How Vertical Farms Bring Fresh Food To Booming Cities

Singapore has one of the highest population densities on the planet. More than five million people crowd into this small, wealthy island city. Land is a scarce commodity here, forcing people to expand upward rather than outward. And it's not just office towers and apartment complexes that are reaching for the sky. Singapore now has one of the world's first commercial

vertical

farms

. It's called SkyGreens. This is the framework. 50-year-old greenhouse entrepreneur Jack Ng, an engineer by training, is the owner and designer of the farm. Translucent structures, nearly four stories high, line the property. Inside, automated towers of vegetables spin like Ferris wheels in slow motion between a nutrient-filled bath below and the sun above.

Ng says each tower is powered by a gravity-fed waterwheel. It's old technology with a modern twist. on top. Ng says one of the biggest benefits of this closed-loop hydraulic system is how little energy it consumes. The electricity we use in Singapore costs three dollars a month. That's three dollars a month to run this entire tower... or about the same amount of electricity used in a single 60-watt light bulb. You can try the lettuce. It's okay, it's

fresh

. Eating

fresh

ly cut local vegetables is a luxury in Singapore. With only 250 acres of farmland remaining, the city grows only seven percent of the produce it consumes.

It may be an extreme case, but it represents a looming problem facing

cities

around the world, says Columbia University ecologist Dickson Despommier. Very soon we will reach a tipping point where traditional agriculture will no longer be able to provide enough

food

for the people living on the planet. Despommier says that producing enough

food

for the three and a half billion people who live in

cities

today requires an amount of land twice that of South America. That would be fine if we could stabilize our population at 7 billion. But that's not going to happen. Despommier believes that 80 percent of the world's population will live in cities by 2050... making current challenges seem trivial in comparison.

So the question arises: can we supply enough food for everyone on the planet, including a growing urban population? And I believe we can. And I think we can do that by empowering people in cities to grow food right there. The SkyGreens

vertical

farm offers an example of how this can be possible, not only technically but also economically. The system is ten times more productive per square foot than conventional farming. It also requires much less water, labor and chemical inputs. Dr Lee Sing Kong heads the National Institute of Education in Singapore. He believes that over time urban factories for vegetable production will be created instead of electronics factories in Singapore.

But Lee says visit any restaurant in Singapore and you'll see how far the country is from being self-sufficient. If you look at the plate of food on the table, let's say vegetables, it could come from China, from the neighboring countries of Indonesia or Malaysia, or it could come in terms of salad vegetables, from places as far away as the United States and the rest of the world. European countries like Holland or Australia... Maintaining that food supply from so many foreign sources is a monumental task. Every night, hundreds of trucks enter Singapore from Malaysia and beyond, unloading their cargo of fruits and vegetables at this central wholesale market.

From here, the food is loaded onto smaller trucks and delivered throughout the city before dawn. More than 90 per cent of the food sold in grocery stores like this one in Singapore comes from foreign countries. That makes local and urban products like SkyGreens a premium novelty for customers. But for some it is much more than that. It is an insurance policy. Supermarkets buy food from dozens of other countries as a defense against climate-related disruptions to the global food chain. But Lee Sing Kong of the National Institute of Education says even that may not be enough to ensure a stable food supply in the future.

We anticipate the need for our own production to reach a certain level of self-sufficiency. I think the government has set a target, an initial target of between 10% and 20% of our needs, and if we can achieve that, I think we will have achieved a great feat. Singapore recently invested $20 million in a fund to boost domestic food production through new agricultural technologies such as SkyGreens. But Lee says incentives alone are not ENOUGH. First, he says, high-altitude agriculture must be cost-competitive. Everything we produce in Singapore must compete with the prices of vegetables that come to Singapore. // That is why the Singapore government is promoting // urban farming models that can really not only increase productivity but also reduce the cost of production.

Skygreens owner Jack Ng says he is confident he can compete. Three years into his experiment, he says his operating costs are only a quarter of what it would cost to run a conventional farm. And because it's local, its transportation costs are minimal too, making the price of its fresh lettuce and bok choy competitive with cheap, mass-produced imports. But most importantly, Ng says they taste better. He says the freshness of the vegetables from him "same day" is a real selling point. Until now, my client keeps asking us: can you produce more, can you supply more? Ng has raised $28 million in public and private money to quadruple his capacity over the next year and a half.

And in rapidly growing Singapore, that seems like a smart investment.