The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century is an engaging read. More visionary treatise than practical guide, it lays out ideas that provide a good starting point for thinking about what shape vertical farming might take. Vertical farming involves the climate controlled indoor growing of crops within urban areas. As we move into a potentially uncertain future, fraught with changing climate and unusual weather, growing crops indoors under controlled conditions offers many benefits. Greatest among these is a degree of security against crop failures that are all too common even under the most gentle weather conditions. In a world where we are pushing over 7 billion people, over half of whom live in cities, vertical farming can offer not only insurance, but national and global security against famine, social unrest and their ugly handmaiden: war.
My grandfather, often talked about the security inherent in living on a farm during the depths of the Great Depression. They were so poor that he had to borrow a penny to buy a two cent stamp. Despite this he was never hungry. Unfortunately, most people today have little access to their own food outside of the tenuous and short sighted links to the grocery store. We are more disconnected from our food sources now than at any time in our history. Why can't the urban environment seek to emulate the natural one in a new symbiotic synthesis that can reconnect people with their food?
I had expected a perspicacious look at the science involved in bringing the vertical farm to reality from the perspective of the chief proponent of the vertical farm.
Dickson Desppommier, as a proffesor of health sciences had the ability to expound to a greater degree than he did on the "nuts and bolts" of putting something like the vertical farm together. The chapters stand back and philosophize at thirty thousand feet about vertical farming. While interesting, it fails to allow readers to take immediate action on moving toward something real that works in the near future. It is a bit like using Plato's
Republic to go out and start running your local city government. It offers much food for thought, but needs more practically applicable ideas. I hope that the author will regale us with another work that helps to flesh out the future of the vertical farm. Possibly an action guide filled with technologies that need to be developed, tested and applied. In essence, a practical way forward.
While using the soil to farm will probably always have a role, developing the vertical farm offers many benefits to humans and the environment. The ability to grow crops year round, day and night, in any climate is powerful. As the previous book review below intoned, placing all our eggs in the soil based farming basket has dire implications for the future.
Like most alternative and new technologies, the start-up costs may be high and the learning curve from failures steep. Still, what are the costs of not trying to develop the idea?
The vertical farm is part of a larger idea of integrating plants and greenery increasingly into the urban landscape. This recent
story discusses how streets with greenery can cut pollution . I hope that we will see many innovative applications of the vertical farm as well as integrating plants into the larger picture of urban life in general.
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