This world’s constantly growing metropolises - whether Calcutta, Delhi, Shanghai or Mexico City - have a gigantic requirement for foodstuffs, impossible to satisfy in future with the yields of open fields alone, since available arable land will no longer suffice. The solution lies in the city that supplies itself: The concept of urban agriculture is not new of itself, its dimensions definitely are. Instead of promoting supplies for urban populations with allotments in which poorer inhabitants originally grew fruit and vegetables, scientists, architects and environmental watchdogs are now setting their sights on the vertical farm, giving inner city high-rises a completely new function. The visionary designs range from the revamping of existing high-rise facades to the construction of new buildings of up to 30 stories that consist of an enclosed system that also supplies itself. Before this is achieved, however, not only does a mass of new territory technically need to be tackled successfully, but public skepticism towards a new form of agriculture needs to be overcome.
Deltapark as an agricultural machine
Once upon a time there was a small country that had a large-scale plan, covering two million square metres, 300,000 pigs and 1.2 million chickens. The plan detailed Delta Park that was to be built in the Netherlands as the world’s first urban farm – a six-storey agricultural machine in the Port of Rotterdam, about 1000 metres long and 400 metres wide, with fish breeding in the basement, with greenhouses full of vegetables higher up, with mushroom cultivation and chicory being grown where no daylight penetrates. Up on the roof, wind turbines for power generation, and with water, sewage and rubbish all being recycled. The high-tech farm, while certainly backed by the politicians, collapsed in 2001 in face of the reaction from the media and the general public, simply seeming to be too industrialized.
Pyramid Farm by Eric Ellingsen and Dickson Despommier © 2008 The Vertical Farm Project; "The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline" by Blake Kurasek © 2008 The Vertical Farm Project; Vertical Farms by Chris Jacobs © 2008 The Vertical Farm ProjectPopulation growth as a challenge
Today some significantly larger countries are considering this type of agricultural production – and on a still greater scale than the 200 hectares planned in Rotterdam. World cities will continue to grow, and supplying people there with fresh products will become a challenge for agriculture. An average city requires about ten times its own area in arable land to feed itself. If world population reaches 9 billion in 2050, as forecast, more than a billion hectares of additional land will be required – or a chunk of terrain as large as Brazil.
Heavier demand will mean that today’s accepted concept of agriculture will have to be changed. Engineers, architects, environmental watchdogs and visionaries are united in dreaming of a new form of agriculture in high-rises – with the aim of ensuring sufficient food for the urban population. Their mentor is Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist at Columbia University in New York. His vision is all-embracing: 30-storey farms right in the cities, with hydro culture for vegetables in the upper stories, and fish and poultry being bred at lower levels. Such “vertical farms” are designed as high-efficiency greenhouses, drawing their energy from wind turbines, solar cells or even the tides, and surpassing conventional agriculture in efficiency thanks to lower consumption of land and water. Lost harvests due to adverse weather will be a thing of the past; short distances for transport in the near vicinity will ensure a clean CO2 footprint. A 30-storey high-rise farm could supply 50,000 people with food – conventional agriculture would require 235 hectares.
Ecological Vision for Conurbations
Despommier’s vision is not as unusual as it initially seems. He and his collaborators want to concentrate foodstuffs currently produced under glass or in sheds, bringing these into the cities and hence as close to the consumers as possible. As much attention needs to be devoted to vertical farming as was once paid to flight to the moon, says Despommier. He is not the only person, moreover, hoping to free the world in this way of worries about its foodstuffs. All the same, not everything is feasible in a vertical farm. Growing and harvesting cereals in high-rise conditions is problematical, trees grow too slowly, and cattle have no place in them. Herbs and greenstuffs and everything that can be harvested relatively quickly, by contrast, are at once possible and profitable. Despommier may be a visionary, but he is not a dreamer. That such farms could materialize purely for profit and without heed for the carbon footprint is something that he certainly sees as a problem. Yet for him sustainability is an essential prerequisite. Along with the introduction of high-rise farms, he is also planning the re-afforestation of agricultural land that will help to stabilize the climate.
"The Living Tower" by SOA Architects © 2008 The Vertical Farm ProjectDreams with a future
The experiment of growing crops has actually been running on the spot for some time. New York-based engineers Sun Works are growing vegetables experimentally on the Science Barge, a floating vegetable garden on Hudson River. Gene Giacomelli of the University of Arizona, a specialist in agricultural technology, has built a forcing house for a South Pole station – thus showing that this form of agriculture even functions in extreme conditions. Yet in fact numerous hurdles far nearer to hand still need to be surmounted. Vertical farming could become an imperative; it is at any rate an inspiring concept. It also raises numerous questions quite aside from its technical feasibility. To whom would the high-rise farms belong? To food manufacturers, who would thus have a monopoly of our food? Will it no longer be nature, but even more emphatically than ever the agricultural industry that dictates how we feed ourselves? Will farmers, currently leaseholders or landowners, have to become factory managers? Who will own and look after former agricultural land, on which “only” forests will still grow? Will centuries-old growing techniques of “traditional” cultivation some day become lost? Will plants and animal species that can be used in such projects be the only ones that survive? And will such farms come into existence at all in the regions where the need – and the hunger – are greatest, or will high-income regions allow themselves cute “sky farms” as a luxury?
Questions galore. It is still mainly natural scientists who are concerned with the projects, meaning engineers, ecologists, biologists. It is time for others to play a part – the sociologists, psychologists and consumers. In the Netherlands it was public opinion at one time that caused the downfall of the Deltapark project. If visions are to become reality, they need to have their feet on the ground. Only then that they will take root.