The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century

by Dickson D. Despommier, Majora Carter (Foreword)

"The vertical farm is a world-changing innovation whose time has come. Dickson Despommier's visionary book provides a blueprint for securing the world's food supply and at the same time solving one of the gravest environmental crises facing us today."--StingImagine a world where every town has their own local food source, grown in the safest way possible, where no drop of water or particle of light is wasted, and where a simple elevator ride can transport you to nature's grocery store - imagine the world of the vertical farm.When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. Despommier's stroke of genius, the vertical farm, has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Despommier explains how the vertical farm will have an incredible impact on changing the face of this planet for future generations. Despommier takes readers on an incredible journey inside the vertical farm, buildings filled with fruits and vegetables that will provide local food sources for entire cities. Vertical farms will allow us - Grow food 24 hours a day, 365 days a year- Protect crops from unpredictable and harmful weather - Re-use water collected from the indoor environment- Provide jobs for residents - Eliminate use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides- Drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels - Prevent crop loss due to shipping or storage- Stop agricultural runoffVertical farms can be built in abandoned buildings and on deserted lots, transforming our cities into urban landscapes which will provide fresh food grown and harvested just around the corner. Possibly the most important aspect of vertical farms is that they can built by nations with little or no arable land, transforming nations which are currently unable to farm into top food producers. In the tradition of the bestselling The World Without Us, The Vertical Farm is a completely original landmark work destined to become an instant classic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Food, Agriculture, Environment, Gardening, Architecture

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 12, 2010

About the author

Dickson Donald Despommier was an American academic, microbiologist and ecologist who was a professor of microbiology and Public Health at Columbia University. From 1971 to 2009, he conducted research on intracellular parasitism and taught courses on parasitic diseases, medical ecology and ecology. Despommier received media coverage for his ideas on vertical farming.

Reviews

[Rachel Bayles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting overview of the idea. One or two really outstanding facts, but in general the writing could be tighter. It's still worth reading, but it's more like reading an extended Wired article than a book.

[Jay French · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started off greatly disappointed with this book. I expected from the title that the book would cover vertical farming in urban areas in some depth. I had recently attended a talk by the folks growing vegetables on the roof of McCormick Place in Chicago, and had seen multiple TED talks on urban farming, so understood some of the issues and possible solutions. Imagine my surprise in reading the entire first half or two thirds of the book and finding it was all a highly opinionated history of agriculture. Huh? Frankly, if you grew up within 20 miles of a farm, you can skip the first half of the book without missing anything you don’t already know, and you would miss a bunch of agri-Luddite commentary (the author comes across as a grumpy lone defender of Mother Earth). The author finally gets around to vertical farming in the second half, but really through the construct of giving checklists of benefits and issues and spending some time describing each. While I found these interesting and new to me, there’s not a lot of meat here, and it could have been handled in a magazine article. And the description is not detailed – this is more of a policy-level description. When it’s over, you still have a hard time picturing what one of these facilities looks like or how it operates. This was a huge opportunity squandered by this book.

It appears, based on other books he’s written, that the author specializes in parasites and related diseases, and this shows in many of the areas he focuses on in this book. His concept of a vertical farm in an urban area is as much a way to filter sewage as to grow food, and I’m not sure combining the two is going to help the concept move beyond untested idea. He also talks at one point about killing hookworms and nematodes, then two paragraphs later he talks about “respecting all lifeforms”.

The writing is not good. The author is very repetitive and I found him focusing on some specific issues, like protecting farming facilities by locking doors and providing “interlocks” between receiving and growing areas, while at the same time not covering other areas. I also found his repeated bashing of President Bush to be misplaced – that truly does not help to “sell” your concept.

And in the end, this is just a document putting forward a strawman of how to do something differently. It is just in the concept stage, not ready for development or testing. It’s more for getting people to think. While I appreciated the idea, I didn’t find this a compelling way to put vertical farming forward. I think the “meat” of this could be put into a TED talk presentation, and I see the author does have a TED talk on this topic. And as I expected based on the book, he goes over his allotted time.

[Book Calendar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Vertical Farm Feeding The World in the 21st Century by Dr, Dickson Despommer

This book is both utopian and visionary. However, I also found it to lacked some attribution for where the science and some of the philosophy for the things which he is describing are coming from. He does not describe some of the more interesting and radical ideas that have come out of ecology recently.

Dr. John Despommier spends quite a bit of time describing how agriculture came into being. Then he describes how modern agriculture is wasteful from an ecological standpoint. I found some of his writing to be a bit overbearing. He jumps from bad modern farming methods to giant skyscraper farms.

There is very little of a median. He goes into greenhouses and how they work, but does not do much with bioshelters, organic farming, or natural pest control.

He also wants the vertical farms he is designing to be hermetically sealed liked the biosphere experiment. This did not work as planned in the biosphere experiment.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/200...


