Our future: skyscraper farms?

Paul Roberts (author of The End of Oil, The End of Food–you get the idea) writes that creating a sustainable food system will require more than “buy local” or “buy organic.” In some cases, he says, these can be misleading and oversimplifying labels for a much more complex reality. For instance, how food is produced is more important in many cases than how far it traveled to get to your plate.

Getting where we need to be, he argues, will require some more imaginative steps between our current industrial system and and a sustainable one. This will mean abandoning in some cases the demand that food be “pure” organic for the sake of creating hybrid models that are environmentally and ethically sounder while still being able to feed people on the scale that industrial food does currently. And the local food movement is going to have to come to terms with regional specialization and long-distance trade if it wants sustainable food to be something other than a luxury item for rich countries.

As this more pragmatic system emerges, it’s a good bet that many of our romantic notions about alternative food production will be cast off. The vision of a nation of small farms, for example, will give way to farms of multiple scales—small farms, but also massive agricultural operations that can produce bulk commodities like grain at the lowest possible cost.

Jettisoned, too, will be the postcard image of the small farm with its neat rows of crops, vegetables, and livestock as constraints on space and resources necessitate new and quite unfamiliar designs. Proponents of vertical farms, for example, envision enormous glass-walled skyscrapers filled with vegetables, fruits, poultry, and aquaculture. Towering as high as 30 stories, and based on soilless farming, these space-age facilities would epitomize efficiency and sustainability: Water would be recycled, as would nutrients. The closed environment would eliminate the need for pesticides. Better still, the year-round, 24-hour growing season would boost yields anywhere from 6 to 30 times those of conventional dirt farms. Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University public health and microbiology professor who has championed vertical farming, claims that a single city block could feed 50,000 people.

The shift will also require more than changing consumer preferences and letting the market do its magic, as ethical consumers and romantic libertarians sometimes contend. The problem, Roberts says, isn’t farm subsidies, but that we’re subsidizing the wrong kind of farming.

Read the whole thing, as the kids say.