By Mwagale Babumba
In the near future, buying groceries may mean going to a nearby neighborhood food center featuring foods grown from a neighborhood farm or vertical farms. Food centers or vertical farms could supply a city with over 50 percent of its produce. Urban farming initiatives are growing rapidly, but many do not know what direction it is headed in.
Jolie Oliveti, a grower for the Revision House urban farm has doubts about urban farms providing food for entire cities in the future. "Building primarily a food system based on urban farms could be a difficult thing, because you have to grow a lot of food to feed all the people of Boston let alone places like New York City which is worlds bigger than Boston," said Oliveti.
According to studies done by Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University and an architect, in 2050 80 percent of the world's population will live in urban areas. Advocates for vertical farms believe that the indoor farms can provide food for as many as three billion people. Despommier designed a 30-story eco-system to feed the added population. "If climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within reach:move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It's called vertical farming," said Despommier.
There are many people who dismiss this idea, claiming that it is costly and not feasible. Andrea Godshalk is writing a book on urban farming and thinks that farming outdoors cost less. "The vertical farming idea seems highly expensive and there's a lot of resources needed and there's a lot we can do before that is really a necessity. I think there is a lot we can be doing in between needing that because people want to farm and I think it's really important that people have access to the farms on the ground."
A vertical farm would work like a functional ecosystem: waste would be recycled and water used in hydroponics and aeroponics would be recaptured by dehumidification and used repeatedly. Buildings built solely for vertical farming are not the only structures that can house a vertical farm. Schools, restaurants, hospitals and top floors of apartment complexes can be used to house vertical farms.
N.J. Unaka, a research fellow at the Institute for Ecological Design, thinks that vertical farming is possible but our current resources should be used to house the farms. "If you have abandoned industrial buildings in the city that could carry the load of soil and plants, why not? If you are planning to build a skyscraper specifically for that purpose, I'm not so sure. I think people should grow food where they can and if that includes on a window sill, on a fire escape, on top of a roof or up awall, great," said Unaka.
The future of urban farming is unknown but it has the possibility of going in many directions. Unaka thinks that there are so many problems with the way American industries grow food and it may take years for America to rework our agricultural process. "The biggest direct problem is the food policy of the US government -it fundamentally pays farmers to waste food, kill soil and then either go out of business or get large and toxic. Their production is efficiently hidden from view, their value is determined solely on the dollar cost to extract, package, preserve and transport it. The costs to the ecosystems they are part of, including the environment and our health are ancillary - economists call these externalities," said Unaka.
Soil is a very integral part of growing food. The healthier the soil, the healthier the harvest. Godshalk thinks composting on a large scale will help change the way we grow food. She says that over 40 percent of trash thrown away is compostable. "There is a lot we can do. We can begin to build soil. In San Francisco, they have a city law that everyone needs to compost and the city picks up the compost and is selling it to vineyards and residents can get it sometimes. Those kinds of laws that make it a normal part of living in the city is that we compost are a valuable resource.
Whether vertical farming or large food systems are the future of urban farming there needs to be a clear plan for healthy food production and sustainability. If done right urban farming has the potential to be the nations leading food supply.
For more information about vertical farming visit http://www.verticalfarm.com/
For more information about Andrea Godshalk's book release date visit http://www.liberatoryecology.com
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