As climate change continues to escalate, and humans are more conscious about what they put in their bodies, plant-based foods and urban vertical farms are becoming increasingly popular.
Vertical farming is a method of indoor farming where crops are grown in layers stacked up high, and most of them don’t even need soil. As the urban population grows, farmlands are pushed out further and demand increases, these methods are becoming more important for cities to establish.
In 2016, Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother, started an indoor urban farming company based in Brooklyn, called Square Roots. The company’s mission is to empower younger generations to begin making urban farms too. “When I was a kid, the only way I could get my family to sit down and connect was by cooking them a meal,” said Kimbal, co-founder of Square Roots.
Kimbal said:
Getting involved with the internet, especially in the late ’90s, was very exciting, and I wouldn’t change anything about those experiences, but my passion has always been food. The moment Elon and I sold Zip2, our first internet company, I knew I wanted to pursue food and become a trained chef.
Not long after, he traveled to New York and enrolled at the International Culinary Center. In 2017, Kimbal was named “Global Social Entrepreneur” of the year by the World Economic Forum.
Kimbal said, that in less than two months, the company would open a Square Roots “Super Farm.” The farm will include biosecurity infrastructure, twenty-five climate-controlled shipping containers, cold storage, and everything else needed to run a sizeable vertical farm.
Since its launch in 2016, Square Roots has grown over 120 different kinds of crops, including strawberries, greens, and vegetables.
However, Square Roots isn’t the first company to popularize vertical farming on this scale. Singapore Airlines is serving airplane food from a vertical farm within the airport, and a startup company Silicon Valley’s Plenty, which was founded in 2013 is also participating in urban farming.
Kheir Al-Kodmany, a professor at Chicago’s University of Illinois, said:
Environmentalists, urban farmers, architects, agronomists, and public health experts, among others, have been joining this mini-revolution as they partner to work out a way to salvage a food-scarce, ultra-urbanized future.
Urban Farming involves various techniques, including aquaponics, which uses aquatic species such as snails and fish, and cultivates plants in water; hydroponics, which uses mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent, and aeroponics, which grows the plants’ roots exposed to the air.
Peggs, the CEO of Square Roots, said:
People want local food because they’ve lost trust in the industrial food system that ships in high calorie, low nutrient food from thousands of miles away with little transparency as to who grew the food and how.
The world population is increasing, and urbanizing is growing with it. According to Peggs, climate change is threatening supplies of food, forcing industries to find alternatives to growing food quickly.
