One gets the distinct impression, and correctly so, that the “City With Big Shoulders” is about to burst onto the global scene as a major player in urban sustainability, encouraged by a rising number of urban agricultural initiatives. Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel has repeatedly endorsed urban agriculture as an integral part of that city’s push for long-term sustainability in several press conferences he has presided over within the past few months. Bloomberg Weekly News in January of 2013 declared that vertical farming would be a sound small business investment for the near future (images.businessweek.com/slideshows/20101105/20-small-businesses-of-the-future#slide20); Yahoo News agrees (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/five-careers-future-031453252.html).

A recent workshop I attended in Berlin, organized and sponsored by a branch of the German government exploring the prospects of federal funding for the developmeynt of vertical farms, attests to the fact that some countries (Korea, Japan, China, Germany) are getting wise to the fact that vertical farms may be the answer to many environmental issues, such as a rising atmospheric temperature and an out-of-control climate regime. Meanwhile, back in the U.S. of A., several other new vertical farm initiatives have been announced: “Green Girls” in Memphis, Tennessee, and Green Spirit Farms in New Buffalo, Michigan. Gotham Greens, a commercially successful high-tech 2,000 sq ft. greenhouse operation in Brooklyn, just announced that construction of another facility of theirs has begun (20,000 sq ft), and will be located on top of the new Whole Foods supermarket in the Gowanus section of that same borough of New York City. I can only hope that when that new facility achieves maximum production several years from now, but consumer demand for fresh, local produce still exceeds their capacity to provide for everyone in that neighborhood, then perhaps another floor’s worth of greenhouse will be added to Gotham Greens already existing structures, turning them into true vertical farms! This would naturally lead to the emergence of a friendly competition between The Big Apple and The Second City in promoting vertical farming as an integral part of all urban agricultural initiatives. Onward and upward!   

Singapore:

 The island country of Singapore announced last month that a commercial version of a vertical farm was now in operation (Sky Greens – skygreens.appsfly.com). It is a four-story, transparent structure fitted with A-frame growing systems that produce leafy green vegetables. It uses sunlight as a source of energy, and captured rainwater to drive a clever pulley system to move the plants on the grow racks, ensuring an even distribution of sunlight for all the plants.

U.S.A. – Bedford Park:

Farmed Here (www.farmedhere.com) opened in 2013 as a commercial-level VF that is housed in a 90,000 square foot post-industrial building in Bedford Park, IL. It produces three products; arugula, basil, and sweet basil vinaigrette.

Canada – Vancouver:

Local Garden (www.localgarden.com) is a newly constructed two-story tall, 6,000 sq. ft. transparent building located on a parking garage rooftop in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is outfitted with an innovative growing platform system (Verticrop: www.alterrus.ca/verticrop/the-technology/) that produces micro-green salad ingredients, baby spinach, and baby kales.

Japan:

Plant factories - aka vertical farms - have been up and running for at least two years, and some have been operational for a lot longer than that. There are some fifty of these indoor vegetable farms spread out over most of the country (e.g., Nuvege – www.nuvege.com; Angel Farms – www.anglefarms.com). Half of them employ sunlight as the sole energy source for growing crops, while an equal number use some variety of LED grow lights. Most of those using grow lights resemble large, windowless warehouses. All of them produce a wide variety of high yield leafy greens. One Japanese online web site estimates that the plant factory industry will grow by over 70 billion yen over the next 5 years, mostly from private investment, and whose progress is largely driven by consumer demand for healthy, radiation-free food in the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown event.

It is anticipated that over the next year or two, the number of viable commercial vertical farm operations the world over will increase at a rate commiserate with city dweller’s demand for safer, reasonably priced, locally grown food. At the same time, severe weather patterns around the world continue to increase in frequency, from extreme droughts to massive floods, and the price of oil remains high. As the result, the availability of food, no matter what the crop, has become more and more problematic, as costs related to production and shipping skyrocket.  Thus, it now appears likely that vertical farms of a wide variety will become a common feature of the global urban landscape over the next decade, as a global industrial-level response to our ever-changing climate.  

For a link to the presentations: http://challengesinverticalfarming.org

Every ecosystem can be characterized by knowing just two physical parameters: the annual temperature profile and its precipitation regimen. Freshwater is crucial for all terrestrial life forms. That is why it should be valued above all else as nature’s premier natural resource.

When we begin to alter our world in ways that alter the distribution of freshwater resources, we are asking for trouble. In the United States, there are over seventy five thousand dams that have created lakes, most of which are used as sources of drinking water and irrigation. In most years, this scheme has allowed farmers the luxury of growing crops that, if no irrigation was possible, they would surely fail.  Other farming communities (particularly in the flat, grassy plains states) must rely on underground sources of water for irrigation and drinking water. Regarding surface water, the amount of precipitation that fell in that year will determine the outcome of agriculture in that region. For those agricultural situations that rely only on ground water, annual rainfall does little to help provide enough for extended periods of time. In our Midwest, the Ogallala Reservoir is the primary resource for irrigation water, and its been drawn down to levels that require oil-driven pumps to get enough to allow their crops of wheat and corn to thrive. This year, the price of oil was so high that farmers elected not to irrigate. The result was disastrous.

In early August of this year, as I drove back home from my annual fishing trip out West, I had the “luxury” of surveying the season’s crops from Utah to New Jersey, and all the states in between via US routes 70 and 80. The USGS estimates that 2012 will go down in the record books as a very dry year, perhaps even the driest on record. Last year, Texas was devastated by drought, loosing over 5 billion dollars in crops and livestock. This year, it looks like Texas will take another big hit in crops lost to drought. In the case of the American heartland (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio), I witnessed field after field of what looked like golden wheat that upon closer inspection, turned out to be abandoned cornfields! The soybeans did not look so great, either. No corn or soybeans means no animal feed. President Obama recently declared that the federal government will buy livestock from drought-affected ranchers and set up an inventory of frozen meats to help them get by until the droughts break. What this will mean for the price of food remains to be calculated, but its certain that the consumers in most urban centers will pay a lot more for the basics of what constitutes the American diet; beef, chicken, fish, milk, flour, bread, vegetables and many fruits. A recent estimate of the amount of money this year’s drought has already cost the U.S. farmers is between 18-20 billion dollars. Some 40-50 per cent of the entire country has now been declared a disaster zone, so extensive is this year’s drought. At least indoor farmer’s crops are safe this year, having opted long ago to grow their crops in a more secure, predictable fashion in greenhouses.

Vertical farming promises to expand this approach, so that perhaps in the near future, food prices will not fluctuate with the uncontrollable weather patterns. Dare I remind us all that climate change issues will continue confound and disrupt this already seriously flawed system of outdoor food production. What a different world this would be if we could produce most of what we needed year round in vertical farms located inside cities. I know this sounds a bit preachy, but I think the concept of the vertical farm is the only viable option we have to a long-term solution to the world food crisis. Why, I’ll bet we could even work out a way to produce animal feed this way, too. Who knows, maybe some day soon a Texas billionaire will step up to the plate and start that ball rolling!      

Two iconic iron chefs were selected, Bobby Flay, one of my favorites, and Rick Bayless, one of my other favorites. In my humble opinion, the only chefs comparable to these guys are Jacques Pepin, my current all-time favorite, and Julia Child, in my view the greatest all-round chef of modern times! Flay and Bayless were charged with using buffalo meat as the secret ingredient in as many Mexican/Southwestern style cuisine dishes as they could assemble in one hour. Of course they had lots of help from their highly competent staff of sous chefs. They both used lots of different ingredients derived from a wide variety of crop plants to augment and compliment the meats being prepared. As the show unraveled, amid Flay shout-outs and Bayless’ artful food plating schemes, I began fantasizing that one of the requirements of the contest should be that they had to use only those ingredients that were grown in their own vertical farms attached to their up-scale restaurants in New York and Chicago. In the end, cherubically charming Flay won on a single style point! I had them tied for first.

As I dozed off afterwards, with images of buffaloes jumping one at a time over the fence at the Ted Turner ranch in the Ruby River valley of western Montana, I got to thinking (dreaming) about LED lighting for indoor crops and how much we need to improve the situation before the commercial side of vertical farming becomes a no-brainer with respect to the return on investment side of things. Granted, there are lots of places where energy is never going to be a major factor in deciding whether or not to invest in a vertical farm, for example Iceland, New Zealand, and other parts of the world where geothermal energy is there for the taking. In addition, other areas in which solar energy is begging to be applied to this new agricultural initiative – The Middle East, Australia, the American Southwest - would also be able to employ LEDs as they currently exist and still reap a favorable return on their investment. But for the rest of us, help is needed at the level of improving LED lighting efficiency to encourage more people to get involved in building and operating vertical farms.

