File:Despommier- Future scenario- vertical farming.webm

English: A vertical farm is a marriage of one-layer horizontal greenhouses. It's like a layer-cake. You have a single layer, that's greenhouse. If you have multiple layers it's a vertical greenhouse. Vertical greenhouse, it's simple. But when Leonardo said it was a good idea to fly, it's not: Look, there goes a bird, I can see it fly, it's simple, right? People didn't know how to look at birds basically. They didn't see the curvage of the wing, they didn't see the tail moving, they just thought: If it's a bird it can fly. I'm going to try that too. You can't just stack greenhouses on top of each other and expect this thing to function. You've got to integrate the systems. What are those systems? You've got water to deal with, the nutritions of the plants, crop selection. Then you've got seed selection, germination, planting, growing and harvesting, and then what do you do with the waste? All of those things have to be worked out. The biggest thing that has to be worked out is that this building has to function as a micro ecosystem. You have to imitate nature. You have to biomimic an ecosystem. In every sense. The energy that you use is the energy that you give, so e=mc2. It all has to balance out. That means you can't be a burden to the grid. You can't use a lot of electricity and a lot of water to make a vertical farm when you're already short on water and electricity. That's just not going to work. It can't work this way, so you won't do it. You have to be clever. You have to capture passive energy sources wherever possible. Locating these farms in various places will allow that. Iceland: all the geothermal energy, Italy: geothermal energy, New Zealand: geothermal energy. Southern California: geothermal energy. East Africa... okay. Then you've got wind power. Who knows wind power better than the Dutch? Nobody, it's where the windmill was invented. High tech versions of this continue to be invented. And wind chimes and all kinds of other very interesting ways of dealing with wind. And then tides. Very, very... By the way, all powered by celestial bodies, the moon, the sun. Take advantage of all that energy and integrate it into a system that is an energy-neutral building. We can do that already, we know how to do it. We're clever, our technology has driven us to this point, we can go beyond this. If everybody in India can own a cell phone, and they do, then I think vertical farming is an inevitability, based on our needs. So I imagine a vertical farm is the most beautiful, transparent, energy-wise, fruitful, nurturing, gorgeous, and attracts-me-to-it-I-wanna-be-part-of-it building that you could ever imagine. And it's not just one building, it's a complex of buildings that you've got. Because you've got value out of products that you can make from some of these things, like bakery goods and that sort of thing from the wheat. Yes, you can grow wheat indoors, lots of it as a matter of fact. Rice, corn, there's nothing that you can't grow indoors. Go to any botanic gardens and you can see for yourself that even the most exotic plants grow very well indoors, as long as you match their conditions. Again, control is everything. I think the vertical farm will be small, associated with restaurants, and medium-sized, with schools and hospitals, on the tops of apartment houses that have flat roofs, and even on commercial buildings. You could integrate them into the living zones as well, you just have to be careful about plant diseases, that's all. But remember, even if you get one, you can wipe it all and start again the next day and it'll still be in good shape.