Bringing Vertical Farming’s Founding Paradox Down to Earth

• In Event: Controlling Environments, Growing Plants - II

Abstract

Long-term developments in Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) are well-recorded in a large body of scientific literature, especially in the plant sciences. The popular Vertical Farming (VF) concept, by contrast, emerged almost exclusively from the grey literature, with no discernible connection to university plant science departments. Working outside of a conventional disciplinary peer review process, the early writing on VF (mostly the work of students enrolled in microbiologist Dickson Despommier’s Medical Ecology class at Columbia University from 2000–2008) does not draw from a clear foundational text, but one contender for such a title might be Mathis Wackernagel and Bill Rees' 1996 book, “The Ecological Footprint." Using EF as a motivating theory for the VF concept presents a curious inversion: "The Ecological Footprint" claims that CEA technology should be considered the lowest-yielding, least efficient, and most ecologically damaging method of farming ever devised. To compare on similar terms, "The Vertical Farm" book claims (using ecological footprint theory) that every hectare of farmland brought indoors will result in twenty hectares of farmland that can be “spared” for wild rehabilitation. "The Ecological Footprint" suggests exactly the opposite, explicitly stating that every new hectare put into CEA would require the appropriation of a fifteen-hectare wild footprint. In this paper, I will explore the origins of this gaping conceptual discontinuity, and identify ways in which VF narratives, epistemologies, and ontologies work to ignore, deny, obscure, re-frame, overwhelm, or counter claims that CEA is more ecologically destructive than comparable field practices.

Author

• Mark Bomford, Yale Sustainable Food Program