At the other end, environmentally-aware consumers and citizens welcome vertically farmed products into their food consumption habits. As the climate continues to be disrupted, populations continue to multiply, and cities continue to expand — all of which are unlikely to slow down — food production and consumption are forced to assume new and more sustainable patterns, in which vertical farming plays a central role.
Thus, vertical farming is expected to continue expanding and scaling across the world. You often depict traditional outdoor farming as an unsustainable model of agriculture. To what extent and how can vertical farming contribute to the sustainability of food systems?
Its first and foremost contribution is on the environment. There is a broad consensus among academia, policymakers, international organization staff, and society in general that the contemporary system of outdoor soil-based farming is unsustainable and largely responsible for climate change.
As it is well known, trees are a core element that sequesters carbon dioxide and produces oxygen, so that the destruction of forests for agricultural land use has a considerable role to play in climate change.
Indoor farming, notably vertical farming, would allow us to reduce the amount of land that is necessary to feed the ever-increasing world population, which is particularly important considering that the latter is expected to grow up to 9. Admittedly, indoor farming cannot be expected to fully replace all of the 1.
For instance, rice is highly costly to grow indoors, while beef is almost impossible to raise indoors. However, it can become a considerable source of food which would decrease the need for excessive farmland usage. Indeed, other animals such as crustaceans, fish, and poultry can be produced in vertical farms, as well as cattle food — growing soy indoors could have a great impact on deforestation. Even if indoor farming does not fully replace outdoor farming, it may well complement the food system facing the increasing pressures of demographic growth coupled with land scarcity.
Not only can urban farms contribute to land use, but also to the reduction of other natural resources such as water and energy, and to the reutilization of organic waste. Further, growing food indoor could have a significant impact on global health.
Outdoor farming is one of the main causes of global diseases since half the world gets sick from vegetables contaminated with human feces. Growing food in a controlled environment would allow everyone to grow safe-to-eat, healthy food and thus decrease the number of diseases throughout the world. Vertical farms decentralize the food system, as well as democratize the food supply, since it increases supply, lowers prices, and therefore contributes to food access to all sections of the population, including the poorest.
It is also interesting to compare the advantages of vertical farms with those of other types of urban agriculture. For instance, open lots are a common way of growing food in an urban environment, as seen in La Paz Bolivia. However, open lots are in close contact with car exhaustion, which penetrates the soil, is absorbed by plants, and consumed by people.
Another example is that of building gardens on rooftops, which can only be done in regions of the world where winter temperatures are mild. While greenhouses deal with this issue, they cannot yield sufficient food to feed the increasing number of urban dwellers.
Vertical farms can be perceived as an ideal method of urban farming, as it optimizes land use and increases food density per square foot of farming space. The Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District integrates vertical farming systems in conjunction with research and public outreach in Shanghai, China. What needs to be done for vertical farming to expand?
First, the question of training and indoor farming skills is very important. Commercial vertical farms operate like any other business, and there are numerous reasons why businesses fail. They require constant oversight of all aspects of the growing environment, as well as employing skilled and experienced staff, who can identify and correct problems in the growing system. I would suggest that schools of agriculture should offer specialized degrees in urban farming, which could not only train city dwellers to work in urban farms, but also stimulate them to work in them, further driving growth in the sector.
Commercial viability is definitely a challenge for vertical farms. There is however great hope that it can become sustainable at a large scale. Some have suggested that the energy cost of running a vertical farm makes it difficult to realize a profit. However, as the price of electricity and LED lights become cheaper, the profitability of vertical farms will undoubtedly increase. They proposed to him that the two companies merge and do business under the name of AeroFarms.
Rosenberg would be the chief executive officer, Oshima the chief marketing officer, and Harwood the chief science officer. It would build the vertical-farm systems but not sell them, grow baby greens commercially, and scale the operation up gigantically. This change in fortunes left Harwood thunderstruck. During the winter months, some production moves to similar fields in Arizona or goes even farther south, into Mexico.
Four dollars for five ounces comes to about thirteen dollars a pound. AeroFarms supplies greens to the dining rooms at the Times , Goldman Sachs, and several other corporate accounts in New York. At the moment, the greens can be purchased retail only at two ShopRite supermarkets, one on Springfield Avenue in Newark and the other on Broad Street in Bloomfield.
The AeroFarms clamshell package clear plastic, No. The company plans to have its greens on the shelves soon at Whole Foods stores and Kings, also in the local area.
Greens that come from California ride in trucks for days. Then she picked up a clamshell of Fresh Attitude arugula and dropped it in her cart. I asked her if she knew that AeroFarms was grown in Newark. She put the out-of-state arugula back, picked up the Newark arugula, and thanked me for telling her.
I think AeroFarms does not play up Newark enough on the packaging. They should call their product Newark Greens. AeroFarms chose Newark because of its convenient location and the relative cheapness of its real estate. City and state development agencies encouraged the decision, and the company has hired about sixty blue-collar workers from Newark, some of them from a program for past offenders.
