Every problem you describe sounds like a solvable engineering problem.
We may need to design our buildings to accommodate these kinds of problems, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed outright -- The potential energy benefits are substantial.
It takes a just a small leap of imagination; we're not talking about magic.
If you take anything away from this discussion, let it be this:
> [Climate change effects] threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk. Numerous adaptation strategies are available to cope with adverse impacts of climate variability and change on agricultural production. These include altering what is produced, modifying the inputs used for production, adopting new technologies [emphasis mine], and adjusting management strategies. [1]
I believe that we can make a small dent on this problem if we improve the technology that runs greenhouses. (My bias: I work for a startup that is working on this and I'm kind of obsessed with the industry.)
Here is what current greenhouse tech looks like: a human (called a grower) uses their intuition to adjust hundreds of settings that parameterise what the actuators should do in different circumstances. For example, 20 settings might parameterise a 'ventilation setpoint line', which determines what air temperature the vents should start opening at given a measurement of the solar radiation intensity from a weather station. All the different actuators (heating pipes, vents, screens, misting systems, irrigation systems) have their own set of heuristics that need to be adjusted by hand..then beneath that a low-level control layer (e.g., PI control) manipulating individual motors/valves.
It's crazy but the grower has to manually adjust the settings as the weather, energy prices and crop state changes. With better software/automation we can improve the control of the environment within the greenhouse and thereby increase yields [kg/m^2] and minimise energy costs.
If the farmers are producing more tomatoes per m^2 for the same input costs they can afford to sell them to consumers (via supermarkets) at lower prices and still make money. It won't solve all the problems but would be a step in the right direction.
Usually the principle concern is temperature rather than sunlight, and the solution is greenhouses or similar structures.
These typically increase the growing season and permit crops to be started (e.g., seeding rooms or houses) or harvested before or after what would otherwise be a killing frost. With apparent increases in weather variability these might have increased applicability.
Low-Tech Magazine's Agriculture section includes numerous traditional such technologies.
Even more conventional greenhouses, however, should help somewhat. I reckon the point of the parent commenter is less about the vertical nature of such farms and more about the climate controllability of such farms.
If you want to use the sun, you'd farm outdoors traditionally. You're right at the core of it, that's why most farming still happens outside.
Building a specialized building is a compromise putting you into an uneconomical position, you'd only provide additional light to the top-most layer of plants (small operating savings) at the cost of building specialized architecture (large capital expense).
From what I understand, the vertical indoor farms are mostly low-calorie high-moisture crops so far like lettuces. Compared to many crops, energy is not the primary input, it's water, space and time. These vertical indoor farms economize by controlling the environment they grow in to avoid wasting water, accelerating growth cycle with grow lighting to avoid wasting time, and stack plants vertically to avoid wasting space. Supposedly it makes sense to pay the premium for electrical energy to be able to save on the other inputs. For higher-calorie crops I imagine the math works out to be quite far from break-even.
This is also why these vertical farms aren't about to solve social issues that people attach hope to them for, low calorie vertical farm produce isn't going to provide for the dietary needs of enough people to impact the the problem of transporting foods from agricultural areas to metropolitan areas basically at all.
Farming is also mostly an energy problem. Assuming cheap energy, you can create hydroponics that scale vertically. Highrise farms, and they could consume electricity during off-peak times when it is extremely low cost.
Water is also not a problem, we are surprisingly good at treating water, can even turn saltwater into freshwater given sufficient energy.
The whole idea is still really new. Some of the objections being brought up don't necessarily apply. Any building generates a lot of grey water and a drainage issue. Keeping the water local, maybe using some simple treatment techniques, could control the runoff and also make use of it. Buildings usually have one side that gets a lot of sun. There are also many methods being used to advance daylighting including lenses and fiber optic lines. This has so far been expensive, but is competitive with powered lighting systems.
Of course attempts to duplicate existing farms in cities will have issues. Many of these may be resolved. For example, even current farms are beginning to make use of automated weeding and picking machines. This could make it practical to grow in awkward built places that have limited or no safe access.
