by Rona Fried
This article first appeared in Progressive Investor, April 2008.
High oil prices, the diversion of 30% of our corn crop for ethanol, and strong demand from China and India are causing food shortages in vulnerable countries around the world. We need to go beyond giving aid and help these communities develop locally grown food sources and we have to focus on growing our food close to home in developed countries.
Some of the best ideas are hatched at our universities where students are often encouraged to think outside the box. Another recent feature in Progressive Investor on carbon capture (December 2007) profiled a disruptive technology developed at Columbia University, where another equally profound contribution is under development – Vertical Farms.
Dickson Despommier, a professor of Environmental Health Science at Columbia, gave birth to the idea in his Medical Ecology class which examines the health consequences of a damaged environment. The graduate school class attracts students from many disciplines such as medicine, law, architecture and nutrition. Over the past three years, he’s focused on the effects of agriculture on the environment.
He gave the class a project: pretend you’re a community of 50,000 people and you have no other food source other than a vertical farm – how big a building would you need and what would you grow? The conclusion: growing food in a 30-story building – one square New York City block – could supply a balanced diet for 50,000 people. One building could supply the same amount of food as 588 acres of land. 110 buildings could feed New York City.
A big idea? Absolutely, but we need to think big to feed an increasingly urban, hungry world. The human population is expected to mushroom by three billion by 2050 with almost all of them living in cities, and with 80% of available farmland already in use, Dickson sees vertical farms doing for agriculture what the skyscraper did for office space.
"We need to devote the level of attention to vertical farming that we did to going to the moon," says Dickson. "It will free the world from having to worry about where our next meal will come from."
The goal: Replace ALL traditional, horizontal farming including plowing, planting and harvesting with a vertical greenhouse that grows every crop including grains (ie., wheat, rice, barley), vegetables, fish (salt and freshwater, crustaceans), poultry and pork. Pigs would be the highest level mammal that could be raised there – cattle would be elsewhere. The food would be grown under 24-hour grow lights, powered by renewable energy.
We’re not inventing anything new, he explains. All these foods are currently grown indoors. Rather, we’re bringing it under one roof and siting it in urban settings.
We interviewed Dickson Despommier to give you insight into this ground-breaking concept.
PI: In a nutshell, what’s driving you to do this?
Dickson Despommier:
Humanity currently lives a linear life while nature lives a circular life. The next step for us is to shift to closed loop living, which is the secret to restoring nature and supporting a steeply rising population. We’ve got to work on both sides or neither will survive.
Right now, we’re crowding into urban centers without knowing how to live there. We could accommodate many more people if we imitated the cycles of nature. If we can turn municipal waste into good clean food, water and energy, we’ve accomplished a cradle to cradle lifestyle. We think vertical farms can accomplish that.
PI: Tell me more about how it works.
Dickson Despommier:
We’re going to scavenge the solids from untreated municipal liquid waste (feces and urine), dry them, pellet them and burn them. We’ll remediate the remaining water to the point where it’s safe and use that to grow crops. The crops will pump the water through their roots, stems and leaves, and send it into the atmosphere where we can collect it again as pure water. We’ll go from feces and urine to food, energy and water in very few steps. That’s a cradle to cradle concept.
That’s in contrast to how we treat waste now – feces and urine goes to a sewage treatment plant where it’s treated and then flushed into our rivers. Meanwhile our food arrives from someplace else relying on a huge irrigation, transport system (trucks, planes, freezers), not to mention taking up much of our land. Think about the amount of fossil fuels that would be saved if we grew our food locally instead of shipping it from places across the country and around the world. Our food is cheap because it’s produced in places where labor costs are almost zero. We can keep the price down by using our own labor, but growing it locally.
We can have our cake and eat it too. We can have all the food we want – short of marbled steak – while we repair the damage we’ve done to the environment. By farming indoors, all the land currently used for agriculture can be allowed to return to its natural state.
PI: How will Big Agriculture feel about that?
Dickson Despommier:
Archers Daniel Midland will love it because they’ll supply chemically defined diets – the exact nutrients needed to produce a tomato or carrot. That will be added to water to grow crops. We won’t need fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides anymore – all the food will be organic.
I’m not trying to get rid of farming completely; I’m trying to give land back to nature. I’d like to say to a farmer, "forget corn and biogas, sit on your porch with your children around you, smoke a pipe, and watch the trees grow back. Farmers would be renamed "carbon farmers" and would be paid through carbon credits.
The abandonment rate of farms is 15-20% a year in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Indiana. The kids grow up and leave. Labor costs are so low outside the U.S. that there’s a huge glut of just about every kind of crop. We can’t compete even with huge subsidies – we’re looking at a $100 billion Farm Bill this year.
If we let it grow back on its own, the forest will re-create itself. If you want proof of concept, look at the Northeastern U.S., which used to be farm land, but is now a haven for wildlife thanks to benign neglect. Eliminate the herbicides and pesticides and other pressures and nature will return. Remember the Grapes of Rath? 600 foot dust clouds blew the topsoil off our heartland, but instead of turning into a desert, the buffalo and antelope are back as is the tall grass prairie. Another great example is the de-militarized zone between North and South Korea. No one has lived there since 1952 – it’s verdant, and the tigers are back.
If we allowed the hardwood forests to grow back in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, they would suck up 4% of the CO2 we produce.
PI: What’s your estimated cost to build vertical farms and what revenues do you expect to generate?
Dickson Despommier:
To produce a prototype would cost $10-20 million, while a full blown Vertical Farm could cost as much as $200-$300 million.
The amount of revenue it generates depends on food prices. Michael Pollan, a professor at the University of California/ Berkeley, estimates that for every calorie of food, we burn 10 calories of oil! That means a head of lettuce that costs $1.49 a head has $0.75 cents of oil in it. If I don’t have to transport it, store it or even wrap it in cellophane, I can sell it for half price and still make a lot of money.
It also depends on the kind of crops you grow. If you grow the most expensive crops you’ll make the most profit, but then you’re building a gourmet farm, not a farm to feed people.
If the U.S. took $2 billion of the $100 billion Farm Bill to construct vertical farms, it wouldn’t have to worry about supporting the agricultural economy anymore. China and India are desperate for an agricultural solution – they’re throwing huge amounts of money down the black hole of pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers. In these situations, the question isn’t the amount of money we can make, it’s about literally being able to supply healthy food for citizens.
On the other hand, if Whole Foods wants a vertical farm on top of its building, we’ll have to look hard at what it would cost.
PI: How realistic is it that you’ll actually get this off the ground?
Dickson Despommier:
Do we know how to do it? Absolutely. Are we going to do it? Absolutely. There will be a vertical farm within the next four years. It might be a 5-story demonstration project that can supply food for say four good sized restaurants and maybe a school and a hospital. When the scale-up issues are worked out we’ll be able to ramp up to supply whole communities.
I’d like to use World Bank funding to build the first vertical farms in Africa, in places like Darfur or Chad. It saves the land and saves them from having to use human feces as fertilizer (which spreads infections). The plants will filter dirty water and make clean water.
Let’s give people the food they need at a price they can afford and everyone gets healthy, and that includes wildlife and nature.
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July 15 2008 NY Times article.
Rona Fried, Ph.D. is President of SustainableBusiness.com and Editor of Progressive Investor. This article is excerpted from Progressive Investor and is adapted from her column, "Investing in Clean Energy," in Solar Today.
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