Vertical Farms Give Urban Agriculture a Bad Name

In my architecture studio class last week, a classmate presented some research she had done on urban farming. She was looking specifically at growing food in rather dense environments like Manhattan. She wasn’t finished with her work on the topic, but she made a great point that none of the “vertical farms” seen in architecture magazines or ArchDaily have ever been built. All downtown urban agriculture projects have been of the rooftop variety, not of the massive, multi-level skyfarm variety.

I believe that unless cities grow to cover all of the available land on the planet (like Coruscant, for Star Wars nerds), we will never see more than a couple of these vertical farms. I am willing to bet that a couple of these will get built by an eccentric billionaire, but nothing more will come of it. The economics of it will never pan out. The land the vertical farm is on is too valuable, and the amount of food they produce will never be enough. I think the worst part of these vertical farm creations is that they give a false image of what urban agriculture is and what the relationship of cities and farms should be.

The image of a skyscraper farm is captivating and memorable, but it doesn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny. Why place a farm downtown when there are vacant lots, parking lots, yards, parks, roofs, and other horizontal surfaces in a city that would be more suitable for farming? If someone reads a Popular Science article about a vertical skyscraper and thinks about it for a minute will immediately be turned off to urban agriculture. They’ll see it as pie-in-the-sky and impractical. Vertical farms get attention but let people down.

Rural areas will always be better suited for large-scale food production. They have the soil, the light, the water, and the acreage (when compared to a downtown parcel). The best thing we can do to ensure ample food production is restrict development on fertile farm land. This is easier said than done, but in the state of Oregon, every city is required to have an urban growth boundary. This keeps cities from sprawling into the countryside. It’s not a perfect solution, but it seems more reasonable than a vertical farm.

While rural areas are better at producing food, it doesn’t mean people shouldn’t grow food within the city limits. There are so many yards and other horizontal surfaces that most cities should easily be able to supplement their fruit and vegetable needs. Some cities could probably grow all of all their fruits and vegetables. Urban agriculture has a long way to go until it gets there, but proposing vertical farms only fuels skepticism about the movement as a whole.