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side ways farming to going up farming... go vertical!

posted on Sunday, March 01, 2009 10:45 PM

Vertical farming…

Year 2050… iphone is already considered a classic, cars may already be flying (or better yet people took to walking and to cycling already), almost everybody lives on buildings already, gardens are considered luxury, technology reached a point that you didn´t expect it to be. A lot of things will change but one thing is certain, we still have to eat.

I do not know if I am going to have kids. You may have already. But we are still at year 2009. I am 25 years old. By year 2050, I may still be alive. At that time, the world population would be really unimaginably high. If everybody is already living on buildings because there is not much space left to construct a house, imagine where the vegetables on your salad will be planted! I do not know about you but I love to eat!

No worries though! Smile! There is hope! Vertical farming! Imagine a skyscraper where the ingredients of your vegetable salad are growing, and the poor cow who is going to be a medium-rare steak on my plate is going to be raised. Pretty cool, huh?

Now, I know that there will be a lot of people who are going to ask questions like… whaaat? Vegetables growing inside a skyscraper? Pigs being raised in that building? No. It is not normal. It is not traditional. There will be comments like… I want my vegetables just the way they are!

Right. Hundreds of years ago you do not have to go to a hospital to give birth. Actually, there are still a lot of places where women do not give birth on hospitals. It does not mean it is very convenient.

Where I come from, I know how the weather affects the livelihood of many people. I hear of stories of a family who puts all their money on buying rice or vegetables to plant; spend loads of months of very hard work. Later on, pests ruin the plants or worst yet, because of a signal no.3 typhoon everything is destroyed. There are also a number of people who get sick or die because of the pesticides used on the crops. Aside from that, a lot of people from the rural areas, in search of a better future, go to the urban areas and settle there without getting a job because almost all their life is spent on tilling land or taking care of the poultry house. Rural areas are rapidly becoming urbanized. A good example of this is the 2 hectare land at the back of the suburban house where I grew up. It was a corn field (4yrs old), a garments factory (10yrs old), warehouse of Toyota car parts (12yrs old), and a shopping center (16yrs old).

Vertical farming has a lot of advantages. It will provide jobs to people who will take care of the plants that are grown organically i.e. no herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers that can harm them. There are possibilities of converting abandoned urban properties into food production centers. The water used will also be recycled. More information can be found at http://www.verticalfarm.com/index.html.

If we want to continue eating the next decades, and provide jobs to more people, I really believe that vertical farming is a very good solution. It is a technology that we have to welcome with arms wide open… and embrace!

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