The Upward Future of Vertical Farming

Dr. Dickson Despommier, author of the The Vertical Farm (just released in paper­back), seemed like a great per­son to go to for answers to these ques­tions. Despommier has a ter­rific opti­mism about the poten­tial of these high-rise farms; he sees them as a way to achieve year-round crop pro­duc­tion, use less water, reduce agri­cul­tural runoff, cut down on food miles, and con­trol pathogens, among other things.

And since the model is based on hydro­pon­ics, or water-based grow­ing sys­tems, there’s none of that messy dirt! Seriously, though: Does farm­ing indoors, using LED light­ing, make any real sense? Despommier, a retired pro­fes­sor of micro­bi­ol­ogy and pub­lic health in envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences from Columbia University, was gra­cious enough to answer my ques­tions recently over the phone. Below is an edited tran­script of our conversation.

Q. How did you arrive at the idea to write a book about ver­ti­cal farming?

A. The idea arose in a class I was teach­ing. The stu­dents expressed dis­sat­is­fac­tion over the fact that all I was talk­ing about was the doom-and-gloom aspects of envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion. They asked me if they could work on some­thing more pos­i­tive, so I asked them to find out how much food could you grow on the rooftops of New York, and they found that you could only feed about 2 per­cent of Manhattan that way. They were more bummed out by that result than they were by the other doom-and-gloom we’d been talk­ing about. So I said, why don’t you take your idea and move it indoors so you could grow on mul­ti­ple lev­els at once?

I gave sim­i­lar assign­ments to my stu­dents for sev­eral years and finally at around the sixth year we pub­lished what we found. That started all kinds of cor­re­spon­dence with peo­ple who made draw­ings and mod­els and got excited about the idea. And then I was approached to write this book. When the hard­cover ver­sion of The Vertical Farm was pub­lished, there were no ver­ti­cal farms. Now there are at least six farms in the works, includ­ing one in Korea, two in Japan in Quonset huts, and two under­way in Holland and England. The mayor of Chicago gave one group there a huge tax incen­tive to get started with a ver­ti­cal farm incu­ba­tor oper­a­tion there, and there’s also one farm going up in Seattle.

Q. Can you say more about the kinds of com­pa­nies start­ing these farms?

A. In Korea the coun­try decided to go into ver­ti­cal farm­ing research. They want to develop the con­cept so that entre­pre­neurs can use what they learn. Otherwise they are for-profit com­pa­nies. The one in Japan is adver­tis­ing radiation-free food.

Q. How is the start-up cost dif­fer­ent than with a tra­di­tional farm?

A. I don’t know. But if you need a trac­tor, and the equip­ment that goes with that trac­tor, a [land-based, rural farm] wouldn’t be any cheaper. The aver­age farmer is so heav­ily in debt. It’s a tough time in the his­tory of farm­ing. The farm­ers who I know do it because they love to farm, not to make money.

Q. I’m just won­der­ing what the odds are that some­one could get involved in ver­ti­cal farm­ing on a small, family-farm scale.

A. It depends who you want to feed. If you go online there are a tremen­dous num­bers of grow­ing sys­tems you can buy that would be scal­able — any­where from a household- or restaurant-sized oper­a­tion, to some­thing that could feed a com­mu­nity of peo­ple (just two floors on top of an apart­ment house would be enough to sup­ply around 40 per­cent of the green veg­eta­bles the res­i­dents would con­sumer over a year).

Ten years ago there were very lim­ited resources for peo­ple want­ing to get involved in hydro­pon­ics; now they sky is the limit. In my book I men­tion a big hydro­ponic farm in Arizona named EuroFresh. It’s a 300-plus-acre production.

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