Everything Poops + Business Sees The Changing Climate = Crapitalism
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 06.16.07
Months ago we posted on a landfill methane capture project: controversial because "offsets" were being sold to cover the costs of capturing and burning methane emitted from buried solid waste. Some likened the practice to selling indulgences for spiritual gain. Then, months later, the Vatican decided to go for the green, causing that simile to lose currency. Now it seems, covering and capturing all manner of poop gas is headed toward the realm of big business. Raw material in excess. Cows do it. Pigs do it. Even billions of crowded miserable little chickens do it. We think capturing the methane wafting from their piles of excrement and selling the credits for this effort is soon to be a global love story for investors. The business potential is nicely embodied by AgCert International (AgCert™), a business that sells credits for those greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. "Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, AgCert was founded to generate emission reductions from livestock farms to reduce the adverse impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to global warming and climate change. AgCert is now the worldwide leader in agriculturally derived emission reductions, and we are applying our expertise to create industrial based emission reductions as well. The GHG emission reductions are pooled and sold to industrial emitters, governments, funds and energy traders."
Anaerobic digestion, the biotic and major source of atmospheric methane releases, works on straw, wasted food, animal bedding, manure....all kinds of organic material...not just the collected byproducts of factory farming.
Now if we could just think of an incentive for capitalists to conserve old growth forests and protect biodiversity on this same scale. Oh wait...there are some. Offsetting, again, if deployed for conservation reserve. And, tax credits for donating money to the Nature Conservancy, for example.
If the covered lagoon method (pictured) proves to be globally valuable for business, the upshot is a large scale incentive to prevent lagoon flooding or leakage, and the resulting loss of raw material (the poop) needed profit from a waste that, if not carefully retained to extract economic value, offends neighbors, is a potential disease vector (for Avian flu for example) and poses an ecological hazard to downstream waters. (What are those huge lagoon covers made out of anyway? Could be a good supply chain aspect to invest in.)
US-EPA (other side of pond from Ireland) is offering a Federal grants program to help animal waste handlers do a better job of managing waste, primarily through education and free consultation. Is there a potential synergy between "crapitalism" and the US-style, regulatory carrot/stick method for improving animal waste management? Or could this be a conflict looming?
Via:: RP at The Shaw Group, Inc.
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
The Powerdown Show: Exploring Peak Oil and Climate Change (Video)
Prototype Biomass Gasifier To Convert California Yardwaste To Power 30,000 Homes
Blanchett to Corporations: Time to Change Climate Change
White Roofs to Sweep the World, Fight Climate Change
Comments (7)
part of the energy mix I buy from my utility includes "landfill gas" which is methane. Since cows are the biggest threat to global warming in the USA (info quoted from articles found online), why not capture and use that gas?
Crapitalism. I love it!
June 16, 2007 2:45 PM | flag a problem
dwightstreetrenter says:
Well, that would evolve putting the cows in a sealed container with no in or out air circulation. Sounds even worse than their life now.
===== author's response follows ===
The cows are already in climate controlled stalls. The manure is carried away by a chain driven conveyor , into a pit, from where it is augured by a big worm gear device into storage lagoons. The whole affair is periodically washed down and that rinseate goes also into the lagoon. In the lagoon is where anaerobes do their methane magic. The balloon cover is over the lagoon.
June 16, 2007 4:49 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
...or we could just promote vegetarianism and stop breeding chickens, cows, and pigs all together. But wait...that means people actually have to give something up. On second thought, I'll just wait for the hybrid Hummer.
June 17, 2007 8:30 AM | flag a problem
Joshua says:
This is a significant shift and has a lot of upside. I remember reading about bio-digestion in Mother Earth news about 30+ years ago. Now it's gone mainstream. Then it was skewed as a methodology for the third world and small farms - which is still very applicable.
The difficulty has always been collecting the wastes efficiently. Free range cattle require hundreds of acres per cow, and you can't really send someone out with a shovel to follow them all.
Feedlots and industrially scaled penned livestock are the main beneficiaries here, which has pluses and minuses.
The downside is that this makes it more cost effective to keep livestock confined by the thousands, with all of the disease and quality of life issues for the animals that this entails. The quality of the meat, dairy and byproducts is also problematic, compared to animals who can roam to greater or lesser degrees.
