At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten-story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough.
PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs.
FWIW, they appear to be talking about something pretty different than cheeseburger and soda ingredients in the linked article, and I think this is where the problem is -- the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well. For better or worse, telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is, for the time being, a non-starter.
The article is really interesting. I guess if the question is "would it be cheaper to raise the food in the sun and drive it into town or use that energy to raise it in a building" it's possible the answer would be the latter, particularly if we're talking specifically about ensuring caloric and nutritional production, not specific foods. Furthermore, there are other points on the continuum that may also work well, such as the large grocery store that has a huge garden inside for fresh ingredients.
I guess the proof is in the pudding. There must be a reason why foods are processed in rural areas and only transported into towns in high calorie form (HFCS, beef, concentrated juices). I suspect subsidies contribute, of course. However, there's too much variability in opportunities to explain it all, in my opinion.
the subsidies to the midwest are ensuring the lifestyle of (sub-)urban people as well.
Not if it costs more to produce food in rural areas than to produce the same food in urban areas.
telling Americans that they're not going to be able to eat meat at every meal is [...] a non-starter.
The statement of HeyLaughingBoy that I was responding to was: "Yeah, we'll just level midtown Manhattan to raise 100 acres of corn."
What I had been referring to in my original comment was the raising of "dairy cows" in urban areas. If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?
* If one could grow corn in a 100 story building, what would stop one from running an automated "Grain/hay/straw-fed" dairy cow operation, or automated beef or veal-calf operations, in a 100 story building?*
1) The relative costs of land urban vs rural. Around here usable farmland land is a relatively expensive $8.5-10k/acre. What's it cost in Manhattan? SF? Boston?
2) The costs of removing animal waste and supplying animals with food: instead of shipping beef in, you're shipping feed in and manure out. Yeah, I know: just put the manure in a digester and run the operation from the resulting methane gas: digester takes up expensive space too and just reduces, not eliminates the waste.
3) How much corn can you grow in that 100 story building? What's the opportunity cost of using the building to grow corn instead of housing an insurance company?
4) I'd really like to know what the financial company across the road from say, a pig farm (mmmm. big manure lagoons) thinks of the lovely midsummer scent.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for local sourcing of food and reducing energy cost where possible. Hell, when I lived in the city, I dug up most of my back lawn to put in fruit & vegetable gardens because grass carpets are a waste of space. But local sourcing only works in small amounts in urban areas for the simple reason that land is so expensive and while sunlight is free, even very high-efficiency lighting costs money. Like the other poster said, theres a reason (actually, reasonS) why farms are in rural areas and it's not just because "that's the way it's always been done." If anything, increasing "efficiency" of food animal operations is going the wrong way: the eggs I get from my chickens every day taste and look infinitely better than the ones I buy at the supermarket from a 10,000 hen operation.
~$100-1,000/sqft (from Harlem to Midtown, respectively). (At the $8,500-10,000/acre price-range you cited, farmland is $0.195-$0.23/sqft.) For a 100-story building, that works out to $1-10/sqft of floor space, not accounting for walls and columns. Would you choose to locate food factories on the most expensive land in a given urban area? If so, why?
Farmland at $0.20/sqft is 1/5th as expensive as 100-story Harlem floorspace. Since the Harlem floorspace would be 1,000 times as food-productive, the farmland would have a relative cost 200 times that of the Harlem floorspace.
2) instead of shipping beef in, you're shipping feed in
Why ship feed in, instead of producing it onsite?
2) you're shipping [...] manure out.
Manure can be dehydrated. That makes it less expensive to ship.
3) How much corn can you grow in that 100 story building?
A 100-story 1 square mile PhytoFarm facility could feed 25 million people. * The New York metropolitan area's population is only 19 million and covers 6,720 square miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
3) What's the opportunity cost
A 100-story Midtown office building would rent for $8,500/year/sqft land area ($85/sqft floor area). http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2009... A 1 square mile (28 million sqft) factory would cost $238 billion/year in opportunity - if it could attract renters. Midtown currently does not have any 1 square mile 100-story buildings, and in fact does not allow them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(architecture)#Setbacks... That much office space might not currently exist in the entire New York metro area, not to speak of all of Manhattan.
4) pig farm [...] the lovely midsummer scent.
Exhaust air can be filtered. This is standard operation procedure for urban cannabis grow operations, and such grow operations are notoriously smelly.
At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire
present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side [...] This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present [...] you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high [...] You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high [...]
PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland.
140^2 is ~20,000 square miles to feed 5 billion people. With a 100 story building, that becomes 200 square miles. Scaling down to 1 square mile scales down the number of people fed to 25 million. 1 square mile is 28 million square feet. At land costs of $100-1,000/sqft, that works out to $2.8-28 billion in land costs. Outside of Manhattan, but still in the metro area, land might cost as little as $10/sqft, bringing the land cost down to $140 million. For comparison, a typical supertall skyscraper construction project costs over $1 billion. http://www.google.com/search?q=freedom+tower+billion
It is not just me making the claim: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...
At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten-story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough.
PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs.