Designer farming

Urban food projects take to the skies and the water

It’s not just a huge floating hydroponic glasshouse, it’s “a metaphor for us and for the future of this planet.” That’s how New York’s parks commissioner Adrian Benepe sees the vegetable-growing Science Barge moored off Manhattan’s West Side. “We can float together or we’ll surely sink together,” he says.

The designers of the Science Barge have high ambitions for the demonstration project,which is powered by solar, wind, and biofuels, irrigated by rainwater and purified riverwater –and packed with tomatoes, lettuce, peppers and cucumbers. “Cities like New York should make use of unexploited rooftop space to grow vegetables,” says Benjamin Linsley of New York Sun Works. “The idea is far from utopian.”

It doesn’t have to be done horizontally, either. Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist at Columbia University, has a dream of extending the principle upwards… in shiny glasshouse skyscrapers, shimmering with aubergines and courgettes. Just one ‘Vertical Farm’ the size of the average New York block could provide enough calories to feed 50,000 people, he has calculated – with less risk of weather-related crop failures than your conventional farm.

Vertical Farms would be 100% organic and powered from renewable sources such as solar, wind, and biogas from animal waste.The tower would mimic the ecological recycling processes in as many ways as possible, treating grey and black water through evapotranspiration (transpiring vegetation returning vapour to the air), and treating sewage from animals and farm workers using biological organisms. So that means surplus energy creation (methane) for the grid from composting, and no agricultural runoff. “We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on Earth,” Despommier insists.

The Vertical Farm team has worked out that the start-up cost per 21-storey farm would be a cool $83.7 million. Brave investors, they claim, would see a doubling of their capital within 12 years. Engineers at Arup and architects at Kiss + Cathcart certainly see it as a serious opportunity, and are drawing up plans for a building in the Gulf that would incorporate mini-farms on the side.– Ruth McCance

20 September 2007

Ruth McCance