The Challenges of Vertical Farming | Big Think

The Challenges of Vertical Farming

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Dickson Despommier explains that vertical farming would constitute a closed cycle, thus solving many of the water and waste related challenges of modern agricultural methods.

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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:

Dickson Despommier: Here’s what we know we can’t do first. We cannot just stack greenhouses on top of each other and get a vertical farm. We know this because people have tried this in the past, and they’ve failed miserably; because there’s no easy way to get water, nutrients, waste to energy schemes.

All of this fails when you start stacking it up and putting it inside of an urban setting. It’s very easy to do if it’s outdoors basically in a rural setting and you’ve got a big spread and you’re not worried about how much land you’ve used, but when you start to add constraints of how do I get enough sunlight to the middle of the building?

Then you have to get creative. It’s not impossible, and in fact basically nothing is impossible. We’re now discovering planets around the suns in different galaxies. That’s incredible. Come on. If that’s not impossible, then this is certainly not impossible. There’s a laboratory out at UC Davis which is a big ag [sic; agriculture] school, and high-tech ag school, and there’s a lighting laboratory. If you just ask them they’ll way well, you know you can solve that in many ways but the best way is to reflect sunlight with parabolic mirrors through a transparent building, and then another set of parabolic mirrors will bounce the light around inside, and pretty soon-- it doesn’t matter how thick your building is. You can get sunlight directly in the middle if you really want to do this.

The Japanese have another solution to that and it’s equally inventive and creative. They’re farming in basements of buildings where there’s no sunlight. Well, that’s not true actually. They bring the sunlight in with fiber optics. Cool. How cool can you get? That is about as cool as you can get. It is expensive to begin with of course, and primitive at a big level, but nonetheless it’s possible.

If you take a country like Iceland, it’s not energy-challenged in any direction. It’s got geothermal energy oozing out of the ground, basically. So you can tap that energy to make steam to make electricity to make the grow lights work. So grow lights would be a big answer here. Now what kind of grow lights are there? So that’s what the fifth year students addressed. I will focus. I will focus. I could exceed my two-hour limit, however. They did a series of really interesting calculations to say that a building that’s 30 stories tall in one square city block in a footprint that grows enough food for 50,000 people might consumer as much as 30 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That’s a big number.

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