Vertical Farming for Fresh Vegtables
Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health and microbiology once challenged his student to feed 50,000 manhattans with the farming on 15 acres of roof top gardening. After much of intelligent calculation, the student concluded that they couldn’t feed more than 2,500. The professor suggested them, “why not cultivate indoors, vertically?” The idea got instant response and from then on the theory, has been taken up by many journals and other professionals. Find out the strategies used by foreign brands to woo Indian consumers
Vertical farming techniques are quite familiar as we are now aware of the cultivation of tomatoes in hot houses. vertical farming building will be a high-tech building with fully automated systems for watering the farms, providing the lights etc. The existing successfully used technologies like drip irrigation, aeroponics and hydroponics can provide the basis for the vertical farming.
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| The Oasis Tower for Zabeel Park, Dubai is an answer to the rise in population and the dearth in the amount of land available for farming. The tower would provide a solution for urban farming and sustainable housing and may be able to provide food enough to feed 40,000 people each year. For more pictures of vertical farming world over visit the site: http://www3.jjc.edu/ftp/wdc12/jjurkiewicz/vfconceptualdesign.html |
Vertical farming provides a solution for some of the prevailing concerns like pollutions from the traditional farming methods; high cost of food, and doing harm to the nature. Since the farming is done inside a closed environment, there is little threat of pesticides, and, therefore, no pesticides are required. And the food that is produced in the city itself can be availed at cheaper rates, by the city dwellers. Presently in US, it is said that fast and unhealthy food are available at cheap rates, whereby increasing risks of obesity, heart diseases and diabetes.
By the mid of this century, it is predicted that the world population will increase by 3 billion, and 80% of the population will be residing in cities, therefore, farming land area as huge as Brazil will be required to feed the world. The present availability of land is insufficient, which can lead to an impending food crisis in future. As the famous American humorist Mark Twain says, “Buy land. They’re not making it any more.” Despommier estimates that a 30 storey block on a square block of land in a city is sufficient to feed 50,000, and he says that we have the technology to start a farm.
Over a period on 10,000 years, man has learned and invented new method of farming, which helps in cultivating high yields of crops and vegetables, on large stretch of horizontal farms. There are many drawbacks in importing or transporting vegetable from farms – many years of farming makes the soil infertile; the yield depends highly on natural elements like sunlight and rain fall, and high expense is incurred for transporting the fresh vegetables to cities.
Though there are some concerns regarding the feasibility of vertical farming, and allegations that the advantages are exaggerated, there is more to gains from developing vertical farming.
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