Agriculture’s large environmental footprint comes in many forms: converting natural lands to cropland and pasture; polluting land and water with fertilizers and pesticides; draining aquifers; using fossil fuel energy to run equipment. Could we reduce that by growing crops more intensively indoors instead of outside? That’s the idea behind vertical farming.

Vertical farms grow vegetables in stacks in warehouses, shipping crates, and other indoor spaces. They can reduce demand for water, agricultural chemicals, and land for growing some types of crops. They may also reduce the need to ship fresh produce long distances under refrigerated conditions. On the flip side, vertical farms are hefty consumers of energy for heating, cooling, and lighting. In addition, because they aren’t suited to grow the corn, rice, and wheat that contribute the bulk of the calories people consume, they don’t contribute significantly to global food security.

Whether vertical farms offer a net benefit from a climate emergency perspective depends on the details of their deployment, such as whether the energy used to maintain them comes from renewable sources. But, managed well, they could be an effective contribution to more regenerative, ecologically safe agriculture.

When you take this action, if you have 2–3 Incentive tags in this card's stack, increase your Energy Demand by 1 and remove 1 Agriculture Emissions token from your player board. If you have 4 or more Incentive tags in this card's stack, increase your Energy Demand by 1 and remove 1 Agriculture Emissions token or 1 Industry Emissions token from your player board.
You may take this action once per Ecology tag in this card's stack each round.

• Vertical Farming (Wikipedia)

• Are Indoor Vertical Farms Really ‘Future-Proofing’ Agriculture? (The Guardian)

• Food, Agriculture, and Land Use Sector Summary (Project Drawdown)

• Grow vegetables, herbs, etc., for your own use with an eye to minimizing greenhouse gas emissions.

• Support the development of renewable energy sources in your community as a way to improve the climate-friendliness of vertical farming and other innovations in the future.

• Encourage people exploring vertical farming to carefully consider costs and benefits.