You Can’t Eat Money
The most important unresolved issue comes from our current obsession with making lots of money as the only reason for introducing a new way of doing something. To always show a profit at the end of the day, no matter what we do, should not be the only motivation for innovation. There are some things that we all need for which making money is the furthest thing from our minds; for example, all of the public health services most countries provide free of charge. Well, not exactly free. Taxpayers pay for them. Lots of other essential services will also never make money, but we must have them in order to live better lives. Government support for farmers falls into that category. The pharmaceutical industry, a profit-driven enterprise if ever there was one, solves the profitability issue in a different way: diversification. All the successful drug houses occasionally discover a compound that is so useful that its sales alone make up for all the research-and-development costs for hundreds of other therapeutic agents that make little or no money at all. It’s called the “cash cow” effect. When patents run out, companies panic and redouble their efforts to get another cash cow through the pipeline and out the door. Car companies, similarly driven by consumer preferences, make most of their revenue selling a mainline product so they can also offer high-end cars at luxury prices. All this might be changing in the wake of the economic breakdown of 2008.
So, now let’s get serious about farming. Since when has farming ever been profitable? Okay, there are a few farmers who make millions growing hay in Alberta and Montana, and a few corn/soybean farmers in the American Midwest who do fine, as well. But throughout most of the world, farming is at best a break-even occupation. Want to see someone laugh until their sides hurt? Ask a small independent farmer what they earned last year. Want to see that farmer cry? Ask them the same question or, better yet, ask them to recount the reasons for the many crop failures they’ve endured over the last ten years. I think the real issue regarding the invention of vertical farming is, who will pay for the first ones? Answer that question and you will know who owns them. Part of the initial cost might involve the purchasing of a site. Real estate inside the city limits is usually not cheap. But, depending upon whom the project is intended for, the land might be donated, free of charge. Venture capitalists rarely give anything away, especially land, so as a group they are at the bottom of my list of potential funders. The same is true for banks or foundations with deep pockets. On the other hand, city, state, and federal governments are prone to encouraging the development of new areas of commerce by, for example, underwriting the building of a new sports arena or entertainment center, creating an industrial park by offering long-term favorable tax incentives, or donating city properties for mixed-income housing developments. These “sweetheart” deals make it nearly impossible to turn one down if the right partners are involved.
We are from The Government and We are Here to Help. No, Really.
In their most altruistic expression, governments exist to oversee the well-being of their citizens. Taxes are collected, then disbursed to create institutions for education, public health, social security, and the military and to ensure a reliable food supply, among other things. In a democracy, all of these governmental activities require buy-in from the majority of its stakeholders. Agriculture is the one area that every government, regardless of type, has never had a problem with convincing its citizenry to support. We all need to eat, and farmers are our indispensable lifeline to the supper table. In America, the public has never failed to financially back farmers’ efforts at the congressional level, although the American farmer has managed to survive some very rough times without any help from Washington. Even our attitude toward the large agricultural conglomerates was rather benign until very recently, but times have changed. A recent disclosure by the Department of Justice revealed that less than 2 percent of farms account for half of all agricultural sales. Sounds like a monopoly to me. Remember also that the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 was passed essentially unopposed to the tune of $280 billion. One percent of that appropriation could have gone a long way to developing the vertical farm from idea to reality (but that is wishful thinking on my part).
So Here’s My Plan
The USDA has amassed a remarkable farm-based infrastructure over the last seventy-five years, with regional offices in every state, successfully pushing for the permanent establishment of federal monies for crop insurance and supporting the establishment of land-grant colleges and universities for generating new technologies in all major areas of the food sciences. The main programs of the USDA over the last fifty years have succeeded beyond even their expectations, due mainly to the innovations associated with the second green revolution—pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and genetically engineered crops. Food availability is the USDA’s proudest achievement, and most of it is for sale at reasonable prices throughout the lower forty-eight states. (Alaska and Hawaii have land-use and shipping issues that decrease consumer access to fresh produce and also increase the price of anything that has to be transported to those remote American outposts.) What if the U.S. federal government were to decide to create a whole new economic engine, in which urban agriculture was to become the centerpiece for a totally revamped model of how cities function, a model filled with lots of new job opportunities that fully embraced the concept of do no harm to the environment? How might it proceed if there were no political impediments or obsolete zoning regulations to prevent the emergence of a third green revolution?
