The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century by Dr. Dickson Despommier. 

2/5 rating. 268 pages.

Book #54 of 2023. Read December 28, 2023.

This book talks about the idea of building vertical farms within urban settings as a way to counteract the problems with farming today.

This idea of Dickson’s has intrigued me since the first time I heard about it years ago. The actual book, though, was a letdown.

Dickson wants to make it cheap to build, modular, durable, easily maintained, and safe to operate vertical farm buildings that use hydroponic or other non-soil growing techniques” and cycle nutrients throughout the system.

The book has a decent amount of jargon and overly complicated sentences that take away from the flow of reading, and doesn’t really seem to have a clear goal.

I also was bothered by his premise that “We have no other choice but to conclude that farming on soil is not a long-term sustainable solution to meeting our population’s energy needs, period.” A lot of the work of John Kempf rebuts this claim and actually asserts that farming and sequestering carbon in the soil while building healthy soils is the fix to our current predicament.

All of those issues aside, I do love his end dream proposal. This would be for each state to get $100 million over 10 years to build a prototype vertical farm headed by the top agricultural university president for each state. From there, there would be requirements about having the prototype built by year 2. In order to promote the best practices, annual competitions could be completed to see which prototypes are behaving best in terms of multiple factors as the experiment progresses.

This idea would produce an urban agriculture unit in each state, with a willing city being the location for the buildings. Imagine being able to see different ideas for the future of agriculture across the states. It is hard to believe that we wouldn’t be pressed on to ever-higher innovative ideas towards how to achieve a better food system for all.

Quotes:

“Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that over 50 percent of all crops planted in the United States never reach the plate of the consumer.”

“If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” – Chinese Proverb

“Leviticus 25: 23-24. The land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.”

“The need to reduce all of nature to an economic paradigm is indicative of our need to anthropomorphize virtually everything to conform to our worldview that we are at its center.”

#bookreviews #books #verticalfarm #farming

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