Skyscraper Farms

[Albion]

http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/verticak_485.jpg

Al Gore urges everyone to plant trees in An Inconvenient Truth. But where, asks Dickson Despommier, a 67-year-old microbiologist at Columbia University, can we plant them if, as scientists suggest, more and more of the world's forests will soon become farmland to support our explosive population growth? Nearly 41 percent of Earth's land is now used for agriculture, yet we're on the brink of vast population growth, from 6.7 billion people today to an estimated 9.2 billion by 2050, with the majority living in cities. The only way to make room for enough carbon-sequestering trees to reverse global warming, Despommier argues, is to change the way we farm. Radically. Despommier envisions blocks of vertical farms in the world's biggest cities, each structure 30 stories high, providing enough food and water for 50,000 people a year, with no waste. He is in discussions with potential investors to build the first prototype. Despommier also sits on the board of New York Sun Works, an eco-friendly engineering firm in Manhattan that in May demonstrated a similar—if much smaller—urban-farm concept on a floating barge.
Q: How did you come to the idea of putting a farm in a skyscraper?
A: About eight years ago, I asked my students to come up with ideas on urban sustainability, and they proposed 13 acres of farmable land on the commercial rooftops of Manhattan. We figured out that it would feed just 2 percent of the city, so I said, "Let's take the 1,723 abandoned buildings in Manhattan, retrofit them and do hydroponics." Then I said, "OK, forget about money, space and time, and design a building that will feed and hydrate 50,000 people a year." I wanted individuals to eat 2,000 calories a day and drink water created by evapotranspiration.
Q: Meaning water
from plants?
A: Right. The condensation comes from the leaves, even though you put the water into the roots. If you had a vertical farm the size of a city block, the plants inside could produce enough water for roughly 50,000 people.
Q: Where would irrigation come from?
A: The sewage. First you'd desludge it. Then you'd filter it through nonedible barrier plants and again through a tower of zebra mussels, the best filtering organism out there. After that, the water would be pristine.
Q: How many different kinds of fruits and vegetables would you grow inside the building?
A: More than 100—strawberries, blueberries, even miniature banana plants. We got a list from NASA of produce that can be grown indoors. It turns out that NASA has a big hydroponics program, because there's no takeout on Mars—you can't send out for a pizza. Genetic engineering and artificial selection will also play an important role in vertical farming because there are
a lot of plants, such as traditional corn, that we don't yet know how
to grow indoors.
Q: How will this fight global warming?
A: All the governmental reports say the same thing: The biggest polluter is agriculture. I love the look of a wheat field, but it's a huge trade-off to grow food outside the city—40.5 percent of the earth is used for agriculture. As the population grows, the demand for food goes up and more land is cleared for farming. Come up with an alternative to traditional agriculture, and you already have the strategy for sequestering carbon dioxide: planting trees.
Q: How much will all this cost?
A: The first vertical farm could run into the billions of dollars. I envision state-of-the-art stuff: The plants will be placed in automated conveyer belts that move past stationary grow lights and automated nutrient-delivery systems. The first buildings would have to be subsidized, with energy incentives and tax incentives. We're talking about the equivalent of engineering a Saturn rocket.
Q: When could we see the first farm?
A: With funding, there could be a prototype in 5 to 10 years. I hope I live to be 106 and see the skyline dotted with them.

Source... (http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2007-07/skyscraper-farms)

Singapore should really take notice of this.

[Albion]

It may sound like a pie in the sky idea, but vertical farms containing enough food to feed four million people, could one day divert a potential world food shortage.

The huge 'living' skyscrapers have captured the imagination of architects in the U.S and Europe as food prices soar.

They are the brainchild of Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University.

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http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/09/25/article-1061036-02C6E71B00000578-743_468x453.jpg


The skyscraper concept is gaining more attention as world food prices soar. The designer claims one farm could produce 12 million lettuces a year

'We need to devote as much attention to vertical farming as we did to going to the moon,' the 68-year-old said.

