Control Freak
Farming indoors is not a new concept; greenhouse-based hydroponic agriculture has been in existence since the 1930s. Numerous commercially viable crops such as strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and a wide variety of spices have seen their way from commercial greenhouses to the world’s supermarkets in ever-increasing amounts over the last fifteen years. Most of these operations are small by comparison to traditional soil-based farms, but unlike their outdoor counterparts, these facilities can produce crops year-round. Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, Spain, and China all have thriving greenhouse industries. In addition to plants, some animal species have been commercialized by indoor farming, including freshwater fish (tilapia, trout, striped bass, catfish, carp) and a wide variety of crustaceans and mollusks (shrimp, crayfish, mussels). Cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and other large farm animals seem to fall well outside the paradigm of urban farming. However, raising fowl (chickens, ducks, geese) and even pigs is well within the capabilities of indoor farming.
Vertical farming promises to eliminate external natural forces as confounding elements in the production of food. Much of what we plant never gets a chance to grow to maturity due to adverse weather events driven by rapid climate changes that are, in turn, linked to an ever-increasing rate of CO2 emissions. 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. The choice is simple: Control everything (indoor farming) or control nothing (outdoor farming).
Today, we stand at an interesting, albeit daunting, crossroad. We continue to urbanize without incorporating the necessary skills to live sustainably, and struggle to understand enough about the damaging effects our penchant for consuming everything in sight is having on ecological processes. In this regard, science has led the way, with satellites reporting on many of the factors that contribute to our present dilemma of rapid climate change.
Do No Harm
On a global scale, we need to emulate the physician’s credo: “Do no harm.” In this case, “do no harm” means helping the rest of life on earth to survive. In doing so, we help ourselves, as well. On the other hand, some tend to ignore the long-term consequences of their actions and opt for an immediate return on investment. In many cases, this results in different forms of encroachment into natural systems, disrupting ecosystem functions and services and eliciting a host of health problems that were clearly avoidable.
We All Live Downstream
One of the most pressing reasons to consider converting to urban agriculture relates to how we currently view and handle agricultural waste. In fact, we don’t handle it at all. Agricultural runoff is responsible for more ecosystem disruption than any other single kind of pollution. 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. What’s more, we can do nothing about it in most instances, since floods dictate the timing and extent of the runoff events. Vertical farms would recycle their own water, thereby eliminating agricultural runoff once and for all.
Water, Water, Everywhere
Liquid municipal waste (black water) is handled differently from solid municipal wastes, such as cardboard. Most often, in less developed countries, grey water and even black water are flushed without treatment. This greatly increases the risk of people contracting salmonella, cholera, amoebic dysentery, and other infectious diseases transmitted by fecal contamination. Instead of getting rid of the waste altogether, ideally, one would want to capture the energy in human fecal solids. A gram of feces, when incinerated, yields some 1.5 kilocalories of energy. If New York’s 8 million citizens decided to pool their fecal resource and generate electricity by incinerating it, they could realize an astounding 900 million kilowatts of electricity per year. That’s enough energy to provide electricity for many large versions of a vertical farm without tapping into the municipal grid.
Some vertical farms will be engineered as stand-alone water-regenerating facilities. They will take in safe-to-use grey water and restore it to drinking-water quality by collecting the water of transpiration using advanced dehumidifier systems. Harvesting water generated from transpiration will be possible because the entire farm will be enclosed. The resulting purified water will then be used in other vertical farms to grow commercial crops and for aquaculture.
Ultimately, any water source that emerges from the vertical farm should be drinkable, thus completely recycling it back into the community that brought it to the farm to begin with. Again, using New York City as the example, the “Big Apple” discards some 1 billion gallons of treated grey water every day into the Hudson River estuary. At a conservative five cents a gallon for industrial-quality water, it appears to be well worth the effort to recover it.
Dust to Dust
Another major source of organic waste comes from the restaurant industry. In New York City there are more than twenty-eight thousand food service establishments, all of which produce significant quantities of “leftovers,” and the restaurateurs pay a hefty price to have it carted off. Stacks of extra-heavy-duty garbage bags bursting at the seams with the stuff sit out on the curb, sometimes for hours to days prior to collection. This allows time for cockroaches, rats, mice, and other vermin to dine al fresco at some of the finest restaurants in the Western Hemisphere. Vertical farming may allow restaurants to be paid (perhaps according to the caloric content) for this valuable commodity. Not only would an industry with a notoriously small (2–5 percent) profit margin earn additional income, it would provide raw material to be recycled through waste-to-energy schemes. Oh, and one more thing: Good-bye, vermin. In New York City, there are eighty to ninety restaurant closings each year, the vast majority of them precipitated by inspections conducted by the Department of Health. A common finding by inspectors is vermin (mouse and rat droppings, cockroaches) and generally unsanitary conditions that encourage the persistence of these unwanted diners. Eliminating significant populations of vermin by controlling the amount of restaurant waste left out on curbs and inside kitchens could encourage the development of abandoned inner-city properties for middle- and low-income housing, and without the health hazards associated with having to share space with the four- and six-legged variety of tenants.