The upside is that the multiple-acre manure lagoons can be brought under control, and their environmental effects mitigated. Pig farms have been particularly problematic in the SE US where they dominate certain regions, where the stench, flies, contamination of groundwater, blowouts into rivers and wetlands, and dispersal of antibiotics and hormones have despoiled entire counties.
The processed manure that results from bio-digestion is sterile, less smelly, and better suited for crop fertilizer. The burning off of the methane removes an aggressive greenhouse gas. The CO2 from burning methane is probably in carbon balance with the livestock feed. Plus you can generate electricity, and do co-generation to provide process heat, heat the livestock barns, and provide hot water for cleaning needs.
This also works for towns and cities with waste treatment plants, you know. My local plant has a series of huge egg-shaped digesters. They capture the heat from burning the methane for much of their needs. The released, treated effluent water is the most innocuous that's ever been released into the waters of the city. Not quite a Clivus Multrum, but a vast step up from what a million people had done previously.
==== author's response follows ====
Thanks for the insightful comment. I hope all readers of this post take the time to ponder the tradeoffs you cite here.
Extrapolations on your thoughts follow.
As any naive person who has traveled in the Lancaster PA, USA area can easily observe, the "nature friendly" free range livestock operations often mean trampled pastures, severely caved stream banks, high silt loads, and excessive nutrients flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.
Better management practices surely are available at low cost - where there is a will there is a way - but we should not romanticize, as often is done, about a more natural farming method being good for nature in all aspects of the product life cycle.
This applies also to the production of goat cheese and sheeps wool. Goats and sheep are extremely destructive to the environment from their over grazing if not properly managed. Every wonder why almost every new photo you see of the landscape of the Middle East shows a near barren landscape? Two millennium of goat and sheep will do that.
June 17, 2007 9:25 AM | flag a problem
jon says:
Ahh, well we certainly should talk about the positives of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Because far be it from us to consider something like factory farming could go away. Or that people could fathom not eating meat.
Sustainability can supersede ethics and consideration for animals, because the people actually changing their diet or lifestyle is inconceivable. And I also forgot how destructive free range, pastured animal farming is. It must be that, and not the concentrated Smithfield Farms hog lots that are polluting the Chesapeake.
Crapitalism is exactly how it sounds and smells. A reeking compromise and excuse because it's "the best we can do".
I am dumbfounded here. People talk about it as though "making the best of a horrible industry," but ultimately that message gets distorted into "oh it may be a good thing". Before you know it the greater population deludes itself into thinking it some kind of sustainable closed loop system. It's like the Canadian and Russian governments talking about the economic boons they may reap from global warming.
I'm with Joshua: I'll nibble my vegan happy meal in my hybrid hummer.
PS to Jon: Cynicism aside, I'd love to read something that quantifies the damage of free range farming in contrast to factory farming.
June 19, 2007 2:19 PM | flag a problem
Jon says:
I'm not a complete vegetarian but after having been raised to eat meat I have cut back by over 90%.
The reason the economy of meat "works" is the final step when a truck is loaded up with the very dense weight of meat. Compare a truckload of tomatoes to a truckload of meat. Even though meat started at a deficit in terms of costs to create, it's the final step where it gets loaded into a truck that it becomes economically feasible.
Localized farming is probably the best solution. Read up on South Central Farms in South Central Los Angeles. Here was a 15 acre plot of land that was divided into a couple hundred individual garden plots, but in the end the land was basically given back to the original owner at far below market value so that the land can be "developed". Developed means put a building up on it that then becomes energy dependent on non renewable resources with a property overvaluation that causes the businesses that will reside in the property to import their goods so they can heavily mark them up to pay for their overhead. This destructive practice continues to proliferate. Yes, local cities do there part to create the problem as much if not moreso than the federal government.
Showing posts with label egg laying chickens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label egg laying chickens. Show all posts
Friday, May 29, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Harvest Green: Vertical Farm
Harvest Green: Vertical Farm by Romses Architects wins Competition
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05. 6.09
Design & Architecture
all images by Romses Architects via Designboom
Romses Architects recently won a competition held by the City of Vancouver to "to address climate change plans and to guide greener and denser development, reducing carbon emissions for the future."
