Indoor Farming: Future Takes Root In Abandoned Buildings, Warehouses, Empty Lots & High Rises

In a 90,000-square foot warehouse not far from Chicagos Midway Airport, the future of urban farming has taken root. Long shelves thick with fresh herbs and salad greens sit beneath hundreds of fluorescent grow lights. Theres planters of basil, watercress and kale stacked in neat rows reaching to the ceiling, afloat in a nutrient-rich stream of water fed by large blue tanks filled with tilapia. Its an eerily beautiful scene, interrupted only by the occasional worker driving an aerial lift through the aisles, stopping to pluck handfuls of greens ready to be packaged and distributed throughout the city.

Welcome to the world of vertical farming.

A tilapia fish tank that provides nutrient-rich water to plants at Chicago's FarmedHere. FarmedHere

As the demand for fresh, locally-grown food has increased among urban consumers, businesses like FarmedHere, which runs the Chicago warehouse, have stepped in to compete with conventional farms. Using advanced hydroponic and aquaponic methods, theyre growing fruits and vegetables year-round in facilities that are often in the same neighborhood as the restaurants and retailers they supply. Proponents like to call it ultra-local farming.

We can grow 200 percent more food per square foot than traditional agriculture, and without the use of chemical fertilizers, said Mark Thomann, chief executive officer of FarmedHere.

According to the Association for Vertical Farming, an industry trade group, vertical farms use 98 percent less water and 70 percent less fertilizers on average than outdoor farms. Weather fluctuations arent a factor, and neither is soil management. They can harvest crops as often as 20 times a year, and with their stack-it-high layout, occupy a fraction of the land traditional agriculture requires.

So efficient is vertical farming that many believe it could move beyond a niche market and become a solution for food insecurity in the United States, which affects nearly 15 percent of households, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some believe it could even be the future of agriculture altogether, with climate change negatively affecting rural farmland while the global population continues to swell. By 2050, the World Health Organization estimates, there will be 9 billion people on Earth, with 70 percent of them residing in urban areas.

An underground World War II bomb shelter in which London's Growing Underground will begin operating in 2015. Zero Carbon Food

But before vertical farming can conquer the world, it has to prove it can scale up and be as environmentally sound as its backers claim. Of the many questions surrounding these ventures, the most important one may be whether it is a good business model to begin with.

Thomann certainly believes so. In the two years FarmedHere has been in business, it has expanded distribution to dozens of supermarkets throughout Chicago, including all of the citys Whole Foods locations. The company packages its own herbs and salad greens, which are certified organic, and can deliver to stores within 24 hours of the product being harvested.

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Indoor Farming: Future Takes Root In Abandoned Buildings, Warehouses, Empty Lots & High Rises