Vertical Farming for Burlington

For a moment in time we thought Dickson Despommier of The Vertical Farm fame would be joining us in Burlington for Earth Week at UVM. We were going to dream of a sustainable world, close the loop on energy and water and waste systems and talk of growing healthy food. The follow-up panel with John Todd, Ocean Arks International; Melinda Moulton, MainStreet Landing; and Ben Falk, Whole Systems Design was going to test these ideas for Vermont and beyond.

Dr. Despommier had to cancel, but the conversation I wanted to host is still relevant. Currently we import most of our energy (even though we have wind and solar available locally); we send all our stormwater either directly into the lake or via a waste treatment plant; our durable goods are buried; and even in Vermont our food travels great distances to get to us (80% of seafood in America is imported; the average food distance is 15,000 miles).

Change doesn’t happen without a vision. And while we might argue with Despommier’s vision of a Vertical Farm in a 40+ story glass-skyscraper because it takes the farmer off the land, I wonder. Haven’t we already done that? Land conservation and open space planning isn’t about farming as much as it is about protecting natural resources and viewsheds. Our ongoing image of Vermont is not a working landscape, but one from Vermont Life.

Anyway back to The Vertical Farm—these farms are about bringing food production into the cities where the majority of people live, eliminating the transport dependency, solving the global shortage of arable land, reducing the water consumption and agricultural wastes, and freeing up our land mass for ecosystem restoration including giving carbon credits for letting farms go back to hardwood forest and rewarding farmers for ecosystems restoration. The permaculturalists I know will argue that this vision is just another example industrial agriculture… This could be, but I suspect that the offense is contained within graphics done by architectural and engineering geeks. An infusion of aggie knowledge might be just the thing—adding bio-dynamic gardening and chinampa technology to the hydroponics and aeroponics.

But we need our own model to test and what could be better than my much loved Moran Plant. I have used this building as a case study in various design classes. We have shown how it can host solar panels, horizontal wind turbines, farmer’s market, and greenhouse on the lower roof deck. The building also provides a perfect location for stormwater mitigation through constructed wetlands as a demonstration project, and, with the addition of vertical farming in the tower, becomes our own experiment with Vertical Farming and building a close-looped system. None of this takes away from current plans of ice-climbing and recreation; rather it adds a layer of function to the reclamation of the building and becomes an urban prototype for energy and food production.

As Dickson Despommier reminds us “farming is not a natural thing, it is a human intervention” … so why not a Third Green Revolution? Why not make buildings more than passive structures that house human activity? Why not use all that embodied energy to a higher and more sustainable of use? Why not grow food in our urban centers?

April 20th 2009