After skyscrapers, company develops plantscrapers to feed people

After the concept of building skyscrapers, a new ‘plantscraper’ is soon to be build that would probably be a food source for over 5,000 people per year.

With growing population, governments from different countries worry how to feed everyone. Thus, a Swedish food-tech organization, Plantagon, has put up an idea of building up ‘plantscrapers’ in cities. The idea of plantscraper is that it would be office towers that have giant farms inside them.

Plantagon started the first one’s construction back in 2012 in Sweden. The $40 million building tower is called ‘The World Food Building’ and will function hydroponically – where vegetables grow with no soil in a nutrient-rich and water-based solution – and will be greatly automated. According to the CEO Hans Hassle, the plantscraper will open in 2020, wrote Futurism.

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As per Business Insider, the 16-storey building is expected to produce almost 550 tons of vegetables per year that would be adequate to feed some 5,500 people annually. The front of the building will have the farm whereas; the back would contain offices, with various companies already signing leases to move in.

The crops would be grown using natural sunlight as well as LEDs that will be adjusted to specific light frequencies in order to maximize production. Also, as an attempt to lower the operational costs, robots would be used to carry out much of the farm’s processes. As the World Food Building will produce more food with less land and water, Hassle says that the tower will save 1,100 tons of carbon dioxide emissions and 13 million gallons of water each year.

Along with containing eateries for the employees as well as for the public, the tower would also have a market where people can buy the vegetables grown. Also, the plantscraper will have a spiral food production line that will move the plants from bottom to top and back again automatically while they grow. The cycle would normally take up to 30 days.

Plantagon is in talks with Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and US developers to start constructing similar buildings. Hassle thinks that more cities should grow food closer to urban centers, “This project demonstrates how to feed cities of the future when they lack land, water, and other resources.”