Students at Columbia University research on feeding 50,000 with a 30 storey farm

[Alex_Spider]

Students at Columbia University in the U.S. determined that in order to feed 50 thousand people, a 30 storey farm, built on the size of basic city block would be needed. It would take roughly 78 structures to feed all residents of LA. This amounts to about 0.1% of the total land area of Los Angeles to feed the entire population of 3.9 million. If we apply this extrapolation to the Earth and the human population of 7.2 billion, we end up needing about a 144,000 vertical farms to feed the whole world. We find that we only need 0,006% of the Earth's existing agriculture land to meet production requirements.

If we were to theoreticaly take only the crop production land, currently being used which is about 4 billion acres, replacing land based cultivation by dropping these 30 storey vertical farms side by side in theory, the food output would be enough, to meet the nutritional needs to feed 34,440,000,000,000 people

Economic Calculation in a Natural Law / RBE, Peter Joseph, The Zeitgeist Movement, Berlin
[YT]K9FDIne7M9o[/YT]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9FDIne7M9o

Nearly a billion people worldwide are starving, UN agency warns. Rising prices mean 14% now under nourished, urgency over food crisis lost and credit crunch.

World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories today than ir did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day.

It is estimated that 30-50% (or 1.2-2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach and this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste

It appears that the most effective and practical means to overcome this global deficiency entirely is to update the system of food production itself with the most strategic localisation in order to reduce the waste caused by inefficiencies in the current global supply chain.

And perhaps the most promising of these arrangments would be Vertical Farming. It has been put to test in a number of regions with extremely promising results regarding efficiency and conservation. This method of abundant food production will not only use less resources per unit output, causing less waste, produce ecological footprint, increase food quality, it will also use less land area.

A Vertical Farm system in Singapore custom built a transparent enclosure, uses a closed loop hydraulic system to rotate the crops and circles between sunlight and organic nutrient treatment, costing only about 3 dollars a month in electricity for each enclosure. This system also has ten times more productivity per square foot than conventional farming, again using much less water, labour and fertiliser.

Vertical farming at 37.30 of the video and water and energy shortages solutions follow after.

 

[KevanG]

The theory has always been sound but actually getting the governments that need to do it in the countries that are desperate for it is almost impossible.

 

[Alpha and Omega]

This is interesting. There is enough food on the planet to annually feed 12 billion people but the present global economy hinders a lot of what could be used to help the less fortunate in the the world.