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Comment by alabut | Hacker News Reader

"You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to replace one major farm."

So what if it didn't replace one major farm and just a small local one? And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate them?

I'm surprised I haven't seen the ideas brought together before, it seems more pragmatic than a dedicated building just for the farm and there's a growing movement to eat healthier at work. We order from FarmFresh at my offices, which supplies us with fruit and veggies from a local family-owned farm and we've been loving the results.

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And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate them?

It takes 1-2 acres of farmland to support one person's eating requirements, which is two floors of the Empire State Building. Alternatively, there's 21000 people working in the ESB so that's about 200 people per floor. If you devoted every second floor to agriculture (and magically solved the lighting problem) then each worker could acquire 0.25% of his daily caloric requirements from the floor below... maybe a couple of strawberries?

Oh, and the ESB rents for $38 a square foot, so working out the effective cost of each strawberry is left as an exercise for the reader.

$38/year or per month?

Per year.

I also looked up the average cost of agricultural land per acre in the US, which comes down to about $1200 per acre, or about 0.3 cents per square foot.

This means that for the cost of buying outright the average agricultural square foot somewhere in the country, you could rent that same square foot in a big-city skyscraper for about 45 minutes.

two floors of the Empire State Building (two floors)

(two floors) x 200 people = 400 floors

(two floors) x 300,000,000 people = 600,000,000 million

Hmm, the world must be really big, or the floors must be really small. If we double that number to include Europe, indeed, lets increase it slightly as Europe has a bigger population, that is 1.5 billion floors of the Empire State buildings to feed only about 1/6th of the world. That does not sound right to be honest.

Pretty sure the 1-2 acre number is quite relative to diet. Perhaps for heavy cattle grazing, bush meat, etc. but not for a vegetable based diet. For an alternative reference see: http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&pg=PA819&#...

Alternating floors would be kinda harsh on the environmental systems of a modern building (one problem: humidity). The other problem is economic. The builder will make more money on more office space than farming.

Also, a lot of farmers really don't want to live in skyscraper land.

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