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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the idea here that every city would have a vertical farm close to it, decentralizing the production of food? And if for various economic reasons food does tend to be grown in clustered vertical farms, I imagine the know how to do so would be widely disseminated and cities in particular would keep aside dormant vertical farms as a measure of food security, to quickly scale up in harder times.

I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in the Midwest. Food production has been the foundation of every successful civilization, this technology would potentially allow us to grow food without wrecking Earths environment.

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Pretty much everybody already farms locally. Go outside any city, virtually any city, and it's farmland. Montreal is surrounded by farmland, despite its absurdly short growing season with five months of -20C weather. You have orchards in New York. Food system disruptions are due to the local distribution system, as in war or natural disaster, or due to literally everybody's failing all at the same time, as in a pandemic.

"I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in California."

I fixed it for you. States like Indiana import 90% of their calories. Midwest farming is all about massive row crops, not human food.

https://www.crcworks.org/infood.pdf

Yet Indiana does not even feed itself, let alone feed the world. The state imports an estimated 90% of its food. More than $14.5 billion is spent by Hoosier consumers each year buying food sourced outside of the state.

Have you ever even been to a farms in the Midwest? They are not centralized. They are distributed over a large part of the country.

California and several other states are also net food exporters.

Net by value, weight, calories, nutrition ..?

Farming enough grapes (as my late Uncle did in California), say, to balance trade doesn't mean you could farm enough food in general.

>cities in particular would keep aside dormant vertical farms as a measure of food security, to quickly scale up in harder times. //

Both USA and UK recently stopped funding pandemic preparations.

Keeping spare capacity on hand when the money could go to private profits instead .. not with our current political systems.

If we can forcibly spread the benefits of technological progress, and require long-term planning in the political processes then we (humanity) can probably do this sort of thing.

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