He also is arguing for moving hydroponics into the city. This is already starting to happen. It is just not happening in the fashion of skyscrapers. When he describes the advantages of a vertical farm, it is the exact same advantage of having urban greenhouses. I see urban greenhouses and farms as being incredible positive for people in cities.

The advantage which a vertical farm would have over a horizontal greenhouse would be that the system he is describing would use less land and probably have a greater surface area to place solar panels and wind turbines on.

He properly praises John Todd for his work on living machines which led to many breakthroughs with ideas for things like bioshelters, water purification based on living machines, and other concepts which are used in the book, The Vertical Farm. http://toddecological.com/eco-machines/



I distinctly remember reading about a multistory bioshelter farm design for cities in the book Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design written in 1984 published by Sierra Club Books. This was the basis for a later book, A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, Island Press c2005.



I think Dr. Dickson Despommier synthesized a new idea from the work of many others. The scale of a vertical farm is what differentiates his idea. It is hard to imagine a skyscraper filled with greenery.



There is also a single sentence citation for the book, Cradle to Cradle Remaking The Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. This is a book about how to design things so there is very little waste in a closed loop system based on ecology. I did find it listed in recommended reads.
http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cr...

Dr. Despommier also uses the term "natural capitalism" without explaining where it comes from. Natural Capitalism is a term for businesses that use environmental principles. It is also a book, Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins.



I wish he had spent some more time describing the workings of how a vertical farm is put together. For example, I might have liked a little more on how Aeroponics which came from NASA works. Incidentally, Dr. Despommier also mentions Biosphere II which was a closed loop system for maintaining humans for long time periods in space. Many of the potential systems he is describing come from space research.



Dr. Despommier's description of the Eurofresh Farms is quite interesting. They are in the middle of the Arizona desert. There is another example of a closed system farm in the antarctic not mentioned in the book where they grow fresh food for researchers. It is also preparation for growing food on Mars. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.h...



The Vertical Farm which he is describing is a future design combining space research, agronomy, and bioshelter design inside a skyscraper. It uses both wind, solar, and biomass power. It commercializes concepts like aeroponics from NASA and adds to some ideas that already came from space research. Solar panels were originally invented at NASA.



This brings the theme to power in the book. Dr. Despommier describes how they will be using wind power, biomass, and solar power. He suggest plasma arc gasification as the way to get rid of biomass. Plasma arc gasification is very expensive. He also suggests that we grow fuel crops in vertical farms. Fuel crops like algae can grow on open water in big bags for far cheaper prices. I liked his sugestion from an earlier article in the New York magazine that they use pellet burning cogeneration for heat, power, and steam. http://nymag.com/news/features/30020/



Dr. Despommier says this can only be built by governments doing research; there is no venture capital interested in this. This statement bothered me. Mr. Despommier is wrong. Bayer is doing research for this and many other companies are working on projects which involve these technologies.
http://www.bayercropscience.com/bcswe...



Other companies are seeking venture capital to build these projects like Home Town Farms. http://www.hometownfarms.com/ Many cities are becoming more interested in investing in urban agricultural greenhouses. In New York, there is http://gothamgreens.com/ whch supplies Whole Foods markets. There are also combined systems called aquaponics which create closed loops for growing fish and vegetables together. http://www.growseed.org/growingpower....



I thought the book was very interesting and very flawed. Most of the advantages which he is describing could be done with rooftop aquaponics, or moving advanced greenhouses into an urban setting. I am not convinced that stacking one greenhouse after another into a skyscraper is a good idea. I can see smaller buildings of three or four stories tried first. This would reduce pollution, provide fresh organic food, create new jobs, and a cleaner environment. It is well worth doing.


In the appendices, there is a lot of material on hydroponics and urban hydroponics with many websites. It would have been nice to see him list a few green incubators like Green Spaces http://www.greenspaceshome.com/ or NYC Acre http://www.nycacre.com/ . Also, it would have been nice to see a little bit on aquaponics as well.



The best part of ths book was the illustrations. They are incredible pictures of green cities, buildings and skyscrapers. In fact, his descriptions of green buildings were also superb. This is an excellent reason to take a look at this book.



This is a fascinating and flawed book. I found many of his ideas to be very interesting, but impractical. Maybe, I had some problems with his not going more deeply into parts of the philosophy behind building a vertical farm. I also did not like his over focus on the idea that the government will fund research into vertical farms. Vertical farms incorporate some fairly radical ideas about science and technology.



This book hopefully will stimulate people to look at the fascinating new developments in aeroponics, hydroponics, recycling, green buildings, cradle to cradle design, ecological design, and alternative energy which this book presents. I think most people will find this book fascinating. I did have some questions about the authors approach and philosophy.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this because I liked Despommier on This Week in Virology, but I was severely disappointed with it. He spends basically the entire book talking about either some sort of ecological problem or some random tangent — most of which seems like it is at the level of second- or third-hand popular science — and at no point does he actually make the case for why vertical farming solves any of this.

