Vertical Farming Quotes

I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical that we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, in a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.

When you honestly assess the strengths of human and machine workers, and what they do well when they collaborate, a whole new world of possibilities emerges for running a business and designing your processes—that is, the important mindset part of MELDS. And by exploring those possibilities, companies can often develop novel businesses, like vertical farms. Indeed, it’s through the experimentation part of MELDS that executives will be able to discover game-changing innovations that could potentially transform their company, if not their entire industry.

vertical farms offer the clearest path toward ending hunger and malnutrition. These farms already have the ability to increase the amount of food grown per harvest by orders of magnitude and increase the number of possible harvests by factors of ten. They have the potential to produce all of this food while simultaneously requiring 80 percent less land, 90 percent less water, 100 percent fewer pesticides, and nearly zero transportation costs.

November The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake, Treed with iron and bridles. In the sunk lane The ditch - a seep silent all summer - Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots On the lane's scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves, Against the hill's hanging silence; Mist silvering the droplets on bare thorns Slower than the change of daylight. In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep; Face tucked down into beard, drawn in Under his hair like a hedgehog's. I took him for dead, But his stillness separated from the death Of the rotting grass on the ground. A wind chilled, And a fresh comfort tightened through him, Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve. His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy band, Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened; A puff shook a glittering from the thorns, And against the rains' dragging grey columns Smudged the farms. In a moment The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals. I stayed on under the welding cold Watching the tramp's face glisten and the drops on his coat Flash and darken. I thought what strong trust Slept in him - as the trickling furrows slept, And the thorn-roots in their grip on darkness; And the buried stones, taking the weight of winter; The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth. Rain plastered the land till it was shining Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood Shuttered by a black oak leaned. The keeper's gibbet had owls and hawks By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows: Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape, Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests Patient to outwait these worst days that beat Their crowns bare and dripped from their feat.

November The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake, Treed with iron and bridles. In the sunk lane The ditch - a seep silent all summer - Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots On the lane's scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves, Against the hill's hanging silence; Mist silvering the droplets on bare thorns Slower than the change of daylight. In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep; Face tucked down into beard, drawn in Under his hair like a hedgehog's. I took him for dead, But his stillness separated from the death Of the rotting grass on the ground. A wind chilled, And a fresh comfort tightened through him, Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve. His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy band, Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened; A puff shook a glittering from the thorns, And against the rains' dragging grey columns Smudged the farms. In a moment The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals. I stayed on under the welding cold Watching the tramp's face glisten and the drops on his coat Flash and darken. I thought what strong trust Slept in him - as the trickling furrows slept, And the thorn-roots in their grip on darkness; And the buried stones, taking the weight of winter; The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth. Rain plastered the land till it was shining Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood Shuttered by a black oak leaned. The keeper's gibbet had owls and hawks By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows: Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape, Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests Patient to outwait these worst days that beat Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.

Between 1989 and 2009, the price that consumers paid for beef in the grocery store rose 60 percent. But the price of cattle rose only 12 percent. The price of pork in the grocery store rose 50 percent in that time, while the price of hogs on the farm actually fell 11.5 percent. The USDA couldn’t determine the gap for chicken because there wasn’t a good way to determine the price on the farm. In a vertically integrated system the company always owned the birds, and it kept the prices confidential.

Heffernan’s research was based in the rural area of Union Parish in Louisiana, where a booming poultry industry was expanding in the 1960s. Vertically integrated poultry production was still a radical concept back then, and Heffernan wanted to study it. So he undertook an effort that no one else seems to have duplicated. He went door to door, made phone calls, and drove hundreds of miles between farms. He surveyed farmers and documented their income and their debt. Crucially, he followed up with farmers in Union Parish every ten years until the turn of the century, building a dataset that was forty years deep. But Heffernan did something more than ask about money. He did something most agricultural economists never thought of doing: He asked the farmers how they felt. He asked them, decade after decade, how much they trusted the companies they worked for and how well they were treated. In doing this, Heffernan assembled a picture that most economists missed. He tracked the relationship between the powerful and the powerless.

The lawsuit against Smithfield turned out to be far more complicated than just trying to enforce the packer ban. By prohibiting vertical integration, the attorney general’s office was essentially suing Smithfield over the company’s business model. So Smithfield just cleverly changed its business model, without really changing it, and let the lawsuit try to catch up to it. At one point, Smithfield’s new Murphy Farms division simply transferred the ownership of all its hogs to a man named Randall Stoecker. Murphy sold all 900,000 of its pigs to Stoecker for about $79 million. Stoecker was hardly a millionaire, so Murphy loaned him the entire amount he needed. Stoecker didn’t have to put a penny down. Then Murphy set up a company called Stoecker Farms Inc., and he was then able to argue in court that it did not in fact own any livestock in Iowa. So the state’s ban on vertical integration didn’t apply. Attorney General Miller sued over the transaction, calling it a sham. So Murphy shifted ownership again to a member of the company’s board. The whole case continued in this way.

