Vertical Farming in the Big Apple
June 20th, 2007I know. Urban hipsters want iPods, free love and electric SUVs. Absolutely any technology or policy that offers a glimmer of hope of keeping things going will be embraced with religious ferocity, regardless of the level of absurdity.
As more and more people give up on the political process, they will seek comfort in the dreams of a technoutopia that is somehow always just out of reach.
To people who have never produced any food in their lives, this sentence, from the article below, probably makes a lot of sense: “All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs.” Instead, devise an “organic” food factory that looks more like a laboratory than anything you would ever encounter outside in the messy imperfect world mother nature. (Go to the Vertical Farming page and look at the illustration at the top left. Notice the vertical farming attire? White lab coats.) Are bees “bugs”? Will they be allowed? Would they have to present ID containing biometric credentials to come and go from the farm?
Notice how the way forward requires us to embrace increasingly absurd and artificial systems?
But why stop there?
Why go through all the pain and uncertainty of child birth? After applying for the appropriate permits, paying exorbitant fees and passing several background checks, just submit your genetic material to the local hatchery (located on the 32nd floor of the vertical farm, perhaps), along with a checklist of desirable features, so your spawn can be grown in a cocoon made out of a cloned cow uterus and filled with nutrient agar. Like the man says about the sky scraper farm, it’s not quite natural, but, the plan is to make the whole complex sustainable…
As the clean, green fascism is rolled out, just keep this in mind:
Billions of people are going to be killed off so that what remains of the strategic resources of the planet may be kept under control of the elite. Survivors will be enslaved under a regime of clean, green fascism.
If you filter all of this eco fascist bullshit through those two sentences above, you’ll see this horror show for what it really is.
Total surveillance. Centralized control. Urban control grids. Biological systems that are fully abstracted from natural ecosystems.
How cool and hip and sustainable does the skyscraper farm look now?
Hint: The extermination will begin (or accelerate drastically) soon after stuff like this actually starts to rise from the filthy, decaying rubble of cities around the world.
Via: BBC:
Downtown Manhattan is hardly a place you would associate with agriculture. Rather, with its countless restaurants, cafes, shops and supermarkets this is a place of consumption.
And so every morsel, every bite of food New Yorkers munch through every day must be trucked, shipped or flown in, from across the country, and across the world.
Now though, scientists at Columbia University are proposing an alternative. Their vision of the future is one in which the skyline of New York and other cities include a new kind of skyscaper: the “vertical farm”.
The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel.
On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect.
There would be a sophisticated irrigation system.
And so crops of all kinds and small livestock could all be grown in a controlled environment in the most urban of settings.
That means there would be no shipping costs, and no pollution caused by moving produce around the country.
…
And, says the professor, vertical farming would allow some existing traditional farms to be returned to natural forests. Good news in a time of global warming.
“Even if it’s not quite natural…. a little bit factory-like in terms of its production, here’s what you’re going to get back: you’re going to get back the rest of the earth. And I’ll take that any time.”
The plan is to make the whole complex sustainable.
Related: Vertical Farm
More grasping at techno-straws.
These so-called experts quoted in the article are beyond pathetic.
“even if it’s not quite natural….”and then the self deluded asshole says..”you’re going to get back to the rest of the earth”
Spare me please.Farmers got along just fine(most of the time ie…back at least 5000 years)without the artificial bullshit foisted on the land over the last 100 years of the oil age.
Kevin,keep posting these stories about the growing of food natural or like this story….unnatural.
I have spent over 300 usd buying heirloom seeds for the coming TEOTWAWKI and love to keep abreast of all things related to raising crops…..the natural way.
GOD help us all who seek to light.
The problem I see is the high cost of urban constuction of erthquake resistant skyscrapers. You have to be looking at at least a million per acre in up front expenses, and at least two million per year in labor and maintenance. Then lets talk about water and fertilizer to replace what goes out the door as produce, that has to be produced from an external source, even if it is local trash.
I think you could probably do better by simply planting brownlots that every city has.
Ah, but what of all the useless, empty, and soon to be free skyscrapers in the cratered, largely abandoned, and energy-depleted urban areas shortly after the collapse begins?
After Joe and Jane Sixpack can’t afford to drive to work and perhaps flee to the countryside on foot in a desperate search for food to fill their empty bellies, they’ll be plenty of free and available ‘formerly valuable’ real estate for TPTB to take control of and use in such schemes.
“All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs.â€
Without all that nasty, inconvenient, germy dirt that old fashioned farms have.
Egads…
well, to me indoors means 2 things. control, and ‘error correction’ for things like, environment… i’d look at this as more of an experiment on the conversion of ‘soon to be’ empty buildings in urban areas and the associated controls. hand pollinating, or some kind of mechanical action may be tested in place of bees. interesting.
