrapers' has all kinds of problems - but don't damn vertical farming that is working based on some concept pieces that aren't describing vertical farms but the greening of urban environments.
but still
just build regular farms
and regular trains
I actually have to disagree with you here. We don't need to talk about towers with plants ont he outside. That is stupid. And 99% of the US and 95% of plants are better grown on fields.
But inside hydro-based farms with LED and climate control - those have an insane amount of output. And just tweaking the light can have a big difference too.
I can totally see them used in Tokyo or Singapur and anywhere else where land is at a premium. And not to forget hot climates like the Arabian Emirates.
Producing salad in the supermarket would also reduce a lot of truck traffic, because whatever you need to bring there - the main ingredient (and volume) water comes through pipes.
So: cars bad, suburbs stupid, indoor farming depends.
Agree with you 100% :)
Eh, idk, i feel like it would be more ressource efficient to grow food outside of the city, and bring it in on passenger rail tracks at night. You only need regular farms and one or two freight trains.
And for places like the emirates, maybe, if these rich fucks decided to live in a fucking desert, they should accept the consequence, that they live in a fucking desert.
Even in Tokyo, is it ever going to be better to build a structure (which could be used for housing, shops, doctors' office, etc)... and use it to grow crops? Why not grow them in rural Japan, put it on an (electric) train, and run the train into Tokyo?
@@robo1p Reduce Transportation costs and decentralize.
@@robo1p Rural Japan has no space. Japan today imports half or so of it's food. Where are you from?
I am from Germany. It has very similar size to Japan. But Japan has 50% more people. And while Germany uses 21% as agricultural land, Japan only 12%.
Japan is just a mountain of mountains. Not much space. That is also why the 2 big plains on Honshu are practically one build over area.
Making only single family homes while shoving all food production into condensed multistory buildings, truly the most sensible future of all.
I think the consumers in the city will directly buy from the building, which can be walking distance away.
Also, I think the main point of these is to maximize the amount of plants grown per acre of land.
But the only reason you need to put in the massive engineering and logistics work to maximise acre usage is that you choose to do one of the most land intensive industries in a city, where land is scarce.
@@MannoMax makes sense. Thanks 👍
@@yayayayya4731 Wow, genuinely the nicest conversation ive ever had in RUclips comments, 10/10
I think we need to first understand that vertical farms as a concept isn't a bad idea. While I do agree that "green buildings" as a concept is stupid, it's possible to repurpose farmland with vertical farms, freeing up the space surrounding it to give way for nature to return in turn improving the climate. With the world increasing in population (Even if it may be plateauing) It makes sense to make land more efficient. While I agree that the sprawl is bad and we should reclaim the farmlands, we forget that technology has allowed us to genetically modify food to require fewer nutrients to grow faster, bigger and healthier in the addition to being able to grow the food at any time of the year. Farmlands already are responsible for a lot of loss of trees and forests and anything that can stop that is a good idea.
The train delivering fresh produce to Rungis (one of the biggest market in the world according to our friend Wikipédia !) was stopped for a while, fortunately the "train des primeurs" is active again !
This just in, Solarpunks still refusing to acknowledge that pollen allergies exist
lmao
Without reasoning, I really like the way these green cities look. I also really like the way solar cells look like. It's this mashup of a futuristic and green urban jungle, that without your listed problems, I would really like to live in.
I feel this. I wish we would consider what would be good for people first. The plants don't even have to feed us to be beautiful
I love it too, they’re crap for usability but they look amazing and I’m glad there’s some models for them in Cities Skylines.
The irony is that maybe that specific suburb popped up there because of the train station...or at least that's how it was advertised. Who knows if people actually use it (maybe not because it looks more like R1 zoning around it, leaving only a few people within a 5-10 minute walk).
Well thats how most suburbs first existed.....
Slap a railway station somewhere and they will come.
Though the R1 zoning law of the US is really stupid.
Tower farms can be built then leased to small entrepreneurial farmers within the city limits. Build to lease is common practice for new construction. The towers can be outfitted with major needs, but the individual producers will complete each unit to their specific needs. These farms can raise more than just plant crops. Fish, algae, mushrooms, hemp. Not only does this create fulfilling jobs, but cuts away large amounts of transport costs by moving the source closer to the demand.
