Could vertical farming be the future?

Rice on the seventh floor. Wheat on the twelfth. And enough food within an 18-story tower to feed a small city of 50,000.

Vertical farms, where staple crops could be grown in environmentally friendly skyscrapers, exist today only in futuristic designs and on optimistic Web sites. Despite concerns over sky-high costs, however, an environmental health expert in New York is convinced the world has the know-how to make the concept a reality — and the imperative to do so quickly.

With a raft of studies suggesting farmers will be hard-pressed to feed the extra 3 billion people swelling the world’s ranks by the year 2050, Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier believes a new model of agriculture is vital to avoid an impending catastrophe.

“The reason why we need vertical farming is that horizontal farming is failing,” he said. If current practices don’t change by mid-century, he points outs, an area bigger than Brazil would need to become farmland just to keep pace with the demand.

Working the soil has always been an uncertain venture, and Despommier argues that the price of crop failure is growing ever steeper as the global population mushrooms. “The world,” he said, “is running out of resources faster than what it can replace.”

Critics like Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University in Logan, see improvements in how future farmlands are managed as more practical and cost-effective. To Despommier, though, the world already has the need and the technology to dramatically improve yields and reliability by adjusting its point of view: from out to up.

The Columbia researcher said his interest in vertical farming is an extension of his long-standing work on disease transmission among humans. Among the laundry list of benefits he cites, Despommier believes vertical farming could help break the transmission cycle of diseases in traditional agricultural settings. But it’s the potential to help solve impending food shortages that really excites him.

A recent exercise conducted by students in his medical ecology class found that a self-sustaining vertical farm able to feed 50,000 people could “fit comfortably within a city block,” rising perhaps 18 stories. With adequate funding, a smaller prototype could be up and running in seven to 10 years, he predicts. Eventually, full-scale versions could be a new feature of city skylines, climbing as high as 30 stories and filled with automated feeders, monitoring devices and harvesting equipment. And, of course, they would feature crops such as wheat, rice, sugar beets and leafy greens grown in mineral nutrient solutions or without any solid substrates at all.

These hydroponic and aeroponic growing techniques, respectively, have benefited from NASA’s strong interest because any long-term venture to the moon or beyond would require the use of self-contained and resource-limited growth chambers. Despommier concedes that current practices must be improved and systems put in place to quickly identify and quarantine plants stricken with pests or disease. “No pun intended, but the bugs need to be worked out of this thing,” he said.

He insists, though, that money is the last major obstacle. To his critics, that hurdle has tripped up past entrepreneurs and may yet be insurmountable. “I can’t be very optimistic about this study,” said Utah State’s Bugbee. “None of this is very new. But it doesn’t mean the whole concept is without merit. It just means the claims are greatly exaggerated.”

Bugbee’s chief objection is the exorbitant power requirement for such a vertical structure.  Plants on the lower floors would require artificial light year-round or expensive mechanical systems to get more light to them. And during a typical winter in northern U.S. cities, he said, average sunlight is only 5 percent to 10 percent of peak summer levels due to sapped intensity and shorter days.

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