So… how would it play out if we could use the Iron Chef America format to showcase the latest in LED lighting, turning it into a lighting “throw-down”, in which anyone with an improved LED lighting system for making green plants grow faster and better using less energy than the currently commercially available LEDs could participate. Of course, the time frame would be longer than an hour; weeks to months would be more appropriate, depending upon the crops selected. In addition to the standard leafy green vegetables (kale, spinach, lettuce), root vegetables, vine crops, grains, and bush berries might be a good mix of crops to challenge any lighting scheme/growing system. All crops would be maintained under a standardized hydroponic configuration, save for the lighting. To insure fairness of growing conditions, a grand master/iron chef-like personality             with indoor farming experience would be placed in charge. Rules and such would be drawn up by a blue-ribbon committee, and the contest would be well-advertized. High-end celebrity chefs, and green foodie Hollywood stars might decide to back such a venture. The Discovery Channel might pick up the show, calling it: “Let There Be Light”. At the end of the show, large cash prizes (millions of dollars; Mr. Buffett, are you listening?) would be awarded in each crop category to the group that showed a significant improvement in the ratio of grams of biomass produced per kilowatt of electricity used. The actual crops could be donated to worthy causes as food donations under the slogan, “Up With Food”! 

The companies that could really make a difference here are Phillips, Siemens, and General Electric. They have all invested heavily in LED technologies, and great strides have been made in just over the last few yeas in terms of efficiency and specificity for what the plants need. More work is needed, however. They are all on the verge of setting the vertical farming/indoor agriculture industries free from economic burdens related to energy use. My plea is for them to keep on truckin’ and stay hungry, so that the two billion people who go to bed that way each day will eventually have something better to look forward to!

ROME (AP): December 1, 2011 — The United Nations has completed the first-ever global assessment of the state of the planet's land resources, finding in a report Monday that a quarter of all land is highly degraded and warning the trend must be reversed if the world's growing population is to be fed.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that farmers will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world's expected 9 billion-strong population. That amounts to 1 billion tons more wheat, rice and other cereals and 200 million more tons of beef and other livestock.

But as it is, most available land is already being farmed, and in ways that often decrease its productivity through practices that lead to soil erosion and wasting of water.

That means that to meet the world's future food needs, a major "sustainable intensification" of agricultural productivity on existing farmland will be necessary, the FAO said in "State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture."

Things appear to be getting worse and worse, as year after year, the climate continues to change at an accelerating rate, and adverse weather events continue to increase as the result of that acceleration, despoiling huge tracts of arable land and rendering them unusable for the foreseeable future. How much more of this environmental insult must we endure before the world’s agricultural communities stop what they are doing and adopt new methods for growing most of our soil-based crops? Of course, I am referring to vertical farming.

I have been advocating for some years now for all the richest countries to pool a small fraction of their trillions of dollars of resources (ten billion would do the job nicely) and support the establishment of a global urban-based agriculture that takes advantage of the fact that we can easily grow most of what we need inside controlled environment structures. In fact, The Republic of Korea is already ahead of the rest of the world in this regard, having established a vertical farm and nearby seed bank in March of 2011. Successful commercial ventures in Japan (Nuvege), have shown that this method of food production can be highly profitable. A few other vertical farms have been established in other places, but there needs to be a much large investment in this kind of farming if we are to stave off a world food crisis that may already be starting.

In the developed world, trying to save traditional agriculture by allowing large argo-businesses to have their way with the soil has done nothing more than to allow these companies to reap more profits, as food prices increase due to the increase in the price of oil. We need a national policy shift to give a voice to the consumers who continue to demand safe, health food choices that are available year round. This can only be achieved by production schemes that employ high tech greenhouse methods – hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics.  Locating large-scale indoor farms next to the largest urban centers solves many problems that now plague the current food system – harvesting before the produce is ripe, shipping and handling, food spoilage – at every step of the food chain from farm to table.

Elections are just around the corner, yet I have heard very little about the food crisis and potential solutions from either side of the aisle. What’s up with that??? Come on America. Lets face up to the situation and solve this problem. Guaranteed that if we do, then lots of other problems will disappear, as well!    

Shope was feisty and notorious for his tell-it-like-it-is attitude and “to hell with social protocol”. His laboratory was located at the prestigious Rockefeller University in New York City on the third floor of Theobald Smith Hall. But despite being recognized as a venerable charter member of that “ivory tower” of science, he was compelled to plainly announce to the world his findings regarding the transmission of his now favorite virus, swine flu. Shope created a rather rude saying in bold, easy-to-read lettering and posted it prominently above the entrance to his lab for all visitors to see (much to the chagrin of university officials leading tours of that famous institution, I might add). It read:

“The Earth Is Covered With A Thin Layer of Shit”

In principle, the World Health Organization agrees with Shope. They state flatly that over half of the world’s farms still use untreated animal waste as fertilizer, and most of it is of human origin. Feces are easy to get and cost nothing. It is also a very good fertilizer! But this creates a real problem, because like the pig parasite story, this unsanitary practice results in the transmission of many fecally-transmitted infectious diseases of humans, as well: a wide variety of dysentery-causing microbes, geo-helminths (intestinal worm parasites that include Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura, Strongyloides stercoralis, and hookworm), and several life-threatening water-borne parasites, the most serious of which is schistosomiasis. These two groups of fecally-transmitted worms infect some 2 billion individuals, and cause serious illness in millions of children, world-wide. Hookworm, alone, infects some 1 billion people. To acquire hookworms, all one has to do is walk around barefoot on ground that is contaminated with human feces that contain the eggs of these parasites. The simple act of swimming in fecally-contaminated fresh water exposes people to the schistosomes. In both of these cases, the parasite does the rest by penetrating our unbroken skin.

Farming facilitates the spread of these parasites, albeit unbeknownst to the farmer. Other microbial infections of animal origin regularly piggy-back on fresh produce, causing outbreaks of serious diseases such as listeriosis, salmonella, and E. coli strain 0157.  The prevention of all of these health risks is to isolate our crops from outside sources of fecal contamination. Indoor controlled environment agriculture is the answer. The more we become victimized by preventable outbreaks of food-borne or water-borne illnesses, the easier it is to convince the public as to the value of creating another way of raising food.

Less developed countries are the most affected by these parasites. Eliminate these parasites and the world would be quite a different place. Literacy rates would go up, infant mortality rates would plummet, and the economic picture would go from grim to self-sustainable.  Eventually, birth rates would also drop, and people would now be able to afford so-called “luxury” items like TVs, homes, and cars.

The vertical farm movement is now well underway, and with it the emergence of a new era in food safety and security, whose mantra is avoidance rather than treatment of easily preventable infectious diseases. Millions of lives and billions of health care dollars will be saved when finally everyone can enjoy fresh vegetables and fruits grown under controlled conditions designed specifically to prevent the spread of these insidious microbial infections. Talk about a good return on investment!   

Long road from farm to fork worsens food outbreaks

In 1970, there were no wild plant species known to be resistant to glyphosate. By 2010, nearly 350 different species of wild plants had become resistant (Science News, July 2, 2011). Weeds were not going to sit there and take it, were they? Of course not. How did this unforeseen consequence of herbicide use happen? It’s a fundamental trait of all living things that random mutations occur at a rather predictable rate. Eventually, given the right situation, it is inevitable that there will be a mutant plant that can withstand increased levels of any given herbicide. They will then replace all the ones that were killed off, and thus the farmer finds himself back at square one. (Our pathogenic microbes have done the same thing regarding the use of antibiotics.) Using higher doses of herbicides the next year solved the weed problem, but only temporarily, and so it went until the weeds were at the same level of resistance as the cash crops. Humans are gifted in creating new problems in attempting to solve old ones. Unintended consequences is now a stock phrase aimed at the introduction of new technologies, no matter what the technology in question.

So what has been the agrochemical industry’s response to weed resistance to herbicides? Answer: genetic modification of crops to resist higher and higher levels of glyphosate. Hmm..., that sounds like the old paradigm. Eventually, the weeds will catch on to this new wrinkle too, and the rest is, well, you guessed it. And that’s not all. Do we know what will happen to all that herbicide when it rains? Sure. It ends up in our estuaries, altering their ecological characteristics beyond recognition. There are ample studies already published on this aspect, and fish tend to be the most sensitive indicator group to the negative effects glyphosate can have on wildlife (e.g., birth defects, endocrine disruption, adverse effects on gene expression). And do we know for sure whether or not it is safe for us to eat produce containing higher levels of herbicides? At the current levels of exposure, glyphosate appears to have caused no detectable increases in certain human diseases (cancers, respiratory distress syndromes, etc.). But what about significantly increased exposure levels? Those “studies” have been done yet. I for one, do not want the consumer public to be the “guinea pig” for that data. We have had enough historical experience with uncontrolled levels of agrochemicals (DDT, malathione, atrazine, etc.) to predict that nothing sustainable will come from the use of higher and higher levels of anything, be it pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. Did I mention atrazine? This particular herbicide has caused more havoc with wildlife (particularly with amphibians) than any other endocrine disruptor. So much so, that its use is now banned throughout Europe. But we still allow its use here in the U.S.. Why? “More studies are needed. “Really? Well, no, but…

So, what can we do? I favor growing most of our plant crops indoors, eliminating completely the use of herbicides and pesticides. No more agricultural runoff. Year-round crop production. No more food miles. Healthy produce available next door to where we live, in our cities. What’s not to like?

