Vertical Farming

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Like all our precious resources, good ideas should be reclaimed and recycled. Urban agriculture is one such good idea now made new again.

The April 1985 issue of THE FUTURIST featured an inspiring new book by New Alchemy Institute founders John and Nancy Jack Todd, Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design (Sierra Club Books, 1984). The visionary seeds they planted then are now coming into season.

Among the Todds’ more intriguing proposals were multi-tiered city farms occupying once-abandoned warehouses: Mushrooms in the basement; chickens, eggs, trout, and catfish on the first floor; hydroponic veggies on the second floor; third-floor lettuce; and rooftop wind turbines and solar-energy panels.

Even more intriguing were the Todds’ micro-agriculture visions, such as park fountains used for irrigation, fish raised in bus-stop aquariums, and sidewalks converted to aquaculture ponds.

Now, these visions are being reclaimed, recycled, and renewed in towers that are half workspaces and half gardens, eco-laboratories and pyramid farms, and “living” skyscrapers with decks dedicated to food, fuel, or families. These and other inventive agro-architectural solutions take the ideas of city and indoor farming into a new, increasingly urbanized future.

The Vertical Farm Project, launched in 2001 by Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, collects ideas that promise to reduce agriculture’s ecological footprint — not only by bringing food growers and consumers closer together, but also by extending “farmland” into a third dimension: skyward.

The advantages of raising food crops and animals indoors and in closer proximity to consumers include year-round production, more-efficient use and reuse of water and other resources, and protection from threats ranging from epidemics to terrorists.

The recent resurgence of urban agriculture in popular futurist and science literature (including articles in Scientific American, Time, Popular Science, and the New York Times) illustrates that good ideas may need to be cycled and recycled before their time truly comes.

Like the Todds’ New Alchemy Institute, the Vertical Farm Project envisions the transformation of urban architecture along ecological principles. A 30-story skyscraper on one city block could potentially feed 50,000 Manhattanites, using technologies available now, according to Despommier. And with technologies available in the future, intensive-farming techniques could enable us to settle on the Moon, Mars, or beyond.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more information, visit The Vertical Farm Project, www.verticalfarm.com.

John and Nancy Jack Todd co-founded (1981) Ocean Arks International, www.oceanarks.org; since 1999, John has been a research professor and distinguished lecturer at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.