Urban growth: Vertical farming offers solutions for China's cities

Want China Times, Staff Reporter 2015-05-19

The design of a vertical farm shown during an expo at the Hainan
International Creative Harbor in Haikou, Hainan province in 2011.
(File photo/CFP)

Lin Jinyi plants 800 head of lettuce in his 15 square meters of living space in Hangzhou and can harvest as much as 500 kilos of the vegetable at a time. Without using any growth hormone or chemicals, all the 39-year-old Lin does is hang the plants on poles. It is the purest form of soil-free cultivation.

A former employee of Google China, Lin is now a "modern farmer" who guides Chinese farmers in building vertical farming systems.

Vertical farming is a concept proposed by scientists as a way to resolve a potential lack of resources in the future as the global population surges. The idea behind the concept is to take full advantage of resources and space to maximize the output of a particular crop.

People from around the world who research and practice vertical farming attended the Association for Vertical Farming (AVF) Summit 2015 in Beijing on May 9-10. Most of the participants could not speak Mandarin but were excited to discover that China could be one of the world's best places to develop vertical farming.

The summit was held in China in recognition of the country's fundamentals, AVF chair Christine Zimmermann Loessl told Guangzhou's Southern Weekly.

It is estimated that by 2030 there will be 800 million people living in China's cities who need a safe and stable supply of nutrients. By that time, vertical farming practices in cities may play a role in contributing to the supply, according to Loessl.

It was a major drought in five southwestern provinces in 2010 that prompted Lin to seek a water-saving, economic and environmentally friendly farming model. During the drought, he saw farmers watering tomato plants on dry land with water they preferred to use on their crops rather than themselves, Lin said.

The concept of vertical farming was proposed by ecologist Dickson Despommier, who saw the possibility of growing food in buildings with plenty of sunlight.

According to Despommier, 80% of the global population will live in cities by 2050. By that time, the population will increase to 9.2 billion people, most of whom will live in developing countries, making food supplies a problem.

Under Despommier's plans, a 30-story skyscraper with vertical farming practices could offer food for 50,000 Manhattan residents. And the food from 160 such buildings could feed all New York City's residents.

Southern Weekly said that while commercial applications of the vertical farming model are not yet mature in China, many property developers have taken notice of the potential of such projects.

If urban communities have their own vertical farms, their residents can harvest their own crops after work, saving time and energy shopping at supermarkets or malls. The planting, transportation, consumption and waste processing can all be handled at one location, the weekly said.

The cost of building a vertical farm is extremely high, however, ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 yuan (US$800-$1,600) per square meter. A high-quality farm of its kind could run into the billions of dollars to build, a far cry from the traditional farming costs Chinese are used to.