this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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A) is just rediculous, the space required to feed even a suburban block is orders of magnitude more than a greenhouse onsite could provide. It may be able to grow enough herbs, but that's about it.
I'm fine with the rest of the idea.
I just replied to your other comment, but even a local network can't feed a city. Let's do some more math.
Los Angeles has about 18 million people, and on average they take about 2 acres of land to feed (it can be less for vegetarians, but lets assume they are just normal people here)
That's 36 million acres needed, which is about 56,000 square miles, which is an area of 280 miles by 200 miles of nothing but farmland.
You quite literally can't even feed Los Angles with a 100 mile diet, even if it was surrounded by nothing but farms (which it isn't)
In fact, California only has about 25 million acres of farmland in total (8 million irrigated, and the rest for animal grazing)
Source local food sounds good, but we import food for a reason. Cities require a ridiculous amount of farm land to feed.
What you said:
What I said:
We're not talking about the same thing. You're arguing with yourself.
I've never been to a cafeteria with a bigger footprint than the average grocery store.
Ground floor is the community grocery, and the next 3-5 floors are a hydroponics farm. It's really not that ridiculous.
You could have 5 floors, and it still wouldn't be enough. You could have 30 floors and it wouldn't be enough.
I don't think you understand the scale of farming to human. Even if you're entirely vegetarian it's on the order of 0.5-1 acre per person to grow the required food. That's 20,000-40,000 square feet. Even if hydroponics were involved and cut that by a factor of 10, you'd still be at 2000 square feet per person. A typical grocery store is 25-50,000 square feet, so let's go with the most generous and say 5 floors of 50,000 square feet you could produce enough food for.... 125 people.
The math doesn't math. No reasonable amount of food growth is ever going to be possible inside a city.
What you said:
What I said:
We're not talking about the same thing. You're arguing with yourself.
Replace grocery store with cafeteria, do you have an actual argument or are you just nitpicking?
No I have an idea to fix food bank shortages, while creating jobs and teaching practical skills. The shortage that occurred collectively in your brains I have nothing for.
Look, I'm all for making the world a better place. So here's my 2c, from somebody who's tried and done it in a small manner. You'll need allies, partners. You'll face a lot of doubt and questions. If you meet it all with outright hostility, you're never going to get very far. Sure, we're all online randos, but if you can't muster a decent argument with all the time in the world, you're going to have a hard time persuading anybody in the real world.
And what part of that comment was indented to make me an ally or not perceive you as outrightly hostile?
Cute adhominim at the end there. Couldn't resist could you? Ya hypocrite.
My vision is
Ground floor: Cafeteria / service kitchen
2nd Floor: Production Kitchen / food packaging
3rd Floor : Aquaponics & fertigation
4+ : greenhouse.
It's a nice utopian idea, but it just doesn't do anything. The aquaponics and greenhouse are just a bad utilization of such prime real estate space, the amount of food produced would be so low as to be a rounding error for the food they would still need to import and you could use that same floor space to house hundreds of more people.
Go look at my comment from a few minutes ago showing the production math for 5 stories of hydroponics.
Aquaponics also has an issue with nutrient density so you would need more volume than traditional soil growing methods to create the same volume of nutrition.
https://www.edengreen.com/blog-collection/vertical-farming-crop-yield-per-acre
We're talking about 2 different things. I have zero interest in debunking all your strawmans and assumptions about a completely different concept.
Your article says it's 40:1 instead of the 10:1 I assumed, but that's still far too little to matter.
Your two floors of farming would still feed less than a hundred people full time, even if they hit those lofty idea targets.
You're the one inserting the assumption that this has to become the only source of food for people.
I said:
If you can't read those words and comprehend them than why would I consider anything you have to say?
What the fuck does local mean? I just showed you the math that even Los Angeles alone consumes more food than you can possibly grow in California.
You're the one fucking around with "I want a greenhouse above my grocery store" with no real proof that it would matter or be a good use of space.
You seem to be assuming that this idea would have to solve all food consumed by everyone. No one is making that assumption except for you.
Thank you. I'm literally just trying to fix food banks not having enough food and a handful of people are insisting I've suggested this will replace Loblaws.