Praise for The Vertical Farm
“A book you will read, and then you will read it again. It is a book that could begin a revolution. Let’s hope it does…. The Vertical Farm is easily accessible to subject novice and expert alike…. Not at all a how-to book for small-scale change, the plan described will influence the future of more than just farming. Despommier invites the reader to realize a bigger future of sustainability, even better than we can imagine…. If you are anyone who is looking for a more hopeful future, you need to read this book.”
—Chicago Examiner
“Dickson Despommier is a futurist, an architect, and an intellectual in the same vein as Leonardo da Vinci, I. M. Pei, and Buckminster Fuller. Vertical farms will be remembered as one of the preeminent breakthroughs of the early twenty-first century, and Despommier will be remembered as the man who brought them to us.”
—Josh Tickell, director of Fields of Fuel,
winner of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival
Audience Award for Best Documentary
“Cities of the future must generate their own food supply. Dickson Despommier’s elegant, simple answer for achieving this goal is vertical farming. Welcome to the third green revolution.”
—Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation
and cofounder of Singularity University
“Despommier looked well outside the box when he began investigating ways to improve the growing and distribution of food crops. The result is a revolutionary theory that could allow the growth of food crops 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; protect crops from weather; reuse water; provide jobs for local people; eliminate the need for pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides; reduce dependence on fossil fuels; prevent crop loss due to shipping and storage; and do away with agricultural runoff. The answer is the vertical farm.”
—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“Persuasive…Given Dr. Despommier’s scientific background we might expect this book to be a dry recitation of facts and figures, but nothing could be further from the case. Despommier writes passionately and argues, at times, even stridently.”
—The New York Journal of Books
“A visionary known the world over, Despommier believes that the ‘vertical farm is the keystone enterprise for establishing an urban-based ecosystem’ and for ‘restoring balance between our lives and the rest of nature….’Provocative.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A captivating argument that will intrigue general readers and give policy makers and investors much to ponder.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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.
Contents
Foreword by Majora Carter
Introduction
Chapter 1
Remodeling Nature
Chapter 2
Yesterday’s Agriculture
Chapter 3
Today’s Agriculture
Chapter 4
Tomorrow’s Agriculture
Chapter 5
The Vertical Farm: Advantages
Chapter 6
The Vertical Farm: Form and Function
Chapter 7
The Vertical Farm: Social Benefits
Chapter 8
The Vertical Farm: Alternate Uses
Chapter 9
Food Fast-forwarded
Afterword
The Rise of the Vertical Farm Movement
Acknowledgments
Appendices
Students Who Contributed to the Vertical Farm Project
Author’s Note on the Rainforest Fund
Suggested Reading
Web Resources
Additional Suggestions
Index
Foreword
America has had a love-hate relationship with “the farm” going back for many decades. It now looks as though our relationship to farming has a chance to become more mature, both technologically and culturally, in the twenty-first century.
The farm can be that romantic, Rockwellian vision of a simple life, somehow more authentic than the urban/suburban life—which is how most of us live now. We like to see a logo with that caricature image of a little red barn with a silo and paddock next to it on the packaging of our dairy products, eggs, cereals, berries, mushrooms, bacon, etc. We like to think of the “farmer” as someone possessing good old-fashioned American values and common sense, with a big family of healthy wholesome children who all go to church every Sunday. An image of people like that, producing our food somewhere, makes us feel better than if we saw where most of our food was actually coming from.
But the farm is equally a source of derision and mockery. For both recent immigrants and multigenerational Americans, “country” can mean unsophisticated. The people we trust to produce enough safe, clean food for us to eat are given little respect on the whole. For many decades, the smart kids were sent off to the city; the less smart stayed back on the farm. It was normal for an individual to move from the farm to the city, but nobody grew up in the city to become a farmer.
Some Americans associate working the land with slavery. A great tide of African Americans migrated from the South to the industrial cities of the North to escape the land and everything associated with it. They found better-paying jobs in factories, and those twentieth-century manufacturing jobs gave Blacks a chance to realize middle-class stability and ambitions. The land was something you left behind. In the minds of many of our relatives and ancestors, the more distant you were from that past, the better.
Much of my work over the past decade has centered on horticultural infrastructure with regard to managing storm-water runoff and urban heat-island effect. Things like green roofing, urban forestry, and wetland and estuary restoration are all important parts of the solution to those environmental challenges—and they provide great jobs for people who often have difficulty getting a job. But many times when I deliver this message to inner-city communities that are suffering from severe unemployment as well as the health effects of environmental mismanagement, there is resistance. Working the land is seen as a step back, not a step forward.
Now that the majority of manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, and our agriculture system has long since abandoned the bucolic notion of a “family farm” in favor of spreadsheet economics, we have a remarkable chance to revise many of those old assumptions, and reexamine the good and bad legacies of our agricultural past. We can look at our needs and the technology available to meet those needs in ways that treat the land and the people with more respect and dignity.
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 t
rucks 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.
In the time between now and the realization of Dickson Despommier’s vision for our food system, there are many opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship. If the skyscraper farm is like a 747 jetliner, we are now at the stage of the Wright Brothers. All kinds of urban micro-agribusinesses are bursting onto the scene in cities across America, and in other countries around the world. There will be many failures as a legion of tinkerers and engineers all struggle to take off with the right combination of profitability, sustainability, and quality food. Exciting career ladders are a part of the mix—this work will be perfected over time with more and more minds engaged. New distribution and delivery systems, and on-the-vine inventory practices will create competitive arenas with relatively low barriers to entry due to the shorter geographic distances between producer and consumer.
