High oil prices, the diversion of 30 percent of the U.S. corn crop for ethanol, and strong demand from China and India are causing food shortages in vulnerable countries around the world.

Some interesting ideas to address the problem are coming from universities, where faculty and students are often encouraged to think outside the box.

Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health science at America's Columbia University, gave birth to the idea of vertical farms in his medical ecology class which examines the health consequences of a damaged environment.

The graduate school class attracts students from many disciplines such as medicine, law, architecture and nutrition. Over the past three years, Despommier has focused on the effects of agriculture on the environment.

He gave his class a project: pretend you're a community of 50,000 people and you have no other food source other than a vertical farm — how big a building would you need, and what would you grow?

The conclusion: growing food in a 30-story building — one square New York City block — could supply a balanced diet for 50,000 people. One building could supply the same amount of food as 588 acres of land. One hundred and ten buildings could feed New York City.

The human population is expected to mushroom by three billion by 2050 with almost all of them living in cities. And with 80 percent of available farmland already in use, Dickson sees vertical farms doing for agriculture what the skyscraper did for office space.

"We need to devote the level of attention to vertical farming that we did to going to the moon," says Despommier. "It will free the world from having to worry about where our next meal will come from."

The goal: Replace all traditional, horizontal farming including plowing, planting and harvesting with a vertical greenhouse that grows every crop including grains (ie., wheat, rice, barley), vegetables, fish (salt and freshwater, crustaceans), poultry and pork.

Pigs would be the highest level mammal that could be raised there — cattle would be elsewhere. The food would be grown under 24-hour grow lights, powered by renewable energy.

We're not inventing anything new, he explains. All these foods are currently grown indoors. Rather, we're bringing it under one roof and siting it in urban settings.

Dickson Despommier

In an interview, Despommier gives insight into this ground-breaking concept.

In a nutshell, what's driving you to do this?

Humanity currently lives a linear life while nature lives a circular life. The next step for us is to shift to closed loop living, which is the secret to restoring nature and supporting a steeply rising population. We've got to work on both sides or neither will survive.

Right now, we're crowding into urban centers without knowing how to live there. We could accommodate many more people if we imitated the cycles of nature.

If we can turn municipal waste into good clean food, water and energy, we've accomplished a cradle to cradle lifestyle. We think vertical farms can accomplish that.

Tell us more about how it works.

We're going to scavenge the solids from untreated municipal liquid waste (feces and urine), dry them, pellet them and burn them. We'll remediate the remaining water to the point where it's safe and use that to grow crops.

The crops will pump the water through their roots, stems and leaves, and send it into the atmosphere where we can collect it again as pure, pristine water. We'll go from feces and urine to food, energy and water in very few steps. That's a cradle to cradle concept.

That's in contrast to how we treat waste now — feces and urine goes to a sewage treatment plant where it's treated and then flushed into our rivers. Meanwhile our food arrives from someplace else relying on a huge irrigation, transport system (trucks, planes, freezers), not to mention taking up much of our land.

Think about the amount of fossil fuels that would be saved if we grew our food locally instead of shipping it from places across the country and around the world. Our food is cheap because it's produced in places where labor costs are almost zero. We can keep the price down by using our own labor, but growing it locally.

I want to know where my food comes from, don't you? Whole Foods may say a food is organically grown but if it comes from Chile, can you really believe that?

We can have our cake and eat it too. We can have all the food we want — short of marbled steak — while we repair the damage we've done to the environment. By farming indoors, all the land currently used for agriculture can be allowed to return to its natural state.

How will the big farmers feel about that?

Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM) will love it because they'll supply chemically defined diets — the exact nutrients needed to produce a tomato or carrot. That will be added to water to grow crops. We won't need fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides anymore — all the food will be organic — no harmful trace elements, heavy metals, or contaminants.

I'm not trying to get rid of farming completely; I'm trying to give land back to nature. I'd like to say to a farmer, "forget corn and biogas, sit on your porch with your children around you, smoke a pipe, and watch the trees grow back."

I'd ask him, "What was the best crop you ever raised and how much money did you get for it?" He might say, "I got $36,000 net after I covered my crop insurance and paid off the tractor," and I'd say, "I'll double it! You're going to become a 'carbon farmer,' by allowing the trees to grow."

Let's put carbon back where it belongs — in trees and under the ground in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. What was it before that? It was creatures and lots and lots and lots of plants.

Where do you get the money to pay this farmer?

The Kyoto Agreement already gives money for this. The abandonment rate of farms is 15 to 20 percent a year in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Indiana. The kids grow up and leave.

Labor costs are so low outside the U.S. that there's a huge glut of just about every kind of crop. We can't compete even with huge subsidies — we're looking at a $100 billion Farm Bill this year.

Carbon farming is happening now on an ad hoc basis. There are some enlightened corporations that emit X amount of carbon a year and then plant the number of trees needed to absorb it.

... continue to page 2