When we think of food waste, we tend to picture all the groceries that get thrown out uneaten or the stacks of fruits and vegetables that are tossed out by grocery stores when they begin to spoil. However, what most people don’t realize, is that the way we grow our food is amazingly wasteful. Farms require a huge amount of land, resources, and they have to use a lot of pesticides to keep insects away from their crops. However, there is another way to provide food for everyone. Even better, it means we can grow food locally, even in the heart of the city.

It’s called vertical farming, and if you’re looking for good examples, then Aero Farm is the company you want to check out.

Aero Farm seems almost too good to be true. If you check out this video, you can see that the company’s New Jersey farm is set up in the middle of the city, in an old laser tag arena. Leafy greens are grown in vertical stacks through the use of electric lights, and they use 95 percent less water than traditional farms do. What’s even more amazing, though, is that these plants are grown without soil. Instead, they’re planted on a re-usable cloth made from recycled plastic, and nutrients are misted to the roots along with water.

So, what we have are healthy plants, grown using fewer resources, and which don’t have to be trucked halfway across the country in order to reach people who need them. Why are we still using the traditional farming model, again?