DR. DICKSON DESPOMMIER, professor of environmental sciences at Columbia University, believes he has seen the future of agriculture, and it takes place in city skyscrapers. Excited by the concept of green roofs, his students calculated the amount of food that could be harvested if all 13 acres of the commercial roof space in Manhattan was used for farming. Unfortunately, it only amounted to a measly two per cent of the borough’s food bill. To come up with the remaining 98% of New York County’s food budget, Despommier advocates planting crops on more than just top floors; let entire high-rises be dedicated to urban agriculture. By his calculation, 33 of these 50-storey farm factories could make the island self-sufficient for food, and with funding money, he could have the first vertical farm up and running in under a decade.

Vertical Farm (exterior), Las Vegas - by Chris Jacobs

FOR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES to grow in the heart of the concrete jungle, an environment completely alien and utterly inhospitable to them, lots of NASA space age technology is required. Instead of embedding them in irrigated soil, they are placed in plastic carts and are ferried around on assembly lines, where robots spray them with mist and minerals, and dose them with their allotted amount of light and heat. A sophisticated sensor system is supposed to screen out any offending bacteria and isolate any infected fruit or vegetable. When their robot keepers scientifically determine that they have sufficiently matured, they are mechanically harvested, processed, and packaged. On the first floor of the building, they are even sold to general public. Talk about vertical consolidation!

DESPOMMIER AND OTHER ADVOCATES of the vertical farm tout its numerous advantages. Conventional farms occasionally suffer from disastrous acts of nature, like hailstorms and monsoons, or droughts and wildfires, and as global warming kicks in, these incidences will only increase. Vertical farms are immune to these, since they regulate their environment and are protected from the elements. For these same reasons, advocates of vertical agriculture claim that these skyfarms will grow only “organic” produce, because fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides will become superfluous without soil. And under these artificial conditions, they will be able to recycle massive amounts of water, one of the biggest expenses of open-air farms. Most fabulously, since they are removing themselves from natural cycles and simulating optimum growing conditions, they will be able to yield far more harvests, producing much more food.

Vertical Farm (interior), Las Vegas - by Chris Jacobs

AND WE’RE NOT JUST TALKING about veggies and legumes.  The plan is to produce cow meat for human consumption. They can’t possibly graze on grass at a thousand dollars per square foot of precious real estate — they still haven’t come up with a techno-fix for that problem — but they can clone bovine stem cells, feed them protein shakes, and electrically shock them to simulate muscle texture.  So just about all aspects of the average American diet are accounted for.  If we base our calculations on Despommier’s optimistic figures — that a 30-storey building that covering a single city block could feed 50,000 people — this means that 60 of these skyfarms could feed the entire city of Toronto… and 600 skyfarms — an array of 25 by 25, the size of a small town — could feed the whole country of Canada!

OKAY, I’VE GIVEN the supporters of skyfarming ample opportunity to present their case in favour. Can I please rip into it now?

Dragonfly (overhead), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

WHERE TO START? Let’s begin with the supposed savings that result from food localization. Yes, growing food much closer to the point of purchase will significantly reduce the amount of costly energy and environmental damage incurred transporting produce to market. But food miles constitute only a very small fraction of the energetic, economic and ecological costs.  That’s not to say that it’s not important to reduce these wherever we can.  But it’s certainly not the area in which we can make the most difference.  University of Toronto professor Pierre Desrochers calculated that even in Britain — an island that has higher import costs than we do, because it can’t have produce trucked in from tropical climates in the way that we can import berries overland from California — the costs associated with driving back and forth from the supermarket to buy green beans from Kenya are more than 40 times the price of it being shipped onto their shores from faraway Africa.