He is convinced that vertical farming will be very profitable, that it will solve food deserts (!!!)¹ and a million other environmental ills, but he doesn't like... run any numbers. It sounds incredibly complex, technologically, which really feels like a major problem if it's going to be some sort of major source of protection against catastrophic disasters. He goes on and on about how it will create tons of jobs, as if that's a benefit and not a massive cost. At no point does he run the numbers like, "A New York city block is 5.5 acres. If we had a 100 story skyscraper that took up the entire block (this would be ~the tallest building in New York), that would be ~550 acres of "farmland"; according to this calculator, it takes around 3.4 acres to feed a single person on a vegetarian diet. Being generous, we'll call it 3 and round up to 600 so that building feeds ~200 people. Maybe you can stack the farm more tightly, or the yields are higher for some reason, so we can add a safety margin and say it's probably not more than 10x that amount, or 2000 people. There are about 46 people per acre in New York, or around 250 people per block, so in our best case scenario every 10th block would need to be replaced with a vertical farm dramatically larger than the largest building in New York today.

Keep in mind this also needs to have enough energy in the form of light to feed the plants, so instead of harvesting that directly from the sun in big open easy-to-maintain fields, you have to capture the energy and re-emit it.

I am not saying that vertical farming is not feasible, or that I don't like the idea of vertical farms — I actually love some of the benefits you get, like year-round availability of seasonal plants, pathogen control, etc. I like it as a reserve source of food in the case of supply chain disruptions and maybe as a local source of foods that don't travel well. However, I think Despommier is totally falling for a technocrat's fallacy in assuming that agribusiness operates the way it does out of greed or because it is made up of people who uniformly don't care about the environment or something (particularly weird since he seems to think vertical farming is also more cost-effective).

At the end of the day, he doesn't really even make the case for vertical farming. Despite the fact that vertical farming apparently doesn't even work at all right now, it's kind of amazing that he can already tell that it will have all these magical problems that solve all kinds of apparently pressing social issues, once we solve the problem of how to do it at all. Seems unlikely that major agribusiness corporations are leaving trillions of dollars on the table by not rushing to develop this, and we should probably look at the long history of technocrats coming in with some elegant-sounding technocratic solution that fails miserably and see reason for skepticism.

¹ I am fairly dubious about food deserts even being a useful concept or a driver of any real problems, but saying that vertical farms will solve food deserts seems a bit like saying that having a Nike factory in your neighborhood means you'll have great access to shoes. Distribution channels and production channels are not usually related on an industrial scale like that.

[Alfanhui · Rating 1 out of 5]

TLDR: dont bother with this purely speculative, badly written book

I had high hopes for this book. I wanted to be taught about vertical farming: some real potential designs, crop capacity, crop variation, current successes and to be told the progress so far. Instead, I got half a book about mumblings on the history of farming, which was interesting in parts but puzzling on why it matters to the vertical farm. And the remaining part about your big ideas for vertical farming, which are in no way based on fact, reality nor practical farming.

The author fails to focus on any section. There are a number of subheadings that are completely unstructured by its placement and contents. When the author does finally starts writing about vertical farms, he bombards it by overly complex fantasies, concept designs and utter lack of detail. Shame on this academic author by having no proper references to his sources. I believe his intention of this book is to get people interested in vertical farming, but after reading it, he only provides empty words and I'm left wondering what he thinks hes achieved?

He appears to have spent all his academic time on this subject thinking internally, with no real world research, rather than any apply any effort in the practical application. Has he progressed the field? Did he even want to? I suggest the author to read up on agile project management to understand how one would start to build a vertical farm incrementally. I would also suggest the author to read up on how hydroponics work, and actually try it out. I am dubious of the absence of pollination in this book, making me think perhaps the author has not even had his hands dirty in garden. Maybe after all this, he can write a book about farming.

[Elijah Abel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a nice introduction to the idea of vertical farming. There is a lot we stand to gain from the widespread adoption of vertical farming, and it may even be necessary to move more towards this in the coming decades due to population growth of the world alone.

Dr. Despommier covers the benefits of vertical farming vs the negatives of the traditional agricultural approach including:
- Crop production per sq ft
- No weather-related crop failures
- No toxic runoff
- No need for herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers
- Use of 70-95% (!!!) less water (modern agriculture currently accounts for some 70% of our world's water usage)
- Reduction of fossil fuel usage for transporting food
- More control over food quality in general

Despommier makes it clear just how much we could solve the environmental issues threatening the world right now, all while providing farmers a more reliable, controlled system for food production. The biggest problem facing it right now is that it's not yet a great way to make money, but that shouldn't be too discouraging yet. There are a lot of innovative technologies that take time to turn the corner into profitability, and I don't think this is any exception.