It is also really important to bear in mind the ugly reality of massive farm failures. When volcanoes blot out the sky for a year or more, which happens every few hundred years, all currently dominant forms of farming fail absolutely and catastrophically. However, in such circumstances some vertical farming setups would have limited challenges. It may be difficult to efficiently and reasonably plan for such scenarios, but we know absolutely that they will happen and it has already been a while since the last really big volcanic event.
The food issue isn't a problem at all. For one thing, plants like CO2. More importantly, CEA (Controlled Environment Farming) is building-up speed all over the world. Farming is not a natural process, it was invented by us to grow food more efficiently. We are now navigating the next evolution in farming by bringing it indoors. We can, at the micro scale of a building, control climate.
I firmly believe this is a necessary future of the reality we are facing. I believe this to such an extent that we have been developing various technologies for CEA over the last couple of years, some of which will allow us to grow the same or better crops using 1/3 to 1/2 less energy (and heat) than best-in-class solutions in the market today.
I think this is an important element of humanity adapting to the changes ahead. It does not solve all problems. It solves one.
My default assumption is that "don't try to engineer things to be better" is the wrong answer. If we don't understand it well enough yet, just experiment more until we do. The awesome thing about indoor farming at scale is that it becomes really easy to do lots of experimenting and zero in on exactly what things each plant requires to thrive.
So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.
The article says that having crops under panels might help them through cooling. Options are worth investigating if it makes the whole system more viable.
What about in places where electrical energy is abundant, and space is limited? Or maybe in locations where terrain is very difficult to farm on. Mountainous terrain provides a lot of potential hydro-power, but are terrible places to place farms.
Would a dam powered multi-storied indoor farm be a feasible solution in a situation like this? Not to mention, it could provide light 24/7.
Not being facetious here. Genuinely curious what the pros and cons would be to a farm designed this way.
Greenhouses cool down rapidly after sunset though, they still freeze if it's many deg below freezing outside. (Also mass crops like wheat and soy would have to solve harvesting machinery and resource cost vs area size)
Consider countries like Spain where outdoor farming is no longer possible due to climate change. Indoor ag, of whatever kind, will likely be essential in many places.
That's until they manage to stack vertically six layers of planted wheat, then you have 156x the yield per acre. You don't need to move all farming indoors either to create a big impact, if some countries manage to move indoors only 20% of the farming for instance, that's already a huge change by any possible measure, be it environmental, economic or geopolitical.
And also your remark about the energy cost doesn't seem correct, if that were true any kind of indoors agriculture would be too expensive to be possible.
Even in such circumstances, lower-intensity ag methods such as greenhouse farming (enclosures to accommodate for inclement weather), but still relying on incident sunlight, are far more resource-effective. The land-use requirements are still large enough that the technologically- and energy-intensive vertical farming methods simply won't compete.
I'd also like to know what these magical nontransportable crops you have in mind are.
- Indoor farming would not have to worry about things like drought. As a water feeding system can be led all the way to the ocean and the salt removed using pure sunlight as power.
- Indoor farming has shown to yield crops with 96% less water in many cases, again solving the problem mentioned previously.
- Many areas don't have ready access to tons of water so these water conservation techniques will be absolutely necessary.
- The lack of need for pesticides and weed killers and other poisons will also have major advantages.
- The indoor operation can be significantly less emitting in terms of greenhouse gasses. Without the need for large gas powered machines for harvesting, these crops can be way more efficient.
- The indoor operations can be built vertically thus allowing cities to feed themselves without having to ship food across the globe, further providing exhaust benefits.
While I find some aspects of your comment interesting, I’d also throw out that the environmental devastation from farming far outstrips that of housing. However, in both scenarios, it’s clear that much of the solution space is vertical (pun intended).
We may need to design our buildings to accommodate these kinds of problems, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed outright -- The potential energy benefits are substantial.
It takes a just a small leap of imagination; we're not talking about magic.
If you take anything away from this discussion, let it be this:
> [Climate change effects] threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk. Numerous adaptation strategies are available to cope with adverse impacts of climate variability and change on agricultural production. These include altering what is produced, modifying the inputs used for production, adopting new technologies [emphasis mine], and adjusting management strategies. [1]
[1] https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/#sf-10
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