Vertical Farms: "Growing Up Sustainably"

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Matt Embrey in Architecture, Concept+Design

This weekend I came up with an innovative solution to both the food shortage and the negative impact modern agricultural practices have on the environment… build up, not out! Then, reading the Huffington Post this morning, I found out that I did not invent this idea…

Vertical Farming, which has been discussed for years, would involve building high rise multi level “Farmscrapers” where farmers would employ sustainable farming practices in a controlled environment. Dickson Despommier, professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia, and one of the true pioneers of this idea, thinks this could ultimately ease the world’s food, water, and energy crises. Despommier argues that the technology to build vertical farms currently exists and that it could be an economical and sustainable solution to a number of problems.

â€œItâ€™s not just a way of generating food. Itâ€™s a way of dealing with municipal waste, recycling water, and using methane digestion to help a city be sustainable.â€

The most obvious benefit is the space economy. By building up, we would not need to clear cut forests to make way for sprawling farms to increase food production. By “Growing Up” we could have farms in urban centers providing a local source of food for cities, greatly reducing food miles and the related pollution & energy consumption. Agricultural encroachment accounts for much of the world’s deforestation and unsustainable farming practices can lead to desertification. Vertical Farms would allow for agricultural expansion in existing or abandoned urban properties, close to population centers.

Another major benefit would be the controlled nature of these Farmscrapers. Current agricultural practices wreak havoc on the environment. Subject to the elements, farmers utilize large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides to ensure crop production. Today, over 70% of the liquid fresh water on Earth is used for horizontal soil-based agriculture. Then instead of being used for drinking this water washes those fertilizers and pesticides into watersheds contaminating everything downstream.

By bringing the farms indoors you create a self contained system that is not affected and does not affect the outside environment. It allows for greater control of the growing environment and the crops are protected from harmful weather. Less harmful chemicals, if any, are needed and the ones that are used are contained in the system and not leached out into the surrounding ecosystem. In urban areas you can they can actually harvest local gray water for use in the “Farmscraper”. That combined with rainwater harvesting will greatly reduce the need for ground water.

One potential drawback is the energy consumption of these systems. I think this could be addressed by the implementation of solar panels or wind turbines on the roof. Also, by composting the unused portion of the plants they could use the methane byproduct for power (like the process we touched on with the New Belgium Brewery).

There is also some resistance from people who are advocates for organic agriculture. While it is proposed that these farms would employ sustainable practices and grow organic food, some may resist the idea of the manufactured and unnatural way of growing food. Angela Caudle, executive director of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement explains,

â€œThe technological solution distracts from our human connection to agriculture and food production. I can appreciate an attempt to find sustainable ways to deal with producing more food for more people, but for me this is kind of like laboratory food.â€

Such weariness is understandable, however, food, water and energy shortages are a real and imminent problem. It’s estimated that by 2050 there will be 9 billion people on this planet. We are having a tough time feeding everyone as it is, and we are struggling to balance the health of the planet with the needs of our population, and this is an excellent way to address these problems. This is a green “UP”GRADE we can get behind.

Read more about Vertical Farms at The Vertical Farm Project.

Tags:

agriculture, farming

23 Responses to “ Vertical Farms: "Growing Up Sustainably" ”

The Horrorist

16. Jun, 2008

On paper, the plan seems ideal, yet, implementing it would prove to be challenging if not impossible, for the time being that is.

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The Horrorist

16. Jun, 2008

Oh, and I think there may be books already written on the idea.
The Colbert Report recently featured a guest that advocated this type of farming.

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Matt (Admin)

16. Jun, 2008

Yeah, that was Dickson Despommier (the quote from the first paragraph): http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=173624

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Chuck

16. Jun, 2008

I know a guy who has a friend who does this in San Francisco with special fast growing plants that take a lot of special nutrients and the grow bulbs eat a lot of electricity and so he has to move all the plants from one building to another about each month so the neighbors don’t get clued in on what he’s doing so they don’t rip off his stash, err.. I mean so they don’t take his good stuff. He does seem to make a profit even with all the overhead and problems from the authorities.