So here we are in 2011 and we still have problems with that issue of conveying scientific findings to those who need to know them in a way that does not turn them off. Climate change is such an issue and its causes are the questions at hand. Changes in our environment are inevitable, as Earth’s geological record clearly shows. But the causes for the rate of those changes are not always clear from those records. We have to dig deep to find them. Volcanic eruptions and their carbon dioxide emissions are the prime causes for many abrupt change events in the Earth’s atmosphere. Today, the industrialized world behaves like a single giant volcano, continually spewing gigatonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere and raising havoc with natural systems. My response to the question: “ Who is responsible for the current change in the rate of climate change?” is: “We are”. Dr. Gordon would probably give me an “ataboy” for that one, too. The data are in on climate change, make no mistake. Humans and our fossil fuel burning economies are solely responsible for the rate increase, period.

The “debate” rages on nonetheless. The “reasoning” goes something like this:  If we are the cause of the rate change, then something can and must be done about it, and that change must come with great financial sacrifice for those industries responsible for causing the change. If it can be proven that we are not responsible, then business as usual can proceed, and the industries creating the highest levels of emissions of green house gasses can carry on with business as usual. So, how do you think all this breaks down, politically? You guessed it.

The latest squabble involved a day’s worth of talks at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. The editor of Chemical and Engineering News, Rudy M. Braun, wrote an editorial on it in the latest issue C&E News (September 5, 2011). There were two sessions on climate change, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The early session had experts from NOAA and other august bodies, presenting overwhelming evidence for our forcing the climate towards higher temperatures as the result of increases in CO₂ emissions.  None of them had ties with any industry that had a role in the emissions (power plants, oil producers, petrochemical industries, etc.). Then, in the afternoon, another set of presentations were given, this time by the skeptics of the “anthopogenic theory of climate change”, much to the dismay and horror of the senior editor of CE&N. None of those presenters gave credence to any of the morning presentations, choosing instead to ignore them and express their own opinions as to the causes of climate change. None of them had any evidence to refute the earlier session presenters. It is like hearing a modern repeat of the Richard Owen vs Thomas Huxley debate over the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Owen ended up surgically altering the brain of a gorilla as “proof” that we did not descend from primates resembling the apes. Huxley got hold of another gorilla brain, this one was intact, and proved Owen to be an unscrupulous fraud, driven to cheating by his unshakable religious convictions. (Note: how ironic that Owen should be so wiling to break one of the main foundation concepts of his own religion in its defense: honesty!)

As a direct result of his dishonest, unethical behavior, Owen lost his job and his credibility as a scientist. Darwin’s ideas live on to this day as the founding principle for explaining change over time with regards to all life forms on the planet. There are more recent examples of this kind of thinking, too. The tobacco industry, for example, claims that while cigarettes may be harmful to your health, the evidence is not yet strong enough to warrant removing them from sale. They claim that more studies are needed. Hmm, more studies in the light of the evidence, so far? If cigarettes were classified as a drug, then they would have long ago been banned.

So, in the end, it’s a matter of whose oxen are being gored, so to speak.  Ultimately, as a species we will have to fess up and admit our role in the climate changes now in progress. It is useful to recall that modern soil-based farming consumes huge quantities of fossil fuels.  Yet another reason to consider converting to urban vertical farms as one measure to limit our CO₂ emissions and still have all the things we want in the way of fresh, healthy produce. This concept must be resonating well with the public, since a recent Google search for the term vertical farm conjures up nearly 27 million hits!    

According to their statistics, nearly 1 billion people go to bed hungry every night, and many have not eaten a real meal for months. Local grown food is not an option for these unfortunates, since farming where they live is either impossible, failing or has already failed. One of the most acute situations lies in the Horn of Africa. Drought and political unrest have combined once again to place millions living there in jeopardy of starving to death. It seems that every time we pick up a newspaper, that hot, dry region is in the headlines, and for the same reasons. Relief efforts are ongoing, but have so far proven ineffective. Food drops routinely fall into the hands of ruthless bands of heavily armed Somali ‘police forces’ and end up being sold on the black market. In other places, such as in Haiti, the situation may seem different, since there is no war in progress, but the result is the same. Not enough food, with millions starving and no hope in sight.  Life, regardless of what form it takes, is all about food and water. Getting both of these essentials to everyone every day is the single most important difference between a developed and a less developed country. 

But what if no one went to bed hungry or thirsty? No one. Ever again. What if all countries were able to satisfy all of the basic needs of their own people without any help? No need for foreign food aid programs. Is that an impossible dream? Not when I go to sleep. I see visions of cheap, reliable technologies coming to the fore in the form of drinking water recovery systems using liquid municipal waste, a burgeoning urban food production system, and an energy generating scheme that takes advantage of solar and wind power. I see the new internet, accessed with smart, inexpensive electronic devices, enabling billions of otherwise uninformed and often oppressed people, providing them with freedom to information as to how to access these technologies.

A world literacy has sprung up as the result of these new applications of information sharing that has already led to the overthrow of selfish, despicable leaders and their family-based empires of greed and excess throughout the Middle East, with more despots to fall in the near future, make not doubt about that. Arab Spring has been given a new breath of fresh air, as Libya falls to the freedom-seeking masses as this blog is being written. There is much to do that follows this paradigm shift, and a modern functional infrastructure is on the horizon for these fortunate infant democracies to make sure that they join the rest of the developed world as equal members. Lets hope that by the time they need them, vertical farming will have come into its own, empowering the cities throughout the Middle East to thrive in their dessert worlds, to provide a sustainable life for all who choose to live there . 

Moving agriculture indoors solves many energy problems associated with outdoor farming, but creates others that need to be addressed if this approach is to succeed. In all vertical farms erected so far (See: Rise of the Vertical Farm), LED lighting has played a key role in the design of the growing systems (for more, see here). Most of that application has been for green leafy vegetables. One exception is PlantLab in Holland. They are growing lots of different vegetables, including green peppers and tomatoes, as well as spinach and lettuce.  The issue at hand is ROI, or return on investment. Can a commercial vertical farmer using only LED lights as his energy source for growing crops, make a profit at the end of the day, when competing against outdoor crops of the same kind? The answer lies in the development of prototype vertical farms to allow the testing of new LED lighting fixtures specifically designed for indoor agriculture.

            Lighting an indoor farm with conventional incandescent or fluorescent bulbs has proven inefficient and hence expensive, due to the fact that these kinds of lights give off a wide spectrum of energy, most of which is useless for the plants. Light in the blue (420-460 nm wavelength) and red (640-660 nm wavelength) spectral ranges activates chlorophylls a,b,c, and d, and therefore is ideal for most plant crops. The efficiency of LEDs emitting light at the desired wavelengths for green plants saves enormous amounts of energy, and thus is much more economical in the long run compared to conventional lighting. Manufacturers of LEDs - Philips, General Electric, Lighting Science Group Corporation, and a host of Chinese manufacturers – Zhejiang G-Sun Optoelectronics Co.; Wenzhou Mvanva Photoelectric Technology Co. Ltd.; Shenzhen Baisheng Semiconductor Lighting Co. Ltd; Blue Sea Lighting (Hong Kong) – offer a wide variety of lighting fixtures in an astonishing assortment of blue and red spectra. Every year there are technical meetings held around the world (e.g., Strategies in Light; Let Life Green; LEDs Conference; Illuminating Engineering Society of North America), bringing together all those interested in making LED lights for all uses more efficient, and thus more economical to operate.

Like the increase in computing power and the growth of the hybrid car industry, every year ushers in a new generation of LEDs that costs less to run and that more accurately meets the requirements of our crop plants. It is likely that LED technologies specifically targeted for the indoor agronomist will one day advance to the point where anyone interested in getting in on vertical farming can do so without having to worry about the monthly electric bill eating up his/her profits. That day is right around the corner. Let there be light! LED light!

Floods and droughts are the farmer’s biggest worries. They seem to go hand in hand. Take this year, for example. The flood of 2011 continues to adversely affect the upper Missouri River system and all points south along its drainage basin. Minot, ND is under siege from that flood (in this case, from the Souris River). Its surrounding farmland is being devastated. But it is not just flooding, the worst in US history, that is causing problems. An oil pipeline, owned and operated by Exxon Mobil, traverses some six feet under the bottom of the Yellowstone River, supplying three large refineries in Billings, Montana. On July 2^nd, that pipe broke, due presumably to erosion of the river bottom caused by flood stage waters. Over 42,000 gallons of crude oil flowed into the river before officials noticed the leak. Oil despoiled the banks of the river for miles downstream. All nearby irrigation ditches that use the river for agriculture were closed and cleanup efforts were begun.