I love going to the Reading Terminal... it just sucks when it gets soooo crowded when shipments come in.
I’m writing a story with a solar punk esthetic and this video is very helpful in creating some grounded ideas for it.
Solarpunk is what happens when artists and engineers dont talk to each other. It's just a splattering of tech from ancient to futuristic because of "aesthetic." It doesn't make me feel better about the shit future we'll endure. We need to make intelligent decisions regarding the places we use and inhabit NOW.
I especially like that painting at the end. 👍
A future that *seems* very realistic, yet just might not happen…
Awesome video! Could you also do that Trains intro as a longer video? That was legit sick AF
Growing vines and crap over the concrete and steel.
I've seen this issue being introduced in a weird way in Poland - capital city (Warsaw of course) started implementing "green stops" both tram stops and bus stops.
They plant grass on top of roofs of stops but not only that.
They plant vines on traction poles - or swap concrete within the tram rails with basic dirt with grass.
I know this isn't the only city or maybe even "town" as you would describe it (in Polish law there is no such a thing as town - it's either a city or a village regardless if the city is small in population or area size).
And I for sure do know it's not the only case in entire Europe.
While watching this, I can't help but think of Iowa's last narrow gauge railway, the Cascade and Bellevue Railway, which was built to help out farmers in the area. The terrain there was wayyyyy to hilly for standard gauge to go through, so the little railway had to make due with it's size. But, as one person put it, "It's 36 by 36 by 36. It's thirty-six inch wide tracks, 36 miles of track, and it takes 36 hours to get from one end to the other."
Too hilly in Iowa??
@@josephfisher426 You'd be surprised. Take a look at some picture of Dubuque or anywhere along the Mississippi next to Wisconsin. Cascade and Bellevue are roughly in that neighborhood.
@@TheSUNGlassKid But regular gauge trains go through the Appalachians, and cross the east coast fall line repeatedly. There must also have been a major cost or materials incentive.
Some lines were built as narrow and retracked as standard, though...
Really wild to see you visit my little no-name hometown; I even recognized the station you arrived at! I knew Chalfont used to be a lot of farmland, but I never knew how recently that had changed.
I love how you edit thumbnails a day or two after the video releases to include a train. Very effective way of bringing in an audience and to convey a point that in the end, everything that's sustainable is related to rail in some way.
Excellent video! This is most definitely a future I would like to see our nation make a reality - even if at the end of the day I'm still living in a place where my closest neighbors are two lobsters and a pine tree.
Holistic planned grazing, aquaculture (shellfish and seaweed) and sewage powered greenhouses are the real big innovations in food sustainability. Not vertical farms...
I think a lot of solarpunk people are more concerned about greenwashed leftism than sensible green policy.
My apartment building had planter beds but they were taken out when we had leaky condo issues (which were also partly due to poor construction). I have a small but nice fenced patio off a 2nd floor play area. I grow herbs and flowers in smaller pots now which suits me very well.
This is doable, but we need to wait for more automation in railway. The SNCF is working on it.
Also, the "stupid pods" could assist in the transition from trucks.
The area where I grew up is becoming infested with suburban sprawl. Used to be a rural area. It even had a railway connection built into Philly for this purpose (look up the PRR Octoraro Branch) which has, unfortunatly, declined over time being abandoned in some places.
When you told me that Reading Terminal Market was at the Reading Terminal for a reason, it absolutely blew my mind that there should be a connection between a city's infrastructure and its cultural life. I don't think many people think about that. I live in an era of gasoline and internet, so the world presents itself to me thinly, like a bunch of jpegs, without any rhyme or reason why it is. Thanks for making me think.
