Vertical Farming

According to current estimates, by the year 2050 70% of the world’s population of 9 billion will reside in urban centers. An estimated land area of 20% bigger than Brazil will be required to grow enough food to feed them, if current farming practices continue as they are today. Adding the transport component of getting crops from distant farms to urban centres exacerbates the challenge.

Prof. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University in New York, tasked his students to come up with innovative solutions to this problem. They started studying the idea of rooftop gardening for cities but quickly discarded that approach – too small scale – in favour of something more ambitious: a 30-story urban farm with a greenhouse on every floor.

These high-rises will utilise hydroponic farming and require 4 – 6 times less acreage (depending on crop) than traditional farming, be entirely organic, utilise grey-water and recycle black-water, produce energy via methane generation from composting non-edible parts of the plants and greatly reduce the transport requirements of food.

Valcent, a tech company based in El Paso, Texas, is trying out the process. At their lab, potted crops grow in rows on clear vertical panels that rotate on a conveyor belt. Moving them gives the plants the precise amount of light and nutrients needed, an optimization that lets him grow 15 times as much lettuce per acre as on a normal farm, using 5% of the water that conventional agriculture does. The company aims to finish a commercial-scale facility by early 2009.

Despommier’s plans are even grander. He has drawn up models for a 30-story, city-block-size vertical farm that would have transparent walls to maximize sunlight and would produce enough food for 50,000 people. “With about 160 of these buildings, you could feed all of New York,” he says. His idea has intrigued architects, but Despommier concedes that it would cost hundreds of millions to build a full-scale skyscraper farm. That’s the main drawback: construction and energy costs would probably make vertically raised food more costly than traditional crops. At least for now.

Original article: Bryan Walsh. TIME. 11 December 2008. Read it… or read more here…