Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
Farmers At Growing Underground Launch Fresh Branding As They Announce B Corp Status And Growth Plans
Since 2015, Growing Underground crops have been generating proprietary data, improving technology and methods to increase yields and reduce resources to create a net carbon negative growing system
Growing Underground announces its status as a B Corp brand, making it the first B Corp salad brand available in mainstream UK supermarkets. Meanwhile, owner Zero Carbon Farms (ZCF) is the first certified B Corp vertical or controlled environment farm in the UK and Europe. B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. Growing Underground boasts a fully net carbon negative growing system, meaning that it off- sets more carbon than it emits.
Target-busting investment shows industry and individual support for the vertical farming movement
Since 2015, Growing Underground crops have been generating proprietary data, improving technology and methods to increase yields and reduce resources to create a net carbon negative growing system. Now the AgTech brand has formed a strategic partnership with one of the leading fresh fruit and veg suppliers to the UK, Reynolds, allowing the brand to distribute nationally.
To scale up its innovative farming mode even further, ZCF is currently undertaking a share offering. The financing has met with strong industry interest and investor endorsement and included a deliberately targeted crowdfunding campaign that hit its target in less than 24 hours. The offering has been over-subscribed and in total over £4 million has been raised, which will be used to expand into a second site in North London this summer.
“Growing Underground continues to grow in every sense,” comments Richard Ballard, Co-Founder & Farmer-in-Chief, Growing Underground. “We’re looking forward to translating our carefully crafted model and sustainability credentials into an industrial-scale distribution network, accelerating the world’s transition to carbon negative farming and continuing to transform the future of sustainable food production in the UK.”
Read the complete article at: Fresh Plaza
For more information:
Growing Underground
www.growing-underground.com
9 July 2021
UNITED KINGDOM: The Secret Underground Farm In The Middle of Sheffield With An Important Mission
Mr. Ellis, from Sheffield, has been growing greens beneath the streets of Sheffield's Kelham Island since last December, after developing an interest in sustainable hydroponic growing techniques
June 20, 2021
Luke Ellis Grows Plants Underground
Using Hydroponics And Artificial Light
Sheffield has its very own underground farm growing microgreens and veg (Image: coloboque (Pixabay)
Luke Ellis used to be a builder, but now he spends his days underground growing sustainable vegetables.
Mr. Ellis, from Sheffield, has been growing greens beneath the streets of Sheffield's Kelham Island since last December, after developing an interest in sustainable hydroponic growing techniques.
Hydroponics replace the need for a conventional soil and sunlight approach to growing vegetables, using water-based growing techniques instead.
This inventive method of growing means that Mr Ellis can produce a huge amount of leafy greens year-round, without needing to wait for the right season or growing conditions to become available.
Mr. Ellis' business, named 'Leaf + Shoot', now grows a wealth of leafy greens, microgreens, herbs, houseplants, and mushrooms for the people of Sheffield to enjoy - with very little food miles, zero pesticides, and no water waste.
On his business website, Mr. Ellis said: "We are a vertical bioponic farm in the heart of Sheffield, underneath 92 Burton Rd, Kelham in an old spring factory.
"Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do, in fact, it's why we started in the first place. Born out of a desire to produce nutrient-dense, tasty produce with minimum food miles and zero water waste.
"We grow 10 x as much food in the same space as traditional farming twice as quickly, year-round. Reducing the need to import seasonal produce and increasing the nutrient density and freshness."
All of Leaf + Shoot's produce is grown with organic principles, which means that there are no pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or other chemicals used.
And the delicious and eco-friendly produce is sold around the city, with many businesses benefitting from Mr. Ellis' innovative underground farm.
And individuals can also purchase the fresh produce as Leaf + Shoot regularly sell their harvested greens at pop-up shops outside their farm on Burton Road, where people can bag freshly harvested salad mixes and house plants.
Have you ever tried Leaf + Shoot greens? Let us know in the comments!
Underground Agriculture In London Is Gearing Up
By 2022, Growing Underground aims to produce 60 metric tons of vegetables across an area of 528 square meters. That should be enough for 10,000 households and is 12x more than what is produced on a regular farm
Growing Underground In London Is One
of The Largest Underground Vertical Farms
In the World That is Controlled Entirely
By A Digital Twin At The University of Cambridge.