Dragonfly (exterior), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

IN DESPOMMIER’S FUTURIST FANTASY, it’s not just that these skyfarms will supply some of the food for city slickers — he means for them to supply most of the food for urban areas, if not almost all of it.  So what will become of the farmers of today, and what will become of the land that they farm?  Let’s dismiss the obviously false claim of allowing farmland to return to its native state:  permitting trees to populate meadows, reducing greenhouse gases and preserving animal habitats, saving them from extinction. Under the hyper-capitalist conditions that caused this food crisis to begin with, there’s no way that so valuable a commodity would be allowed to lie fallow. Will they start supplementing the monocultural crops grown in the inner-city food factories with exotic, expensive heirloom varieties of vegetables?  Under current market conditions, it’s far likelier that these fields will be turned into carbon farms, growing inefficient bio-fuels to replace rapidly-peaking oil and natural gas.

Dragonfly (interior), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

AN ARRAY OF SOLAR PANELS on the southern face of the building and wind turbines on top of the tower are not going to even come remotely close to meeting the needs of an energy-addicted skyfarm. Fifty-storey concrete-and-steel skyscrapers contain megatonnes of embedded energy. Water recycling systems are incredibly energy-intensive, too. And because crops won’t be exposed to the southern sun, it’ll need lots of artificial light and heat — 100 times more than is used by the average office worker! Despommier thinks that by funneling the city’s sewage system through the base of the building, he can burn methane and create excess energy to power the whole damn contraption. But he hasn’t done his high school homework:  the amount of power produced is miniscule in comparison — if it even came close, it would violate the law of conservation of energy!

Skyfarm (skyline), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

BUT DESPOMMIER’S MOST OFFENSIVE claim is that this is a solution for Darfur and other conflict-ridden regions of the world that suffer from food shortages.  Ha!  Billion-dollar vertical farms wouldn’t even be profitable in a First World city, competing with investment bankers for premium square footage.  And when environmental costs can’t be externalized any more and food starts to its reflect real value, making rent on a Park Avenue penthouse will be the least of his worries, as the inevitable riots ensue. On average, North Americans spend less a tenth of every dollar they earn on foodstuffs — less than anyone else in the world, so our perspective on this issue is completely skewed. Sudan won’t ever be able to afford a castle-in-the-skyfarm — this is just another neo-colonial slavery scheme that has more to do with First World agro-tech profits than Third World sustainability strategies.

Skyfarm (rendering), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

DESPOMMIER HAS EVEN SUGGESTED that Monsanto, arguably the most evil corporation on the planet, is the perfect partner to develop seeds specifically for skyfarms. This fact alone pushes the plan over the edge from impossible pipe dream to heinous apocalyptic nightmare. Media critic Jerry Mander has explained how it is insane and suicidal to insist on trying to fix a problem that was caused by technology with another technology-based solution! The first two high-tech agricultural revolutions in our lifetimes produced much more food for market, but at great human and environmental cost. Yes, conventional agriculture is the biggest polluter on the planet, even bigger than ‘industry’, as Despommier points out — but this is a red herring false dichotomy: conventional agriculture is industrial. Yes, we have to change the way that we acquire our calories, and fast. But NOT LIKE THIS.

Skyfarm (overhead), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

IF THE OBJECTIVE IS really to grow healthy food much closer to the point of purchase, there’s no reason that supermarkets all across the country can’t turn their own roofs into greenhouse grow-ops. In fact, there’s already a company out in California that is doing exactly that. Sky Vegetables, out of San Francisco, partners with local grocers to produce food right on top of their retail outlets. Even Harrod’s, the largest department store in the United Kingdom at over a million square feet, has begun to grow green vegetables on the roof at their flagship location. You don’t have to engineer any complex structure or research any unproven technology; just go green on your existing roof, and save on your heating and cooling bills while you’re at it.

