| I just read a must-read article over at New York Magazine.
It's about the promises of Vertical Farming, an idea dreamed up by a Columbia Professor and it so crazy it just might work.
In a nutshell, Vertical Farming has the potential to feed the world's hungry in a very sustainable way, grow crops without pesticides, purify urban air and water, create clean energy, increase access to locally-grown produce in poor communities where it is lacking, and provide jobs to many people.
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| I strongly recommend you read the whole article (it's mostly designs).
One good passage:
Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. Roughly 150 such buildings, Despommier estimates, could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.
Another huge benefit is that it will allow a lot of farmland to return to forest, thus somewhat offsetting global warming.
I think the most amazing potential of vertical farming is its ability to clean water and air in nasty urban centers, like NYC, while also providing clean electricity from the agricultural waste.
And it would be a boon towards New York City's recent healthy-eating policies. The Times has a great article about Bloomberg's latest efforts a few days ago.
from a policy perspective, Mr. Bloomberg has taken on more food issues, and provoked more controversy, than any New York mayor before him. As a result, he has the potential to change the way more New Yorkers eat - whether in the haughtiest dining rooms or the poorest home kitchens - than all the city's food activists and restaurant critics combined....
However, one program, the Healthy Bodegas Inititive, has not been entirely successful:
the department often trots out its Healthy Bodegas Initiative as an example of innovative food policy work, the project has not gotten very far.
The idea was to encourage bodegas in neighborhoods with poverty and health problems to sell more nutritious food. An effort to get more 1 percent milk into some stores worked, but an attempt to persuade 60 bodegas in East Harlem and the South Bronx to sell packages of sliced New York apples and carrots didn't take off.
The program began in all 60 in December, but as of last week, no one could say how many bodegas still sold the snacks, and a department spokeswoman called it a preliminary effort that bogged down by distribution problems.
Perhaps billionaire Bloomy will pony up some of the capital to make a vertical farm?
And just maybe the publicity of having one of these in your neighboorhood will spur people to eat more fruits and vegetables:
Would love to hear what everyone thinks about this. |
