Institute For The Future

Green Acres, Now Including Penthouse View

Vertical farms finally make the move from cybergreen fantasy to the pages of the New York Times. The logic is seductive: urban towers, filled not with more offices and apartments, but with food crops.

Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a vertical farm, but hundreds of millions to build one of the 30-story towers that he suggests could feed 50,000 people. “I’m viewed as kind of an outlier because it’s kind of a crazy idea,” Dr. Despommier, 68, said with a chuckle. “You’d think these are mythological creatures.” [...]

“If I were to set myself as a certifier of vertical farms, I would begin with security,” he said. “How do you keep insects and bacteria from invading your crops?” He says growing food in climate-controlled skyscrapers would also protect against hail and other weather-related hazards, ensuring a higher quality food supply for a city, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

 

Vertical farms offer a nice way of sidestepping a big urban density problem (that is, how does a city feed itself without relying on hundreds of square miles of farmland?), and have the (to me) right balance of futurosity and plausibility.

It occurs to me, though, that a variant of the vertical farms might work well for the hollowed-out suburbs, too: how much would it cost to convert a McMansion to allow it to grow food?