It has everything. From Designboom:
The concept of 'harvest' is explored in the project through the vertical farming of vegetables, herbs, fruits, fish, egg laying chickens, and a boutique goat and sheep dairy facility. In addition, renewable energy will be harvested via green building design elements harnessing geothermal, wind and solar power. The buildings have photovoltaic glazing and incorporate small and large-scale wind turbines to turn the structure into solar and wind-farm infrastructure. In addition, vertical farming potentially adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible parts of plants and animals. Furthermore, a large rainwater cistern terminates the top of the 'harvest tower' providing on-site irrigation for the numerous indoor and outdoor crops and roof gardens.
In addition to food and energy harvesting, the proposal purposefully incorporates program uses for residential, transit, a large farmers market and supermarket, office and agricultural research and educational facilities, and food related retail/hospitality. The result will be a highly dynamic synergy of uses that compliment and support each other.
More on Vertical Farms:
Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC (roundup)
Vertical Farm in Dubai Uses Seawater
Adam Stein on Vertical Farms: "Pie in the Sky"
The Future of Farming: Vertical or Horizontal?
Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto
Mithun Architects' Vertical Farm for Seattle
Related Tags: design competitions | food | vancouver | vertical farms
Comments (17)
Cooool!
May 6, 2009 11:07 AM | flag a problem
Kelvin says:
I have read a lot about vertical farming and I think it is a great idea with some big hurdles to jump. The only issue I take with this paln is adding the animal production levels. One, PETA is going to have a fit about containing animals in small indoor space their whole lives. Two, has anyone every been to a cattle feed lot or a poultry farm? The smell is overwhelming. The supermarket is suppossed to be the level below the grazing area for cattle. I am sure people that are going to be paying a premium for their food want to shop in a store that smells like cow crap.
May 6, 2009 11:54 AM | flag a problem
Trent says:
I'm curious what the net energy and resource balance of the building will be. Will it be self-powered? That would be amazing. Will it recycle it's water, and how effectively? Compost its waste?
May 6, 2009 3:21 PM | flag a problem
Anthony says:
Wow a freaking city boy architect and his urban friends are designing a farm ..... without talking to farmers ---- I'm to stunned into stupidity to understand how they won this competition.
Environmental farms are supposed to be about function over form but this fake farm is about form over function.
May 6, 2009 6:59 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
@Trent
Well I think vertical farming for plants and agricultural crops is the future. But in terms of keeping livestock I think it's a really bad idea both ethically and logistically.
Asides from the smell, the amount of damage that would be done to the floors and living environment would be considerable and means that the livestock would have to be on the first few floors. Having them higher up would increase the cost of maintenance and would also be rather risky.
Ethically, the conditions would be abhorrent - conventional factory farms, as they are, already limit the amount of light that enters - by stacking up a few of these vertical towers you would basically be boxing in these animals - not only does this arise ethical/moral concerns but it also leads to issues in the meat that arise from stress and poor health in the animals.
May 6, 2009 10:34 PM | flag a problem
Television Spy says:
wow. . pretty sure they have a much cheaper, humane and environmentally friendly version. . it is called the family farm.
this is about as far from the right changes as we can get.
May 7, 2009 12:53 AM | flag a problem
d says:
The cross sections of available rainwater, sunlight, and grazing area are too small to support any sort of farming even close to what current intensive agriculture allows. To support even a very small population you would need huge amounts of land devoted solely to these things, which are much more expensive to produce (both ecologically and financially) than remote farmland.
Suggestions:
-drop grazing, it requires more surface area than it's worth
-don't rely on natural sunlight, if you're urban, you have the benefit of cheap electricity
-don't rely on rainwater, that's just ludicrous in most of the world
-aquaculture is generally a good return on investment (energy/calorie wise) but poultry is not
-move the whole thing 40 miles outside of the city, use a larger land footprint, and use the energy/land/tax savings to subsidize the cost of moving goods to market
It does look cute though.
May 7, 2009 3:10 AM | flag a problem
anon says:
This design is very cool. I would really like to see this in person. However, I think a project like this would be more af an art project, rather than an advance in ecological design.
What will the embodied energy be in construction? Even if this is made out of 100 percent recycled content, it will be a massive, expensive, energy-intensive project. And most likely, the number of calories produced by the food grown inside the building will never exceed the number of calories used in extracting, processing, refining, recycling, transporting, constructing, etc. this building.
