The Economist Quarterly Technology Review

Last week The Economist published the latest of its great Quarterly Technology Reviews. These articles seemed especially relevant to this blog:

• Aeronautics: A new type of dirigible could make it easier to deliver people and provisions to inaccessible places. It looks pretty cool, too

  An Australian aeronautical firm, Skylifter, is developing a piloted dirigible capable of carrying loads of up to 150 tonnes over distances as great as 2,000km (1,240 miles) at a speed of 45 knots (83kph). This would permit the craft to transport not just hefty equipment but entire buildings to remote areas. The company envisages modules ranging from rural hospitals and disaster-relief centres to luxury airborne cruise-ships.

• Wireless networking: The spectrum released by TV’s switch to digital broadcasting will soon be put to good use
• Making data dance: Hans Rosling has become an online star by using data visualisations to make serious points about health policy and development

  He has the computerised graphs to prove it: colourful visuals with circles that swarm, swell and shrink like living creatures. 

I want to comment specifically on Vertical Farming: Does it really stack up? The article describes efforts to build multi-story glass houses that produce crops hydroponically all year round and that can be located in cities where those crops would be consumed. It suggests that the energy costs of artificial lighting and other functions for skyscrapers that would be required to produce large amounts of food would be so great as to surpass the transportation costs of bringing food from outside the city.

The article points out that hydroponic farming in one-story glass houses can produce 20 times as much food per acre as traditional farming on the land. I conclude that there is a real opportunity for:

• rooftop, sheltered, hydroponic gardening in urban areas, 
• for school greenhouses, and even 
• for urban hydroponic greenhouses that would serve as parks. 

There is also room for increases in peri-urban greenhouses that would have high levels of production and low transportation costs. This would be especially true if they could be located in areas in which transportation services used for people or other goods could be used without further energy input to carry produce to market.