Credit: The Vertical Farm Project
The days of quaint market gardens on the fringes of the city supplying fresh produce straight to your dinner plate have been well and truly crushed under the giant tractor wheel of mass farming.
Suburban sprawl, combined with the vast economies of scale in operation in agriculture, have typically driven food production far from populated centres, with a corresponding increase in the cost of transport and risk of spoilage on route.
Yet, in a strange twist, a visionary microbiologist and environmental science lecturer at Columbia University in New York, sees our future cities populated with a new kind of market garden: one that doesn’t spread out, but that spreads up.
Perched on a spring-loaded chair in his office overlooking the Hudson River, and armed with two mobile phones, the silver-haired and effusive brainchild of vertical farming, Dickson Despommier’s enthusiasm is infectious.
“This technology disrupts everything,” he tells me. “What we all have to ask is, do you want to disrupt or be disrupted.”
Despommier runs me through the evolution of his idea from a long-ago project involving rooftop gardening in Manhattan, which, though a pleasant pursuit, he says can’t be sustained on a mass scale. But this seeded the concept and he started thinking bigger.
Looking at greenhouse projects – and thinking like a New Yorker, which means building up - the resulting concept is large-scale, indoor, urban agriculture. In skyscrapers.
Following this Despommier set up laboratory projects aimed at different design challenges and attracted a wide range of enthusiastic collaborators and contributors. He launched a website, The Vertical Farm Project (www.verticalfarm.com), around his essay outlining the argument for vertical farming, all of which has generated substantial buzz in media around the world.
If the idea of slapping farms in the middle of a metropolis seems muddled, Despommier has good reasons for thinking it could be a solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the world population is expected to grow by three billion to 8.6 billion over the next half a century. By then, some 80 per cent of the developed world’s population will live in cities. The urbanisation trend is playing out in the developing world too, where sprawling mega-slums grow by the day.
At the same time, conventional farmland -- and grazing land -- takes up an enormous amount of rural space, with over one-third of the world’s surface in use for agriculture, according to a study directed by Wisconsin’s Centre of Sustainability and the Global Environment. That’s about 800 million hectares of arable land.
Despommier figures in the next five decades new arable landspace roughly the size of Brazil will be required to feed the world’s growing population - land that simply doesn’t exist.
His concept relies on using green methods of architecture and materials to build skyscrapers that house, grow and produce crops. Newly designed materials and technology such as cheaper heliostats, which reflect sunlight where it's needed, more efficient photovoltaic solar panels for energy and system-wide recycling are all integral to the potential success of such a building.
