Food Crisis
OKAY, FOR OUR FIRST FORAY into urban agriculture, we wrote Backyard Farming, a blog about vegetable gardens and fruit trees. For those interested in kicking it up a notch, we brought you Backyard Chickens, a blog about raising birds right outside your house. I imagine that we’re already treading on weird and wacky territory here when we start talking about food-producing animals. You may know a couple people in the neighbourhood that take care of a vegetable patch, but you probably aren’t aware of anyone that’s providing a happy home for chickens and turkeys, ducks and geese. So I don’t actually expect anyone out there to take me up on what I’m going to talk about next. But in the event that you’ve already aced Homesteading 101 and you’re past the intermediate class, then we’ve got to give you something to shoot for: an entire menagerie of livestock, fauna of the land, sea, and air!
THERE IS AN ELEPHANT in the room, and its name is Population. Whenever we start to discuss the global food crisis and its possible solutions, there is always a staunch unwillingness to look into the abyss at the population issue and its inevitable implications. After drafting plans for the Toronto Skyfarm, featured in the last Green Apple Pie blog entry Grasping at Grass, local architect Gordon Graff justified the high-tech hyper-densification of our agriculture by stating that “unless we want to start talking about human population control — which is politically impossible, in a democracy — we have to start considering new strategies… There’s either going to be massive famine, or we’ll have to condense our agricultural practice… Human beings have never shown the capacity to consume less… The simple fact is that, somehow, we have to find a way to produce more.”
THE PROBLEM IS Malthus remixed: the population of the planet is expanding exponentially, but forty per cent of the planet’s land mass is already being used for agriculture. There are hardly any virgin patches left in the temperate zones to convert into new farmland, and what’s currently being used to grow food is expected to fail in the decades to come. These are the facts and figures for so-called conventional agriculture, using poisonous pesticides. If we demanded that everyone have the right to eat organic food — currently less than three per cent of the population does — we would need to more than double the amount of land being cultivated for food crops. It would mean the total destruction of all of the tropical rainforests, since they would need to be used for grazing, to produce poop for natural fertilizer. So how do we provide the whole human family with healthy food?
IN OUR BLOG POST of a couple of weeks ago, Beautiful Blanc Walls, we looked at the possibility of greenifying not only the land that surrounds a building, and not even just the land that’s on top of a building, but land that’s on the sides of buildings, as well! In our blog post of last week, Chow Towers of Babel, we took a close and critical look at the way that our civilization produces most of its human food, far away from most of its humans, and far from healthy for human, animal, and plant alike. Now here in this blog post, The History of High, we will begin examining the futurist pancake-stack answer to the agricultural crisis, Vertical Farming.
SOME SCIENTISTS HAVE become so excited by the work of bio-wall pioneers like Patrick Blanc that they have begun to contemplate greenifying not only the outer envelopes of buildings, but their stratified floors, as well. Specifically, if green roofs and green walls can serve positive purposes, like preventing sewage wastewater from clogging up the city’s arteries, maybe green buildings can be put to even more productive use — like solving the planet’s food crisis, perhaps?
