An architecture student is looking to the skies to help high-density cities such as Toronto eat fresh.
As part of his master’s thesis, Gordon Graff is proposing something he calls a “SkyFarm,” a 58storey vertical greenhouse that can grow enough food to fill the bellies of about 40,000 people a year.
“Food production is just the obvious problem for cities,” the 29year-old said. “With high density cities, you can’t possibly feed all the inhabitants.”
His building concept sees the bottom floors serving as retail outlets, similar to St. Lawrence Market, selling the harvest from the upper floors, which include fare such as strawberries, tomatoes and cucumbers.
While there are some kinks to be worked out, such as energy lodes and water consumption, Graff said his SkyFarm could help solve problems like keeping outof-season produce prices low, reducing delivery truck traffic and helping Torontonians eat more vipe-ripened fruits and vegetables. Currently, most produce is harvested before maturity and ripens in delivery trucks or planes while enroute to the city.
“It’s literally pick of the day that would be in the market,” Graff said. Graff, in his final year at the University of Waterloo, has piqued some interest from developers and is working out cost details.
He is also working on a “grow housing” concept, a scaled down version of SkyFarm to 1/40th the size, where residents of condominiums or social housing could eat food that’s grown where they live.
"We're not inventing anything new here," says Graff, garrulous and passionate, with a thorough commitment to the burgeoning field of green architecture. "It might seem space-age, but all of the technology required to do this exists right now, today."
Graff explains the rationale for vertical farms:"Unless we want to start talking about human population control – which is politically impossible, in a democracy – we have to start considering new strategies," Graff says. "There's either going to be massive famine, or we'll have to condense our agricultural practice."
While the site he originally proposed is now planted with condos, Graff's vision now is smaller, more local vertical farms. "The real sweet spot for this is six-to-10 storey neighbourhood farms......Human beings have never shown the capacity to consume less," he says. "The simple fact is that, somehow, we have to find a way to produce more."
HOW SKYFARM COULD WORK
"Gordon Graff's Skyfarm isn't intended as an out-there suggestion of what might be. He's convinced it would work, right now. In Graff's conception, Skyfarm is a self-sustaining system.
It almost has to be: With virtually no penetration of natural light, Skyfarm's demand for electric lighting comes in at an estimated 82 million kilowatt hours per year. The average household uses about 10,000 kwh annually.
Hooking Skyfarm into the grid would completely cancel out any of the energy-saving advantages gained by not having to truck its produce thousands of kilometres. And then there's all that water – 59 storeys of hydroponic plants, stacked half a dozen storeys deep.
But Graff thought of that. Skyfarm would be equipped with its own biogas plant, to produce methane from its own waste. When burned, methane produces less carbon dioxide than other hydrocarbon fuels. It would be used by Skyfarm to produce its own electricity.
When Skyfarm is unable to produce enough waste to power itself – Graff estimates that the farm's internal waste would generate enough methane to fulfill 50 per cent of its energy needs – he suggests a win-win partnership with the city. Waste that travels to civic composting facilities – with questionable renewability, by some accounts – could be diverted to Skyfarm's anaerobic digester to produce the methane it needs. Skyfarm could take on some other problems to its benefit, too: Sewage is a rich methane source.
And the water issue? Enter the Living Machine, a patented biological water-filtration system that would recover waste water from sewage and divert it to Skyfarm's hydroponic growing demands."
Full article:
http://www.thestar.com/article/468023
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/pie-in-the-sky-the-worlds-first-edible-highrise-836350.html
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Related links:
GTA's 1st Annual BUY LOCAL WEEK (Dec 1-7)
http://greenenterprise.net/web/index.php?id=243
The Stop Green Barn (Farmer's Market Saturdays @9-12am)
An all-year round community greenhouse and farm market, situated in a LEED certified building featuring the latest environmental technology system.
http://www.thestop.org/greenbarn/index.html
