VERTICAL FARMING 2014





Food Scraps To Fuel Vertical Farming's Rise In Chicago – NPR
by April Fulton
April 09, 2014

From plant factories fueled by the magenta glow of blue and red LED lights, to the 30-foot tall Ferris wheel for plants in Singapore, we've shown you the design possibilities for growing vegetables up instead of out.

But critics ask, what kind of stresses does that put on the plant? And how do you feed this kind of intensive cultivation without spending more than what you get back in the harvest?

They say one of the signs of reaching maturity is your ability to answer your critics. Well, vertical farming may be about at that stage.

Our colleagues over at Harvest Public Media report that in Chicago, entrepreneur John Edel is "working hard to show skeptics that garbage itself can fuel vertical farming." With a grant from the State of Illinois, Edel is "installing a giant anaerobic digester that will convert truckloads of food waste into biogas, burned onsite to keep the lights on," HPM reports.

Edel's baby is The Plant, a 93,500 square-foot former meatpacking facility in Chicago's downtrodden Back of the Yards neighborhood. He's helped transform it into an energy self-sufficient food production operation that will house food non-profits, for-profits and educational enterprises. Here's how the website says it works:
"Once completed, the completely enclosed, odorless anaerobic digester will consume 27 tons of food waste a day (nearly 11,000 tons annually), including all of the waste produced in the facility and by food producing businesses all over Chicago. The digester will capture all of the methane from that waste, and the methane will be burned in a combined heat and power system to produce electricity, plus all the process heat needed for an future onsite craft beer brewery. Excess heat will be used to regulate the building's temperature."

Talk about going off the grid. Among the producers that will benefit from the energy at The Plant are a mushroom farm, an outdoor fruit and vegetable farm and aquaponics system raising fish.

Chicago, it seems, is emerging as a hotbed of urban agriculture innovation in the U.S. As we've reported, it's also the home of one of the country's biggest rooftop farms.

While the digester is still being built, Edel is not shy about his expectations for The Plant. "I think by the end of this year everything will be operational and we'll be well beyond net-zero," he says.

And with a brewery coming, too, we could drink to that.




“Vertical farming” is a promising new way to handle some of the environmental problems that we may face increasingly as a society. “Harvest Public Media” is a branch of National Public Radio which reports on food production issues. From this website, http://www.studymode.com/essays/The-Benefits-Of-Vertical-Farming-92435.html, comes a definition of vertical farming and some facts about it.

“With the growing need for land and the growing population scientists have come up with the idea of vertical farming. The idea of vertical farming is continually growing. According to Wikipedia online, the encyclopedic definition of vertical farming is a form of farming done in urban area high rises that utilize greenhouse growing methods and recycled resources year-round to grow crops. Using these Vertical Farms will allow the populations of the future to rely more on themselves and not depend on others so much. …. One indoor acre is equal to 4-6 outdoor acres or more, that is depending on the crop that is being grown. For instance, to grow a crop of strawberries indoors, one acre inside is equivalent to 30 acres.”

John Edel an entrepreneur is “installing a giant anaerobic digester that will convert truckloads of food waste into biogas, burned onsite to keep the lights on," HPM reports. He runs “The Plant,” is a production unit to generate methane gas which is to be housed in a 93,500 square-foot Chicago building for the production of energy for a “self-sufficient food production operation that will house food non-profits, for-profits and educational enterprises.” Such creative thinking as Edel's is what we will need as the population consumes more and more land for housing, leaving less and less for growing food. Indoor spaces can also be kept warm and wet when the outdoor weather is not conducive to growing plants, especially if we have droughts as a result of Climate Change. This article didn't explore what the costs of these operations would be, and how that would be reflected in the family's food budget. That's a subject for another story.