Many people seem down on this book because they were expecting a deeper dive into how vertical farming is done, but if you're just looking for an overview, then I think this is a good start. Now, on to a book with a more in depth look at the technology and process of vertical farming!

[Ryan Berger · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first glance, Vertical Farms have the dint of the exact kind of snake-oil bullshit that routinely comes out of Silicon Valley that is often rendered in tacky futurist artwork and overall does not seem to be a practical, realistic, or even requested solution to a problem that doesn't exist. This tradition of over-promising backed by charisma and imagination instead of science and fact and under-delivering in every conceivable way has become the norm for technocrats' leading edge. We are fortunate, in a way, that so many of these schemes are transparently awful. Just in the last year we saw the total collapse of the already famished crypto industry only for its seat to be replaced by the onset of AI shoehorned into every aspect of life.

Food production and the larger crisis of climate change convinced me to approach the vertical farm with skeptical but hopeful eyes. Add in the fact that Dr. Despommier is far from the usual techno-huckster and I was willing to meet this overwhelmingly radical proposal (the complete overhaul of how humanity farms) on its own terms.

The mere hint that a new technology might be a "disruptor" in the global economy is usually a dog whistle that you're about to be shamelessly lied to and pitched at, but what Despommier is advocating for is exactly that. Knowing this, Despommier has raised the bar for would-be "disruptors" by outlining and rigorously establishing the problem (a bare-minimum that many don't accomplish), providing an appropriate solution, and anticipating counter arguments. There's even a compelling chapter on what you might call "deal sweeteners" that suggest other benefits to vertical farming.

The facts: Agriculture has overtaxed the land and the problem is going to get dramatically more dire the more mouths we have to feed. Rapid climate change and environmental devastation has also made what is already a precarious, vulnerable industry even more unsafe. Despommier is also wise to establish the social and class consequences of food scarcity, which would be a significant issue even if climate change were benign (which of course, it's not).

Vertical farms are not a cure-all for many of these issues, but if they were to be adopted, I believe Despommier that it could be extraordinarily beneficial to turn urban spaces into major areas of food production. The most exciting and personally fascinating idea to me, though-- is the idea of what our ecology might do if we replaced major agricultural hubs not with more cities and more vertical farms (as I was holding my breath for. Give tech bros and inch and they'll take a mile) but instead hardwood forests. Sadly, the history of stretches of occupied land being given back to nature is scarce, but returns are extremely encouraging. The carbon math is as favorable as you might expect (even if climate change continues to throw the math needed to keep pace into dire straits), but biome diversity and even ecological "beauty" comes roaring back if given enough space. It is difficult to imagine, but regions like in Ohio and Nebraska turning into a landscape reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest is tantalizing. I dare say it's the stuff of Science Fiction.

I've neglected to actually discuss the purpose of vertical farming because it feels so obvious: turn urban areas into crop producers, protect crops by moving them indoors, recycle water at a completely unprecedented rate, and feed the population boom we're on a course collision with all while removing the food-miles between us. The major critique and "what-about" of Vertical Farming that not even Despommier seems eager to tackle is the electricity needed to implement this properly. Even major consideration given to solar and wind as alternative energy sources (the first of which would be innate to the construction of these farms) seems to put the cost of operation near the margins (but still within) of what's feasible. Still, even as water-treatment plants and food-desert eliminators, the benefits are staggering and the arguments against feel closer to doomerism than anything rooted in observation and hypothesis.

My edition of this book is slightly revised from its original run, but still not the latest 10-year anniversary edition that tracks the actual implementation of these farms. My copy ends with a glimmer of hope for vertical farms in Wyoming searching for funding. Today, that farm is up and running, as are several others. Early returns are promising, but detractors use small sample sizes challenges faced because of a lack of government subsidy (it is understandably not in many lobbyists best interests to pivot to vertical farming) as evidence that it's a flash in the pan. I don't believe it is.

I'm a believer. The only hope now is that we throw more weight behind it before feeding the world becomes too tall a challenge.

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting overview of a very exciting idea. I wish Despommier spent less time going through the history (and pre-history) of agriculture, and focused instead on contemporary issues. All the same, some great information:

- Humans now farm a land mass the size of south america (that doesn't include grazing land)
- Vertical farms can be as much as 10x more efficient than normal soil-based farms
- The average distance food travels between farm and plate in the us is 1500 miles
- Plants can convert grey water into safe to drink through transpiration
- The USDA estimates >50% of all crops grown on farms do not reach our plates (droughts, floods, spoilage, and plant diseases account for most of the waste). World-wide, 70% of crops are not even harvested (they are subject to pests and pathogens)
- Wheat was first domesticated in Scotland
- Victory gardens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory...)
- In 2006 (!) India had to buy wheat from abroad when freak weather unexpectly destroyed most of that year's crops
- The 2009 (!) recall of peanuts in the US was the largest and most expensive recall of any food product in history
- The Central Valley of California, which grows most of the non-grain food produce America eats, is expected to fail this century due to high salt levels in groundwater, which was created by irrigation runoff accumulating in California's aquifer
- The benefits of vertical farm production: 1. Year round production 2. No weather-related crop failures 3. No agricultural runoff 4. Allowance for ecosystem restoration 5. No use of pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers 6. Use of 70% to 95% less water 7. More control of food safety and security 8. New employment opportunities 9. Purification of grey water to drinking water 10. Animal feed from post-harvest plant material 11.
- The USDA states agricultural non-point source pollution is the primary cause of pollution in the US (https://www.ars.usda.gov/)
- Today, traditional agriculture uses ~70% of all fresh water on earth
- Aeroponics consumes 70% less water than hydroponics, which itself consumes 70% less water than normal irrigation
- OLED (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED) are made of thin, flexible platics, would be an ideally controllable light source for indoor farming
- ETFE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETFE) is an ideal greenhouse plastic, as it does not yellow when exposed to sunlight, is lightweight, and strong
- Composting is a great idea for small (family) scale, but not efficient for commercial-scale energy generation. Incinerating biomass is much better, and used across Europe Plasma gasification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_...
- Hydroponics employes many different structures for supporting plant growth. Those used for vegetables differ from cereals. Even tall plants like corn have been shown to work
- PVC is a common material for hydroponic structures, but needs treatment first to prevent leaching of hazardous chemicals
- Some great resources: https://www.hydroponics.com.au/ | http://www.fao.org/home/en/ | and https://attra.ncat.org/
- Vegetables that have been grown successfully commerically are: tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, zuccini, green peppers, green beans, and the strawberry
-

[Josiah Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came upon Despommier through the podcast “This Week in Virology” which I have listened to religiously since 2019. Despommier is a guest on that podcast as well as other shows I like to listen to such as “This Week in Parasitism,” “Immune,” “This Week in Microbiology,” “Urban Agriculture,” and “This Week in Neuroscience.” Suffice to say that I have heard a lot of Despommier over the past 5 years, and so I decided to pick this book up as I am a glutton for punishment.

The book seeks to answer the problem of world hunger by farming. The difficulty with farming is that you need a lot of land and you need a lot of good weather. To circumvent the problem of weather, we have created greenhouses and indoor farming. But the issue of real estate plays an obvious role here because where are you going to get the space and money for an indoor farm in say, NYC? The solution, if we want to call it that, is an obvious one where we build upwards instead of outwards; hence the name “Vertical Farm.”

But there are challenges to this method too. Despommier outlines some specific challenges and gives his thoughts on how to overcome them in real space and time. This book was written several years ago and there have already been advances. I was at Epcot a couple of years ago and saw a vertical farm myself. It wasn’t extravagant but we can see that it is already being implemented around the country. Most of the book is pretty interesting and gives the reader the will to push on in the book. Other parts are like reading a can-opener manual.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an essential book for anyone in urban design and engineering - it is a vision of what our future agricultural and food systems will need to look like for us to be able to handle an increasing global population and the drastic effects of climate change, which are already beginning to show themselves. The Vertical Farm is inspiring, though not a work of literary art.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up before starting work on a vertical growing system. It was a fairly interesting read and a good introduction to newcomers of the many challenges faced by those working within agriculture.

However, it stays more towards the social science side of things, with little in the way of hard evidence of the genuine possibilities (other than Despommier's own ideas) and application of vertical farming; prototype vertical farms are mentioned, but with 'prototype' being the key word. Vertical farming is taking off on the smaller scale, with a number of good studies being carried out, but the application of this on a big scale is essentially an unknown. It is easy for Despommier to put figures in his books suggesting that growing crops in colossal and attractive skyscrapers would work, but the proof will be in the pudding (and there are a significant number of doubters).

Ultimately, whilst the first handful of chapters give some nice insight to the history of agriculture amongst other things, there is far too much repetition and conjecture in this book. There are a number of very good articles available online looking at vertical farming from a social sciences point of view (many written by Despommier himself), which slightly devalues the ultimate goal of this book.

[Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely enthusiastic author (you can see why he would make an excellent teacher) speaking at length on a fascinating topic. So it's not surprisingly (if a little disappointing) that the incredibly optimistic, glowing report of vertical farming in this book make the results and conclusions a little hard to swallow.

