Advantages of the Vertical Farm

The history of how we became an agrarian society and of farming’s increasingly destructive force on the world’s functional ecosystems provides convincing proof that soil-based farming is not working and probably never did. Over 12,000 years of continuous human activity of working the land is a long time to prove or disprove something, but such has been the case for in-soil cultivation. By failure, I mean that without irrigation, agrochemicals, and modern farm machinery, raising crops for human consumption could not go on indefinitely in the same place. It is simply not an ecological option. Selectively breeding a set of domesticated plants with high-yielding reproductive structures but with no ability to survive on their own is bound to place extraordinary demands on any soil, even nutrient-rich volcanic deposits. By contrast, monocultures are quite rare in nature, with some stands of trees and wide swaths of tall grass prairies being the primary exceptions. Even here, thought, there is ample diversity of both other plant species, vertebrates of many kinds, and a myriad of invertebrates and microbes living on and in the soil. Biodiversity means there is competition among all the assemblages of plants and animals for resources. It also means that there is effective recycling of nutrients at all four trophic levels. For that reason, competition on farmland, if allowed to go unchecked (i.e., sans fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides), would greatly reduce yields. Sharing resources with the rest of the wildlife is not an option for commercial farming, no matter how “ecological” the farmer claims to be. Therefore, the sole purpose of agrochemicals is to reduce, or, better yet, completely eliminate the competition, favoring the crop of choice, by killing off the insects and unwanted weeds. It should also be noted that over the past 50 years of implementing this two-pronged chemical strategy, numerous weed-like plants have become more and more resistant to herbicides, while the insect pests have become almost totally resistant to a wide variety of pesticides. It is natural selection at work, no matter how clever we get in the laboratory.