Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

Historically, food needed to be transported from rural farms to urban centres. But the new technology of urban farming means this need not be the case. With their smaller footprints, farms can be closer to the mouths they feed – sometimes even in the city they serve. Montreal’s 160,000-square-foot Lufa Farms greenhouse, the world’s largest, sits directly on top of a distribution warehouse.8 A tennis court is less than 3,000 square feet; Lufa would easily fit 50 of those. The proximity of Lufa to its consumers allows for fresher product, cultivated for nutrition. And many urban farms are following this template: built close to the retailer, so that the tomato practically rolls from its vine into your shopping bag. As of 2020, vertical farms have a tiny share of the food market. But the market for high-intensity vertical farms is growing at more than 20 per cent per annum, on the march up our exponential curve.9 The effects of this shift could be staggering. If, in the twentieth century, that ancient human problem – that you can only eat what is nearby – was solved by globalised logistics, then the twenty-first century offers an alternative solution. Today, you can use technology to transform what is actually nearby.