7. Greatly Reduced Food Miles
There is something reassuring about the phrase “home-grown,” whether it refers to a local football hero or the food we consume. Local is best because we know where it came from. The vertical farm is a neighborhood concept couched in futuristic terms, but with a homespun intent. The things we trust most are the things we can see for ourselves. Locally grown corn, tomatoes, or free-range chickens seem to taste better, also. We even brag about them to outsiders: Jersey tomatoes, Maine potatoes, Georgia peaches, and so forth. Michael Pollan stresses this concept almost to the breaking point in his epic foodie tome The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The vertical farm will reside inside city limits and in doing so will create a local sustainable source of produce that will undoubtedly find its way into restaurants, school cafeterias, hospital bedside meals, prisons, and apartment complexes, as well as, of course, into the green markets. It will be freshly picked at the peak of ripeness, never frozen or even refrigerated. Its contents will be known down to the last atom of each element. It will all be sold at the end of the day. The amount of travel between the tomato and your plate will be measured in blocks, not miles. Ultimately, the United States will finally be able to reduce its carbon emissions. Remember, farming in the United States consumes some 20 percent of the fossil fuels used annually. Because food from the vertical farm needn’t travel very far, its rate of spoilage will also be greatly reduced. No storage will mean less refrigeration and more fossil fuel saved. The urban waste scene, now swarming with vermin, may be greatly reduced, as well. Is there a downside? Well, urban properties are prohibitively expensive compared to even the most expensive farmland. I will deal with this issue in another chapter. For now, be reassured that even in New York or Los Angeles, there is affordable real estate where the presence of a vertical farm would transform the most neglected of neighborhoods into a wellspring of urban rebirth and vigor. I am convinced by what I have learned over the last few years of traveling and speaking to city councils, mayors, city planners, and ministers of agriculture that if vertical farms become firmly established inside the city, it will be because these officials saw virtue in them and created incentives to bring them on board.
8. More Control of Food Safety and Security
The vertical farm, regardless of configuration, should be constructed in such a way as to exclude most known plant arthropod pests and microbial pathogens by using the same principals that are applied to the design and construction of intensive care units for hospitals. Barrier medicine has been successfully developed and deployed over the last hundred years, ever since we first became aware of pathogenic microbes and their characteristics. This approach will enable the vertical farm to operate pest- and pathogen-free for the great majority of the time. Prevention is key. Reacting to an invading plant disease or insect pest is expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. Vertical farming would become impractical if it had to shut down every six weeks or so to address an outbreak of something like whitefly, a common visitor to most open greenhouses. Once inside, this tiny pest can reduce profitability in several weeks, and must be dealt with before production can be resumed. Rice blast, wheat rust, and a number of other plant pathogens must be controlled by exclusion, not with antifungal agents. Positive-pressure buildings with filtered air supplies, secure locks, and workers who must change their clothes before entering will guarantee that the vertical farm is a safe and secure place to raise our crops. Andrew Carnegie offered the world his philosophy on protecting the things we treasure most: “The fool saith in his heart: Do not put all your eggs in one basket. But the wise man exhorteth thus: Put all your eggs in one basket; then watch the basket.” I am almost certain that he was referring to the money he had amassed and stashed away in some bank. Yet bank robberies do occur from time to time. Nowadays, high-tech safes and a cadre of well-armed guards stand between the Butch Cassidys and Willie Suttons of the world and our hard-earned deposits. Similarly, by centralizing agriculture into the urban landscape, it will be necessary to ensure that no one can easily sabotage the operation. Secure entryways and badge-only admittance of approved workers will be essential in this regard. On a traditional farm, there are plenty of weak points from a security standpoint. I expect that the concept of vertical farming will become applied to a variety of situations—restaurants, schools, hospitals, and apartment complexes, for example. Decentralization of food production, once it is situated inside the urban landscape, will go a long way to thwarting any terrorist activities. Remember: Outside, we control nothing, while inside, we get to control everything. The choice is ours. I choose indoors every time.
Workers in vertical farms will have to be screened for certain groups of parasitic infections that could be spread by fecal contamination, the way the City of New York used to screen food handlers before certifying them for working in restaurants. Economic constraints prohibit such an approach today in New York, but I would argue that detecting organisms such as geohelminths and salmonella, then treating those few infected workers before they go on the job, could eliminate the potential for spreading food-borne illnesses once vertical farms become the primary source of produce in the city.
