Part 1 - I am convinced, we need to advance Vertical Farming…

Image credits — https://tinyurl.com/y9lhto9k

My notes from the book — The Vertical Farm by Dr. Dickson Dispommier

For the more than one billion people who, through no fault of their own, go to sleep hungry each night; and for the three billion more who will most likely arrive on this planet over the next forty years to join them in their suffering, if nothing changes.

• Cities of the future must generate their own food supply.
• For the more than one billion people who, through no fault of their own, go to sleep hungry each night; and for the three billion more who will most likely arrive on this planet over the next forty years to join them in their suffering, if nothing changes.
• To be fair, our current food production and distribution system does deliver edible calories to the people at an affordable “price.” But its toll on both the environment and its consumers is astonishing. The herbicides and pesticides that are applied to the plants wash out into our rivers and oceans — creating dead zones where fishing is no longer viable. That means hard-working people might not have jobs in the seafood industry because of agribusiness decisions made way upstream, decisions that are often subsidized by our tax dollars.
• Chemical fertilizers leave the soil incapable of supporting plants, without even more fertilizer. All these chemicals can eventually make it to the drinking water as well. For folks living near the trans-shipping centers where the food comes into a city and goes out to grocers, restaurants, etc., the diesel exhaust is thick in the local air, and the lungs of anyone who cares to breathe. Children living near these facilities are put at risk by the large trucks passing through their neighborhoods, discouraging active play and exacerbating the obesity epidemic facing our nation. These quality-of-life costs are borne most often by poor people, with no just compensation.
• Sustainable urban life is technologically achievable, and most important, highly desirable. For example, food waste can easily be converted back into energy employing clean state-of-the-art incineration technologies, and wastewater can be converted back into drinking water. For the first time in history, an entire city can choose to become the functional urban equivalent of a natural ecosystem. We could even generate energy from incinerating human feces if we so desired. We have the ability to create a “cradle to cradle” waste-free economy. All that is needed is the political will to do so. Once we begin the process, cities will be able to live within their means without further damaging the environment.
• The concept of vertical farming is dead simple. Still, making it happen could require the kind of technical expertise needed for, say, rocket science or brain surgery. Then again, human beings do rocket science and brain surgery quite well. We should not shy away from the challenge of farming vertically simply because it requires cutting-edge engineering, architecture, and agronomy. All of this is within our grasp.
• The idea of growing crops in tall buildings might sound strange. But farming indoors is not a new concept. Commercially viable crops such as strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and a wide variety of spices have made their way from commercial greenhouses to the world’s supermarkets in ever-increasing amounts over the last fifteen years. Most of these greenhouse operations are small in comparison to the large commercial farms of the American Midwest, but unlike their outdoor counterparts, greenhouse facilities can produce crops year-round. Fish, as well as a wide variety of crustaceans and mollusks, have also been raised indoors. Chickens, ducks, and geese could be as well.
• Vertical farms are immune to weather and other natural elements that can abort food production.

Agriculture is responsible for more ecosystem disruption than any other kind of pollution

• The efficiency of each floor of a vertical farm, one acre in footprint, could be equivalent to as many as ten to twenty traditional soil-based acres, depending upon the crop. Vertical farms offer many environmental benefits as well. Farming indoors eliminates the need for fossil fuels now used for plowing, applying fertilizer, seeding, weeding, and harvesting.
• Vertical farms could act as stand-alone water-regenerating facilities.
• New York City discards some one billion gallons of treated grey water every day into the Hudson River estuary. If industrial-quality water costs five cents a gallon (a conservative estimate), reclamation would be well worth the effort, even if the system cost as much as $30 billion to construct and manage. This is hardly a pie-in-the-sky scheme. A portion of Orange County, California, with a population of approximately 500,000, converts grey water back into tap water using a state-of-the-art purification system that cost its taxpayers $500 million to install. It was worth every penny.
• Agriculture is responsible for more ecosystem disruption than any other kind of pollution. What’s more, today’s farmers can’t do much about it: Floods dictate the timing and extent of runoff.

In nature, there is no waste!!

