By Andrew Vittiglio and Ansh Motiani The world’s population is predicted to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, a drastic increase from the current 7.3 billion, and feeding could possibly be the biggest challenge of the century. UN data suggest we'll need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to meet increased global demand. This statistic even reduces food waste by nearly 10 percent, which can be seen by some as a drastic curve or flaw in the data. The number of farms has steadily declined over the past eight years by what is estimated to be 117,500 farms. With the declination of total farms, farmers around the world are forced to compensate as seen by the average farm size increasing by 20 acres. This indicates that there is some consolidation, so fewer total farm owners with larger farms. “This is a trend that has been ongoing since World War II, but as the average farm size grows, it also becomes that much harder for a young family to get started with a farming operation,” says Doug Mayo, Jackson County, Missouri Extension Director. Additionally, scientists say that the Earth has lost a third of its arable lands over the last 40 years, mainly due to expansion and urbanization. This poses an immense problem as the world will see increasing food demands due to a growing population along with ever decreasing arable lands. So what is the overarching solution that will save humanity from our own internal collapse? Vertical farming, a fairly new and unknown method of farming, is seen as a very practical way to do just that. What is vertical farming? Vertical farming isn’t just the practice of producing food on vertically inclined surfaces. Picture it as a skyscraper, but on every floor, a farmer produces food in vertically stacked layers commonly integrated into other structures. The idea of vertical farming is actually quite old. Indigenous peoples used vertically layered growing techniques like the rice terraces of East Asia. The term itself was coined by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey in 1915. However, it was popularized in 1999 by a professor at New York’s Columbia University, Dickson Despommier, who built upon the idea with his students. Vertical Farming is a type of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) technology uses modernized farming techniques to artificially control the light, gases, humidity, and temperature, making the production of foods indoor possible. The primary goal of the vertical farming method is to produce the most food as possible in a limited amount of space. There are many other advantages besides the most obvious land issues: Increased Production: Vertical farming allows for the production of more crops from the same square footage of growing area. According to TheBalancesMB, “1 acre of an indoor area offers equivalent production to at least 4-6 acres of outdoor capacity...a 30-story building with a basal area of 5 acres can potentially produce an equivalent of 2,400 acres of conventional horizontal farming”. Less Use Of Water: Vertical farming produces crops with up to 95 percent less water than required for normal cultivation. It uses a method known as hydroponics, which is a system of growing plants in a water based, nutrient rich solution, that requires no soil at all. With the proper setup, plants can mature 25% faster and produce up to 30% more produce than the same plants grown in soil. Since the system is enclosed, less water is evaporated and the solution that is not used by the plants can be recycled and reused again. Ease of Farming: Crops in a field most often are affected by natural disasters (flooding or severe droughts); indoor vertical farms are much less likely to even be slightly affected by any unfavorable weather, providing greater certainty of harvest output. What are the Disadvantages of Vertical Farming? Cost Efficiency: The financial practicality of the new farming method is still uncertain. Major costs, such as the physical building of skyscrapers for farming, heating, lighting, and labor cost, can easily outweigh the benefits we can get from the output of vertical farming. The building cost for a 60-hectare farm can be well over $100 million. With a heavy concentration in urban cities, labor costs can be exponentially high due to a general higher wage in a skilled labor job. Manual pollination, one of the most difficult and challenging pieces of vertical farming, may become one of the more labor-intensive functions in vertical farms. At Work: Singapore With an area of 279 square miles and a population of five million, Singapore is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. With most of the land set aside for urban development, the mere 250 acres of farmland are not enough to feed the growing population. As a result, more than 90% of Singapore’s food demand is fulfilled by imports from over 30 countries. The dependency on the external world makes the country highly vulnerable to turbulence in food supply and prices. The way out of this problem is for the city is to produce food themselves, but with high real estate prices and where land is premium, the only viable option is to go vertical and take advantage of the limited amount of land they have. Entrepreneur Jack Ng, with the help of Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA), has come up with one of the world’s first commercial vertical farms. Although this is a soil based vertical farm, it still produces one ton of vegetables every other day and is five to ten times more productive than a regular farm. It is the first low carbon hydraulic water-driven vertical system in the world to grow tropical-vegetables vertically which gives significant yield and uses less water, energy and natural resources, to achieve a sustainable green high-tech farm. Ng’s system, known as “A-Go-Gro” technology grows plants in 6 meter tall, A-shaped towers. Each tower consists of 22 to 26 tiers of growing troughs, which are rotated around the aluminium tower frame at a rate of one millimeter per second to ensure uniform distribution of sunlight, good air flow and irrigation for all the plants. It is powered by a unique gravity aided water-pulley system that uses only one litre of water, collected in a rainwater fed overhead reservoir. The energy needed to power one A-frame is the equivalent of illuminating just one 60-watt light bulb, its carbon footprint almost nonexistent. The water powering the frames is recycled and filtered before returning to the plants. All organic waste on the farm is composted and reused. The small amount of energy and water needed to grow vegetables, and the close proximity of the consumer potentially reduces transportation costs, carbon dioxide emissions and risk of spoilage. The vegetables are harvested everyday and delivered almost immediately to retail outlets.
Sources: http://cea.cals.cornell.edu/about/index.html http://www.fao.org/sustainable-food-value-chains/library/details/en/c/265952/ https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/08/14/vertical-farming-future https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage https://thewaternetwork.com/_/sustainable-agriculture/article-FfV/vertical-farm-95-less-water-and-no-soil-zsP9I_Vwv-LLvzMOK1tSeg https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9b2d/86d017d9d1d73c8574de9537b1457a1c159b.pdf https://permaculturenews.org/2014/07/25/vertical-farming-singapores-solution-feed-local-urban-population/ https://www.fullbloomhydroponics.net/hydroponic-systems-101/ Images: https://permaculturenews.org/images/Vertical_Farming_VF_illustration_large.jpg https://permaculturenews.org/images/Vertical_Farming_2_skygreens_vertical_farm.jpg https://nwdistrict.ifas.ufl.edu/phag/files/2016/03/USDA-Farms-Land-in-Farms-2015-Summary.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2600/0*34MJeWQCz8JIgxD5
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AuthorsAnsh Motiani, Andrew Vittiglio, Charles Kirby, and Benjamin Yurovsky
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April 2021
CategoriesEnvironmental Tech
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