If you missed Lou Albright’s February 10 seminar, Skyscraper Farms and Abandoned Warehouses: Are These Horticulture’s New Clothes, it’s available online.
Abstract: Despite great enthusiasm in the media and elsewhere, a simple engineering evaluation of closed system urban farming based on mostly electrically-generated photosynthetic light shows reality to be food production with high cost, large energy use, a giant carbon footprint, and incompatability with renewable energy. These system aspects will be detailed, ending with a discussion of peri-urban greenhouses as a potential local food production alternative. Lou Albright is professor emeritus, Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University who helped pioneer Controlled Environment Agriculture.