• ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The hard part will be water lines for so much active water use. A sink and a few toilets is one thing but rigging an irrigation system that also has drainage for leaks or overflows requires space and lots of upfront renovation costs that will be paid back over a very long time. It’s a difficult financial proposition.

      • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        You’re not running showers out whatever that needs fresh water and the goal would be to reuse that water over and over. You only need to get the water in there to begin with, then your pumps will move it around.

        • unoriginalsin@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          The problem is a constant fight against gravity. You’ve still got to pump the water effectively to the top of the building every day. And there’s still the issue of getting sunlight to the plants.

          The question really becomes whether it’s more economical to just use traditional irrigation techniques upstream and ship the produce in vs converting a skyscraper into a very inefficient farm space.

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            Vertical farming usually uses LED lighting, not direct sunlight. And I think the idea is that once the water is present on a given level it gets recirculated and reprocessed there, so it wouldn’t need much additional pumping.

            • unoriginalsin@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Vertical farming usually uses LED lighting, not direct sunlight.

              That’s one method of bringing"sunlight" to plants. Another would be to grow them outside.

              And I think the idea is that once the water is present on a given level it gets recirculated and reprocessed there, so it wouldn’t need much additional pumping.

              Even if all you do is pump all the water from the floor of each level to the ceiling of the respective level, you’ve done the exact same amount of work as pumping all the water for the top floor back to the roof in the first place. Only you’ve done it with a hundred pumps and a hundred times the points of failure and repair rate as a single pump for the entire building.

              You’d be so much farther ahead to just install a reservoir on the roof that gets filled by a single pump and let gravity feed the lower floors. Much the way we already do for flat farming.

              And then you’ve got to make up for the inefficiencies lost in planting and harvesting. Vertical farming brings nothing to the table except a smaller footprint in a world where that’s not a real advantage.

              A far better use of empty office buildings would be to convert much of the space into full-time living space.

      • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        Because there’s a massive homeless crisis in downtown LA and people need food, not to be forced to commute into the most congested area of the city to stare at hungry people. So maybe they should make food there too.

        • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          10 months ago

          I’m not sure anyone is starving because of a shortage of food. It’s not 1980s Ethiopia.

          • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Right and people starve due to political and logistical reasons now. The politics are “this space is for office work” and the logistical ones are where we fail to account for how people actually live.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          You don’t fix problems of food distribution or food cost, just by making production more local, especially if you’re also making production more expensive

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              I was just at my grocery store yesterday, looking at all the amazing and reasonably priced food choices from around the world, and I really find that hard to believe. When I go to a farmers market, I see things for double or triple the cost of grocery store produce because local farmers already can’t compete on price. What’s unique about LA that it can’t have cheap potatoes from Idaho, cheap lettuce from California, cheap oranges from Florida, cheap bananas from Nicaragua, etc? How has anyone come to the conclusion that using the most expensive land for farming, and spending hundreds of millions on a verticals infrastructure, will ever be sustainable, much less cheaper?

              Where there are grocery stores, do you not have these things? Isn’t the problem more that a food desert does t have a grocery store?

              • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
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                10 months ago

                It’s because people (large capital) have decided that the area is to be used for business, not for living, despite the fact that lots of people live (and suffer) there. There are a couple of grocery stores in downtown LA, but they’re inadequate to address the general societal collapse that has been Skid Row for the last 40+ years. Food deserts exist despite the fact that there are plentiful options elsewhere. That’s why they’re deserts. It’s entirely social.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Love the idea, but how much CO2 you willing to put into that project? It’s gonna cost. Big time.

      Ever built or installed anything? It costs far more energy to retrofit than to burn it down and start fresh.