The future of farming is … vertical

If you take the old axiom about how they’re not making any more land and apply it to farming, you realize that, if you can’t expand out, you have to go up.

During a lecture at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, last Friday, Dickson Despommier, director of The Vertical Farm Project, explained how vertical farms could be the answer to reduced yields and meet the increasing needs of a swelling human population.

The Center for a Livable Future recaps Despommier’s reasons as to why vertical farming is a system that produces less waste and uses fewer resources:

According to Despommier, the benefits of vertical farms include: lack of farm runoff, year-round production, no crop loss due to severe weather, 70 percent less water use than traditional farming, and no use of fossil fuels or pesticides. By moving some farming into the city, he says it will also allow some damaged ecosystems to be restored.