29 March 2021
All the good things an old World War II bunker can bring, right? Thirty meters below ground, near the London New Covent Garden food market, two entrepreneurs have been working together for several years with the British University of Cambridge on an underground farm that has great ambitions.
Their intention is not only to significantly increase production on-site over the coming years. The project also serves as an example for the whole world, according to co-founder Richard Ballard,
By 2022, Growing Underground aims to produce 60 metric tons of vegetables across an area of 528 square meters. That should be enough for 10,000 households and is 12x more than what is produced on a regular farm.
Energy and water
Vegetable cultivation takes place without soil, as the plants thrive on a kind of ‘woolen carpet’ that uses very little water. “70% less than on a conventional farm,” claims Growing Underground. Energy consumption is also low due to the great depth – which ensures few temperature fluctuations – and thanks to the energy-efficient LED lighting.
Nevertheless, energy is the one thing that still stands in the way of a global breakthrough. Ballard: “Vertical agriculture is on the verge of exponential growth due to ever-improving LED technology, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and wireless sensors. But the really big breakthrough will come once more and cheaper renewable energy becomes available that can also be stored.”
Ballard believes vertical agriculture can make a significant contribution to the food problem we undoubtedly have in store as a result of an ever- growing global population. For a techie, the fun part is that it also requires a lot of high-end sensor technology.
Melanie Jans-Singh
A digital twin
There are 25 sensors in the underground farm that constantly track how the plants are doing. E.g., whether something needs to be done with the amount of CO2 in the air, nutrients, temperature, humidity and light. In total, 89 variables are involved. Even the speed at which the plants grow is measured, says researcher Melanie Jans-Singh from the University of Cambridge.
Jans-Singh: “The digital twin provides us with a 3D representation of the situation in London here in Cambridge. That image is even better than if you were there on site yourself. The digital twin can do much more than a human being. It can monitor, learn, give feedback and make predictions. All factors that will help increase productivity.”
A great deal of research into vertical farming is also being done in the Netherlands, such as by the company Plantlab.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maurits Kuypers graduated as a macroeconomist from the University of Amsterdam, specializing in international work. He has been active as a journalist since 1997, first for 10 years on the editorial staff of Het Financieele Dagblad in Amsterdam, then as a freelance correspondent in Berlin and Central Europe. When it comes to technological innovations, he always has an eye for the financial feasibility of a project.
UNITED KINGDOM: Sheffield Underground Farm Is 'Green And Sustainable'
Luke Ellis, from Sheffield, grows his produce at Kelham Island using organic soil and food created from waste products and without natural light
03-18-21
A Former Builder Has Transformed Unused Cellar Space
Into An Underground Farm To Produce
Fresh Herbs And Vegetables
Luke Ellis, from Sheffield, grows his produce at Kelham Island using organic soil and food created from waste products and without natural light.
He said it might sound like science fiction, but the unusual farming method has the potential to address food shortages and climate change.
The business already sells produce to restaurants and direct to customers.
Mr. Ellis first became interested in hydroponics technology six years ago but felt it was not as sustainable as it could be with most companies using high-tech, state-of-the-art equipment with a high start-up cost.
To address that he decided to create a bioponic farm, an organic form of hydroponics.
"Bioponic vertical farming may sound like something straight out of the world of science fiction, but it is a sector which holds a lot of potential for growth," he said.
The produce is grown in soil created from waste food, paper, used coffee, and ash
COPYRIGHT LUKE ELLIS
The plants are fed with an organic food packed with nutrients | COPYRIGHT LUKE ELLIS
The company uses waste materials, such as paper, card and food scraps, to create its own soil and the run-off from those systems is not wasted either.
"We make our own plant food, which means we don't ever pour anything away," said Mr Ellis.
The plants are grown under electric lights which, he added, offer advantages.
"Artificial light can be better than natural light because we can control the flavour of the food and control the growth rate."
Electric lighting helps control the growth rate of the plants. COPYRIGHT LUKE ELLIS
The produce is sold to both restaurants and individual customers. COPYRIGHT LUKE ELLIS
Mr. Ellis said he hoped the business, which opened in December 2020, would inspire others to help build a "greener, more sustainable society".
"It's super fast to grow, we use recyclable materials, it's 100% organic and it's very efficient," he added.
Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.
