Vertical Farming

This is an interesting article from Spiegel, the German news site. As an excerpt:

Vertical farming is an old idea. Indigenous people in South America have long used vertically layered growing techniques, and the rice terraces of East Asia follow a similar principle. But, now, a rapidly growing global population and increasingly limited resources are making the technique more attractive than ever...


Vertical farming has the potential to solve this problem. The term "vertical farming" was coined in 1915 by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey. Architects and scientists have repeatedly looked into the idea since then, especially toward the end of the 20th century. In 1999, Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences and microbiology at New York's Columbia University seized upon the idea together with his students. After having grown tired of his depressing lectures on the state of the world, his students finally protested and asked Despommier to work with them on a more positive project.

From the initial idea of "rooftop farming," the cultivation of plants on flat roofs, the class developed a high-rise concept. The students calculated that rooftop-based rice growing would be able to feed, at most, 2 percent of Manhattan's population. "If it can't be done using rooftops, why don't we just grow the crops inside the buildings?" Despommier asked himself. "We already know how to cultivate and water plants indoors."

With its many empty high-rise buildings, Manhattan was the perfect location to develop the idea. Despommier's students calculated that a single 30-story vertical farm could feed some 50,000 people. And, theoretically, 160 of these structures could provide all of New York with food year-round, without being at the mercy of cold snaps and dry spells. 

Apart from being a relatively new technology, vertical farming has several barriers it must hurdle before it becomes market-ready. The article mentions the most important one: where can one find the power to provide light for all those indoor crops? Since sunlight is to be replaced by artificial light most of the time, the questions now are: 1) what are the best, most efficient methods of gathering as much natural sunlight as possible and 2) how can a building converted to vertical farming be able to generate the much needed electricity to power all its light-emitting diodes?

Still, the perceived technical difficulties fail to dampen the exciting possibilities that vertical farming has to offer. Given more research, vertical farming has the potential to greatly reduce world hunger, especially today where the world has less arable land than ever before, where water is becoming scarcer, where the weather is transforming previously robust farm land into either deserts or floodplains, and where the human population is putting a strain on our planet's resources.

To close, do I see vertical farming being practiced in the Philippines anytime soon? Ayoko magsalita ng patapos but I doubt it. Vertical farming implicitly thrives on the idea of several high-rise, abandoned buildings in the city, just waiting to be converted to agricultural purposes. As we stand now, with the exception of Makati and Taguig, there aren't that many cities in the Philippines which do feature skyscrapers. What I can see though is the rise of home-grown food products, organically cultivated atop residential and commercial buildings, grown and harvested in line with the principles of vertical farming. Now, that would be lovely to look at.