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briz

16. Jun, 2008

not gonna happen how u gonna fit thousands of acres worth of farmland in a building id have to be the size of a city to fit in a city u no how big grain elevators are

hydroponics and grow lights use lotsa electricity

keep the plants in the ground this is a rediculous idea

citys 4 ppl plants 4 farms

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guest

16. Jun, 2008

Well briz you have now idea on how this works do you, and you probably have never stepped foot out of the city.
Hers a few helpful hints for you, hydroponics, pv cells, wind turbine.
Now run along and google those words and then come back with your dick tucked between you legs and try again.
I look forward to your reply.

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Wolfie Rankin

17. Jun, 2008

The real problem with the world that everyone skips over is not the energy crisis, or greenhouse effect or air pollution… the problem nobody is looking at is the cause of all that, which is over-population.

If we bred less, we’d have a much better world.

In every documentary about endangered animals, it’s always due to human encroachment on the animals space, am I wrong?

It’s us, we’re the problem, the sooner we face that, the better.

The green belongs in it’s own space, I hope that I never live to see a day where it’s all cities and nothing else… but sadly, that day is coming.

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schwagg

17. Jun, 2008

i’d rather see my food be fed by the sun, and not cultivated in some makeshift atmosphere.

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1976come&gone

17. Jun, 2008

Wolfie Rankin is right, but we are not going to start breeding less. Unfortunately the ones that have the capacity to understand the problem are not the problem. It is the uneducated people who can’t even take care of their kids that keep pumping them out. They don’t raise them so those kids grow up and start having babies when they are 14. It’s a bad cycle. You have to get a license to drive a car, a permit to build a house but any idiot is allowed to have 6 kids! It’s crazy, but what are you going to do?

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Green Authors

17. Jun, 2008

Two weeks ago I was reading about people in the city growing tomato plants upside down and thought it was a move in the right direction.

Now I am blown away by the potential of a larger scale production of food. Not having to rely of tractor trailers traveling 100’s of miles to deliver food alone is a giant step in the right direction. Speaking of which, supporting your local farm stands for your vegetables is a small step that we each can take.

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Roxanne Christensen

17. Jun, 2008

A complimentary solution with vertical farming is sub-acre farming. A sub-acre farming method now being practiced throughout the U.S. and Canada is called SPIN-Farming. SPIN stands for S-mall P-lot IN-tensive, and it makes it possible to earn significant income from growing vegetables on land bases under an acre in size. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN’s farming techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you’d expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn’t any different from McDonalds. So by offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, it allows many more people to farm, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them, and it removes the two big barriers to entry â€“ sizeable acreage and significant start-up capital.
So while vertical farming will still take some time to get off the ground, sub-are farming is already showing how agriculture can be integrated into the built environment in an economically viable manner. This is not subsistence farming a la Cuba. This is recasting farming as a small business in cities and towns, “right sizing” agriculture for an urbanized century and making local food production a viable business proposition once again.

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jeb

18. Jun, 2008

Hi’ i am a architecture student and i have done a thesis on this 3 years ago. the plans are beautifull but people are used to the situation as it is today. if only some people would have the guts to start building. problems only get solved by experimenting with these building.

what if the cavemen that discoverd that fire could be usefull had the same response. we would all still be in caves hunting for food.

and for you Wolfie Rankin i’ve only got one message: why don’t you start with your self. look at china; people lost children in the storm and floods and can’t have another one because of state regulations on childbirth. who are you or anyone to say, who should and who shouldn’t procreate? We are human beings smart enough to invent things. look at the world from a creating and optimistic way and we’ll get there!