Innovation is necessary and creativity is the cornerstone of the "green" movement, however, the new "green" economy has to be about a lot more than neat designs and actually make this stuff ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE. Projects like this will cost millions of dollars, keeping the elite architects and developers on top of the pyramid and not dealing with the issues of restrictive economies or growth.
Just say "no more growth" and then farm the traditional and sensical way--in the soil. It provides a lot more connection to the earth anyway.
May 11, 2009 6:05 PM | flag a problem
Chris says:
I wonder how practical it would be to build these sorts of vertical farms next to power stations and pipe the CO2 emissions directly into the building to increase the growth rates; kill two birds with one stone and all that.
May 12, 2009 1:21 AM | flag a problem
Fernando S says:
I hate to rain on your pretty ideas about being green, but a steel and concrete tower to grow food is a phenomenally stupid and wastefully ideas. It represents the worst of wooly thinking. Applying only the slightest analysis to this project reveals that nothing about it works, energy wise, cost wise, environmentally wise. It merely allows one to feel good about ruining the planet.
Applauding this misguided design undermines the value of good green design and makes us easy targets/laughing stock of the polluters. Oh, this is so kewl, when actually, even the paper it was printed on and the electricity used to display it only adds to it despicable nature.
Hard science (How far do windmills need to be separated to be effective, for instance?) will let you see the benefit, or not, of this design. I am not going to make your lazy lives any easier by giving you the answers to why this sucks so much. You must learn to think for yourselves.
OK, just one answer, 5D. That is 5 blade diameters are required between windmills, and sure as hell you can put them behind a frekkin tower as it would block, the, you know, wind.
May 12, 2009 10:40 AM | flag a problem
j.blit says:
Nothing says eco-friendly like a skyscraper. How about less-dense development, we all spread out and use fields and orchards to grow food? I can only imagine the diseases that'd run through that cow and chicken factory. BTW what happen to free-range fanfare? Is that trend over? And where does the poop go?
I think a better approach would be to liquefy our meals and plum them directly to our living units where we can suck a straw and shop for eco-fads on LED HDTVs. Why bother getting up to eat? That's just a waste of energy.
May 12, 2009 7:04 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
Sigh. Yet another design competition won by a pretty rendering.
Fantasyland designs like this make it harder for me to develop real vertical farming systems.
May 13, 2009 2:58 PM | flag a problem
brennan says:
Hey, easy now, this is just a design competition to generate ideas and stimulate progressive discussion! Also, remember that Architecture is all about site, and some of the criticisms ignore the fact that this was designed for Vancouver (in BC, Canada I presume)
Vancouver has lots of rain, so a roof-top collector and cistern is not a bad idea. Excess water could run a micro-generator as it is drained away.
Metro Vancouver has little room to farm traditionally: It is closely bordered on three sides by seawater, mountains and the US border. The arable land of the Fraser Valley goes roughly 150 km to the East and that is steadily filling up with residences and warehouses.
Because land is scarce and its economy strong-ish, land prices make horizontal farming uneconomic.
Vancouver is heavily dependent on food imported from the USA, Mexico and Asia, so any way to increase food production locally is a good one. One of these vertical farms would make one heckuva grow-op too!
May 14, 2009 3:24 PM | flag a problem
Van Car Idler says:
I can go with this as a purely axiomatic, mental exercise.
As a practical matter not so much.
But you should have included both halves of that vertical exploded diagram. It IS a cool design of consolidation, and something may come of some piece of it.
May 14, 2009 7:07 PM | flag a problem
John says:
Why don't they build it already? This sounds really cool. If it could be a profitable business, they should hop to it.
May 15, 2009 3:51 AM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
I agree that they should get started on this already. It also has the potential to save thousands of acres of farm land from being eroded from over-production.
May 15, 2009 8:39 AM | flag a problem
Fred Smilek says:
I'd have to agree with most of the other intelligent comments about how impractical this is. Lets focus on retrofitting all of the unused buildings we already have and use the valuable farmland on the outskirts of our cities as a limit to sprawl and carbon sink that they could be.
Wonder if they had a farmer on the project team?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05. 6.09
Design & Architecture
all images by Romses Architects via Designboom
Romses Architects recently won a competition held by the City of Vancouver to "to address climate change plans and to guide greener and denser development, reducing carbon emissions for the future."
