PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Farmers have traditionally been people of the earth, tilling the soil and feeling the ground beneath their feet. Tomorrow’s farmers may know less about soil and little about the ground if Dickson Despommier gets his way.
The Columbia professor of environmental health and microbiology has been working on the idea of building massive skyscrapers with farms built along their sides. These “farmscrapers” may be the answer to feeding growing urban populations without developing raw land or depleting resources.
The ideas aren’t new. More than a decade ago, Despommier and his students conceived of a 30-story building that would take over an entire city block; this building would use artificial lighting, hydroponic and aeroponic growing methods for optimal crop yields.
Despommier’s plan would distribute the food to those in the immediate environs to save transportation costs and green house emissions – and also provide fresher food. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers would be unnecessary due to sensors and crop managers. A gas chromatograph will tell us when to pick the plant by analyzing which flavenoids the produce contains, Despommier said. “It’s very easy to do. These are all right-off-the-shelf technologies. The ability to construct a vertical farm exists now. We don't have to make anything new.”
Besides providing chemical-free food that ideally would not be trucked across the country, Despommier envisions that land that has been converted to farmland and depleted could return to its natural state. It would revert back to forest or green fields, providing both habitat for wildlife and a sort of natural carbon dioxide filter for the Earth. It could, conceivably, help fight global warming.
Flash forward to today. Vertical farming could soon become a viable solution to the growing global hunger problem. As the population grows to nine billion in 2050, the Earth cannot keep up with the demand for more resources and more food. One vertical acre farm can yield as much as 4-6 acres of horizontal farm land. Eighty percent of the population lives in urban areas, and farms like these could relieve the burden of feeding them all.
In Santa Rosa, Calif., housing developer Syamak Taromi is developing a farmscraper called Vertical Harvest. And last fall, Romses Architects’s vertical farm won “The 2030 Challenge,” a design competition held by the city of Vancouver to address climatic change plans and to guide green development. The “Harvest,” as the building is called, provided different levels for growing vegetables, housing cattle and more. The building will be powered by wind and solar incorporated into the design.
If it was cheap and easy, vertical farming would not be a novel idea. It does have drawbacks. One of which, points out Utah State crop physiologist, Bruce Bugbee, is the enormous power demand. Growing food all year long inside would require as much as 100 times the light that an office building needs. Energy consumption also translates to higher prices, making it prohibitively expensive at this point. While traditional farming does have drawbacks, the sunshine is free.
Those who want to see farmscrapers in urban areas say that this could be overcome if the vertical farms used renewable resources, including solar and wind power, and using biofuel from crops. Proponents believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and vertical farming is a viable solution to the growing population’s growing hunger.
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