Vertical Farming and Other Agriculture Stuff

Food, agriculture, and food security are hot topics these days, with good reason. One of the problems with cities has always been that we rely on food to be grown elsewhere and shipped / trucked to us. This creates all sorts of problems with respect to costs and the stability of the system. Cities allow us to live at a much greater population density than what could be supported by the physical area of the city's footprint, and as this density increases, we rely on increasingly complex and expensive supply chains to be able to get all the food into the city that is needed to sustain us. This makes for an unstable system, for if the supply chain ever broke down, the collective millions of us in cities would essentially have no way of getting food.

What could cause such an instability? Climate change, of course!
Check this article out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/09/food-climate-change

Thanks to rising temperatures and changing weather patterns, scientists predict that half of the world's population could face food shortages by 2100. Half! (Which will be around 4.5 billion by then, at least, if the population growth models hold.) This is no laughing matter and we're going to need big solutions fast, otherwise these food shortages will likely hit our cities especially hard.

So how can we approach this issue? Well, I came across 3 neat ways via the news in the last few days, and I'm sure there's many more. The most important thing, of course, is that we gain the willingness to act - once we have motivation, ideas soon follow. It is, of course, excellent then that we now have Mr. Obama as President of the US, as his leadership will hopefully spur the developed world into tackling issues like these. His speech today regarding his climate and energy plan was particularly compelling, and involved phrases like, "no single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy" , "The days of Washington dragging its heels are over" , and "We will not be put off from action because action is hard." Woohoo!

Anyways, back to the ideas:
For an issue as huge as food security, we need action on an international and national level, but also on a local community level. For example:

http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/39052

The city of Seattle recently extended its program known as "Green Seattle Partnership", which is an urban reforestation project with the Cascade Land Conservancy that aims to restore 2,500 acres of parkland by 2025. This is a good thing because not only does increased parkland "'improve our infrastructure and strengthen the social fabric of the city'" (Gene Duvernoy, from the article), but it could also be used for local food production. While such an idea would still require some hurdles to jump over, it at least retains the biodiversity in place so that, if a disaster struck, the city wouldn't be completely screwed!

Change also needs to occur on an individual level, by getting people inspired about growing their own food. See, for example, this article:

http://www.enn.com/agriculture/article/39054

While it does take time, growing food is still easier than one would think and every little bit you can contribute brings you one step closer to self-sufficiency should a disaster occur. Of course, getting people motivated to get their hands dirty is the hard part, especially when there's upfront expenses involved. As well, we North Americans have grown fond of having exotic fruits and vegetables available to us all through the year, so convincing people to switch back to the good ol' potatoes and carrots all through winter would be no easy task. But again, I think the goal here is not necessarily to become wholly self-sufficient, but to simply to be able to provide at least some of your food (I certainly wouldn't mind living off potatoes if a disaster struck and there was nothing else to eat!) and to get back in touch with our food and how it is grown, which is a whole other issue occurring in developed societies.

Finally, and my favourite - why not build farms like we build apartment buildings?
"Levels Jerry!" (Kramer) :)


http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/12/24/cities-may-sprout-vertical-farms/

While this idea faces a vast array of technical challenges, if we could pull it off, it would potentially be able to not only make our cities self-sufficient, but also allow us to decommission a lot of our farmland in the country and allow this land to return to nature!

Ahhh the optimism. :)