Jon: Welcome to episode 159 of "The Digital Life," a show about our adventures in the world of design, and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me, as founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Howdy, Jon.

Jon: Howdy, Dirk. For our podcast today, we're going to chat about urban agriculture, and its importance for the cities of the future. This is a topic that I'm very interested in. We're quickly approaching 8 billion people on the planet, and more than half of them live in cities, and this number is growing everyday. The ag industry is, as we know, resource intensive. When it comes to water, energy usage, you name it, the agriculture industry requires it. Around the world, as they're planning for this increased population living in cities, people are really starting to look at agriculture taking place within the confines of the urban environment.

Some advantages of urban agriculture include that you're growing food near where you live, so that reduces the environmental impact of these long supply chains that we've grown used to, so instead of shipping grapes up from Chile, you're growing some kind of fruit locally. It also means that the food is fresher, because once again, you're not in this long supply chain scenario, and cities also get a benefit from this increased greenery, because it reduces something called the "heat island effect." What happens with cities, because it has all these impermeable surfaces that used to be absorbent surfaces, as it would be in a rural area, it just causes the whole urban region to be much warmer than the surrounding environments that have more vegetation.

The heat island effect is reduced as we have more greenery in the urban confines. Then finally, something really cool about urban agriculture, urban farming, is that it's bringing healthy food and jobs to underserved areas. If you have areas of the inner city where you can't get fresh produce, and jobs might be scarce, urban agriculture can be quite helpful for that. Where are we today? There are some pretty high profile urban ag areas. I mean, not specifically for urban agriculture alone, but I'm thinking especially of New York City's High Line Park, where there's lots of vegetation, including agriculture. Boston ...

Dirk: Have you been to High Line Park? Have you walked it?

Jon: I have not. I have not. That is on my list of things to do when I have a moment to myself, which is not very frequent these days.

Dirk: Because High Line Park I would call pleasant and quaint. The pleasant is definitely a compliment. The quaint is not a criticism, but they're not gardening at scale in High Line Park. I mean, let's be clear about that, but keep going, I apologize.

Jon: No, no, no. Boston is in the middle of a visioning process which they're basically trying to figure out what land they can allocate to urban agriculture. We have these, call them ... Maybe modest is the wrong word, but we have these toe in the water projects where we're beginning to see some of the fruits of urban agriculture, but nothing on a massive scale, that would be required to say, feed the city of New York, right?

Dirk: Yeah.

Jon: For things like that, the thought or the process, the vision for things like that is vertical farming, right? Imagine a high rise, but instead of people and offices, you've got, well, gardens and fields basically in the space where cars would be parked normally, or what have you. What's so interesting about vertical farming is you get that scale that you're looking for with High Line and at the same time, it has all of those other advantages that we talked about before, like it's local, it's providing the jobs, it's providing the fresh food, et cetera. Singapore launched one of the first commercial vertical farms in the world a couple of years ago in 2012.

It is happening and it is part of this move towards urban agriculture, but we know that Singapore is pretty advanced when it comes to that kind of thinking.