'It will free the world from having to worry where our next meal will come from.'

The revolutionary scientist proposes gleaming 21 storey skyscrapers that could potentially be as productive as 588 acres of land and grow up to 12 million lettuces a year.
He said the farms, projected to cost £45m to build and £2.7m a year to run, would be both environmentally friendly and economically profitable.

Dr Despommier created his concept in 1999 with graduate students during a class on medical ecology.

With the world's population expected to increase to 3 billion by 2050 and almost 80 per cent of farming land in use, the idea has never been more relevant.

Despommieren has used the internet and a series of lectures to spread his concept.

However, despite the neat simplicity of his idea, Dr Despommier is treated with suspicion in academic circles.

'I'm viewed as kind of an outsider because it's kind of a crazy idea,' Dr Despommier says.

Not put off, Despommier, has pushed for city planners in America to take his project seriously.

'Vertical farming practised on a large scale in urban centres has great potential to supply enough food in a sustainable fashion to comfortably feed all of humankind for the foreseeable future,' he said.

'All of this may sound too good to be true but these are realistic and achievable goals, given the full development of a few new technologies.

'High-rise food-producing buildings will succeed only if they function by mimicking ecological process.
'Most important, there must be strong, government-supported economic incentives to the private sector, as well as to universities and local government to develop the concept,' the professor said.

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Building these modern Hanging Gardens of Babylon may seem like something from a science fiction novel, but Despommier believes they are necessary for mankind's future.

'It's very idealistic and ivory tower and all of that. But there's a real desire to make this happen,' he said.

Source... (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1061036/Blue-sky-thinking-The-skyscraper-farms-feeding-millions-2050.html)

[Albion]

I think governments really have to look into this. City states such as Singapore and Luxembourg can't grow enough food on the limited amount of land they have and even if they tried it would mean turning over more of the environment or potential building land (in the case of Singapore) to the plough.

Outside of the city states there's countries such as the Netherlands and Britain in Europe which would benefit from having to turn less space over to food production. Food security is becoming a big issue with the growing populations of Asia, their increased purchasing power and the availability of agricultural land.

Skyscrapper farms make things a lot more efficient. Say you had 5 acres of land, now build a skyscraper with a floor plan of 5 acres going up 10 levels - that makes 50 acres! 45 acres of extra space.
Now imaging quite a lot of these dotted about just outside of cities with some small and some very tall ones.
We could also potentially use them in effect as one great big greenhouse, allowing tropical crops to be grown in northern latitudes.

[The Lawspeaker]

Vertical Farming


Can Urban Agriculture Feed a Hungry World?

http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-234880-panoV9-shwo.jpg
Click on the picture to view the photo gallery. (http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-70665.html)

Agricultural researchers believe that building indoor farms in the middle of cities could help solve the world's hunger problem. Experts say that vertical farming could feed up to 10 billion people and make agriculture independent of the weather and the need for land. There's only one snag: The urban farms need huge amounts of energy.

One day, Choi Kyu Hong might find himself in a vegetable garden on the 65th floor of a skyscraper. But, so far, his dream of picking fresh vegetables some 200 meters (655 feet) up has only been realized in hundreds of architectural designs.

In real life, the agricultural scientist remains far below such dizzying heights, conducting his work in a nondescript three-story building in the South Korean city of Suwon. The only thing that makes the squat structure stand out is the solar panels on its roof, which provide power for the prototype of a farm Choi is working on. If he and his colleagues succeed, their efforts may change the future of urban farming -- and how the world gets its food.
From the outside, the so-called vertical farm has nothing in common with the luxury high-rises surrounding it. Inside the building, heads of lettuce covering 450 square meters (4,800 square feet) are being painstakingly cultivated. Light and temperature levels are precisely regulated. Meanwhile, in the surrounding city, some 20 million people are hustling among the high-rises and apartment complexes, going about their daily lives.

