Vertical URBAN Gardening скачать в хорошем качестве

Vertical URBAN Gardening

Urban Farming: Growing Vegetables in Cities Empty shelves, lines of shoppers waiting to get into grocery stores, worried people panic-buying – scenes from the novel coronavirus pandemic have suddenly made us aware of how fragile the supply chains for everyday items that we assumed were secure can be in times of crisis. In order to feed the world in the future, there need to be new solutions for farming. One such solution is urban farming. While panicked shoppers have focused on items such as disinfectants, face masks, and toilet paper, researchers have long been contemplating how to ensure that the growing populations in congested urban areas will have access to staple food. The United Nations estimates that there will be approximately 10 billion people on our planet by the year 2050, with some two-thirds living in cities. The world’s arable land per-capita is likely to shrink by 20 percent over that same period, due in part to increasing climate change and advancing erosion. Innovative solutions are needed for feeding more people while using less land. Urban farming – particularly vertical farming – is one such solution. Rooftop vegetables This cultivation method offers a whole range of advantages: In fact, a single vertical farm can grow 4 hectares (10 acres) — or roughly five Olympic-size swimming pools — worth of food on less than half a hectare of land, making it ideal for urban areas and in preserving space for biodiversity (by relieving pressure on natural fallow land that otherwise would be turned into farmland, thereby aiding wildlife conservation). Vertical Farming also helps to meet the increasing need and desire for locally-grown produce. Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, and mushrooms : These crops thrive in the controlled microclimates of the fields on each floor - free of the harsh extremes of climate change and seasonality. Correspondingly, these urban farms promise higher yields. At the same time, these self-contained, precision growing systems protect the exterior environment by reducing dependency on synthetic chemistry and other crop inputs, optimizing water use and allowing food growth in challenging environments with limited arable land. And of course, the benefits don’t end there. Frost can’t bite so farmers can grow their crops year-round. Pests can't pester so farmers can dramatically reduce inputs. Nutrients stay put so farmers can conserve natural resources. Moisture is recycled so farmers can use virtually every single drop to increase water efficiency by up to 90%. Land is (barely) needed so farmers can grow enough with less.