One study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 gave a detailed outlook for the next twenty-five to fifty years based on current practices. The outlook was positively depressing. According to this study, failure of much of the southern half of the Great Central Valley is certain due to high salt levels in groundwater, unless another method of supplying water to crops can be implemented that does not allow runoff to accumulate in the aquifer. But finding such a method may not be possible if California runs out of water, which it might over the next twenty to fifty years. The Department of Energy secretary, Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu, flatly stated three weeks after he took office in 2009 that the entire agricultural sector of California would become obsolete in less than fifty years due to lack of a source of noncontaminated fresh water: “I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” PBS’s Bill Moyers produced a Frontline story in 1993 titled “In Our Children’s Food,” documenting the environmental disasters that were incubating just under the surface of the most productive agricultural site on the planet. If the Central Valley fails, then consumers the world over will feel the economic effects, as food prices will certainly go even higher than predicted based on rising fuel prices.
The island of Chongming off the coast of Shanghai “grows” at a rate of about 150 meters per year. This may not seem like much, but consider that it is roughly 40 miles across and the second-largest island in China, and one gets the feeling that something unusual is happening. Indeed, there is. Valuable topsoil, farmland quality, is being transported by the mighty Yangtze River from that country’s heartland to the edge of the South China Sea due to an annual flooding regime driven by RCC. Deforestation to make room for more and more cropland has made the central region of China vulnerable to even moderate alluvial erosion, but in the last ten years, floods of millennial proportion have altered the way China farms. Even the Three Gorges Dam project cannot bring back the soil lost over that time period. In the seventh century, Chongming was only several sandbars wide and not much to look at. Then, as the population rose and agriculture took off, the island began to form, and within several hundred years Chongming was visible from outer space, along with China’s world-famous 1,500-mile-long Great Wall. If you recently bought property at the tip of Chongming hoping to build a house with an ocean view, think again: Within just three years, your South China Sea villa would soon become surrounded by a dense forest growing on new land that was deposited right before your very eyes. Perhaps we will have to modify Will Rogers’s prophetic statement about investing in real estate. The island is now so big that a planned city of some five hundred thousand people was contemplated, to be named Dongtan. Its purpose was to demonstrate how to live sustainably in a carbon-neutral way. Ironically, the project had to be scrapped due to the “nonsustainability” of funding from the Shanghai International Investment Corporation.
With the fertile countryside disappearing downstream and into the sunset, maybe the future of farming in China will manifest itself better and more efficiently within the urban environment. I had the privilege of attending a seminal meeting held in Beijing in 2007 at which the countries of the Netherlands and China gathered to discuss bringing farming to the cities. The meeting was titled “Innovating Metropolitan Agriculture.” If perseverance and need are the driving forces for innovation, then China will win the day, hands down, as they have done for so many other challenges throughout their rich and long history.
The third and final example is somewhat less upbeat and has ominous overtones of impending doom. Established in 1971, Bangladesh is a country that averages just 5 feet above sea level. It is home to some 154 million people and is only 133,910 square kilometers, or roughly half the size of the state of Texas, making it one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. Bangladesh is the recipient of all the waters flowing down the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, and both join up to then empty into the Indian Ocean through a massive, tangled network of estuaries and deltas. Flooding is a regular part of the country’s ecological heritage. In 2008 the monsoons came on particularly strong and washed away topsoil that would have provided food for some 2 million Bangladeshi. That year, 2 million other Bangladeshi shared their meager larders with these unfortunate individuals. The flooding of 2008 was a single event that forever rearranged the farming landscape, placing even greater stress on that country’s agricultural system. Bangladesh’s next-door neighbor, India, is not immune to these events, either. The subcontinent experienced a massive flood in October 2009 in the state of Karnataka that wiped out a wide swath of farmland, killing thousands of farm animals and hundreds of innocent people in the process.
As RCC tightens its grip on the land, it’s obvious that tomorrow’s agriculture will become increasingly tenuous, and farming as an occupation will continue to attract fewer people to it. For example, in the United States in the 1930s, there were about 6 million people listing themselves as farmers (this figure included their immediate families, as well). In 2009 there were fewer than 150,000 individuals who declared farming as their principal occupation. At the same time, urbanization will continue to exert its pull on those living in the suburbs and rural areas. The single most important reason for people moving to the city, worldwide, has its roots in failed farming. Today, the designation “farmer” is not even listed as a separate occupation on the U.S. national census form, since there are currently so few of them.
As farmer numbers drop and as the size of the average farm increases due to industrialization of farm operations, conglomerates have developed their own set of problems, one of which is the cost of food inspection. For example, attempts to cut expenses related to sanitary practices have led to widespread outbreaks of a variety of food-borne illnesses. The public is no longer convinced that big agriculture has their best interests at heart, and this has resulted in a deep mistrust of mass-produced food. If the current global economic downturn continues to deepen, cutting costs wherever possible will become even more tempting to companies that are already at the edge of bankruptcy.
