Is the world ready for vertical farming?

 

Undoubtedly, low ‘food miles’ products are ecologically advantageous, but Covid related supply chain disruptions have further exposed the vulnerability of undue reliance on food imports or produce that has high food miles.

 

Would it not be great if we could get fresh produce from farms located not far from our communities? It is however, difficult to have large farmlands integrated within cities. In such a situation Vertical farming comes across as a viable solution to ensure consistent and sufficient food supply locally. It would indeed be ideal to have windowless warehouses on city outskirts, growing commercial produce in indoor environments with LED lights. The facilities, smaller than traditional farms, can churn out much higher volumes of produce, with no soil, sun or rain.

 

Vertical farming involves growing crops in vertically stacked layers in a controlled-environment, to optimize plant growth. It often utilizes soilless farming techniques and food production systems that broadly fall under three main categories:

• Hydroponics- Growing crop plants in nutrient solutions of necessary minerals in an aqueous solvent.
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• Aquaponics- Growing crop plants through a system that derives the aqueous nutrient-rich growing medium from aquaculture, by raising aquatic animals such as fish, crayfish, snails or prawns in tanks.
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• Aeroponics- Growing crops plants suspended in an air or mist environment without any specific medium, by atomized spraying of nutrient-rich water solution on to the dangling plant roots and lower stem.

 

Initial Concept

The vertical farm concept was a brainchild of Professor Dickson Despommier, a ‘Public and Environmental Health’ teacher at Columbia University. It started with a question that he threw at his class to estimate the quantity of food that could be grown on New York rooftops. When they estimated that only about 1000 people could be thus fed, came the idea of growing plants indoors and vertically on multiple layers to increase the area. The ‘professor-students’ team came up with a proposal of a 30-story vertical farm to produce enough food for 50,000 people. Their project envisaged a ‘poultry and seafood farm’ on the lower floors being fed by the plant waste from nearly 100 kinds of fruits and vegetables growing on the upper floors. Although this skyscraper farm has not risen above the paper stage, it popularized the vertical farming concept and served as an inspiration to various designs that were realized in the coming years.

Advantages:

Vertical farming technologies have many advantages as listed below:

• Increased crop yield with a smaller unit area of land requirement.
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• Limited land use also means less disruption of natural habitats, and regular supply of guilt free food that does not harm the native flora and fauna.
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• Cultivation of a larger variety of crops at the same time in their respective specific requirements.
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• Minimizing crop damages due to pests; and extreme unexpected weather, as the farming is indoor.
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• Better plant development, health, growth, flowering and fruiting, under controlled environments.
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• Recycling of the used water reduces costs, as also heat from the LED lamps during winter months, does away with the need of a heating system.

Disadvantages

However vertical farming technologies face various challenges:

• Considering the significantly large start-up costs, as compared to traditional land farms. Economic constraints are a big deterrent.
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• Power demands of a vertical farm as compared to traditional farm that relies totally on natural sunlight can make vertical farming uncompetitive.
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• If the energy needs are met through fossil fuels that could mean a net loss to due environmental pollution.
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• Light pollution from vertical farms has faced some criticism.
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• Effluent waste water from the vertical farms could cause pollution unless proper water treatment is employed before waste water disposal.

 

Vertical farming is still not very popular in Canada, where I currently reside. I believe this is a major aspect that the government can focus on supporting to cut reliance on imported food. Canada gets a substantial food import from USA and Mexico. Besides Covid-related logistics issues, extreme drought and wildfires in California have also impacted the Canadian food chain. Local indoor vertical farming can be a great solution going forward for a country that has just about five or six good growing months. This is a fast growing industry in my opinion and I look forward to capital investments in improving and improvising this branch of agriculture with new innovations and technology, in the days to come.

 

Sources and references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

https://financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/vertical-farming

 

Image Source

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IFarm.fi_Vertical_farm_Finland.jpg