About Us
At Alternative Foods, we want to push the status quo of farming with vertical farming. We want to bring your countryside farms into urban areas and make our cities greener with taking indoor vertical farming to a new level of precision and productivity with minimal environmental impact and virtually zero risks. With vertical farming, you can enjoy locally grown, pesticide-free produce that bursts with flavor and nutrition, all year round.
Some Fun Facts
What is Vertical Farming?
Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers. It often incorporates controlled-environment agriculture, which aims to optimize plant growth, and soilless farming techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics. Some common choices of structures to house vertical farming systems include buildings, shipping containers, tunnels, and abandoned mine shafts.
History
Dickson Despommier, professor of Public and Environmental Health at Columbia University, founded the root of the concept of vertical farming. In 1999, he challenged his class of graduate students to calculate how much food they could grow on the rooftops of New York. The student concluded that they could only feed about 1000 people.
Advantages
Traditional farming’s arable land requirements are too large and invasive to remain sustainable for future generations. With the ever-so-rapid population growth rates, it is expected that arable land per person will drop about 66% in 2050 in comparison to 1970. Vertical farming allows for, in some cases, over ten times the crop yield per acre than traditional methods.