Are vertical farms the future of city food?

This story was originally covered by PRI’s Living on Earth. For more, listen to the audio above.

“The city has assumed the role of a monstrous parasite when viewed from an ecological perspective,” microbiologist and public health professor Dickson Despommier told PRI’s Living on Earth. If humans hope to survive, Despommier believes that people have to figure out how to make a city live like an ecosystem. One way is to start using “vertical farms.”

The project for Despommier came about when a group of his students wanted to work on something more positive than the usual environmental doom and gloom. They started with rooftop farming in New York City. The project then morphed to vertical farming.

The farms represent an effort to “make food production at the center of an ecological behavior pattern, and make them imitate the balanced ecosystems that are still left.” Despommier explains what one would look like:

First of all, you wouldn’t see the building, because all you would see would be the plants growing inside of a totally transparent building. It would look like the plants were being suspended in midair, and they were growing on…you couldn’t actually tell what they were growing on. And, in fact, they’re not growing in soil at all, they’re being grown hydroponically.

All the plants would be fed with chemicals dissolved into water, like using Miracle Grow. Geothermal energy could be used to power the grow lights, and the waste from the plants could be used to power the farm. Despommier says, “it’s a closed-loop agricultural system, basically.”

There are no current examples of vertical farms, but Despommier believes they’ll be coming soon. He told Living on Earth:

I can almost guarantee you that within a year from now, there will be many. The country of Qatar has an enormous interest in this. China, India- they’re very interested in food security and food safety. They want food that’s produced by themselves, and if you live in Qatar, that’s not going to happen unless, somehow, you import all the soil.

Instead, according to Despommier, vertical farms may be the way of the future.

Hosted by Steve Curwood, “Living on Earth” is an award-winning environmental news program that delves into the leading issues affecting the world we inhabit. More “Living on Earth.”