IN ANY CASE, there’s no need to reinvent the plow in every generation. We already have a perfectly good idea of what happens when a culture suddenly has to feed far more mouths than its industrial farming model can provide for.  When the Soviet Union collapsed twenty years ago, and its ideologically-motivated oil subsidies ended, Cuba was still under a crippling American trade embargo. But it managed to survive its food crisis, because of old-school small-scale organic urban agriculture that proliferated across the island. Watch the incredible 53-minute documentary below and be amazed, then learn more at the website The Power of Community. Thirty-six years ago, E.F. Schumacher taught us that Small Is Beautiful, and it’s truer than ever in our own time.

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.

PANCAKE-STACKING, the visual metaphor I’m going to use to describe the proposal that human sleeping quarters and work camps be located extremely close to one another, to achieve certain excellent efficiencies of scale, is a state of affairs that is completely alien to the way that humans have lived on the planet for 99% of the time that they have been classified as distinctly human, of the species homo sapiens sapiens. But in the last hundred years, humans have started to imagine a not-too-distant future where they live less like monkeys and more like termites or bumblebees.

Visionary City

IN 1908, AMERICANA ARTIST William Robinson Leigh produced a painting entitled Visionary City. In it, he imagines an urban area of such complexity and compactness that it surpasses even contemporary rates of human density. Look at this image in isolation and it seems that Leigh is glorifying twenty-first century technae. But compare it to the rest of his large body of work — which consists almost exclusively of idealized desert landscapes and indigenous peoples of the Southwest — and it is instantly transformed into a dystopia. Observe the human subjects that Leigh lovingly portrays: they are obviously affluent, they have all the time in the world to embellish their own artwork or just stare off into the sunset.

Visionary City & The Golden Hour

Pueblo Summer & On The Sand

ARCOLOGY IS THE WORD that has been used ever since his time to describe an environment that is composed primarily of architectural elements. Only for the last forty years has the term been used by Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri to signify environmentally conscious architecture — specifically, the purposeful densification of human habitation, not only for logistic reasons in order to achieve greater rates of economic production, but for ecologic reasons in order to mitigate the devastating destructive impacts of human economic activity to the planet and her playthings.

STARTING IN THE LATE 1960′s, Soleri began to react to suburban sprawl by designing arcologies of up to a million human residents. By dispensing with private automobiles altogether, Soleri prefigured that pedestrian culture would be paramount, that all interpersonal interactions would occur at a much more human scale. The land surrounding the megalopoli would be reserved for recreation, and further afield, for farming. Architecture and agriculture were still separate components in Soleri’s system, but his hyperbuildings would enter the public consciousness. Since the 70′s, he has built the beginnings of Arcosanti, an intentional community in the Arizona desert based on his planning principles.

Arcologies

MANY FANTASTIC ARCOLOGIES have been brainstormed since then. I believe that the most fantastical of these is the Bay Area Architect Eugene Tsui‘s Ultima Tower. At two miles high, it dwarfs all existing skyscrapers by more than a factor of five! In 2004, I apprenticed at his Oakland offices and had the chance to work on some of his amazing projects. Eugene is a biomimic, so he looks at animal architecture and draws inspiration from their ingenius building techniques. If humans are going to end up living like insects, in infinite condominiums, then it would make good sense for our human hives to resemble massive African anthills, and that’s what the Ultima Tower appears to be.

Ultima Tower

BUT MOST EGOTISTICAL ARCHITECTS don’t look to nature as a model master-builder, but as an adversary to be conquered and controlled. So as the planetary population skyrockets and rural residents follow the jobs to the big cities, engineers everywhere are drafting up plans to shoot up to increasingly absurd heights. It is almost impossible to see this pattern as anything other than cock-jockeying, an architectural attempt to prove that you have a sizable phallus. That, and the ideological extension of the colonial project to the in-between spaces in a world in which there are no more physical frontiers.

Burj Dubai

BUT NOW IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, since the granaries of the West aren’t growing quick enough to keep up with more than seven billion bellies, at long last, ecological sustainability is starting to take to the stage. Architectural firms are beginning to take plant elements much more seriously in their skyscraper designs. Unfortunately, some of these examples are only green window dressing, like putting on lots of perfume when you haven’t bathed your body recently enough. But some forward-thinking people are proposing a radical idea — turning big buildings into fifty-story full-on farms, to feed the people.

