Dickson Despommier On Selling the Vertical Farming Concept | Big Think

Dickson Despommier On Selling the Vertical Farming Concept

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When describing vertical farming Dickson Despommier used to hear “Should we do this?” Now he hears, “How should we do this?”

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Dickson Despommier:

I am a microbiologist/ecologist by training, and for 27 years I conducted laboratory-based research on molecular aspects of intracellular parasitism funded by NIH. I also teach courses in the medical school and in our school of public health (e.g., Parasitic Diseases; Medical Ecology; Ecology 101). Many of them deal with parasitism and its effects on large segments of the poor that live in the tropics. Controlling soil-based transmission cycles of helminthes that cause significant health problems throughout the world is of prime importance to me.

I left the lab in favor of working on more globally relevant projects that address some these important problems. Since it is generally agreed agriculture is solely responsible for so much environmental disturbance and serves as the interface for the transmission of geohelminths, one area of focus of mine has been on how to raise food without further encroachment into natural ecosystems.

I have established The Vertical Farm as a theoretical construct to look at the possibility of agricultural sustainability within cities. The idea grew out of a class project to measure the effects of rooftop gardening in New York City on reducing the dome of heat that develops over us each year. From that original idea, I expanded the concept to include urban agriculture and finally to multi-story indoor farming. I have given this project to my students in my course, "Medical Ecology.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How will you attract investors?

Dickson Despommier: Okay,

well, it’s not that we haven’t thought about this. In fact, we began to

seriously think about this, “we” my wife and I, about five years ago

when we set our website up. Our website is a target as you well know.

Websites-- people, they contact you and they give you your opinion. And

if this was as crazy as an idea as it starts out to sound like, but

doesn’t end up sounding like, then if it was a truly crazy idea then I

wouldn’t be sitting here right now and I’m going to tell you that if I

can share all my email with you, you would see. They don’t just come

from do-gooders and tree-huggers and fuzzy type people. These are from

the head of ARUP who says “Not just possible. We must do this.” So they

never said “Can’t do.” That’s the company that never says “can’t do”

all right? What would it take to do it? After that we just that’s what

we asked. We weren’t saying “Should we do it?” We were saying “How

should we do it?” That’s a much different question, so that’s the

question you’ve asked so I’ll try to give you the answer. The fact is

we haven’t done one yet, but we have a plan on how to do it. A, you

need some money. You need lots of money. How much? If I had I would

give you a conservative estimate of 50 to 60 million dollars. I could

build you a prototype with all the personnel that I now have as willing

participants the moment that money shows up they will be there. Those

are architects, engineers, designers, planners, politicians, funders,

agronomists, and when I say I’m using plurals here these are not single

entities. These are like the University of Arizona Controlled Indoor

Farming Group which is huge. NASA, ARUP, Philip Johnson Architects,

Kiss + Cathcart Architects, Steelcase [ph?] as a builder, these are

huge people in terms of their impact on the world already, and on their

desire to make things ecologically sound and profitable. So with sixty

million dollars, what I will do is I will enlist their talents together

as a team, and I will build a building which will be some five to six

stories tall, and maybe an eighth of a city block in footprint, and

inside of which it will become a laboratory for how to do this, because

in essence we don’t know how to do this yet, but we will include into

it all the engineering schemes for capturing energy passively, for

taking waste and creating energy from that, to making sure that our

plants are not contaminated with pathogens, to make sure that their

diets include all of our micronutrients but not any heavy metals or

pesticides or herbicides. All of that is doable stuff. That’s an easy

deal. I mean for 27 years I was a laboratory-based scientist and I know

how to do this part.

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