LEIT THEMA:FOOD SECURIT Y
The vertical farm:controlled environment agriculture carried out in tall buildings would create greater food safety and curity for large urban populations
Dickson Despommier
Received:10September 2010/Accepted:26October 2010/Published online:3December 2010ÓSpringer Bal AG 2010
我的乡村Abstract Over the next 50years,rapid climate change issues will play a major role in agriculture.It is estimated for every 1°of increa in atmospheric temperature,10%of the land where we now grow food crops will be lost.The ability of governments to pro-vide esntial rvices for its citizens,and in particular to maintain systems that provide a reliable and safe food and water supply becomes more and more problematic.In less developed countries,other prob-lems also exist that will become magnified becau of global warming.For example,dias transmitted by fecal contamination,such as cholera,typhoid fever and a plethora of parasitic infections,are common-place where human excrement is ud as fertilizer (an estimated 50%of all farming on the planet).The infections are in large part responsible for widespread poverty and illiteracy.Geo-helminths,alone,cripple enormous num
bers of children and adults alike.Heavy infections with ascaris,hookworm and whipworm can permanently reduce a child’s capacity for learning,and the diarrheal dias they cau routinely keep them out of school.Illiteracy,malnutrition,and pov-erty are the result.Today,even in more developed countries where many of the kinds of infectious dias have been either eradicated or are under control,food safety and curity issues dominate the headlines.Over the last 5years,in the United States alone,food recalls due to bacterial infectious dias have resulted in billions of dollars of lost income.In traditional farming,a plethora of plant pathogens
(e.g.,rice blast,wheat rust)and inct pests (e.g.,locusts)account for staggering loss of crops world-wide,further pushing the yields of most grain and vegetable crops towards lower and lower limits.Soil erosion due to floods and droughts completes the picture of climate change issues that have already significantly reduced where we can grow our food.The majority of environmental experts agree that farming as we know it will become marginalized over the next 50years,as climate changes accelerate even more due to deforestation.This is becau forests are being sacrificed for farmland.The conquence of this activity is that the carbon cycle is out of balance and will only get wor if nothing is done on a global scale.Controlled environment agriculture is one answer to reversing this situation.Greenhou technologies are well-established and guarantee a safer,more re
liable food supply that can be produced year round,and they can be located clo to urban centers.By ‘‘stacking’’the buildings on top of each other in an integrated well-engineered fashion,we can greatly reduce our agricultural footprint,and the vertical farm concept can then be applied to every urban center,regardless of location.
Keywords Vertical farming ÁFood safety ÁFood curity
1Rationale for creating vertical farms in urban centers
Farming inside tall buildings within the cityscape has many advantages over conventional agriculture:year
Prof.D.Despommier Ph.D.(&)
Public Health and Microbiology,Columbia University,60Haven Ave,Rm.100,New York,NY 10032,USA e-mail:ddd1@columbia.edu
J.Verbr.Lebensm.(2011)6:233–236DOI 10.1007/s00003-010-0654-3Journal fu
¨r Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit Journal of Consumer Protection and Food Safety
/article/10.1007/s00003-010-0654-3
round produce,no crops lost to weather events,no u of fossil fuels to harvest,transport and refriger-ate,no u of pesticides or herbicides,multiple job opportunities for urbanites,us far less water(70%) than outdoor farming(Molden2007),safer crops without risk from human fecal contamination (Knudn et al.2008).Food grown locally would require much less transportation,thus avoiding spoilage due to excessive handling.There are many other reasons why this concept of vertical farming could solve veral global problems if applied on a large scale.
2Environmental and economic reasons
for switching from traditional farming in favor
普济消毒饮of controlled environment agriculture
Over the last veral years much has been written both in the scientific and popular press regarding the need for a safer and more reliable food and water supply. Climate change issues,mostly related to the increa of adver weather events(floods,droughts,hurricanes), threaten to greatly reduce the availability of the two esntials.The alarming rate at which climate change has accelerated in
over just the last25years has forced us to re-examine some of our most cherished ideas about how we carry out our daily lives.Farming is one of tho human activities that has remained largely immune from criticism due to its central role in sup-porting some 6.8billion of us.In fact,farming is considered so necessary that it us most of the avail-able freshwater,despite the fact that in many agrarian societies,drinking water is already is short supply.In industrialized countries such as the United States,up to20%of the fossil fuels ud annually is for farming (FAO,UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization).Eco-logically,farming has other negative conquences, such as the despoliation of the world’s estuaries (v/polwaste/nps/outreach/point6. cfm)and the systematic elimination of most of the world’s hardwood forests(www.umich.edu/* gs265/society/deforestation.htm).
物理试题One publication dealing with the economic impact of climate change that was both stunningly on point with respect to in its fact gathering,and down right ominous in its prognostications was the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (PDF online at World Bank website),published in 2006.It was sponsored by the British government and was the product of veral years of intensive rearch and review by Nicolas Stern and colleagues.Their conclusions were:(a)The benefits of strong, early action on climate change outweigh the costs.