The topic of food safety has become so acute that it has risen to the top of the list of things that consumers want most in their food supply. As an outgrowth of this crisis, many advocate groups in urban centers throughout the United States and elsewhere have voiced their demand for produce that is free of agrochemicals such as pesticides and herbicides. The phrase “organically grown” has become the mantra of a new “foodie” generation of middle-class consumers, championed by the likes of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters. Numerous food retailers, Whole Foods in particular, have risen to the challenge, and have gone to great lengths to ensure a steady supply of organic produce on their shelves in an increasing effort to meet the burgeoning demand for what many perceive as healthier, albeit more expensive, food items. Portland, Oregon, has its own local food mart chain, New Seasons Market. Patterned somewhat after the Whole Foods model, New Seasons Market went public in 2000 as a single store offering choices that included organic, locally grown produce. By the summer of 2009, it opened its ninth store in Portland, this time in the middle of an urban food desert (if one can imagine such a thing existing in that food-conscious city), and captured the inner-city market with reasonably priced fresh produce that practically flew off the shelves the moment it opened. Within the last ten years, a groundswell of consumer interest in supporting local farmers has emerged, spearheaded by the Slow Food movement. The urban landscape has become the new agricultural frontier for rooftop vegetable gardens, restaurants growing their own herbs and spices, and city dwellers forming consortia for the production of all kinds of produce. Urban farming has caught on in places such as Portland, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Vancouver, Canada. If this trend continues to gain momentum, then, as with China, the next agricultural revolution might well be an urban-based one. But regardless of the reasons, it’s apparent that something radically
different is needed to allow for the large-scale production of locally grown food, especially within the urban landscape, as RCC progresses to the next level of an environmental crisis that appears to be unavoidable.
If farming as we know it collapses under the heavy weight of climate change, what will be the fate of the agrochemical industry? The production of ammonium nitrate–based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides has been the mainstay of companies such as Dow Chemical, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, the Mosaic Company, PotashCorp, and Agrium, Inc. The pesticide business is the most widely diversified of the three agrochemical industries. The National Pesticide Information Center, co-sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Oregon State University, lists no fewer than 443 companies that manufacture at least one major pesticide, as of the summer of 2009. It’s no wonder that regulating pesticide use has become so difficult. Environmentalists have repeatedly lobbied for tighter controls over their use, but with only modest success. Rachel Carson would still be outraged over the lack of good practices for most pesticides currently on the market.
The laboratory manipulation of commercial crop plants, another new venture from the agrobusiness sector, has become highly lucrative for some plants, corn, for instance. Generally referred to as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), this initiative has come under attack because of a perception on the part of the public that GMOs are potentially harmful and should not be allowed. In fact, they have been modified to resist droughts, attack from a variety of plant pathogens, and increased amounts of herbicides. Nonetheless, the industrialization of crops has galvanized a number of advocate groups worldwide that oppose all genetic research on commercial produce. It’s interesting to note that these same groups did not object strenuously to the introduction of a fast-growing, flood-tolerant “super” rice that was modified in the laboratory by Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Today, over half the world enjoys a better life because of his pioneering work. Despite this beneficial research, not even GMOs can compete with nature and RCC. Similarly, over the next twenty to forty years, if even the most conservative predictions regarding the linkages between climate change and crop failures are considered, applying more and more agrochemicals to land that continues to give lower and lower yields will not solve the problem of how to feed the next 3 billion people. An ecological solution is required that takes into account all the life forms on our planet.
Can a city produce most of its own food and recycle most or all of its own wastes? I believe the answer is yes. In fact, I know the answer is yes. There are many new modalities for growing produce of all kinds indoors that will make any urban food production scheme possible. It’s called controlled indoor environment agriculture. High-tech greenhouse farming is already being deployed in many places around the world, most notably in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Hydroponics, aeroponics, and drip-irrigation methods have improved vastly over the last ten years, to the point of revolutionizing the ways in which we can produce indoor crops at will. Large-scale commercial indoor facilities located in Arizona, England, and the Netherlands have proven to be highly profitable. The only missing element is urbanization of the concept. Reengineering greenhouses from a horizontal footprint to one that conserves space by stacking them on top of each other is all that is needed to bring them into the city proper. Abandoned urban spaces can then be fully utilized. In addition, vertical farms of varying heights can be constructed to meet the needs of restaurants, school cafeterias, hospitals, and apartment complexes. Some stand-alone vertical farms will also surely be built for mass production of essential crops such as rice, wheat, corn, and other grains, even crops for the production of biodiesel. These might be located just on the outskirts of the city, where land is perhaps more available and/or more economical. Taken together, urban farming in specially constructed buildings specifically designed to grow whatever crops we need without the application of soil-based technologies is the founding principal upon which tomorrow’s agriculture will be based.
