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Zen Suggestions
 | The Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings: Save Money, Save the Earth, Jennifer Thorne Amann, Alex Wilson, Katie Ackerly, New Society Publishers, 2007Great guide with a lot of advice and suggestions. |
 | The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, William Easterly, MIT Press, 2002 |
 | Renewable Electricity and the Grid: The Challenge of Variability , Godfrey Boyle, Earthscan Ltd, 2007 |
 | Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice, Howard Gardner, Basic Books, 2006 |
 | The Homeowner's Handbook to Energy Efficiency: A Guide to Big and Small Improvements, John T Krigger, Chris Dorsi, Saturn Resource Management, 2008 |
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Inspiration
He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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| Are Vertical Farms the Urban Farm of the Future |
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| Written by Richard | ||||||||
| Wednesday, 17 March 2010 15:23 | ||||||||
 What will farms look like in the future? It's always interesting to imagine what the future will hold, and farming is a very interesting and important topic. With the advent of Vertical Farming, could farms move back into urban areas?Today, farms are spread out in vast fields in the countryside. Food is shipped by sea, air, road and rail to get it to consumers. However, one of the latest trends in consumption is the move towards consumption of primarily local produce, the so called locavoire movement. What could be more local than having farms in the centre of cities? It's an interesting concept, especially if we move away from processed food to more naturally grown fruits and vegetables. People would be able to stop by the farm on their way home from work and pick up freshly grown items that had been picked several hours before. It's difficult to get fresher produce and and nutrient content would be so high! In many ways, this would be making our food chains similar to the "just in time" lean supply chains of the automobile manufacturers. This is done in industry to cut down on waste and improve financial performance. By placing farms in the centre of cities, could we cut down on our waste and save money? It's an interesting prospect. This manner of delivering food goods would probably suite concentrated urban living well. Downtown cores such as Vancouver in Canada, Hong Kong or Singapore would probably be well able to integrate such systems into the fabric of daily life - more so than suburban dwellers. However, the technology will need to vastly improve before this is possible. It's difficult to imagine urban farms without the use of a lot of chemical fertilizers which are good neither for a consumer's health nor for the people working and living around such farms. A prototype vertical farm has been built at Paignton Zoo, in the UK, to feed the animals there, with quite some success. There is also the question of space. Urban land is very expensive, so financially is it more attractive to build a residential or commercial building, or an urban farm? The Huffington Post has an article on the question of urban farms, along with several graphics of what they may look like. Today that seems to be more science fiction than actual science fact. Images: Verticalfarm.com - Blake Kurasek For more insight into this topic, see these articles:
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 16:07 |
