Will Zeal for Profits Hinder High-tech Farming from Feeding People?

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Vegetables grown on modular indoor farms in the hearts of cities may soon give roadside you-pick farms a run for their money. From produce ordered on-demand from smartphones to retrofitted shipping containers growing baby kale in the dead of urban winters, the future of farming looks ever more high-tech.

So-called vertical farming appeals to consumers devoted to clean eating and sustainable futures. Its potential to mitigate impending crises in the food system, like climate change, malnutrition and the challenge of feeding growing urban populations as the number of farmers drops worldwide, has attracted an array of investors and entrepreneurs. But can these typically venture-capital-backed businesses — which currently grow a tempting array of greens and herbs but little else  — disrupt the massive and influential reach of big agriculture? That is far from certain.

An Urban Forest of Food

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In the future envisioned by Dr. Dickson Despommier, author of Vertical Farming: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, cities and the surrounding communities will house intensive agricultural production.

“They liken Manhattan to a forest of skyscrapers,” he told WhoWhatWhy, “I love that image because, yes, let’s make Manhattan imitate a real forest!”

He sees skyscrapers where basements harbor aquaculture tanks filled with tilapia, swimming laps under beds of microgreens whose roots take up the nutrients the fish waste provides. Heirloom tomatoes, sugar snap peas, and scotch bonnet peppers will grow on upper floors in beds programmed to provide ideal conditions through meticulous micronutrient dosage, light exposure and humidity controls.

A central column will house a massive freight elevator and utilities that allow the building to recycle the vast majority of its water. The behemoth will run on renewable energy. Vertical farmers share a common sentiment to, as Dr. Despommier put it, “get the hell off the grid.”

Investors and venture capitalists in the indoor agriculture space share his conviction. Many of the same companies that funded giants in the app-driven technology space underwrite vertical farm ventures: Bezos Expeditions, part of the empire of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has invested in Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based vertical farming company. In June 2017, Plenty purchased Bright Agrotech, producer of the leading vertical farm hardware, the trademarked ZipGrow tower system. Square Roots, a Brooklyn vertical farm incubator and entrepreneurial space, is led by founder Kimbal Musk, the younger brother of Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame.

But the dream of this type of farming clashes with the way farming actually operates today. Agribusiness, supported by the federal government, is focused on raising a few cash crops. Of the $25 billion spent yearly on farm subsidies, 75 percent goes to just 10 percent of farmers. That 10% represents large scale commercial farms growing commodities for the global marketplace, raising livestock on feedlots, and turning considerable profits.

“People aren’t farming to raise food for people,” Despommier said, “they are raising crops to make money. It’s all about which crops the world needs rather than us.”

Federal support for agriculture was born in the 1930s to maintain a degree of stability in the business of farming commodity crops.    

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from building (Cjacobs627 / Flickr – CC BY-SA 3.0) and VertiCrop System (Valcenteu / Wikimedia – CC BY-SA 3.0).