Spending
time in the local urban farms of my East Vancouver neighborhood inspired me to
grow my very own vegetable garden. Unfortunately, a raccoon urinated on my
artisan lettuce and my herb crop was teeming with baby spiders. This marked the
end of my urban farming career, as my ancestral prairie knowledge told me that
pee and spiders render a crop useless and that I should throw my little garden
into the yard trimmings bin.
It
makes perfect sense to grow the food you eat close to where you live, as it
eliminates both travel and environmental costs. Seeing as we live in a world
with a shrinking supply of land suitable for agriculture coupled with a booming
population, we’re running out of land to feed us. The concept made so evident
by the KFC Double-Down is that humans haven’t demonstrated the capacity to
consume less, so we’re going to have to learn to produce more in ways that don’t
harm the planet that we rely on.
How
do you create new large areas of agriculture close to, or inside, large cities?
By creating growing space out of thin air. Vertical farming is the idea that
growing food in enclosed structures, whether it’s a skyscraper or a rotating
rack of plants, allows the year-round production of food, minimizes pesticides
and herbicide use, creates more farmable land, and eliminates both the fossil
fuel use and spoilage factor of transporting food long distances.
Years
ago, when wandering around the Internet first became a paying job, I worked as
a blogger for a company that pioneered a system where over 50 varieties of
leafy green vegetables are grown in vertically stacked trays and continuously rotated
within a climate controlled area, ensuring an even exposure to light and
nutrients while creating a constant airflow. The vertical method they used
produced as much as 20 times greater yields than conventional growing methods, while
using only eight per cent of the water usage typical in soil farming.
The
problems with the current industrial agriculture system are becoming evident.
We
have the ability to produce a lot of food, enough food that supermarkets can
stock only the most unblemished and perfect looking produce, but this comes at
a cost. Looking down your supermarket aisles you’ll see foods that are grown in
ways that consume massive volumes of water, degrade topsoil through monoculture
(single-crop) production techniques, and are heavily dependent on fossil fuels
for both synthetic fertilizer and for transportation.
What
would we do if the industrial farms closed today? Our society has become
dependent on a huge, centralized agriculture operations and long distance
transport – I certainly don’t think the Mr. Noodles I have stashed away in the
emergency cupboard could take me very far into the week in terms of nutrition.
Relying on food deliveries from thousands of miles away offers poor food
security and leaves us vulnerable to food shortages caused by volatile market prices
and unpredictable growing conditions.
Vertical
farms could eventually be able to supply much of the produce for urban centers on
demand and at a reasonable cost. Building a skyscraper full of crops sounds
expensive, and it is, but so is the way we’re currently growing as a global
population. When comparing costs, it’s important to remember that currently,
industrial agriculture is subsidized, and gets help from policies that
encourage the current destructive industrial practices. The hidden costs of production,
such as the environmental mess that’s continuously building, isn’t included in
the price of the industrial foods in the supermarket, but we’ll be paying for
it later as a society.
Vertical
farms aren’t the perfect solution for every city and every situation. The
advantages of controlling the growing environment in an indoor landscape also
comes with what could be a troubling level of energy consumption to keep ideal
growing temperatures, both for heating and for the lights acting as stand-ins
for the sun.
According
to agriculture researcher Stan Cox, if you wanted to replace all of the wheat
cultivation in America for a year using vertical farming, you would need eight
times the amount of electricity generated by all the power plants in the US. If
a vertical farm is plugged into an energy system that uses coal power plants,
or other carbon intensive energy forms, it negates some of vertical farming’s
positive effects.
In
B.C., we’re lucky to have a fairly strong renewable energy portfolio with
hydropower feeding the majority of the electricity into our grid. So with a
goal of only using renewable types of energy to feed the vertical farms, they
become a sustainable option.
There
are already vertical farm projects around the world that are showing promise,
so it’s looking like vertical farming won’t become the Segway of agriculture.
In Suwon, South Korea they have a vertical farm working and producing vegetables
in a three-story demonstration built to the specifications of vertical farming
guru Dick Despommier. Vancouver will have their own example soon, as local
company Valcent will be installing a vertical farm on the roof level of an EasyPark
lot in downtown Vancouver.
As
someone who depends on a calculator for equations that can’t be counted on
fingers, let me show some simple numbers to illustrate the logic of vertical
farms: we don’t have much land left because we used it all to build malls and grow
whatever is in the middle of a McDonald’s burger. The world’s population is
growing by 1.10 per cent every year, and we’re depleting groundwater, especially
in places like California, where half the fruits and vegetables in the United
States are grown, the water table is being over-drafted at a rate of 1.6
billion cubic meters per year.
It
makes sense to look at different options to the existing model, because as
strange as it sounds, the current industrial farming model makes far less sense
than creating skyscrapers full of vegetables.
Michaela
Davies is a Communications Director for a local corporation based in Vancouver.
Her long list of accomplishments is only matched by her love of all things
Netflix and pizza. She currently holds the record for "afternoon
napping." Michaelas father is also an esteemed professor at Capilano
University.
//Michaela Davis, guest columnist
//Graphics by Katie So
//Michaela Davis, guest columnist
//Graphics by Katie So
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