Aggregate Efficiency & Food Security

A food-focused discussion from an industrial designer’s perspective on the eminent need for designing better systems that will move us forward into the Third Industrial Revolution.

The future of food security will be ever-more pressing as population increase and sea levels rise, giving way to mass-migration. If you think this is generations out, think again. It’s been happening since before the Syrian civil war broke out — incidentally the droughts that Syria experienced were the major cause to the recent atrocities.

The need to create increased efficacy in food production systems will be paramount to the survival of humans. Further, the ability to control factors of environment are equally important.

Creating steps to secure the unforeseen shifts in weather, population and large movements of localized people, tribes, and groups will therefore rely on food security as well as distribution.

Water, of course is the single largest factor in all of this. Current crop irrigation techniques are outdated, wasteful, and have depleted ancient underground aquifers beyond repair in your lifetime.

One plausible answer is indoor vertical farming. A technique that has been honed over the past couple of decades and continues to outperform yields with ‘modern’ outdoor farming. It uses point-source watering methods to mitigate unwanted evaporation with a distribution percentage hitting nearly 100% of the vegetation being grown.

Shrinking supply chain to localized production and availability is something that needs to be done on almost all levels of manufacturing, whether you’re making shoes, or snack bars. This also implies the need for multi-faceted hybridized production facilities that are much more nimble than present-day systems.

Vertical farming systems represent a new era in food propagation and manufacturing — it’s distributed, autonomous, and highly efficient. They are smaller — but more productive — with an inherent nimble nature about them. Additionally, around the clock production regardless of season, latitude, or longitude makes for obvious benefits to systems dependent on the elements and other input variables.

My point is that if we are to continue in the manner we have been accustomed, we’ll need our systems to decrease the aggregate loss distribution by factors of 100 or more, so when it comes to food production, vertical farming will be necessary component in feeding the brilliant minds of tomorrow.