Effluent Society
However great the contribution of urban waste is to the destruction of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, it is agricultural runoff that wins the gold medal for pollution worldwide. As already alluded to, farm runoff despoils vast amounts of surface water and groundwater. Some 70 percent of all the available freshwater on earth is used for irrigation, and the resulting runoff, typically laden with leftover salts, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, and fertilizers leached from the nutrient-depleted farmed soil, is returned to countless rivers and streams. Runoff that reaches the oceans untreated has the potential to disconnect other ecological systems through its nutrient-loading and oxygen-scavenging agrochemicals, particularly nitrates and nitrites. Estuaries and coral reefs have been the hardest hit. For example, agricultural runoff from farms in Jamaica has reduced the coral reefs in the surrounding ocean to nearly barren remnants of once abundant undersea life. This, in turn, has shut down a fishing industry that wa
s wholly dependent on the intact coral reef for its existence. Similar results from deforestation for purposes of creating farmland have forever altered the reefs surrounding Madagascar. And a major flood in 1993 along the middle reaches of the Mississippi River left the ocean life of the Gulf of Mexico reeling for years afterward. A dead zone caused by the mobilization of nitrates left in the soil from years of agriculture along the fertile bottomland of that river system killed off an entire fishery (oysters, shrimp, fish) from Port Arthur, Louisiana, to Brownsville, Texas. Hurricane Katrina delivered the latest blow that will most likely ensure that this once productive coastal fishery remains in the dead zone for decades to come.
Spaced Out
Vertical farming offers the possibility of greatly reducing the quantity of this nonpoint source of water pollution. 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. I will offer the reader my views on how we might proceed to the first vertical farm, but I have no doubt that others are working hard on the creation of a practical version of one, as well. May we benefit from everyone’s efforts and enter into the next phase of our evolution with a greater sense of security about the essentials of life itself—a safe and constant source of food and water.
Circular Reasoning
To emulate the behavior of an ecosystem means to live within our means with regard to recycling energy, water, and food, and in dealing in a realistic and responsible fashion with populations. Most important, we must learn to handle the problem of waste management ecologically. In nature, there is no waste. When seen through the eyes of the ecologist, the city fails to meet even the minimum standards of the simplest of ecosystems. Everything that the city consumes comes from outside its limits: energy, water, food, dry goods. Add to that the millions to billions of dollars that are spent annually trying to get rid of waste, and you end up with a crazy-quilt system that works exactly opposite to the way we would have designed one a hundred years ago if we knew what pitfalls lay ahead.
The main premise of this book is to focus on food grown inside tall buildings within the cityscape, but if we can learn to do that, then we can also figure out what to do with the waste generated by vertical farming. Solving that problem (which would require no new technologies) would solve all the other waste-management problems, too. The biomimic principle has grown recently and is now the mantra for Silicon Valley and other regions of the technosphere. The logic system (i.e., copying what nature does best) that spawned the nanotechnology industry has led virally to a host of related new companies, and will continue to grow as we learn more about how nature has solved its problems of coping in an ever-changing environment. Howard Odum, the noted ecologist, once remarked: “Nature has all the answers. What is your question?” Mine is, how can a city biomimic a functional ecosystem?
Chapter 2
Yesterday’s Agriculture
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.
—CHINESE PROVERB
A Movable Feast
Sometime in the year 2010, the human population exceeded seven billion. This is more than a little disconcerting. The World Health Organization and the Population Council estimate that, given the current rate, by the year 2050, we will top out at around 8.6 billion. When I was born, there were only 2.6 billion of us. As if that were not enough to be concerned about, the human population is not the only thing on the rise. Our planet is developing a “fever,” an obvious indication that something is wrong with the entire system. Global warming, also referred to as climate change, is an unanticipated consequence of the unprecedented growth in our population. The ice is melting all over the globe: Earth is suffering from a colossal case of a “bipolar” disorder. It’s directly linked to our penchant for using more and more fossil fuels to accommodate our increasing demand for food and manufactured goods. If we continue with our current food-producing strategies, getting enough high-quality, safe produce to 8.5 billion people will define the next crisis we must address and remedy if the human species is to survive. How did things get so out of control? To answer this question, we have to understand how agriculture arose to begin with. Along with that invention, it is necessary to document how we managed to escape an early extinction and emerge into the light of the modern era as the “masters” of our small part of the universe.
