The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century

INTRODUCTION

Fifteen thousand years ago, there was not a single farm on the planet. Fast-forward to the present, when we now farm a landmass the size of South America, which does not include grazing land. Along the way, we invented, among other things, written language, mathematics, music, and, of course, cities. Yet our journey from hunter-gatherers to urban dwellers still hasn’t produced a single metropolis that is truly healthy to live in.

As populations grew and urban life became the norm, our habit for producing mountains of waste began to take its toll. Garbage provided sustenance for a wide variety of peri-domestic diseases that emerged and then became endemic. For example, in the twelfth century, trash of all kinds, strewn carelessly across the European landscape by returning crusaders from the Middle East, attracted hordes of rats. These vermin harbored the plague bacillus, a flea-borne infection. As the rats died, their fleas soon found human hosts to feed on, igniting the first outbreak of the Black Death in Europe. It killed more than one-third of all those living there. Cholera came to Europe in 1836 by way of trading vessels from the Bay of Bengal, first to London, England. Because of the high nutrient content of the Thames River, due mostly to garbage dumping, cholera became endemic, killing thousands of Londoners every year until John Snow figured out its modus operandi.

You’d think we would have learned something from all this. But as late as the nineteenth century, waste on the streets of New York City was still causing massive outbreaks of diarrheal diseases. To this day, most cities still haven’t found a good use for garbage. New York remains plagued by vermin and poor-sanitation-related diseases such as asthma. With landfills for most cities now bulging at the seams, urban communities will have to reinvent waste management. Yet there is hope. All of this is about to change. We now have in our hands the tools and the desire to convert squalid urban blight into places where we’d want to raise our children. Once we have transformed our urban centers, we can turn our attention to renewing the hardwood forests that we destroyed in our zeal to create the farmlands that now produce food for our cities.

Sustainable urban life is technologically achievable, and most important, highly desirable. For example, food waste can easily be converted back into energy employing clean state-of-the-art incineration technologies, and wastewater can be converted back into drinking water. For the first time in history, an entire city can choose to become the functional urban equivalent of a natural ecosystem. We could even generate energy from incinerating human feces if we so desired. We have the ability to create a cradle to cradle waste-free economy. All that is needed is the political will to do so. Once we begin the process, cities will be able to live within their means without further damaging the environment.

VERTICAL FARMS

Repairing the environment and still having enough good, healthy food choices may seem like mutually exclusive goals. If the world’s population continues to increase, wouldn’t we need to cut down even more forest to produce enough food to feed everyone? Not necessarily. One solution lies in vertical farms. These farms would raise food without soil in specially constructed buildings. When farms are successfully moved to cities, we can convert significant amounts of farmland back into whatever ecosystem was there originally, simply by leaving it alone.

This plan may sound naive and impractical. Yet the concept of vertical farming is dead simple. Still, making it happen could require the kind of technical expertise needed for, say, rocket science or brain surgery. Then again, human beings do rocket science and brain surgery quite well. We should not shy away from the challenge of farming vertically simply because it requires cutting-edge engineering, architecture, and agronomy. All of this is within our grasp. We understand the hydroponic and aeroponic farming methodologies needed to grow crops within multistory buildings. Although there are still no examples of functioning vertical farms, many urban planners have become familiar with the concept and are now looking for ways to make it happen. There are already plans on the drawing board by developers in wealthy countries that are running short of arable farmland. In other places where food is becoming scarce and people are going to bed hungry, vertical farms could eventually solve this seemingly intractable problem.

The idea of growing crops in tall buildings might sound strange. But farming indoors is not a new concept. Commercially viable crops such as strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and a wide variety of spices have made their way from commercial greenhouses to the world’s supermarkets in ever-increasing amounts over the last fifteen years. Most of these greenhouse operations are small in comparison to the large commercial farms of the American Midwest, but unlike their outdoor counterparts, greenhouse facilities can produce crops year-round. Fish, as well as a wide variety of crustaceans and mollusks, have also been raised indoors. Chickens, ducks, and geese could conceivably be raised in indoor farms as well.

