Building-integrated agriculture

Building-integrated agriculture (BIA) is the practice of locating high-performance hydroponic greenhouse farming systems on and in mixed-use buildings to exploit synergies between the built environment and agriculture. Typical characteristics of BIA installations include recirculating hydroponics, waste heat captured from a building's heating-ventilation-air condition system (HVAC), solar photovoltaics or other forms of renewable energy, rainwater catchment systems, and evaporative cooling. The earliest example of BIA may have been the Hanging Gardens of Babylon around 600 BC. Modern examples include Eli Zabar's Vinegar Factory Greenhouse, Gotham Greens, Dongtan, Masdar City, and Lufa Farms. The term building-integrated agriculture was coined by Ted Caplow in a paper delivered at the 2007 Passive and Low Energy Cooling Conference in Crete, Greece. Applications of BIA are motivated by trends in patterns of energy use, global population, and global climate change. Specific observations include: According to official UN estimates, the global population is expected to exceed nine billion by 2050. Food travels hundreds of thousands of miles to reach urban consumers, adding to traffic congestion, air pollution, and carbon emissions. Global warming is predicted to lead to widespread shortages of food, water, and arable land by 2050. Globally, modern agriculture uses 70% of freshwater withdrawals, is the world's largest source of water pollution, and is the largest consumer of land. In the United States, buildings account for 39% of energy use, 68% of electricity consumption, 12% of water consumption, and 38% of carbon dioxide emissions. Increased urbanization, results in the marginalization of the natural world and distance from food production. Proponents maintain that BIA is an environmentally sustainable strategy for urban food production that reduces our environmental footprint, cuts transportation costs, enhances food security/safety, conserves water, protects rivers, improves health, reduces waste, cools buildings, and combats global warming.