The Vertical Farming Revolution Under Threat… And Why
When Abundance and a Voluntary Society Oppose the BigAg
Our current Big Ag monopoly is preventing an agricultural revolution from happening and monetarism is too part of the problem as you will see. Please read our highlights from the article below and you will understand why we are on a collision course and Voluntaryism is inevitable.
PS: The Mind Awakened foresees that at some point conventional electricity relying on power plants will eventually be replaced with a more sustainable means to harvest energy. It is on our view the only real problem, if any, with vertical farming but the latter will be circumvented, we are sure. Such as this picture demonstrates. The costs of the building are often cited as an obstacle, but in a Voluntary Society, people willing to participate in such projects will not be difficult to find. It is a huge incentive!
Why Vertical Farming Could Be On The Verge Of A Revolution — And What’s Keeping It Down | Dec 2017 | Huffingtonpost.com
HUFFPOST| According to Despommier’s theory, by as soon as 2050 the world will run short on land suitable for the amount of traditional farming that will be required to feed a growing population. Vertical farming, he argues, would make for more efficient use of the limited land. It also comes with a number of other benefits, including year-round crop production regardless of climate and a shorter distance between farms and consumers.
The Mind Awakened: Exactly why the farming revolution has to occur, and rather sooner than later because consumers are being held hostages by traditional and now obsolete farming. Everything comes to end when lacking efficiency and empathy, especially when considering that we waste close to 50% of our global food production the incentive is definitely huge. This 6 pages analysis will help you understand the inner workings of our “endless economic growth” nonsensical mantra.
Further, all the produce grown in vertical farms is, due to the nature of its cultivation, organic and free of any chemicals, herbicides or pesticides — meaning that the food is both local and healthy.
Oops, it seems as if we could be running into an impasse here as “the biotech monopoly” (aka Monsanto-Bayer and the like) would be losing lots of revenues, while putting conventional farming completely out of business.
In our current economic landscape, this is not an option because we are condemned to spend or go broke. Wall Street, along with other world stock exchanges, are the instruments enforcing this merciless economic doctrine. And this means that the revolution will be held back indefinitely by antagonistic economic trends and some powerful corporate lobbies working in the shadows to impede the latter from unfolding.
The industry is growing so quickly, according to Maximilian Loessl, the Munich-based vice chair of the Association for Vertical Farming, that it can be difficult to keep track of where new vertical farm operations are being built.
Because the coming paradigm shift is obvious, innovative entrepreneurs willing to remain ahead of the trend are rushing in (at their own risks). The Huffpost article cites the number of 100 companies in 2012 alone. Even corporations like Philips and General Electric have entered the industry.
From a Voluntary perspective, any monopolies’ involvement is something we’d reject completely, but as long as monetarism exists, they will continue their intrusion into the Financial Matrix. Special interests know that vertical farming is the future and since vertical farms need lots of electricity, greed is what motivates them essentially. Not to mention that it also is the best way to “control” this brand new sector. No electricity, no crops. No PhD needed to comprehend the risk that such a takeover by the energy sector could represent.
Still, success is no guarantee. VertiCrop, a large vertical farm founded in 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, declared bankruptcy earlier this year. Harper points out that no farms have yet released data proving that their operations are profitable. None most likely are, he says — at least currently.
That’s where it all comes down to profits and control…. but how about the real costs of conventional farming, considering that we waste so much food, the chemicals going into our soils, tab water, and bodies. GMOs altering the expressions of our genes… indeed what are the costs we are really talking about here? How does it relate when vertical farming uses 95% less water and can produce 100 times more food? And how about the senseless farm programs and subsidies paid by taxpayers?
Such a large scale of organic farming would also mean the end of healthcare as we know it since chronic diseases would drastically decrease. Society stands literally at crossroads: a resource-based economy supported by Voluntaryism must now take over. It is the natural outcome as our economic paradigm has been stretched to no end, and the latter is now close to unraveling under its own weight.
What’s holding many farms back is the struggle to simultaneously increase their yield-per-square-foot and decrease the cost of production — particularly the cost of powering round-the-clock lights, which is high.
This quote is very enlightening though. Because of monopolies’ pressure and market fundamentalism, vertical farmers are already squeezed to produce more efficiently when it is not even necessary at this stage. Moreover, if going the road of efficiency and profitability, we’ll just end up perpetuating the same scarcity and waste we today suffer from.
We need a system that produces more or less exactly what it consumes because resources wise any waste is costly. In Nature, everything is redistributed evenly and in cycles, every species has its own role to keep this natural redistribution balanced… but humans who just keep taking from Nature while polluting as if there are no tomorrows.
Not many people are aware that overproduction is being charged to the customers, no matter what. Famers will shift the burden of their loss whenever possible, or ask the government to make up for them. We pay for our food waste, one way or another, and it is the main cause of food inflation.
We are about to witness the deep end of our economic paradigm — and there is no way back.
Harper also questions whether consumers will embrace produce grown in such an unusual and unfamiliar way. “People are incredibly skeptical of science and technology in food and are scared of it,” Harper said. “How do we talk about that? Will people accept or understand it, and ultimately will they buy it?”
This is not a question in a system empowered by Voluntarysim — or Contributionism — because people participate freely since there is no “employee or contractor agreement”. People will be available to participate also in the level of transparency, knowing that the latter is key to abundance and world peace. People are way more influenceable when they work for a salary because they need to pay their bills, and will therefore hold back data more easily to the detriment of society. Well informed people will always be supportive of organics and Voluntaryism.
“Marketing becomes preeminent,” Zulauf told HuffPost. “Will people buy into it and what aura will they assign to that product? If that aura isn’t a good aura, it will be hard to get a premium price out of the product.”
This is the type of reasoning that must become obsolete… people today going paycheck to paycheck, and this represents 72% of Americans and Europeans alike, will not consume at premium price daily. So here again, we have this prevalent market fundamentalism that is preventing us from improving the way we produce food and enjoying much healthier lives, meaning that we still could have to endure the criminal biotech industry for many years to come.
This is pure irrationality, isn’t it? ‘
FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
Vertical farms sprouting all over the world (newscientist.com 2014)
World’s largest vertical farm grows without soil, sunlight or water in Newark (guardian.uk)
Can Urban Agriculture Feed a Hungry World? (spiegel.de)
The benefits of vertical farming are many, according to advocates such as Dickson Despommier. He authored what could be considered the industry’s Bible, The Vertical Farm, in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1wQ2LXeF-k