Lead photo: Luke Ellis supplies residents and restaurants with herbs and greens. COPYRIGHT LUKE ELLIS
Indoor Farming Gains Ground Amid Pandemic, Climate Challenges
Investors used to brush off Amin Jadavji’s pitch to buy Elevate Farms’ vertical growing technology and produce stacks of leafy greens indoors with artificial light. Now, indoor farms are positioning themselves as one of the solutions to coronavirus pandemic-induced disruptions to the harvesting, shipping, and sale of food
Investors say urban farming can boost food security despite rising inflation, trade tensions and global food shortages.
Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest
Investors used to brush off Amin Jadavji’s pitch to buy Elevate Farms’ vertical growing technology and produce stacks of leafy greens indoors with artificial light.
“They would say, ‘This is great, but it sounds like a science experiment,'” said Jadavji, CEO of Toronto, Canada-based Elevate.
Now, indoor farms are positioning themselves as one of the solutions to coronavirus pandemic-induced disruptions to the harvesting, shipping, and sale of food.
“It’s helped us change the narrative,” said Jadavji, whose company runs a vertical farm in Ontario, and is building others in New York and New Zealand.
Proponents, including the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), say urban farming increases food security at a time of rising inflation and limited global supplies. North American produce output is concentrated in Mexico and the US southwest, including California, which is prone to wildfires and other severe weather.
Climate-change concerns are also accelerating investments, including by agribusiness giant Bayer AG, into multi-storey vertical farms or greenhouses the size of 50 football fields.
They are enabling small North American companies like Elevate to bolster indoor production and compete with established players BrightFarms, AeroFarms and Plenty, backed by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos.
But critics question the environmental cost of indoor farms’ high power requirements.
Vertical farms grow leafy greens indoors in stacked layers or on walls of foliage inside of warehouses or shipping containers. They rely on artificial light, temperature control and growing systems with minimal soil that involve water or mist, instead of the vast tracts of land in traditional agriculture.
Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest
Greenhouses can harness the sun’s rays and have lower power requirements. Well-established in Asia and Europe, greenhouses are expanding in North America, using greater automation.
Investments in global indoor farms totalled a record-high $500m in 2020, AgFunder research head Louisa Burwood-Taylor said.
The average investment last year rose sharply, as large players including BrightFarms and Plenty raised fresh capital, she said.
A big funding acceleration lies ahead, after pandemic food disruptions – such as infections among migrant workers that harvest North American produce – raised concerns about supply disruptions, said Joe Crotty, director of corporate finance at accounting firm KPMG, which advises vertical farms and provides investment banking services.
“The real ramp-up is the next three to five years,” Crotty said.
Vegetables grown in vertical farms or greenhouses are still just a fraction of overall production. US sales of food crops grown under cover, including tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, amounted to 358 million kilogrammes (790 million pounds) in 2019, up 50 percent from 2014, according to the USDA.
California’s outdoor head lettuce production alone was nearly four times larger, at 1.3 billion kg (2.9 billion pounds).
Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest
The USDA is seeking members for a new urban agriculture advisory committee to encourage indoor and other emerging farm practices.
Plant Breeding Moves Indoors
Bayer, one of the world’s biggest seed developers, aims to provide the plant technology to expand vertical agriculture. In August, it teamed with Singapore sovereign fund Temasek to create Unfold, a California-based company, with $30m in seed money.
Unfold says it is the first company focused on designing seeds for indoor lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, spinach and cucumbers, using Bayer germplasm, a plant’s genetic material, said Chief Executive John Purcell.
Their advances may include, for example, more compact plants and an increased breeding focus on quality, Purcell said.
Unfold hopes to make its first sales by early 2022, targeting existing farms, and startups in Singapore and the United Kingdom.
Greenhouses are also expanding, touting higher yields than open-field farming.
AppHarvest, which grows tomatoes in a 60-acre greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky, broke ground on two more in the state last year. The company aims to operate 12 facilities by 2025.
Its greenhouses are positioned to reach 70 percent of the US population within a day’s drive, giving them a transportation edge over the southwest produce industry, said Chief Executive Jonathan Webb.
“We’re looking to rip the produce industry out of California and Mexico and bring it over here,” Webb said.
Projected global population growth will require a large increase in food production, a tough proposition outdoors given frequent disasters and severe weather, he said.
