What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.
The story included this reality check on the economics of these enterprises:
Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., called the idea “very provocative.” But it requires a rigorous economic analysis, he added. “Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.”
Scientific American ran a story in 2009 that also featured Despommier's vision and noted what would be saved in money and carbon in not having to transport food to city consumers:
[A] 30-story building built on one city block and engineered to maximize year-round agricultural yield—thanks largely to artificial lighting and advanced hydroponic and aeroponic growing techniques—could feed tens of thousands of people. Ideally the recipients of the bounty would live in the surrounding area, so as to avoid the transport costs and carbon emissions associated with moving food hundreds if not thousands of miles to consumers.
I was intrigued when I learned about these developments (which was about the time I started this blog), but to be honest, I was also a tiny bit disappointed because vertical farms risked making rural places obsolete. I was starting to see that one of the things rural places provided to urban places--one of the ways rural places were seen as adding value--was food. If, somehow, urban places came to be able to supply their own food needs, it would become one more reason for metro folks not to care about rural folks and their livelihoods.
The most recent [vertical gardens] addition is Sky Greens, a collection of 120 30-foot towers that opened in late 2012 using a method called “A-Go-Gro Vertical Farming,” which resembles a sort of vegetable-stuffed Ferris wheel, and is designed for leafy greens like spinach and bok choy. Sky Greens is Singapore’s first vertical farm, located in Kranji, 14 miles from Singapore’s central business district, with bus service available every 75 minutes.
The Kranji Heritage Trail, instituted in 2011, includes 34 independent farms and agriculture-related businesses. Seventeen of the trail stops are open to the public, including a poultry farm, a goat farm, frog-breeding aquaculture, a community vegetable garden, a cooking school, and the no-frills D’Kranji Farm Resort, with 19 eco-friendly villas and a spa. A day spent exploring Kranji’s farms is a great antidote to Singapore’s crush of street-food hawkers and urban attractions.
A few more recent stories suggest conflicting answers to the question whether these farms can go beyond serving as tourist attractions and make significant dents in the world's food needs--or even a city's food needs.
First, this February New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu caught my eye. It's about a multi-story hog factory in Ezhou, China, on the south bank of the Yangtze River, which will produce 1.2 million pigs a year once its sister facility is completed and at full capacity later in 2023:
The first sows arrived in late September at the hulking, 26-story high-rise towering above a rural village in central China. The female pigs were whisked away dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the higher floors where the hogs would reside from insemination to maturity.
This is pig farming in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging and pork supply is a strategic imperative.
Inside the edifice, which resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the hogs.
Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it’s collected in giant tanks that deliver more than one million pounds of food a day to the floors below through high-tech feeding troughs that automatically dispense the meal to the hogs based on their stage of life, weight, and health.
* * *
China has had a long love affair with pigs. For decades, many rural Chinese households raised backyard pigs, considered valuable livestock as a source of not only meat but also manure. Pigs also hold cultural significance as a symbol of prosperity because, historically, pork was served only on special occasions.
And here are some more interesting tidbits about the factory, which was built by a cement manufacturer just diversifying into the hog breeding business:
The farm is next to the company’s cement factory, in a region known as the “Land of Fish and Rice” for its importance to Chinese cuisine with its fertile farmlands and surrounding bodies of water.
While the journalists refer to the location of the hog factory as a "rural village," Ezhou is a city of more than a million. Here's more on the factory itself:
A pig farm in name, the operation is more like a Foxconn factory for pigs with the precision required of an iPhone production line. Even pig feces are measured, collected and repurposed. Roughly one-quarter of the feed will come out as dry excrement that can be repurposed as methane to generate electricity.
A Chinese executive who designs hog farms is quoted as suggesting that "multistory farms will have an impact on the world." Meanwhile, the U.S. perspective is more skeptical, largely because of concerns about the inability to control contamination in these facilities:
U.S. hog farmers look at the pictures of those farms in China, and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that.’ ... It’s just too risky.
Contrast what's happening in China with this recent story out of western Pennsylvania, where a multi-story facility producing lettuces recently shut down. Adele Peters reports for Fast Company under the headline, "The Vertical Farming Bubble is Finally Popping."
When workers arrived at Fifth Season, an indoor farm in the former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, on a cloudy Friday morning last October, they expected it would be a normal day.
The farm, which had opened two years earlier, seemed to be running smoothly, growing tens of thousands of pounds of lettuce per year inside a robot-filled 60,000-square-foot warehouse. The brand was selling salad kits—like a taco-themed version with the company’s baby romaine, plus guacamole, tortilla strips, and cheese—in more than 1,200 stores, including Whole Foods and Kroger. Earlier in the year, the company had said that it projected a 600% growth in sales in 2022. The branding was updated in October, and new packages were rolling out in stores. Solar panels and a new microgrid had recently been installed at the building. A larger farm was being planned for Columbus, Ohio.
But the workday never started. ... The managers announced that the company was closing immediately. After shutting down the electrical equipment and draining water lines, the plants were left to die. ... Dozens ... were left scrambling to find new jobs.
Fifth Season’s failure is only the most dramatic signal of a reckoning taking place in what’s known as the vertical farming sector.
The story goes on to provide other examples of this trend of vertical farm failures in the United States and in Europe.
So, is the salient distinction between what's happening in China and what's happening in the United States that the former involves meat and the latter involves fruit and veg? That farmers--really agribusiness--in assess risk differently? Or are there other reasons for the differing trajectories?
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