SOA Architects

Twelve thousand years ago, in the wake of the last ice age, our ancestors invented agriculture in at least six different locations across the globe. Becoming an agrarian society would eventually lead to the creation of the calendar, astronomy, mathematics, writing, and religion. Yet farming -- at least as it has been practiced for the past dozen millennia -- is an outright failure, according to ecological visionary Dickson Despommier. The whole enterprise "is not working and probably never did work," he writes in his new book The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. "It just had the outward appearance of working."

Despommier is not the only one to suggest recently that agriculture has been flawed from the start (see "The Dirty Secret on the Farm"). Without irrigation and lots of chemicals, it’s not possible to farm indefinitely in one place, because the very act of growing crops depletes groundwater and soil nutrients. And by continually supplanting biodiversity with a handful of our favorite plants, humans have long been destroying the ecosystems that sustain us -- from the Fertile Crescent, rendered a desert by the earliest farmers, to the American plains-turned-cornfields. Growing food and raising livestock for the world’s 6.8 billion people currently requires a landmass the size of South America. With the global population due to swell by three billion over the next half-century, we will soon need to plow over the equivalent of another Brazil. That much new arable land simply doesn’t exist.

Fortunately, Despommier, a professor of microbiology and public health at Columbia University, has been cultivating an answer -- not just to the coming food crisis, but also to the water crisis, deforestation, inner-city poverty, urban pests, and to some extent, global warming. "Doomsday will have to wait," he writes, "for what I am about to present in detail is a realistic, workable solution addressing food production and environmental repair."

His vision is this: stack up state-of the-art greenhouses in urban wastelands and employ local workers to raise year-round crops in these "vertical farms." Grow the plants with hydroponics, substituting nutrient-enriched water for soil. Manipulate mirrors to control sunlight. Install energy-efficient growing lamps. And power the whole operation with organic waste -- that is, food scraps and feces converted into electricity through clean incineration technologies.

The ultimate goal is to transform the modern metropolis into "the functional urban equivalent of a natural ecosystem." But the environmental benefits stand to extend far beyond cities themselves. Some seventy percent of the earth’s available freshwater is currently used for irrigation, and tainted runoff is one of the main sources of pollution in the United States. Indoor farms, in Despommier’s vision, would recycle that water while eliminating the need for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Fewer fossil fuels would be devoted to transporting food, because the eaters and growers would be in such close proximity.

And then there’s this: according to Despommier, vertical farms would be so efficient -- ten to twenty times more productive than the outdoor equivalent -- that a great deal of traditional farmland could be abandoned. Left untouched, it would naturally revert to whatever ecosystem was originally there, like the forests of New England that grew back after being clear-cut by early colonists, or the prairies that revived themselves in the wake of the Dust Bowl. He even points to Chernobyl’s return to wilderness and a spontaneous wildlife sanctuary that has arisen in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. (If you’ve read The World Without Us, you’ve traversed these landscapes before.)

Yes, finding good news at the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster and most heavily militarized border is the sign of an incurable optimist. But Despommier insists that vertical farming is within our grasp -- that all the necessary technologies already exist, and it’s just a matter of bringing them together.

Not everyone agrees. "It’s one of these exciting, romantic ideas, but the numbers do not fit," says Dr. Louis Albright, who directs the Controlled Environment Agriculture program at Cornell University. "I think it’s totally unsustainable. It makes no sense from a production standpoint." His central objection has to do with the verticality of the farms -- the fact that lower floors are necessarily shaded and rely heavily on electric lighting. In other words, why expend gigawatts of power to do what sunlight does for free?

It would be far more productive, Albright suggests, to build single-story greenhouses close to -- but not in -- cities, a plan that would require less energy and make use of the existing infrastructure for food distribution. Dr. Bruce Bugbee, a crop physiologist at Utah State University, shares this view. Vertical farms would consume "massive amounts of electric power," he says, noting that indoor crops require lighting that is ten to a hundred times more intense than a brightly lit office.

On the subject of economic viability, there’s also the question of whether a tomato could ever truly afford to compete in the New York real estate market. Despommier himself writes: "I think the real issue regarding the invention of vertical farming is, who will pay for the first ones?"

Perhaps the answer will emerge out of China, Japan, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, or Australia -- all countries said to be moving toward such a scheme. No vertical farm yet exists, but futuristic prototypes abound. Picture the glass-box Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, but five times as tall and insulated as securely as the intensive care unit of a hospital.

Such "farmscrapers" may seem like an improbable outgrowth of the local foods movement championed in recent years by figures like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters. Yet vertical farming, at its core, is about moving the source of our food to where we actually live -- which for the majority of people on earth is a city.

Still, the nostalgic tenor typically associated with small farms and organic produce is utterly absent here. Despommier is an unabashed advocate for genetically modified crops. (He suggests creating inedible "canary in the coal mine" plants designed to fluoresce in the presence of pathogens.) And as much as he blames technology for removing us from the biosphere, romanticizing societies that have eschewed development, his particular utopia is a highly engineered one -- so artificial, in fact, that he suggests it might serve as a model for colonizing the moon or Mars.

This would-be urban farmer has his sights set high.