Quote:

LAUREL, Mont. (AP) — Teams of federal and state workers fanned out Sunday along Montana's Yellowstone River to gauge the environmental damage from a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline that spewed tens of thousands of gallons of crude into the famous waterway.

An Environmental Protection Agency representative said that only a small fraction of the spilled oil is likely to be recovered.

Agency on-scene coordinator Steve Way said fast flows along the flooding river are spreading the oil over a large area, making it harder to capture. But Way said that also could reduce damage to wildlife and cropland along the river.

A 25-mile long slick of oil had reached as far west as Hysham Saturday night. An estimated 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, spilled Saturday before the flow of oil from the damaged pipeline was stopped.

Duane Winslow with Yellowstone County disaster coordinator Duane Winslow says dozens more ExxonMobil cleanup workers began to arrive in Montana on Sunday morning.

The break near Billings in south-central Montana fouled the riverbank and forced municipalities and irrigation districts Saturday to close intakes. The river has no dams on its way to its confluence with the Missouri River just across the Montana border in North Dakota. It was unclear how far the plume might travel.

Meanwhile in the Southeast, a drought that has been around now for most of the spring and into the summer has raised havoc with livestock and crops.

Quote from USGS website:

Southern US:

The lack of rainfall has resulted in extremely low river and creek levels, with many wells going dry, and has begun to impact southwest Georgia water utilities that rely on groundwater.  The dry weather and hot temperatures have ravaged crops, with a fourth to half of several crops (corn, cotton, peanuts, sorghum, and soybeans) rated in poor to very poor condition across several southeast states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina).  The hard soils and hot temperatures have made successful sprouting of seed difficult and, due to lack of forage, farmers are sending cattle to feedlots or selling cattle.

Texas, too, has had to contend with a drought, that in some places, has limited the amount of drinking water to just one month’s supply. If rain does not come within the next few weeks, then cattle will die and people will have to rely on water drought in from outside sources.

Unintended and certainly unwanted consequences of this year’s extreme weather patterns are not yet over. What’s next?

 For more, see:

 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=55982

and

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/cities-self-sufficient-new-urban-energy-centres

While vertical farms will eventually be able to supply much of the produce for urban centers on demand and at a reasonable cost, the concept does not address the issue of food for those who need it most and cannot afford to shop at Whole Foods, for example. In other words, how will everyone who needs to benefit from this new agricultural strategy be served, if vertical farms need to show a profit at the end of the day? Governments have been the lowest common denominator with respect to basic rights and privileges of their citizenry. The Republic of Korea sees the vertical farm as a transformative principle, whose end point is to allow all Koreans access to a healthy diet at an affordable cost, because the government is the one that initiated the research and development of vertical farming in that region of the world. Korea is ranked ninth in the world economically, and is also one of the most technologically gifted countries, creating the perfect womb for the gestation and birth of vertical farming. Many other countries see the role of government in much the same way (e.g., all of the Scandinavian countries, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Kuwait, Canada), while many others allow economics to sort out who gets and who does not.  Others cannot afford to extend social services to ensuring a constant food supply, due to low GDPs.  Finally, many countries are politically unstable and remain in a state of chaos as this blog is being written.

We all agree that, ultimately, the world would be a much better place if everyone were well-fed and enjoyed a safe and abundant drinking water supply. Vertical farming has the potential to bring that about, but it will need a lot of help from the enabling countries (G12).  The rewards for doing so will be felt almost immediately. As the nutritional status of everyone rises above the poverty level, time spent in school will double, eliminating the single most important cause of poverty: illiteracy.  So, who needs vertical farms? We all do.

-For more on Sustainable Urban Agriculture, join Mitchell Joachim (of Terreform ONE) and me for a great discussion at Proteus Gowanus this Thursday night. 

The vertical farm in Kyoto, Japan (www.Nuvege.com) is housed in a 4 story quanset hut-like building, the rough size of a 747 hangar (2851 square meters) on 4780 square meters of land. Inside, there are many examples of automated growing systems being tested. I have not had the pleasure of visiting that facility-yet. 

PlantLab (www.plantlab.nl/4.0) is located in Den Bosch, The Netherlands. It is currently under construction and is based on a smaller prototype that has been up and running for several years. Everything is grown by LED lighting, and they claim that their experiments, using a wide variety of LED fixtures, give a 3X increase in plant yield using precisely controlled frequencies of light in the visible red and blue spectrum. I have no knowledge as to when they will finish their construction phase and go into full production. All growing will be indoors with no natural light sources. In addition, they are putting it three stories underground, making PlantLab the world’s first and perhaps only “up-side-down” vertical farm!

A demonstration vertical farm of five stories is under construction in Manchester, England. It takes advantage of an abandoned warehouse and the designers plan to raise poultry in addition to the standard variety of indoor vegetables and fruits. I will have the pleasure of speaking at the opening of their vertical farm at the Manchester International Festival this July 17, 2011. 

A vertical farm of five stories is planned for Milwaukee, Wisconsin by Will Allen’s Growing Power organization, in collaboration with the Sweet Water Foundation (aquaponics components). The architect is Allen Washatko, the same architect that designed the Aldo Leopold Center and the International Crane Recovery Center. Both of these ecologically oriented, beautifully executed projects are also in Wisconsin. Milwaukee’s vertical farm is in the final stages of fund-raising.

A three story vertical farm is planned for Jackson, Wyoming. It is in the early stages of fund-raising. Stay tuned for more on this one.

I am truly amazed at how fast the idea of the vertical farm had caught on (some 40 million hits on Google as of June 12, 2011). I congratulate all those associated with these wonderful projects who had the courage and the conviction of their belief that urban agriculture in tall buildings would soon revolutionize the way we eat, and live in cities. More to come on these wonderful projects, and on the many others that will no doubt spring up in the future.

As if all that were not enough to satisfy anyone with a penchant for worrying, when the waters recede, mosquito populations burgeon, giving rise to more than a “just  nuisance” insect. Outbreaks of West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis, and the remote possibility of Dengue Fever are real infectious disease threats that will no doubt keep public health officials on their toes for months to come. Finally, there is an issue that must be addressed if we are to alleviate and/or modify the severity of this kind of disaster in the future. It’s a real simple-minded approach, but in natural settings, it seems to do the trick.  Create a defensive barrier of trees that, in pre-industrial times, used to protect against most modest to moderate floods. Trees hold in soil and absorb water in their root systems. A tree line some ten trees deep on both sides of a river is enough to control most floods. Why not give farmers agricultural credits of some sort (lower rates of farm insurance, etc.) to re-plant those missing trees, and give Ol’ Man River a helping hand for once, instead of trying to construct more levees that don’t seem to be doing exactly what they were constructed to do.   

So how do clouds form? Hmm, you say. Water evaporates at the equator then rises in the air and condenses into clouds that then drift over the land, rising higher and cooling down even more, eventually causing them to release all that water vapor in the form of rain, snow, sleet, and hail. I would give that essay half credit. It’s a bit more complex that that. Clouds do form over the ocean, particularly near the equator where its good and hot, but just evaporating ocean water into the air is not enough to form a cloud. Something else has to happen, too. The water vapor needs to condense around minute particles of dust. No problem, you say, the air is filled with the stuff! Roger that. But, the process requires yet another component from a very unlikely source, coccolithic phytoplankton (small, flat colonial algae).  What the heck is that, you say? Why, they are the secret life form behind cloud formation, at least for the clouds that form over the world’s oceans. They secrete a sulfur compound called dimethyl sulfide that they synthesize as a waste product during their own version of photosynthesis. It is a volatile compound and rapidly gets into the air by wave action. The sunlight then breaks it apart into methane (a greenhouse gas) and sulfur. The sulfur combines with the oxygen in the air forming sulfur dioxide (SO₂), the same stuff that comes out to the exhaust pipes of cars and trucks. But wait, there’s more. Sulfur dioxide then combines with more oxygen, forming sulfate (SO₄). Sulfate is a solid, and gloms onto the water vapor-laden dust particles. Then the magic happens. Sulfate particles on the dust “melt” from the water vapor there forming sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄)! That’s right, an acid. That is part of the reason why pure rainwater is slightly acidic. Sulfuric acid is hygroscopic, meaning that it “loves” water. As the result, the dust particle can now accumulate much more water vapor, enabling it to finally form a cloud. So, it turns out that a marine algae is in large part responsible for getting the water to the land. Clouds form over land too, by the same mechanism, only this time it’s due to air pollution from combustion engines. Ever wonder why it rains more over populated areas, and usually on the weekends? Automobile exhausts build up over the week and culminate in rain clouds that spoil our picnics, ball games, etc.