• In nature, there is no waste. In the new eco-city, discarding anything without finding another use for it would be quite unthinkable. Imagine how absurd it would be to siphon off a gallon’s worth of gasoline from the family car and pour it down the sewer. Yet this is equivalent to what we are doing with everything we now throw away.
• Today’s cities fail to meet even the minimum standards of self-reliance. No city lives within its own means. Everything consumed is produced outside the city, and as a result, waste accumulates at an alarming rate. A midsize city annually produces gigatons of solid material and billions of gallons of wastewater. Add to that the billions of dollars spent annually trying to get rid of this unwanted material, and you have a clear picture of our current environmental crisis.

Today’s cities fail to meet even the minimum standards of self-reliance. No city lives within its own means

• There is only so much natural capital out there, and we are on the verge of exhausting it. Building self-sustaining cities now will allow the land to heal itself, thereby restoring balance between our lives and the rest of nature.
• The one characteristic they all share is that primary productivity (the total mass of plants produced over a year in a given geographically defined region) is limited by the total amount of energy received and processed.
• The most important features of an ecosystem are the annual temperature regimes and precipitation profiles, which vary greatly with latitude and altitude. Hence, there is a plethora of varied, vibrant, robust assemblages of life that have flourished for hundreds of thousands of years.
• The real question is, can a city bio-mimic an intact ecosystem with respect to the allocation and use of essential resources and, at the same time, provide a healthy, nurturing, sustainable environment for its inhabitants?
• Vertical farming is a concept whose premise is easy to envision: Stack up “high-tech” greenhouses on top of each other and locate these “super” indoor farms inside the urban landscape, close to where most of us have chosen to live. However, I came to realize early on that making it happen will not be an easily attainable goal, and certainly not simple from an engineering and design perspective.
• Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that over 50 percent of all crops planted in the United States never reach the plate of the consumer. Droughts, floods, spoilage, and plant diseases account for most of the losses. On a worldwide basis, the situation is even worse, with nearly 70 percent of planted crops never reaching the harvest stage, succumbing — in addition to the things listed above — to attack from insect pests such as locusts and a wide variety of endemic microbial pathogens. These losses are totally avoidable, since we can now grow most of what we need to eat inside under carefully selected and well-monitored conditions that ensure an optimal yield for each species of plant and animal year-round.

USDA estimates that over 50 percent of all crops planted in the United States never reach the plate of the consumer. On a worldwide basis, the situation is even worse, with nearly 70 percent of planted crops never reaching the harvest stage, succumbing!!

• The choice is simple: Control everything (indoor farming) or control nothing (outdoor farming).
• Most of the world’s estuaries have been so adversely affected by runoff that they no longer function as nurseries for the ocean’s marine fish, crustacea, and mollusks. That is why the United States must import more than 80 percent of its seafood from abroad.
• Vertical farms would recycle their own water, thereby eliminating agricultural runoff once and for all.
• The concept of sustainability will be realized through the valuing of waste as a commodity. We are now able to live for long periods of time in closed systems (e.g., the International Space Station) off the surface of the Earth, and in that instance, the concept of waste is already an outdated paradigm. Unfortunately, this goal has yet to be fully realized, even by NASA. So if we are to live continuously on the moon or Mars, then we had better learn how to do it here first.

The concept of sustainability will be realized through the valuing of waste as a commodity

• A few wry observers of the human condition have said that what actually happened was that wild plants in fact cultivated us by trapping humans into becoming totally dependent upon them for their very survival, thus ensuring the plants’ own survival in the process! This sort of a “you feed me and I’ll feed you” hypothesis of symbiotic relationships is an interesting twist on the practice of farming, to say the least.

Wild plants in fact cultivated us by trapping humans into becoming totally dependent upon them for their very survival, thus ensuring the plants’ own survival in the process!

• Nature had never planned for monocultures; biodiversity was and still is the rule that enables the establishment of functional ecosystems. Resiliency in nature is related to the number of species a region can support, not the number of individuals of a single species, such as corn or wheat.
• Insightful and creative mythologies, and a robust fiction-based literature, pits “man against nature.” In the real world, nature usually wins. One colorful bumper sticker sums it up this way: nature bats last.

In the next part, we will see an interesting analysis of factors that shaped some of the agricultural practices of today and more… Stay tuned!

Part 2…

The origins of twenty-first-century agriculture can be traced back to the convergence of four things: the American Civil War, the discovery of oil, the development of the internal-combustion engine, and the invention of dynamite.

1. Part 1 — I am convinced, we need to advance Vertical Farming…
2. Part 2 — I am convinced, we need to advance Vertical Farming…