Agriculture & Industry
Beyond a community’s inner blocks and thruway easements are located 49 additional blocks for agriculture; livestock, poultry, and large pets; industry; and drilling for oil, gas, water, and minerals.
While the outer blocks provide room for larger-scale activities needed to sustain the community, the overall scale is still small and controlled enough to avoid the inefficiencies, pollution, and other hazards of oversized, sprawling agriculture and industry.
A community’s 24 districts are responsible for specific agricultural and industrial blocks.
In addition to the inner-block terraced gardens, street groves, and building-top greenhouses, a NewVistas community needs the outer agricultural blocks to provide healthy nutrition for all 75,000–100,000 inhabitants, which presents a considerable challenge.
As shown above, the agricultural blocks are chiefly used for vertical farming rather than traditional flat fields, enabling more efficient, intensive food production. For protein, a community raises fish, poultry [1] and rabbits, with limited red meat harvested from natural bison, bovine, and ovine herds out in wilderness areas.
While a NewVistas community produces enough food to “supply” itself, communities trade food with each other for greater variety.
- Vertical, high-efficiency, more humane animal farming technologies are beginning to emerge. For example, see Food Project Proposes Matrix-Style Vertical Chicken Farms, Wired magazine.↩