The Rise of Urban Vertical Farming
The invention of agriculture has been around for approximately 10,000 years and established its appearance in multiple grand sites that we know today such as Mexico, China, and the Middle East. The idea spread rapidly throughout cultures and provided success and a better life to those who utilized it. This single factor allowed for sustainability and growth of entire populations. From 1 million people in the era agriculture was first introduced to roughly 7.8 billion people by the year 2020. But in doing so, along with various other factors, have contributed to the high percentage of deforestation and pollution to keep up with the world's population and high demand. A solution to this is vertical farming; instead of cutting down trees to create space for traditional farming, the building would be built skywards. This would reduce the amount of deforestation and harmful gases produced by machines in order to cut down spaces to build old-fashioned farms. It would also help with recycling energy by placing higher efficiency light-emitting diodes, LED, grow lights. Together with computer assisted control systems for monitoring and delivering precise amount of nutrients, adjusting pH, temperature, and oxygen content of nutrient solution, and for assessing the growth in crops.
Vertical farming offers many advantages over traditional agriculture. The most important factor being is complete control of conditions necessary to achieve optimal survival and growth of crops. A wide variety of vegetables and fruits, as well as some species of marine animals such as fish and shrimp, thrive under ideal conditions. From an environmental prospective, growing food indoors creates an opportunity for returning farmland to its original ecological form. For example, neglected agricultural land results in the regrowth of forests and habitats. Which is why, in my personal opinion, advocate for the widespread of vertical farming because I believe it could eventually lead to significant positive effects on lowering the too rapid incline of climate change. Vertical farming has various other advantages as well such it allows for crop production to be year round, uses drastically less water (approximately 80% less), it is not affected by severe weather, and vertical farming can be established anywhere in the world.
Despommier, D., et al. 2013. Farming up the city: The rise of urban vertical farms. Trends in Biotechnology, 31(7), 388-389.
I'm always interested in the topics related to maximize efficiency with new alternative methods, such as vertical farming. I noticed you mentioned fish and shrimp in passing and became interested in the idea of using aquaponics to supply the nutrients to the plants. Furthermore, automated processes, such as neural net AI training to best understand the condition of the plants, temperature, light, and humidity would be ideal in order to reduce the amount of staff required to maintain the crops regularly. Overall, I'm glad to see the idea of alternative methods to conventional farming could be used to slow deforestation while supplying more resources to people.
ReplyDeleteWow! This is very interesting. It is the first time that I've heard something like this. I love that people are looking for innovative ways to maximize efficiency. I really liked the idea of having marine species and using that water to supply for plants. However, there are a few things that worries me. For instance, the cost... I'm not sure that developing countries could apply this idea if it is expensive. Also, how high could it go? Regarding the levels of oxygen, could it go very high? These are questions that popped in my mind but I loved the idea. I think it is a great way to let the environment go back to how it was.
ReplyDeleteYep, that is the only trade off: it would definitely be costly and governments would not implement policies to help assist in such buildings because of it. "Why waste your tax dollars on that when we could..." type of thing. As of how high, I'm not entirely sure if I'm being honest. But in regards to oxygen, it would be no problem since recycled water, H2O, would trickle down from the top to the bottom (to reuse again), so there would be a constant flow of oxygen.
DeleteI completely agree with you that vertical farming is an excellent option to grow food. It saves up space and it can be a solution to stop deforestation. Our Earth doesn't have much time left and it's important that we start looking for more efficient options. I also think that it can cost a lot of money and because of that it can make people be against it. It's sad but that's the true right now. Not a lot of people are aware of the environmental crisis and still see climate change as a political view. It'd be nice if more people knew about these ecological options that can save our planet.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. It is costly and people would be strongly against investing a big fortunate into these buildings. Like you said, it's sad but true.
DeleteI really do think that this is such an interesting way to farm, and it could promote agricultural and environmental sustainability. There are some very interesting ways that this is being implemented, and I think it might have some reluctance in implementation based on expected crop yield vs current yield. I am guessing that this is likely crop- and region-specific.
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