Vertical Farms Will Be Big, But For Whom?

In a windowless warehouse just outside of Chicago, where todays forecast is for below-freezing temperatures, Green Sense Farms grows leafy greens and herbs all year around. They sell their bountyprotected from insects, disease and brutal wintersto grocers like Whole Foods and some local restaurants. Green Sense grows their soil-free produce (they use coconut husk instead) in indoor growing towers. Beneath 30 foot ceilings, rows and rows of produce are stacked and CO2 levels, water, lighting, and humidity are precisely controlled.

"At capacity, were producing about three to four million pounds a year," said Robert Colangelo, the president and founder of Green Sense Farms. With their current footprint30,000 square feetGreen Sense can grow fresh produce that can be distributed within 100 miles to 20 million people.

Their success is another sign that the vertical urban farming movement is beginning to scale. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, MITs Media Lab is developing an open source version, known as City Farm. In Japan, just 60 miles from where the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred, inside of a former silicon chip manufacturing facility, Fujitsu grows 3000 heads of lettuce a day that sell for three times the price of other lettuce.

Growers say they want to grow nutritious food in a new, sustainable way, and supplement field farms and greenhouses. They believe the technique can revolutionize farming in crowded urban metropolises, during cold winters, and in impoverished parts of the world. And, the growers add, their produce is already in demand because its local, available year around, and frankly, pristine.

"In the fieldtheres pests, theres animals, theres fungus, and theres weatherthe sun may shine, it may not," said Colangelo. "We see this as the future of farming."

Because City Farm is funded and backed by MIT, Harper says he is in a unique position to make his technology open source, to prototype rapidly and then spread it far and wide.

At the moment, he is working with universities and governments in Dubai, Accra, Guadalajara, and Detroit to develop vertical growing laboratories launching starting this January. In exchange for providing them with his technology, he hopes that each group will share their "recipes" for serving locals.

"We can optimize for different things," he said. "Like power use or water usethis is about harnessing the power of computing for food. Agriculture is thousands of years old but its only in recent times that weve been able to quantify a lot of the things around production."

And City Farm, Harper said, is trying to be the Linux of the vertical urban farm world.

"Were creating an OS that is open to the world," he said. "That will allow us to scale up faster."

Continued here:
Vertical Farms Will Be Big, But For Whom?