It seems the most powerful underlying compulsion of our culture is to live in absolute disconnect from life and nature–to be inhabitants of artificial/imaginary worlds that are constructs of the human brain–to live in “the matrix”, the video game.
Malgwyn’s comment is a highly salient point–but clearly no one cares to analyze this concept in a practical, factual context. The purpose is to exclude life from the human condition.
“You’re going to get back the rest of the earth….” Even if that were true (which, as Malgwyn observes, it is not), the question is, get back the rest of the earth for whom, and for what purpose?
This plan doesn’t exactly embrace the idea of human communities living in connection with the earth and within nature. It embraces the idea of human communities living caged in utterly artificial environments. Perhaps the “rest of the earth”–were this plan workable–would be a playground for vacationing elites.
This is a wonderful article, by the way, as was the one that suggested that a die-off is being engineered–which I suspect is true.
Even if the die-off thing is some form of hysteria, there’s one thing that is clear as exemplified by this article: This society’s descent into stark raving insanity is now complete.
“Soylent green” anyone?
Madness on the cusp of disaster.
Your faith in THEIR ability to centralize control is touching. THEY will never centralize control. Not completely. That’s because as soon as THEY come close, some of THEM will splinter away for some reason.
Think about it.
If you were one of THEM, would you want anyone telling YOU what to do? And wouldn’t you want to be the one in charge?
Part of the reason they do what they do is that they think everyone thinks as ruthlessly and as cruelly as they do.
Take the Nazis, for instance. Had they conquered the world, who would they have gone after as their unifying outside enemy? What would they have done after purifying the race? Keep purifying it?
Their schemes are lunacy. They are so drunk on their own power that they forget REALITY.
As for the sky-scraper farms; I’m a pluralist. So, I don’t really care where or how the food is grown, so long as it isn’t poisonous, and so long as the growing techniques aren’t destructive.
Also, consider this: horizontal, traditional agriculture necessitated, and gave birth to, WAR. Sure, it was great no longer having to hunt and gather in the jungles, which you had just cleared to make room for planting crops. But now you had to defend them, and you had to increase your territory to feed and clothe your growing population.
Why NOT try growing the food vertically? Then we can have trees in the Heartland in a few generations again, rather than the homogeneous fields of corn? People might actually want to visit Nebraska and Iowa again.
Of course, if you grow all the food vertically, then you could destroy it pretty easily.
Naturally, it would make sense to use as many different models as possible.
I’m in the minority here, but I say sure, go for it. Its a hundred times better than any of the other sh*tty things they are currently doing in buildings downtown.
It sort of makes me laugh considering that they’re demolishing several multi-story buildings downtown, for quite a tidy sum, because they couldn’t figure out any way of making them pay. Seems that in our city fathers haste to “beautify” they’d just as soon tear it down. In either case we’re only losing more.
Here is my vote for the kill shot:
1. Load the wealthy into these gated survival ‘ark’ communities. Go into lock down.
2. Pull the trigger on this baby…
“LONDON: Scientists have recreated the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the deadliest ever to emerge, to the alarm of many researchers who fear it presents a serious security risk.”
http://politicsinternational.web-log.nl/politicsinternational/2005/10/bird_flu_beware.html
http://www.hindu.com/2005/10/07/stories/2005100704671400.htm
3. Charge whatever you want for food, vaccinations and other ‘medicine’.
The idea is never about living in balance with nature, it’s about surpassing and/or controlling it. Someone has to have control over the relationship.
So easily deceived,…
http://www.transparencynow.com/
Sharon,you may find that site interesting
others here maybe,…particularly info about writer Stanislaw Lem and his “the futurological congress”
Why don’t they just build a Vertical Farm on the site of the World Trade Center, to demonstrate how centralization makes an easy target?
This should be taken as an “AND” scenario and not an “OR”.
Aside from the sterile lab-like environment, it’s not such a bad idea. We need larger-scale farming models that adopt sustainable methods of irrigation, energy use, etc.
But to use vertical farming alone is asking for trouble on many levels.
Pollination by hand? C’mon!
The only reason for not using nature’s best pollinators- bees, is if they indeed become extinct.
Or maybe that’s just another part of the larger conspiracy?
I wouldn’t think it a far stretch to consider that the recent bee die-offs may be part of a plot to further regulate our food supply sources by forcing controlled pollination?
Look at what Monsanto’s been up to, and it actually doesn’t seem that far fetched.
Give people a “green” alternative like Vertical Farming, instead of an uncomfortable option, like say, CONSUMING LESS, and they’re delighted to take it.
How long do you think it will be until we see government owned and regulated Vertical Farms?
Or maybe government-owned, private-sector run?