Ok, so far so good, but where does the rain go after it gets to the land? Well, it either soaks into the ground, or washes into the nearest stream or river. If it has rained really hard for a long time, then it saturates the land and then runoff, i.e., floods, happen. That is what exactly is happening in Missouri and Tennessee as this blog is being written. Fifteen inches of rain in three days will do it every time! Farmland is laid waste, tons of topsoil is lost, and all of the agricultural products (herbicides, pesticides and oxygen-depleting nitrogen fertilizers) wash into the rivers, then eventually into the mighty Mississippi and finally into the Gulf of Mexico.  In 2011, we will once again experience a millennium-level flood (three other destructive floods occurred in 1993, 2007, 2008) that will cost America dearly in terms of our most important resource, land; it is irreplaceable. Soil forms very slowly and requires an intact ecosystem to do so. None of the rivers in the Midwest have protective forested banks. They have all been replaced with the economics of corn and soybean.  We suffer from agricultural runoff at the mouth of all of our rivers. The result is the trashing of highly productive coastal estuaries; creating “dead zones” that refuse to go away. We import 80 percent of our seafood as the consequence of our penchant for plowing up every last plot of land along some of the world’s most fertile floodplains. Hmm,…..floodplains. Hey, wait a minute, I think we are onto something, here. Farming on flood plains has always been a high risk/high reward activity. The rewards seem worth it until the floods trash the farm, preventing further use for decades. Lets re-think farming and land use in general. We have everything to gain.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/vertical-farming-solution-growing-global-food-insecurity/story?id=13463122

and

http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2011/04/27/farming-in-skyscrapers-fantasy-or-necessity/

farm up!

So how can we sure that the shrimp that came from Thailand, or the Chilean snap peas, were produced under the same rigorous standards that we demand of our locally grown crops? The 2008 melamine-in-infant-formula scandal in China placed the world on red alert for contaminants in everyday food items, and made us all aware that when we eat at home or in a restaurant, we place a lot of trust in food handlers and manufacturers of value-added products, and it’s often misplaced trust at that! 

Prevention of contamination with toxins and pathogenic microbes of fresh or processed crops and meats comes under the jurisdiction of the USDA. It deserves a lot of credit for maintaining a high standard of excellence in food safety, especially when we consider the complexity of our food supply. But keeping tabs on imported goods is another thing all together. Imagine how hard it would be to inspect every round of imported provolone from Italy, each farm-raised freshwater prawn from Thailand, or every beefsteak tomato from Mexico. Right. That is just not going to happen. We cannot even inspect our own food supply the way we would like. Expense is the reason, and cost/benefit studies clearly favor methods that prevent outbreaks (best practices standards for growing crops) rather than by employing costly online inspection technologies in an attempt to detect harmful agents once they enter the food system.

Nothing is foolproof, so the occasional food-borne outbreak occurs from time to time. Some outbreaks are unpreventable, while others can be avoided by simply changing the setting in which a given crop is grown. Among the more memorable ones, the spinach/E. coli-0157:H7 outbreak in 2006, and the 2009 peanut butter/Salmonella typhimurium outbreak (largest food recall in U.S. history) attest to the fact that, given the rate of demand for a staggering variety of food items, breaches in food safety are bound to happen. But there are two kinds of problems; those that occur outdoors (E. coli-0157:H7)—currently hard to prevent, and those that occur indoors (peanut butter)—easier to prevent. Now, to keep animal droppings laden with E. coli from coming in contact with fresh produce, all we would have to do is create  “barrier agriculture.” Indoor farming would solve that problem once and for all. And, oh, by the way, it solves the food security problem, too, if we are at all worried about mischief on the farm from some would-be agro-terrorist! In short, indoor farming allows us to answer the question: Where have you been? 

Take tomatoes for example. I live in New Jersey, and “Jersey” beefsteak tomatoes harvested in late August or early September can be spectacular. In their prime, they are firm, juicy, and taste wonderful. Interestingly, the chief factor in creating such mouth-watering taste is stress. That’s right, stress. So, if stress puts an actor on ‘red alert’ and prepares them for what ever may come, how does stress make a tomato taste better than its blissfully content cousins?

Horticulturists have known for years that you can grow just about anything in plain water and a few dissolved nutrients. Hydroponics is the result. Everyone also “knows” that greenhouse tomatoes are inferior to soil-grown ones. But that was then. Today, we know a lot more about what drives the market when it comes to almost anything, including tomatoes. Today, we can grow greenhouse tomatoes to taste as good as they look. Over their brief life span, tomatoes accumulate sugars (sucrose and fructose, mostly), and a variety of organic compounds called flavonoids. These complex molecules give plants their colors and often contribute to their flavor, as well. If a given plant experiences too much water, then these compounds are diluted, and although the tomato looks great (red and plump), it has lost its superior flavor. Taking away the water at just the right time before harvesting produces the best results from a consumer’s perspective. Outdoors, this is hard to do, especially when it comes to rain. Keeping track of the weather near the end of the growing season enables the farmer to have a better idea as to how tasty his or her crops will be. The only people who seem to know all about this sort of thing are the wine makers.

“Noble rot” is what mature grapes are referred to as by the growers. No one would ever think of eating this desiccated looking fruit. They are emaciated, crusty and covered with yeast. To the casual observer the grapes look ‘half-dead’. But, after they are harvested and the precious juice is pressed out of them, a miracle happens; wines of exquisite taste and beauty often flow out of the oaken fermentation casks. Not every year yields the best tasting wines. Vintage years become established and everything before and afterward for that varietal is compared to them. The wine makers meticulously track these environmental conditions by the minute throughout the growing season, so they can predict with some accuracy whether or not that year will be a vintage one. If wine grapes were to be grown indoors under strict conditions that mimicked the weather conditions that resulted in vintage years, then one would expect that the wines that flowed from that effort would also be equally superior. In short, it’s about the stress a plant experiences that makes the difference when it comes to taste. I learned all most all of this from my conversations with experts like Jenn Nelkin of Gotham Greens, right here in New York City, and from many of the staff at the University of Arizona at the Center for Controlled Environment Agriculture. Based on what we now know, perhaps even Charlie the Tuna would have tasted better if he were being chased by a great white just before being caught! 

Farm up!

We humans fall into rather predictable patterns of behavior based on our extensive lists of likes and avoidances. In fact, marketing research depends on this trait for its very livelihood. Favorite colors, style of furniture, choice of mates, even down to the list of options we include in the new car we just negotiated for at the dealership. Just consider politics. Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, Communist, Liberal, Bleeding Heart Liberal; all these stereotypical people can be described fairly accurately based on their past behaviors and the use of sophisticated data mining technologies. I once saw an amazing presentation about the fragmentation of whole towns classifiable by political persuasions based solely on the kinds of stores one encountered on various “miracle miles”. I can’t remember the details, but you would know right off which side of town you were on simply by reading the brand names on the outlet malls and restaurants and the vehicles parked outside them: Birkenstocks vs. Cabelas, Burger King vs. StarBucks, The Gap vs. Neiman Marcus; Dodge pickup trucks (of course with the 12 gauge shotgun on the rear seat window rack) vs. Prius (of course with the bumper sticker: “My son is an honors student at Podunk U.). It is amazing in some ways how we all run true to form, and apparently based on our proclivity for advertising who we are on just about everything we own, we want everyone else to know it too, probably so we can attract like-minded folk to our side of the fray. I call it heard behavior.

Yet, it is the other side of us that intrigues me even more than our reliable behaviors side.  Here’s what I mean. If I gave you a choice of two options, which one would you pick? 1. You control everything; 2. You control nothing. It’s an all-or- nothing-at-all proposition. No real choice here, really. I venture to guess that even the most reticent, curmudgeonly, persnickety old codger would pick the one we would all chose, if of course, we had a choice like that to begin with. It’s that kind of thing that absolutely baffles me when it comes to farming. We all know the universal dream of farmers; to control the weather! A perfect set of temperature and precipitation events throughout the growing season means bumper crops all around. Even non-farmers like myself understand that. I fish for trout, so I understand what good and bad weather can do to a season. It’s exactly the same with farming. Droughts, floods, and other severe, unpredictable, natural events can ruin a farmer’s dream in a New York minute. Hail routinely knocks the grain off wheat plants just before harvesting; locust eat a crop to the ground just as fast, and a plethora of plant pathogens trashes billions of dollars worth of harvest each and every year. So what is taking us so long to shift over to a totally controllable farming strategy of indoor crop production? So ask the farmers of the world what they can completely control and they will just laugh (loudly). Are you kidding, they say. The only thing I can control is when I get up in the morning (that is if the rooster gets up before me!). Each day is different and farmers live in fear of the worst and pray for the best.

