The most successful form of vertical farming is agroforestry, or tree-based agriculture. It provides habitat, shade, carbon sequestration, and water retention while raising per acre productivity over that of 2-D cropping. Agroforestry is a well studied, widely implemented practice that big talking green tech "big thinkers" tend to ignore if not openly scoff at.
For some reason they're called "bumpers" instead of "slicers" or "crushers" and frankly I just think that's just a failure of language not being able to keep up with the blazingly fast pace of transportation technology over the decades and decades. /s but not really
The lady in the vid, Valer Austin Clark, has some great lectures and slideshow presentations on YT if you search for her name and sort for 20+ mins. She built some absolutely massive rock dams that survived some huge floods.
I currently move a Salatin-style chicken tractor 12 feet every day, and I could totally see turning this thing into a chicken tractor that moves itself. Bonus points if it could spot sick or injured birds, or identify a problem bird that attacks the other chickens, etc. Or even predator detection/deterrence if a fox or raccoon starts trying to dig under the edge to get inside to the chickens.
That's a great application. Robot could even move from tractor to tractor to move multiple of them down the field.
When you're manually moving the tractor, do the birds ever get stuck/pinched under the edges? Seeing videos of them being moved, it seems like it might be easy to have happen if the chicken got lazy.
If you use water to compress the air as it goes down, you get isothermal compression. The trompe, which originated in the ancient Catalan forges, has been widely used over the centuries. Anecdotally, a trompe in a mine in Switzerland powered a whole bunch of ~1000 horsepower rock drills, provided fresh air to the underground miners, and powered turbines that generated enough electricity to power a town of about 1500 people.
