Cultivation of Crops
Can vertical farms save the planet?
Vertical farms could be one of the most sustainable ways to meet rising food demand throughout the 21st century.
By 2050, the world population is expected to reach approximately 10 billion people — that’s about 2 billion more mouths to feed than today. Meeting that demand will be difficult. Doing so sustainably will be even harder, but perhaps necessary considering that producing more food through current practices would exacerbate both climate change and existing problems with the food supply caused by 20th-century industrial farming.
One problem is soil quality. Over the past 150 years, farming has depleted much of the world’s topsoil, while modern industrial practices like monocropping and chemical use have degraded soil quality, directly impacting the quality and amount of food farmers can produce.
Green Side Up Farms Alaric Overbey speaks at Indoor AG-CON
Agriculture is also one of the leading emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, and to date, the industry has cleared an area larger than South America for farmland. Although the world’s fertile land could be a renewable resource, large swaths of it are depleted every year due to farming and climate change, which incentivizes deforestation to create more farmland.
2023 Food Desert Tour & Mixer
Vertical farming is one solution that is changing the way we think about food production. Vertical farming is a type of controlled-environment agriculture (CEA), in which crops are grown indoors in vertically stacked rows that rely on LED lighting technology in the place of natural sunlight.