Maybe the author believes that most people won't read the book cover to cover, because he repeats himself frequently, using the same examples or nifty facts in several parts of the book. And while there are all kinds of nifty technological advances and ingenious solutions already in development that could make indoor farming a real and viable part of our future, I think any reasonable (and/or cynical) reader couldn't help but think that indoor farming is likely to have its own unique set of problems and can't be expected to transform the entire world into the kind of utopia Dr. Despommier describes. But as a book to introduce the uninitiated into a new way of thinking about farming, it's a great primer, hopefully one that would pave the way to a more comprehensive look at what the future of farming might be.

[NAT.orious reads ☾ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this was indeed a very nice read. I love it when science knowledge is written in human language - and I am allowed to say this because as of October this year, I am a scientist, too.

The idea is indeed, as the author so excitedly states, groundbreaking and has great potential. Dickson knows about the unanswered questions and that is where my slightly shy rating comes in. YES, as the inventor of something, it is kind of your duty to advocate your idea and to think of it as groundbreaking. But in my eyes, with something as important, urgent and highly ignored as the global agricultural industry, you cannot just throw out the open questions and answer them partly like "well, that is not my job, so I am famous now, off you go, minions, solve it". I feel so bad about this because my advisor critised this when she graded my thesis, but it is SO TRUE.

nonetheless, everyone who still thinks organic and fair trade are a waste of money should read this, because if you don't open your eyes, I will pick them out and feed them to the pigs you oh so love to keep together in packs of 100s in tiny spaces.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book surprised me - I was prepared for a slog through details in the economics of farming, global trade or some such thing, but it's a lively summary of the history of agriculture and how we got to where we are now - having stripped the world of much of its natural resources and so that we can eat tomatoes in December. We started farming 10,000 years ago or so, Neanderthals didn't do it - and so why did we? Find out how agriculture played into - among other things - the evolution of writing and calendars and why some epic battles, such as the Civil War, arose from how we choose to use land.

Desponmmier then makes the case for the Vertical farm rising in urban areas - how it will save space, water, pesticides, etc. I actually met the author - lively, quite knowledgeable - and then went to see drawings of the concept at Cooper Hewitt Museum. It's a contemplation of the future and one that left me feeling encouraged that maybe - just maybe - human ingenuity will get us out of the mess it got us into.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some really interesting ideas but needed a little more focus. The author started out with the city as a ecosystem idea, which is interesting, but I'm not sure why he kept bringing up burning human waste. It has nothing to do with the vertical farm and he admits that it sends up a little pollution.

The author obviously feel very strongly for the vertical farm but let's be realistic. I doubt a couple of vertical farms would end the conflict in the middle east. Also, the idea of returning current farm land to its natural habitat is great, but realistically, once vertical farms start getting built, that farmland will probably continue growing food because the population is only expanding and how are farmers going to make money and support themselves by letting their fields return to forests.

The author also mentions some of the preliminary steps towards building a vertical farm although he could've gone much further in this aspect. And without realistic plans and sections, all the renderings of designs are nothing more than architectural porn.

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books like this get me really excited until after I finish them, my enthusiasm fades realizing how unlikely we are to actually carry out such a great idea. Curse reality, it has a way of spoiling all the fun of dreaming. Because that is what this book is, a dream, a visionary solution to several of the global communities pressing problems, especially agriculture.

The author lays out a sound argument in favor of these essentially urban-greenhouse-skyscrapers. I doubt any one will actually disagree that the idea has merit. Only one big problem $$$$$$ how can an operation as sophisticated and complex as the one the author describes be financially feasible let alone profitable? Unless they are some how mass-produced and sold in bulk I don't see how selling fresh tomatoes and cucumbers will pay for a self-contained-contaminant-free-skyscraper.

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad at all. The author lists the benefits and they are many but neglects the pitfalls. High startup costs and the social dislocation as farmers go broke and the banks that lent them the money for their land go under etc. Also he would have made a better case in 2011 by stating more of the benefits than the enviornmental ones. Making food safe from terrorism and disease should have been emphasized more. Best book yet on the subject.

[Stephen M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book but I felt it could have been turned into a 15-20 page article. The author repeats points and can be vague in his argument at times. Overall, very informative and I would love to see some prototypes built in the coming years. Maybe we should start with an urban greenhouse movement first though.

[Ron Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book. Very hopeful view of the future. However, I can't share the author's optimism that the invested parties in the existing technologies that vertical farms will make redundant will be so willing to let progress pass them by. Perhaps, but I suspect lobbying and the other anti-progress techniques of the entrenched elite will be a factor. Still, nice to hope and dream.

[Jb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way less technical and practical than what I expected. Inspirational and forward looking. Fortunately the references and the 10th year edition adds follow up content. I’m amazed by the idea of a self contained building in my neighborhood that would not only produce food but recycle waste water and capture CO2. Definitely want to be part of that revolution if I get the opportunity.

[Mark Brady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idealistic, clearly outlines why this would be awesome, doesn't get very into the practicalities. Read it if you want to be inspired to learn more but I got all I got out of it from the first 150 pages

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gotta be good, blurb from Sting :9

[Gavin · Rating 1 out of 5]

tldr: Don't take advice on growing plants from somebody with no experience growing plants.