Image from: Reuters via AppHarvest
New York-based BrightFarms, which runs four greenhouses, positions them near major US cities, said Chief Executive Steve Platt. The company, whose customers include grocers Kroger and Walmart, plans to open its two largest farms this year, in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
Platt expects that within a decade, half of all leafy greens in the US will come from indoor farms, up from less than 10 percent currently.
“It’s a whole wave moving in this direction because the system we have today isn’t set up to feed people across the country,” he said.
‘Crazy, Crazy Things’
But Stan Cox, research scholar for non-profit The Land Institute, is sceptical of vertical farms. They depend on grocery store premiums to offset higher electricity costs for lighting and temperature control, he said.
“The whole reason we have agriculture is to harvest sunlight that’s hitting the earth every day,” he said. “We can get it for free.”
Bruce Bugbee, a professor of environmental plant physiology at Utah State University, has studied space farming for NASA. But he finds power-intensive vertical farming on Earth far-fetched.
“Venture capital goes into all kinds of crazy, crazy things and this is another thing on the list.”
Bugbee estimates that vertical farms use 10 times the energy to produce food as outdoor farms, even factoring in the fuel to truck conventional produce across the country from California.
AeroFarms, operator of one of the world’s largest vertical farms, based in a former New Jersey steel mill, says comparing energy use with outdoor agriculture is not straightforward. Produce that ships long distances has a higher spoilage rate and many outdoor produce farms use irrigated water and pesticides, said Chief Executive Officer David Rosenberg.
Vertical farmers tout other environmental benefits.
Elevate uses a closed-loop system to water plants automatically, collect moisture that plants emit and then re-water them with it. Such a system requires two percent of the water used on an outdoor romaine lettuce operation, Jadavji said. The company uses no pesticides.
“I think we’re solving a problem,” he said.
Bringing The Future To life In Abu Dhabi
A cluster of shipping containers in a city centre is about the last place you’d expect to find salad growing. Yet for the past year, vertical farming startup Madar Farms has been using this site in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, to grow leafy green vegetables using 95 per cent less water than traditional agriculture
Amid the deserts of Abu Dhabi, a new wave of entrepreneurs and innovators are sowing the seeds of a more sustainable future.
Image from: Wired
A cluster of shipping containers in a city centre is about the last place you’d expect to find salad growing. Yet for the past year, vertical farming startup Madar Farms has been using this site in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, to grow leafy green vegetables using 95 per cent less water than traditional agriculture.
Madar Farms is one of a number of agtech startups benefitting from a package of incentives from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) aimed at spurring the development of innovative solutions for sustainable desert farming. The partnership is part of ADIO’s $545 million Innovation Programme dedicated to supporting companies in high-growth areas.
“Abu Dhabi is pressing ahead with our mission to ‘turn the desert green’,” explained H.E. Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, in November 2020. “We have created an environment where innovative ideas can flourish and the companies we partnered with earlier this year are already propelling the growth of Abu Dhabi’s 24,000 farms.”
The pandemic has made food supply a critical concern across the entire world, combined with the effects of population growth and climate change, which are stretching the capacity of less efficient traditional farming methods. Abu Dhabi’s pioneering efforts to drive agricultural innovation have been gathering pace and look set to produce cutting-edge solutions addressing food security challenges.
Beyond work supporting the application of novel agricultural technologies, Abu Dhabi is also investing in foundational research and development to tackle this growing problem.
In December, the emirate’s recently created Advanced Technology Research Council [ATRC], responsible for defining Abu Dhabi’s R&D strategy and establishing the emirate and the wider UAE as a desired home for advanced technology talent, announced a four-year competition with a $15 million prize for food security research. Launched through ATRC’s project management arm, ASPIRE, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, the award will support the development of environmentally-friendly protein alternatives with the aim to "feed the next billion".
Image from: Madar Farms
Global Challenges, Local Solutions
Food security is far from the only global challenge on the emirate’s R&D menu. In November 2020, the ATRC announced the launch of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), created to support applied research on the key priorities of quantum research, autonomous robotics, cryptography, advanced materials, digital security, directed energy and secure systems.
“The technologies under development at TII are not randomly selected,” explains the centre’s secretary general Faisal Al Bannai. “This research will complement fields that are of national importance. Quantum technologies and cryptography are crucial for protecting critical infrastructure, for example, while directed energy research has use-cases in healthcare. But beyond this, the technologies and research of TII will have global impact.”
