Farming is running out of land. The solution may not be better fields—but abandoning fields entirely and growing vertically, inside the earth.
By Futurist Thomas Frey
Agriculture has a geography problem.
The places where food grows best — flat, fertile, temperate, well-watered — are also the places where people want to live, build cities, and expand infrastructure. As the global population pushes toward ten billion, the competition between agriculture and development for the same arable land is intensifying in ways that traditional farming, no matter how optimized, cannot resolve. We are running out of the right kind of ground.
The idea I want to explore today reframes the question entirely. Instead of asking how to farm better on the land we have, it asks: what if we stopped thinking about land as the primary surface for agriculture altogether?
What if the growing surface was the wall of a cylinder, descending into the earth?
Continue reading… “The Farming Silo That Could Feed the World From Places Nothing Grows”