As for unfarmable land, this arrangement makes unfarmable land farmable. Consider that one group of cooperating farmers could feed thousands. Not everyone –in fact, only a small percentage of the population — neeeds to farm to make this work.

I like it. It is not so different from the farms I visited as a child, where all of the animals lived in the same space. We called those hardy farming souls “dirt farmers,” which is only one step down the evolutionary scale from the grass farmer. They produced some of everything with 40 acres and a mule. It was the introduction of the “cash crop” that ruined that smelly but organically organic paradise.

Is there a kit I can order on the ‘net to get started? : )
(You can lead a man to the verge of real system awareness, but you can’t make him give up his technological vanity–read “species arrogance”.)

I haven’t looked through the Vertical Farm site (it’s down at the moment, though the cached pages on Google give some good hints as to what it’s about), but I’m rather skeptical of their ability to replicate the mind-bogglingly complex ecosystem that makes places like Polyface Farm actually work. Some alarm bells go off in my head when I view this from the perspective of yet another attempt by science to simplify and cut-and-control something that’s inherently complex.

Short of physically migrating entire ecosystems into the vertical environment, I don’t see how we’d get away with building a vertical farm *without* making some reckless abstractions.