It has everything. From Designboom:
The concept of 'harvest' is explored in the project through the vertical farming of vegetables, herbs, fruits, fish, egg laying chickens, and a boutique goat and sheep dairy facility. In addition, renewable energy will be harvested via green building design elements harnessing geothermal, wind and solar power. The buildings have photovoltaic glazing and incorporate small and large-scale wind turbines to turn the structure into solar and wind-farm infrastructure. In addition, vertical farming potentially adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible parts of plants and animals. Furthermore, a large rainwater cistern terminates the top of the 'harvest tower' providing on-site irrigation for the numerous indoor and outdoor crops and roof gardens.
In addition to food and energy harvesting, the proposal purposefully incorporates program uses for residential, transit, a large farmers market and supermarket, office and agricultural research and educational facilities, and food related retail/hospitality. The result will be a highly dynamic synergy of uses that compliment and support each other.
More on Vertical Farms:
Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC (roundup)
Vertical Farm in Dubai Uses Seawater
Adam Stein on Vertical Farms: "Pie in the Sky"
The Future of Farming: Vertical or Horizontal?
Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto
Mithun Architects' Vertical Farm for Seattle
Related Tags: design competitions | food | vancouver | vertical farms
Comments (17)
Cooool!
May 6, 2009 11:07 AM | flag a problem
Kelvin says:
I have read a lot about vertical farming and I think it is a great idea with some big hurdles to jump. The only issue I take with this paln is adding the animal production levels. One, PETA is going to have a fit about containing animals in small indoor space their whole lives. Two, has anyone every been to a cattle feed lot or a poultry farm? The smell is overwhelming. The supermarket is suppossed to be the level below the grazing area for cattle. I am sure people that are going to be paying a premium for their food want to shop in a store that smells like cow crap.
May 6, 2009 11:54 AM | flag a problem
Trent says:
I'm curious what the net energy and resource balance of the building will be. Will it be self-powered? That would be amazing. Will it recycle it's water, and how effectively? Compost its waste?
May 6, 2009 3:21 PM | flag a problem
Anthony says:
Wow a freaking city boy architect and his urban friends are designing a farm ..... without talking to farmers ---- I'm to stunned into stupidity to understand how they won this competition.
Environmental farms are supposed to be about function over form but this fake farm is about form over function.
May 6, 2009 6:59 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
@Trent
Well I think vertical farming for plants and agricultural crops is the future. But in terms of keeping livestock I think it's a really bad idea both ethically and logistically.
Asides from the smell, the amount of damage that would be done to the floors and living environment would be considerable and means that the livestock would have to be on the first few floors. Having them higher up would increase the cost of maintenance and would also be rather risky.
Ethically, the conditions would be abhorrent - conventional factory farms, as they are, already limit the amount of light that enters - by stacking up a few of these vertical towers you would basically be boxing in these animals - not only does this arise ethical/moral concerns but it also leads to issues in the meat that arise from stress and poor health in the animals.
May 6, 2009 10:34 PM | flag a problem
Television Spy says:
wow. . pretty sure they have a much cheaper, humane and environmentally friendly version. . it is called the family farm.
this is about as far from the right changes as we can get.
May 7, 2009 12:53 AM | flag a problem
d says:
The cross sections of available rainwater, sunlight, and grazing area are too small to support any sort of farming even close to what current intensive agriculture allows. To support even a very small population you would need huge amounts of land devoted solely to these things, which are much more expensive to produce (both ecologically and financially) than remote farmland.
Suggestions:
-drop grazing, it requires more surface area than it's worth
-don't rely on natural sunlight, if you're urban, you have the benefit of cheap electricity
-don't rely on rainwater, that's just ludicrous in most of the world
-aquaculture is generally a good return on investment (energy/calorie wise) but poultry is not
-move the whole thing 40 miles outside of the city, use a larger land footprint, and use the energy/land/tax savings to subsidize the cost of moving goods to market
It does look cute though.
May 7, 2009 3:10 AM | flag a problem
anon says:
This design is very cool. I would really like to see this in person. However, I think a project like this would be more af an art project, rather than an advance in ecological design.