Municipal waste management is another area that has improved by quantum leaps over the last ten years. Today, modern incineration strategies, including plasma arc gasification, are widely accepted for handling most kinds of wastes throughout Europe, and Germany has become a world leader in applying incineration to the safe disposal of both solid and liquid waste streams. Near pollution-free burning of solid municipal waste has all but eliminated the need for landfills, and at the same time produced much-needed energy through steam-driven power generation of electricity. Grey water and sludge derived from black water can also be handled in such a way as to allow any municipality to reap the benefits of recycling its wastewater, while extracting energy from the solids. The combination of all of these currently applied strategies will allow the city of the future to mimic the best qualities of an intact, functional ecosystem: bioproductivity and zero waste. Tomorrow’s urban environment will be the focal point for the rest of this book, in which the details of such a scheme will be presented.
Chapter 5
The Vertical Farm: Advantages
We must become the change we want to see.
—MAHATMA GANDHI
The epic journey of how we became an agrarian society and of farming’s steady, destructive force on the natural world provides ample and convincing evidence that traditional agriculture is not working and probably never did work. It just had the outward appearance of working. Admittedly, twelve thousand years is a long time to prove or disprove failure, but such has been the case for in-soil cultivation. By failure, I mean that without irrigation and lots of additives (e.g., agrochemicals, modern farm machinery), farming could not go on indefinitely in the same place. It’s simply not an ecological option. Selectively breeding a set of domesticated plants with high-yielding reproductive structures but with no ability to survive on their own is bound to place extraordinary demands on any soil, even nutrient-rich volcanic deposits. By contrast, monocultures are quite rare in nature, with some stands of trees and wide swaths of tall grass prairies being the primary exceptions. Even in those examples, though, there is ample diversity of other plant species, vertebrates of many kinds, and a myriad of invertebrates and microbes living on and in the soil.
Biodiversity means there is competition among all the assemblages of plants and animals for resources. It also means that there is much recycling of nutrients going on. For that reason, competition on farmland, if allowed to go unchecked, would greatly reduce yields. Sharing resources with the rest of the surrounding wildlife is not an option for commercial farming, no matter how “ecological” the farmer claims to be. Therefore, the sole purpose of agrochemicals is to reduce—or, better yet, completely eliminate—the competition, favoring the crop of choice by killing off the insects and unwanted weeds. It should also be noted that over the past fifty years of implementing this two-pronged chemical strategy, numerous weedlike plants have become more and more resistant to herbicides, while insect pests have become almost totally resistant to a wide variety of pesticides. It’s natural selection at work, no matter how clever we get in the laboratory.
At the same time that our agricultural landscapes have been pushed to their limits and beyond, our population has just about risen to the point of no return—less land left to cultivate but still plenty of hungry mouths to feed, and 3 billion more on the way. We have no other choice but to conclude that farming on soil is not a long-term sustainable solution to meeting our population’s energy needs, period. Environmental scientists predict that if things do not change, soils will soon collapse under the heavy burden of the application of too much shortsighted technology and not enough long-term ecological planning. Like the ostrich, we have buried our heads in the sand, hoping that this impending crisis may somehow go away. So we continue to deforest, to plow and plant more tracts of land, to irrigate using up more precious freshwater, and to spread more po
werful—and more harmful—agrochemicals over the now biologically impoverished earth. When we use human feces as the fertilizer, as is the case in most of the less developed countries where commercial ones are too expensive, we also encourage the spread of numerous gastrointestinal parasitic worm infections. To get a feeling for how serious a global health problem this has become, a clinical correlation has recently been discovered in which four different helminth infections, often found together in the same individuals, can undermine the health status of those already infected with either HIV/AIDS, malaria, or tuberculosis: “Therefore, achieving success in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria may well require a concurrent attack on the neglected tropical diseases (re: the hookworms, Ascaris, Trichuris and the schistosomes) and waging a larger battle against a new 21st century ‘gang of four.’” What’s more, the elimination of this gang o’ worms from the environment requires nothing more than good sanitation. We don’t need any drugs, vaccines, or any other complicated, expensive medical intervention strategy; avoid contaminating food or water with human feces containing their infectious stages and they go away. That is why the Western world does not have much in the way of those diseases, though it still has to deal with sexually transmitted HIV/AIDS and droplet-transmitted tuberculosis. Thus, elimination of the use of human feces as fertilizer goes a long way to solving a major global health problem. Indoor farming would be an integral part of that solution.
The Vertical Farm Page 9