Looking back to our origins on the verdant, fertile plains of East Africa, and our rise to prominence as a dominant mammalian species, it all seems quite improbable. Three million years ago, all of the hominid species (just how many we still are not certain) were slow moving compared to even the laziest large cats, of which there were many kinds. Fight or flight was not an option. Avoiding those predators was key. To do so, our forerunners had to rely largely on cunning and guile rather than on physical prowess, or else be eaten. A handful of plausible theories may explain how our ancestors managed to avoid elimination, all supported by careful examination of the fossil record. One group of physical anthropologists contends that human evolution was favored over the strictly herbivorous hominids due to our ancestors’ high-protein diet that included meat, enabling them to rapidly develop a larger brain. That, coupled with the development of opposable thumbs, allowed humans to acquire a remarkable level of dexterity that, in turn, enabled them to invent and manufacture tools, especially weapons. As an aside, it is ironic that once humans were the only hominid species left on earth, much of the advancement of the species, right up to the present, was dependent upon the development of superior weaponry. Advanced techniques for hunting, as well as for defense against predators and other competing hominid species (such as those portrayed by Stanley Kubrick in the opening scene of the film version of Arthur C. Clarke’s riveting novel 2001: A Space Odyssey) were adopted over less efficient gathering and scavenging strategies. This supposedly allowed humans the freedom to track and hunt the migrating herds of gnus, zebras, and other large grazing herbivores.
A Nonmovable Feast
A far less popular but equally plausible theory holds that, instead of making tools for the purposes of hunting and expressing our technological superiority, our ancestors functioned in those savannas as opportunistic omnivores whose main activity was scavenging. Humans used hand axes and other simple tools to break open the long bones of abandoned carcasses of animals that had been recently killed and completely stripped bare of flesh by lions, tigers, leopards, vultures, and the like. The nutrient-rich marrow might have been all that was left for them to consume, but it would have been enough of an energy and high-protein hit, supplemented with the local edible fruits, nuts, and grains, to allow them to flourish in an otherwise hostile environment. The notable absence of hyenalike ancestors in Africa, but not in western Europe, during early human development further strengthens this hypothesis, since the present-day hyena, a notably aggressive species, is the only East African predator/scavenger capable of cracking open bovine long bones with its incredibly strong jaws and durable teeth. In fact, they can make fast work of elephant and hippo bones, too. Their presence in humanity’s original habitat would undoubtedly have negated any opportunity afforded us to harvest marrow, especially in the absence of any kind of effective weapons such as spears. Perhaps it is best to view the level of success our ancestors enjoyed during their early development as the deployment of a combination of survival strategies, a sort of “whatever works best” approach, applied on the spot at the time of need. Though most anthropologists rarely agree on anything related to human evolution, they all seem to believe that, if nothing else, early hominids were resourceful, thoughtful mammals capable of a wide range of behaviors, grounded in a strong, inst
inctual desire to survive long enough to reproduce. Early populations of modern humans (who lived about two hundred thousand years ago) can be easily identified as omnivorous hunter-gatherers by examining the grinding patterns on their fossilized teeth—clear evidence that they ate whatever was most available and safe to harvest. The marks left on many broken animal bones found at gathering sites give indisputable evidence that humans cracked open those bones with hand axes. For many thousands of years, they managed to eke out a living this way without a thought to growing edible plants or settling down and urbanizing.
And Then There was One
Neanderthals were one of the last remaining hominid species still around after humans evolved into their final genetic signature of Homo sapiens sapiens (Homo floresiensis aside). While Homo sapiens sapiens was trying to figure out how to leave South Africa, these close relatives had escaped earlier, around 250,000 years beforehand, as Homo helmei, and migrated northward into Europe. There they evolved into Homo neanderthalensis and spread out, occupying most of Eurasia beginning around 130,000 years ago. They crafted a wonderful set of tools, mostly heavy spears for jabbing and thrusting but probably not for throwing long distances, with which they hunted, skinned, and carved up their game animals. Their main quarry were the mammals of the Pleistocene megafauna, including wooly mammoths and cave bears. They remained attached to a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle that died out almost the moment Homo sapiens sapiens arrived on the European scene some forty-five thousand years ago. Apparently a few humans were attracted to Neanderthals, since our genome has recently been shown to contain about 2 to 4 percent DNA sequences from the Neanderthal genome (which has recently been sequenced), proving that the two species produced hybrids.
The Vertical Farm Page 3