Those jobs will bring hope to some of the Americans who once would have been employed by jobs that have been exported. By dramatically reducing the financial burden of fossil fuel–based transport, refrigeration, and chemical inputs, more money can stay in local urban economies where food is produced—and more money will be available for jobs in our cities.
The first of these farms will likely be located where the land is least expensive, and that usually means poor neighborhoods. It will be many years before urban farming production capacity even approaches filling the demand out there for food—which means a steady increase for this sector is possible for many years to come. That means many years of living, local, positive examples for economic prosperity that can inspire and employ people for generations. This productive commercial activity will be a welcome relief from the type of economic development we generally see driven into low-income neighborhoods—low wage retail, waste handling facilities, stadiums, and jails. It’s time we stopped building such tributes to our collective failure to innovate, and embrace our fellow Americans. It’s time to build monuments to hope and prosperity. Vertical farming represents an elegant opportunity for us to rise to that challenge.
Majora Carter
Majora Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 to achieve environmental justice through economically sustainable projects informed by community needs. Her work has earned numerous awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship; she was also named one of Essence Magazine’s Twenty-five Most Influential African Americans. She is a board member of the Wilderness Society and hosts a special Corporation for Public Broadcasting radio series “The Promised Land” (thepromisedland.org). She is currently President of the Majora Carter Group, LLC, a green-project development and consulting group.
Introduction
Fifteen thousand years ago, there was not a single farm on the planet. Fast-forward to the present, when we now farm a landmass the size of South America, which does not include grazing land. Along the way, we invented, among other things, written language, mathematics, music, and, of course, cities. Yet our journey from hunter-gatherers to urban dwellers still hasn’t produced a single metropolis that is truly healthy to live in.
As populations grew and urban life became the norm, our habit for producing mountains of waste began to take its toll. Garbage provided sustenance for a wide variety of peri-domestic diseases that emerged and then became endemic. For example, in the twelfth century, trash of all kinds, strewn carelessly across the European landscape by returning crusaders from the Middle East, attracted hordes of rats. These vermin harbored the plague bacillus, a flea-borne infection. As the rats died, their fleas soon found human hosts to feed on, igniting the first outbreak of the Black Death in Europe. It killed more than one-third of all those living there. Cholera came to Europe in 1836 by way of trading vessels from the Bay of Bengal, first to London, England. Because of the high nutrient content of the Thames River, due mostly to garbage dumping, cholera became endemic, killing thousands of Londoners every year until John Snow figured out its modus operandi.
You’d think we would have learned something from all this. But as late as the nineteenth century, waste on the streets of New York City was still causing massive outbreaks of diarrheal diseases. To this day, most cities still haven’t found a good use for garbage. New York remains plagued by vermin and poor-sanitation-related diseases such as asthma. With landfills for most cities now bulging at the seams, urban communities will have to reinvent waste management. Yet there is hope. All of this is about to change. We now have in our hands the tools and the desire to convert squalid urban blight into places where we’d want to raise our children. Once we have transformed our urban centers, we can turn our attention to renewing the hardwood forests that we destroyed in our zeal to create the farmlands that now produce food for our cities.
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.
Vertical Farms
Repairing the environment and still having enough good, healthy food choices may seem like mutually exclusive goals. If the world’s population continues to increase, wouldn’t we need to cut down even more forest to produce enough food to feed everyone? Not necessarily. One solution lies in vertical farms. These farms would raise food without soil in specially constructed buildings. When farms are successfully moved to cities, we can convert significant amounts of farmland back into whatever ecosystem was there originally, simply by leaving it alone.
This plan may sound naive and impractical. Yet 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. We understand the hydroponic and aeroponic farming methodologies needed to grow crops within multistory buildings. Although there are still no examples of functioning vertical farms, many urban planners have become familiar with the concept and are now looking for ways to make it happen. There are already plans on the drawing board by developers in wealthy countries that are running short of arable farmland. In other places where food is becoming scarce and people are going to bed hungry, vertical farms could eventually solve this seemingly intractable problem.
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 conceivably be raised in indoor farms as well.
Vertical farms are immune to weather and other natural elements that can abort food production. Crops can be grown under carefully selected and well-monitored conditions that ensure optimal growth rates for each species of plant and animal year-round. In other words, there are no seasons indoors. The efficiency of each floor of a vertical farm, o
ne 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.
Cities Without Waste
The ingredients in the dinner you just ate at your favorite restaurant likely came from more than fifteen hundred miles away. If you had a vertical farm in your city, all the food on your plate could come from down the block, saving huge amounts of fossil fuel now used to refrigerate and ship produce from all over the world. Also, think of what happens to the food you left on your plate. These leftovers, plus the waste generated in the food-preparation process, are currently nonrecoverable costs—also known as dinner for vermin. Now imagine if this organic waste could be converted back into energy. This would allow restaurants to be paid for the recoverable energy from their waste streams. An industry with a notoriously small (2–5 percent) profit margin would be able to earn additional income without raising the prices on its menus.
Water: Clean and Clear
One of the greatest urban health threats comes from liquid municipal waste (black water, which is composed, in part, of urine and feces). To disarm its potential for causing disease, it is first aerated, a process that breaks the solids into smaller and smaller particles, reduces the biomass, and converts most of the solids to oxygen-consuming bacteria. The mixture is then digested in the absence of oxygen, releasing a significant amount of methane, which some facilities are equipped to collect and use as an alternate energy source. The resulting sludge is culled and used in landfills, while the remaining grey water is chlorinated and discharged into the nearest body of water. In less developed countries, grey water is discarded without treatment. This practice greatly increases the risk of salmonella, cholera, amoebic dysentery, and other infectious diseases being transmitted by fecal contamination. In either case, it’s a shameful waste of freshwater.
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