Vertical Farming
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?
