Deterritorialization and Vertical Farming
The philosophic case against controlled environment agriculture, with Deleuze and Guattari
Oddly enough, I haven’t written about vertical farming on this platform yet. I’ve often talked about how vertical farming is the next big coming step for humanity, most simply because I can’t imagine how it won’t change society if it comes to fruition.
Vertical Farming is growing crops indoors on many shelves in especially controlled or curated environments. The crops are lit by LEDs or grow lights and hydroponics supply water and nutrients. Compacting the crops in a controlled environment allows more crops to be grown more efficiently, so it’s not uncommon to hear of 20 or 30 times the productivity of a traditional farm. Farming in this way reduces food miles, meaning fresher produce at the grocery store or in your favorite restaurant, and mitigates urban deserts. Vertical farming also uses 90% less the water a traditional farm uses. Plus, they look pretty.
Special
purple grow lights optimize plant growth. Courtesy of Business Insider.
The biggest drawback is, from a technical point of view, that while vertical farming was intended as a sustainable solution to feeding our populace it turns out that it is incredible energy intensive. The LED light use alone, in one story of a vertical farms, is equivalent to a ten story building. Which makes sense, because if you have ten shelves and and LED panel per shelf you’ve effectively just flattened a ten story building but you haven’t reduced its energy consumption at all.
This isn’t a good excuse to me to not pursue vertical farming — the technology will improve, but it can only improve if people try craft better and better versions. And the unit economics will work out at some point. It might be expensive to harvest lettuce today, but who knows what ill change 20 or 30 years down the line?
But there are good reasons to be careful…
I have to preface this with a disclaimer: I also don’t think civilization is ALL bad (I am, after all, writing this on a laptop and you are reading this on social media, so there were some benefits). But it should be at least addressed. This is relevant because agriculture is the beating heart of civilization.
The thought goes that the first agriculturalists happened out of necessity because agriculture, compared to hunting/gathering at that particular era, was time intensive and exhausting. But agriculture lead to a surplus of food which allowed small scale conflicts to become wars of attrition, to which an agriculturalist would win out because of the excess resources. This forced other non-agricultural societies to adopt agriculture. Farming and husbandry is relatively complex and thus required stricter forms of organization which eventually evolved to government and civilization.
In addition to sustaining longer conflicts, other critiques of agriculture include decreasing biodiversity by farming only monocultures, the associated increased impacts of diseases (Swine flu, Mad Cow, etc), and the sheer energy intensity of the act. Of course, there is also pollutants from fertilizers, water runoff, and supply chain issues. See Joseph Tainter, Christopher Ryan’s Sex at Dawn, and other associated anthropologists. Anarcho-primitivists love pointing out how most evils of the modern era are due to civilization and how civilization is mostly enabled by agriculture.
Again, I just ate an orange that was probably shipped from California, in Michigan, in September. There is a lot of hypocrisy in even making this claim, I am well aware.
Generally vertical farming is introduced as a solution to world hunger, but I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. We produce enough food, in fact, we can feed the world four times over but our supply chains are incredibly wasteful. Vertical farming is an interesting supply chain solution because the quick turn around and proximity allows a tighter push-pull supply chain model as opposed to a pure push model, which is what we have right now. Or, I suppose, subsidies providing a pull with a delayed push. And as mentioned earlier, vertical farming also provides a good solution to the water conservation issue, especially in distressed areas like Southwestern US or Central Africa, so maybe VF is a more surgical application.
But vertical farming currently does nothing for energy intensity nor does it address the key issue endemic to agriculture as an institution itself: growth. Agriculturalists wanted to grow their areas of control and need the surpluses supplied by agriculture. And this impulse carried over in colonialist projects. Just look at the Bengal Famine of 1770, how most of foodstuffs were taxed out of Bengal territory by the British Empire. Or consider how the scientists who came up with Haber-Bosch process, which allowed nitrogen recycling so that agriculture could scale to feed the modern world, also provided not only the means to make explosives but Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi concentration camps.
Vertical farming, as an enterprise, would only exasperate these impulses. Conceivably, vertical farming would be well suited to urban life and increase the rural-urban divide as well as remove all dependency of urbanites from rural folk. And what of jobs? Would low-skill labor farm hands be totally out of work and be replaced by high skill programmers and control technicians in hyper productive vertical farms? And here’s the thing, these questions I’m asking are even about the most dangerous part of the agricultural revolution.
But what would make vertical farming more dangerous than the first agricultural revolution?
There is a concept that stretches over anthropology, sociology, postmodern philosophy and media studies called “Deterritorialization” and “Reterritorialization.” In anthropology, deterritorialization refers to a culture severed from a geographic place.
In the past, this was a physical result often of colonization. For example, when the British (again) ruled over Egypt, Victorian furniture was being sold in Egyptian markets in as little as two years and remains there to this day. This is not anything particularly novel or exciting. After all, cultures shift, mix, and change through out history. But in recent years, it has become especially incoherent because of advances in technology. I can now ingest the cultural values of Japan from my home in Boston or San Fransisco via streamed anime. Deterritorialization gained new prominence in a globalized society.
But what does this have to do with vertical farming?
Think of ecology as separate from geography. In general, we tend to blend the two, but in reality an ecology is imposed onto a geography. In fact, Wes Jackson of the acclaimed Land Institute, has said that (emphasis my own):
Let’s start at the atoms. And atoms are embedded within molecules, consist of them. And then there are cells. And then there are tissues. And then there are organs. And then there are organisms. And a man by the name of Feibelman wrote a paper in the early 50s on the laws of integrative levels. And he came to organisms, and biologists were saying, “What comes next?” And some said species. Some said populations.
But an ecologist in Canada, J. “Stan” Rowe, said, “Well, what do the others have in common?” He said they have contiguous volume. Species don’t have contiguous volume. Populations don’t have contiguous volume. Ecosystems do. Once ecosystems was there, those twelve laws of Feibelman fit.
So here’s the hierarchy: atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, ecosystems, and ecosphere.
Courtesy
of the Land Institute
What this implies is that an ecology is its own organism, or super-organism more accurately. This super-organism, the ecology, lives on a geography. What vertical farming does is actual pretty insidious because vertical farming deterritorializes an entire ecology. Given the trauma associated with deterritorializing culture from geography, imagine the trauma of separating ecology from geography.
We haven’t talked much about how deterritorialization works with immigration, although I’m sure you could see the direct connection and understand its importance in a post-2016 world. What vertical farming does is ask how we should address entire ecologies immigrating. We haven’t even figured out how to handle populations of people immigrating! And those two issues are actually one and the same in several cases. Immigrant labor is often needed/exploited in order for agriculture to sustain itself. With vertical farming, we may claim that it “provides jobs,” but if the majority of labor is imported because it’s too “high-skilled” the same ongoing discussion of H1-Bs in the tech industry just gains steam.
I still don’t think I’ve provided anything that would stop someone from pursuing vertical farming, but I hope I’ve provided enough to give pause.