Can Indoor Farms Feed Humanity?

July 22, 2011

Is indoor farming a healthy alternative to the mass production of Genetically Modified Organisms? Given GMO toxicity, will governments adopt indoor farming instead?

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
July 22, 2011

Depending who you talk to, scientists and trend forecasters believe that in 30 years time, most people will live in urban centers -so much for Arthur C. Clarke’s rural communities prediction-. Also in 30 to 40 years, food will be one of the most, if not the most valuable commodity. The one characteristic that all commodities have in common to make themselves valuable is its scarcity. Diamonds are not valuable because of how easy they can be harvested. Water does not spur conflict because of its transparent color. These two commodities are valuable because overall they are scarce or are becoming scarce.

Scarcity is a trait that diamonds and water are beginning to share with food. The reasons for this varies in different parts of the world, but my educated guess is that the main cause is food price speculation. Given this fact, does it not make sense to look for ways to guarantee food availability for all? Well, not if it is for food speculators to decide. Fortunately, each of us has the power to decide for ourselves.

The next great thing when it comes to food supply is having our own food greenhouses. Food greenhouses can vary in size, and that is one of their beauties. They can be small enough to feed an individual, a family, a small community or a whole city. But greenhouses are not the novelty here. The new great alternative -at least for me- is vertical farming, that is, having our own greenhouses where we can plant our own food in the middle of the city we live in. It is its verticality what gives this kind of farming its charm. Since more and more people decide to move to the large urban centers, and food there is usually less available than, say, the countryside, vertical farming becomes a space efficient, alternative for those who have the space in their homes or communities.

On a personal note, vertical farming is all urban humans need in order to be food independent, much like farmers are in rural areas. But a key point here is that since we have the choice -no matter what the government says- to feed ourselves with our own food, it is a great opportunity to choose healthy food. In other words, clean seeds, clean vegetables and fruit instead of GMO seeds and GMO agricultural products. Depending on what your urgency for food is and where you are located, it is urgent that you go out and scout for clean, organic seeds before they are just a thing of the past. That’s right. With a handful of companies pushing for bans on organic farming and food monopolies, it only makes sense to be food independent while we can. Here is where vertical farming comes in.

Population Growth vs Food Availability

Although many people relate food scarcity to overpopulation and say the planet is running out of food and space, research shows that at current levels, the planet could feed its whole population in an area the size of Texas. Because some researchers believe human population will grow out of control in the next decades, they estimate that there will not be enough food for everyone. However, studies done by organizations like the Population Research Institute show that the world’s population will grow to 9 billion to then stabilize and decrease to a healthy level, naturally. Studies also show that there is currently enough food to feed everyone on the planet.

So why are some researchers and politicians sounding the alarms of overpopulation and food scarcity on the wrong tones? My own research by talking to people in those two groups show that it is a combination of economics, corruption and ignorance. In fact, overpopulation has been profoundly unmasked as a lie and although food scarcity is a problem in many parts of the world, it is not a result of overpopulation, but food price speculation, food monopolies and war.

Going back to Vertical Farming, according to the Spiegel Online, urban agriculture may be a solution to feed more people, in more places in the world. “Agricultural researchers believe that building indoor farms in the middle of cities could help solve the world’s hunger problem. Experts say that vertical farming could feed up to 10 billion people and make agriculture independent of the weather and the need for land. There’s only one snag: The urban farms need huge amounts of energy.”

But despite any snags, people in countries where space is a luxury are already planning and executing vertical farming projects. In South Korea, independent researchers are already cultivating food in indoor greenhouses. “Heads of lettuce are lined up in stacked layers. At the very bottom, small seedlings are thriving while, further up, there are riper plants almost ready to be picked.”

In his book The Vertical Farm, Dr. Dickson Despommier explains how vertical farming may be the solution to world hunger with or without overpopulation.

“An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.”

How does vertical farming compare to traditional outdoor farming. Here is a list of reasons why vertical, indoor farming is an option to be food independent and plant your own fruit and vegetables regardless of whether you have a five story building available for planting or not.

Advantages of Vertical Farming (From TheVerticalFarm.com)

  • Year-round crop production; 1 indoor acre is equivalent to 4-6 outdoor acres or more, depending upon the crop (e.g., strawberries: 1 indoor acre = 30 outdoor acres)
  • No weather-related crop failures due to droughts, floods, pests
  • All VF food is grown organically: no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers
  • VF virtually eliminates agricultural runoff by recycling black water
  • VF returns farmland to nature, restoring ecosystem functions and services
  • VF greatly reduces the incidence of many infectious diseases that are acquired at the agricultural interface
  • VF converts black and gray water into potable water by collecting the water of
    evapotranspiration
  • VF adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edible
    parts of plants and animals
  • VF dramatically reduces fossil fuel use (no tractors, plows, shipping.)
  • VF converts abandoned urban properties into food production centers
  • VF creates sustainable environments for urban centers
  • VF creates new employment opportunities
  • We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on
    earth
  • VF may prove to be useful for integrating into refugee camps
  • VF offers the promise of measurable economic improvement for tropical and subtropical
    LDCs. If this should prove to be the case, then VF may be a catalyst in helping to reduce or even reverse the population growth of LDCs as they adopt urban agriculture as a strategy for sustainable food production.
  • VF could reduce the incidence of armed conflict over natural resources, such as water
    and land for agriculture

Dr. Dickson Despommier believes we are at the doors of another farming revolution. Although this new way of being food independent may not be available to everyone at an industrial level, people can take the methods and techniques and adapt them to their corner of the world. Humans had to experiment for hundreds or even thousands of years to understand how farming techniques could play to their benefit. However, growing crops is now taken for granted. Masses of land that were once used to feed ourselves before are now unused or turned into wastelands mainly because of government or corporate intervention.