2:22 reminds me of Buenos Aires' line B, which was built in a way freight trains could go down a ramp from Federico Lacroze station through the subway line to a secret station under the Abasto market
in terms of Trains, Kintetsu Railway used to run a special train for fish delivery, and according to "Train Geek Championship"'s Keisei Electric Rwy. Episode. Keisei used to reserve one car for farmers and their produce during the 60's on some trains as i remember watching
Great video, but I am interested in a deeper dive into agriculture because the way we farm right now (large fields of just one crop doused in chemicals to make sure that nature can't take the land back) is not sustainable. I agree vertical farms make very little sense today, but just adding trains only solves one of the many problems with farming.
I think the Garden City Movement had some promise for being an way to a solarpunk future but it got ruined with monoculture grass cultivation and crazy amounts of car dependent infrastructure. If the garden city movement could be revived and setup with permaculture food forests that require little to no maintenance effort, I think that would be the most sustainable option for combining human habitation and food cultivation without needing too much transportation between the two.
How I know skyscrapers shouldn't have trees on them:
1. That's uhhh not where the trees are supposed to be
Once land is converted to suburb, it's too expensive to convert it to other use. People will let buildings stand empty rather than take a loss on their investment.
So glad to see some admonishment towards the Solarpunk “dreamscape”
A lot of people, too many, get lost in the futuristic aesthetic and don’t understand what it means to be punk.
I've always thought the point of vertical farms was to allow everyone to live in an urban environment, to minimize the number of people who have to live rurally. Vertical Farms would allow for farmers to live in urban areas.
Right now a huge amount of farmers are seasonal workers with low quality of life. Imagine a world where farmers can commute to work side by side with an office worker, and be compensated well to do their job, year round, in a consistent indoor environment
@@yanDeriction more like imagine a world where you walk into your favorite local burger joint and instead of some crap wilted produce they actually can show you the tomato3s grown right down the street
Still a lot of engineering issues with vertical farms that would increase cost as mentioned in the video
@@Novashadow115 don't imagine it. Move to a town with a decent farmers market. But no yall want to urbanized everything
Welcome to Philly! Looking forward to checking out more of your stuff. Thanks for sharing!
I grew up near Englishtown, NJ. Back in the 80s, it was all farms. Now it's all suburban hell. The farm my Uncle worked for was sold five years ago. The money the developers were offering was too good to pass up. Now it's an apartment and condo complex.
I feel like we need a follow up video doing, vertical farms vs traditional farms vs greenhouses. I was actually interested in that but there wasn't much content in this video about it
Not mentioning that the concrete itself is an ecological disaster
Sure, whipping out an entire beach just to build a glorified tomato pole is a good idea
Running freight services into a massive passenger terminal, used to happen all over the place but now it's a rarity
Vertical farms are just a waste of housing and decreases density.
Alan, have you seen BritMonkey's recent video on the housing crisis? I think he nails the issues of suburban neighborhoods and a lack of housing
I just want more buildings like the one you showed in the beginning to be in games/movies/etc. Would love to see one in person as well but that is just because of how aethstetically beautiful it is.
Economic incentives to do things right can help. Futuristic thinking about hydroponics etc. has its place too. The video is right to point out that flim-flam may occur, since actually changing policy, as in politics, is tough.
Highway trucking does not pay for anywhere near its road damage in fuel and other taxes (despite the stickers you used to see on the backs of tractor trailers). Automobile-only parkways need far less maintenance since road damage is almost all from trucks.
The use of commuter rail to carry produce at night wasn't done for altruistic reasons: it made economic sense. Yet also the 19th century was a low point in nutritrous food, due to the industrialization of food, so you could say ideas (rather than economics) did lead people to want fresh food.
That area of Pennsylnvania in particular was perhaps the richest farmland in the US back in the 18th century. Later millions of acres of dairyland supplied the major cities, as close to them as feasible, due to the lack of refrigeration. Dairyland is often what made a trip to the countryside so scenic. And it left behind rich soil when land use changed.
One error in the video: suburban housing tracts cannot be turned back into farmland, or hardly can. Dirt farming is based on soil structure, and the suburbs are made up of deep holes under houses and other buildings, slabs and pavement. It was done with bulldozers, but bulldozers can't bring back the topsoil that was trucked away or shoved over hills. Not to mention, there is a housing shortage. Gardens and long-term soil building are the best we'll get there. Some land may be reclaimed by emerging flood zones.
