This project presents the proposal of vertical farming at the average farmer's budget and capabilities. This is essentially a greenhouse, but with multiple floors. With dimensions of 208'x208'x208' the building takes up an acre of land and is smaller than a Wal-Mart Superstore.
Throughout this project, I will be referring to tomatoes only because its a fruit I know how to handle. The efficiency of the greenhouse will be boosted with the help of aeroponics, which is a way to grow crops and plants without soil. The only constant is a spray of fine mist. This decreases the cost of water and soil as well as boosts the growth rate by 1200%
This entire idea is for my senior exit project, but I can see it going further than that. Julie LaChance who is my mentor and Mo who has been helping me immensely will both be blogging with me so we can all document the progress of this project. My mother will be joining the blog as well to document her experience and ideas through this project
Brendan, this looks like a really interesting project! I'm looking forward to seeing how it works out. In particular, I'm curious about a couple of things: are you using the SL build to simulate the entire growing process, or just to construct a model of the greenhouse? Also, other than efficient use of land, what's the rationale for building a multiple floor greenhouse? Why do you think it's never yet been done?
ReplyDeleteWell Gerald to start I am going to just make a model in SL, but after I get that part down I definitely want to simulate real crops. Other than efficient use of land, this greenhouse produces a lot more crops than the normal famr. This means after the waves of supply and demand settle, you'll have a lot to sell at a cheaper price. More money for the farmers. That's my theory anyway. I saw a few pictures of other farm high rise ideas but it looked like that's all it was, was a picture. The main struggles I am having are the lighting factors. I want natural lighting but as you can imagine there are many shadows.
ReplyDeleteAny input is greatly appreciated, I'm glad to see people reading this.
Light was one of the things I was wondering about, actually, and I'm really interested to see how you solve that problem. I think the SL model will be a great way to simulate that and see how you can work around the shadow issue.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to following this project and seeing how it goes.