Cheers Jeb

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enZee

07. Jul, 2008

Hi there, we have the same idea, it is my thesis proposal for my partial requirement as an architecture student. There is really a shortage in agricultural products like rice even here in the Philippines where there is a big potential in agriculture but less government assistance. I would like to ask if this idea is only suited for cities? because nowadays agricultural lands here are turned into commercial lands, the urban sprawl is getting faster. And to think most farmers are from the province not from the cities, they will loose income or have more competitors.

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Sandy

27. Jul, 2008

Hey Jeb,
I love this idea…since you are an architecture student, do you think you could desgn a Vertical Farm structure that could feed a small ecovillage of 500 people? We would love to actually start test this concept out.
add me if you are interested… myspace.com/awakenowtv
Sandy

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Alex Steed [of Make Something Happen]

28. Jul, 2008

I saw the piece in the post and elsewhere. We very recently covered a campaign that was built to raise awareness around the possibility of the vertical farm - especially in NY. I believe there will be one in Las Vegas soon, no?

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AB

30. Oct, 2008

I think this is an awesome idea, but I completely agree that this isn’t going to solve all of our environmental problems. Overconsumption, inefficient energy, and just a complete lack of respect for the environment still need to be addressed. Overpopulation is a major problem, It would be great if total fertility rates decreased world wide, but that seems completely unlikely. Maybe if religious institutions advocated birthcontrol, and if underdeveloped countries advocated and funded more family planning and education programs, we’d have a chance at stabilizing our population

“The green belongs in it’s own space, I hope that I never live to see a day where it’s all cities and nothing else…”

I agree, but don’t you think that vertical farming may help this? Farming takes up so much land space, sometimes it depletes the land of nutrients and it destroys natural habitats, but people have to eat, so growing our food in skyscrapers that require a lot less land seems like a good alternative to me. Then nature could take back the land that was once solely dedicated to agriculture. I’d rather see real nature (forests, plains, jungles) on the outskirts of towns and cities than miles and miles of farm land, and vertical farming sky scrapers in cities might help combat the heat island effect, co2 emissions, and it might cheer up the atmosphere a little too. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads.

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Caroline Keddy

13. Jan, 2009

Vertical farming does not have to be in skyscrappers. The concept is great and time/money will bring it to our urban centers. Vertical farming in greenhouses is happening now, we at Valcent are successfully vertically growing.

Recently, Valcent was featured in Time Magazine with Dr. Dickson Despommier regarding vertical farming in urban settings. Please visit: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1865974,00.html

Caroline Keddy
http://blog.valcent.net

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Wolfie Rankin

21. Mar, 2009

Someone above wanted to know how many kids I have? none is your answer, give me a lovely dog any day.

I have a lot less hassles, and my bills are lighter, and I get a lot of love.

There are some who say we must breed to save the economy or to look after us when we’re old… but who is going to look after those kids when they’re old.

And are the ones supposedly bred to look after us all going to become health care workers, like all of us did, in order to look after our elderly? (sarcasm here if you didn’t detect it).

It’s awful, people really need to wake up and not get sucked into the peer pressure of having kids, this planet can’t handle the strain any longer.

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soa architectes

08. Oct, 2009

thanks to indicate the rights “soa architectes” http://www.eco-tower.fr

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Sites linking to this post:

www.buzzflash.net

16. Jun, 2008

Vertical Farms: "Growing Up Sustainably"

an innovative solution to both the food shortage and the negative impact modern agricultural practices have on the environmentâ€¦ build up, not out!

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There’s No Way But Up, Up, Up! | SKIRMISHER

16. Jun, 2008

[...] link [...]

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greenauthors.com

17. Jun, 2008

Vertical Farms: “Growing Up Sustainably”

This concept of farming is about going up not out and it allows for sustainable, organic, locally grown crops in urban centers. This type of farming would reduce pollution, reduce energy consumption, reduce deforestation and desertification, all the w…

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Green Guard » Blog Archive » Vertical Farms: “Growing Up Sustainably”

22. Jun, 2008

[...] Read Onâ€¦ [...]

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