World’s Biggest Indoor Vertical Farm Near NYC to Use 95% Less Water
[Warning metric not used]<p>I was reading this and trying to parse the economics. I mean 70k square feet is about two acres [@ 43560&#x2F;acre] and at 75x efficiency per square foot it works out to about 150 acres of farmland. Lets call it a quarter section [160 acres]. Now a quarter section is the size farm my boy&#x27;s Great Grandpa Fred farmed with his German speaking father and a mule in Kussuth County, Iowa the better part of 100 years ago. Enough land in a year with no major misfortune to support a family farm as a business but that today would perhaps need subscribed city folk and organic certification and a used tractor to be a gentleman&#x27;s break even hobby.<p>At this point in the rant I was going to write, I was going to write about how little food two million pounds is and how it would never make a dent in the logistics of feeding people. And as I composed that part in my head, &quot;two million pounds&quot; seemed a queer [with no sexual connotation] way of marketing the output. And the whole thing made little sense economically...I mean even at Whole Foods, two million pounds of tomatoes might barely keep the lights on and the employee parking lot full.<p>I thought &quot;What are they smoking?&quot; And it looks to me like this is an effort to get out in front of marijuana legalization. Two million pounds at even a piddly $1000&#x2F;per does make sense with the big bucks of the Big Apple&#x27;s stoners spitting distance away. And since that is consistent with my heuristic that when someone looks like an idiot and they&#x27;re not a teenager, then I&#x27;m probably the idiot if I assume that they are, so I figure that getting ready for growing weed is about the best sense of the venture I&#x27;m going to make.