I would guess the author is an academic, not a farmer. (After checking, the author is indeed an academic with no background or experience in farming.) I'm learning to distinguish the two. Despommier is an ivory tower technophile who recommends farmers take the advice of government agencies and academics despite lacking the expertise to give useful advice. I don't know of any long time farmers who share those characteristics, and for a very good reason: more often than not, government agencies and academics give wrong advice, and a good farmer knows the land better. Despommier offers more bad advice. Academics of the 20th century seem easily blinded to the superior education offered by the land.

A decade ago, I would have swooned for the ideas in this book. Now, I think they are inefficient, counterproductive, and possibly destructive. I see that Despommier is suggesting nothing more than the completion of the abandonment of the farm and nature and the total urbanization of human populations.

Instead of taking people out of ecosystems, we should be playing roles in ecosystems. Instead of keeping people away from centralized farming systems, we need everyone involved in food and soil. The author's vision of the future is a dystopia, where corporations control food production in urban areas and few people are even allowed to see the plants.

It's possible vertical urban soil-less farming in high-security, negative-pressure clean rooms by authorized personnel in single-use PPE will happen at some time somewhere. Possibly it already is. This is a truly impoverished and unsustainable relationship with Mother Nature.

Imagine the costs of building structures that rival what Apple (the computer company, not to confuse this with farming) builds. This is a vision of food for the rich, controlled by the rich. It is fundamentally dystopian. The author recognizes the potential for humanitarian tragedy in his concept, but cavalierly brushes away his misgivings with the assumption that the idea is already out in the public and therefore it must be an inevitability. Lots of ideas have been thrown into the public sphere, but fortunately there is no mandate to develop all of them.

In lieu of expertise in farming, the author copies and pastes oversimplified textbook speculations on the "origins" of farming. Instead of insights into ecosystems and what plants want to be healthy, the author liberally sews the pages with the assumption that tech bros could easily feed humanity if only they could finally get rid of farmers, hunters, foragers, and anyone with actual experience with the land.

In this book, you will find no useful information on ecosystem functions, ecology, plant health, companion planting, urban farming, vertical gardening, agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, farming or food policy, how to farm, or anything at all useful. Instead, you'll find assertions like "burning compost for the electrical energy grid is more efficient than composting compost for the soil."

The author seems to believe nature can heal once humans all leave to live in cities. He ignores the healthy role of traditional human societies in their ecosystems. He ignores the question of where all his high-tech building materials will come from. He ignores population dynamics: if a 100% urban population is ever fully fed by a vegetarian diet from high-security sky scrapers of single-crop plants, that population will again expand into the "human-free nature zones".

The only thing the author proposes that is supported by generations of farming practice is that we should value our poo.

I did enjoy the forward to the book by Majora Carter, but the rest of the book was a waste of time.

[Alex Furst · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book #54 of 2023. "The Vertical Farm" by Dr. Dickson Despommier. 2/5 rating.

This book talks about the idea of building vertical farms within urban settings as a way to counteract the problems with farming today.

This idea of Dickson's has intrigued me since the first time I heard about it years ago. The actual book, though, was a letdown.

Dickson wants to make cheap to build, modular, durable, easily maintained, and safe to operate vertical farm buildings that use hydroponic or other non-soil growing techniques" and cycle nutrients throughout the system.

The book has a decent amount of jargon and overly complicated sentences that take away from the flow of reading, and doesn't really seem to have a clear goal.

I also was bothered by his premise that "We have no other choice but to conclude that farming on soil is not a long-term sustainable solution to meeting our population's energy needs, period." A lot of the work of John Kempf rebuts this claim and actually asserts that farming and sequestering carbon in the soil while building healthy soils is the fix to our current predicament.

All of those issues aside, I do love his end dream proposal. This would be for each state to get $100 million over 10 years to build a prototype vertical farm headed by the top agricultural university president for each state. From there, there would be requirements about having the prototype built by year 2. In order to promote the best practices, annual competitions could be completed to see which prototypes are behaving best in terms of multiple factors as the experiment progresses.

This idea would produce an urban agriculture unit in each state, with a willing city being the location for the buildings. Imagine being able to see different ideas for the future of agriculture across the states. It is hard to believe that we wouldn't be pressed on to ever-higher innovative ideas towards how to achieve a better food system for all.

[Lynne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted a serious book about vertical farming - the engineering, efficacy, economics, etc.. What I got was an amateur enthusiast's exposition on the subject, which would be fine if only he had dialed back the self-aggrandizement and offered a critical review of the subject, instead of an evangelical treatise. Dr. Despommier is (according to him) a highly regarded professor in public health, with "106 graduate students", (which was apparently important for us to know...). I have the greatest respect for my colleagues in public health, but he has no personal experience in agriculture or food production, and apparently he did not have anyone with that experience edit his book.

