Imagine a glass-walled skyscraper in the midst of a bustling American metropolis. Instead of offices and cubicles, though, this high-rise is filled with rows and rows of tomatoes, lettuce, squash and cucumbers. The elevator takes you past whole floors of strawberries, broccoli, and corn plants – all thriving hundreds of feet above the city streets. High above the honking taxis and pedestrians you may even find indoor fish-farms and chicken coops.

Welcome to the Vertical Farm.

With sustainable buildings and "cradle-to-cradle" design already the hottest thing in architecture, Columbia professor Dickson Despommier has an idea for a truly "green" building that is far grander. Leveraging new energy-efficient technologies and "closed loop" systems that reduce or eliminate waste, Despommier and his students have conceived a towering greenhouse-in-the-sky that could produce enough food to feed 60,000 people — winter, summer, spring and fall.

Unlike traditional farms which consume vast amounts of water and spew torrents of toxic run-off, this farm would use a living machine of microbes and algae to treat sewage. The treated water would then be pumped back through 30 stories of organic crops, grown with ultra-efficient aeroponics and 24 hour lighting systems. The building would compost organic waste in a bio-gas reactor, and capture evaporated moisture from the ceilings of the humid grow rooms.

The result? Ripe produce, renewable energy, and fresh water – right in the cities where they’re needed most.

While this may sound too good to be true, Despommier and his students insist that, while still theoretical, their dream can be realized using currently available technologies. What's more, to hear them tell it, transforming this surreal vision into living, breathing reality is vitally important — in fact, they say, the future of farming may depend on it.


Old problem, new approach

Cultivating crops has been the defining act of civilization since the first wheat fields sprang up in the Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent. In the ensuing millenia, agriculture has allowed humanity to vastly increase its numbers and spread across the globe - but has wreaked havoc on the environment in the process.

Deforestation and depletion of topsoil have been going on for centuries, while the advent of mechanized, mono-crop farming has led to the use of an increasingly toxic batch of chemical pesticides. As unwanted species adapt to these poisons, farmers must use increasingly potent doses which flood into the ecosystem after every rainfall, and contaminate groundwater year after year. “This is why the single most damaging source of pollution is agricultural runoff,” notes Despommier.

But letting machines and chemicals do the farming has freed us up for other things – among them, urbanization. And lets face it, we’re not going to move out of the city and back to the farm; in fact, the trend is just the opposite. In 1800, nearly 90 percent of the labor force in America was working on farms. That number had fallen to 40 percent by 1900, and is below four percent today. This year, for the first time in history, more than half of humanity will live in urban areas. And by 2050, forecasters say, nearly 80 percent of our species will be city dwellers.

Meanwhile, Despommier points out, we’ve used up virtually all the world’s arable land - and with three billion more humans headed for our crowded planet in the next few decades, we’re flat out of room. After attending a meeting of agricultural experts in August, he says, “I was stunned that they recognize across the board that in 25 years there won’t be farming as we know it in California.”

We are effectively sowing our fields with chemical salts; and large agricultural suppliers like Delmonte, Hunt and Dole are already outsourcing asparagus, spinach, and tomatoes to China, India, and Mexico. The World Bank, which ensures agricultural loans, reports that soil is being used up at a rate twenty times greater than it’s being replaced. And this year, the ‘breadbasket of the world’ is set to become a net food importer for the first time in our history.

Faced with these facts, Despommier argues, why not bring farming back to the people? Urban planners, at long last, have begun to recognize that sprawl is an incredibly inefficient way for people to live. Vertical Farming simply applies that same logic to our crops.