Farming on the Y-Axis

On my way to class this afternoon, I was listening to an interview with Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia's Department of Environmental Health Sciences, on the Leonard Lopate show.  Despommier is doing work on vertical farming, an agricultural model for an increasingly populated world with increasingly limited resources.  From the abstract to the Vertical Farm Essay:

Over the next 50 years, the human population is expected to rise to at least 8.6 billion, requiring an additional 10⁹ hectares to feed them using current technologies. That quantity of farmland is no longer available. Thus, alternative strategies for obtaining an abundant and varied food supply without encroachment into the few remaining functional ecosystems must be seriously entertained. If traditional farming could be replaced by constructing urban food production centers - vertical farms - then a long-term benefit would be the gradual repair of many of the world’s damaged ecosystems through the systematic abandonment of farmland.

Some upsides to the initiative hold a lot of appeal (cutting down on fossil fuels, converting abandoned property) while others seem just a little far-fetched at this point (we can't go to the moon or to Mars until we know how to farm indoors on Earth), and, as with any innovation, it's probably not out of the question for some drawbacks to reveal themselves in time.  But on the whole I have to say I'm intrigued, and I'll be really curious to see if this or something like it comes to fruition in the coming years.

Comments

[Bonnie/Dairy Queen]

That's very cool -- I haven't listened to the interview yet, so I don't know what it entails. I'm always looking at urban landscaping and thinking, why don't they grow herbs on those balconies? or use colorful yet edible plants like kale for borders? The Food Not Lawns people are big on this idea: http://www.foodnotlawns.com/

[Ellia]

A dear friend of mine is doing urban agricultural work in Senegal with the Peace Corps. This is probably not what vertical farming entails, but it's still very cool.

http://heatherinsenegal.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_heatherinsenegal_archive.html