Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist who suggested that cities should cultivate food at high levels, issuing the term “vertical cultivation”-an idea that crossed the purely fantastic realm to come true around the world-died at 7 February 7 February in Manhattan. He was 84 years old.
His wife, Marlene Bloom, confirmed the death to a hospital. Lived in Fort Lee, NJ
Dr. Despommier (pronounced de-pom-eay), who was a professor for 38 years at Columbia’s Public Health School, specialized in parasitic diseases, but has gained much wider influence as a guru vertical.
In 2001, he and students in a class of medical ecology designed a 30 -story building that could theoretically develop food for 50,000 people. About 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables will be cultivated on the upper floors, with chickens housed below. The fish would be fed with herbal waste.
Dr. Despommier claimed that vertical farms would use 70 to 90 percent less water than traditional farms, allowing agricultural land to return to a physical state and help restore climate change. He was announced in TEDx conversations and in a book, “The Certical Farm: Fowering the world in the 21st century”.
“When my book came out in 2010, there were no vertical farms they know,” he told New Yorker several years later. “Until I published a revised edition in 2011, vertical holdings were built in England, the Netherlands, Japan and Korea.”
Technological investors threw money into vertical agriculture. Functions generally replace the LEDs for sunlight and used watering systems that launch plant roots – no soil is required. The holdings broke into places varying from the center of Newark and Dubai, in the Persian Gulf.
The Guardian estimates that there were more than 2,000 vertical farms in the US in 2022, increasing vegetables and fruits on discs stacked or large columns, some high stories, some tend from robots. That year, Walmart announced that it would harvest salad greens from a vertical farm at Compton, California, to run by a company called Plenty.
More recently, the industry has stumbled. High interest rates and energy costs have caused many businesses to close or declare. They include one in Compton and the one in Newark Aerofarms, which New Yorker described in his article for Dr Despommier in 2017. A company with farms in three Eastern states, Bowery Farming, whose investors included Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman and who once appreciated in $ 2.3 billion, ended last year.
Critics have questioned whether vertical agriculture really reduces carbon emissions and called it fury. Others said the industry is simply passing through a shakeout and will withstand.
Dickson Donald Despommier was born on June 5, 1940 in New Orleans in Roland and Beverly (Wood) Despommier. His father was an accountant for a mission line. His parents divorced when Dickson was young.
He received BS in Biology from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1962, an MS in Medical Parasiology from Columbia in 1964 and a Ph.D. In Microbiology from Notre Dame University in 1967.
Dr. Despommier joined the Columbia School in 1971 as an assistant professor of microbiology. He taught a required lesson in parasitic diseases for a second year medical students for three decades. His research focused on tropical diseases. He was a co-author of a manual, “parasitic diseases”, and director of the “Parasites Without Borders” website.
In addition to his wife, he survives his sister, Duane Despommier Kuykendall. His sons, Bruce and Bradley. A violent daughter, Molly Bloom? A uncle, Michael Goodwin. four grandchildren. and three big-scorpions. A previous marriage, with Judith Forman, ended with a divorce.
The idea of vertical agriculture appeared when students told Dr. Despommier in 2000 that they were bored with his career for medical ecology. Redirects the semester by asking a question, “How will the world be in 2050?” and a follow -up question, “What would you do like Is the world like 2050? ”
The discussion focused on how densely full of the planet it would be in 50 years and how foods with less water and less pollution from chemical fertilizers should be cultivated. The students said New York should supply all its food up close. Suggested that they use the city’s roofs for agriculture. But then they calculated that if each terrace in all five municipalities was converted into a garden, the growing area would only supply about 2 % of the population.
Dr. Despommier then thought to increase the crops in glass and steel skyscrapers, with plants stacked on multiple levels, as are their human inhabitants. He continued to improve plans with students of the Ecology category of each year. In 2001, he adopted the term vertical agriculture.
After appearing at the comedy Central late at night “The Colbert Report” in 2008 to discuss his eggplants on the idea, release on his website went up to 400,000 visitors at night.
Many of the newly established businesses that have turned the vision of Dr. Despommier in a reality built vertical farms that were only two or three stories high, compared to the 30-historical magnificence he had proposed. One was associated with a garage in Jackson, Wyo. Others were housed in shipping boxes.
But the idea crossed the planet, with a non -profit organization, the union for vertical cultivation, starting from Germany in 2013.
Throughout the year, skeptics have questioned whether the cost and carbon footprint of internal cultivation was an improvement in relation to the traditional species exerted by humanity for about 12,000 years.
“It’s such an attractive idea -” floor 10 for lettuce ” – that people got it right away,” said Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University. It is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we are going to do so, it will be needed to burn many fossil fuels. ”
The industry was brutal, with the editor of the vertical news agriculture that today states in 2023 that business capital investments in vertical agriculture had been reduced by about 90 %.
Dr. Despommier continued to worry about how modern life could thrive in front of a dangerously changing climate. In his latest book, “The New City: How to build our sustainable urban future” (2023), he proposed to build the cities that are now built of wood.
The carbon footprint of concrete and steel construction, explained, is huge, while the wood is carbon sink – the trees absorb carbon from the air as they grow older – and new technologies for engineering technology are allowed to build very tall buildings.
“It sounds like using all the wood,” he said last year, “but the fact is that if vertical agriculture succeeds, there will be much more land to grow trees.”
