They considered the feedback from the vertical farms and the main indicators the farms said were important to measure for systems performance. One farm that particularly impressed the students was Sky Vegetables in the Bronx, which is building sustainable, commercial-scale hydroponic farms on urban rooftops across the country.īased in a LEED building, the Bronx farm grows fresh, chemical-free produce, which it provides to local residents and restaurants, and creates jobs and educational opportunities.Īfter researching other certification systems to understand the types of systems and frameworks that exist, the students broke them down into various principles and criteria. The other team researched vertical farms in the New York and New Jersey area, visiting nine farms and conducting 17 interviews with growers. One team was tasked with investigating other certification systems such as LEED, Energy Star and USDA Organic to figure out how established systems do their benchmarking. Susanne DesRoches, the capstone’s instructor, divided her 14 students into two teams. “Or they might be using less water, but it might have nutrients in it that could cause problems for the urban water system.” For example, “They might be growing a big yield in a small space, but be using a lot of energy to do it and not talking about that,” he said. While the benefits of vertical farming seem obvious, its real effects are complex and need to be quantified since they might be subject to greenwashing. Henry Gordon-Smith, vice chair of The Association for Vertical Farming and an alumnus of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management program, said that because vertical farming is a rapidly growing and young industry, it is important to develop a strategy capable of defining its impacts early on. Students, from left: Michelle Bostwick (team member), Kiley Miller and Katie MacDonald (managers) So The Association for Vertical Farming is trying to figure out a way to standardize systems performance across the industry and within the farms, and to identify best practices and benchmarking baselines so it can engage with these farms and ask how can we improve, how can the industry improve as a whole.”

There’s a lot of focus on food as a sustainable piece, but not as much on entire farming systems, and operations and management structures. “As that growth continues, you need to make sure that these operations are sustainable, and not impacting water resources and energy use. “The challenge The Association for Vertical Farming is facing is how do you manage the growing industry of vertical farming,” said Kiley Miller, one of the project’s student managers. Ideally, the certification system would be able to define the criteria for a credits-based sustainability rating of farms, recognize farms operating sustainably, and provide a best practices guide for existing and new farms to become more sustainable. The 109-member, Munich, Germany-headquartered Association for Vertical Farming challenged a group of students in Columbia University’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management program, who must work in teams with real clients for their final capstone projects, to come up with a certification system to assess the sustainability of vertical farms. Crops can be grown using hydroponics, in water or a growing medium with nutrients delivered directly to their roots aeroponics, where a mist delivers nutrients to plant roots aquaponics, when fish are raised concurrently and their waste is used as nutrients for crops or even in soil if the building is designed accordingly. There are many kinds of vertical farms, differing in the type and square footage of buildings or rooftops they occupy and the mode of light used (daylight or LEDs). Moreover as the global population becomes more urbanized, vertical farms can help meet the rising demand for fresh local produce. It produces healthier and higher yields faster than traditional agriculture, and is resilient to climate change. The Association for Vertical Farming, a two-year-old nonprofit focused on advancing the industry, says that vertical farming allows farmers to produce crops all year round because all environmental factors are controlled. Compared to traditional agriculture, vertical farming uses 70 to 95 percent less water and over 90 percent less land, while harvesting 80 percent more per unit of area. Vertical farming-the growing of crops (up rather than out) in a closed stacked system- is one promising solution to the drawbacks of traditional agriculture. Moreover, the average item of food travels approximately 1,500 miles before it reaches our plates, resulting in wasted food and more greenhouse gas emissions.

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