by Jocelyn-19, 24 June 2007

Discovery: SKY-FARMING – A Comprehensive Plan to Address Food Shortage, Water Pollution & Global Warming

All around the globe, there are many cities, like Hong Kong and Singapore, that are never associated with the word 'agriculture'. Land resources are limited, and to ensure we humans have places to fill our need to shop and to have a roof over our heads, space in cities are never associated with farming or agriculture.

This explains why China and Malaysia are main sources of agricultural products to Hong Kong and Singapore respectively, and we rely on complex and polluting food transportation system to bring food and produce into cities to feed the populations that live there. With looming crises of over-population, deforestation and serious threats to biodiversity on the planet, the oil and energy shortages ahead, model of supplying food looks to be unsustainable. There has to be a better model…

ENTER STAGE RIGHT: the innovative scientists at Columbia University… finding Manhattan in the same quandary, – the team, led by Professor Dickson Despommier, proposes the concept of ‘VERTICAL farming’ to the public.

“Their vision of the future is one in which the skyline of New York and other cities include a new kind of skyscraper: the “vertical farm”. The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect,” reports the BBC News.
(Click here to read about vertical farming)

According to the Vertical Farming Project team, energy that powers the ‘virtual farms’ will be generated by giant solar panels and also incinerators which burn the farms' waste products for methane as a fuel resource. Given sophisticated water irrigation & recycling system, agricultural runoff, which may carry pollutants, can be eliminated; water loss in the course of evapotranspiration can also be collected and reused.

Scientists anticipate that the virtual farm concept will be phenomenal. With the well-controlled environment, year-round crop production can be implemented regardless of adverse weather conditions. Located in the urban districts with size equivalent to ordinary office towers, these farms can develop a sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply for the general public. In this way, cities can become more self-reliant in food production.

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‘Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers …Don’t our harvest-able plants deserve the same level of “comfort” and protection that we now enjoy? The time is at hand for us to learn how to safely grow our food inside environmentally controlled multistory buildings within urban centers,’ stated the team at its official website.

(Click here for more about the Vertical Farm Project)
It is justifiable to conclude that vertical farming can be a superior substitute for horizontal farming. The most obvious advantage is that it saves land resources – the government can simply convert abandoned properties in the city into sky-farms as one of its tasks in urban renewal. Since the towers will be highly accessible, transportation costs can be lessened; fossil fuel use will also be dramatically reduced given the decreased need to transport produce thousands of mile.
The virtual farms’ environmentally friendliness also lies in their well-controlled farming conditions: Not only is the leakage of water pollutants prevented, all crops can also be grown organically without pesticides and fertilizers because the farmlands lie indoors, AWAY FROM WILD PARASITES AND BUGS!

(Click to investigate the concrete designs & systems within the Sky Farms)
Farmlands are ordinary, so are skyscrapers. It’s amazing our scientists can make sense out of them both and merge the two ideas into an innovative sky farms. If the proposal is really adopted in the future, existing traditional horizontal farmlands can be returned to natural forests and hopefully, the complex ecosystems can be restored.

WHEN can the envisioned skyfarms become a reality? Let’s hope it’s sooner, rather than later!

We’re interested in what you think. Write to us at EDITOR [at] iCUBED.us… or, COMMENT BELOW!

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