良辰的意思(b)The scientific evidence points to increasing risks of rious,irreversible impacts from climate change associated with business-as-usual(BAU)paths for emissions.(c)Climate change threatens the basic elements of life for people around the world—access to water,food production,health,and u of land and the environment.(d)The impacts of climate change are not evenly distributed—the poorest countries and people will suffer earliest and most. And if and when the damages appear it will be too late to rever the process.Thus we are forced to look a long way ahead.(e)Climate change may initially have small positive effects for a few developed countries,but it is likely to be very damaging for the much higher temperature increas expected by mid-to-late century under BAU scenarios.(f)Inte-grated asssment modelling provides a tool for estimating the total impact on the economy;our estimates suggest that this is likely to be higher than previously suggested.(g)Emissions have been,and continue to be,driven by economic growth;yet sta-bilisation of greenhou gas concentration in the atmosphere is feasible and consistent with continued growth.(h)Central estimates of the annual costs of achieving stabilisation between500and550ppm CO2e are around1%of global GDP,if we start to take strong action now.[…]It would already be very difficult and costly to aim to stabili at450ppm CO2e.If we delay,the opportunity to stabili at 500–550ppm CO2e may slip away(www. ).(i)The transition to a low-carbon economy will bring challenges for competitiveness but also opportunities for growth.Policies to support the develo
pment of a range of low-carbon and high-efficiency technologies are required urgently.(j) Establishing a carbon price,through tax,trading or regulation,is an esntial foundation for climate change policy.Creating a broadly similar carbon price signal around the world,and using carbon finance to accelerate action in developing countries, are urgent priorities for international cooperation.(k) Adaptation policy is crucial for dealing with the unavoidable impacts of climate change,but it has been under-emphasid in many countries.(l)An effective respon to climate change will depend on creating the conditions for international collective action.(m)There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change if strong collective action starts now.
不慌不忙类似的词语
Their last statement is remarkable in its simplicity and directness.Strong collective action is needed if
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234 D.Despommier
we are to avert ecological disaster.Reducing our carbon footprint is the bottom line with respect to our impact on global systems.Yet,despite this con-rvatively constructed document,its message has yet to be fully heard,let alone heeded.Many world leaders and industrialists are still quibbling over the meaning of climate change and who is to blame for the accelerated rate at which it is proceeding.This back and forth bantering is now referred to as the Red Queen Effect,named after a
story gment in Lewis Carroll’s‘‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’’. The faster she runs,the more she remains in the same place.
Farming requires water and applied nutrients in the form of artificial fertilizers.Most countries can find the water,but less developed ones have a diffi-cult time when it comes to purchasing fertilizers. Most of the are located in the tropics.They rely instead on a product we all produce each and every day as the result of our metabolism;feces.It is a wonderful source of nutrients for the plants and is readily available.There is a heavy price to pay for its u,however.The transmission of many forms of parasites depends upon our carelessness with our own feces.Lack of sanitation is the bane of most less well-developed countries.Geo-helminths(hook-worm,Ascaris,and whipworm),the latter two who eggs can survive for years in soil under the right conditions,cau diarrheal dias,induce perma-nent learning deficit in heavily infected children (Hotez and Pecoul2010),and keep them out of school.The result in endemic areas is an illiterate, poverty-stricken population unable to work at max-imum efficiency.Farming indoors creates the opportunity of returning land back to nature, allowing it to resume its multiple ecological func-tions,many of which are directly beneficial for us.
As if the currentfix wefind ourlves in is not enough,demographers the world over conrvatively predict that with just another40years,there will be another2.6–3billion people to feed(Demeny and M
不要对一个人太好cNicoll2006;WHO(2004)World Population to 2300).How this will be accomplished is more than problematic,since we now u some80%of the land that can be farmed for food production(Monfreda et al.2008).A new batch of farmland the area of the size of Brazil would be adequate for the purpo,but is obviously not available.The constant pressure to put more and more land into farming,mostly through the cutting down of hardwood forest,as farmland now in u continues to fail(droughts,floods,etc.)has a predictable negative endpoint (/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000385/index.html).Several alternative strategies have been suggested to address this impending crisis.
3Potential solutions to the food crisis
(safety and curity)
One approach relies heavily on science and technol-ogy:produce food crops better adapted to a changing environment.Genetically modified plants, so-called GMOs,manipulated in the laboratory have been developed to resist longer droughts,and higher levels of herbicides(the weeds are winning that war). The protein from Bacillus thuringiensis that is toxic for incts has been engineered into tomatoes.Rice and wheat plants have been lected for resistance to fungal and vir
al dias,and much more of this kind of rearch is in the pipeline.Not all of the inge-nious efforts have been successful,however.But even if the plant scientists were to triumph in producing better strains of crop plants for all the right reasons (i.e.,not for pure profit),consumer opposition to GMOs might negate what otherwi would have been a temporary victory(www.saynotogmos. org/).Eventually,evolution wins and the pests and plant pathogens re-gain the upper hand within v-eral years.