Future research directions will be developed by the ATRC’s ASPIRE pillar, in collaboration with stakeholders from across a diverse range of industry sectors.
“ASPIRE defines the problem, sets milestones, and monitors the progress of the projects,” Al Bannai says. “It will also make impactful decisions related to the selection of research partners and the allocation of funding, to ensure that their R&D priorities align with Abu Dhabi and the UAE's broader development goals.”
Image from: Agritecture
Nurturing Next-Generation Talent
To address these challenges, ATRC’s first initiative is a talent development programme, NexTech, which has begun the recruitment of 125 local researchers, who will work across 31 projects in collaboration with 23 world-leading research centres.
Alongside universities and research institutes from across the US, the UK, Europe and South America, these partners include Abu Dhabi’s own Khalifa University, and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first graduate-level institute focused on artificial intelligence.
“Our aim is to up skill the researchers by allowing them to work across various disciplines in collaboration with world-renowned experts,” Al Bannai says.
Beyond academic collaborators, TII is also working with a number of industry partners, such as hyperloop technology company, Virgin Hyperloop. Such industry collaborations, Al Bannai points out, are essential to ensuring that TII research directly tackles relevant problems and has a smooth path to commercial impact in order to fuel job creation across the UAE.
“By engaging with top global talent, universities and research institutions and industry players, TII connects an intellectual community,” he says. “This reinforces Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s status as a global hub for innovation and contributes to the broader development of the knowledge-based economy.”
Future of Agriculture Grows Under Seoul’s Subway Stations
The Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Metro, and the agriculture company Farm8 have come together for this project
Experts introduce the facility during the opening showcase of Metro Farm at Sangdo Station in September 2019. (Farm8)
Walking down the stairs from exit No. 2 of Sangdo Station in southwestern Seoul, its not easy to miss a white and green signboard that reads “METRO Farm.”
A method of what‘s known as “smart farming,” Metro Farms can create nature-friendly environments while being located inside urban subway stations, using AI and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
Sangdo Station’s exit No. 2 was originally left unattended, merely serving its purpose as a meet-up plaza. Since September 2019, the space is now a farm full of sprouts and herbs.
The 394-square-meter cultivation facility is a complex space consisting of an “Auto-Farm,“ where robots manage basic sowing and harvesting, a “Farm Cafe,” which sells fresh salad and juice, made from crops harvested on the same day, and “FarmX,” a zone where visitors can learn about the future of agriculture.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Metro, and the agriculture company Farm8 have come together for this project. In 2004, Farm8 started out as a firm that produced and distributed vegetable salads. Over time, the company shifted gears to conduct research on indoor farming as a method of sustainable agriculture that can operate regardless of weather conditions and has succeeded in developing high-tech distribution centers.
The three organizations worked together to enhance the ecological sensitivity of Seoul as a city, and allow young people living in urban districts to experience agriculture with their own eyes.
Children line up in front of a Metro Farm to experience and learn about agriculture in January 2020.(Farm8)
“We tried our best to make Metro Farms a lively experience, where visitors can get a grasp of its possibilities and to be recognized a place where technology meets nature,” senior manager of Farm8 Yeo Chan-dong told The Korea Herald.
Since the very first showcase of Metro Farm at Dapsimni Station in eastern Seoul in May 2019, Yeo explained that they have made progress in creating urban agricultural jobs and expanded Metro Farms across the city.
An average of 7.5 million people take the subway each day in Seoul, according to Seoul Metro. This means that passersby will naturally encounter Metro Farms on their way to work, home or to meet family and friends.
“Our assignment for the new year is to make Metro Farms more popular and sustainable,” Yeo spoke with confidence, “In other words, not only presenting the experience but eventually making a system for the crops grown to be made a competitive quality to suit the needs of the public.”
By Kim Hae-yeon (hykim@heraldcorp.com)
AUSTRALIA: Sydney's First Underground Farm Reducing Distance Between Paddock And Plate
From pink kale, spicy radish, coriander, basil, and cabbage, the vertical garden is controlled almost entirely by artificial means including fans which imitate a light breeze to help the plans grow
Underneath Sydney's bustling CBD, a group of savvy farmers have designed the city's first underground commercial farm. Four basement levels below the city streets in Barangaroo, in an office tower car park, Urban Green is now the largest vertical farm in Sydney. It features 35 verities of microgreens - seedlings of plants that are usually harvested early before being fully grown.
