Farming in Skyscrapers

A while back, TIME ran a story on how biofuels are destroying the Amazon and carbon-trapping forests in South America:

"The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."
This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate."

As I read this article back in March, I thought about something that I've wondered for years: Why can't we create farms that go up instead of out? In other words, why can't we build skyscrapers and put farms in them? And, in this case, why can't we build skyscrapers, and put farms in them for the use of biofuel? Recently, I learned that, low and behold, I'm not the only person who has thought about this. It's called "vertical farming" and while I haven't seen it talked about in terms of producing biofuel, it would reduce fuel consumption by bringing the farms right into the city. Vertical farming and entomophagy: food-environmental-energy-factory farming-global warming crises solved!