Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University, is promoting urban vertical farms. It’s great to see some of us thinking-big and thinking outside the box. Compared to the R&D costs of, say, fusion research it shouldn’t be very expensive to design, plan and build some pilot projects. Like geosequestration, this is in the class of engineering that requires learning by doing. For funding, perhaps this is a better outlet for some of the excess Soros money :-)
Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. Roughly 150 such buildings, Despommier estimates, could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.
Despommier began developing the vertical-farming concept six years ago (his research can be found at verticalfarm .com), and he has been contacted by scientists and venture capitalists from the Netherlands to Dubai who are interested in establishing a Center for Urban Sustainable Agriculture, either independently or within Columbia. He estimates it could take a working group of agricultural economists, architects, engineers, agronomists, and urban planners five to ten years to figure out how to marry high-tech agricultural practices with the latest sustainable building technology.
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