Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

I don't always agree with her, and she takes a lot of words to say something, 
but this makes a lot of sense to me. K-I-S-S.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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It is elegant, but is it feasible?
by Sharon Astyk
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-08/it-elegant-it-feasible
 Published Dec 8 2010 by Casaubon's Book

As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about 
feeding cities that includes a nice, rational (look at the comments for more 
good stuff) discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I'm glad to see the 
issue come up, because it has so much power. I'm grateful to Liz for 
providing such a balanced and rational discussion, since most of them aren't.

I don't think I'm even overstating when I say that every time I go somewhere 
and talk about food, someone asks me what I think of the idea of Vertical 
Farming. It is the cool, trendy idea about feeding cities that gets tons of 
attention - woohoo, let's build heated food towers in Manhattan. I can 
understand the appeal in many ways.

Now this idea has been subject to some take downs, including this one by 
George Monbiot (thanks to Moshe Braner for pointing me to this article), but 
to me, the problem with vertical farming is the same problem that I have to 
whatever the latest super-hot renewable technology that's going to save us as 
soon as it comes out of development and becomes affordable, or even for fancy 
light rail systems in smaller cities (note, I'm not opposd to all light 
rail). The problem is that that the ideas are bad or wrong per se - the 
problem is that they are complex and expensive, and we are puttiing the cart 
before the horse when we leap to complex and expensive before we go for cheap 
and simple.

We have a strong taste for complex and expensive, especially when it looks 
cool - generally speaking, and in an era of cheap energy and economic 
stability, there's at least an argument for doing the complicated fancy thing 
- first, you can, second, the results are more elegant than what you can 
generally get without complexity. But in a society with major economic 
constraints and facing the reality of less, rather than more available energy 
for consumption, complex and expensive becomes not only a bad idea, but 
infeasible.

This isn't something we have to hypothesize about - ask yourself whether the 
State government or city of New York can afford to build multi-million dollar 
high rise, heated semi-solar food growing towers in mid-town Manhattan? Ask 
whether your small city, already laying off cops and firefighters can afford 
a huge new tranportation system? Ask whether you can wait for X miracle 
technology to come online before you act? Where will the money come from 
right now? And if we don't have the money right now, why do you think we can 
do it further down the depletion curve, or after climate change starts taking 
a larger and larger percentage of our GDP?

These are often elegant solutions, and that's how they get so much airplay - 
I don't deny that, and like everyone, I have a taste for the elegant. It 
would be fun for you to be able to go to your vertical farm and buy out of 
season tomatoes - but it would be smarter if you could just get tomatoes in 
season that were grown in your neighborhood, without the million dollar 
investment. Moreover, given the energy required to make it happen, it almost 
certainly would require less energy to fly tomatoes in from Florida. If you 
could do it at all, do we really think that the ordinary middle class and 
poor will be eating those vertical farm tomatoes? If not, why do we care? 
Making sure the rich get tomatoes in February is simply not a priority for 
me, and I suspect, shouldn't be for a society at large, if the larger 
question is "feeding the city" not "feeding the affluent" (generally speaking 
the affluent do a decent job of taking care of that for themselves, I've 
heard)

More at the link
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