Dateline: July 15 2028.
Every restaurant and deli owner knows it’s a constant headache ensuring there’s a daily fresh supply of tasty and healthy food products for their customers. It’s a challenge dealing with suppliers, deliveries and markets. Costly too.
One of the ways to deal with this problem is to grow your own produce — and what better way to do that than right where you need it. Indoor urban farming in your own basement or rooftop garden cuts out the problem of transport too. Greener greens, on the spot.
With limited space you need to go hi-tech, using hydroponics and LED lighting for 24-hour growth cycles and optimum nutrition. But it’s still not fast enough. Farming takes time. Or does it?
Thanks to MIT protein engineers we now have bioengineered enzymes that supercharge photosynthesis, the process plants use to convert light into energy for growth. This means improved crop yields and much faster growing cycles. Combined with controlled environment methods, edible crops are typically ready to be harvested in half the time.
Which means you’re never short of fresh daily produce, and your customers don’t have to wait for nature to take its course. Commercial farmers are winning too, with better yields and healthier, more robust plants. And that’s good for food security.
Boosting photosynthesis with better enzymes has given new meaning to “fast food”.
First published on Mindbullets July 17 2025.
Skyscraper farms solve urban food supply chain
Dateline: May 1 2030.
New thinking in urban design, plus new technologies, are turning city blocks into self-contained country villages. Hydrogen fuel cells and community reactors now power whole city blocks, which rise up and turn inward, creating a new open plan living that includes business, residential and farming.
City dwellers want their fruit and vegetables fresh, and want to be sure they are healthy. Modern techniques mean farming needs less space, crops can be grown right in front of you, and you save on transport and logistics costs.
Farming has taken to the skies. Multi-storey food markets actually produce the goods right here in the city. With hi-tech growth mediums and nutrient drips, the best herbs, fruit and vegetables are now grown in the heart of the metropolis.
Of course, maize, wheat and rice hybrids are still cultivated on traditional farms, but new species of crops have been engineered to make high-rise farming amazingly versatile. The latest fashion foods are born and bred upstairs, in climate-controlled and bug-free conditions.
The limiting factor for indoor farming has been insufficient light, especially in winter months, but advances in OLED materials have solved that. Now the whole ceiling can be as bright as day, all day and night if necessary, without huge energy bills.
Savvy, green urban consumers know what they want. Produce has to be fresh, healthy and “cool”. They’re getting it from city skyscraper farms.
First published on Mindbullets October 25 2007.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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