Vertical Farming

As our civilization has expanded outward we find ourselves running out of new room to settle and farm, and often look to other worlds as an option, but perhaps our farms can rise vertically much as many of our buildings have.
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Credits:
Vertical Farming
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 321, December 16, 2021
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Jerry Guern • Paleontology - by Jerr...
Yamagishi
Cover Art:
Jakub Grygier www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier
Graphics:
Jeremy Jozwik www.artstation.com/zeuxis_of_...
Graham Tattersall
Ken York / ydvisual
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.com/creator

[@iainballas]

As a small-scale farmer, I always find futuristic farming visions awesome:

[@jeremyleyland1047]

The fact that this episode was not sponsored by Hello Fresh feels like a missed opportunity

[@josiahhockenberry9846]

I really like how you mention that heat isn't necessarily a waste product, given that plants need warmth. It used to always urke me when in chem and bio heat was always calculated as waste. I get why, but still. It's like, if it's waste then why do I pay so much for it!?

[@JustABill02]

I wonder if/when we'll see "sun rights" associated with land in the same way we see mineral rights today...

[@Stuugie.]

I've been watching you for many years now, since your skyhook video. You've always made great content

[@AnimeShinigami13]

Well Isaac, you finally covered a topic I know something about. XD urban agriculture in general. So I wanted to suggest a book "Winter Gardening" by Caleb Warnock. It goes very heavily into french market gardening, which you mentioned. One of the things it discusses is how to make a 'hotbed', which uses the heat from microbes decomposing horse manure as a heat source. If you were ever wondering where the phrase "big steaming pile" comes from, that's it. And what you said about sewage might be able to be used with that technique. A hot compost pile of any kind is capable of straight up pasteurizing the soil beneath and inside it. contain that under a greenhouse and you may be able to heat a large area. A new technique, Bokashi compost, ferments waste in a homemade reactor (really just a bucket with a spigot). This can be scaled up to an industrial level, and the local supermarkets in my area send all their rotten produce to such a location. you could in theory send a water pipe through a bokashi reactor and set it up so the pipe goes through a radiator leading up to a greenhouse. I can't remember any sci fi scenario in which thermophilic bacteria were used for heating. so it might be fertile ground, literally.

[@arcadiaberger9204]

I used to live in a home that had blackberry vines, grape vines, raspberry canes, apple trees, a cherry tree, plum trees, filbert trees and a chicken coop. We had a compost heap which absorbed all of our organic waste (including the eggshells from the chickens and the mash from the apples we squeezed for juice, which we canned each Autumn).

[@jsbrads1]

Water treatment of city water… the Vertical Farming design created by a professor and his students mentioned having fish farms in the basement.

[@hovant6666]

Thank you, I am now obsessed with the idea of stray food trucks needing homes as if they're cats. Adopt a truck today!

[@calebfielding6352]

Another side of vertical farming is farming for industrious crops, like cotton or hemp, or something else.

[@ryanm.191]

I am currently doing a lot of research into vertical farming at university and there’s no other way to say it but vertical farming is the future of farming, not because of improvement but because of necessity.

[@halilzelenka5813]

Changing our food production system to closed environmental systems (ie greenhouses), and stockpiling non-perishable food, would make us less vulnerable to the effects of impact/nuclear winter. “Lean” manufacturing is great for maximizing profits, not so great for building resilience to, for example, pandemics and famine. When your goods are sitting in a warehouse, they are not earning you profit

[@S_Roach]

As a tangent to your idea of trucks hauling still growing produce.

[@albertonunez2045]

The idea of a wild food truck was a good way to start the day. Thank you

[@Satellite_Of_Love]

I love the videos on agriculture. With how important food is to human beings, we definitely need to be thinking of how to feed ourselves if we're going to colonize space.

[@unbreakableldorado7723]

Having been in Brazil for a long time, one thing I realized is that vertical farming is probably one of the most desperately needed changes for our planet

[@franklinz8098]

You didn't mention a very important aspect of this: GM crops.

[@mauriciovic100]

When I heard that last bit about farming getting overlooked in Scy-Fi I remembered, in Stargate it is a subject that showed up in that episode about the Aschen and now I am curious, what kind of population would be big enough to demand the conversion of an entire planet into a giant farm? Disregarding of course just how inefficient their farming was in SG1 and considering that the food of whatever human personal

[@cqmanufacturing1130]

Farmer in the sky was one of my favourite books in the early 80's (showing my age there!). Thankyou for doing this channel, I have been binge watching lately.

[@rustyshackleford1508]

Something I'll forever appreciate about SFIA, is that regardless of anyone's opinions on anything, he