HIGH RISE AGRICULTURE PROPOSED

TREE HUGGER - "Best of Show" in the Cascadia Region Green Building Council's Living Building Challenge. . . is a "Center for Urban Agriculture," a building, located on a .72-acre site, that includes fields for growing vegetables and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens and even a chicken farm." According to CEO Washington, The building also would run completely independent of city water, providing its own drinking water partly by collecting rain via the structure's 31,000-square-foot rooftop rainwater collection area. The water would be treated and recycled on site. And photovoltaic cells would produce nearly 100 percent of the building's electricity. . . "And not to worry, potential urban-farm dwellers. Mithun would make room for humans, as well as chickens. The site would provide 318 small studio, one- and two-bedroom affordable apartments (no word on the mitigation of farm smells wafting into your room). The entry level would feature a cafe serving organic foods grown on site. Produce grown at the site would be distributed to local grocers, saving even more energy by reducing transportation mile

JEREMY COOKE, BBC - Downtown Manhattan is hardly a place you would associate with agriculture. Rather, with its countless restaurants, cafes, shops and supermarkets this is a place of consumption.

And so every morsel, every bite of food New Yorkers munch through every day must be trucked, shipped or flown in, from across the country, and across the world.

Now though, scientists at Columbia University are proposing an alternative. Their vision of the future is one in which the skyline of New York and other cities include a new kind of skyscaper: the "vertical farm".

The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-story building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel.

On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect.
There would be a sophisticated irrigation system.

And so crops of all kinds and small livestock could all be grown in a controlled environment in the most urban of settings.

That means there would be no shipping costs, and no pollution caused by moving produce around the country.

Energy would come from a giant solar panel but there would also be incinerators which use the farm's waste products for fuel. All of the water in the entire complex would be recycled.