I will now share with the reader a part of my consciousness normally reserved for fantasies involving catching the biggest trout of my life, or running the marathon in record time, or hitting the Powerball lottery for 300 million big ones. I invite you to also suspend your own sense of reality and imagine along with me that I am now in control of the country’s purse strings. Without funding, the vertical-farm concept will simply disappear into the government warehouse featured in Raiders of the Lost Ark and get put up on a shelf alongside all the other good-intentioned ideas that failed due to lack of momentum and financial support. Here, then, is my master plan, complete with rationale for establishing a permanent presence for urban agriculture in every state in the union, with the vertical-farm concept as its focal point.
You Can Solve a Lot of Problems with Food and Water
Establishing many experimental vertical farms simultaneously is key, as it will enable a wide variety of like-minded scientists, architects, planners, engineers, and builders to enter into a collegial competition to push the vertical farm to its limits and beyond. How many groups should initially be established is a subject that could generate an entire day’s worth of discussion among any governing body interested in getting the idea into the hands of those who can actually make it happen. In my fantasy, and please do keep in mind that it’s simply a fantasy, I will empower every state to take the lead in developing its own version of the vertical farm. I believe that competition is healthy and productive as long as everyone competing has an equal chance of winning. My single objective as the person in charge of dishing out the dough will be to enable each group (soon to be defined) to design, build, and staff a prototype vertical farm. I don’t want any of them to have to waste much time applying for grants and such. The money will be there, and identifying the participating members of each group will be up to a select committee established in each state. I have to be careful to structure my plan in such a way as not to discriminate against any state or major consumer group. I will accomplish this by supporting existing institutions and free up their time and enlist their creative energies with generous helpings of cash.
Each urban agricultural center (fifty in all) will receive a $100 million grant to be spent over a five-year period. Each state will agree to accept this federal money if they also agree to provide for personnel benefits, including health insurance and retirement packages in line with that state’s standard employee benefits agreements. There will be stringent rules of engagement to ensure the pr
oper conduct of business, complete with an oversight committee that will routinely audit the books for each center. I think the best model as to how to proceed is as follows: Each state will form a blue-ribbon committee for the purpose of choosing the actual members of the urban agricultural center that will manage the grant and do the work. The founder committee should be cochaired by the governor and the president of the most respected and productive university in that state that also is engaged in ongoing agricultural research. Other members include the deans of the schools of agriculture, architecture, engineering, biological sciences, business, and public health (wherever possible). Once they have selected the working group, their job is done. The next steps would be up to the new committee to establish ground rules for proceeding to design, build, and manage the prototype vertical farm. Under the rules of the grant, all building should be completed by year two. Each group is free to select the specific crops to be grown inside, but they must include a balance of types of edible plants—fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs, and spices. The managing of each enterprise would be at the university level, perhaps in a special division in the university’s office of grants and contracts. The prototype could employ a total of several hundred people. The corporate structure will be left up to each group. Some may choose to go the academic route, establishing a department of urban agriculture, while others might opt for something more elegant in name; perhaps calling themselves the Center for Urban Sustainable Agriculture.
Other government-funding strategies already exist and could easily be applied to facilitate the creation of the vertical farm and other related versions of urban agriculture. A request for proposals to establish a prototype vertical farm would be issued for the purpose of funding ten centers of excellence. Not every state will enter the bidding, but all of them will eventually benefit from the execution of the five-year grants by the centers that do get awarded the $100 million. This model has in the past proven highly effective in encouraging the development of a good number of high-profile federally sponsored research programs, including cancer treatment and prevention centers, high-energy particle physics facilities, telescopes, and biomedical-research centers focusing on neurological diseases. If this program catches fire, then I would encourage another round to make a total of twenty vertical farms, spread evenly throughout the country.
In any case, when the first prototypical vertical farms are up and running, I would then establish a number of annual public- and private-sponsored competitions with big cash prizes for things like best overall design; best energy-saving system; best use of passive energy; best system for recycling water; best use of automation for monitoring pH, root temperature, and nutrient delivery in a hydroponic system; and best yield per square foot for wheat, chickpeas, barley, rice, and other essential crops. Other prizes would be given for the best-tasting tomatoes, most innovative use for hydroponic and aeroponic growth systems, and the like. The winning teams would share equally in the distribution of monies, rewarding everyone who participated in the vertical farm (as in the World Series, where even the bat boy of the championship team gets a share). The anticipated result of all this activity would be the permanent establishment of urban agricultural initiatives throughout the entire country. Each group would be obliged to partner with a city in its state willing to be the urban laboratory for trying out practical applications of its research findings. Restaurants, schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, and senior-citizen facilities would all be fair game for attaching a version of the vertical farm to them. Free-standing vertical-farm complexes, complete with all the ancillary buildings described in chapter 6, would be the culmination of years’ worth of applied research defining the limits of this new agricultural strategy. They would rapidly become showplaces for sustainability. A significant spin-off from the program would be the establishment of a national Society for Urban Sustainable Agriculture, a professional research journal, and an annual meeting, at which graduate students and their mentors could exchange findings in a series of ten-minute talks, poster sessions, and plenary lectures. Monographs and books on the subject would undoubtedly follow, as academic careers matured and the science behind the practice of vertical farming became more and more focused.