According to Wikipedia, All Or Nothing At All was Frank Sinatra’s pick for his historic audition with Tommy Dorsey and the song went on to become an American Song Book classic. It is my pick too, for the way we should behave given the choice! I choose All. Indoor farmers do too!

Take what happened last week off the coast of Japan. Everyone who lives along the Pacific Ring of Fire is aware of the possibility of earthquakes. They occur all the time. But no one expected one as destructive as the one that occurred last week on March 11. It was so severe in magnitude that it threw the Earth itself off its axis and changed the actual time it takes our planet to complete a rotation. The aftermath was as horrific as the event itself and lots of it was caught on video. The tsunami and the destruction it caused was unimaginable, yet there it was for the world to see. Forty-foot waves washed over the land and obliterated every structure as if they were children’s toys being scooped up and thrown to the ground by some monster, shattering everything into unrecognizable debris. Thousands of human lives were lost and millions more were permanently displaced from their homes and loved ones. I am uncomfortable just writing about it, and I want to express my deepest empathy and sorrow for all those who died or who suffered through this tragic natural disaster.

Regrettably, there is a long-term aftermath to all this, too. I am not referring to the potential meltdown of a nuclear reactor. Rather, I am thinking about what will happen to the entire affected region of farmland surrounding Sendai, now that it can no longer be used due to the salt water and other pollutants left behind in the soil by the tsunami. Japan is nearly 80 percent forested, so farmland is precious. Losing even an acre is significant. Thousands of acres were trashed that day. How will Japan deal with that?

Developing food production systems that are not affected by adverse environmental events and that are located throughout the built landscape would ensure a steady supply of locally grown crops and could be replaced if and when another tsunami should wash them away.  I am sure that Sendai will re-build, but the livelihoods of its farmers are not assured just because they will be able to live in their new homes.  Controlled environment agriculture as a permanent alternative to the traditional way of farming is worth looking into as a means of offering employment to those who still want to farm but cannot due to these extraordinary circumstances. Given Japan’s incredible technologically gifted brain trust of engineers, architects, and scientists, what is suggested here could happen much sooner than later. The opportunity is there for the taking.

In this regard, the February 28^th, 2011 issue had a small piece on page 26 that really caught my attention. It was about the connection between the unrest in the Mideast and the fertilizer industry. Agriculture is big business in those desert countries, with Egypt leading the way in soil-based crop production. According to a 2009 report by the European Commission (EuroStat), “Among the MPCs, Egypt is the main producer, with18.0 million tonnes produced on average each year, followed by Morocco, Algeria and Syria with 5.8, 4.7 and 3.0 million tonnes respectively”. The flooding regimes of the Nile traditionally brought fertile topsoil from The Sudan to upper Egypt, enabling that country to sustain a farming tradition dating back to the time of the pharaohs. But everything changed in 1970 with the completion of the high dam at Aswan, forcing farmers along the world’s longest river to rely instead on nitrogen-phosphorous-potassium-based fertilizers; NPK for short. The nitrogen components of NPK are typically a mixture of ammonia-based nitrogen compounds (e.g., ammonium nitrate), and urea, the very same compound we excrete in our urine each and every day. In the Mideast, phosphorous comes from enormous surface deposits in the north of Jordan, while the organic nitrogen compounds (mostly ammonium nitrate) are derived from oil by a complex synthetic process known as the Haber-Bosch process (1918). It was originally used to make explosives, and modern mining operations still use it, particularly the coal industry. It would be a gross understatement to point out that oil is plentiful in many places throughout the Mideast, Libya included. Hence, there is a natural link between farming and the petrochemical industry. In fact, Egypt has five major fertilizer manufacturing plants, that together produce some 7 million tons of nitrogen-based product per year, making them self-sufficient for that critical ingredient (Société El-Nasr d'Engrais et d'Industries Chimiques (Semadco), Abu Qir Fertilizer and Chemical Industries Company, Abu-Zaabal Fertilizer and Chemical Company, Société Financiere et Industrielle d'Egypte, and El-Nasr Company). Virtually every one of these Egyptian companies has foreign partners based in Europe, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom that oversee the production of these essential compounds. While things appear to have calmed down in that country, because of the civil unrest that has spread to Libya, most of the executives and many of their middle management teams that run the Libyan oil industry have fled back to their home countries. Libya’s oil production has come to a dead stop. As a result, those facilities in Egypt dependent on Libyan oil have either shut down completely, or are significantly scaled back in production quotas for urea and other agriculture-related compounds. When either of these essential industries will resume to full capacity is problematic, at best. So, the take home lesson here is that when one essential industry fails, it sends ripples, and sometimes even big waves, out over the troubled waters of commerce, affecting all other dependent commercial enterprises. We only become aware of the industrial ecological relationships that they share in times of strife or economic downturns.

In the meantime, spring rapidly approaches and planting must commence soon or there will be nothing to harvest. In most experts’ opinion, this will be a disastrous year for crops for all Mideast countries. Should things go along as they have over the last 3 months, millions of already disadvantaged people will continue to feel the heavy weight of starvation and many will die from it. Of course, another way of dealing with the food production system, controlled environment agriculture, could provide at least a temporary solution to the food crisis for the entire area. Developing a M.A.S.H-like emergency response system for crop production inside specially constructed (i.e., modular and highly transportable) greenhouses would allow for humanitarian interventions at least for refugees that are forced out of their countries by political turmoil. As catastrophes linked to non-sustainable systems of soil-based agriculture continue to increase (unpredictable adverse weather patterns, civil unrest and war), waiting to see what happens next flies in the face of a strong public health desire to alleviate suffering. We must change the entire approach to how we get food on the table or our species will start to resemble just one more of Earth’s many failed ‘crops’.  

Take the example of the use of herbicides; atrazine and glyphosate (Roundup) in specific. These are two powerful chemicals and commonly used throughout the Midwest to keep native plant species (they are called weeds by the agronomists) from invading the wheat, corn and soybean fields, and from eating up all that yummy fertilizer that the farmer sprayed on his/her fields at spring planting time. It should also be mentioned that atrazine is banned in Europe due to its strong association with teratogenic effects in cold-blooded vertebrates, especially frogs. So, as time goes on, perhaps 10-20 years of use of herbicides, the weeds eventually fight back by random selection, producing a few individuals with a higher tolerance for that herbicide than their weaker cousins. The next thing the farmer knows, they have a weed problem again, big time, and yields go down. So, the agro-chemical manufacturers produce genetically modified crops (so-called GM/GMO varieties) in the lab that are significantly more tolerant of glyphosate than last years crops. Did I mention that this industry also produces both of these plant killers? The following year the farmer, now armed with more resistant crop strains, applies a bigger dose of herbicide and with good results. But, by now I think you can see where all this is going. You guessed it! The weeds refuse to go away and up rises another mutant with an even higher tolerance for Roundup. (See here for an interctive graphis detailing the Roundup-resistant areas in the US). Hm, sounds like our current problem with the pharmaceutical industries and antibiotic resistance. Oh, well, history does in fact repeat itself, at least when it comes to natural selection. The farmer says, ‘Looks like I‘ve got myself a real problem here’. So goes the Herbicides vrs. Weeds war. In the end, who will win? Right again. The weeds, that’s who. Oh, and one more thing. When it rains, (I mean real rains and floods), down the drain go the agrochemicals, eventually ending up in our estuaries and loading them with nutrients from unused portions of fertilizers. What’s more, the nitrogen component of fertilizers scavenges all the dissolved oxygen in those brackish coastal waters so the larval fish and mollusks suffocate. Not good. So what can we do about all this? Forget herbicides and fertilizers and switch to an indoor, herbicide and pesticide free farming strategy. If we do not, then some day we might have to learn how to prepare our evening meals using weeds as the basis for all our vegetarian dishes. I would like to pass on the daisies and crabgrass salad.

For now I'd like to set aside the fact that this group seems like an ideal candidate to partner with for bringing VF to the mainstream and focus on the amazing lecture Mr. Pawlyn delivers to a full TED theater. 

Hope you enjoy(ed) it!  And Mr. Pawlyn, if you're reading this, get in touch with Dr. Dickson Despommier--I'm sure you two would have a lot to talk about!

Check out her full book review here.  And remember to "Like" us on Facebook for daily VF-relevant updates. 

Oh, and Happy 2011!!!

Oh, and one final thing: if you're still searching for that perfect gift for that special somone, Dickson Despommier's The Vertical Farm will be sure to satisfy .

A country's meat consumption increases with its GDP per capita, but what happens to a country when foreign bankers make cold, hard wagers on its future food prices? The Food and Water Watch, a consumer NGO headquartered in Washington DC, published this report in November, 2009, which provides a startling look at the connection between Wall Street's investments (read: speculation) in the future prices of commodities--including food--and the sharp rise in global hunger attributable to higher food prices.

