My Empire of Dirt

http://nymag.com/print/?/restaurants/features/37273/

by fendrak • 16 years ago

63 39 16 years ago

todayiamme2• 16 years ago

This article reminded me of something I've always wanted to do before I grow old; make an automated farm. What drives me crazy is the idea of an integrated system that gives me high quality produce at the maximum possible efficiency.

If we use something like hydroponics then we can precisely control the nutrients the plants get. Further, since they grow inside a greenhouse we don't need to use any pesticides at all. Further, we can control the amount of light they receive to optimize for maximum growth, and by stacking such units one on top of the other than we don't have to worry space at all. So a massive 500 acre farm can be theoretically reduced to a one acre farm with 500 decks of plants in an efficient arrangement.

In fact, someone else way smarter than me has already though of this and developed the idea to quite a long extent (see: http://www.verticalfarm.com/). Has anyone over here ever tried something like this? Are there more awesome people like Mr. Howard?

cullenking2• 16 years ago

To address one of your points, just because the crop is inside a greenhouse (or even indoors!) does not mean you won't get pests. Anyone who has had fungus gnats or spider mites even in their far-spaced house plants can attest it happens :(

loewenskind2• 16 years ago

Well, once you go indoors you have a lot more control over this. Think quarantine scenario since this is basically what we're talking about. Nothing gets in that hasn't been cleared.

todayiamme2• 16 years ago

Yes, but as loewenskind pointed out. It is exactly like quarantine. think about it this way if we can keep entire football fields dust free for years at a time to fabricate micro-processors then surely we can do this?

Something that really amazes me is that technology has been pushed to limits that we can't imagine. Who would have thought that we are now engineering things 100 atoms apart? Unbelievable.

khafra2• 16 years ago

To address another concern with vertical farms, you'll need to use low-sun-requirement crops; most modern stuff optimized for quick growth with maximum solar and NPK input simply won't grow in those conditions--like expecting full voltage from a vertical photovoltaic panel.

jtbigwoo• 16 years ago

The big problem with sterility is taste and nutrition. It turns out that many of those vitamins and flavor compounds that we like are natural fungicides, pesticides, and preservatives. That's part of the reason why a home-grown tomato tastes so good--it's spent its whole life fighting off attackers while the bland industrial tomatoes have been protected by farm chemicals. A sterile greenhouse or vertical farm would create produce that was bland and less nutritious. You might be able to trick your plants into fighting by introducing controlled stressors (like a weakened pathogen, maybe?) into the "farm."

weak• 16 years ago

The author, Manny Howard, was on the Colbert Report tonight. This guy was incredibly deadpan, one of the more enjoyable Colbert guests that I can remember.

fendrak• 16 years ago

That's what prompted me to look him up. I caught parts of the interview while browsing the web, and decided that he sounded interesting enough to warrant a quick search, and this article turned out to be better than the interview (at least from an information perspective).

dylanz• 16 years ago

Permaculture FTW

thunk• 16 years ago

Title is a reference to NIN's Hurt, (beautifully) covered by Johnny Cash:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go&feature=relat...

hartror• 16 years ago

Nice, NIN fan here and I really enjoyed that cover :)

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

More trivia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurt_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)#Mus...

Read the Reznor quote.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form.

To have your own work transformed in such a profoundly moving way has to be among the greatest possible creative experiences.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society.

And it's bad for the environment too based on the studies Superfreakonomics quoted. Why? It turns out transportation is a minor contributor to food related emissions:

Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent.

You need the book to go into full detail but the crux of it is that large, optimized farms are significantly less destructive to the environment on a proportional basis than small, local farms. The people behind the study said that cutting out one meal of red meat and dairy per week would have a better result than eating entirely locally produced food.

Some quotes here: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce...

redcap• 16 years ago

Red meat certainly takes a lot of energy to produce, and may well be environmentally beneficial to cut it from your diet if that's your thing. Personally I stay away from beef because my genes have decided that I have more than enough iron, thank-you-very-much.

