A holistic look at VF's carbon footprint and land use

Added on 10 May 2022

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A holistic look at VF's carbon footprint and land use

It's no secret that a host of simultaneous crises have been pressuring the current food system. With a worsening climate, biodiversity loss, a global pandemic, and war, we're being challenged both from a supply resilience and an environmental sustainability perspective.

Image sourced from Heliospectra

Vertical farming has slowly become one of the more eye-popping solutions to these growing challenges, attracting billions in private funding.

With all the hype in the industry, many proponents claim that vertical farming is more sustainable than the current food supply, citing reductions in land, water, and pesticide use alongside reduced food miles.

However, environmental sustainability is not a single-issue concept. And, as a result, vertical farms face a lot of criticism about how "sustainable" they truly are. According to respondents of the 2021 Global CEA Census, 70% of CEA operators believe that the industry is susceptible to excessive greenwashing.

We need to consider the holistic sustainability of bringing farming indoors.

Even though there is evidence behind vertical farms significantly reducing freshwater withdrawal and the loss of biosphere integrity from pesticides, the main area of concern is greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use.

Alongside researchers from Michigan State University and the Stockholm Environment Institute, I recently dove into why this is a problem.