Vertical Farming

In tackling this problem, Prof. Dickinson Despommier of the Columbia University, along with his graduate students in medical ecology, thought of moving farms right into the heart of cities in huge, ultramodern towers. Imagine having a fish farm on the third floor, a wheat farm on the ninth floor, and enough food and water within a 30-storey agricultural tower to feed a city of 50 000 residents a year. Seemingly crazy, but vertical farming will soon be the only hope of feeding the world, according to Despommier. Also called skyfarming, Vertical farming is a theoretical form of agriculture that can be done in urban high-rise buildings. In these “farmscrapers”, food, such as fruits, fishes, vegetables, and even livestocks can be raised by using greenhouse growing methods.

“We need to devote as much attention to vertical farming as we did to going to the moon.” Despommier said in an interview with Business2.0 Magazine. “It will free the world from having to worry where our next meal will come from.”

A vertical farm can feed 50 000 people. In order to have a sufficient large surface area for cultivation, each of these future farms will need to be built on a minimum of a 32 330 square meter ground area and 200 meter-high building that will comprise around thirty floors. Most of them will be used for cultivating plants. Soy, wheat, spinach, strawberries, and Jerusalem artichokes are just some of the more than a hundred different species that could be grown. The lower floors will be reserved for raising fish and chicken. The tower will have transparent glass walls covered with titanium oxide that will allow a maximum amount of sunlight to enter. In addition, all of the farms will include rooms for recycling water and fro treating waste products and the city’s waste water. The idea is that farms will function to wind energy in areas exposed to the wind, geothermal energy in areas of volcanic activity, and to a large extent, using solar energy in sunny regions.

Despommier’s calculations peg the construction cost of a 30-storey vertical farm at about $84 million, operating costs at $5 million a year, and revenue at $18 million a year, based on the price of produce at upscale Manhattan delis.

The entire operation of these vertical farms has benefits not only to humanity but also to the environment. First, vertical farms will put an end to harvests being damaged by hail, drought, or tornados since the weather will always be ideal due to indoor cultivation and harvesting. And if the building is sealed and carefully monitored, the use of pesticides will no longer be needed. Moreover, the use of soil-free cultivation methods will guarantee 5-30 times higher crop returns than currently achieved with traditional farms. With a sophisticated irrigation system, the term organic will finally be true among crops treated with fertilizers.