Off The Shelf #15: Vertigo
Green leaves, farmed on shelves, indoors under LED lights, shipped quickly to demanding urban consumers. But you can't smoke this stuff.
I searched high and low for a generic indoor farming stock image, but paranoid about copyright battles in the high courts, decided to show off my own indoor crop. © Liam Moore
This weekend, my 4-year old nephew presented me with ‘the juiciest cucumber [he] ever grew’. That’s quite a claim, given his long horticultural experience: he’s been lovingly tending to his little vegetable patch in his grandparents’ garden for, oh, say, the last 6 months or so. He’s really into the whole grow-your-own food thing, and it’s starting to pay off. After carefully plucking this particular cucumber with his safety scissors, he quickly set about arranging for his household staff (his mother and grandmother) to serve it to him with his dinner. It was a very exciting moment.
He had obviously read my top tips from last week, when I had explored the issue of food miles. There’s no denying that food straight from the back garden is particularly satisfying. And if you can’t get it from quite your back garden, then sourcing as locally as possible is still pretty good.
But, as I also pointed out last week, that’s not always possible for a large number of people - for example, those in urban areas or those who live in places where growing varied crops is difficult. These people just have to put up with a few food miles.
Or do they?
Enter the concept of the indoor, or vertical, farm.
There’s been a fair bit of hype about vertical farming in the tech world for many years. Investment has flooded into the sector, and the market is now estimated to be worth around 4 billion US dollars. According to Fortune Business Insights, this is only the beginning, with annual growth expected of around 26% per year from here, taking the market to a massive 21 billion dollars by 2029. Even if these growth figures are optimistic and it doesn’t play out quite that way, this is still big business.
VERTICAL FARMING - WHAT IS IT?
Essentially, it’s the idea that we can grow food indoors, on shelves, near cities, using highly-advanced scientific methods, such as hydroponics, aquaponics or aeroponics. I’m not even going to go there. For a layman like me: it’s indoor farming on shelves, using a smaller land footprint and no soil.
Why? Well, with the global population forecast to hit 10 billion within the next 30 years, and with most of those people expected to be living in urban environments, it is going to become more challenging to grow and supply fresh food in the right places. And even without this population growth, the burden of our current agricultural system on the earth’s soil is already taking an immense toll on biodiversity and the planet’s natural resilience. That’s a topic for a whole other week, to which I plan to return.
But the point here is that vertical farming aims to take away some of this burden by removing the need for soil, reducing land use and eliminating food miles. The video below is a pretty good explainer, and outlines some of the benefits - although I would take it with a pinch of salt given that it also looks like it’s doubling up as a promotional video for one particular company.
This video kicks off by talking about farming on Mars, and it does look like it’s come straight from science fiction: shelves of plants, tended by robots, stacked high in impossibly clean, temperature-controlled factories under LED lights, with a continuous supply of recycled water and finely balanced nutrients. All grown with no soil, and therefore no impact to the earth’s struggling ecosystem. The water use reduction alone in vertical farming is widely recognised as one of the key benefits, with general agreement that these methods require 95% less water than traditional farms. Explainer here.
And these facilities can be built anywhere, meaning major population centres can get a steady supply of fresh, local produce in perpetuity.
It’s surely the agricultural silver bullet we’ve all been waiting for.
WHAT’S THE CATCH?
Sadly, it’s not a silver bullet. There are a few significant challenges for vertical farming.
⚡️ Energy use. The requirements for vertical farming are immense. As Gemma Milne points out in her excellent book Smoke & Mirrors, a vertical farm requires 14 times more energy than a traditional greenhouse per square meter. And as for the prospect of using renewables, she puts it better than I could:
Of course, renewable energy sources could be used, but the idea of taking some of the tiny amount of renewable energy which society harvests, some of which we get from the sun via solar panels, and then use it to replicate the sun in an indoor farm, begs the question of why we don’t just use the sun in the first place.
Energy use already accounts for more than a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. A transition en masse to vertical farming could help the earth’s soil recover, but the planet would likely continue to get hotter.
💵 Cost. The outlay for vertical farming facilities is high: as the above video indicates, some buildings can run into the tens of millions to establish. Add this to high overheads given the energy requirements. This going to be reflected in the cost to consumer. I looked up a UK-based startup and checked out their product range: £6 for three lettuce heads. As lovely as they look, this is 3-4 times more expensive than comparable UK-grown products in the major supermarkets. If these are going to be a premium offering, the scope to really change the world with this method of farming is limited.
🛒 Variety. This is probably the biggest hurdle for me. Energy and cost efficiency may improve over time if mass adoption can take hold. But watching the video above, I was waiting to see anything that didn’t resemble a leaf. But while tomatoes and strawberries get a mention, there was no evidence that these are being produced at any scale. A quick visit to Plenty’s website confirmed that, indeed, vertical farming really is limited to salad at the moment. And it’s not just them: Crate to Plate, closer to home in the UK, offers lettuces, leafy greens and herbs. No grains, no wheat, no vegetables or fruit. We can’t survive on salad, so it looks as though vertical farming is a side-show at best, and in order to grow what we need for a diverse diet, we’ll still need those traditional farms.
SO IS THIS IS A SILVER BULLET?
It’s a nascent industry and an emerging technology. All of the points above could improve and be mitigated over time, and there could be scope for this industry to continue growing. And I’m sure that some good can come of it: after all, if we’re going to solve the climate challenge, it’s going to be through hundreds, if not thousands, of iterative innovations and solutions. This could be one of them. But I’m not sure that vertical farming is ever going to feed the world at the scale we need: the hype certainly doesn’t seem justified to me.
Instead of shunning the soil and going indoors, I think we require a widespread adaptation to farming methods which work in harmony with our natural environment. This is a huge, but essential, undertaking, and that’s where I think the smart money should go.
What are these methods? I don’t know, but I intend to keep exploring. Maybe I’ll ask my nephew when I see him later.
MORSELS
🌾 Grain is slowly making its way to places in need from Ukraine
☀️ Crops are in danger as the UK finds itself in drought
🏷 Eco-labelling might be starting to gather some traction
HOW CAN WE STAY IN TOUCH?
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GROWING OUR COMMUNITY
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