Solving the global food crisis: vertical aeroponic farm grows food out of thin air

01:14 February 17, 2009 PST

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Eric Vergne's Dystopian Farm concept

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The Dystopian Farm took out third prize out of 416 entrants in Evolo's 2009 Skyscraper Competition - and while it's by no means yet a practical solution, it highlights the potential of aeroponics in combination with high-density urban high-rise farming.

Where to from here?

Perhaps with the right sort of automation technology, aeroponic farms could be made even more vertically dense, with just a foot or two between matrix levels, automatic planting, care, harvesting and packaging, resulting in a super high-efficiency organic food factory.

With bumper crops year-round and high production from a tiny Earth footprint, surely these aeroponic vertical farms could become an economically attractive use of land. Government policy and assistance would surely reflect the efficiency of such a progressive solution as population concentration and food supply problems continue to increase.

We congratulate Vergne on his design's success, and look forward to seeing a growing focus on high-density, high-efficiency food production as aeroponic technology improves.

Loz Blain

Via Inhabitat.

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User Comments (2)

I think the major point of this design exercise is to educate people about the potential for 'urban farming'. I think its often overlooked that our cities could be more than simply heat islands. Simply considering the surface area wasted for aesthetics or for no other reason than its the way its always been. While reading this article I began to imagine a city that was built where pedestrian traffic walked across the roofs of buildings covered in agriculture and greenspace. Pedestrians would travel down to access rail or surface streets and their desired destination.

The one thing that bothered me about this article was that aeroponic farming is touted as such an efficient way of growing. This neglects the fact it is much more complicated than pushing a seed into dirt and occasionally watering it. Aeroponic is more work... the yield may be greater but the integrated systems that need to be in working order for the plants NOT TO DIE is immense. Would the energy cost of such a system outweigh the benefits? It might but you would have to consider the longevity of the structure, and energy costs to run such a system, nevermind the material and manufacturing/environmental costs. I would think that many smaller self contained systems would be more cost efficient to take advantage of existing structures. Don't get me wrong, I think these are great ideas... lets get farming into the city!

TheDuke

- February 17, 2009 @ 06:02 pm PST

Its almost like we are adopting the ways of the alien race in "The War of The Worlds"... I like it...

@tgmeob: The obvious advantage of Aeroponics is that the variety of plants that can be cultured is immense and they tend to be healthier due to the good supply of oxygen to their roots.. in the industrial scale it might actually be easier to use Aeroponics... additionally as opposed to the traditional methods, our requirement of water will be reduced as we will not need to wash the vegetables thoroughly... plus the chances of infection from dirt will be reduced and the whole setup may be even rendered automatic.

What I do object to is that if such towers are to provide food to so many, these will tend to be soft targets for anti-social elements or even natural outbreaks and we might need to scatter the facilities to reduce thier vulnerability...

Sougata Pahari

- July 29, 2009 @ 08:07 am PDT