The Case Against Vertical Farming
Friday, February 19, 2010 at 9:15AM This silent video produced by MVRDV has been circulating on several food-related blogs this week. The concept of urban farming is gaining popularity among local food advocates, with some, like Columbia professor Dickson Despommier, advocating building large vertical farms in skyscrapers. The argument is pretty simple: In theory, vertical farms could eliminate water pollution, reduce transportation costs, and create new urban employment opportunities.
As nifty as that sounds, I don't see it as a viable fix to the broken food system. According to this video, it would take a 23-mile high vertical farm to feed Manhattan, or a dense cluster of skyscrapers that would fill lower Manhattan.
I fully support urban farming projects like Chicago's City Farm, which is a small farm on a previously vacant lot, but I don't think that building food-production skyscrapers in a very competitive and expensive real estate market like Manhattan makes much sense. And I have an even harder time envisioning every building in Manhattan getting a 650-foot add-on devoted to food production, an idea that's raised at the end of the video.
In Chicago, the urban farming advocates I interviewed for a recent article about aquaponics talked about converting abandoned or underused buildings far from the city center to vertical farms. Although even that might be difficult to accomplish, it seems much more practical than erecting new skyscraper-farms.
-Mark
[Via GOOD]
Reader Comments (6)
Time Magazine says Valcent's Vertical Farming Technology one of the Top 50 Best Innovations of 2009: http://bit.ly/5zDIqh
Mark:
Great perspective. I think vertical farming is good in concept but would be unsustainable economically. However any intensive to fortify existing buildings to be able to/and have rooftop gardens (urban farms) would be most beneficial. This would create almost 3/4 of the land mass of the city into "farmed space" about 10-15 squared miles at much less a cost.
I agree whole-heartedly that we should take advantage first of vacant land and abandoned buildings before we erect new structures: it just makes more sense economically and for community building.
The one beef I have with the video is that it assumes two things: 1. that we will continue to use the food system we have and transfer it to the city, and 2. that we should try to grow our 'animal feed' and 'cereal grains' in the city. Regarding the first assumption, growing 'animal feed' is a practice that we need to phase out of our food system if we ever want a sustainable system. Regarding the second assumption, what if we grew all our produce in the city...that might be do-able. Grains just don't make any sense in the city. It skews the images to make growing our food in the city an impossibility.
Eat well and check out our website: www.bkfarmyards.com
We are fighting for a homegrown, local food system in Brooklyn
There are 10,000 acres of unused land in NYC, 1500 of them in Brooklyn...let's get digging!
Thanks for weighing in on this.
Rain: I think you're right that rooftop farming would be a good use of urban space, but it can be pretty costly too. A restaurant in Chicago where we shot a video recently built a 2500 square-foot rooftop farm cost upwards of $150,000 in structural reinforcements and materials. I'm sure there are buildings that are better suited for it, but that's serious money. If developers start constructing buildings with this in mind, it'd probably be much more feasible on a wider scale.
-Mark
"I can't think of any technology that addresses more urgent issues than Valcent's vertical farming system", says RFK Jr http://bit.ly/cPb00g
Vertical farming is really a joke proposal. It would require massive amounts of energy to build a vertical farm, and even the daily operation would use more energy than you would save from transporting food shorter distances. This means a vertical farm would generate large amount of net carbon and contribute to global warming. It would also be much less resilient in the face of energy shortages or peak oil. However, that's not to say that growing more food in urban areas isn't a good idea. Growing food on lawns and building community gardens are both great idea.