What will the embodied energy be in construction? Even if this is made out of 100 percent recycled content, it will be a massive, expensive, energy-intensive project. And most likely, the number of calories produced by the food grown inside the building will never exceed the number of calories used in extracting, processing, refining, recycling, transporting, constructing, etc. this building.
Innovation is necessary and creativity is the cornerstone of the "green" movement, however, the new "green" economy has to be about a lot more than neat designs and actually make this stuff ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE. Projects like this will cost millions of dollars, keeping the elite architects and developers on top of the pyramid and not dealing with the issues of restrictive economies or growth.
Just say "no more growth" and then farm the traditional and sensical way--in the soil. It provides a lot more connection to the earth anyway.
May 11, 2009 6:05 PM | flag a problem
Chris says:
I wonder how practical it would be to build these sorts of vertical farms next to power stations and pipe the CO2 emissions directly into the building to increase the growth rates; kill two birds with one stone and all that.
May 12, 2009 1:21 AM | flag a problem
Fernando S says:
I hate to rain on your pretty ideas about being green, but a steel and concrete tower to grow food is a phenomenally stupid and wastefully ideas. It represents the worst of wooly thinking. Applying only the slightest analysis to this project reveals that nothing about it works, energy wise, cost wise, environmentally wise. It merely allows one to feel good about ruining the planet.
Applauding this misguided design undermines the value of good green design and makes us easy targets/laughing stock of the polluters. Oh, this is so kewl, when actually, even the paper it was printed on and the electricity used to display it only adds to it despicable nature.
Hard science (How far do windmills need to be separated to be effective, for instance?) will let you see the benefit, or not, of this design. I am not going to make your lazy lives any easier by giving you the answers to why this sucks so much. You must learn to think for yourselves.
OK, just one answer, 5D. That is 5 blade diameters are required between windmills, and sure as hell you can put them behind a frekkin tower as it would block, the, you know, wind.
May 12, 2009 10:40 AM | flag a problem
j.blit says:
Nothing says eco-friendly like a skyscraper. How about less-dense development, we all spread out and use fields and orchards to grow food? I can only imagine the diseases that'd run through that cow and chicken factory. BTW what happen to free-range fanfare? Is that trend over? And where does the poop go?
I think a better approach would be to liquefy our meals and plum them directly to our living units where we can suck a straw and shop for eco-fads on LED HDTVs. Why bother getting up to eat? That's just a waste of energy.
May 12, 2009 7:04 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
Sigh. Yet another design competition won by a pretty rendering.
Fantasyland designs like this make it harder for me to develop real vertical farming systems.
May 13, 2009 2:58 PM | flag a problem
brennan says:
Hey, easy now, this is just a design competition to generate ideas and stimulate progressive discussion! Also, remember that Architecture is all about site, and some of the criticisms ignore the fact that this was designed for Vancouver (in BC, Canada I presume)
Vancouver has lots of rain, so a roof-top collector and cistern is not a bad idea. Excess water could run a micro-generator as it is drained away.
Metro Vancouver has little room to farm traditionally: It is closely bordered on three sides by seawater, mountains and the US border. The arable land of the Fraser Valley goes roughly 150 km to the East and that is steadily filling up with residences and warehouses.
Because land is scarce and its economy strong-ish, land prices make horizontal farming uneconomic.
Vancouver is heavily dependent on food imported from the USA, Mexico and Asia, so any way to increase food production locally is a good one. One of these vertical farms would make one heckuva grow-op too!
May 14, 2009 3:24 PM | flag a problem
Van Car Idler says:
I can go with this as a purely axiomatic, mental exercise.
As a practical matter not so much.
But you should have included both halves of that vertical exploded diagram. It IS a cool design of consolidation, and something may come of some piece of it.
May 14, 2009 7:07 PM | flag a problem
John says:
Why don't they build it already? This sounds really cool. If it could be a profitable business, they should hop to it.
May 15, 2009 3:51 AM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
I agree that they should get started on this already. It also has the potential to save thousands of acres of farm land from being eroded from over-production.
May 15, 2009 8:39 AM | flag a problem
Fred Smilek says:
I'd have to agree with most of the other intelligent comments about how impractical this is. Lets focus on retrofitting all of the unused buildings we already have and use the valuable farmland on the outskirts of our cities as a limit to sprawl and carbon sink that they could be.
Wonder if they had a farmer on the project team?
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