Farms in the Sky

Tuesday's New York Times ran a story about Dickson Despommier's Vertical Farm Project, a plan to build urban farms. The plan seeks to bring agriculture into the cities, in the form of high-rise farms. (Have a look at some of the designs.)

It's a fascinating idea, but I didn't quite get it at first. It isn't, as I first read it, a plan to put farming on the outside of city buildings. Instead, it's a plan to create purpose-built high rise building for farming. That's pretty revolutionary. Surely the cost of land in cities is prohibitive, as is the cost of putting up one of these structures (the article says $20-30 million to build a prototype, hundreds of millions to build a structure capable of feeding 50,000 people).

Certainly it's an interesting idea. But apart from cost, there's a question of energy budgets - these designs are supposed to be self-sustaining in terms of energy inputs and grown without chemical inputs, but someone will probably figure that you can make more money using fossil fuels and the idea that you can avoid pest outbreaks sounds like someone who has never run a greenhouse. That said, I'm opining based on a New York Times article. I need to actually read what people involved with the project have written.