At least geographically, the company so far is exclusively a Newark production. But in another sense it could be anywhere. The technology it uses derives partly from systems designed to grow crops on the moon. The interior space is its own sealed-off world; nothing inside the vertical-farm buildings is uncontrolled.
Countless algorithm-driven computer commands combine to induce the greens to grow, night and day, so that a crop can go from seed to shoot to harvest in eighteen days.
Like all air today, it has an average CO 2 content of about four hundred parts per million we exceeded the three-fifty-p. The L. Their radiance has been stripped of the heat-producing part of the spectrum, the most expensive part of it from an energy point of view. In row after row, the L. At different growth stages, the plants require light in different intensities, and algorithms controlling the L.
In short, each plant grows at the pinnacle of a trembling heap of tightly focussed and hypersensitive data. The temperature, humidity, and CO 2 content of the air; the nutrient solution, pH, and electro-conductivity of the water; the plant growth rate, the shape and size and complexion of the leaves—all these factors and many others are tracked on a second-by-second basis.
A few even have phone apps through which they can adjust the functioning of the vertical farm remotely. Though many of the hundred-plus employees seem to be diffused throughout the enterprise and most vividly present in cyberspace, everybody gathers sometimes in the headquarters building for a buffet-style lunch, at which Rosenberg makes a short speech.
We have to be the best total farmers. And to do all this we need the best data. If the data is not current and completely reliable, we will fail.
We must always keep paying close attention to the data. The invention sits in a corner of the cafeteria by the round lunch tables and the molded black plastic cafeteria chairs, an improbable-looking teaching tool. Its dimensions are five feet wide by twelve feet long by six and a half feet high. Essentially, it consists of two horizontal trays of thick plastic, both about ten inches deep, one above the other, suspended in a strong but minimal framework of aluminum.
Below the trays, at floor level, a plastic tank holds two hundred and fifty gallons of water. Frames like those used for window screens fit on top of the plastic trays. The cloth is attached to the frame by snaps. The spray hits the bottom of the tray and bounces up, and some of it becomes the mist that nourishes the roots growing through the cloths. Eventually, most of the water drains down and returns to the tank to be reused.
Seeds speckle the white surface of the cloth. They germinate, and soon the roots descend. Seedlings grow. However, greenhouses can have many climate variations. You might have experienced the same kind of variation while driving a car in the rain, when the car windows get all foggy and you need to adjust the inside climate to improve your view. In agriculture, such climate variations can often limit plant growth, causing a loss of flavour or even a reduction in nutritional value.
To solve this issue of variation, scientists and technologists started creating more optimal circumstances for plant growth in greenhouses—even on a rainy day. They experimented with variables like temperature and CO2. In the early s, they even found a way to grow crops without soil by adopting things like rockwool, a growing medium made from stones or rocks, instead of soil. As a result of this innovation, the agricultural carbon footprint in these regions was reduced, and better quality crop yields increased [4].
Later on, technical innovations such as hydroponics and artificial lightning were used to further optimize growing conditions [5]. In the second decade of the 21st century, LED lighting was introduced in greenhouses. This innovation paved the way for farming crops indoors [6]. Plant scientists and technologists realized that it would not sustain to continue controlling plants and pushing them to fit the environment.
The term vertical farming was coined by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey in In , Dickson Despommier, a professor at New York's Columbia University, popularized the modern idea of vertical farming, building upon the idea together with his students.
Vertical farms are a type of controlled environment agriculture CEA that usually has closed atmospheric systems with artificial lighting systems and hydroponic or aeroponic nutrient delivery. Going from farming in fields to farming in huge buildings might seems like a big jump and could be considered unrealistic by some.
And vertical farming technology is not so farfetched as it may first seem. In fact, there are numerous vertical farms operating today! Of course, there are some challenges to overcome before vertical farming can reach its full potential. Some of the limitations of vertical farming are:.
Technological development in horticulture has already pushed the concept of vertical farms from fantasy to reality through the use of solutions like hydroponics, aeroponics, and artificial illumination. Companies are popping up all over with world e. AeroFarms, Spread, Plenty, Green Sense Farms setting up vertical farming plants and producing a limited variety of products.
In the big cities some groups are providing fresh products for gourmet restaurants. Some dairy farms are vertical farming in transport containers to grown barley.
Data is taken from: Vertical Farm 2. Today many different types of light sources are being used to mimic the sun to get plants to perform photosynthesis: incandescence, halogen, compact fluorescent lights CFL , metal halide, high pressure sodium HPS , and LEDs. Various lighting technology efficiency improvements; Source: Osram. But the trajectories are what is interesting to notice. By all indicators, LEDs have an extremely bright future. The absorption spectrum of photosynthesis, source: Fluence.
The most important wavelengths are known as photosynthetically active radiation PAR and the measure of how many photons are produced in the PAR spectrum is called the photosynthetic photon flux density PPFD.
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