course material

1. When you hear the word “farm,” chances are you picture
When you hear the word “farm,” chances are you picture rolling hills in the country covered
with cows and cornstalks. But some scientists, engineers and city planners say the farms of
the future could rise straight into the air. They imagine them in skyscrapers in the world’s
most populated cities.It might sound far-fetched, but in fact, some of the technology for
growing crops indoors already exists. The scientists stationed at the South Pole research
station enjoy fresh salads every day. They grow vegetables in their own greenhouse. And
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, has been experimenting for
years with ways to grow fresh fruits and veggies on the moon or even on Mars.Those in the
know say bringing farming indoors solves a number of problems. First, traditional farming
takes up a lot of land. Dickson Despommier is an ecologist at Columbia University. He notes
that it takes a plot of land as big as the entire state of Virginia just to grow enough food for
all the people in New York City. That’s about 8 million people.Swiss chard grows in water
enriched with nutrients in the greenhouse aboard the Science Barge. An indoor, vertical
farm would probably take advantage of a similar system, re-using the water.Courtesy of
www.nysunworks.orgCities that grow their own food would become more self-reliant. They
also would be less vulnerable to catastrophes such as hurricanes that can make it
impossible for trucks to deliver fresh produce to grocery stores. What’s more, fruits and
vegetables grown outdoors face all kinds of hazards, from flooding to insect pests. There’s
also weather instability, such as late or early frosts that can damage a crop. “What happens
outside is lightning bolts strike, there are floods, pests, drought,” Despommier says. “You
can control everything indoors. You can’t control anything outdoors.”To top it off, by the
year 2050, the world population will grow by another 3 billion. As populations grow, the
land available for farming shrinks. This raises an important question: Where will we grow
the food for all these people? Despommier and his colleagues say “vertical farming” is the
answer — growing crops in skyscrapers tens of stories high.Vertical farming takes up much
less land than traditional, “horizontal” farming. And its advocates say it could provide new
uses for hundreds of abandoned buildings in cities around the world.One idea architects
and engineers have is to build this “Living Skyscraper,” which would house 16 floors
dedicated to farming right in the middle of the city.Blake KurasekVertical farms don’t exist
yet. But their proponents say a well-designed facility could recycle water from indoor fish
ponds and use that water to irrigate crops like strawberries, peppers and tomatoes. Crop
waste, such as stalks and leaves, would be composted. And the gases given off from
composting would be used to heat the building. Livestock such as chicken or pigs could even

2. live in a vertical farm. Their waste would be recycled as a source of energy.But those
familiar with the hurdles of growing crops indoors say it’s not going to be easy to make the
transition to vertical farming. “If I was going to play devil’s advocate, I’d say it is going to be
tough,” says Gene Giacomelli. He heads up the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at
the University of Arizona in Tucson.It can be tricky to regulate climate conditions indoors,
he says. Maintaining the correct balance of humidity can be especially challenging. “At the
end of the day, it is going to be raining in these buildings,” he says.Plus, plants differ in their
weather and lighting needs. Tomatoes like warm, sunny weather. Greens like lettuce prefer
cooler temperatures. And nearly all crop plants require lots of sunlight.Mimicking sunlight
is challenging, but scientists are learning how to make artificial lights that produce the
colors, or wavelengths, of light — especially red and blue — that crop plants need. Still,
artificial, electric lights present their own challenges. First, overhead lights are inefficient.
They give off the majority of their energy as heat, instead of light. One type of light, called a
light-emitting diode, or LED, overcomes this problem, but Giacomelli says these are still too
expensive for widespread use.Overcoming these challenges will take time. Most experts
suggest it would be anywhere between 5 and 15 years before the first vertical farms could
be created.It is a staggering challenge: feeding the seven billion-plus people in the world
and delivering fresh food to the rapidly rising number of them who live in cities.One
solution, more theoretical than practical so far, amounts to killing two birds with one stone
and adding a third benefit: vertical farming.By growing crops on the sides or roofs of
buildings, or in stacks inside, in the large cities where they will be consumed, food can be
produced in a way that saves energy and time, proponents of vertical farming assert.The
advantages will become even clearer, they say, as techniques and technologies improve,
urban populations expand and factors such as increasing water scarcity and climate change
hamper traditional flat-earth farming.“Growing outdoors is more challenged than ever
before, especially when you layer in the increasing volatility of weather and climate change
and issues of food safety and pesticides,” said Marc Oshima, marketing director and co-
founder of AeroFarms, a New Jersey company that produces leafy green vegetables and
herbs on 30,000 square feet (about 2,800 square meters) of vertical farms in Newark. “We
need a new paradigm. Vertical farming gives us control over a lot of these variables.”They
are the same variables that any farmer hopes to control, including water, light, the growing
medium and the insects and other pests that might reduce yields.Thanks for reading The
Times.Subscribe to The TimesAeroFarms, which expects to operate 25 facilities of 45,000 to
60,000 square feet each all over the world in five years, uses a closed-loop irrigation system
that allows food to be grown with 95 percent less water than conventionally cultivated
vegetables, Mr. Oshima said. Using light-emitting diodes instead of sunlight means that a
growing cycle takes about two weeks, allowing for up to 30 harvests a year and resulting in
75 times greater productivity per square foot, he said. And because its Newark farm is
indoors, there are no bugs or rodents to contend with.“Nothing touches the plant,” he said.
“With the right lighting spectrum, we can optimize for taste, nutrition, texture and
color.”AeroFarms uses repurposed warehouse space for its farms. Plantagon International,
a Swedish company designing prototype farms with real estate developers, government
authorities and universities around the world, hopes to incorporate its farms into