From pink kale, spicy radish, coriander, basil, and cabbage, the vertical garden is controlled almost entirely by artificial means including fans which imitate a light breeze to help the plans grow. Just four years on from when it first began, Urban Green now provides fresh produce to restaurants and chefs around the city.
Watch the video at 9news.com.au
26 Nov 2020
The Future of Farming Is Inside This Bomb Shelter
The farm is known as Growing Underground (GU), and it’s located 108 feet below the main street in Clapham, a south London suburb
Ten Stories Underneath London,
Thousands of Plants Are growing
BY ROB KEMP
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATE PETERS
NOV 12, 2020
Deep beneath the streets of London, in a complex of bomb shelters left abandoned since World War II, something is growing. Thousands of green sprouts burst from their hydroponic trays, stretching toward glowing pink lights that line the arched ceilings. These plants, along with tens of thousands of other salad crops, are being grown from seed without soil or sunlight, in tunnels transformed into a high-tech commercial farm.
The farm is known as Growing Underground (GU), and it’s located 108 feet below the main street in Clapham, a south London suburb. Every year, in 6,000 square feet of old bomb shelter, more than 100 tons of pea shoots, garlic chives, cilantro, broccoli, wasabi mustard, arugula, fennel, red mustard, pink stem radishes, watercress, sunflower shoots, and salad leaves are sown, grown, and prepared for dispatch.
London’s unique move toward re-localizing agriculture—feeding its growing population while cutting the environmental impact of producing and transporting crops—is the brain-child of entrepreneur Richard Ballard and his business partner Steve Dring.
The tunnels consist of two portions - a larger upper level, where growing and processing takes place, and a smaller lower level, shown here, which is used for storage. KATE PETERS
“The United Nations predicts that we need 70 percent more food by 2050,” says Ballard. “But how are we going to achieve this when only 10 percent of the Earth’s surface is suitable for agriculture and we use a third of that to grow livestock feed?”
Ballard’s journey to becoming a pioneering subterranean farmer is an unusual one. After his ethical garden furniture business went bust in 2008, he moved closer to his old friend, Dring, and the pair would regularly sit in the pub and discuss ideas for start-ups. Both men were intrigued by the idea of vertical farming as an efficient way to feed people, especially in urban areas.
These farms are not susceptible to weather, and crops can be protected from food contamination and grown without herbicides and pesticides. Transport costs are minimal, harvesting is often automated, and much of the water used to grow crops can be recycled.
But the question of how to build it in a city where living space is at such a high premium presented their first major challenge.
At that time, London’s Crossrail line was in its construction stages. The excavations for the 73-mile-long high-speed railway across the city regularly featured on the TV news—especially as secrets to the city’s past were being unearthed, including plague pits, Roman artifacts, and unexploded World War II bombs. It led Ballard and Dring to consider going underground.
Cilantro sprouts under the pink growing lights. KATE PETERS
They worked with the management company for the city’s underground railway network, Transport for London (TfL), to find the Clapham site. “As long as we weren’t building an underground nightclub, they were happy for us to trial a small farm to see if a tunnel could work as a growing environment,” Dring says.
A crowdfunded campaign raised more than $900,000 to develop the site. After a successful trial in one small section of the shelters, Ballard and Dring negotiated a nearly 20-year lease from TfL and began operating in 2015.
The entrance to GU is within an unassuming brick office at street level. In here sit four of the site’s seven aboveground staff; they work at computers taking orders from retailers and arranging deliveries. It’s also the spot where visitors are asked to remove any jewelry and sign a consent form confirming that they are in good health, have never carried typhoid, and are not bringing any nuts onto the site.
From there, it’s a trip into a cramped elevator with barely enough room for two people. It descends slowly, 10 stories belowground, to where visitors step out into a tunnel of whitewashed corrugated arches that contrast brightly with the eerie elevator shaft. Through a row of rubber strips hanging from a tunnel entrance, the kind you see in an industrial refrigerator, a bright pink light glows. Coupled with a sound of hard-core punk music coming from another passageway, this farm has the feel of the illicit nightclub their landlords had feared.
