Best Trends: Eat Your City
by J. Michael Wheeler
The Urban SkyFarmer
Want to be a farmer, but don’t want to give up the city life? Well, if the city can’t come to the farm, the farm just might make it to the city soon. We’re not talking balcony gardens here; we’re talking skyscrapers filled with green.
Imagine a 21-story circular greenhouse with rooftop solar panels powering 24-hour grow lights and irrigated by advanced evaporation-capture technology. Dickson Despommier, an environmental science professor at Columbia University, imagined just that. He called it Vertical Farming. Despommier’s 21-story vertical farm could be as productive as 588 acres of land, enough to grow 12 million heads of lettuce a year! (The Vertical Farm Project was established in 2001, and is an on-going activity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City.)
Farm debt? Think farm profit: Despommier calculates that his 21-story vertical farm would cost about $84 million to build, operating costs at about $5 million per year, and revenue at $18 million a year. And the transportation costs, one of the most expensive aspects of traditional agriculture, would virtually disappear as shipping morphs into delivery.
Indoor farming, like hydroponics and aeroponics, isn’t new. Over the past several years it has brought strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and spices to our supermarkets. Most of these indoor farms are small when compared to factory farms, but unlike their outdoor counterparts, they produce crops year-round. Japan, Scandinavia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada have thriving greenhouse industries. Freshwater fishes like tilapia, trout, stripped bass, and carp, and a wide variety of shellfish, (shrimp, crayfish, and mussels) have also been commercialized in this way.
But the Vertical Farm differs radically from what currently exists. It literally scales up the operation. Despommier’s group has determined that a single 30 story vertical farm on one square New York City block could provide enough calories (2,000 cal/day/person) to comfortably accommodate the needs of 50,000 people! And we’re not talking future technology: most of the tech is here, now.
What’s Grown Here, Stays Here
New York City’s population of approximately 9 million people use about 3 million tons of agricultural produce each year. According to Despommier, to grow that much produce requires over 266,000 acres of cropland. Food production for New York City requires an estimated 9.9 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually: transportation of produce to New York City results in 24 million tons of greenhouse gas emission.
Growing a city’s food in the city has lots of advantages.
Seasons? Nope. A Vertical Farm knows no season: it’s year-round production. Crop yields, depending on the crop, translates into a 4-30 fold increase. (It would take 30 acres of outdoor land to grow the same amount of strawberries grown indoors on one acre.)
Other intriguing advantages of urban vertical farms: minimized crop failures due to droughts, floods, and pests. Food can be grown organically employing diets specific to each plant and animal species: no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers; no agricultural runoff. Farmland could be returned to the natural landscape, restoring ecosystems. Lowered energy costs: no tractors, plows, or shipping. Blighted urban properties could be converted into “SkyFarms.”
It’s an intriguing, achievable and BIG idea. Too big to really present it in this article, so visit the Vertical Farm Project’s website (verticalfarm.com). It’s the place to get a handle on this forward-looking concept, from floor plans to crop yields to amazing design drawings.
Images and information used by permission. Designs and illustrations by Chris Jacobs.
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Thanks for the interest!
Posted by: Chris Jacobs | Jan 05, 2008 at 03:01 AM