Why the Future of Farming is in Cities - The Big Money in Vertical Farming
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: undefined
Views: 767,529
Rating: 4.9286165 out of 5
Keywords: future, future of farming, farming, kimbal musk, aerofarms, Square Roots, Growing Underground, SpaceX, Open Agriculture Initiative, Farm One, Bowery, Plenty, Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat, future farming, future farming technology, documentary, hydroponics, aeroponics, agriculture, growing plant on mars
Id: LiNI-JUFtsA
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)
Published: Sat Dec 07 2019
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Urban farming is a cool movement, but I don’t see it becoming a such huge, significant source of food that would merit calling it the “future” of farming. For thousands of years farms have been put at the periphery of cities. Unless there is some fundamental change to how cities are set up, I don’t see a reason why farming would move to the urban centers in any large amount. Agriculture is too space-consuming of an activity for it to make sense, and IMO even the climate controlled indoor farms that the video highlighted make more sense to be situated at city peripheries. I think urban farming is mostly a manifestation of the urban greening movement that is taking place. As a side side, rainforests aren’t being cut down because there’s simply a lack of room to farm elsewhere like the video says. There is plenty of underutilized arable land elsewhere. They’re being cut down to make a profit and because the government doesn’t stop them. Anyways thanks for sharing.
I wish this trend would hurry up and die.
We've been promised utopian visions centered around this for at least 20 years now. Depending on the year, we've been told that urban agriculture will lead to 'sustainability', 'resilience', and 'food security'. We've been told that the benefits are so large and so low-hanging that anyone who adopted these technologies would make money hand over fist. Every time I have tried to incorporate urban ag into one of my projects, the vendor ultimately wants me to subsidize them. I think it's been long enough to state pretty categorically that this was all nonsense from the beginning.
Food production is very intensive from a land and resource perspective, but it is a very low-value activity as measured by production per unit of land. This is exact opposite of the type of activity that you would want to put in an urban area. Generally, cities are great places for high-value, low-resource activities. This is why the service sector has all but displaced urban manufacturing activity over the last 200 years. And manufacturing is an order of magnitude more efficient and productive than agriculture is. Bottom line, to produce enough food to feed a city, you'd have to allocate tons of physical space and artificially displace high-productivity uses to lower-density areas.
I think it’s a cool idea that could work in certain places but imo the majority of our farms will remain on the peripheries. This would be an awesome use of land in desolate cities like Detroit and East St Louis though.
I work at AeroFarms! Great to see it featured in a piece like this. AMA?