Vertical farms are immune to weather and other natural elements that can abort food production. Crops can be grown under carefully selected and well-monitored conditions that ensure optimal growth rates for each species of plant and animal year-round. In other words, there are no seasons indoors. The efficiency of each floor of a vertical farm, one acre in footprint, could be equivalent to as many as ten to twenty traditional soil-based acres, depending upon the crop. Vertical farms offer many environmental benefits as well. Farming indoors eliminates the need for fossil fuels now used for plowing, applying fertilizer, seeding, weeding, and harvesting.

CITIES WITHOUT WASTE

The ingredients in the dinner you just ate at your favorite restaurant likely came from more than fifteen hundred miles away. If you had a vertical farm in your city, all the food on your plate could come from down the block, saving huge amounts of fossil fuel now used to refrigerate and ship produce from all over the world. Also, think of what happens to the food you left on your plate. These leftovers, plus the waste generated in the food-preparation process, are currently nonrecoverable costs—also known as dinner for vermin. Now imagine if this organic waste could be converted back into energy. This would allow restaurants to be paid for the recoverable energy from their waste streams. An industry with a notoriously small (2–5 percent) profit margin would be able to earn additional income without raising the prices on its menus.

WATER: CLEAN AND CLEAR

One of the greatest urban health threats comes from liquid municipal waste (black water, which is composed, in part, of urine and feces). To disarm its potential for causing disease, it is first aerated, a process that breaks the solids into smaller and smaller particles, reduces the biomass, and converts most of the solids to oxygen-consuming bacteria. The mixture is then digested in the absence of oxygen, releasing a significant amount of methane, which some facilities are equipped to collect and use as an alternate energy source. The resulting sludge is culled and used in landfills, while the remaining grey water is chlorinated and discharged into the nearest body of water. In less developed countries, grey water is discarded without treatment. This practice greatly increases the risk of salmonella, cholera, amoebic dysentery, and other infectious diseases being transmitted by fecal contamination. In either case, it’s a shameful waste of freshwater.

In many cities throughout the United States, sludge derived from wastewater treatment plants is processed further, then turned into high-grade topsoil and sold to farming communities. The cities of New York and Boston, for example, have operating sludge-to-fertilizer schemes. The problem is that most municipal sludge is often heavily contaminated by copper, mercury, zinc, arsenic, and chromium, which limits its use for farming.

Some vertical farms could act as stand-alone water-regenerating facilities. A cold-brine pipe system could be engineered to aid in the condensation and harvesting of moisture released by the plants. Plants in the vertical farm could convert safe-to-use grey water into drinking water by transpiration. The fact that the entire farm would be a closed-loop system would allow us to recover this unrealized, highly valued resource.

The resulting purified water would then be used in other vertical farms for raising fish and even algae, and for growing commercial crops. Ultimately, any water that emerged from the vertical farm would be drinkable, thus bringing it back into the community that brought it to the farm to begin with. New York City discards some one billion gallons of treated grey water every day into the Hudson River estuary. If industrial-quality water costs five cents a gallon (a conservative estimate), reclamation would be well worth the effort, even if the system cost as much as $30 billion to construct and manage. This is hardly a pie-in-the-sky scheme. A portion of Orange County, California, with a population of approximately 500,000, converts grey water back into tap water using a state-of-the-art purification system that cost its taxpayers $500 million to install. It was worth every penny.

THE END OF POLLUTION

The most pressing case for urban agriculture lies in our failure to handle waste, in particular agricultural runoff (leftover irrigation water laden with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and silt). Agriculture is responsible for more ecosystem disruption than any other kind of pollution. What’s more, today’s farmers can’t do much about it: Floods dictate the timing and extent of runoff.

