If you take the old axiom about how they're not making any more land and apply it to farming, you realize that, if you can't expand out, you have to go up.
During a lecture at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, last Friday, Dickson Despommier, director of The Vertical Farm Project, explained how vertical farms could be the answer to reduced yields and meet the increasing needs of a swelling human population.
The Center for a Livable Future recaps Despommier's reasons as to why vertical farming is a system that produces less waste and uses fewer resources:
According to Despommier, the benefits of vertical farms include: lack of farm runoff, year-round production, no crop loss due to severe weather, 70 percent less water use than traditional farming, and no use of fossil fuels or pesticides. By moving some farming into the city, he says it will also allow some damaged ecosystems to be restored.
An indoor vertical farm relies on a system of hydroponics, where plants are grown in nutrient-rich water rather than soil. If those farms were within an urban environment, they could use local wastewater and solid waste as fertilizers. Despommier then envisions a series of localized farmer's markets.
Although it's difficult to imagine entire buildings being converted into greenhouses -- the Vertical Farm Project's Web site shows models of skyscrapers used as vertical farms -- the concept could be a way for corporations to green their facilities. Something along the lines of Black & Veatch's rain garden project.
And after all these years, farmers can realize the American Dream and discover what life is like in the penthouse. It will just be a penthouse filled with radishes.
[Image via Flickr: wc forrest]
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Vertical farming is really a joke proposal. It would require massive amounts of energy to build a vertical farm, and even the daily operation would use more energy than you would save from transporting food shorter distances. This means a vertical farm would generate large amount of net carbon and contribute to global warming. It would also be much less resilient in the face of energy shortages or peak oil. However, that's not to say that growing more food in urban areas isn't a good idea. Growing food on lawns and building community gardens are both great idea.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/12/vertical-farming.html
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