Another approach suggests that urban environ-ments should be the new agricultural tting. Converting roof tops into gardens,planting and harvesting crops in empty lots,and other suitable abandoned city spaces has become the norm for many western hemisphere cities.However,raising crops in abandoned city lots has some rious prob-lems associated with contaminated soils and heavy metals.The idea of urban farming has gained so much traction within the last5years that city farm produce is competing at the green markets each summer next to more distantly grown vegetables, herbs and fruits(/2009/LIVING/ 06/29/bia.urban.farming/index.html).The movement towards urban farming has raid awareness among city dwellers that their food needn’t come from so far away as the highly irrigated valleys of California or the fruited plains of distant countries like Chile, Argentina,Thailand or New Zealand(http:/
/attra. /attra-pub/farm_energy/food_miles.html).Of cour,meat production prents another level of problem not solvable with urban farms.The main drawback to any open air farming operation,whe-ther it is located within the city or in the countryside, is the asons.One crop per year is all too common in most parts of the subtropical and temperate zones.
Vertical farming235
Throw in inct pests and plant dias and one gets the impression that no progress at all has been made, except maybe for moving the food production clor to where most people now choo to live.In fact, within the next20years,as many as80%of us will live in or very near a city(/ pds/urbanization.htm),making urban agriculture even more relevant a practice.
Move urban farming indoors and problems of pest control and plant dia outbreaks are greatly reduced.This is especially true if the greenhou is positively pressured and cure entry ways are built into the structure.Secure greenhous on rooftops situated on apartment complexes,schools,shopping Malls,and other buildings could supply significant amounts of vegetables,herbs,and some fruits, such as strawberries and blueberries.Hydroponic (www.hydr
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<)and aeroponic( )technologies,well-established methods for growing a wide variety of crops,would rve as the main methods of indoor agriculture, saving huge amounts of water when compared to outdoor farming.The re-u of gray water could rve as the source for such operations.However,to maximize production and minimize the agricultural footprint,another advance in greenhou construc-tion must occur;namely the vertical farm( ).
4The vertical farm concept
The idea for the vertical farm aro in respon to the inadequate model of a rooftop garden.The amount of space provided by the roof is dwarfed when one takes into account thefloor space of the entire building,even one just2–6stories tall.Retro-fitting existing buildings with hydroponic and aeroponic growing systems ems like a logical next step towards constructing a free-standing vertical farm with all its‘‘bells and whistles’’.The main consider-ation in using already built structures is providing enough lighting for the plants.There are some commercially available hydroponic grow systems that could accommodate a commercial grower, provided that the price of the crop was high enough to compete with soil-grown produce().Nonetheless,buildings designed for people are usually not adequate for maximum yield indoor farming.LED lighting can sol
ve some of the issues(/ university%20of%20minn%20study.PDF),but ideally,a new,totally transparent building designed with plants in mind from the start would overcome many of the objections.Capture of passive energy(wind, solar,geothermal,tidal)and recovery of energy from the inedible portions of the crops could result in a net zero energy building that at the same time questers huge amounts of carbon and releas oxygen into the atmosphere.Making the vertical farm out of lf-cleaning,transparent material for the skin of the building,such as ETFE(ethylene tetrafluoroethylene), and the emergence of the high-tech vertical farm becomes a thing of functional beauty.ETFE is already a standard building material and covers the massive, ethereal domes of the Eden Project in the south of England().
In summary,creating an urban environment in which human populations produce most of their food and re-cycle all freshwater pos no technolog-ical difficulties,given the available technologies at our disposal.With the right kind of economic incentives and enough social pressure,the eco-city of the future could be realized sooner rather than later. References
Demeny P,McNicoll G(eds)(2006)The political demography of the world system,2000–2050.Workp,Policy Rearch Division.No.213.Population Council
Hotez PJ,Pecoul B(2010)‘‘Manifesto’’for advancing the control and elimination of neglected tropical dias.PLoS Negl Trop Dis25(4):e718
Knudn LG,Phuc PD,Hiep NT,Samueln H,Jenn PK, Dalsgaard A,Raschid-Sally L,Konradn F(2008)The fear of awful smell:risk perceptions among farmers in Vietnam using wastewater and human excreta in agricul-ture.Southeast Asian J Trop Med Public Health39:341–352 Molden D(ed)(2007)Water for food water for life.A compre-hensive asssment of water management in agriculture.
International Water Management Institute,London,p2 Monfreda C,Ramankutty CN,Foley JA(2008)Farming the planet.2:The geographic distribution of crop areas,yields, physiological types,and NPP in the year2000.Glob Biogeochem Cycles22:GB1022
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