The working farm currently occupies an eighth of its potential 45,000 square feet of growing space. The entire site is two parallel tunnels, each 1,640 feet in length. Built at the height of the Blitz between 1940 and 1942 and capable of accommodating 8,000 people, the space was already connected to electricity and the London water supply before Growing Underground moved in.
Pea shoots are planted in the recycled growing medium. KATE PETERS
Belowground the next set of safety precautions sees visitors putting on white rubber boots, disposable hair nets, another net to cover any facial hair, and white lab coats.
“It’s a controlled environment. We don’t need pesticides but we can’t afford contamination,” says Jess Moseley, GU’s operations coordinator and tour guide. “We ask visitors to remove their jewelry to prevent any possibility of any foreign body contamination. We don’t want tiny gemstones in our salad.” Visitors wash their hands thoroughly with soap and use an alcohol-based sanitizer on them, and then are free to enter the farm.
Moseley works alongside a team of growers, all wearing the same hair net and rubber boots combo. Four of them, dressed in blue, stand in a line at polished-metal weighing scales picking bunches of harvested herbs and packing them for distribution.
“There are 16 production staff and two growers who organize the sowing,” Moseley explains, as the electronic scales beep and another box of fresh herbs is sealed and stacked. These micro greens are the intensely flavored early stages of plants that are usually harvested later in their life cycle. They’re especially popular with restaurants that serve dishes with very little on the plate. “We switched pea shoots to tendril pea shoots, which are frillier, because the chefs prefer them,” says Moseley.
The trays in the foreground hold crops that are ready for the harvest, while those under the lights are still growing. KATE PETERS
Most of GU’s crops are micro herbs—there are only two larger crops, pea shoots and sunflower shoots. Most full-size produce such as carrots or bok choy could be grown here, but they take too long to grow to make them profitable. However, more research into alternative lighting spectrums may make these a possibility, says GU operations manager Alex Hamilton-Jones.
"OUR PEA SHOOTS CAN BE HARVESTED UP TO 60 TIMES IN A YEAR. OUTDOORS YOU GET THREE OR FOUR HARVESTS A YEAR; IN A GREENHOUSE, AROUND 30."
“Larger crops require a change to the growing equipment, like the height of the stacks and light intensity,” Moseley says. “This is going to be a part of the next iteration of the farm.”
Within its short existence, Growing Underground’s team has expanded its variety and reduced turnaround time on crops. That’s due in no small part to a number of technological innovations that optimize growing conditions on the farm.
“Our pea shoots can be harvested up to 60 times in a year,” Ballard says. “Outdoors you get three or four harvests of those in a year; in a greenhouse, around 30.”
To help plants grow quickly, the correct lights are key. Ballard and Dring tried seven different LEDs during their R&D and found that the system they settled on—spectrum AP673L LEDs from Valoya of Finland—produced the best yield and greatest flavors.
These LEDs utilize a red:far-red (R:Fr) spectrum ratio that targets the red and far-red light-absorbing photoreceptors on the plant leaf. The light resembles sunlight at its peak level, which delays the flowering of herbs and allows the plant to focus its energy into fast biomass development.
The result is a compact, intensely flavored product grown in a short time in conditions that not only suit the plant but meet the needs of the growers, too. “The cycle for growing coriander has gone from 21 to 14 days,” explains Riley Anderson, the site’s team leader. “Some plants can be harvested after just six days in the growing tunnel, which beats anything a farm aboveground can achieve consistently through the year.” They toyed with duller tones than the vivid pink that now illuminates the growing tunnel, but found that the reduction in visibility meant having to lift each plant tray out off of its bench to do quality checks. It slowed the process and didn’t enhance the crop.
Jess Moseley, GU’s operations coordinator and tour guide, checks on some of the crops. KATE PETERS
“We wanted to source the lowest energy-consuming lighting system we could find,” explains Ballard. “The LEDs do not use the same amount of energy nor do they create the high direct heat that conventional (high-pressure sodium) lights do, which means we’re able to grow the plants in shelves closer together.”
The power comes from Good Energy, which only uses renewable sources. “As it’s a closed-loop system of farming, anything that’s added—nutrients or fertilizers—stays within the circuit,” says Ballard. The only farm waste—the substrate recycled carpet leftover from harvesting the herbs—is sent to SELCHP, a waste-to-energy converter in southeast London. “Zero carbon output has been the Key Performance Indicator we chose to work to from the very start because any business starting today needs to think about its impact on the environment,” says Ballard.
