Skyfarming: Turning Skyscrapers Into Crop Farms

An interesting article from New York Magazine describes a Columbia University professor's plan that could make it possible to have farming in skyscrapers in New York City, or any city for that matter. These so-called vertical farms have many benefits, including producing food for local people, providing sustainable energy, and purifying wastewater, and potentially reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

There is another reason to develop indoor farming: exploding population growth. By 2050, demographers estimate there will be an additional 3 billion people (a global total of 9.2 billion). If current farming practices are maintained, extra landmass as large as Brazil would have to be cultivated to feed them. Yet nearly all the land that can produce food is already being farmed—even without accounting for the possibility of losing more to rising sea levels and climate change (which could turn arable land into dust bowls).

Depending on the crops being grown, a single vertical farm could allow thousands of farmland acres to be permanently reforested. For the moment, these calculations remain highly speculative, but a real-life example offers a clue: After a strawberry farm in Florida was wiped out by Hurricane Andrew, the owners built a hydroponic farm. By growing strawberries indoors and stacking layers on top of each other, they now produce on one acre of land what used to require 30 acres.

The article goes on to provide an interesting and informative diagram about how one of these vertical farms would function. Definitely a neat read.

Home, Green Home

I was talking to a friend from home last night and she showed me this really interesting article about the possibility of greening homes in Connecticut. The article is about how a family who wanted to build an environmentally friendly house had trouble a few years ago, but now are finding that green building is starting to go mainstream and, get this, low income housing projects in Hartford and Bridgeport are currently being built with the environment in mind.

Green residential buildings remain a sliver of the residential construction pie, to be sure, but when low-income housing goes green, as is happening in Hartford and Bridgeport, that is a signal. Because if there was a criticism of green residential construction, it was the cost.

But the premium for green construction can be comparatively small, and often offset by lower operating costs. Some elements of green construction, in fact, are so competitive that in both Hartford and Bridgeport, low-income green housing projects - where every dollar is critical - are under way. Some green building features don't even carry an extra cost, such as positioning windows to take advantage of natural light.

I too was under the impression that greening one's house would be an expensive process (and I still think that parts of it are, but then again, so it building/remodeling a house), but hearing that low-income "environmentally sensitive" housing is being made is a great step towards dispelling this belief. It's also important that this is low-income housing because traditionally the environmental protection movement is directed towards members of the upper-middle class and many people simply aren't aware that there are other options out there. I just have to say, I am pretty proud of my home state for this.