Why agriculture may someday take place in towers, not fields. chipmunk_1/Flickr A couple of Octobers ago, I found myself standing on a 5,000-acre cotton crop in the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas, shoulder-to-shoulder with a third-generation cotton farmer. He swept his arm across the flat, brown horizon of his field, which was at that moment being plowed by an industrial-sized picker—a toothy machine as tall as a house and operated by one man. The picker’s yields were being dropped into a giant pod to be delivered late that night to the local gin. And far beneath our feet, the Ogallala aquifer dwindled away at its frighteningly swift pace. When asked about this, the farmer spoke of reverse osmosis—the process of desalinating water—which he seemed to put his faith in, and which kept him unafraid of famine and permanent drought. Beyond his crop were others, belonging to other farmers, so that as far as the eye could see were brown stretches of newly harvested cotton plants. When I think of the potential ills of contemporary agriculture, I think of this farm, a 19th-century crop taken to its 21st-century logical limit, organized largely the same way it was two centuries ago—only with less human labor, and over a much bigger expanse. There is, even in Texas, only so much usable surface area, and so much irrigable water to maintain future commercial crops, and it made me wonder: What would a truly modern crop look like? To keep reading, click here. Read this article –  Farming in the Sky ; ; ;

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Farming in the Sky