Task force proposal could put grapevines on 18th & Vine

A bill with wide-ranging support in the Missouri House of Representatives would establish a task force that would explore the possibility of building vertical urban farms in Missouri's major cities.

House Bill 1848, introduced by Democrat Jason Holsman of Kansas City, aims to explore the viability of vertical urban farms in Missouri by way of establishing a 15-member task force.

“It’s really designed to take what we believe is going to be a very positive impact for the community and do the research and gather the information necessary so that way we’re not just saying that it’s going to have an impact,” Holsman said in an interview Tuesday.

The 15-member task force would include among its members the director of agriculture, agriculture committee chairmen from both the House and Senate, a representative from the University of Missouri extension service, and people who are actively involved in sustainable communities. This task force would meet over the course of two years to determine whether such farms could appear on the streets of Kansas City and St. Louis.

“We know this technology exists. We’ve seen the conceptual designs of what’s possible. We know the potential and the benefits associated with that potential,” Holsman said. “But what we don’t know is if we were to subsidize this, if we were to incentivize it, what is the impact to rural agriculture? What does it do to the locations around where we would put an urban farm?”

Holsman said he became interested in urban farms through two chance encounters. First, he received from a constituent a copy of an article in Popular Science magazine describing the technological advances and potential benefits of urban farms. More recently, Holsman and his family explored a conceptual urban farm when visiting Disney's EPCOT Center in Florida.

The 2008 Popular Science article reports that vertical urban farms can run on electricity generated from solar, wind, and sewage. Various fruits, vegetables, and even small animals such as chickens can be grown and harvested in such a strictly climate-controlled facility.

Smaller versions of urban farms already exist in inner cities and can include farmers’ markets and organic and horizontal farms. Holsman said that an urban farm could feed 50,000 people in a metropolitan area.

“The majority of food that’s consumed in Kansas City travels from the coasts. That’s 1400 miles of transit that your peas have to go through,” Holsman said. “They have to be preserved, they have to be put on a frozen truck, they have to be pre-packaged. There’s all sorts of carbon footprint associated with each step of that process to get that food to our table.”

For produce to be consumed locally, it would need to be sold locally.

Ruth Comer, assistant vice president for media relations with Hy-Vee Food Stores, said that each of their stores is granted leeway to stock shelves with local produce, as it is the Iowa company’s goal to source as much from local producers as possible.

She says urban farms would be something Hy-Vee would take a look at, but it would need to meet two criteria.

“The challenges that we run into for a company of our size is first, quantity and consistency of supply from local growers,” Comer said. “Do they on a large enough scale that they can meet our demands and do that on a consistent basis? The second is food safety assurances, just making sure that they have the protocol in place and the record-keeping that they can assure the safety of the food as it passes along the food chain.”

Comer said they are very interested in working with local growers that meet those two criteria.

Holsman adds that building urban farms would not only reduce environmental impact from transportation, but also reduce the use of pesticides and develop self-sustainable energy sources for the facility.

He said this also would create jobs in the inner city that can’t be outsourced.

“If you build a 12-story vertical farm, you're creating inner city jobs that don’t currently exist,” Holsman said. “You’re improving the property values around this farm because now it’s turning a blighted area, a vacant building that was sitting without any revenue in it at all, and now you’re producing food out of it, you’re creating jobs and you’re helping the surrounding areas around it.”

HB1848, which features 48 co-sponsors, has yet to be assigned to a committee. However, Holsman said he has verbal assurances from House Speaker Ron Richard (R-Joplin) that it will be assigned and from Majority Floor Leader Steve Tilley (R-Perryville) that should the bill pass through committee, it will receive time on the floor for debate.

Holsman says he looks forward to fighting hard for the bill and believes urban farms are the future of food production.

“The more we can learn about what that future looks like, the better prepared we are as decision makers to help create that future and make sure it goes in a direction that’s going to be beneficial for the environment, that’s going to be beneficial for the economy, and that’s going to be beneficial for the constituents we represent,” Holsman said. “Producing our own food and doing it in an energy efficient way is the right direction.”