Vertical Agriculture

The Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 25, 2010) had a piece in its Review section entitled “The Farm of the Future: Harvesting the Sky (http://www.icyte.com/saved/online.wsj.com/341123).  It reviews a new book by Dickson Despommier entitled The Vertical Farm. I’ve attached a short article by Despommier and Eric Ellingsen which describes the theory of vertical agriculture in somewhat more detail than the Journal article, although the latter has a good interactive visual which is worth looking at.

Despommier, Ellingsen, and the Journal are quite excited by this new approach to intensive agriculture on the vertical rather than horizontal scale as a means of eliminating the ecological disadvantages of industrial farming (extensive agriculture) as it is currently practiced, without sacrificing its enormous productivity gains which have eliminated widespread famine and made mass prosperity a hallmark of 20th-Century capitalism. I remain skeptical; they underestimate the ecology movement’s obsessive preoccupation with “naturalness,” which will lead it to denounce the product of this new form of non-territorial agriculture as “Frankenfood.” And the movement’s hidden agenda of radical population reduction, rooted in its usually unspoken hatred of the human race as “the cancer of the planet,” will also militate against endorsing vertical farming. Nevertheless, it will be politically difficult to oppose any new form of food production which “liberates the land” from mankind’s food requirements at the same time that it harnesses so many of the new politically correct technologies like solar and windpower.

But the aspect which I find most fascinating about Vertical Farming is how it compares, and contrasts, with the role of the skyscraper in early 20th-century capitalism.

Skyscrapers first emerged on the urban skyline when Otis’ automatic speed governor (300 lbs of greasy brass -- I actually own an early version) made it possible to safely transport people for many stories up and down tall buildings. Tall buildings were a necessity if corporate capitalism was to efficiently administer its huge industrial and financial assets. Efficient administration was accomplished through military-style organization of ranks and files of middle-management and their clerical assistants, located on whole floors stacked one on top of another in huge “cathedrals of capitalism.” The skyscraper incarnated the corporate bureaucracy that managed the joint-stock enterprise, which replaced capitalism’s earlier institutional form, the family-owned business. It also conveyed a domineering presence as a side benefit.

But the skyscraper as capitalism’s premier architectural symbol has become obsolete. The computer-driven database, spreadsheet, project management and word-processing software revolutions have sharply reduced the need for middle management and its support staff in the modern corporation. They make possible a much more efficient centralization of control by eliminating middle-management’s tendency to stimulate bureaucratic “thickening.” Top management can now get almost real-time data on production and sales flow and all the other information requirements that govern business enterprise in the modern world. “White-collar” workers are now joining their “blue-collar” brethren in lumpenproletarian droves.

Enter the agricultural tower! This development transfers the vertical dimension of construction from the administrative to the production side of capitalism. It liberates agriculture from its age-old dependence on horizontal “fields” (the root of “agriculture” is the Latin word ager, “field,” or “country”) and thereby transforms verticality into an dimension of wealth generation rather than coercive oversight. Farms can now move into cities – not as space-wasting and busywork urban “greenplots” but as resource-efficient testimonials to human ingenuity. And exploitation of verticality need not stop at agriculture. Most industrial production in the world still follows the horizontal model, because it is labor-intensive. The beauty of the vertical model is that it is technology-driven – and coercion plays no role in technological functioning.

Coercion can then be liberated from its apparent roots in a non-existent economics of scarcity to assume its undisguised purpose in capitalist society, which of course we are not allowed to discuss.