[Pil-pc-oceania] Las Vegas to build farm skyscraper

[permaculture at apollobay.org.au]

I looked into this... it's certainly not Boyd's designs (his designs were
putting infrastructure for vertical gardens on the exterior of existing
buildings).

This Las Vegas farm skyscraper sounds scary... especially Hessel's last
comment; 
"It might turn out that the only way to make agriculture truly sustainable
is to stop farming the crops and start manufacturing them." and what they
call organic is to be grown without soil and be GM!?!

see article:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68888

No Green Acres? Try Skyscrapers
- Sam Jaffe

Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along
I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They're heaped there in
perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped back to Asia but too expensive to melt
down.

Where many might see a pile of garbage, Lior Hessel sees, of all things, an
organic farm. Those storage containers would be ideal housing for miniature
farms, he believes, stacked one upon another like an agricultural
skyscraper, all growing fresh organic produce for millions of wealthy
consumers. And since the crops would be grown with artificial lighting,
servers, sensors and robots, the cost of labor would consist of a single
computer technician's salary.

Hessel has a personal stake in this vision: He's the CEO of OrganiTech, a
Wilmington, Delaware, company working toward making such farms a reality.
The design and layout of the automated farms are more related to the
semiconductor plants of Silicon Valley than the lettuce fields of Salinas
Valley. "This is a factory, not a farm," says Hessel, whose own background
is in the chip industry. "We just build lettuce instead of CPUs."

The vertical farm model is one of Hessel's ultimate goals, and OrganiTech
has been busy laying the groundwork to make skyscraper farms possible. It's
already using a system of robotics in high-tech greenhouses. "You might as
well take advantage of the sunlight when you can," he says. "It's free
energy."

Saving the cost of energy is a big part of OrganiTech's near-term business
plan. As of mid-2005, it cost as much as 50 cents to transport a 1-pound
head of lettuce from California (where 85 percent of America's lettuce is
grown) to the East Coast, according to Ram Acharya, an agricultural
economist at Arizona State University. If the lettuce can be grown near
where it's eaten, it will have an automatic cost advantage.

OrganiTech can supply a complete set of robotic equipment plus greenhouse
for $2 million. A system the size of a tennis court can produce 145,000
bags of lettuce leaves per year -- that's a yield similar to a 100-acre
traditional farm. According to the company, it costs 27 cents to produce a
single head of lettuce with its system, compared to about 18 cents per head
of lettuce grown in California fields. Factor in the transportation costs
and suddenly the automated greenhouse grower saves as much as 43 cents a
head.

Add to that the fact that OrganiTech's system is entirely free of
pesticides (the greenhouses keep positive air pressure inside the
structure, so few if any insects can fly in) and are grown hydroponically
(without soil) so nutrients, fertilizers and water requirements are
one-third to one-fifth the needs of soil-grown lettuce. That means the
lettuce can be marketed as water-friendly and organic, which adds to the
premium consumers are willing to pay.

Greenhouse farming isn't the easiest way to make a living, though, says
Cornell University horticulture economist Gerald White, who has written
papers on the topic. "There is a lot more greenhouse cheerleading than
there is solid analysis of the costs and rewards," he says. "It's a very
difficult business that hasn't quite figured out a model that works right
yet." Nevertheless, he points out that there are several Canadian and
European greenhouse farms that operate profitably. "Profitability is
usually a function of better technology," he says. 

 And few greenhouses can claim their technology is any more advanced than
OrganiTech's. The system is essentially an assembly line of plastic foam
trays that float in a nutrient broth. The trays, which have been seeded
with lettuce by a robot, inch their way through the greenhouse as they go
through their two- to three-month growth cycle. Hundreds of sensors
throughout the building monitor temperature, humidity, air pressure and
lighting, all to ensure that each plant reaches its height, density and
nutritional content goals.

During winter months, the natural sunlight is augmented by banks of
artificial lighting. At the end of the greenhouse, the mature lettuce
plants are cut and packaged by another robot. So far, test structures in
Israel, Ireland, Russia, Germany and Singapore have produced yields of
lettuce that were predicted exactly by the computer program.

Now OrganiTech's system is coming to the United States. The company
recently signed an agreement with a food industry incubator overseen by
Rutgers University in Bridgeton, New Jersey, to grow lettuce. "This
technology not only eliminates the transportation costs for New Jersey
consumers, but also creates high-tech jobs in a depressed part of New
Jersey," says Lou Cooperhouse, director of the Rutgers Food Innovation
Center in Bridgeton and president of Food Spectrum, a prepared-food
consultancy. "They're not just putting a farm here, they're creating an
entirely new model for agriculture."

OrganiTech is also in talks with several pharmaceutical companies to create
custom "plant factories" for genetically engineered crops that produce
medically useful compounds. If the company's offerings in that area start
selling well, it could compete with other technologies for raising
genetically modified plants, including plans to harvest such crops
underground.

If the cost of energy comes down enough to make artificial lighting and
heating affordable for agriculture, Hessel's vision of automated skyscraper
farms could one day be a reality, too. "Agriculture is a very wasteful
industry right now," he says, pointing out that in regular farms, the
majority of water, fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide used is wasted as
runoff. "It might turn out that the only way to make agriculture truly
sustainable is to stop farming the crops and start manufacturing them." 



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