However, there's surely some benefit from growing food in your own backyard - you do cut down on the (admittedly minimal transport costs), and doing something physical outside has got to be good for you - even if it is a few pots outside if you live in a high-rise. Here's hoping you don't cut your finger off doing so.

khafra2• 16 years ago

I associate "localvore" with "farmer's market," not with "vegetable garden." Vegetable gardens sound unambiguously good to me, whereas 50 pickup trucks making 50mi trips to a farmer's market might be worse than 1 semi truck making a 500mi trip to the grocery store.

kleiba• 16 years ago

This is not true. The book you cite, 'SuperFreakonomics,' by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, apparently misquotes the original research on which they base their claim. Here's a quote from the book[1]:

"Even the 'locavore' movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn't help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions."

But compare that to how one of the two authors of the original study, Christoph Weber, actually summarizes their findings[2]:

"The point of the paper was to say that yes, you can lower your footprint by eating local foods, but you can do more on average by eating differently. It’s not that eating local is a crock."

In that light, it seems as if Levitt and Dubner either misunderstood the paper by Weber and Matthews or preferred to portrait it in a light that helps make their own book look profound and surprising.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce...

[2] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es900427m?cookieSet=1

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

You're quoting the authors' summary of their opinions, not disagreeing with Superfreakonomics' interpretation of their data. There's a big difference.

karzeem• 16 years ago

People who cite local food as being good in and of itself are likely to value it because they feel it'll help the local economy. If someone is truly interested in sustainability, then they'll rank food sources for sustainability, not proximity.

Small, local farms are, however, more likely to use sustainable methods, and people sometimes think that means that local == sustainable.

spoiledtechie• 16 years ago

Its time consuming. Thats exactly why I don't grow my own things. Its a hobby within it self. If I had to grow my own food, then I would not have time for other things in my life.

Now imagine everyone not having time for other things in their life. We would be a much LESS productive society..

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Now imagine everyone not having time for other things in their life. We would be a much LESS productive society..

Not much imagination needed. That's exactly what the pre-industrial age was like :-)

jgershen• 16 years ago

What I really enjoyed about this article was hearing how difficult his experience really was -- and you can tell he A) actually knows what he's talking about and B) is still understating the difficulty. I've always assumed that I would "know how to survive off the land" -- my outdoor self-confidence pretty much comes from time backpacking in the Scouts as a kid, and from reading a lot of Heinlein. And I have power tool experience, and I can do physical labor. How hard could it be?

So at the beginning of the article, I was thinking "this seems incredible, I would love to do something like that." In the middle, I was beginning to appreciate how horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be. And by the end, I was realizing that if I absolutely had to live off the land on my own, without society to bail me out, I would almost certainly screw something up and starve. I think almost all of us would.

Anyway, you might have already known that. But for some reason this article hit just the right note to make me aware of the arrogance I've always had about how hard surviving via subsistence farming would really be. I'm going to go eat some cereal now and get back to work on the startup in the morning.

barrkel• 16 years ago

I thought he was being way too ambitious. If I had to make something like that work, my focus would be on potatoes and possibly a cow for milk, but it would of course depend on more land, the correct climate and probably better timing. He seemed dead-set on eating meat every day, which seems to me to have been very unrealistic, especially with such a tiny amount of land, unless he was cheating and using bought grain etc. to feed the animals.

eru4• 16 years ago

You can probably go for eating eggs every day.

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

horribly difficult and unpleasant it would actually be.

I seriously doubt that he knew what he was talking about. The biggest problem in subsistence farming is the risk you take. All the knowledge you need is out there: we've been growing food for thousands of years and are still researching how to get better at it. Yes, it requires hard physical labor, but beyond that, it's not at all difficult on a small scale.

You want to have a small garden? Find a bit of land and prepare about 3'x3' of it: Dig it up, turn the soil over and make sure it isn't too sandy (add mulch if it is) or clayey (add sand if it is). If the area regularly gets flooded, then build a small wall around it and fill with dirt so you have a 3x3' raised bed that will drain properly.

