Informational Summative Essay

Passage 1:  "Farms Sprout in Cities" by Jennifer Cutraro

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When you hear the word “farm,” chances are you picture rolling hills in the country covered with cows and cornstalks. But some scientists, engineers and city planners say the farms of the future could rise straight into the air. They imagine them in skyscrapers in the world’s most populated cities.

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It might sound far-fetched, but in fact, some of the technology for growing crops indoors already exists. The scientists stationed at the South Pole research station enjoy fresh salads every day. They grow vegetables in their own greenhouse. And the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, has been experimenting for years with ways to grow fresh fruits and veggies on the moon or even on Mars.

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Those in the know say bringing farming indoors solves a number of problems. First, traditional farming takes up a lot of land. Dickson Despommier is an ecologist at Columbia University. He notes that it takes a plot of land as big as the entire state of Virginia just to grow enough food for all the people in New York City. That’s about 8 million people.

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Cities that grow their own food would become more self-reliant. They also would be less vulnerable to catastrophes such as hurricanes that can make it impossible for trucks to deliver fresh produce to grocery stores. What’s more, fruits and vegetables grown outdoors face all kinds of hazards, from flooding to insect pests. There’s also weather instability, such as late or early frosts that can damage a crop. “What happens outside is lightning bolts strike, there are floods, pests, drought,” Despommier says. “You can control everything indoors. You can’t control anything outdoors.”

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To top it off, by the year 2050, the world population will grow by another 3 billion. As populations grow, the land available for farming shrinks. This raises an important question: Where will we grow the food for all these people? Despommier and his colleagues say “vertical farming” is the answer—growing crops in skyscrapers tens of stories high.

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Vertical farming takes up much less land than traditional, “horizontal” farming. And its advocates say it could provide new uses for hundreds of abandoned buildings in cities around the world.

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Vertical farms don’t exist yet. But their proponents say a well-designed facility could recycle water from indoor fish ponds and use that water to irrigate crops like strawberries, peppers and tomatoes. Crop waste, such as stalks and leaves, would be composted. And the gases given off from composting would be used to heat the building. Livestock such as chicken or pigs could even live in a vertical farm. Their waste would be recycled as a source of energy.

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But those familiar with the hurdles of growing crops indoors say it’s not going to be easy to make the transition to vertical farming. “If I was going to play devil’s advocate, I’d say it is going to be tough,” says Gene Giacomelli. He heads up the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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It can be tricky to regulate climate conditions indoors, he says. Maintaining the correct balance of humidity can be especially challenging. “At the end of the day, it is going to be raining in these buildings,” he says.

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Plus, plants differ in their weather and lighting needs. Tomatoes like warm, sunny weather. Greens like lettuce prefer cooler temperatures. And nearly all crop plants require lots of sunlight.

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Mimicking sunlight is challenging, but scientists are learning how to make artificial lights that produce the colors, or wavelengths, of light—especially red and blue—that crop plants need. . . .

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Overcoming these challenges will take time. Most experts suggest it would be anywhere between 5 and 15 years before the first vertical farms could be created.

Passage 2:  "Farms That Rise to the Challenge" by Conrad de Aenlle

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It is a staggering challenge: feeding the seven billion-plus people in the world and delivering fresh food to the rapidly rising number of them who live in cities.

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One solution, more theoretical than practical so far . . . : vertical farming.

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By growing crops on the sides or roofs of buildings, or in stacks inside, in the large cities where they will be consumed, food can be produced in a way that saves energy and time, proponents of vertical farming assert.

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The advantages will become even clearer, they say, as techniques and technologies improve, urban populations expand and factors such as increasing water scarcity and climate change hamper traditional flat-earth farming.

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But vertical farming has many skeptics and critics who expect that whatever energy and money are saved by shortening the distance from farm to table to be lost, and then some, by the high cost of artificial lighting and other equipment needed to produce food indoors and even outdoors in many urban settings.

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It may be feasible to grow certain crops efficiently in certain circumstances in certain settings, they say, but only to a certain extent and at certain times. They consider it unlikely for the foreseeable future that vertical farming could produce enough food of different varieties to feed a significant number of people in a commercially viable way.

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“It’s such an appealing idea—‘Press Floor 10 for lettuce’—that people picked up on it right away,” said Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University. “The fundamental problem is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require the burning of a lot of fossil fuels. Vertical farming is fine if you’ll let me have a vertical nuclear reactor next to it.”

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If that’s not an option, then success in urban vertical farming is likely to be confined to a small number of crops . . . .

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“There are situations in dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights, stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin.

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[Hans] Hassle, at Plantagon, acknowledged that whatever problems may be solved, producing food in the heart of a city can create other difficulties. There’s more to making a vertical farm successful than growing crops.

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The challenges of doing vertical farming profitably on a large scale are so daunting that even a true believer like Mr. Hassle can’t help but be skeptical.

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“Vertical farming as an industry is very much at the beginning,” Mr. Hassle said. “We have focused on making it industrial and scalable, and that’s a little bit crazy. It’s like trying to do the impossible. It looks almost like science fiction.”