Vertical Farming – The Future of Agriculture?
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 06.27.05
The Internet never sleeps. You blink and everybody beats you to the punch; WorldChanging, the Gristmill blog and BoingBoing already have posts about the interesting concept of vertical farming. Why is it interesting? Because, according to projections, in about 50 years 80% of the Earth's population will live in cities and 3 billion more people will crowd our planet. Problem is, 80% of the land that can be used to grow crops is already in use, and 15% of that land has been damaged by poor agricultural practices. They say that vertical farming will help us feed these additional 3 billion people.
An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world's urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), [...] a long-term benefit would be the gradual repair of many of the world’s damaged ecosystems through the systematic abandonment of farmland. In temperate and tropical zones, the re-growth of hardwood forests could play a significant role in carbon sequestration and may help reverse current trends in global climate change.
To learn more about vertical farming, you can read this essay on the subject and look at some of the potential designs.
Personally, I'm more excited about this concept as a way to help us stop the use of pesticides, herbicides, oil-based fertilizers, and to give a break to a lot of land that we have been stressing for decades than as an extra food source. Another advantage: the food would grow quite a bit closer to the consumers, something that will become more important as oil prices keep rising and transportation on long distances becomes a luxury (no more kiwis from New-Zealand in Canada during the winter).
I don't want to start a big debate on vegetarianism vs. meat-eating, but right now there is way more than enough food being produced in the world; it's just that we grow crops that we feed to animals, and then we eat the animals (in many cases it's a way to make money – sell meat for a premium to the rich instead of selling tons of grain for a fraction of that price to starving people). That's not very efficient, and if it came to having massive food shortages in the future, I think that phasing in a more vegetarian diet could help solve that problem - along with many other problems related to the consumption of meat - with more ease than trying to build enough of these vertical farms to feed all these billions of people and the dozens of billions of animals they would eat. You can read more about some of the environmental impacts of eating meat here (you might find different numbers elsewhere, but the general idea that it's inefficient is pretty hard to argue against).
Vertical farms are an exciting possibility, I'm just not excited for quite the same reasons as others who see them as an additional food source – I think we already produce enough food, it's just that we do it in a way that destroys nature and we don't distribute that food properly. These farm can be one of many technical solutions to the first of these problems, but the solution to the second one will need to come from a societal choice.
::Vertical Farm, via ::BoingBoing, ::WorldChanging & ::Gristmill
Eating meat isn't inefficient. Feeding things to cows that people can eat is inefficient. A cow can take things we can't eat (like grass) and turn it into things we can eat. That's the reason we started eating them in the first place. If you were a caveman, would you rather hunt down a potato or a mammoth?
Of course, if we used grass-fed beef it would be very expensive to produce, which is why we've ended up feeding them all manner of other things in order to grow as many cows as possible.
I understood from the BoingBoing post that they were talking about keeping animals in these vertical farms, which sounds pretty nasty. I've no problem with growing plants like this, but growing animals in what looks like a high-rise parking lot seems pretty cruel.
Growing stuff nearer to the consumer does seem a good idea, but even if there's one of these in every town, the food will still be shipped half-way across the country to be packaged and ware-housed before it ends up on the shelves. That needs to change.
Re: "growing animals in what looks like a high-rise parking lot seems pretty cruel."
We do it to ourselves, our kids and our pets...
Since I make no effort to hide the fact that one of my main interests is the ultimate effects of peak oil, the best thing about vertical farming is that it would allow us to produce food in places that aren't otherwise surrounded by land. As an NYC resident, I've wondered if cities will be able to sustain themselves at all in the absence of cheap oil for transportation, but perhaps knocking down inefficient highrises and putting in moderate height vertical farms will save us.
I really don't know how the economics of this would work, as farming is one of the lowest value economic enterprises in terms of space utilization. Going vertical with it will only compound the costs, it seems, and it makes no sense as to how this could be done without the government buying the land and holding it in trust somehow.
Even then, it would still be spendy to do.
Seems like more of an issue for the 22nd century. There is plenty of space such as front lawns that could be used to grow food. Plants grow best in deep soil where they need minimal watering and other imputs. I wonder if you would need a high tech greenhouse approach to effectively go vertical.
Regarding the efficiency of cows and other farm animals. The problem is one of scale. They are the centre of our agricultural system, not a sideline. And when they graze they often disrupt wild prairie ecosytems.
More on this at http://www.veg.ca/issues/enintro.html (click on my name to go to this URL)
In North America we are consumers of some of the cheapest and safest food in the world. As a primary producer myself, I can't imagine becoming any more efficient than we (as an industry) already are. But we will be. Ever been on a cruise ship? How many tonnes of wasted food per ship per week is thrown out? How about hotels and restaurants? As North Americans we take for granted the richness of our country and are very wasteful of our resources - because they are cheap. Conservation will be the key to feeding 8 billion people - not vertical farming.
Large parts of the solution already exist. There will be crops that are more tolerant to cold temperatures - they can be seeded earlier and harvested sooner - greater chance being graded for human consumption. Poultry will grow faster. Pigs will be grow faster. Cows will grow faster. Genetics, nutrition and management will all contribute to feeding the world. The availability of fresh fish will increase on the prairies. These are not pipe dreams - they are happening today thanks to hard working and dedicated research groups.
A large part of the inefficiency of food production is in the processing and the transportation. In Canada, we are the only country in the world who is not improving our railroad - it actually appears we are slowly dismantling it. Canada is the only country in the Americas (North and South) that is not encouraging development of bio-fuels. In fact we are shipping raw products elsewhere to be made into bio-fuel - how crazy is that? Almost as crazy as shipping cattle from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Texas to be processed and then selling back the processing beef to Canada!! This is where the inefficiencies are - shrinkage of live animal carcasses during transportation amounts to HUGE quanities of meat. Transporting products for the sake of out-of-region employement without benefiting local areas. Political decisions made in the east without regard to citizens in the west. Its the end of October and there is grain piled on the ground - 10,000's of tonnes of grain. This grain will stay there because there has not been a call for this grain to market. The farmer can't ship until the grain is called for, so the grain will sit on the ground, some will blow away, some will rot, some will be eaten by wildlife - this is inefficient. The economics of buying a metal bin for storage doesn't pencil out when the price of steel has risen dramatically, and we still sell our grain for the same price we did in the 70's and 80's.
Primary producers are more than capable of feeding the world. The currnet nature of agriculture today prevents it from happening.