Location, Location, Location

People who are by now familiar with the practices and techniques of vertical farms are likely aware of the immense potential in scalability of the technology itself. This sort of dimensional flexibility allows vertical growing to be generally applicable at every level of production from the smallest home garden to the largest industrial farm.

The concept is a simple one: that a farm or garden is more efficient and more compact when vertical than when it is spread out horizontally across a broader space. The design created by the vertical farm in Singapore which was discussed in an earlier post is a prime example of how vertical growing can scale. This design uses a simple, almost-zero-energy-use waterwheel component that rotates the crops and supplies water and nutrients automatically. While this design may seem intricate, most of the components can be reconstructed from cheap and readily-available products which can be purchased by the average consumer. With this in mind,  you as the every-day-citizen are able to use this technique in your own home to grow considerable amounts of your own food. Vegetables and plants like spinach, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, and even tomatoes can be grown indoors and year-round.
However the true potential of the vertical farm is in its capacity to enable industrial-sized growing operations to be located in urban areas. Countries which import large quantities of agricultural products would stand the most to gain from this technology. Countries like Russia, Venezuela, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and others typically must import food due to their harsh climates which are inhospitable to growth; more than this, water is a valuable commodity in these areas and the optimized use of water via the vertical growing method will have a double-effect of conservation in addition to boosting or even enabling large-scale agricultural growth. Here at home in the U.S., we stand to benefit in other ways, namely the reversal of our growing food imports versus our shrinking food exports.

Due to many economic factors, as well as environmental, the U.S. has suffered a sharp decrease in the amount of food available for consumption. Although the availability of food hasn't reached a point of crisis in decades, there are negative consequences when food has to be grown in one area, processed in another, and then shipped around the country to meet point-of-use demands. However, if we could put a vertical farm in the style of a skyscraper in the middle of New York, for example, we could eliminate at least 95% of the transportation costs as well as some of the negative health-effects associated with the current mode of cultivation. More than New York, there are urban areas in the developing world which can benefit even more from a shift to urban vertical growing; Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon would be ideal areas for the application of vertical growth and a rapid increase in the availability of food in the areas could even help to ease civil unrest. In fact, there are so many positives associated with the application of vertical growth in developing countries that it is almost baffling when considering that these techniques have never even attempted to be applied in the third world. However, with more support and more exploration, development, and proliferation, we may see this technology take a more central role in the near future.