Designing the future of urban farming (Essay Sample)

Designing the Future of Urban Farming
By Name
Course Title
Instructor’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
City, State
Date
INFARM is a startup that develops vertical farming for grocery stores and restaurants to sustain population in urban areas. The startup provides information on high-tech modular, allowing consumers to purchase according to their needs. Collaboration between startup and IDEO facilitates customers education on new vegetables and herbs, selling packs of complementary seeds, with suggested recipes for them, and cooking instructions. (60 words)
Primarily, the startup uses an advanced technology to equip farmers with necessary knowledge and information on strategies to enhance herbs and vegetable farming. As such, the information help farmers to engage in agriculture in a sustainable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly way ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"0Wyy7bYL","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Despommier, 2019, p. 70)","plainCitation":"(Despommier, 2019, p. 70)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1197,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/qBtJ3Wwt/items/BQU27S22"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/qBtJ3Wwt/items/BQU27S22"],"itemData":{"id":1197,"type":"article-journal","abstract":"The number of vertical farms has grown to several hundred farms across Asia, Europe, and North America since the first appeared back in 2010. Using different types of technologies, vertical farms are a new type of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) that could be described as a stack of greenhouses on top of each other, multiplying the plant yield by the number of floors comprising the vertical farm. It has now become a solution to most of the issues deriving from traditional outdoor farming: by occupying less land, it can contribute to the restoration of forests and by operating within a circular economy framework, it uses fewer resources and reuses organic waste. Impacts on health could also be significant as outdoor farming contributes to the spread of global infectious diseases. While vertical farms require a high-tech environment, which can mostly be acquired in wealthy countries, the model could rise in the coming years as a viable solution to increase food sufficiency of cities across the world with the support of local authorities and international organizations, as well as with the multiplication of large commercial growers.","container-title":"Field Actions Science Reports. The journal of field actions","ISSN":"1867-139X","issue":"Special Issue 20","language":"en","note":"number: Special Issue 20\npublisher: Institut Veolia","page":"68-73","source":"journals.openedition.org","title":"Vertical farms, building a viable indoor farming model for cities","author":[{"family":"Despommier","given":"Dickson"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2019",9,24]]}},"locator":"70","label":"page"}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Despommier, 2019, p. 70). The startup meets clients' needs since farming takes place in small spaces, with no soil and far less water. (60 words)
Farmers are kept updated by the startup after signing up for "farming as a service," and a monthly subscription of seeds, cartridges filled with nutrients, and a pH regulator. Thereafter, the app will remotely regulate each unit's moisture, light, temperature, and nutrients to enhance production, meeting client’s and population needs, and conserving more than 540,000 square miles of forest lands ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"F1H2arOg","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Cointet et al., 2019, p. 117)","plainCitation":"(Cointet et al., 2019, p. 117)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1200,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/qBtJ3Wwt/items/2M4N9DVE"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/qBtJ3Wwt/items/2M4N9DVE"],"itemData":{"id":1200,"type":"article-journal","abstract":"In November 2018, the METRO store in Nanterre opened Europe’s largest indoor urban garden, operated by the startup Infarm. Incorporated directly into the wholesaler’s store, the Infarm garden is based on a vertical hydroponic design using a closed water loop that allows production of several varieties of herbs throughout the year. Although yields are as high as 600-700 plants harvested per day, equivalent to 4 metric tons and 40% of the herbs on sale in the store, the environmental impact of this initiative is appreciably lower than with conventional farming.Despite the inevitable differences in size and business culture – a startup working with France’s leading supplier to the ind