The Farms

The Farms are the silo's growing levels, floors given over to crops raised under strings of grow lights. Dirt farms and hydroponic gardens supply the community's food, and the plants pull their share of duty freshening the air as well. The levels smell of soil, fertilizer, and green growth, a strangeness in a world of steel, and their light and dark cycles run on timers rather than any sun. Farmers plant, pick, and guard their plots with the seriousness of people who know exactly how many mouths each harvest feeds. Spread through the shaft rather than gathered in one place, the growing levels give the silo its meals, some of its air, and the only fields its children know.