Whether or not many people agree with urban sprawl and its negative effects, our team wants to make life easier for all suburbs by following a conservationist ideology for farming. Men and women, of all ages, need food to produce energy and go about their day. Usually what happens with our food, at least crops, is that it's treated with pesticides on a monoculture field, a field where only one type of crop is repeatedly planted, which leads to desertification of the soil over time; which is then transported miles via truck to a store near you. My idea for Tower of Power Research is to prevent harm being done to our Earth by providing safe growing tactics, community facilities, and affordable food for all. In this proposal, I’ll go over our "team's" needs and budget, our research methods, and, finally, data evaluation on the “Tower of Power” and see if it’ll work in a place like Iowa City.
The TP team came together to make a set of rules and needs to move forward on this project. We decided that this project’s research could be carried out effectively by the government. If the objective of this research is to pave the way for community-based nutrition, what better way to pay/maintain it than with tax dollars. Residents would get the best discounts in their “designated” Tower of Power, limiting the amount of outsiders coming to the store which can lead to better product management (how much of, etc). Another reason why we want this grant to go federal would be to prevent a future monopoly of urban agriculture so that prices will stay relatively cheap for the local community. People in these neighbourhoods would have access to cheap or free organic food (depending on food stamp policy) that doesn’t require pesticides/herbicides, doesn’t need to use as much CO2 via transportation, and helps reduce desertification by running conventional monoculture farms out of business.
To get this project to take off, small towns and cities need to try them out on their own first. With the money from National Science Fund and Iowa City’s taxpayers, the first Tower of Power will be located on Dubuque and Burlington where the old Sheraton Hotel and parking lot used to be. After purchasing the lot, modifications would have to be made to the interior and exterior of the buildings to make them airtight. The reason for this is to be able to easily trap certain chemicals without them flying into the atmosphere and to be able to produce all year round. To be able to produce corn in the winter you need the room to be a certain temperature. That combined with sewage water, rain guns, and sun lamps, and you’ve got yourself all year round production. Once the construction portion is over, the seeds will be assigned to certain buildings. Since corn and soy are of high demand, they would be grown in the long stretches of the old parking lot. Other vegetables would be grown in the upper levels of the hotel, while the bottom of the hotel will act as the storefront and main office. The floors will be waterproof, followed by a piping system to collect excess water, and then the soil mixed with sewage collected from our sewage plants. Why use our poop? Because like all other animal excrement, human poop yields a certain amount of biomass that the plants we eat could reuse. Here at TP, we want to make the food industry a closed-end loop, where all materials are harnessed and used, as opposed to a linear style of consumption which leaves waste. Like it or not, our feces takes away some of the water and biomass with it when flushed down the toilet.
A closed-end loop means that we have to find a way to use all of our resources in way that nature can keep up. With the linear system we’ve been living with for so long, waste piles up at the end of the system. Our city dumps are a reminder of how we are producing too much waste for the natural cycle of decomposition to catch up to. If instead of throwing the gunk away after treating sewage water we used it as fertilizer, this would be an example of a closed-end loop system. We would need trucks to come and dump it off, but maybe in the future we could get a pipeline coming in from the local sewage treatment plant to reduce the amount of transportation (CO2 emissions). We would also like to set up a point system for locals that give back food compost or waste for us to use as fertilizer and/or energy via anaerobic digestion. The anaerobic digester would then produce methane which can be used to power the building. Those who donate their food waste get discounts or something along that line. It’s incentive for being an aware consumer, to think about what you eat. We would also need some IT guys to set up the computers and software that would turn on/off the facilities (sun lamps, rain guns, anaerobic digester, etc). After the facilities are up and yielding product, TP would like to hire locals, if possible, so that the store has familiar faces to all those that shop. It will also help that community by bringing jobs; more money circulating the neighbourhood means more businesses can hire. It also helps local business by having a farm nearby to buy cheap products instead of getting it from California. Not only will this strengthen individuals/small business in the vicinity, but it will also ease California’s drought by putting less demand on them. Below are most of the costs for the first ever Tower of Power.
As far as showing the experiment’s data, I can only assume that my yield would eventually be sustainable over time through government funding; but vertical farming is in no way a new concept. People have been talking about it since the 50s, but not many have pursued the construction of the skyscrapers visualized in those talks. Places like Chicago have started a few small ones, and people like Dickson Despommier have tried bringing it up to its utmost potential. The technology he describes in some of his TED Talks makes us at TP think that this is the future of farming. Over time we have found out that agriculture has been the leading proponent in man-made climate change. If we can figure out a way to completely cut or reuse emissions and waste related to agriculture, the Earth may still have a chance at sustaining us. With population size estimated to get to 9-11 billion in the next century, we must find a way to feed ourselves without causing so much harm to the atmosphere and soil. Many think that farming has to be an outdoors thing, when in reality we have the technology to grow crops inside. As Despommier envisioned, “each floor will have its own watering and nutrient monitoring systems. There will be sensors for every single plant that tracks how much and what kinds of nutrients the plant has absorbed. You'll even have systems to monitor plant diseases by employing DNA chip technologies that detect the presence of plant pathogens by simply sampling the air and using snippets from various viral and bacterial infections. It's very easy to do. Moreover, a gas chromatograph will tell us when to pick the plant by analyzing which flavonoids the produce contains. These flavonoids are what gives the food the flavors you're so fond of, particularly for more aromatic produce like tomatoes and peppers. These are all right-off-the-shelf technologies. The ability to construct a vertical farm exists now. We don't have to make anything new” (TED, 2010). Not only would this method cut down on emissions, we would also get the best possible crops by monitoring the chemicals released into the room. Not only is it safer to grow indoors, it is more bang for your buck.