Farm-state politicians and activists were berating the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to take action. The urgency of the issue was stoked by the upcoming presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, faced a growing challenge from the longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader was unequivocal in his opposition to industrial meat production and the rise of factory farms. Clinton’s administration needed to look like it was doing something about it. In this increasingly tense environment, Eric Tabor was given a rare public chance to be the good guy. Iowa had gone further than any other state in combating the rise of corporate agribusiness, and Tabor was invited to the Kansas City forum to outline what Iowa regulators were doing. Tom Miller was attacking corporate meat production from two angles: through litigation and the creation of new laws. The lawsuit against Smithfield, filed just a few months earlier, threatened to upend the creeping vertical integration of the hog industry. At the same time, Miller was pressing for the passage of the Producer Protection Act in sixteen states, which would limit how much power companies like Tyson and Smithfield could wield over farmers.

The biggest fight of all was waged out of Iowa, the nation’s strongest farm state, the land of cheap corn and soybeans. In the mid-1990s, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller launched a fight against vertically integrated meat production that ended up encompassing more than a dozen states and went all the way to Washington, D.C., and the halls of Congress.

Acclimatizing to its customs and particular brand of bustle, he’d gotten a sense of Wewoka. Without the lens of a fever-induced vision, it proved to be a dense, vertical city of narrow, terraced streets with expansive walkways. Largely devoid of motor traffic, any point could be reached by foot in fifteen minutes. Pictures painted on the sidewalks provided a colorful trail. With a central street lined with shops bustling with commerce, the noise and smell were different from what he was used to. Wewoka had none of the overworked smokestacks from innumerable factories; much of the city was made up by parks. The air had a hint of ozone to it. A collection of buildings sprouted at the heart of the city. Gleaming green and metallic spires in the distance, the sun reflected from their solar panels. A mushroom-like structure drew in sewer water from its “roots” and funneled it to its dome. Solar energy evaporated the water, which was then collected and released throughout the streets, watering the surrounding green spaces. Photovoltaic panels lined solar drop towers. Titanium dioxide reacted with ultraviolet rays and smog, filtering and dissipating them. They had developed similar technology in Jamaica. Vertical gardens and vegetation covered the steep towers of housing units and work offices. The exterior vertical gardens filtered the rain, which was reused with liquid wastes for farming needs. A deep calm reverberated through the city, quiet preserved like a commodity. Desmond

In the farming economy, buildings had counted for little, for it was in the fields surrounding them that the source of all productive value lay. But in the modern city, land became the launching pad for new vertical economies—derived from the acreage beneath but multiplied by the number of square feet that could be built above. Here wealth turned increasingly mobile and intangible as it wrested itself free from the earth-bound limitations of agricultural or even factory production.

Tyson first pioneered this model in the poultry business. Then the company expanded into raising hogs. Within two short decades America’s independent hog industry was wiped out and replaced with a vertically integrated, corporate-controlled model. Ninety percent of all hog farms disappeared. The amount of money spent at grocery stores went up, but the amount of money farmers received went down. Companies like Tyson keep much of the difference.

The cost-savings from factory farming are slowing down, but Tyson’s control over the marketplace has not loosened. Once the broad-based meat industry was traded away for a vertically integrated one, the deal could not be easily undone. The economies of scale now make it almost impossible for new competitors to enter the field and compete head-to-head with Tyson and its imitators. The tallest ramparts that protect Tyson’s rule are its network of meat factories in places like Waldron. To compete against those facilities, a new company would need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars up front, before the first day of business. It would need animals, of course, and Tyson has much of that supply locked down with its contracts. And a competitor would surely know that even if it built a plant and secured supplies of chickens or hogs, Tyson and its few competitors have the ability to flood the market with product and make prices collapse in the short term, a hardship they could surely endure while an upstart struggled.

become the tesserae of vast corporate mosaics. Most megafarms are many thousands of acres, the conglomerations of brilliant family farmers who had the vision and the will to take the advice of their lenders long ago to “go big or go broke.” Thus arose vertically integrated farms, incorporating packers, processors, truckers, shippers, brokers, and merchandisers rather than just farmers dependent on a chain of mercurial middlemen well beyond their control.