He claims to have "invented vertical farming" after brainstorming with students. In fact, the concept of vertical farming was first described in 1915 by an American geologist, Gilber Ellis Bailey, and has evolved over that past 100 years and been implemented to varying degrees around the world. Would have been nice to read about that... Instead we get the science fiction version of Dr. Despommier's vision.

Dr. Despommier poses the question of whether his method could someday also be used to grow livestock. Turns out, pigs have been raised in multistory, farrow-to-finish operations for decades. Maybe a discussion of animal welfare and biosecurity challenges in those operations would be a good subject for his book, if only he'd known about it.

The average person who reads this book will probably love it because he writes like a motivational speaker. If this book gets a few more people to think about where their food comes from, great - so I'll give it 2 stars. But if you are serious about learning about the logistics of feeding 9+ billion humans sustainably utilizing vertical farms, keep looking.

[RuBisCO Reviews · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that is written by someone who has mastered a field and decided to just go after something else since he is a "smart dude". I am sure Despommier is a great epidemiologist but a horticulturist he is not.

There are some good ideas but the random tangents and odd references take away from any good argument (I guess he is "good" enough to be his own editor?). East of Eden was a good book but two pages and a review of the actors in the movie doesn't make the point.

He also fails in some important reality checks. For instance he says that vertical farms don't need fertilizers. That's crazy just look at his argument on page 161 to see he just glosses over the fact that plants do need nutrition. Where does that nutrition come from? You would need to give liquid fertilizers in his system and that fertilizer needs to come from some kind of system that is likely not ideal. All the answers to these questions are mostly just wait for the next round of technology or just not

Overall, very pie in the sky, interesting at times, but I'm the end just kinda a loose collection of thoughts.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting introduction to some new ideas, although published nearly ten years ago so the results should be in for the pilot projects mentioned at the end. A lot of the background history is a bit sketchy though it's unusual to see a popular writer admit that the US Civil War had economic causes as well as the usual ones mentioned. With regard to the long-term consequences, Despommier can't be expected to predict everything but it is a weakness that he doesn't seem to consider the collateral effects on countries who currently earn from agricultural exports to the West and other more developed regions. How do they adapt to the new world economy? Or shall international trade simply end, as 3D printing and vertical farms make the smallest states fully independent? Despite the liberal optimism, he doesn't seem to be aware that autarkic notions of national self-sufficiency play a big part in fascist agendas. But there is also the question of vulnerability: having all food supplies concentrated in a (relatively) small area makes it an easier target for enemies.

[Dhiran · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Vertical Farm by Dr Dickson Despommier shows one what’s wrong with the traditional farming methods and how we can make it right through Vertical Farming.
Vertical Farming is the future. It takes in to account sustainability for the environment and supply of secured food for all. Traditional farming has only been about deforestation, using the nutrients of the soil, using fresh water, contaminating the soil and water with fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides, the agricultural runoff in to the oceans that in turn affect the marine life and lastly dependent on weather systems to be favourable for a good crop which most times is not the case due to current climate changes. Food is going to get costlier whether we adopt to vertical farming or not, because the world population is expected to touch 10 billion by 2050 and current farming cannot cope up to feed that number. The Vertical Farm has been an interesting read, providing great insights from the past and for the future. #BookLovers #LoveToRead #dntjbookclub #atozentrepreneurship

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, the author paints an inspiring picture of a future powered by vertical farms: skyscraper greenhouses producing fresh food at the heart of cities across the globe. This idea is cool because among other benefits, it could help everyone “eat local” and reduce emissions from shipping food worldwide; efficiently leverage water through closed loop systems; and free up vast areas of farmland to “re-wild.”

I’ve long loved the idea of vertical gardens and rooftop plantings from a purely aesthetic perspective- they just look cool! - but was surprised by how compelling the vision for vertical farming is from a more practical perspective.

That being said, this book is just that - a vision. Don’t expect an in-depth look at the mechanics behind them, or how to overcome the many challenges. There are definitely dry bits as well, but overall I think it’s worth a read if you want something inspiring to imagine and hope for.

[Navarre · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's been awhile since I read this book, but seeing it pop up on my Goodreads, I wanted to warn other people away from wasting their time with this one. I borrowed this as an audiobook from our library, and there wasn't a whole lot of substance here other than the author's strange obsession with using agricultural waste to feed incinerators for electrical power. For a book purporting to have a "green" bent, ignoring the human health implications of incinerators and the much cheaper solution of composting makes me think the author is more interested in techno-solutionism than actual best practices.

If you're actually interested in vertical farming, your time would be better spent listening to select episodes of the Farm to Taber. I'm sure there's a good book on the subject out there, but this isn't it.