Having spent many years in academia, I am confident that the research part of the plan I have roughly outlined would have a good chance of succeeding, based on a series of other highly successful initiatives that I am familiar with in the biological, physical, and chemical sciences. Research carried out by universities and colleges is now a main conduit for the commercialization of scads of new technologies; witness Silicon Valley, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera (apologies to Yul Brynner). Despite an enormously successful technology-driven college-based research enterprise, some business types might argue that my plan, as sketchy and optimistic as presented, is rife with flaws of all kinds, mostly financial ones. I tend to agree with them, but we have to start the discussion somewhere in scoping out how to proceed. Other models for getting the vertical farm literally off the ground would require huge inputs of money from the private sector, but as I pointed out earlier, profit is the key here. The vertical farm will undoubtedly make money and lots of it, but the return on investment may take a bit longer than most investors are willing to wait. Failures in design and execution have to be paid for, and no one wants to end up owning a drawerful of reports documenting mistake after mistake with little else to show for his or her time and effort.
To Dream the Impossible Dream
Well, come to think of it, maybe some businesses do take risks. Despite recent setbacks, the Toyota Motor Corporation is a car manufacturer with vision and lots of resources. It has the luxury of success on its side, and therefore it can afford to take chances that might have big payoffs. Toyota took a very big one in developing a new kind of automobile, reasoning correctly that consumers would buy a car that burned less fossil fuel and got amazing mileage. Enter the hybrid vehicle. Only one thing stood in the company’s way: a reliable, cheap, small, high-energy rechargeable battery. Not a new idea, but when it announced its plan to the world the idea was within reach from a research perspective. Someone had to be first and invest in the technology. Toyota had bravely stepped forward and seized the lead. The rest of the international automotive industry shook their heads and laughed at the idea, continuing to manufacture gas guzzlers, and completely misjudged or downright ignored the consumer demand for a greener ride. The Bush administration was no help at all, and in 2001 discontinued federally sponsored research and development of hybrid vehicles, a program first initiated by President Clinton. In 1995 Toyota announced that it had finally succeeded, and the first Prius stealthily purred off the assembly line and into the international auto shows as a concept car for all to see. In 1997 Japan began selling them in its own country, and by 2000, models were being sold in the United States. The U.S. buying public ate them up, driving them out of the showroom and into the hearts of the world’s environmentally conscious drivers. In the Prius’s first year of full production, 2003, Toyota could not keep up with demand, and as everyone now knows, the rest was history. A new version now even comes with a solar panel on the roof to offset even more fossil-fuel use. A long line of auto manufacturers formed at their doorstep to get on board the new gravy train. The behind-the-back snickering and joking turned to apologetic bows of respect at the signing ceremonies for licensing the battery technology. Toyota ended up with a pocketful of gold. The other automakers ended up saving a bundle by not having to invent something they could now buy. Everybody won, including the consumer and the environment.
Are there similar forward-looking companies in the United States that could take up the challenge of helping to invent the vertical farm? In 2009 Fortune magazine listed among its top ten (NetApp, Edward Jones, Boston Consulting Group, Google, Wegmans, Cisco, Genentech, Methodist Hospital, Goldman Sachs, and Nugget Market) several that might fall into this category. Google would be my first choice. This giant has an altruistic streak a mile w
ide. Google could afford to promote the concept with significant financial aid. So, who will be first to invent the vertical farm? I can hardly wait to see!
Aim High
I am going to assume that within the next few months, a serious initiative to build a vertical farm will be under way. I base this prediction on the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response the idea gets every time I speak, and on communications to me and my colleagues via the Internet. So, given that there will eventually be vertical farms, what are the long-term implications of urban agriculture in the context of the future city? So far, I have purposely presented the concept in its best light without too much speculation and detail regarding some of the difficulties that might be encountered during its execution, save for funding. Negative thinking is not in my nature. I am an optimist through and through, and I remain thoroughly convinced that we can solve any problem, no matter how big or small. We simply have to want to solve it. Of course there will always be a handful of detractors voicing their negative-laden critiques for any idea, no matter if it’s an important one or not. I like to keep in mind the lyrics of George Gershwin’s American Songbook classic “They All Laughed.” So go ahead and have a good chuckle if you must, but time is running out. The prototype vertical farm is right around the corner and it will become the proving grounds for its eventual success.
The Vertical Farm Page 17