Hello Everyone,
I am new here and really only have one question for this forum. What would it take to build a vertical farm?
What are the issues that face the actual building and what would the cost be?
I would like to see one in Portland Oregon and so I am putting together a business plan to approach investors with. I need realistic numbers and I need to know what the concerns would be.
There are lots of great buildings
here but it doesn't matter much to me what the outside of the building looks like. What does matter is that the inside have some pretty unique features.
It needs to be able to support an Aquaponics system for growing food in a large commercial scale. I would like it to have a view restaurant on the top floor to take advantage of the view of Mt Hood and a produce market and herb pharmacy on the ground floor. A glass elevator up the center would allow restaurant patrons a view of where their food came from, I think it would be a nice touch but not essential.
The concerns I can think of are weight and lighting.
Lighting can be supplemented with LED but it would be nice if most of the building could have natural light.
Weight is a bigger issue (I think) because water is so heavy. It would be helpful to find out what the maximum load per floor is so that I can design a system that uses fish tanks that can be held up. I would like to have 10 10,000 gallon tanks per floor but that may be too much. We might need to put the fish tanks on the ground floor or even in the ground and pump the water up to the farm.
Anyway I am just in the dreaming stages and would appreciate any help anyone wants to give. I will keep watch here and I also have a forum going at CityBounty.org where I am hoping to pull all of this together.
Thanks,
Pam