Every person who steps foot in the Suwon vertical farm must first pass through an "air shower" to keep outside germs and bacteria from influencing the scientific experiment. Other than this oddity, though, the indoor agricultural center closely resembles a traditional rural farm. There are a few more technological bells and whistles (not to mention bright pink lighting) which remind visitors this is no normal farm. But the damp air, with its scent of fresh flowers, recalls that of a greenhouse.

Heads of lettuce are lined up in stacked layers. At the very bottom, small seedlings are thriving while, further up, there are riper plants almost ready to be picked. Unlike in conventional greenhouses, the one in Suwon uses no pesticides between the sowing and harvest periods, and all water is recycled. This makes the facility completely organic. It is also far more productive than a conventional greenhouse.

Choi meticulously checks the room temperature. He carefully checks the wavelengths of the red, white and blue LED lights aimed at the tender plants. Nothing is left to chance when it comes to the laboratory conditions of this young agricultural experiment. The goal is to develop optimal cultivation methods -- and ones that can compete on the open market. Indeed, Korea wants to bring vertical farming to the free market.



Nine Billion People by 2050


Vertical farming is an old idea. Indigenous people in South America have long used vertically layered growing techniques, and the rice terraces of East Asia follow a similar principle. But, now, a rapidly growing global population and increasingly limited resources are making the technique more attractive than ever.

The Green Revolution of the late 1950s boosted agricultural productivity at an astounding rate, allowing for the explosive population growth still seen today. Indeed, since 1950, the Earth's population has nearly tripled, from 2.4 billion to 7 billion, and global demand for food has grown accordingly.

Until now, the agricultural industry could keep up well enough -- otherwise swelling population figures would have leveled off long ago. But scientists warn that agricultural productivity has its limits. What's more, much of the land on which the world's food is grown has become exhausted or no longer usable. Likewise, there is not an endless supply of areas that can be converted to agricultural use.

By 2050, the UN predicts that the global population will surpass 9 billion people. Given current agricultural productivity rates, the Vertical Farm Project estimates that an agricultural area equal in size to roughly half of South America will be needed to feed this larger population.

Vertical farming has the potential to solve this problem. The term "vertical farming" was coined in 1915 by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey. Architects and scientists have repeatedly looked into the idea since then, especially toward the end of the 20th century. In 1999, Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences and microbiology at New York's Columbia University seized upon the idea together with his students. After having grown tired of his depressing lectures on the state of the world, his students finally protested and asked Despommier to work with them on a more positive project.

From the initial idea of "rooftop farming," the cultivation of plants on flat roofs, the class developed a high-rise concept. The students calculated that rooftop-based rice growing would be able to feed, at most, 2 percent of Manhattan's population. "If it can't be done using rooftops, why don't we just grow the crops inside the buildings?" Despommier asked himself. "We already know how to cultivate and water plants indoors."

With its many empty high-rise buildings, Manhattan was the perfect location to develop the idea. Despommier's students calculated that a single 30-story vertical farm could feed some 50,000 people. And, theoretically, 160 of these structures could provide all of New York with food year-round, without being at the mercy of cold snaps and dry spells.



The Power Problem


Despite these promising calculations, such high-rise farms still only exist as small-scale models. Critics don't expect this to change anytime soon. Agricultural researcher Stan Cox of the Kansas-based Land Institute sees vertical farming as more of a project for dreamy young architecture students than a practical solution to potential shortages in the global food supply.

The main problem is light -- in particular, the fact that sunlight has to be replaced by LEDs. According to Cox's calculations, if you wanted to replace all of the wheat cultivation in the US for an entire year using vertical farming, you would need eight times the amount of electricity generated by all the power plants in the US over a single year -- and that's just for powering the lighting.

It gets even more difficult if you intend to rely exclusively on renewable energies to supply this power, as Despommier hopes to do. At the moment, renewable energy sources only generate about 2 percent of all power in the US. Accordingly, the sector would have to be expanded 400-fold to create enough energy to illuminate indoor wheat crops for an entire year. Despommier seems to have fallen in love with an idea, Cox says, without considering the difficulties of its actual implementation.



