Vertical farming may be the future of our food supply, involving rows and tiers of indoor growing.

THE FUTURE OF THE NEXT MEAL
It May Be As Near As Your Own Balcony!

by Peter W. Gribble
“It’s like May!” warned one of my garden centre colleagues when I announced in early March I was coming back to work. “The weather makes no difference. Rain or shine, every day is like Saturday! Sales have doubled over last year’s! It’s nuts!”

Last year’s pandemic empty shelves in food stores struck a nerve in the human psyche. Suddenly, gardening was up there along with making sourdough bread. This year the sourdough bread craze has settled down, but not gardening. Despite February’s cool and sometimes downright cold weather, the gardening season started a month early. The pandemic seems to have infected the retail experience with a paranoiac sense of potential shortages. This is despite fully stocked shelves, displays and tables and the fact that last year’s empty shelves were largely logistical issues, not actual shortages. If you were patient, the shelves were usually, eventually refilled.

The pandemic’s jolt to the food supply system has brought fresh attention to an urgent question: Where will future meals come from?

Vertical living; humans piled on top of one another, has been around since the inventions of the second floor and bunk beds. Vertical gardening has been around since at least the times of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (more likely the earlier garden at the palace of Nineveh of Sennacherib reigning 704-681BC.) What is new is vertical farming.

Vertical farming is an emergent technology where, in its idealized form, a skyscraper farm grows crops on endless floors in a controlled environment of LED lights, and programmed irrigation utilizing soilless farming techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics.

Even if you don’t happen to have an unused warehouse or abandoned mine handy, you can still do some vertical gardening at home.

It’s efficient, clean, no sudden changes in weather to worry about and no pests. Because it is growing upwards, not out, there is less impact on existing land and its native species and the farm-to-fork distances can be negligible. Happily, there’s no need for a skyscraper. Vertical farming projects have successfully converted empty warehouses, cargo containers and abandoned mines and the tenfold increase in some crop yields, compared to traditional farming, speaks for itself.

A defining characteristic of emerging technologies is that their development and applications are unrealized. While vertical farming‘s crop yields are impressive for the compact space they take up; compared to traditional farms, the start-up costs and continued expenses of running the technological components are enormous. If the LED lighting, irrigation system, temperature and humidity control energy consumption, which are large, are derived from non-renewable energy sources, this could result in more pollution than greenhouses or traditional farms. A study from Cornell pointed out that a loaf of bread grown from vertically grown wheat would cost $27 instead of the average $2.85 that one 2020 Canadian study cited.

Even those little sprouting pots on your window sill qualify as vertical gardening.

Vertical farming looks very promising but, like electric vehicles twenty years ago, we have to see if the costs come down. If they do, then its development and application will have been realized. With the human population expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, let’s hope this happens soon.

Yet the curious thing about this projection in population is a term associated with it. The “absolute increase in global population per year” started falling in 1968. It means that while global numbers are going up, they are slowing. The “downward pressures” causing this growth rate reduction includes family planning, education, health care and standard of living commonly seen throughout developed countries. Not so across the semi-arid Sahel region in the widest part of Africa where population growth rates are the highest and where the world’s severest droughts and famines recur. The Great Green Wall is an ongoing project hoping to mitigate this by planting a nine-mile-wide tree and shrub green wall stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea crossing 11 countries to reclaim lands lost to desertification by the Sahara desert. The aim is to have it completed by 2030 because Sahel’s population is set to double by 2039.

And with a little ingenuity, you can enjoy tasty salads from your own vertical farm!

In our West End studios and one or two-bedroom apartment-condos, how do we enlarge our own green space? Vertical green walls are a possibility and easily erected on our nine-by-five-foot balcony. If you don’t have a balcony, the four-dish sprouter sitting on your kitchen counter counts for vertical farming.

Once you realize you can grow upwards, suddenly space reveals itself for gardening that was always there. There are many Youtube videos on how to construct and plant a living green wall. Many rely on a pre-made 36 Pocket Wall Planter you can hang on a free-standing structure or a wall (check with the strata.) These panels are rare to find in garden centres, but are available online. These are ideal if you are growing succulents or smaller plants for the green wall effect, but are too small for veggies. If you are a DIYer, these pocket panels can be made by sewing together ground cover cloth and felt with pockets sized to your requirements.

Even easier is to hang individual pots on a trellis to grow veggies and herbs. Years ago I assembled one with clipped lengths of bent coat hanger wire threaded up through the bottom drainage holes of the pots to serve as hooks. Fourteen seven-inch round plastic pots were hung in the open squares of a store-bought two-by-seven-inch wooden trellis. A metal trellis would’ve been better, but at the time was too expensive (and still is.) My wooden one was rickety and felt fragile so I planted the base in a long six-inch deep, three-foot-long planter box, bolstered with bricks hidden under a layer of soil. The trellis leaned close against the wall to prevent the bottom pots from tilting. The wall it leaned against faced west but, with just this half-day of sun during the early summer months, I was able to harvest a salad for two’s- worth of cherry tomatoes, lettuce, thyme, oregano and basil two or three times a week during the early summer.

Not so ambitious? Try a multi-pocket strawberry pot for an entrée into vertical gardening. Along with trellises, I’ve used tables, pillars and step stools to lift and “raise the walls.” Sitting, at the end of the day, surrounded by lush green growth ... somehow, the balcony disappears.

Meanwhile back at the garden centre, April is the month to begin gardening in earnest. Roses, basket stuffers, fuchsia hanging baskets, water plants and many other plants don’t come in until mid to late April. Check the weather before planting out: nighttime temperatures are still cool. April 2021’s south coast weather is predicted to be rainier and cooler than normal. The big order for tomatoes is scheduled to arrive the last week of April, but main rose shipments are rumoured to be late this year. Last year’s product sold out quickly, but there shouldn’t be the logistical issues of last year and cool weather can extend the planting season. However, if you see something you want, purchase it. Don’t overbuy. Plant waste is as bad as food waste ... as is, in gardening terms, the waste of space.

Where might a future meal come from? By mid-May or early June ... it could be mere steps away on your own balcony.

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