Change the way we produce food

Since the moment people adapted a sedentary lifestyle, the way we produce food isn't dramatically altered. We have better machines, better techniques, and crops with better characteristics to survive plagues, extreme weather events and we were able to refine the tastes to our needs due selection. But fundamentally, the way we produce food is the same as it has always been in history.

Despite this, today our society is totally different. We have a far more greater population which is still raising almost exponentially and most people live concentrated in the big cities of our world. But this cities aren't suitable places for growing food because of loads of reasons: first, you need space to grow food and land is exactly the thing that is very scarce in the city. Second, there is a lot of pollution which is nefast for the growing of food and other green, thirdly, there also is a pressure on resources like for instance clean water, ... Ironically, these urban cities and metropoles are the places where food is most needed (speaking in terms of quantity). Most people live there and they of course don't have the space nor the time to grow food on their own. So the food has to come from the peripherial and other parts of the country with unbuilt land and other circumstances more suitable to grow food. This means that all this food, from everywhere over the world, has to be transported massively to all these cities, everyday or weekly over and over again... The quantities of energy we are just spilling by transporting all these food, are immense.

Happily, some people invented a solution for this and other problems and challenges associated with our agriculturing arises. The concept is called vertical farming. The idea is that you built a skycraper with diverse stores that instead of using for housing and organisations, can now be used to grow food! The advantages of this idea are enormous. First of all, this buildings can easily be integrated in the city without leading to a discomforting view of agricultural in the cities, because they won't pop-out between all skycrapres. Secondly, you may not have a lot of space, but you can multiply the amount of space you have because you built your farm in storages. Thirdly, the traffic for food transport from all over the world to the cities is no more necesarry since our vertical farm in the middle of the city can provide all the inhabitants, restaurants, hotels, magazines, markets, ... with food. Energy use and transport emissions can be reduced substantially this way. Figure: Possible outside view of a vertical farm, showing how benefits from a triangle piece of ground can be exponentially increased. Another advantage is undoubly the fact that our vertical farm can be hermetically closed from the outside influences, meaning that there is no chance of outside pollutions, organisms and other that can affect our destroy the harvest. Because the harvest is now unentrancable to viruses, bacterias and animals that can potentially have dramatic effects on the harvest, there is no more need to use agressive and toxic pesticides now! Which may drastically increase the health of the population and the environment. Figure: Inside, it may look like this. Even more important is that the ecologically negative consequences of our monocultural agriculture we use today can be disminished. I'm thinking of the salination of masses of land so they become unusable for most plants, the drying effect of the land by agriculture, the pesticides and other toxins coming into the water and polluting it, ... Because of course, when you have a totally hermetical farm, no drop of water has to get lost cause everything, energy and water can be recuperated and used again. This vertical farm can of course gets his energy from solar panels, making it green in all manners of speaking. Ultimately interesting, is that this way of agriculturing will make us, finally and for the first time since the existence of mankind, totally independent from the climatic and geographical circumstances for our food production. Meaning that every skycraper can ass well be planted in a country with water shortages and dry land such as is common in most African developing countries as in a country with a climate that's more suitable for food production. This implicates that this way of farming can be a giant step forwarth in finally banning food famine from the world.