The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century

farming in the United States consumes some 20 percent of the fossil fuels used annually. Because food from the vertical farm needn’t travel very far, its rate of spoilage will also be greatly reduced. No storage will mean less refrigeration and more fossil fuel saved.

can a city bio-mimic an intact ecosystem with respect to the allocation and use of essential resources and, at the same time, provide a healthy, nurturing, sustainable environment for its inhabitants?

The herbicides and pesticides that are applied to the

Bamboo in various diameters could also serve the purpose quite well, and since it’s one of the toughest natural materials we know of,

fermentation products of sugars derived from higher plants such as ethanol. Biodiesel can also be made from oils produced in lower plants like algae.

sludge derived from wastewater treatment plants is processed further, then turned into high-grade topsoil and sold to farming communities. The cities of New York and Boston, for example, have operating sludge-to-fertilizer schemes. The problem is that most municipal sludge is often heavily contaminated by copper, mercury, zinc, arsenic, and chromiu

The production of ammonium nitrate–based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides has been the mainstay of companies such as Dow Chemical, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, the Mosaic Company, PotashCorp, and Agrium, Inc. The pesticide business is the most widely diversified of the three agrochemical industries. The National Pesticide Infor

Everything consumed is produced outside the city,

not be practical, nor would it be humane.