That is why vertical indoor farming is such a great alternative to attain food security.

See a complete photo gallery of vertical farming prototype projects here.

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Eco-Fascists Call For Prison Cities

January 6, 2011

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
January 6, 2011

People who resist the state controlling every aspect of their existence will be forced to live in squalid ghettos while the rest of the population will be tightly controlled in high-tech prison cities – that’s the future envisaged by eco-fascists who are exploiting the contrived global warming fraud to openly flaunt their plan for the total enslavement of mankind.Forum for the Future

The threat posed by the kind of scenario being promoted by Forum for the Future, the group responsible for the chilling video below, cannot be emphasized enough. The dictatorial hellhole of 2040, where cars will be banned, meat rationed, farming completely abolished and overtaken by the state, behavior catalogued on “calorie cards,” and careers ordained by the government, is the ultimate goal of the control freaks who have seized the reigns of the environmental movement.

Nearly every aspect of the policies undertaken by the global dictatorship that runs the “planned-opolis” depicted in the video are lifted wholesale from historical tyrannies.

- The state completely taking over the means of food production and farming. This is a throwback to the Soviet system of collectivized farming, where Stalin organized land and labor into large-scale collective farms. Farmers who resisted the state taking over their farms were arrested and sent to Siberian gulags. As a result of the mass seizure of property and the disruption that collective farming brought to food production, upwards of 3 million people died from starvation from 1932-33 alone. A similar system imposed in Maoist China under the “Great Leap Forward” led to the Great Chinese Famine and the starvation of at least 36 million people.

- The incarceration of resistors to green fascism inside squalid ghettos and their subsequent separation from family members is a frightening throwback to the Nazi-run Warsaw Ghetto and other concentration camps and prisons within cities that housed Jews and political dissidents during World War Two.

- The restriction or even outlawing of meat, something already being vehemently pushed by eco-fascists, to the point where a hamburger becomes a rare delicacy to be enjoyed on special occasions – and only then if you can afford it. As my wife who is Chinese will attest, up until the late 80′s before China started to lift itself out of poverty, meat was a rare treat that was sparsely available and highly restricted. Again, the “planned-opolis” is nothing less than a fusion of Communist and fascist control measures inflicted upon the population to keep them poor, starving and weak.

The people who produced this video, funded by monolithic elitist banks and corporations like Royal Dutch Shell and Bank of America as well as the British government, know very well that every aspect of their “planned-opolis” is lifted directly from the most abhorrent and brutal dictatorships in history. They are openly flaunting the neo-fascist ideology behind the green movement.

Of course, as is made clear in the video, none of these regulations or controls will apply to any of the elitists imposing them on the rest of us. Think Al Gore and his multiple oceanside mansions with heated swimming pools. They will still be able to roll around in SUV’s and fly private jets while quaffing the finest fillet steak and belching tons of CO2 as they lecture the rest of humanity about their carbon footprint. Think Prince Charles and his insistence that the proles not be allowed to take baths as he lounges in the luxuriant splendor of royal palaces.

They are also engaged in a ploy to shift the parameters of the Overton Window - which is defined as “A range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion.” By constantly bombarding us with extreme and repugnant proposals, they gradually wear down the human psyche until people begin to accept draconian controls over their personal life as normal, necessary and reasonable.

This is part of the reason behind last year’s “splattergate” controversy, where global warming alarmists – again funded by government and big business – produced an infomercial in which children who refused to lower their carbon emissions were slaughtered in an orgy of blood and guts.

This is a psychological attack and a realization of the stepping stone method to tyranny. Whereas we might not accept cars being banned and meat being rationed now, we will accept incandescent light bulbs being outlawed and paying carbon taxes on fuel. As each hurdle is cleared, the globalists propose something more extreme so that we will always come to a compromise and accept a slighter lesser tyranny, but in the long term, the elitists achieve all of their goals with aplomb.

And to top it all off, the debate between the “liberals” over at the Guardian website in response to this story did not revolve around a castigation of this authoritarian future hell, but a question of whether old people should merely be advised by government workers how to kill themselves when they reach 65, or whether the state should just kill them directly.

This kind of despotic destiny is not only being pushed by the elite, it has an army of greenwashed zombies behind it who have been recruited to make the democide of the elderly (the useless eaters) an intellectually acceptable and reasonable idea. Presumably, the disabled and the mentally ill will also be exterminated in the pursuit of a highly efficient “planned-opolis,” another idea of which Hitler would have vehemently approved.

