Traditional agriculture is changing, and it’s changing rapidly. Around the world, people are looking to such technological advancements as vertical farming to tackle supply and demand issues. From cities that are running out of farmland due to overpopulation, to urban sprawl taking out precious farms, to the growing cost of traditional farming practices, there are more and more reasons to be looking to science for environmentally sound answers when it comes to feeding our growing populations.
Many cities are looking to vertical farming as a way to keep up with the demands. Vertical farms utilize relatively small plots of land to accommodate the needs. Take Newark, New Jersey for example. The city is in the process of building the world’s largest vertical farm that will be able to generate 2,000,000 pounds of food per year. While the price tag of building the farm might first appear significant at $30 million, the long-lasting effects are well worth the initial investment (see article in Collective-Evolution).
With state of the art vertical farms said to be ten times more productive that traditional farming per square foot, the future is looking up for those cities and countries that are moving forward with the vertical farming initiatives. The Collective-Evolution article pointed towards a fascinating video that features vertical farming efforts in Singapore (see below). All one has to do is to examine how far food must travel before it ends up in markets and restaurants. Transporting food is bad for the environment. It also means that food is not as fresh as it should be. And in the end, transporting goods adds to the cost.
Once we realize the energy savings, the job creation, the proximity of the food to urban populations and the green technologies that revolve around these futuristic projects, it’s not hard to imagine that more and more cities will be looking to develop similar food-producing systems.
So, who is investing in such sophisticated growing operations? In Newark there are private investments that are fueling the vertical growth. In Singapore there are hopes that the government will continue to divert additional funds to the industry, while private dollars also being smartly invested.
In Buffalo, we still have plenty of access to plenty of locally grown foods, via myriad traditional farms. There are also new urban farming initiatives that are proving fruitful both on the West and the East Sides. But that doesn’t mean that vertical farming couldn’t be initiated on a small scale, especially since there are so many proven advancements underway in other cities around the world (plenty to glean from). ‘Farm to table’ is a buzz phrase at the movement that is still relatively new. As climate change continues to be a factor (western US for example), it will be interesting to see how Buffalo might factor into this ‘growing’ trend due to our proximity to fresh water, centralized location to other large cities, strong number of higher education institutions and our available workforce.
As we continue to look for ways to diversify our economy, vertical farming and related self sustaining industries should be taken into consideration.
Photo: Collective-Evolution