9. New Employment Opportunities
The advent of vertical farms will create numerous new opportunities at many levels. Municipalities will use vertical farms to rehabilitate urban spaces once considered too degraded to serve as commercial properties. Areas in which vertical farms become situated will, in turn, attract new development, making the urban food desert a thing of the past. A 2009 survey of urban farmers in New York City, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, revealed that they began their interest in agriculture after committing to a life in the city. They wanted both to live an urban lifestyle and to raise some of their own food. Most were self-taught, but as farming inside tall buildings catches on, it will generate a new set of careers: managers, indoor controlled-agriculture specialists, waste-to-energy specialists, and farmworkers for the nursery, planting, monitoring, harvesting, sorting, and selling. New industries associated with developments in hydroponic and aeroponic grow systems will become the new “Silicon Valley” specialty industries, along with sophisticated electronics corporations manufacturing instruments for everything from germinating seeds to monitoring nutrient delivery systems to harvesting crops. Groups of specialized workers will undoubtedly form organizations that will offer their services to the varied vertical-farm industries, such as the owners of small versions situated on the roofs of apartment complexes, restaurants, and hospitals. Value-added manufacturing establishments will also spring up next to the larger vertical farms to process fish, shrimp, shellfish, and poultry, and to take advantage of the year-round availability of fresh, vine-ripened fruits and vegetables. Grain production is not out of the question, either, and mills could become located in cities. The year-round production of hops and barley in some vertical farms may even ignite a renewed interest in city breweries. Wine grapes grown in vertical farms could make vintage wines as commonplace as bottled water.
Within the last five years, less developed countries have experienced countless crop failures, caused mostly by adverse weather events such as floods and droughts. No matter where the meeting or what the announced purpose, gatherings of world leaders invariably include speeches about the need to develop new strategies for overcoming hunger and poverty, and they all cite agriculture as the number-one priority in starting to turn things around. With the failure of farming in already-stressed-out regions of the globe, urbanization has increased at a rate disproportionate to the birth rate. Most of the migrants are composed of farmers and their families. What better groups to have work in vertical farms than those who already know how to farm? The future looks bright for the creation of new jobs for the new industry of vertical farming.
10. Purification of Grey Water to Drinking Water
Each day, every city produces huge amounts of grey water derived from black water by the removal of solids. New York City, as mentioned earlier, produc
es and then throws away an astounding 1 billion gallons of grey water a day. It is the responsibility of each community to discard their waste in ways that do no harm to the environment. This is the basic plan for all municipal sanitation codes, but waste management has proven difficult to execute and very expensive to sustain. Billions of dollars are spent each year in the United States figuring out new ways of disposing of liquid municipal waste. It is time to realize that these products of our own metabolism have intrinsic value and must be turned into recyclables, and the energy in the solids extracted by some form of high-tech incineration scheme. For recovering the water, plants have the answer. They are called living machines for that reason. In brief, plants obtain their nutrients by pumping water up through their roots, through their leaves, and then out into the atmosphere. This process, referred to as transpiration, allows them to take up nutrients in the form of elements and organic nitrogen. The elements and nitrogen stay inside the plant and become incorporated into new tissues of the growing parts of the organism, while the water is continually transpired through tiny pores in the leaves called stomata. Remediation of grey water could easily be accomplished by taking advantage of this basic plant activity inside vertical farms constructed solely for that purpose. In this case, the plants would not end up as someone’s salad; that would be too risky from a public-health standpoint. Capturing the water of transpiration can be accomplished after the plants have pumped the grey water through their tissues, purifying it before releasing pure H2O into the enclosed atmosphere of the vertical farm. Dehumidification of the indoor air is all that would be needed to get back the water we produced by eating and drinking. It might require a second round of transpiration to completely purify the grey water, but this may not even prove necessary once an experimental system is up and running. In conventional greenhouses, the humid air is expelled outside by window fans. If New York City were to establish a water-recovery system based on the above strategy, and sold the water for as much as two cents per gallon, a year’s worth of NYC grey water turned into drinking water would be valued at $720 million. Quite a windfall over the long term, considering the expense the city now goes to in order to treat and discard it. As Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois once said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
11. Animal Feed from Postharvest Plant Material
Conserving energy will be a concern if the vertical farm uses a significant amount of electricity to grow crops. In this case, incinerating the postharvest portion of crops would be a viable strategy for energy recovery. In other situations that do not require this, leftover plant material could be consumed as animal feed, depending on the crop.
Chapter 6
The Vertical Farm: Form and Function
Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.
