Vertical farming could help urbanisation and climate change

CITIES will have to become part of the solution to producing food as urbanisation and climate change continue to be challenges.

City growth: AeroFarms' vertical grow towers in Newark, New Jersey, is the largest vertical farm in the world and could be a sign of things to come in Australia. Picture: Angela Weiss

CITIES will have to become part of the solution to producing food, as urbanisation and climate change continue to be challenges.

Henry Gordon-Smith, the managing director of Agritecture, an urban agriculture consulting firm, Smith, said he doesn’t understand why cities only have to be consumers.

“I see the future of cities as being producers and part of the solution to provide self reliance,” Mr Gordon-Smith said. “As we’ve moved to cities we’ve moved agriculture from them … we have cities that aren’t driving any of the decision making in agriculture, even though they are driving all the consumption.”

Mr Gordon-Smith said in Australia about 86 per cent of people lived in cities — globally it was 55 per cent, moving toward 68 per cent by 2050.

“We also have other issues like water scarcity, droughts and heatwaves, which may be a driver for growing food indoors,” he said. “There is declining arable land around the world. A lot of our quality land for certain vegetables exists around cities, so as urbanisation grows this is one of the major problems.”

In the Sydney Basin in 2011 20 per cent of the city’s food consumption was grown within the area. That is projected to drop to 6 per cent by 2031. “That might not be an issue if we see that in one city in the world, but we are seeing that in every major city in the world. As these cities urbanise and prioritise affordable housing, we don’t have viable solutions to develop agriculture along with them, so that’s the role of urban agriculture,” Mr Gordon-Smith said.

“A lot of urban agriculture is very pie in the sky, it is for wealthy people and it is a more expensive product typically, and while that might be where we are today as we look toward the future these pressures will make a lot of these models more viable.”