Vertical Farming: Reactions against space limitations
In an increasingly urbanised environment, with more people living in cities than in rural areas (since 2009), people are having to come up with food-growing alternatives that don't rely on large areas of space. One such answer to this problem is vertical farming.
We met with Pradeep Barpande of ELT India, a company that has specialised in green walls and green roofs, and took a look around his exceedingly green office space, and the research facility/farm that is located just outside of the city.
He has developed several space-effective methods of growing plants, with green walls, green curtains, hanging strings of plants, green roofs and even green sliding doors. His farming experiments have focused on which plants grow best in limited soil: the image above showing a range of plants such as peanuts, tomatoes, cauliflower, lettuces, cabbage and beetroots. The limited soil does seem to affect the size of the fruit or vegetable produced in some cases - cauliflower for example, although perfectly formed, was smaller than average. Pradeep also discussed with us the fact that the highest return you would get from plants would be from leafy vegetables, as you're taking the produce from the plant in its first stages of development, and therefore not waiting fot the plant to put energies into producing fruits and veg.
A lot of ELT's research has been focused on the growth medium used - for his green walls, the effect is cleaner and more efficient without the use of soil. Predominantly available on the market at the moment is a hydroponic foam that has to be shipped in from Europe (see photo below). This makes it costly and not a sustainable option, so Pradeep wanted to design an Indian substitute - sustainable and using materials easily found in India.
What he has developed so far is a combination of materials: recycled polyester, coir (coconut fibres), perlite (for aeration: below left) and coco chips (below right). These materials will hold a lot of water, which will in turn be slowly released for the plant.
The image below shows a simple DIY solution for climbing plants such as gourd that are lacking space. The plant can grow out of a single pot and spread across the netting. This could be installed above a roof to provide a surface for veg to grow and would have the added advantage of providing shade.
It's clear that lack of space is a problem in the city but vertical farming could go a long way towards providing a logistical solution for urban farming to be implemented in Pune's poorer communities.
