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Sea Change Radio

Nine years ago on Sea Change Radio, we spoke to the self-pro­claimed found­ing father of ver­ti­cal farm­ing, Dick­son Despom­mi­er, about the con­cept of mov­ing crops onwards and upwards (lit­er­al­ly). In an inter­est­ing twist, the glob­al COVID pan­dem­ic has result­ed in a lot of aban­doned office build­ings. To pro­po­nents of ver­ti­cal farm­ing, these spaces may rep­re­sent unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty. We thought this seemed like a good time to revis­it our orig­i­nal Sea Change Radio inter­view with Dr. Despom­mi­er, unedit­ed, in its entire­ty. In fact, Dr. Despom­mi­er co-authored a paper just last week for the Pro­ceed­ings for the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences (PNAS) titled Wheat Yield Poten­tial in Con­trolled-envi­ron­ment ver­ti­cal farms.” In the paper, the authors write that although it is unlike­ly that indoor wheat farm­ing will be eco­nom­i­cal­ly com­pet­i­tive with cur­rent mar­ket prices in the near future, it could play an essen­tial role in hedg­ing against future cli­mate or oth­er unex­pect­ed dis­rup­tions to the food sys­tem.” Now, let’s go back to our inter­view from Novem­ber 2011.