Farms In The Sky

The world faces many great problems as we begin to move through the 21st century; global warming, getting carbon emissions down, lack of clean water, not to mention the over exposure of Big Brother contestants.

One of the other major problems that will hit human populations over the next 50 years will be a lack of land for growing food.

Many places on earth such as Australia and Russia are “empty” with hardly any population relative to the amount of land available.

Even closer to home there are many large areas that are basically population free, the Pennines, the Scottish Highlands, Dartmoor and new car sales forecourts.

So it is not that we do not actually have land available, the problem is that the land is not viable for growing foods for one reason or another.

One factor that can make land unusable for food production is climate.

Central Australia roasts in high temperatures most of the year and the ground is baked like concrete.

A similar but opposite problem exists in Russia where the ground is frozen into rock for many months each year.

Another problem, perhaps more applicable in the UK, is the cost of transporting the foods to our main population areas.

We had a taste of this last year when food prices soared 25% because the cost of transportation fuel skyrocketed.

That is a situation that will arise again, but of course we have no choice as we have to grow food in the fields out in the country and transport them to supermarkets in London and greengrocers in Manchester, don’t we?

Well maybe not. A guy by the name of Dickson Despommier, who is a professor at Columbia University, believes that we do have plenty of options that will allow us to grow enough food to deal with our ever-growing population and at the same time keep transport costs down to a minimum.

His idea is pretty simple; grow the food where the people are, grow the food in the cities.

That seems very obvious, but of course there is nowhere to grow food in the cities.

Well Prof Despommier believes that there is plenty of room to grow food in vertical farms.

These will be multi-story units that have fields in layers one on top of the other.

Think of a multi-storey car park with a much higher ceiling on each floor to allow the sunlight in.

He believes that such farms could be built for around $50 million each and could supply very large amounts of food right on our doorsteps.

He also envisages massive skyscraper farms of perhaps 30 floors.

He believes that these semi-indoor farms will be far more productive than their traditional counterparts as it will be relatively simple to protect crops from the worst of the weather while also giving them the correct amount of water and nutrients that they need to flourish.

Other people working in this “field” point out that we already have huge untapped spaces within our cities that could be turned into farms.

We have rooftops on shopping malls with perhaps half a million square meters of space, we have apartment block rooftops, big warehouses with unused real estate over their heads.

According to the professor all that is needed is the public and political will to make these things practical and viable, and we will have a way to feed our population that is expected to grow by 3 billion in just the next 30 years.