This is just one post in the Agriculture Category

Urban growers go high-tech to feed city dwellers

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 21, 2008 at 5:24 am

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Terry Fujimoto sees the future of agriculture in the exposed roots of the leafy greens he and his students grow in thin streams of water at a campus greenhouse. The program run by the California State Polytechnic University agriculture professor is part of a growing effort to use hydroponics — a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil — to bring farming into the cities where consumers are concentrated.

Hydroponic farming requires less water and less land than traditional field farming, leading Fujimoto and researchers-turned-growers in other U.S. cities to see it as the perfect way to bring agriculture to apartment buildings, rooftops and vacant lots. “The goal here is to look at growing food crops in small spaces,” Fujimoto said.

Long a niche technology existing in the big shadow of conventional growing methods, hydroponics is getting a second look from university researchers and public health advocates. Supporters point to the environmental cost of trucking produce from farms to cities, the loss of wilderness for farmland to feed a growing world population, and the risk of bacteria along extensive, insecure food chains as reasons for establishing urban hydroponic farms.

However, the expense of setting up the high-tech farms on pricey city land and providing enough year-round heat and light could present some insurmountable obstacles. “These are university theories,” said Produce Business magazine editor Jim Prevor. “They’re not mapped to things that actually exist.”