Cool Video: Vertical Farming
Modern farming is water and energy intensive. The time and distance from the farm to the plate also consumes energy and distorts the taste and nutrition of food.
While there is much talk about an industrial revolution with 3-D printers, automation, robots, what we need is an agricultural revolution. We need to apply cutting edge technology to the growing of food.
Here are two videos that may point in this direction. They present the concept of vertical farming. The vertical is in reference to growing food in a building rather than on a sprawling farm.
This first video is a brief (2.5 minute) clip from a CBS. It is to whet you appetite, so to speak.
This second video is longer (6.25 minutes) that is more in depth and provides more examples. It is narrated by Dickson Despommer, one of the leading voices in vertical farming.
Disclosure: None.
The big issue right now is not that there isn't enough land, but a growing lack of water. In fact, the US produces way too much food and requires the US to subsidize it, export it to countries that can't pay for it, buy the excess, and try to force people convert farms to corn to use it as fuel.
Seriously, those countries that need food and can't pay for it can't even pay to transform habitable land into farms. If anything, one should focus on how to transform deserts into habitable land, but once again you have the issue of water and fertilizer to get it started. Indeed, vertical farming may have a place in Japan or Singapore, but even in Japan, rice farmers have a hard time not because they can't produce, but to keep in business at a higher price than imported food. Thus, there is really very little economic impetus to find more expensive ways to grow food. If one is serious about future food shortages one should look at countering global warming.
Excellent points