The FAWW explains why a commodities future market exists at all:

On the most basic level, the commodity futures market is a way for farmers to avoid having to sell their crops at harvest times, when the supply is high and the price is low. Instead, farmers can market their crops before they are harvested through a futures contract to lock in a price they hope will be better, or at least more predictable, than what they would get at harvest time. On the flip side, the buyers of agricultural products can ensure they have a steady supply of crops like corn or wheat at a certain price. The commodity futures market allows both the seller (farmer) and buyer (food manufacturer) to reduce their risk from volatile prices and uncertain supplies — allowing both to hedge their bets.

But, as the report explains and similar to the abuse we have come to expect from Wall Street, the regulations that were supposed to keep commodities speculation in check were largely undone or sidestepped over the past twenty years. With housing investments and other typical safe harbors run dry from misuse, the commodities markets soaked up cash by the boatloads. Every two-bit investment house scanned the horizon for a place to profit, and an inordinate amount of money landed in the commodities markets, where a billion dollar investment in the future price of, say, wheat, has a potentially life-changing affect in how much bread the 3 billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day can afford. So far from this being a place where Farmer Joe pre-sells his crop of corn to Food Processor Jack, now Investor Bernie can buy the crop with no intention of ever actually collecting X amount of corn. The outcome is that investors profit, but producers and consumers all along the food chain suffer. Why? Because Investor Bernie was never interested in eating--or doing anything at all--with the crop of corn he purchased. Instead, he's introduced an artificial demand for foods, which naturally raises their prices, which cuts out a huge segment of the market that could barely scrape by pre-price-hike.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler told the U.S. Senate in February, 2009, “I believe that increased speculation in energy and agricultural products has hurt farmers and consumers.”

It's like professional baseball players playing high school ball for a while just to bolster their own stats. In this case, the stats are profits (for smaller investors too, all of whom have handed their money over to big investment houses in expectation of a nice return) and if the high school teams give up too many home runs, or if the pitchers have too high an ERA, then some of the players die. It's an unfair game, and the rules seem extreme and sometimes arbitrary, but so it goes for human life; and those investors who enter this benign market to pillage the inexperienced are nimrods--their infantile pursuit of self-interest will prove to be nothing more than a hedonist's Guide to Dying.

But maybe the problem is deeper, maybe it lies in the tangled web of life, money, politics and appearances. Whatever the root, the hunger problem is a real problem in my eyes, and the best I can do is try to fix it. That doesn't mean betting on the price of corn next week.

"Only when the last tree is cut, only when the last river is polluted, only when the last fish is caught, will they realise that you can't eat money." - Native American proverb

I believe the world largely functions in accordance to the economic idea of players in markets responding to incentives.  Incentives can take all sorts of forms, but the most common demoninator as I see it from my New York City life, is money.  Most people respond strongly to financial incentives (when they know about them).  So, grocery stores stock fifteen different types of 12-grain bread because every bread maker has found customers.  And these shoppers make it worth the grocery store's while to carry all those varieties of 12-grain through their purchasing dollars (two options: either their bread decisions are a crap-shoot, or they're knowledgeable and discerning enough to prefer one brand over the other). With enough buyers, I guess there's room for five, ten, twenty different players competing for the same dough.  The TV options at the Holiday Inn is a less interesting case.  Hotel guests have different viewing preferences, and the available options need to be sufficiently varied to meet most guests' wishes.  Especially now that people are so conditioned to having exactly the kind of entertainment they want, when they want it, hotels really have to meet a bare minimum otherwise they'll just be passed over by the discerning traveler.  Entertainment, with Netflix instant download and its ilk, is a rapidly evolving beast, and here is not the place for an extensive analysis, although I'd love to try it.  Silly Bandz is something that really gets me.  Three years ago, no one had heard of these funny shaped, colorful rubberbands.  That's becasue they didnt' exist.  Today, this arguably completely useless product with literally zero marketing dollars behind it has made Robert Croak, Silly Bandz' founder, unquestionably a millionaire.  This is one of those things that when I see someone wearing it or see it being sold in a store, it boggles my mind.  I just don't get it.  But still, my best market-player-incentive reasoning goes something like this: there's clearly a market for silly rubberbands (either it was latent or it is the same sort of market that Tamagotchi left a while ago; that is, the "schoolyard fad" market); a player, Mr. Croak, recognized that people would give him money if he gave them silly rubberbands; he put his money where his mouth was; and viola!  Not very scientific, but it at least makes for a clean storyboard in my head. 

I recently got to thinking (again) about the role that government plays in the market-player-incentive model that I so often call upon.  As it affects vertical farming--and more broadly, the urban agriculture movement--the government seriously undercuts large-scale efforts by subsidizing urban ag's competition.  The 2007 Farm Bill only deepened the government's ties with Big Ag, which is obviously not a good thing, unless you think cheap food for the consumer is the most important metric, which I don't believe.  But while I was thinking about the government's food alms, I wondered where else they're spending our money.

War is one place.  (I really don't understand how the government gets away with as much violence as it does, especially after watching the Matt Lauer/George Bush interview the other night.)  Then I found this Global Issues blog breakdown of the war budget of the USA compared to the rest of the world. 

But my two favorite are the EcoSalon article discussing the "Ten Least Green Government Subsidies" and the Visual Economics article "How Countries Spend Their Money."  Check 'em out and let me know what you think.  For me, understanding how the world is the way it is becomes much easier when you know where our tax dollars go.  Let's not chalk up our bewilderment to a lack of knowledge.  The information is all out there.  Sometimes it's simply our responsibility to go inform ourselves.  

"The goal is to provide safe, fresh food around the globe in a way Despommier says is impossible with modern farming. He acknowledges that getting to that future might be expensive, but he considers it a challenge akin to the space race...'What could be more worth spending money on, in my view, than to try to get everybody safe food and water?' Despommier asked."

Read about it, and watch a virtual video tour, here.

1BOG is doing some amazing things with solar right now.  But the subsidy landscape is extremely unfavorable to renewables.  I'll hold back on my thoughts about subsidies in general, but I think it's pretty clear that this game isn't even close to fair right now, so it would be unrealistic to expect that solar will dominate like so many people (including me) think it should.  Maybe someday it will, but not soon.  If investor Jim Chanos is right, and oil producing companies are secretly running low on oil, then maybe that day is nearer than I expect.  But I mean, that day is bound to come eventually, right?  And is it really that hard to see that if governments continue to subsidize a non-renewable resource, then when that day comes, and we've exhausted that resource, we'll then need an alternative source capable of producing energy at the same level we were used to before?  And that if we keep playing our hand this way, we're setting ourselves up for a crisis, completely avoidable if we'd only invest (subsidize) as much in "energies of the future" as we do in "energies of the 18th Century"?  Seems like a fairly straightforward chain of events to me. 

Anyway, this grphic from 1BOG should be very eye-opening for those who think solar is "too expensive."  It's really a matter of Americans and the world not understanding the true cost of fossil fuels.  We don't realize, for example, that the price at the pump is only a fraction of oil's true cost.  We pay extra through taxes that go straight to oil companies under the term "subsidies."  Politicians, for all the "talk" they sell us, seem to be doing much less green "walking."  I hope we, the people, make it clear to them that it's in each one of their best interest to start walking. 

"The Vertical Farm – Feeding The World In The 21st Century" by Dr. Dickson Despommier is a book you will read, and then, you will read it again. It is a book that could begin a revolution. Let's hope it does...[Despommier] has written a very readable book that is easily accessible to subject novice and expert alike.

After you read the review, watch the video Anthony Crain created showing pictures of all sorts of vertical farm renderings.  (And put some music on, because the video's silent.)

In case you'd rather read the trascript than listen, find it below:

Chris Hill: One of the things that you write about is that vertical farms will allow us to eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides. When I hear something like that, I can't help but think of chemical companies like Monsanto (NYSE: MON) or fertilizer producers like Potash (NYSE: POT), Mosaic (NYSE: MOS), Agrium (NYSE: AGU). They can't be happy about that.

Dr. Dickson Despommier: (Laughs.) Well, in the outset, I would agree with you because we have thought a lot about this, too. We are not in the business of putting other people out of business, and I don't see this as a disruptive technology in terms of Monsanto or other large corporations like Cargill. They could make other things besides what they are making now and make just as much money. For instance, they could make chemically defined diets for these plants and charge just as much for that as they now have to charge for the production of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer. So a switch on a dime, so to speak, for their product, using their chemical know-how to produce well-defined, toxin-free, heavy-metal-free food, I think they would end up as the winners; they would end up as the heroes rather than the goats that they are right now, unfortunately.

Hill: So no one from big agriculture is leaning on you? You are not getting late night phone calls from ConAgra (NYSE: CAG) or Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM)?

