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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Digital Scrapbook entry #2 -Agrarian Era

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/09/business/eco-singapore-vertical-farm/index.html
http://www.softschools.com/facts/wonders_of_the_world/hanging_gardens_of_babylon_facts/67/
In the agrarian era sometime around the 600 BC king Nebakanezer II is said to have built a spectacular hanging garden for his wife. Although no archeological evidence is left of these gardens they are believed to have existed due to many written accounts. Some say that the gardens were as high as 75 feet, 400 feet wide by 400 feet long and that the walls were more than 80 feet high.
It is said that the plants hung from many terraces creating a breath taking hanging garden that might be difficult to recreate even today. 
In today's modern world a group of environmental scientists are trying to creat something every similar to Nebaknezer's hanging gardens in the U.S. and have already succeeded in Singapore. They have developed sky farms.
These sky farms work by placing the plants on small terraces above one another inside or outside a skyscraper, creating a vertical farm that uses little land for the goods it produces. There are many designees for these sky farms. Some farms will be soil free hydroponic farms and others like the ones currently in Singapore will be simply soil beds placed on rotating terraces. Scientists in the U.S. are currently waiting for funding, but have designed a sky farm built in a 30 story skyscraper. In the hanging gardens of Babylon nothing as fancy as rotating terraces were used, but they did have a system for making sure the plants all received plenty of sunlight. In the hanging gardens the terraces were not stacked, but arranged on different levels of the ziggurat, similar to one current sky farm design. Sky farms, although obviously more advanced, follow the same idea as the hanging gardens of Babylon giving precent day farmers and interesting link to ancient history of the agrarian era. 

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