Getting Closer to Reality


Even so, Despommier still believes in his vision of urban agriculture. And recent developments, like the ones in South Korea, might mean his dream is not as remote as critics say. Ten years ago, vertical farming was only an idea. Today, it has developed into a concrete model. About two years ago, the first prototypes were created.

In fact, the concept seems to be working already, at least on a small scale. In the Netherlands, the first foods from a vertical farm are already stocking supermarket shelves. The PlantLab, a 10-year-old company based three floors underground in the southern city of Den Bosch, has cultivated everything from ornamental shrubs and roses to nearly every crop imaginable, including strawberries, beans, cucumbers and corn. "We manage completely without sunlight," says PlantLab's Gertjan Meeuws. "But we still manage to achieve a yield three times the size of an average greenhouse's." What's more, PlantLab uses almost 90 percent less water than a conventional farm.

As a country which has limited land resources but which possesses much of the necessary technology, the Netherlands seems to be an ideal place to develop vertical farming. This is especially true now that its residents are increasingly demanding organic, pesticide-free foods -- and are prepared to pay more for it.



'The Next Agricultural Revolution'


Despommier believes that entire countries will soon be able to use vertical farming to feed their populations. The South Korean government, at least, is interested in exploring the possibility. At the moment, the country is forced to import a large share of its food. Indeed, according to a 2005 OECD report, South Korea places fifth-to-last in a global ranking on food security. Increasing food prices, climate change and the possibility of natural disasters can compound the problem.
These facts are not lost on the researchers in the vertical farming laboratory in Suwon. "We must be prepared to avert a catastrophe," Choi says.

Still, it will be some time before vertical farming is implemented on a commercial scale in South Korea. Choi's colleague Lee Hye Jin thinks that five more years of research are needed. "Only then will our vertical farm be ready for the free market," he says.



Source: Der Spiegel (http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,775754,00.html) (22 July 2011)

[Albion]

Of course a lot of land is put to poor use as grazing for livestock or used as arable to feed livestock. There's also land being wasted to grow biofuels too.

If we grew arable crops for humans and cut back on biofuels, converted lowland grazing to arable where suitable and stopped eating so much meat then food security wouldn't be quite so much an issue.

In the UK certainly we could become self-sufficient in arable if we stopped wasting suitable lowland areas on grazing and biofuels.
Pastoral and Dairy farming (grazing) still have their place in the UK in the areas less suitable for arable - the uplands, hilly areas and thin soils.

Much of Wales, the Highlands and Pennines are only suitable for grazing sheep, in the lower valleys around them and areas of England and Scotland such as Devon, the Welsh Marches and Central Scotland there is more suitablity for cows and less so for arable.
Certainly most of East Anglia, SE England, the East Midlands, much of the West Midlands, the Vale of York and much of Eastern Scotland should become arable.

There is a movement, Enviromental Vegitarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_vegetarianism) which makes some good points, that the world would be able to feed more people if we consumed less meat.
Of course most of the world's best arable land lies in the OECD, most poor countries suffering from famine probably still wouldn't be able to afford to purchase OECD grown foods even though the surge in arable would lead to a large depreciation in prices.
The depreciation would also hurt farmers too. Myself though, I think its just a matter of consuming less meat, there's no need to totally abandon it.
Marginal areas as I mentioned above are useful for nothing much else but livestock farming and humans are adapted to and will want to continue to eat meat.


In 2006 FAO estimated that meat industry contributes 18% of all emissions of greenhouse gases. This figure was revised in 2009 by two World Bank scientists and estimated at 51% minimum

A person existing chiefly on animal protein requires 10 times more land to provide adequate food than someone living on vegetable sources of protein.


massive reductions in meat consumption in industrial nations will ease the health care burden while improving public health; declining livestock herds will take pressure off rangelands and grainlands, allowing the agricultural resource base to rejuvenate. As populations grow, lowering meat consumption worldwide will allow more efficient use of declining per capita land and water resources, while at the same time making grain more affordable to the world's chronically hungry."