3. multipurpose buildings.Editors’ PicksIs There Life After Influencing?Why Does My Neck
Look So Much Older Than My Face?To Become Oscar Levant, Sean Hayes Revisited His First
RolePlantagon intends to make vertical farming more efficient through various forms of
symbiosis. It plans, for instance, to integrate farms into ventilation systems, delivering
oxygen produced by plants to a building’s human occupants and sending the carbon dioxide
they exhale in the opposite direction.Hans Hassle, chief executive of Plantagon, explained
how two projects underway in Sweden will try to keep energy costs down by warming the
buildings housing the farms with heat thrown off by the artificial lighting. That’s a sensible
idea — in Sweden. Mr. Hassle conceded that the excess heat from a farm that Plantagon is
building in Singapore would not be put to such effective use.“Vertical farming won’t be
proven until we see the technology working and the business model working in different
markets,” he said.Proven or not, vertical farming has existed for more than 100 years, often
on the pages of books and magazines spitballing ideas for creating a utopian society. What is
believed to be the first vertical farm in the real world was a hydroponics facility built in
Armenia sometime before 1951.Commercial vertical farming expanded after the 2011
earthquake and tidal wave in Fukushima, Japan, destroyed a substantial amount of
cropland, said Dickson Despommier, emeritus professor of public health and microbiology
at Columbia University.“Japan has emerged as a leader in vertical farms,” Mr. Despommier
said. “There are 150 or so, all commercial, producing crops for mass consumption. The
government poured lots of money into projects, and universities and corporations helped.
The next thing you know, they were up and running.”Vertical farms also can be found in
fairly large numbers in Taiwan, Singapore and the American Midwest, he said. In one
conspicuous example in Europe, the United States Pavilion at Expo 2015 in Milan featured
fields of leafy vegetables on its outer walls.How much food comes from vertical farms is
hard to calculate, though it is thought to be a very small fraction of all food grown. The
United States Department of Agriculture keeps no statistics on production from vertical
farming, according to a spokesman, Damon Thompson, but the agency is about to issue an
“urban agriculture toolkit,” available online for anyone interested in pursuing the practice,
he said.One reason that vertical farming remains a small, obscure niche is that farmers need
to make money, not just food. Mr. Oshima said that AeroFarms was “cost competitive today
with the field farmer.” But vertical farming has many skeptics and critics who expect that
whatever energy and money are saved by shortening the distance from farm to table to be
lost, and then some, by the high cost of artificial lighting and other equipment needed to
produce food indoors and even outdoors in many urban settings.It may be feasible to grow
certain crops efficiently in certain circumstances in certain settings, they say, but only to a
certain extent and at certain times. They consider it unlikely for the foreseeable future that
vertical farming could produce enough food of different varieties to feed a significant
number of people in a commercially viable way.“It’s such an appealing idea — ‘Press Floor
10 for lettuce’ — that people picked up on it right away,” said Bruce Bugbee, a professor of
crop physiology at Utah State University. “The fundamental problem is that plants need a lot
of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require the burning of a lot of
fossil fuels. Vertical farming is fine if you’ll let me have a vertical nuclear reactor next to it.”If
that’s not an option, then success in urban vertical farming is likely to be confined to a small

4. number of crops, such as the varieties that AeroFarms cultivates.“There are situations in
dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights,
stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad
greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor
of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin.“The local-food
movement has made people more aware of where their food is coming from and helped
create a general trend toward more production in and around cities,” he added. “That has
led to innovations for relatively small-scale urban farming and people growing oregano and
basil on a stoop. Whether we build dedicated buildings for vertical farming, I’m
skeptical.”Mr. Ventura also pointed out that the middle of nowhere and the middle of
Broadway aren’t the only possible locations for food production. Many cities have arable
land on the outskirts of town that is far cheaper than prime urban real estate and close
enough to consumers to keep shipping costs and logistical headaches to a minimum.Mr.
Hassle, at Plantagon, acknowledged that whatever problems may be solved, producing food
in the heart of a city can create other difficulties. There’s more to making a vertical farm
successful than growing crops.“It’s not just one thing that has to happen,” he said. “If you’re
going to grow inside a city, there won’t be farmers standing there waiting to buy products.
We’re trying to find bulk buyers that don’t add a lot of transportation to a city.”The
challenges of doing vertical farming profitably on a large scale are so daunting that even a
true believer like Mr. Hassle can’t help but be skeptical.“Vertical farming as an industry is
very much at the beginning,” Mr. Hassle said. “We have focused on making it industrial and
scalable, and that’s a little bit crazy. It’s like trying to do the impossible. It looks almost like
science fiction.”