According to verticalfarm.com, by 2050 more than 80 per cent of world’s population will have moved into cities (or should I say mega-cities). The total population of planet would have added another 3 billion souls. They would all need to munch on something. Such a spike in population would inevitably mean the humankind destroying the natural habitat of wild animals, cutting forests and depleting oceans in order to provide the square-footage for growing food. Where’s the solution? Teaching people about contraception, one might hope… anyway, vertical farms could provide an answer.
At least they could stop deforestation. Dr Dickson Despommier, the guru and the main promoter of the idea, thinks that the vertical farms could be so successful that the governments might even consider paying the conventional (and jobless) farmers subsidies so that they remain on their land to introduce and maintain forests. That is lovely! Alternatively, I think that some of them could also grow biofuels. Thus the conventional farmland is returned to nature and we can restore the natural balance.
Technically, vertical farms will be nothing more than huge multi-storey greenhouses with optimised and automated growing and harvesting methods in place. Some architects suggest that a farm can be incorporated into a residential or office building in order to justify the cost of construction. If you can solve the dampness issues, I don’t see why not. Living next to a multi-storey garden sounds pretty appealing.
Pros and cons of vertical farms
Pros
- On-the-spot food production. Your fruit and veg live where you live.
- A steep decrease in foodmiles and transportation costs.
- Urban farms have a potential to become self sufficient by producing methane from their own organic waste!
- Efficiency way beyond the conventional farms – one acre of an urban farm is equivalent to 6 – 20 acres of arable land (depending on the crop).
- No more pests and weeds, hence no more pesticides and chemicals.
Cons
- Vertical farms will encourage urbanisation and cities will bloat to whopping sizes. Look what happened to Moscow this summer when it was affected by the peat fires. The situation clearly shown the disadvantages of being the largest city in Europe. Don’t get me wrong, I love Moscow to bits, but it has already reached a stage where its size is starting to cause problems.
- Cannot guarantee clean produce. Growing veg in cities is a crazy idea because the air pollution. Will you filter the air you give your carrots? Obviously not, unless you charge £5 per lb. Nevertheless, there are rooftop gardens and even rooftop beehives in large US cities, particularly New York…
- Eco credentials of vertical farms. Unless you convert an unused urban building, it will take a huge amount of grey energy (aka embedded energy) to build a vertical farm. If you build from steel and concrete (like you usually do when it comes to skyscrapers), it will take decades for the farm to recoup its CO2 emissions.
- Economical viability of vertical farms. Building skyscrapers costs tens of millions of pounds. Considering that farming business exists on really ridiculous margins, will such a venture ever pay itself off? One solution is for the farm to be self-contained business, i.e. they cut out the middleman and sell their produce from their publicly accessible ground floor premises. How’s that for an idea?
All in all, vertical farms is not a bad concept and they will eventually become part of our modern cityscape. I’m not sure how they’re going to produce pork in 2050. Getting pigs up the stairs might prove a difficult task; and I’ll still want my bacon even though I’m a GOM 🙂
Pic credit: Pierre Sartoux & Augustin Rosenstiehl
This is an insane idea, I kinda like it. The cons aren’t too bad, quite similar to typical farms. I mean look at the beauty of this, take one farm convert it into a vertical farm and you’ve got 50 extra farms for the same amount of space. This idea also makes water recycling alot easier plus the farms alot more manageable.