The ongoing agricultural revolution

At last I am moved by a story to write: German Urban Farms the company's website is here.

The Frisch vom Dach, or Fresh from the Roof project, plans to create a 7,000-square-meter roof garden, complete with a fish farm, to provide Berliners with sustainable, locally-grown food....

The fish will be sold as food and, crucially, their excretions, especially the ammonia excreted through the gills, will be converted into nitrates. That will serve as fertilizer for the plants growing in green houses above the fish tanks. In turn, the plants will purify the water for the fish. The system for sustainable food production is known as "aquaponics."

The first instance of vertical farming, or industrial farming. Bringing the countryside into the city. As the Spiegel article points out, this model is low energy, unlike the more science fictional dreams of vertical farms. It also fits in with the permaculture crowd. That said, it does offer the prospect of advancing the cause of re-wilding (and of driving urbanisation faster).

I'd be interested in how much their prototype container farm manages to produce, since the idea of mass producing and distributing a container/greenhouse strikes me as being an efficient way to spread food production massively.

Fed up

Uncle Charley Marx once wrote about ending the divide between town and countryside. Following a reference in Ken Macleod's latest, I found this interesting stuff on vertical farming:

It seems crazy to talk about farming in a hi-rise; the vision it gives rise to is of a kind of student-residence crammed with pot-smoking hippies who've traded their carpets for wheat. In fact, the approach is pretty hard-nosed and industrial, with very high outputs as its aim. And here's where it gets interesting from the point of view of our ambition to rewild the country: in the study entitled "Feeding 50,000 People, Anisa Buck, Stacy Goldberg and others conclude that a single building covering one city block, and up to 48 stories high depending on the design, can grow enough food to sustain 50,000 people. This calculation doesn't require any magical technology; there's no fairy-dust being evoked here, we could build such a structure now.

It would take about 1,200 such to feed the entire UK population - more sensibly, 150 to feed London. Now, I'm not thinking of "rewilding" but of opening up more space for us to live in, if we use less land for industrial agriculture, we can more in and garden the rest - I think the results would be equally eco friendly, and we could all spread out.

But, this would represent the conquest of the countryside by the city, the turning of farming into another factory/desk job with industrial scale feeding going on. Coupled with algae biofuel (which we could grow in some of the space abandoned from farming as well), a picture emerges that suggests we could return to the 1950's sci-fi vision of urban progress. Maybe we could build the megacities of the future. After all,t he algae might provide the energy source to make the whole shebang efficient...