THE FUTURE OF FARMING: HYDROPONICSContributor:
“Vertical farming practiced on a large scale in urban centers has great potential to: 1. supply enough food in a sustainable fashion to comfortably feed all of humankind for the foreseeable future; 2. allow large tracts of land to revert to the natural landscape restoring ecosystem functions and services; 3. safely and efficiently use the organic portion of human and agricultural waste to produce energy through methane generation, and at the same time significantly reduce populations of vermin (e.g., rats, cockroaches); 4. remediate black water creating a much needed new strategy for the conservation of drinking water; 5. take advantage of abandoned and unused urban spaces; 6. break the transmission cycle of agents of disease associated with a fecally-contaminated environment; 7. allow year-round food production without loss of yields due to climate change or weather-related events; 8. eliminate the need for large-scale use of pesticides and herbicides; 9. provide a major new role for agrochemical industries (i.e., designing and producing safe, chemically-defined diets for a wide variety of commercially viable plant species; 10. create an environment that encourages sustainable urban life, promoting a state of good health for all those who choose to live in cities.”
Rationale for Vertical Farms by Dickson Despommier
What’s the problem? Why hydroponic farming?
Our current agricultural system is up to a huge task: by 2050, we will need to increase food production by about 70% in order to meet the caloric needs of a global population of 9.8 billion people—68% of whom are projected to live in urban areas. If we were to project linear growth in yield from our agricultural output from the past five decades, we would be nowhere near achieving this kind of growth by 2050.
The amount of resources used by traditional agriculture is astronomical. With most crop production already pushed to its ceiling both genetically and chemically (a significant increase in fertilizer or pesticide use will not sufficiently increase yields), intensification and the expansion of land used for food production have been seen as the only viable options to meet these growing food demands. Globally, 70% of water usage goes towards agricultural production, largely due to unsustainable irrigation practices. At present, 38% of earth’s non-frozen land is used for growing food. This percentage will continue to rise: by 2050, 593 million hectares of land will need to be transformed into agricultural land to meet the projected calorie needs of the global population if we continue with business as usual. This needed land is equal to roughly double the size of India. This outlook is placing many essential ecosystems at risk of being completely destroyed, especially those that are key to maintaining an already disturbed balance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Rainforests, key ecosystems that regulate earth’s biosphere and house the majority of the world’s biodiversity, are being rapidly transformed into monocultures for industrial agriculture. Deforestation is a key driver in the global loss of biodiversity and in anthropogenic carbon emissions. In 2014, the WWF found that we had already lost 52% of our world’s biodiversity of vertebrate species due to human exploitation of earth’s resources. Deforestation was found to be the second largest source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, second only to the combustion of fossil fuels. This widespread destruction of essential ecosystems, driving the significant loss of biodiversity and disruption of ecosystem functions, must come to an end. Furthermore, climate change threatens agricultural yields with drier climates in already dry areas and wetter climates in already wet areas, along with many other impacts. These effects will only worsen the food insecurity in dry places around the world. While clearing land for agricultural production is in the name of meeting the dietary needs of the global population, there are high social and ecological tradeoffs.
These tradeoffs are already completely altering the social fabric of our lives, as seen in the rapid development of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). The COVID-19 pandemic has made humans more aware of the detrimental effects of our increasing contact with previously untouched wildlife. This impingement into the natural world is driven largely by the need for more agricultural land to support our growing human population. As the creation of ecotones between wildlife and our cultivated fields increases, so will the risk of more infectious zoonotic diseases emerging in our lifetime. If no changes are made to our current agricultural trajectory, it will be inevitable that more instances of mass infection and destruction by zoonotic diseases will occur.
This survey of reasons why we must find alternatives to our current agricultural system to meet the growing demands for food is far from exhaustive. Hydroponic farming offers a solution to many of the detriments of our world’s current agricultural problems.
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