Will There Ever Be Vertical Farms In Manhattan?

Modern greenhouses, such as those that cover large portions of southern Spain, produce an increasingly significant percentage of the food that we eat every day. That’s because these “farms” are far more productive than traditional planted fields, using advanced technologies like hydroponics and aeroponics. They also create less pollution because they don’t rely on tractors or plows, which emit a lot of carbon dioxide. Producing food in non-”natural” environments such as these decreases living costs and increases the variety of food available to people around the world.

But some climate change advocates would argue that relying on greenhouses in the world’s sunniest areas to produce our food isn’t good policy because food transportation produces pollution. On average, food found in American supermarkets has traveled 1,500 miles to get there. One solution proposed by the locavore movement, is to encourage people to consume food produced by farms located near their homes. But in big metropolises like New York or Los Angeles, with inhabitants spread out over thousands of square miles and few farms particularly close, would this ever be possible?

That’s where the buzzy idea of vertical farming–entertained by Time, the BBC and New York Times, among many other media outlets–comes in. Think of a vertical farm as a skyscraper of greenhouses, stacked one on top of the other. Though no such farm exists today, the idea is to produce fruit and vegetables in the center of our cities to minimize transportation costs and pollution.

The Vertical Farm Project suggests that New York City, for instance, could be outfitted with dozens of 30-story farms, costing hundreds of millions of dollars each.

The real question is not whether a vertical farm could be built - someone with an unlimited supply of funds would surely be able to - but whether such a farm makes any sense economically.

Do the reduced transport costs associated with in-city faming make up for increased costs related to the intense artificial lighting necessary for plants to grow in a tower, or for the high land and construction costs of the skyscraper itself? To put matters simply, will it ever be more profitable to build a farm, rather than an office tower, in midtown Manhattan?

For a 30-story building on a standard 100′ by 50′ lot with plants on 50% of floor space, but on three racks per floor, that’s 225,000 square feet of planted space that needs to be lit for growing needs. You need at least six 40-watt bulbs for every 4 square foot area, meaning 337,500 fluorescent bulbs. Running at 12 hours a day, they would consume 118 million kilowatt-hours per year of electricity usage for lighting alone. In New York City, that’s a yearly energy bill of $21.6 million.

How much would it cost to use the building’s space? Average New York commercial rates were $14.88 per square foot last year, including low-rise buildings in far-out Queens and Brooklyn, but in Midtown Manhattan, the average was $83.96 per square foot. Considering that the vertical farm would likely have to be built in a new tower but might receive some discounts from willing developers, let’s assume an asking price of $25 per square foot. A vertical farm, 30 stories tall, would cost $45,000,000 per year to rent.

Can a vertical farm in one skyscraper make up more than $65 million a year in energy and building costs alone? Well, no - even with the significant reduction in transportation costs that would come with this agricultural technique. But transportation just isn’t significant enough in the total cost of production or the total carbon footprint to justify moving food production into the middle of densely populated areas.

This isn’t to say that the vertical farm concept isn’t an intriguing one. It’s just that the land values of areas where skyscrapers are located are so high that only building uses that are very profitable and economically “dense” are typically found in downtowns. Suffice it to say that there’s a reason that farms are typically found in the country, rather than in the middle of neighborhoods. With subsidies and tax abatements, it would be possible to envision vertical farms - but only if the transportation cost disincentive becomes strong enough to counter the cheapness of growing plants in fields. That probably won’t be happening any time soon.