Is the future of urban gardening up? New York magazine recently published this piece on “Sky Farms,” and while I devoured every word and illustration, I can’t help but feel like it’s exactly the sort of dream project we’d read about in old Popular Mechanics about the Year. Two. Thousand. The idea is simple enough: skyscrapers dedicated to food production, fueled by sunlight, treated sewage, and organic waste pellets. Dr. Dickson Despommier, the professor behind these big farms in the sky, estimates that a 150 of these 30-story buildings could produce enough food to feed the entirety of New York City.

Depending on the crops being grown, a single vertical farm could allow thousands of farmland acres to be permanently reforested. For the moment, these calculations remain highly speculative, but a real-life example offers a clue: After a strawberry farm in Florida was wiped out by Hurricane Andrew, the owners built a hydroponic farm. By growing strawberries indoors and stacking layers on top of each other, they now produce on one acre of land what used to require 30 acres.

Dr. Despommier has a website dedicated to the project at Vertical Farm (dot com).

Skyfarming [NYMag.com]