According to the BBC (http://www.bbc.com/...), "Urban agriculture has the potential to become so pervasive within our cities that by the year 2050 they may be able to provide its citizens with up to 50% of the food they consume."
The BBC forgets that the Victory Gardens of WWII produced 50% of US vegetables by the end of WWII. At that rate, if we decided to, we could be producing at least 50% of our vegetables from local urban and suburban gardeners before 2020 using only 1940s technology.
Besides the already existing community gardens and the rooftop gardens which are beginning to spring up in places like Brooklyn and Boston, vertical farming in one form or another is now happening in Japan, Korea, Singapore, the United States, and Canada. New vertical farms are planned for Milwaukee (http://www.tkwa.com/...), Memphis (http://www.memphisdailynews.com/...) and Jackson Hole, Wyoming (http://www.verticalharvest.org)).
A project in Linköping, Sweden (http://www.the9billion.com/...) is especially interesting as it will be an urban agriculture industrial ecology, using heat from the neighborhood of a biogas plant and an incinerator, part of the municipal district heating system. The vertical farm will use heat from waste incineration and process waste from the greenhouse to produce biogas.
More at http://www.biorama.at/... [in German]
Another aspect of urban agricultural industrial ecological design is illustrated at FarmedHere (http://farmedhere.com) of Bedford Park, Illinois which operates a 90,000 square-foot (8,360 square meter) indoor farm producing tilapia (freshwater fish), a variety of leafy green vegetables, and several other products. Such combined fish and plant systems can also be used to process human or industrial wastes and even restore damaged local ecosystems as John Todd (http://www.toddecological.com) and others have shown.
Another development is controlled environment agriculture (CEA), growing specialty crops in closed systems under LED lights tuned directly to the red and blue wavelengths the plants use. These are pinkhouses rather than greenhouses.
Barry Holtz of Caliber Biotherapeutics (http://www.caliberbio.com), which grows millions of plants to make new drugs and vaccines in a 150,000-square-foot, 50 foot tall "plant factory", says "A photon is a terrible thing to waste, so we developed these lights to correctly match the photosynthesis needs of our plants. We get almost 20 percent faster growth rate and save a lot energy…. We couldn't compete with iceberg lettuce farmers, but for certain specialty crops, the economics wouldn't be so bad."
from http://www.npr.org/...
More at http://www.ledinside.com/...
Previous diaries:
City Agriculture Links List
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Eating the City and Town: Todmorden and Beyond
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Local Food Network: Cambridge, MA
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Integrated Urban Agricultural Systems
http://www.dailykos.com/...
How to Heal the World
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Urban Fruit Harvesting
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Community Gardens as Permaculture Nurseries
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Growing Green in the City
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Celebrate Gleaning with the Boston Area Farm Gleaning Project
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Urban Permaculture: Chicken Coop Grapevine and Water Footprint
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Raspberry Gobble
http://www.dailykos.com/...
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
http://www.dailykos.com/...