Some 70 percent of all available freshwater on earth is used for irrigation, and the resulting unused portion is returned to countless rivers and streams. Runoff that reaches the oceans disconnects other ecological systems. Nitrogen fertilizer (ammonium nitrate) has the chemical property of absorbing oxygen from water. Agricultural runoff reduces the vibrant, abundant undersea life of coral reefs to barren remnants. Deforestation for purposes of freeing up farmland reinforces this toxic cycle by adding more nitrogen fertilizer to the mix and by further reducing the earth’s capacity to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

In a city with vertical farms, waste will be replaced with the recovery of unrealized energy. In nature, there is no waste. In the new eco-city, discarding anything without finding another use for it would be quite unthinkable. Imagine how absurd it would be to siphon off a gallon’s worth of gasoline from the family car and pour it down the sewer. Yet this is equivalent to what we are doing with everything we now throw away.

CITIES OF THE NEAR FUTURE

Today’s cities fail to meet even the minimum standards of self-reliance. No city lives within its own means. Everything consumed is produced outside the city, and as a result, waste accumulates at an alarming rate. A midsize city annually produces gigatons of solid material and billions of gallons of wastewater. Add to that the billions of dollars spent annually trying to get rid of this unwanted material, and you have a clear picture of our current environmental crisis.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Technology continues to astound us with new proof of the inventiveness of the human species. Computers keep getting faster and more sophisticated. We are contemplating establishing colonies on the moon and on Mars. We have even collected the dust emitted from the tail of a comet. Yet despite this astounding prowess, most of the earth’s inhabitants remain oblivious to the profound, and largely negative, effect they have on the planet. We continue to urbanize without building cities that are equipped to handle their populations. Most evolutionary biologists agree that continued failure to live within our means will relegate the human species to the fossil record.

Science has led the way in helping us to understand the toll we are taking on the planet. Satellites report on the status of many of the factors that contribute to climate change. Ground-based and satellite observations of coal-burning power plants, for example, support the unavoidable conclusion that we are the root cause of it. Now that we’ve identified the problem, we can devote our energy to finding a set of solutions. Producing food crops in mass quantities within the city limits would be a step in the right direction. The good news is that many of us are already trying to repair the environment through scientific research and philanthropic support. This is good evidence of our ability to behave in a selfless and altruistic manner when we have the opportunity to do so.

It’s time to accept our connectedness to the rest of the natural world. There is only so much natural capital out there, and we are on the verge of exhausting it. Building self-sustaining cities now will allow the land to heal itself, thereby restoring balance between our lives and the rest of nature.

CHAPTER 1

REMODELING NATURE

Nothing endures but change.

—HERACLITUS

DOWN ON THE FARM

Ten to twelve thousand years ago, all over the globe, humans began systematically to modify their environment by purposely domesticating parts of the natural world to meet their basic biological needs. Creating a reliable source of food and water was at the top of their list. Apparently, as if a switch had been thrown, we nearly unanimously tired of hunting and gathering. We learned how to grow crops derived from wild plants (corn, wheat, barley, rice) and to selectively breed various four-legged animals into tame versions of their wild counterparts for food, transportation, and, of course, labor. We catapulted out of the biosphere and into the technosphere, where we now find ourselves deeply embedded. Along the way, all natural systems suffered under our heavy foot of progress. It’s the progress part of our history that we are currently having a problem with; the environmental crises of today have their roots deeply embedded in that last bit of human evolution. To understand the cumulative negative effects we have had on the natural world since we began to urbanize, we must first understand the essence of what the world was like without us in it (for glimpses of its former glory, see the BBC production Planet Earth; to see what the world might become again if we were to suddenly disappear, see Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us). By grasping the basics of what allows natural assemblages of plants and animals to organize into mutually dependent networks called ecosystems, we gain insight into how a city might be redesigned to mimic that process. It is my contention that if the built environment could behave by reflecting the integration of functions equivalent to that of an ecosystem, life would be a lot more bearable for all of us, and more economically stable,