sis. In Chicago, the company
Farmed Here produces arugula,
basil, and sweet basil vinaigrette in
an aquaponic system located in a
post-industrial building. They apply
no herbicides or pesticides and reuse 97% of their water. In Singapore, Sky Greens won the INDEX:
Award 2015 – the world’s biggest
and probably most important design prize. They produce a variety
of leafy greens in a tented vertical
farming system which is made up
of rotating tiers of growing gutters
attached to an A-shape aluminium
frame. The gutters rotate around
the aluminium frame to make sure
all the plants get the same amount
of light, water and nutrients as they
rotate through different points in
the structure. This also means no
supplemental light is needed as the
available sunlight is used to its full
potential.
So far expertise in vertical farming
Figure 6: Plants being fertigated in a growing system where all the
water and nutrients is re-used.
is surprisingly not only coming from
the traditional agricultural industries but rather from a variety of
unexpected sources of which the
most well-known is Dickson
Despommier, a professor at Columbia University. Valuabl e knowledge
and design ideas have also been
contributed by architects, NASA,
the Antarctica research and even
indoor marijuana growers. The idea
is not that vertical farms will replace
traditional agriculture, but it will
unquestionably take the pressure
off the arable land to produce all
the food we will need. At this stage
the cost of building and running
these vertical farms may deter the
large scale adoption in most South
African cities but it might be a viable solution in the not too distant
future.