Look! Up in the Sky! It's a...Farm?
Professor's vision of "vertical farms" is attracting global attention
By Laura Leigh Davidson April 23 , 2009

"Eat local." It's one way to reduce human impact on the planet, experts say. Eating local means to try to buy and consume foods that are grown in places close to home.

However, most of the food sold at supermarkets is not locally grown or produced. Trucks and planes deliver these foods from hundreds or thousands of miles away. In the process, greenhouse gases are released, contributing to global warming. So the shorter the distance your groceries must travel, the less the harm done to the environment.

But how do you get access to local food if you live in a large city, hundreds of miles away from farms?

As the world's population grows, this question is becoming an even more important one to answer.

More and more people are living in cities. By the year 2030, 60 percent of the world's population and 87 percent of people in North America will make their homes in urban centers, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Environmental health scientist Dickson Despommier started considering this (and many other food-supply questions) about 10 years ago. The Columbia University professor and his students came up with the idea of a "vertical farm."

A vertical farm is a glass-walled structure that could be built as tall as a skyscraper.

Despommier envisions a 30-story building with a greenhouse on every floor. The walls of the building would be transparent, to allow crops to get as much sunlight as possible.

The skyscraper farm would generate its own energy. Plant and wastewater solid matter would be burned to generate electricity for the greenhouses.

Depending on a city's water resources, Despommier thinks hydroponic gardening is another promising process for the vertical farm.

Hydroponics is the growth of plants without soil. Instead of soil, the plants are grown directly in water or in a coarse substance such as gravel. A solution containing nutrients is regularly added to the growth containers to feed the plants' roots.

Despommier says the hydroponic greenhouses in his vertical farm would use a system that would recycle a city's wastewater and infuse it with nutrients to make the crops grow.

If this process works, it would provide food to a city and save millions of gallons of water.

The vertical farm concept has grabbed the attention of government officials around the world.

Scott Stringer, a government official from New York City, thinks the Big Apple is ripe for the vertical farming concept."

Obviously we don't have vast amounts of vacant land," Stringer told The New York Times. "But the sky is the limit in Manhattan."

Stringer and his staff are working on a vertical farm proposal to pitch to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "I think we can really do this," he added. "We could get the funding."

In addition to New York City, Despommier says he has been contacted about researching vertical farms for Shanghai, China, and the countries of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. And architectural firms in Paris, France, and Queensland, Australia, have submitted designs and ideas for vertical farms that might work in their countries.

Despommier admits that there is still a lot of work to be done to make vertical farms a reality. But the eco-dreamer told news magazine Time that he feels encouraged by the interest his concept has sparked so far."

I think vertical farming is an idea that can work in a big way," he says.

Let us write an essay about what we learned about vertical farming.

How is vertical farming beneficial?
Do you think it is a realistic idea for the future? Why or why not?