Farming Up

I came across the idea of farming in skyscrapers a couple of years ago. The idea seemed interesting and far fetched at the time. Lately though I have been running across this idea everywhere I go on the internet. (With that said I go to some pretty nerdy places). First I came across it recently again in Scientific American the November 2009 issue. Then while reading an interesting article about farming Detroit I linked over to an article about how Detroit is a food desert and there are possible plans to turn parts of it into farm land again or to turn the skyscrapers into hydroponic farms.  Then today I saw that vertical farming was the spotlight story in the technology section at the CBC website.

So what is vertical farming? In a few simple words it is farming in a skyscraper. It is obviously more involved than that but it gets across the general gist of the concept.

So why farm in a skyscraper?
The various articles give a number of reasons. I will try to sum up the major ones below. These are in no particular order.
1) The farms can be built into the cities water management systems to better use waste water.
     The idea here is that the farm building  has a water treatment center in it and that municipal waste water gets purified enough to water the plants and the solid wastes are burned to provide energy. This would help to deal with city water management problems and provide water and energy for the farm. (it may need to supplement its energy with other sources of power still)
2) There is not enough land to keep farming using current methods if the population continues to grow.
     I do not know how accurate it is but many different articles from different sources all seem to say that we will run out of farmland within the next 50 years. This includes if we just wholesale clear cut all current forests. The only way to allow for a growing population is to provide more food. In order to do that we need to have more farming in a tinier area. This means many storied farms.
3) Limited water supply.
     We have all heard that water supplies are going to become more and more scarce as more people have to share them. In a controlled environment like a building you can recapture any water that evaporates off of plants and reuse it. You can also use things like drip irrigation to reduce the amount of water you need.
4) Access to quality food.
     While most of us have access to good food this food has often traveled around the world to get to us. If we had vertical farms then you could have farms right in the city and they could provide local produce year round to grocery stores. You might even have a grocery store right on the first floor of the farm.
5) Pollution reduction.
     This would reduce all the pollution that is used to ship it to you normally. It would likely take some time before the reduction in transportation pollution was greater than that of constructing the building but it would eventually be greener.
6) Local jobs
    Running a large farm like this would generate jobs. The fact that there is a growing population means that this would not take jobs away from current farmers as they will still be needed as well.
7) Save wild landscapes
     If we can build these kinds of farms then we do not need to expand farmland into areas that are currently still wild areas.

There are likely many more ideas. I would like to hear what different people think about this concept. One business model idea I had about it would be to have people that cannot use all of their own compost to give it to the vertical farms. They then get a share in the produce being grown. Kind of like a Co-op or something.

Well let me know what you think. Also if you want more information the website that seems to be the collecting point for all things relating to vertical farms is www.verticalfarm.com .