Expert views - Dickson Despommier on Urban Agriculture & Vertical Farming (full interview)

In September 2014 the Centre for Urban Agriculture held an international conference on Vertical Farming and Urban Agriculture. As part of the conference Dick…
Video Rating: 3 / 5

http://www.verticalfarm.com By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to …

Expert views – Dickson Despommier on Urban Agriculture & Vertical Farming (full interview)

About The Author
-

25 Comments

  • Isaiah Macadam

    I saw a video on kickstarter a couple years ago that had something along
    the line of this concept. From what I remember it was around the idea of
    automated farming in ‘cheep’ ‘convent’ ‘confided’ settings. Now this with
    the concepts of vertical farming, and the ideas of “The Venus Project” is
    something quite beautiful. A world I want to work towards and live in.?

  • Rosebud Magazine

    #Verticalfarming pioneer #dickson #despommier says, “By the year 2050,
    nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying
    the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human
    population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An
    estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented
    by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them,
    if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today.”
    Watch him speak on vertical farming and #hydroponics ! The Vertical Farm?

  • richzap2

    @ApostateAbe While your point on the amount of light a vertical farm could
    collect from sunlight is correct, aren’t you forgetting that we can produce
    artificial light which mimics sunlight. In that case we can reduce the
    vertical farm to a simple equation, energy = food. Put electricity in for
    powering the lights (and anything else) and get food out. You would still
    probably save energy overall due to the concentrated nature of the building
    reducing transport and other costs.

  • SBFloppie

    @SupremeCommander360 The production of metal that can support
    skyscraper-sized farms like he is proposing (hint: you’ll need steel) has a
    substantial environmental impact. We’re talking strip-mining for the
    metals, chemical treatments, foundries, and the logistics to ship the
    material to the farm site. Once something like this is constructed it might
    be sustainable, but the cost of constructing it isn’t. And like I said,
    it’s MUCH more labor-intensive. You can’t mass harvest vertical farms.

  • cass2chk

    Awesome but not practical. With the drawings alone it is big failure –
    plastics, concrete, processed wood and steel. Make the best dreams out from
    everyone’s home backyard, simple but not costly. Agriculture is not a blue
    collar dream, we still got bare lands to be nurtured by common sense with
    nature.

  • ApostateAbe

    @plasmavore The thing is that the fact that they look really nice is really
    their only appeal. They are not practical in the least. They do not have
    the geometry to capture enough sunlight and they would inhabit valuable
    building space in cities.

  • thedrunkfr0g

    @vlogbrothers unfortunately illinois soil does not exist overseas or any
    place besides illinois, and rich soil in general is confined to a few areas
    around the world, so it becomes hard for those places without the rich soil
    to grow decent produce. the buildings don’t have to be skyscrapers anyways,
    a standard office building (not an office building in new york or any other
    large city) but one in a medium sized city should be able to handle a
    vertical farm.

  • SupremeCommander360

    @SBFloppie What tech? it’s not exactly that hard to stack greenhouses onto
    of each other. No need for any serious infrastructure, just use light
    weight materials like wood/aluminum and lots of glass. The structure
    doesn’t necessarily have to be that tall, as long as it’s contained it will
    be able to produce crops at a higher efficiency than traditional farming,
    with the benefit of no runoff and less land being used.

  • mason v

    insted of doing all this complex ass stuff to support the rising number of
    people why dont we just sterilize a good chunk of earth? just because you
    can have kids doesnt mean you should. back when people were few in the
    bible it was ok but now theres to many of us… so fuck it.

  • stratocaster1986able

    @yesiamanalien Some use low power led lights. Also a lot of these buildings
    are designed with solar and wind power sources, they build them to be as
    efficient as possible. I’m sure to provide nutrients they have an extremely
    well thought out system, you’d just have to ask an expert. Hydroponics are
    the way, I have a system in my own home. And if the Venus project came into
    play there would be no need for greed at all, unfortunately these greedy
    fucks are gonna be around till the end.

  • holdingoutformyhero

    Question: how is this going to affect the rural agricultural communities
    that are currently providing this country’s food and the small family
    farmers that are already struggling due to market bullys like Monsanto?
    sounds great ideally, but corporate farming can’t end well.

  • ApostateAbe

    Paraphrase from Alternet.org’s article, “Why Planting Farms in Skyscrapers
    Won’t Solve Our Food Problems” For obvious reasons, no one has ever
    proposed stacking solar panels one above the other. For the same reasons,
    crop fields cannot be layered one above the other without providing a
    substitute for the sunlight. Even with all-glass walls, the amount of light
    reaching plants on all of a high-rise would fall far short of what is
    needed.

  • 40pointplan

    @holdingoutformyhero New Movie coming soon called “40 Point Plan”. A Save
    the World film showing how Food Sky Towers will SIGNIFICANTLY help these
    struggling farmers you refer to, along with eliminating billion dollar crop
    failures and cross contamination with livestock causing people to die. What
    if a company was the exact opposite of Monsanto and actually gave 33% off
    all profits to “We the People” who are struggling. What if Food Sky Towers
    they build sole purpose was to eliminate hunger…?

  • ApostateAbe

    @richzap2 Any country that can afford to build vertical farms and produce
    artificial sunlight to sustain them can also sustainably import the food
    from elsewhere for much cheaper. When there is a poor and dense population
    on the Moon with no soil, then maybe vertical farms will be a good idea.
    The economics and physics can be modeled with feasibility studies funded by
    interested investors, which probably explains why not one vertical farm has
    ever been built.

Leave a Reply to Rosebud Magazine Cancel reply