IS THE PANCAKE-STACK PLANTATION even possible? If so, is it desirable? Will it fix our plethora of problems? Or will it cause even more of them? Can cubicles co-exist with tractors? Or is this complicated scheme just another bluff by the industrial capitalist system? In our next blog, Grasping at Grass, we focus our sights on Vertical Farms, architecture’s answer to edible jenga.

THIS ISSUE IS A LITTLE BIT outside the scope of Green Apple’s work — we’re certainly an ambitious group of people, but I highly doubt that we’re going to be building a full-scale farm anytime soon. But we most certainly plan on introducing much more food production into our landscape designing, from hops and herb gardens to beekeeping and backyard chickens. So it’s important that we examine the future of food and its relationship to landscape and localization.

THE CONCEPT GOES something like this: Our food system is currently undergoing a major crisis. Fact: the population of the planet will reach a staggering seven billion by the year 2012, and most estimates put the population at eight billion only 12 years after that, with nine not far behind. And as the human settlement project expands on the land, residential and industrial developments gobble up what were once mom-and-pop farms. We still end up producing more food every year than the year before, but the human population expansion far outstrips these food increases.

FACT: THE WESTERN fast-food industry, which requires massive amounts of grazing ground to satiate our appetite for cheap beef, is responsible for the depletion of huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest, the last set of lungs for Planet Earth. It also diverts a lot of grains grown elsewhere for the feeding of these animals, instead of providing plant-food for people. So a much more meat-intensive diet is mass-marketed to America and less developed countries. The result: more corporate profit, less food for humans, per plant input.

FACT: INDUSTRIAL FARMING, the process by which we bombard the soil with chemicals and artificially facilitate the growth of monoculture food crops, has depleted the earth of its natural nutritional content. This locks us into a vicious cycle whereby we must continue to poison the soil if we want it to yield any harvest. The alternative, letting the land lie fallow for years while we pay for the sins of previous generations and patiently rebuild the mineral content of the topsoil, is too expensive to contemplate in a capitalist system, meaning, that it’s not profitable in the short term.

FACT: THE AMOUNT OF fossil fuel that can be pumped out of the ground every day has reached its peak, and is undeniably steadily and permanently declining. Ten calories of oil energy — in the form of fertilizers and fuel for transportation — are required in order produce only a single calorie of food. Less oil means less food produced at higher prices. And putting pressure on the grain industry to supply bio-fuels from corn and sugar cane only increases demand, which causes a corresponding further increase in the prices of these food staples, mainly for poor people.

BOTTOM LINE: WE HAVE reached the physical limits of the globalized industrial food production and distribution network. In the last couple of years, dozens of countries around the world, from Egypt to Russia and from Mexico to the Phillippines, have seen rioting in the streets due to rising food prices. Even in rich countries like Canada, food stockpiles have declined to insanely low levels (I would rather not speculate about specific figures I have read about). Add the effects of climate change into the mix, and we only need a couple of unusually low-level harvests in a row, and we’re looking at planetary famine.

Food Riots in Mexico, 2007

Food Riots in Haiti, 2008

Food Riots in Milwaukee, 2008

SO AN IDEA BEING PROPOSED as a possible solution to these terminal ills is called ‘Vertical Farming’. The general gist of it is: either take pre-existing skyscrapers in the downtown core, or build brand new ones, exclusively for the purposes of growing more food — kind of like combining the Hanging Gardens of Babylon with the Towers of Babel. If we’re running out of space to do horizontal horticulture, maybe there needs to be a third agricultural revolution, this time in the third dimension? This is the problem and the proposal; in the next blog entry in this series, The History of Height, we’ll analyze it from a deep eco practical perspective.