Vertical Farmland Coming to a City Near You

by Andrea Millar — May 4, 2008

If you live in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom wants to put wind turbines in your backyard. Now, how about a farm? It's not news that food is more and more of an issue as the global population continues to rise, especially in urban centers. This will be the case even if the current politics involved with food/biofuel competition are resolved tomorrow. With this in mind, the next skyscraper you see erected in your neighborhood could be a 30-story vertical farm, supplying you with all your basic food needs and maybe even keeping some of those sweet Chinese eggplants within easy reach too.

If you follow the green blogs, you may have caught a recent snippet about plans to build a vertical farm in a city that usually isn't #1 on anyone's green list--Las Vegas. Unfortunately, that was probably a dose of Internet-brewed hype, but in a very, very pretty parallel story, green media Web site TreeHugger.com let slip plans for a magnificent vertical farm structure to be built in Toronto, Canada. Hopefully this one isn't all hype. The farms can reportedly feed 35,000 people when operating optimally, and I'm pretty sure this is one skyscraper that most people wouldn't mind having on their block. I'm a big fan of any idea that could reduce masses of CO2 emissions, especially if it means I could keep eating strawberries year long...two or three whole stories of them!

I'm not sure if he has the patent for this idea or what, but a Google search for vertical farms will lead you to Dr. Dickson Despommier, Ph.D., owner of the verticalfarms.com domain name. Apparently he'll build you one of these babies for a cool $84 million, with a $5 million/year upkeep cost. This is something I gotta see! Sir, I shall see you in Toronto.