Then plant one row each of squash, potatoes (for the experiment you can just cut an eye out of a potato you would eat and plant it) and tomato seeds. Potatoes go about 3" deep, squash and tomatoes about 1/2" deep. If you're in the Northern US you might need to use tomato plants instead of seeds since it's already July.

If you want to, you can build a no-effort compost heap next to it: just dump your organic kitchen waste in a pile next to the garden. At the end of the growing season, work the pile into the soil and it will get more fertile every year.

Check daily to make sure the soil doesn't get too dry (water in the evening) and pull any weeds you see. Don't do any more than this and you'll be eating squash, tomatoes and potatoes in three months. With a plot only 3'x3' it will take only a few minutes a day. It's that easy.

cullenking2• 16 years ago

It's insanely difficult to start, but maintaining when you get in a habit isn't TOO bad.

I just moved to a new place a few months back and had to dig out a garden. The existing soil was CRAP, I literally spent 4 solid days of digging and amassed what I estimate to be nearly 1000 pounds of rocks in my driveway, merely from digging out a 30x8x1.5 foot section along my driveway. The soil is so poor that even bringing in 2.5 yards (two very full pickup truck loads) of premium organic soil and mixing it in has yielded horrible soil. It will take a year and some more serious cash to make that soil any decent.

However, once that is done, it's merely daily watering/weeding and thinning and eating. Of course, there are no chickens (yet, still have to make a run and coop) to complicate things, but it's all about making a habit and sticking to it.

yardie4• 16 years ago

The author started way too fast and was surprised he would burn out so quickly. If you are trying to set up a small self sustaining ecosystem you don't dump everything in all at once. Anyone that's done an aquarium will tell you that. You start with one thing, stabilize it, add another thing, stabilize, rinse and repeat.

After reading this the only lesson he learned was how to waste $11,000. Off the mark he's growing tomatoes, corn, potatoes, eggplant, raspberries, etc. Nothing is mentioned about the watering and fertilizing cycles of the plants. Which is pretty damn important. And these aren't the easiest vegetables, except maybe the tomatoes and the cale.

I've started my own little terrace garden this summer and so far I've learned getting started is expensive and no matter how smart you think you are, read the directions. I basically spent $200 last month on what basically amounts to soil, pots, hand tools, and seedlings. And this is only to grow herbs.

My objective is to get out from under the thumb of my local grocery store. Last time I went shopping they were charging $3 for a bag of lettuce! If things work out by the end of summer I won't be paying for something like that again.

mncaudill• 16 years ago

And in 2 or 3 years' time, you'll break even!

yardie4• 16 years ago

Possibly. But the point isn't about breaking even it's about having lettuce that isn't washed in pesticides and fertilizer. Which for me is priceless.

mhb2• 16 years ago

You may be interested in this DIY Earthbox:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-your-own-earth-fill...

eru4• 16 years ago

Why did you have to spent $200? Would you give a small breakdown?

My housemates and I have recently started growing stuff in our garden. We did not have to buy soil and pots, only some seeds and tools.

yardie4• 16 years ago

Organic soil 25lbs (10kg) : $11

Handtools : $25

Garden hose : $20

Garden hose attachments : $18

Seed packets $4 x 8 : $32

Various pots : $70

Primer and varnish : $40

Now that I think about it it probably wasn't my wisest shopping. But I live in the city and to get to a gardening center would take a few hours by bus or metro.

But these are sunk costs, you only need to by seeds once, you only need to pots once, a big bag of soil costs almost the same as a small bag and can last a while. If this little experiment works out I will have learned a lot from the experience and have the required material.

But I'd never spend $11,000 on the first run. That's a really expensive education. If anything the guy proves that "his" urban farm is unsustainable.

rubashov• 16 years ago

This guy's goal was apparently to get all his calories from home, rather than supplement his diet with fresh home produce. In that situation it makes little sense to grow anything but potatoes or yams. Nothing else is as easy, nutritious, and calorie dense. Subsistence farmers the world over know this. Throwing down a dozen different plants is fairly silly.

jkndrkn• 16 years ago

Nice Nine Inch Nails reference ^_^

My Empire of Dirt

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