The High-Climbing Dreams Of Vertical Farming
Skyscrapers, those emblems of commercial city life, have new secrets. Not shady Wall Street deals or the routine gossip of office life; instead, across the world, the tall fixed buildings of our cities are being repurposed for something decidedly un-urban. The next generation of urban farming is here, and far from the rooftop gardens and communal plots of the past, they’re building up, not out. The potential for urban farming in terms of sustainability, environmental impact, and public and social benefits is huge. And it comes at a time when we desperately need it, where our food sources are both grossly over-producing carbon and environmental damage, and under-producing according to our demand: the UN estimates that we will need 70% more food within the next 35 years.
Vertical farming means moving away from crops on large pieces of land and instead using the high rise buildings of our cities to an advantage. Vertical farmers stack their crops in old factory buildings or warehouses, and old problems — like the issue of getting light to plants somewhere in the middle, or making sure the plants on your top layer are getting enough water and nutrients — are rapidly being solved by growths in new technology and research.
“Enabled by artificial lights, hydroponic systems, and computerised automation we can grow the most healthy, tasty, chemical free greens and vegetables, that are fresh all year round,” explains Simon Caspersen, the co-founder of SPACE10, a future-living lab based in Copenhagen that explores better and more sustainable ways of living. “We can create the perfect spring day everyday.”
Urban farming’s benefits run so long as to be vaguely hyperbolic. Moving our farms into the places most of us live offers a host of new possibilities: reduction of carbon emissions as our food travels much less further to reach us; water preservation (vertical farming, Caspersen tells me, uses 90% less water than conventional methods); increased sustainability made possible when urban farming is powered by clean energy sources; employment growth as new urban farming jobs become available; public health benefits in teaching and reconnecting people with where their food comes from. But at the same time, part of the joy of urban farming seems to be the fact that it isn’t a standard solution — indeed, in the many countries across the world where it’s being developed, it’s rarely used to solve the same problem twice.
In Detroit, urban farming is seen as a community building exercise and way to reconnect young people with their environment. In Montreal, a group of students are using their rooftop garden to develop agricultural business skills, for a particularly green kind of entrepreneurship. In Sweden, companies like Plantagon are focusing on developing urban agricultural technology that they can share with other countries. There’s a sense that urban farming offers a wealth of riches and that individual cities and communities can align these opportunities to their own values.
And it’s clear that we’re at the beginning of a tech boom, as more organisations and start-ups turn their minds to the commercial and societal benefits of vertical farming. “We haven’t even seen [what will happen] when [vertical farming] systems are supported by AI, automation and convenient delivery services,” Caspersen says. “Or when you can log on and play soothing classical music for your own growing stack in the farm.”
Part of SPACE10’s work is in exploring new ways that technology can enable and support urban farming, as in their Farm project, a quite literal farm located in the basement of their Copenhagen headquarters. “At the moment,” Capersen says, “we are testing both hydroponic and aquaponic farming systems. We play around with sensors and machine learning, and connect the data from our greens with Google Home, so we can ‘talk’ to the plants and understand their growing conditions and nutrient needs. We also have a small bioreactor for growing micro-algae.” SPACE10 is now producing 100 kg of food per month; they eat it themselves, as well as delivering produce to local restaurants.
SPACE10 and their peers are working from a position of strength; as consciousness rises around urban farming there have been big steps towards growth and commercial viability. IKEA recently invested in Aerofarms, a vertical farming company, who secured $40 million from a range of high-profile investors; VCs have invested $200 million in Plenty, a vertical farming start-up that grows its food inside a former electronics distribution center in San Francisco; a new vertical farm in New Jersey, Bowery, has raised $20 million in investments since it launched in 2017; Berlin’s own vertical farming juggernaut infarm have recently launched their first restaurant and raised €20 million for their European expansion project, which will see them partnering with supermarket chain Edeka to install mini-farms in supermarkets as well as rolling out new urban farms across Europe.
Public interest, too, is huge. When SPACE10 launched their new project The Growroom, a spherical urban farm designed for cities, they made their design files open source so anyone could download and reconstruct it, requiring only rubber hammers and 17 sheets of plywood. In the first few months, the files were downloaded 30,000 times, and local versions of the Growroom have popped up in Helsinki, Moscow, Dubai, Rio De Janeiro, Seoul and Sydney.
But it’s important to keep in mind that the reason vertical farming feels so vital is because we’re at a crisis point when it comes to food. “Our current food production system is broken,” says Caspersen. “It’s a massive driver of climate change. It requires loads of resources for production, transport and cooling; and it uses our dwindling supplies of freshwater. We need to find smarter and better ways to produce food.”
The stakes are high. Yet there’s something intrinsically hopeful about vertical farming and the people working within its field, melding some of the oldest human ideas about agriculture and food production with our most exciting advances: AI, hydroponics, new architecture or old architecture made new. It’s a form of tech where we can, for once, perhaps feel uncomplicatedly good; where the sky, quite literally, is the limit.
Written by Mikaella Clements
