I am tired of all the dystopian, doomsday pundits. As a Futurist, I am reporting to you, dear Readers, there is a lot to look forward to. Good things are happening in the vastly un-reported world of positive news. One particular area I find very exciting is Vertical Farming (VF), a method of growing crops indoors, under artificial conditions of light and temperature. It aims at higher productivity in smaller spaces. It uses soil-less methods such as hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics, according to John Turner, farmer and administrator of goruralforbusiness.com. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil. Plants need water and nutrients, both of which they can get from soil. They can also grow with their roots in a solution of water and nutrients, without soil. Aquaponics is a combination of growing fish and other aquatic animals and hydroponics, growing plants without soil. Plants eat the animal discharges that bacteria in their roots break down, fertilizing themselves and cleaning the water at the same time, which goes back to the fish. Aeroponics is the process of growing plants in thin air where its roots are exposed to nutrient packed mist. No soil or aggregate medium is used to support the plant. According to aeroponicsdiy.com, it is the fastest way to grow plants. In VF, racks of plants are stacked over each other as high as your system will allow. Every rack can have its own irrigation, ventilation, lighting, and remote monitoring systems for a perfect yield every growth cycle. VF can be done in large warehouses, abandoned factories, tall buildings, greenhouse-type enclosures, shipping containers, single rooms… even on your kitchen windowsill! A Little History The practice of vertical farming goes back as far as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in 600 B.C., according to Mark Crumpacker, who writes about “vaulted terraces, stacked one on top of the other, and planted with many different types of trees and flowers. Reaching a height of 20 meters, the gardens were likely irrigated by an early engineering innovation known as a chain pump, which would have used a system of buckets and pulleys to bring water from the Euphrates River at the foot of the gardens to a pool at the top.� During the so-called Dark Ages, Crumpacker writes, “Aztec people used a form of hydroponic farming known as chinampas to grow crops in marshy areas near lakes. Since the swampy soil in these areas was not suitable for agriculture, the Aztecs instead constructed rafts out of reeds, stalks, and roots, covered the rafts with mud and soil from the lake bottom, and then drifted them out into the lake. Due to the structural support provided by the rafts, crops could grow upwards while their roots grew downwards through the rafts and into the water. Often, many of these individual rafts were attached together to form expansive floating “fields.� Dickson Despommier of Columbia University published “The Vertical Farm: feeding the world in the 21st Century� in 2010, in an effort to address the need to feed growing urban populations, using tall buildings and rooftop gardens.A strong proponent of veritical farming, Despommier understood that this type of crop production’s time had come. An interesting note in the history of vertical varming: Along with Greenhouse Gardening and NASA’s drive to develop technologies to grow crops in space, the production of illegal cannabis contributed greatly to the technology of VF. Gabe Blanchett, co-founder of Grove, writes, “Many indoor growing technologies—from high pressure (HPS) sodium lighting to metal halide lighting to LED grow lighting to specially formulated nutrient blends to rootzone technologies like rockwool, hydroponics, plus aeroponics, even beneficial mycorrhizal fungi inoculants—were developed, improved, and marketed for cannabis growers, driving innovation in hydroponics and aeroponics, mostly in secrecy.