City Food: The Vertical Farms Growing Produce Next Door
Episode 5: Vertical farms are optimized around one idea: Growing fresh, local produce incredibly well.
Audio File
Vertical Farming: As Good as We Can Grow
We love efficiency. We love reconfiguring a system, creating better outcomes, and in the process, using less.
This type of efficient design thinking has taken us to the moon. It has slipped entire volumes of encyclopedias into our pockets. And when it comes to growing food and caring for the planet, we’ve been striving toward greater and greater efficiency since the dawn of agriculture. Vertical farming is one more step in that direction.
Cities are growing, but the natural resources they need are in short supply. Luckily, creativity is not. Inside a vertical farm, brilliant, sustainable design ideas are about as abundant as kale leaves. This urban agricultural trend is creating stronger harvests with fewer inputs, and in some cases, almost zero waste.
Vertical farms are the pinnacle of agricultural technology, but can biology help unlock their full potential?
Vertical farming will never replace traditional agriculture; we’ll always need both. But they do have the potential to help solve some of our most pressing challenges.