Once government is given the power to kill anyone they deem to be unproductive in this collectivist Orwellian nightmare, the gates of hell are thrown wide open. In comparison, meat rationing, carbon taxes, eco-surveillance, calorie credits and transport restriction will seem like a walk in the park.

Alex Jones’ seminal film Endgame, released in 2007, warned precisely of the kind of hi-tech slave grids being implemented that are now routinely proposed by top eco-fascist organizations. We urge you to warn everyone you know about this agenda and to stand up in unison to resist the first great assault on human liberty of the 21st century, which is now certain to be inflicted on us under the guise of saving mother earth. We either stop this now, or we end up in the eco-ghettos that our masters have readied for us in their “planned-opolis” of 2040.

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World Food Prices Rise to Record on Sugar, Meat Costs

January 5, 2011

Bloomberg

World food prices rose to a record in December on higher sugar, grain and oilseed costs, the United Nations said, exceeding levels reached in 2008 that sparked deadly riots from Haiti to Egypt.Sugar Cane

An index of 55 food commodities tracked by the Food and Agriculture Organization gained for a sixth month to 214.7 points, above the previous all-time high of 213.5 in June 2008, the Rome-based UN agency said in a monthly report. The gauges for sugar and meat prices advanced to records.

Sugar climbed for a third year in a row in 2010, and corn jumped the most in four years in Chicago. Food prices may rise more unless the world grain crop increases “significantly” in 2011, the FAO said Nov. 17. At least 13 people died last year in Mozambique in protests against plans to lift bread prices.

“There is still, unfortunately, the potential for grain prices to strengthen on the back of a lot of uncertainty,” Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the FAO, said by phone from Rome today. “If anything goes wrong with the South American crop, there is plenty of room for them to increase.”

White, or refined, sugar traded at $752.70 a metric ton at 11:53 a.m. on NYSE Liffe in London, compared with $383.70 at the end of June 2008. Corn, which added 52 percent last year on the Chicago Board of Trade, was at $6.01 a bushel, down from $7.57 in June 2008. Soybeans were at $13.6325 a bushel, against $15.74 at the close of June 2008.

Demand From China

The cost of food climbed 25 percent from a year earlier in December, based on the FAO figures, after Chinese demand strengthened and Russia’s worst drought in a half-century devastated grain crops. The agency’s food-price indicator rose from 206 points in November.

Last month’s year-on-year rise compares with the 43 percent jump in food costs in June 2008. Record fuel prices, weather- related crop problems, increasing demand from the growing Indian and Chinese middle classes, and the push to grow corn for ethanol fuel all contributed to the crisis that year.

“In 2008 we had rapid increases in petroleum prices, fertilizer prices and other inputs,” Abbassian said. “So far, those increases have been rather constrained. It doesn’t really reduce the fear about what could be in store in the coming weeks or months.”

New York-traded crude was last at $88.44 a barrel, compared with $140 at the end of June 2008. Bulk urea pellets, used in fertilizer as a source of nitrogen, were at $320 a ton in the last week of December, against $460 in June 2008.

9.1 Billion People

Global food production will have to rise 70 percent by 2050 as the world population expands to 9.1 billion people from about 6.8 billion people in 2010, the FAO has said.

In response to the 2008 crisis, countries from India and Egypt to Vietnam and Indonesia banned exports of rice, a staple for half the world. Skyrocketing food prices sparked protests and riots in almost three dozen poor nations including Haiti, Somalia, Burkina Faso and Cameroon.

Sugar and oilseeds have a disproportionate effect on the FAO’s food index because it’s based on trade values for commodities, Abbassian said. The price of staples including rice is lower than in 2008, he said. Rough rice last traded at $13.90 per 100 pounds in Chicago, compared with $20.21 at the end of June 2008.

“If you want to see the index as a barometer of food crisis, I’m not so sure this is the right thing to do,” Abbassian said. “In the previous episode, really the main driver in food commodities was cereals. This time around, look at sugar and oilseeds.”

Grain Inventories

Compared with 2007-2008, many poor countries had “good or above-average” cereal harvests last year, the economist said. Production problems took place in grain-exporting countries, and “supply at hand should be adequate,” he said.

The FAO’s gauge for sugar prices reached 398.4 points last month, increasing from 373.4 in November. The meat-price index rose to 142.2 points from 141.5.

The agency’s cereal-price index jumped to 237.6 points in December, the highest level since August 2008, from 223.3 the previous month. The indicator for cooking oils advanced to 263 points, the highest since July 2008, from 243.3. The index for dairy prices rose to 208.4 points from 207.8.

Global grain output will have to rise at least 2 percent this year to meet demand in 2011-2012 and avoid further depletion of stocks, the UN agency has said.

The basis for the FAO index is 2002-04. The gauge includes commodity quotations that the agency considers representative for international food prices.

“The real uncertainty and problem is the 2011-2012 market,” Abbassian said. “We are at a very high level. If it’s further up than this, then you really begin to be concerned.”

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