The Rise Of Agriculture

Tim Heath and Yiming Shao see it in vertical farming:

It has been suggested that a 30-story, 27,800,000-square-meter vertical farm could be achieved within one New York City block. That farm could feed 50,000 people, providing 2,000 calories for every person each day. With results like that as a prospect, it’s easy to see why enthusiasts see vertical farms as the future. … Vertical farms do indeed have many advantages. They would enable us to produce crops all year round using 70 percent less water. We wouldn’t need to use agro-chemicals and could avoid the adverse environmental factors that affect yield and quality in more traditional farming. And if food were grown in urban areas in the first place, we could eliminate the financial and environmental costs of importing food into towns and cities.

And in fact, we have the technology to do it:

We can already cultivate plants without soil and…