Despommier: Not yet, and in fact, I made these presentations to the United States Department of Agriculture, where I thought I would have to use a bullet-proof vest in order to go in the room, and they not only welcomed me with open arms, but they actually lamented the fact that they hadn't thought of doing something like this sooner.

So the reasons why the United States Department of Agriculture is concerned is that they enable other countries in their own agricultural situations to go forward. There are lots of countries out there that are in great need of agricultural solutions. Just today, for instance, I saw something on Yahoo! News, which is, of course, the ultimate setting for news stories, right? There is an enormous outbreak of locusts right now in Australia, of all places, eating up all these wonderful crops that they finally had a good year for. Now that is not going to happen when you grow your food indoors. You can actually lock out locusts quite nicely.

The other thing you can do with this too is to keep out plant diseases, so there is no need for pesticides or herbicides. If you can make this food supply secure indoors, if we can do it for people isolated in hospitals that have their immune systems compromised or that have an infectious disease that you don't want to catch, if we can do that easily now in health-care settings, we can certainly give some health care to our plants that we eat as well.

Hill: What do you think the timing is looking like and do you have a couple of finalists, for lack of a better word, in terms of a location for this pilot project?

Despommier: We actually do. I was sort of hoping that you would have asked that question, and I am glad you did because we have been in discussions now, and when I say "we," there are some obvious associates of mine as well who have gotten together and said this would make an interesting company if we could parlay this into a consulting firm that would teach people how to proceed in terms of making indoor food production a livelihood for them.

We have been fortunate to be invited to the table in Jordan and Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Khatar. In those situations, where those countries have virtually no soil to speak of to feed their people, and still great need for food security and food safety issues, those would be at the top of my list, for those that are going to start to do this first. But I have also been in touch with the cities of Chicago and Seattle and Portland and San Francisco and New York City, and I haven't received any flak from those people at all. They have all been enthusiastic about the concept. It's just that generating the funding for this would be the biggest difficulty. And Newark, I should have mentioned Newark also. Newark has expressed deep interest in wanting to do this.

Hill: All right, before we let you get away, we have to wrap up with a round of buy, sell, or hold.

Despommier: Uh-oh.

Hill: No, this is going to be fun; you'll love this.

Despommier: OK.

Hill: Let's start with the fact that you have been a professor at Columbia for more than 35 years, so buy, sell, or hold pop quizzes.

Despommier: Oh, you mean as a student or as a professor? (Laughs.)

Hill: As a professor.

Despommier: Oh, I'd buy them. I would buy them.

Hill: Is that something that is never going to go away?

Despommier: That is never going to go away. How else do you judge your own success at teaching, and in other words, you get feedback from the students this way? You don't often grade them, but you have to give them.

Hill: All right, this is the biggest scientific challenge confronting New York City today. Buy, sell, or hold bedbugs.

Despommier: Aaah, now you are into a deep area of interest of mine. I am actually a trained parasitologist. I would buy bedbug control. I wouldn't buy the bedbugs themselves, but I would certainly buy controls that actually worked. And we are still looking for those because it is an intractable problem of dense populations.

Hill: You can buy the controls, but from what I have read about the problem, right now I am buying bedbugs, because they look like they are not going anywhere.

Despommier: I see your point, all right. If I am a bedbug, I'd buy into this one, no problem.

Hill: This is really big on Facebook. Buy, sell, or hold Farmville.

Despommier: Oh, I am going to buy that in an instant. I will buy that in a second, and I will incorporate the vertical farm concept into it, and we'll ride off into the sunset on that one. If you throw in Lego, I will do that one, too.

Hill: Perfect. And finally, this is a license plate motto that has a lot of people scratching their heads. Buy, sell, or hold New Jersey as "The Garden State."

Despommier: (Laughing) I happen to live in New Jersey, and when we gave our presentation to Newark, we actually used the motto, "Bring the garden back to the Garden State," but of course we would bring it back in another form. I would leave the Garden State as a natural wonderland and incorporate vertical farming, so I would buy the state, but I would convert it back to what it used to be before we got there.

Hill: Congratulations, Doctor. I think that is the first time anyone has used the words "New Jersey" and "natural wonderland" in the same sentence.

WNYC's Brian Lehrer recently hosted Dickson Despommier to discuss the Vertical Farm, both the book and the broader idea.  It's a solid 10-minute conversation very worth listening to.  An interesting side note: Brian Lehrer was a student of Dr. Despommier's while he was earning his Master's degree in Public Health from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. 

Pretty cool stuff.  As Cliff Kuang has put it, whether or not we ever see real-life versions of these amazing renderings, the fact that they're out there is a hugely positive thing. He says:

Now, I'd argue that part of the reason why [small scale urban agriculture projects] capture our imagination is the very existence of far-out ideas like vertical farms. Those crazy concepts give imaginative scale to your daily life. And that, in itself, is valuable, because it connects something mundane with something grand--and that's good for motivating people to change.

What do you think?  Does vertical farming inspire you?  Share your comments in the soon-to-exist comments section.  Or visit our Facebook page and post something on our wall.

We wanted to build a new environmentally-friendly town where the environment is considered as an important part of everyday life.  We propose "Spiral Garden System": a public sustainable place like a green heart, easy to maintain and self-sufficient, created by a joint population that will stimulate social interaction among neighbors...To sum it up, we propose an ecological project in a way to give sustainable change to daily city lives, where humans and nature can coexist.

I love this design for a few reasons.  First of all, like all vertical farm renderings, it's visually very attractive.  I'd be proud to have something like this in my city.  Secondly, I like that the designers scaled the size down to something very realistic.  This is the approximate size of where I think we need to start; work out all the kinks inherent in vertical farming on a five or six story building before launching a massive project.  We need to remember the lessons of Biosphere 2.  Thirdly, I love the spiral aspect.  I'm a huge believer in bio-mimicry, and the spiral is one of nature's best creations.  It just might be the route we'll have to take to address human weight concerns when actually developing the first vertical farm. Calls to mind Plantagon as well. 

Read more about this story and the IIDA 2010 competition at DesignBloom. 

 “Despommier’s…ingenious idea…could ultimately ease the world’s food, water, and energy crises.”

                                                            --Huffington Post

“Despommier has quickly become a central figure in what could be a worldwide revolution in food production and waste reduction.”

                                                            --Scientific American

“A captivating argument that will intrigue general readers and give policymakers and investors much to ponder.”

                                                            --Kirkus Reviews

“A visionary known the world over, Despommier believes that the ‘vertical farm is the keystone enterprise for establishing an urban-based ecosystem’ and for ‘restoring balance between our lives and the rest of nature.”

                                                            --Booklist (starred review)

Renowned Columbia University professor Dr. Dickson Despommier has the vision to change society as we know it. Lauded around the world, for developing the concept and championing the idea of vertical farming, Despommier now presents his revolutionary ideas in his new book, THE VERTICAL FARM: Feeding the World in the 21^st Century.

As we face the challenges of rapid population growth, climate change, and dwindling resources, it’s clear that we need to find alternative sources of food, water, and energy to meet the world’s ever-growing demands for these necessities. Moving our agricultural systems into high-rise city buildings, says Despommier, would transform the way we grow fruit, vegetables, poultry, and fish, and alleviate many of the serious environmental problems we are currently facing.

Vertical farms will allow us to:

• Grow food 24 hours a day, 365 days a year 
• Protect crops from unpredictable and harmful weather
• Re-use water collected from the indoor environment
• Provide jobs for local residents
• Eliminate use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides
• Drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels
• Prevent crop loss due to disease or pests
• Stop agricultural runoff

Despommier has been discussing the construction of the world’s first vertical farm with city and national governments around the world, and vertical farming projects have already been under consideration in some U.S. cities, including Newark, N.J and Chicago, Illinois.

In the tradition of the bestselling The World Without Us, Despommier’s THE VERTICAL FARM is an important, original landmark work. With stunning illustrations and clear and entertaining writing, it is destined to become a classic.

THE VERTICAL FARM was recently featured in the 40^th anniversary issue of Smithsonian magazine. Despommier’s work is also featured at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum as part of the Why Design Now? exhibit.

DR. DICKSON DESPOMMIER spent thirty-eight years as a professor at Columbia University, where he won the Best Teacher Award six times and received the national 2003 American Medical Student Association Golden Apple Award for teaching. The author is a seasoned public speaker, having addressed professional audiences at leading universities throughout the world. He will be speaking at multiple upcoming engagements, including TEDx in Washington D.C. and TEDx in Chicago. Despommier is a veteran of appearances on The Colbert Report and The Discovery Channel. He recently spoke at the TED Conference, Pop!Tech, and the World Science Festival and has been invited by the governments of China, India, Mexico, Jordan, Canada, and Korea to work on environmental problems. He is one of the visionaries featured at the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology. Despommier lives in Fort Lee, NJ.

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