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HI-RISE HORTICULTURE
Submitted by KAT on Fri, 02/02/2007 - 11:48am.
One of my all-time favorite children’s books, Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House, tells the saga of a building superintendent who gets bit by the gardening bug and goes on an edible landscaping spree. As tenants move out, vegetables move in. The building becomes a four-story farm, to the landlord’s consternation:
“…When he saw that his tenants had been replaced by vegetables, fruit trees, cows, and chickens, he got upset. Very upset.
“Look here, Old MacDonald, what have you done?” he shouted. “Where are the families? All that’s here now are bushels of fruits and vegetables, herds of cows, and flocks of chickens. And they can’t pay me rent.”
Oh, yes, they can. When the landlord realizes there’s a profit to be made from produce, he constructs a farm stand in front of the building, and sells Old MacDonald’s ultra-local, super-fresh fruits and vegetables four seasons round:
And even in winter, when the earth outside was frozen and covered with snow, things were still growing on the steam-heated farm.
Old MacDonald was quite the visionary, it turns out; first published in 1969, the book not only pre-dates the guerilla gardening movement by several decades, it provides a kind of cartoon blueprint for a futuristic form of food production called “vertical farming.”
I say “futuristic” because it doesn’t exactly exist yet, except in the mind of Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist at Columbia University and founder of the Vertical Farm Project, “Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond…”
Despommier proposes a new kind of urban agriculture: 30-story buildings that each take up a city block and grow enough food for 50,000 people per year.
If that sounds preposterous to you, you must have missed that piece in the NY Times last Wednesday about Moscow’s vast greenhouse complex, covering some 300 acres and providing an abundance of fresh produce all year round.
The greenhouses were constructed by the Communist Party in 1969, the same year that Old MacDonald was pioneering the concept of vertical farming. “The sprawling complex once fed the party elite, keeping the Kremlin stocked with mushrooms and greens no matter the winters swirling outside.”
Now, the soccer field-sized buildings keep the shelves of Moscow’s supermarkets perpetually stocked with fresh, pesticide-free produce:
As many as 1,700 people work in the business, from delivery truck drivers to those who breed and raise the predacious insects that are released, instead of pesticides, to keep the plant-eating insect population in check.
“Warmed by gas and lighted by almost uncountable electric lights,” the greenhouses undoubtedly generate plenty of (sigh) greenhouse gas emissions, so they’re not exactly a model of energy efficiency.
But they do demonstrate the viability of urban farming as a way to feed our most densely populated communities.
Despommier’s design calls for a fish pound on the ground floor stocked with tilapia, trout, and striped bass, with the upper floors devoted to hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables, eliminating the need for soil. Wastewater from the fish tanks would be treated and then recycled, while water containing human wastes and other organic material would be converted to methane to power the building.
Whether this kind of self-contained, sustainable urban food system could really work remains to be seen; Despommier’s concept has generated more curiosity than capital. As Despommier told Plenty magazine:
“The problem is that nobody wants to be first…I think this will arise when someone realizes that they can make a lot of money.”
Or, perhaps, when the drought, water shortages, ice storms, insect infestations and other manifestations of global warming render the future of traditional farming doubtful. Which, judging from the dire warnings in the just-released report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, could be sooner than you think.
Either way, you’ve got to give Despommier credit for thinking inside the box.
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