Green Buildings and Food Production

Our existing food production system is rife with problems. The average mouthful of food travels 1,500 miles before reaching your plate, losing nutrition and flavor while consuming a huge amount of energy. Agribusiness has created vast monocultures of grains, corn, and soybeans, decreasing biodiversity and necessitating the use of vast amounts of pesticides and other chemicals. The mammoth, centralized operations that produce our food, especially meat and poultry, mean that a single contamination event can put huge numbers of people at risk. We need a new model of food production.

Green building could play a role in producing healthier food closer to home, even in urban and suburban areas. In suburbia, we can garden our backyards as our grandparents did with their Victory Gardens during World War II, when up to 40% of vegetables were home-grown. In cities, we can create productive gardens out of abandoned and unused vacant lots, which account for an average of 15% of our urban landscapes. On land that may be contaminated, we can follow the model of City Farm in Chicago, which uses a layer of clay to isolate contaminated substrate from a rich, compost-based soil for growing crops.

Other strategies for local food production are much newer, higher-tech, and less familiar. The nation’s 4.8 million commercial buildings have about 1,400 square miles of nearly flat roof, an area the size of Rhode Island. On those roofs, green roofs or rooftop greenhouses can be constructed and planted with edible crops. New hydroponic greenhouses can achieve significantly greater yields than soil-based greenhouses, with far less weight. A hybrid system called aquaponics merges aquaculture (fish production) with hydroponics, so that the waste from the fish fertilizes the plants, providing an integrated, balanced system.

What do you think? As the green building movement evolves, should the integration of food production be a consideration? In an increasingly urbanized world, should our buildings and the landscapes around them become a part of our agricultural system?