One error in the comments: Japan's population is decreasing, fairly rapidly in recent years.
Dude you're covering all the places I grew up in and romped around in for 30 years. Loving the coverage of southeastern Pennsylvania
I mean no offense, but I disagree with this assessment greatly as it suggests vertical farming as a replacement for conventional farming and as something incompatible with pedestrianised infrastructure. This is not a good assessment for several reasons:
1. Crops, it is no secret among fans of vertical farms that not all crops are even financially viable, with crops like wheat, rice and maize being outright nonviable for use in vertical farms. Instead, fruits and vegetables would likely be grown under hydroponic or aeroponic farms that are water sealed (seemed weird to bring up the concrete argument given we have things like baths and pools in real life already).
2. Supply, the main draw for vertical farms isn't just space efficiency but also because cities have massive food demands that require regular imports to keep its people fed, but by growing the food in the city, it reduces demand, reducing traffic coming in. Even in a zero-carbon reality where all supplies come in by train it still helps to have some vertical farms to offset freight traffic. It's also weird to bring up freight elevators and trucks since, in such a sustainable, pedestrianised future, they could also be done by short-range vans or cargo bikes, if not to supply city shops then to load them into trains for export.
Overall, it is idiotic to say vertical farms should replace conventional farms, as instead they're being developed basically as scaled up, high-tech greenhouses that supplement conventional farming with feeding the many city-dwellers. Also if you look up a real vertical farm, it is aesthetically identical to any other building.
I am sorry Alan, but I am questioning if you have properly researched vertical farming and its current state of progress. I hope this issue can be rectified in your future videos.
A lot of this really feels a bit like a straw man. No sane person is asking for all agriculture to be done on vertical farms. They're a thing that you can add to some buildings to get some benefits one of which is getting a little bit of food out of it. Really it's more like rooftop PV or green roofs but just... sideways. It makes things look nicer, passively cools buildings, removes some air pollution, and let's you have a nice little garden without using additional land
Or take an old walk-up or parking structure that isn't being used and repurpose it for hydroponic farms and other vertical farming techniques. Some top floors available that aren't being used anyways? Why not repurpose them for those uses? Just need to knock down as many walls as possible, put a quick-to-install system up there and start growing.
As a railfan I can confirm we can solve environmental issues by paintings units in chessie system as CSX would get merch money from foamers and trains would replace cars
i love your videos you're doing great but god it's funny watching you do everything in one take
One of your best Alan! I’d love to see more critiques of solar punk
Once two shaky motives of solar punk are teased out, 1. The myth of self sufficiency and 2 aesthetics and greenwashing over functionality, I think there is a lot to be said for solar punk as a noble goal when paired with real world land, labor and capital reforms
Hello Alan, another nice video and a good critique about lack of planning of land use and transportation. However I think you missed the point on vertical farming, from all those vertical farms I saw in real life, they are a multi-store (2-3 floors) greenhouse, with a water mist spray or with a nutrient bath pool and rotating hydroponics. While not cheap to start running, it's a better solution in the long run for places with low rain.
But, if you critique isn't about how a actual vertical farm is, but about a the solar punk BS, yeah, I agree 100% with your video.
I live a 5 minute walk from some farmland and have for as long as I can remember. With that said, my suburb is still expanding in every other direction. Ew
I really appreciate seeing the Bombardier Bi-Level as the first footage of the video!
It's also hilarious to sell people on vertical farms when US have almost 10 million km^2 land (4th largest country by land), you can sell this to Singapore or Hong Kong places where land is scarce.
Disappointed you never talked about vertical farms like Aero Farms in Newark where they take what are essentially abandoned warehouses in industrial parts of cities and turn them into aquaponics farms.
Yeah but that’s not the same thing as vertical farms. That’s an Aquaponics system.
@@doylethelovely2555 It meets the National Center for Appropriate Technology's definition of vertical farming "Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers".
