Salad in the sky: The rise of the vertical farm?

It is an unlikely site for a revolution: more likely, you would think, to be noted for its collection of Cuban crocodiles than its cameo at the birth of a potentially world-changing industry.

But for the past three years, Paignton zoo in Devon has been growing food for its animals using a Verticrop greenhouse, one of the world’s first working examples of a vertical farm, a radical new approach to agriculture that many believe could address one of humanity’s most pressing problems: feeding our rapidly growing population.

Currently around the seven billion mark, the world’s population is expected to rise to 10 billion by 2050. But with 80 per cent of the planet’s usable farmland already cultivated, the effects of climate change wreaking havoc across large areas of existing farmland, and more than 10 per cent of humanity going to bed hungry every night, growing enough food for these three billion new mouths is not going to be easy.