Waking up with the roosters, reaping and sowing with the family may or may not be the way of the farm and our food supply in the future.

The design of the modern farm will be smaller and interstitial – packed between cities and suburban areas or grown sky high.

Movements on both sides of the aisle are set to make changes to the current way of farming, and make changes for the better for the environment.

Vertical farming, essentially farming in urban high rise buildings, is getting more attention.

In fact, in the heart of Seattle, Washington, design professionals at Mithun are still promoting their building design called the “Center for Urban Agriculture” (CUA). The building design is 250’ tall built on .72 acres to include fields for growing veggies and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens, apartments, a restaurant and even a 19,000 square foot chicken farm on a lower terrace. Mithun’s design won “best of show” in Cascadia Region Green Building Council’s Living Building Challenge. The challenge is a competition encouraging builders and designers to produce designs for advancement of the sustainable building industry. This building meets those requirements, focusing on food, water and energy in the surrounding environment.

The idea came about originally by trying to bring nature back into the city, said Bert Gregory, president and CEO of Mithun. Ideally, the CUA would be completely independent of city water - providing its own drinking water. The rain would be collected via the structure’s 31,000 square feet rooftop rainwater collection area, treated and recycled on site. Mithun envisions the building to be off-the-grid not only with respect to water, but also with energy, as the facility could produce all of its own energy. According to Gregory, the CUA would utilize photovoltaic (PV) cells on the vertical south face to generate approximately 550,000 kWh of energy every year. Underground hydrogen tanks would store excess for later use.

Designers state that birds, insects and native plants would inhabit 22,000 square feet of planters and upper terraces, thus supporting a broader species of birds for the city. Eighteen of the 23 stories are designed to have 318 apartments. The theory is that if 100 percent of the food consumed by people living at the CUA comes from within a 150-mile radius, designers state “then production of 2,130 metric tons of carbon dioxide is prevented. This is equivalent to keeping 461 passenger cars a year off the road or saving the electricity used by 273 households annually.”

The CUA could also benefit the surrounding community by serving as a site for neighborhood storm water collection and distribution. The facility’s 45 extra storage tanks allows for 20 times its own discharge potential, thus a potential revenue source for the project.

Designers state that daylight, views and flow-through ventilation on the north and south ends as well as sliding exterior screens, located behind the PV panels, provide sun control to dissipate heat before it enter the residences.

Gregory said, “The CUA demonstrates what could be in an urban environment. It won’t happen on this particular site, but we hope that Seattle and other cities start to realize that urban farms, in addition to preserving and enhancing existing farms and farmland, are part of the answer to preserving and enhancing existing farms and farmland, are part of the answer to a beautiful, healthy new life in the city. It’s one additional step to help minimize global warming.”

The CUA proposal is not the only one getting attention. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health at Columbia University in New York City worked with designer Chris Jacobs of Los Angeles on vertical farm concepts. Their technology is aimed at accommodating the additional 3 billion people expected to populate the United States within the next 50 years, according to the United States Census Bureau. Worldwide another 9 billion is expected.

Despommier states that if successfully implemented, they (vertical farms) offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year round ‘crop’ production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming. Benefits of vertical farming, Despommier writes, are to supply enough food in a sustainable fashion to comfortably feed all of humankind for the foreseeable future; take advantage of abandoned and unused urban spaces; and allow year-round without loss yields due to climate change or weather-related events.

Unlike the CUA, his proposal is for a closed system, thus eliminating the large-scale use of pesticides and herbicides. In order for it to work, Despommier believes that the farm must be cheap to build and generate some of its power from waste and clean up sewage water. The farm tower would grow fruits and vegetables, and Despommier writes, even has the potential to house fowl and pigs.

Not everyone is on the vertical farming bandwagon. Some of these designs are not sitting well with some, especially those trying to get back to the basics.

In Glastonbury, Connecticut, Sandy Rose of Rose’s Berry Farm says, “The thoughts of farming indoors … I have a hard time going there. I just don’t think it’s practical. I don’t think it’s the panacea.”

Mrs. Rose says there is still a lot of land available and that land is 400 percent more efficient than it was 100 years ago. Despommier’s plan does not mention laborers, and Mrs. Rose says the laborers are part of the problems for farmers. Many are not choosing that profession, she says, because of the 80 to 90 hour work weeks. Of course, Despommier’s plan does contend that those extra long work weeks would not be needed. Still, “Who’s picking it?” she asks, noting that even when shipped locally fruit and vegetables get nicked and banged. “You still have to pick it and get it to someone. … We can’t get our own kids to do it,” she says.

Mrs. Rose also says that she sees the closed growing environment as a potential “to be like wildfire” if a virus were to bloom. Finally, she says, farmers are coming around to middle ground. Small farms, she notes, are not going to feed us, at least at a price that people can pay, while commercial farms are succumbing to public pressure. These new farms will be woven around suburbia, she says. “I’m more worried about the farmers than the farm land,” she adds. According to Mrs. Rose, lots of farmland has now grown back to forest or been sold for housing. To help keep the local farm land, she says, consumers need to buy locally or purchase local produce at their grocery stores. Also, “we need to treat every piece of land left as treasure, subsidize or get the best to farm it.”

“The biggest waste of land,” according to Mrs. Rose, “is suburbia.” She says we would save land if we started building 100 houses on 20 acres instead of 100 acres. “People don’t want it,” she says. The biggest farming problem, she adds, is land estate tax. Valued in housing dollars, the only way those who inherit farms can afford to pay the estate tax is sometimes to sell the land, says Mrs. Rose.

In South Glastonbury, she says we are very fortunate to have another farming generation coming in many of the farms. But, she adds, the town keeps purchasing space that is not farmable. Another issue with a growing suburbia, she adds, is that sometimes neighbors complain about the noise of farm equipment.

Rob Johnson, executive director of the New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation, agrees. In New Hampshire, he says one of the land issues in his state right now is some urban dwellers moving in farm proximity making nuisance complaints.

Vertical farming, he says, “is interesting and intriguing, but that’s a long way off.” Farming in New Hampshire, he says, is growing and staying strong. In fact, he adds, there has been an increase in overall farmers in the state. Dairy farmers, however, he says have decreased. Johnson says he knows a handful of strawberry farmers using a hydroponic carousel to experiment as part of a larger operation, but he doesn’t believe it will sustain farmers’ long term.

Omega Gardens sells hydroponic carousels that spin crops around in a one to two-foot cycle. Ted Marchildon, co-owner of Omega Gardens, believes farming has to move up. “We’ve stacked up people, but we have not stacked up farming,” he says.

This does not mean that Marchildon agrees with the farming skyscraper concept. He says fruit and vegetables grown flat would need six times more light than his carousel. In fact, Marchildon feels the flat indoor growing surface of Despommier’s proposal is the least sustainable. “Their concept will never work,” he says, “They don’t seem to understand the math.” Ideal lighting, he says, is approximately from one to two feet. Not only that, he says, but in a greenhouse, extra light frequently acts as an annoyance to the plants, keeping them awake. “It’s never going to work unless you have banks of lamps just above all your plants.”

Despite all varying opinions of whether we can produce more food on less land, farming is changing immensely now and farmers are trying it all.

>Written by d/visible contributor Doreen Campbell.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Technology, Business, Industrial, Culture, Architecture, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.