—ANONYMOUS
In its most complete configuration, the vertical farm will consist of a complex of buildings constructed in close proximity to one another. They will include a building for growing food; offices for management; a separate control center for monitoring the overall running of the facility; a nursery for selecting and germinating seeds; a quality-control laboratory to monitor food safety, document the nutritional status of each crop, and monitor for plant diseases; a building for the vertical farm workforce; an eco-education/tourist center for the general public; a green market; and eventually a restaurant. Aquaculture and poultry will be housed in adjacent but separate buildings with no physical connection to the vertical-farm building to ensure safety for the plants. I will limit my discussion here to the buildings devoted to plant-based agriculture and leave the fascinating subject of indoor aquaculture and the raising of fowl for a later discourse on the eco-city. A vertical farm that might accommodate four-legged animals would not be practical, nor would it be humane. That having been said, ultimately, I will not be the one to control the choice of what goes into the vertical farms. In many societies, pigs would be a natural addition to the farm. I doubt, however, that anyone would contemplate raising goats, sheep, or cattle inside one.
“Form follows function” is the defining principal for life on earth. The environment selects examples at every level that best emulate this “golden rule” of nature, right down to the shape and mode of action of the molecules we’re made of. The wings of a bird or a bat have much in common, obviously because they both have the ability to fly. The long, muscular legs of an ostrich are built for running, mostly from predators, while the eight-jointed, spindly legs of a spider enable it to nimbly manipulate itself about on its silken, sticky fly trap. It’s the same when we design for ourselves. Louis Sullivan, the acknowledged dean of American architecture, stated the concept in powerful, sweeping syntax, as Moses himself might have done were he to have somehow given himself permission to add an eleventh commandment governing the aesthetics of the human condition: “It is the pervading law of all things organic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”
When planning the vertical farm, architects and engineers must be driven by this critical concept, since the vertical farm will be built to satisfy the needs of the crops and not necessarily ours. Failure to do good science to bring it all together will all but guarantee a repeat of the Biosphere 2 fiasco. Despite the fact that no vertical farms currently exist, some general notions can be established ahead of time that would apply to any version of one. The concept of farming in tall buildings inside the city limits has slowly fermented into a unique broth of ideas over the last three or four years. This “reaction mixture” is composed of numerous inputs besides those that occurred in my classroom: midnight conversations over half-empty glasses of wine (notice I didn’t say exactly how many times it had been totally empty); exhausting question-and-answer sessions and extended conversations following presentations to numerous professional groups; as well as academic lectures at schools of architecture, engineering, and planning. I have also been asked to present my thoughts on vertical farming to branches of the USDA and the United States Agency for International Development. I can now, for the first time since this project was conceived in 2000, envision what a vertical farm might look like. Through the many conversations I’ve had with all of those who share my passion for urban farming, I have further refined my ideas as to how to proceed. Amazingly, I have received little in the way of negative-toned feedback encouraging me to redirect my efforts, or heard that I am out-and-out crazy and that the vertical farm will never “fly.” A large number of images of vertical farm designs (shown in the signature section of the book and on the Web site www.verticalfarm.com) preempted these conversations. The vast majority of these wonderful, and often futuristic, designs were unsolicited. They arrived to me unannounced, and, I might add, very much appreciated for their ability to stimulate thought without necessarily addressing the functionality issues I am about to discuss. Therefore, these colorful, creative objects of imagination are more in the way of “eye candy” and “what ifs” than practical applications.
What follows is based on the construction of an experimental prototype vertical farm and associated essential buildings (nursery, laboratory, control center), first referred to in chapter 4. The farm itself would be modest in height, perhaps five stories tall and maybe 1⁄8th of a city block in footprint. The interior space would be highly flexible, allowing the expert team of controlled indoor-agriculture scientists the maximum freedom to configure and reconfigure the conditions the crops will be subjected to. They would work closely with local communities of consumers, a team of material scientists and structural engineers, and a state-of-the-art construction facility for the selection of crops and the custom manufacture of hydroponic and aeroponic equipment. Undoubtedly, many new modes of growing would be invented under these ideal
research conditions. All of the experimentation would be of the applied variety for the sole purpose of eventually being able to make the vertical farm as productive and profitable as possible.
The Vertical Farm Building
Most crops have a fairly broad range of tolerances with respect to temperature and humidity. This will enable the indoor farmer to mix and match a wide variety of plants and to grow them in the same room if desired, as long as their root systems are held at the optimal temperature for each species. In designing for the tenants, success goes to the farmer who can best manage temperature, humidity, and security. This is the “holy trinity” of indoor controlled-environment agriculture.
There are four major themes that designers and engineers must include in any version of a vertical farm:
The Vertical Farm Page 12