In most cities, where any available land tends to be quickly snatched up by developers, it can be hard for would-be urban farmers without backyards to find a place to plant crops. But if there aren’t enough community garden plots to go around, one urban farming company thinks cities have another resource: walls.
Bright Agrotech, a Wyoming-based vertical farming company, designs lightweight hydroponic farm systems that can attach to any unused wall space along sidewalks or behind buildings.
Vertical surfaces are really one of the most undervalued types of real estate in the world,” says Nate Storey, CEO of Bright Agrotech. “Basically all you can use them for is advertising.”
While living walls have been around for a while, they aren’t usually used for growing food, and they’re usually expensive. Bright Agrotech’s system is still a little pricey—a small system starts at $569—but they’re working to make it accessible to anyone who wants to grow food and bring the cost down further.
“What we’re really focused on is decentralizing and democratizing agriculture,” Storey says. “Getting produce from the grower to the consumer as quickly as possible, as efficiently and as locally as possible.”
The company also designed the system to be simple enough for non-gardeners to master.
“Traditional living walls or green walls are typically pretty bulky, hard to set up, and hard to maintain,” he says. “Our goal is to put together something that’s really simple and really easy to use.” Because the wall is self-watering and the design eliminates weeds, the company calculates that it takes less time to maintain than an ordinary garden. Every five or six weeks, you can harvest around 40 pounds of greens.
The same system can also be used indoors, but the company sees some advantages to plastering plants on the sides of buildings. “I think that agriculture is not just functional but beautiful,” Storey says. “I really feel strongly that humanity we weren’t designed to live in the concrete jungle. Living in these bleak cityscapes takes a toll on our psyche…being able to take ag to the sides of buildings, and change the landscape is going to be a powerful thing not just for food production, but for people.”
Ultimately, he thinks that future cities could double as massive gardens. “I see a future where cities are green, and not grey,” he says. “We’re growing on the outsides of buildings, we’re growing on the insides of buildings. We’re growing anywhere we can grow.”
Every time some bright spark touts vertical farming indoors as an answer to all our problems, they never mention capital costs nor the cost of inputs, particularly energy. If you replace the sun with artificial lighting you’ll consume a massive amount of electricity to create the same effective brightness to enable photosynthesis. If you use fossil energy to generate the electricity, you’ve shot yourself — and the rest of us — in the foot. If you use solar then how much cheaper to have used the land the solar panels covers for growing in the first place?
No one has ever shown the EROEI of these systems. For a reason.
Best,
D
Sell your Solar Roadway stock, folks, and buy into this bit of wishful thinking. We’ve talked about vertical farming before on Crock, and it makes no more sense this time than last.
So what are your guys’s solutions to this then?
IMO, there is no solution that we will adopt in time to stave off disaster. It’s not a question of IF, but WHEN the SHTF.
We keep looking to technology for solutions, but do not realize that technology is what has allowed us to achieve the unsustainable life style we enjoy in the West, and that the rest of the world wants to emulate.
Perhaps the few hundred million humans that MAY survive will do it better next time if there really is a next time (but I doubt it—-we humans seldom learn from our mistakes).
We can engineer some recessions in fossil fuel based industries. At the same time we can try to invest in technologies that will suck CO2 from the atmosphere. You’re too pessimistic. Yes, the S probably will HTF sometime soon, but we can at the very least try to minimize the amount of it that will hit the fan, if we can’t stop it all from connecting. We gotta build up our lobbying arm, it seems. Entrenched interests have fallen before, but the opposing forces will have to be crafty and organized to win.
I never said we shouldn’t try, only that we don’t have the will to do so in the time frame necessary for real success. I have no doubt that when the SHTF we will adopt a Manhattan Project style approach and run around like chickens with heads off—-get ready for all kinds of “technology solutions” that will likely make things worse for whatever number of humans and other living things may survive.
There IS a “technology” that will suck CO2 from the atmosphere, and it worked fine for billions of years on this planet until man came along and started using fossil fuels to excess. We don’t understand it fully, and seem to think that we can control it merely by wishing things to be different. Lots of luck on that!
(I’m not pessimistic, merely a realist. YOU are too bright-sided, guilty of wishful thinking, and are actually in a state of denial. Wake up and smell the fumes).