- [Narrator] The food of the future
has nowhere to go but up.
(dubstep music)
Let's say you're about to take a bite
out of a fresh, delicious mango.
Mango.
Let's say you're about to take a bite
out of a fresh, delicious bok choy.
(bok choy crunches)
Do you ever stop to wonder
where all that fresh plant matter comes from?
Farms are a big reason why our species has been able to grow
over the last 10,000 years.
But modern agriculture comes with some pretty big drawbacks.
For one thing, it requires a lot of water;
up to 70% of our fresh water goes to agriculture.
And then, it depends a lot on the weather.
Unseasonable temperatures or long droughts,
like what we see in California, or flooding,
can damage billions of dollars worth of crops.
And then there's the fact that farms are often very far away
from where the people are.
So the food you eat may travel thousands of miles
on trucks, ships, even airplanes,
meaning that those leafy greens
have a pretty hefty carbon footprint.
But the ecologist Dickson Despommier
has been advocating a technological solution to this problem
for several years.
It's an elegant approach called the vertical farm.
Imagine a greenhouse in the middle of a city block.
Okay, so far so good.
Now imagine it's a dozen stories tall.
Vertical farms could employ growing techniques
that use no soil.
With aeroponics, crop roots are exposed to the air
and are fed through a moisturizing fertilizer mist.
These approaches can cut back up to 90% of the water needed
compared to conventional farming.
This idea is beautiful but there's some serious questions
about the viability of large-scale vertical farms
and it all comes down to energy and cost.
Now with a vertical farm, the floors above
are gonna block some of the sunlight for the floors below.
And plants that are near a window
are going to get more sunlight
than plants that are at the core of the structure.
So to balance this all out and to get healthy, even crops,
you might have to use artificial lighting.
But that takes a lot of energy and it might mean
that you're generating a carbon footprint so large
that you could've just shipped the crops in
from a farm anyway.
Advances in LED lighting
may make large-scale vertical farms possible.
Industry research is making LEDs more efficient
all the time.
And check this out, some plants, like lettuce,
don't need the full spectrum of visible light
in order to thrive.
This is where we get pink houses, special facilities
where red and blue lights let plans thrive.
And by cutting out the rest of the visible spectrum,
you save energy.
Combine that with innovative energy sourcing,
like the kind proposed by The Plant in Chicago.
The vertical farmers behind The Plant are already using
self sustaining techniques like aquaponics,
wherein the plants get the nutrients they need
from the waste generated by an on-site fish farm.
But as far as the energy is concerned,
they plan on using an anaerobic digester
to produce bio-gas, a renewable energy source,
from 27 tons of food waste generated every single day.
They then burn the bio-gas to power the lights
that will grow the plants.
But The Plant isn't the only place forging ahead
with vertical farm systems.
There's already a successful vertical farm in Singapore
that's three stories tall and it's called Sky Greens.
It grows leafy vegetables on shelves
that can rotate up towards the ceiling like a Ferris wheel
so each plant gets an equal amount of sunlight.
Here's my question for you this week:
if you were designing an urban, agriculture environment,
how would you do it and what would you grow there?
I wanna know your thoughts in the comments below.
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(bok choy crunches)