Let me start with the fact that I love your channel and have watched almost every video you have done. With that said I do not think this video was as well thought out as most of your other content. I do think vertical farming is far from being at a place to sustainably replace or even reduce reliance on traditional farms but there are several things to consider. First is a lot of the newer vertical farms are trying to use hydroponics which creates a closed loop system. Many innovations have been used to ensure water is recycled and not lost. Energy efficiency and yield are the biggest obstacles to sustainable vertical farms. Both of these issues have potential engineering solutions. The surface area of urban/suburban environments is limited and as you know becoming more scarce as the housing market struggles to keep up with demand. Not to mention inefficient farming practices that require obscene amounts of water and the use of pesticides in order to maintain profitable yields. Trains as a delivery method for goods should be implemented regardless of vertical farming but with a little progress and innovation vertical farming could alleviate some of the stress of feeding large city populations and continued research should not be discouraged.
Yeah I recently had the thought, derived from annoyance of the amount of trucks on the road, that they should have their own highways…then I realized that’s what trains are
Vertical farms require an insane amount of maintenance. The environment has to be precisely controlled. Drainage is a huge problem, as is water damage. It's a logistical nightmare scaling the solution up as well. And how about doing gardening? Plants grow pretty quickly, and maintaining those plants in (and outside) those skyscrapers ain't an easy task. Much better to just plant street trees and keep indoor plants limited to balconies and roof decks, and instead get more food from normal farms which are far more efficient and far cheaper.
It would depend on the type of plant Vine like plants some love vertical area spaces.
I do it with the roof and the balconies it's also quite beautiful.
vertical farms dont need fertiliser, they are hydroponic, this seems based off of a misunderstanding of what vertical farming is.
You seem to be the one with the misunderstanding. Hydroponics still use fertilizer.
You just showed that you got no clue on how the world works.
You might eat your cake and still have it in economics, but sadly not in agriculture.
@@ZuraZoldyck Yes, but a truck load of fertilizer for hydroponics is about what? 1000 trucks of salad transported from a field?
@@steemlenn8797 I wasn't trying to give analysis on the pros or cons of hydroponics; I was simply stating that they still do use fertilizer.
@@ZuraZoldyck oh, guess I was wrong, thank you, thankfully in this case the point still stands.
(I presume small amounts of fertiliser are used for sprouting and trace quantities in the water)
edit: here is your well deserved upvote.
My trouble, as someone in the vastly suburby North East Texas area, is how are we supposed to un-stroad / un-suburb? Over just my own life I have watched the empty spaces that were farms, either active or long abandoned and regrown into trees, get replaced by endless suburb sprawl as master-plan cookie cutter stamp-pads of big box stores and a bucket of strip malls and pad sites are developed at a previously unused exit, followed by all the land as far as one can see being painted in with STARTING IN THE HIGH 400's homes.
Short of an especially effective apocalypse you will never be able to bulldoze these places to realign them or rewild them because the cities that suddenly had their population increase by %1200 can't afford anything that threatens to make the property value arrow not point up and to the right, much less all the investors- I mean residents. All the residents, who had a reasonable desire to own a home and now live three rush-hour hours away from their job, twenty driving minutes from any kind of groceries or schools and an entire dimension away from any kind of public transit at all, down in the center of squiggly little development roads that have Great Natural Amenities that turn out to be a concrete walking path that crosses hundred of roads but fails to lead anywhere outside the main faux gates.
You speak of the exurbs my son
The farrr suburbs
I'm not sure there is a mass transit solution for them ....
If they wish to run a light rail in that far it could help. ....
@@YourCapyBro_windows95_3DPipes @@YourCapyBro_windows95_3DPipes some places are the distant 'urbs but this texture of stroads and big boxes starts at the edge of the city core and proceeds outward at increasing speed. We put in some light rail but it is maximum compromise and laid out on old freight lines, serving to transit office workers from parking lots that they have to drive to, in the burbs, to a small accessible area of office buildings in the two downtown cores and a slightly larger bus access area around them. We are cursed to stroad situations but in theory could have accessibility in far more spaces. What haunts me is that every strip mall, every fully enclosed housing development, is a nailed-in spike that secures the current situation into the future
Reading terminal is really cool! Glad to say I've been once on a school trip in highschool!