This 700-recipe cookbook will have you eating every last bit of your bounty. This is an actual problem at our house. Cooking everything takes creativity.
In addition to high-tech lighting, there are several other adaptations that allow plants in the tunnels to grow so quickly. It starts when the seeds are sown, without the aid of conventional soil: Workers place two-inch-thick rectangular growing mats—called Growfelt and made from pulped floor carpet—into shallow trays. The mats are sprinkled with seeds by hand.
Once sown, the seed trays are stacked onto carts and left in a dark section of the same tunnel for propagation. For a short time, they sit in complete darkness, covered with plastic wrap. This “fools” the seeds into thinking they’re beneath the earth. This is where germination begins. Within a day or two, the seed shoots appear. By the fourth day, the trays are transferred to shelves known as benches under the banks of LEDs in the crop-growing tunnel.
Garlic chive seeds are sewn into the recycled carpet seed bed. KATE PETERS
There’s no music playing in the growing area—workers seldom spend much time in here, as the plants are doing all the work on their own. Instead, the only noise in this long, flamingo-pink chamber is the whirring of the axial fans dangling from the ceiling. Although the fans help keep the farm at a settled temperature of around 59°F, the plants beneath the glare of the LEDs feel the warmth of up to 77°F.
“There’s a slight variance throughout the farm,” says Anderson. “We place the crops strategically to optimize growth. Our radishes prefer to be right at the front of the farm, where it is coolest. Our most robust crop, the pea shoot, grows well wherever it is positioned within the farm.”
On either side of the tunnel are trays bristling with herbs at different stages of growth. In each tray, a handwritten sign identifies the type of crop, along with a P date of propagation, an L for the day it was put under the lights (when transferred to the farm from propagation), and B for the bench the tray is assigned to.
The warming glow provides “sunlight” for 18 hours a day. Rain comes in the form of hydroponics. A faucet fills each tray of plants with a water-and-nutrient mix five times a day. The roots in the trays grow down through the matting to absorb the mix and then water is filtered through tanks beneath the benches. “We use 70 percent less water than conventional field farming,” says Moseley.
The garlic chive crop is harvested and ready for packing. KATE PETERS
The night before a harvest, workers put the plants on carts in the middle of the farm, which has the best airflow, Anderson says. That dries them overnight to the point of being packable without them breaking down quicker.
CROPS HERE CAN BE HARVESTED, PACKED, DELIVERED, AND SERVED ON A PLATE ALL WITHIN FOUR HOURS.
To harvest, fresh herbs are sliced from their roots, shaken off of the matting that served as their soil bed, and placed into a blue bowl. From there the crop is weighed and packed into transparent tubs made from rPET—recycled plastic—and labeled with the GU logo and contents.
Above each growing bench is a round, yellow sensor the size of a large coin that records temperature, humidity, and illumination, and sends the data to the University of Cambridge’s engineering department. The results are fed back to GU, which compares them with the crop yields to determine which conditions are working best for growth.
“We monitor yields every day when we cut,” says Ballard. “A platform with machine learning capability collects the data from all the sensors and alerts you to any anomalies. It gives us access to the sort of technology being used in big agricultural projects, but that would be too expensive for us to put together.”
Crops here can be harvested, packed, delivered, and served on a plate all within four hours. The reduced time spent in transit means GU products have a longer shelf life than those grown outside of the capital. As a result, they’re sold in some of the U.K.’s major food retailers and wholesalers.
A number of renowned London chefs use GU produce, too, including Michelin-starred Michel Roux Jr. He not only uses their herbs in his dishes at Le Gavroche, a French restaurant in the Mayfair area of London, but he also came on board as a founding supporter. He describes the shoots and leaves that it provides as “mind-blowingly good.”
For distribution to smaller restaurants, GU goes underground as well. “We send our delivery guys off with all these bags of orders onto the subway trains,” says Anderson. “Food that’s been grown in a Tube tunnel is delivered through one as well, further reducing the carbon footprint.”
Tours of the tunnels take place outside of the production cycle, with chefs, students, and potential investors visiting during the week and members of the public shown around on Saturday afternoons. “We’ve had farmers from Scotland, mainland Europe, and as far as America come and visit us,” adds Anderson. In the past five years that the farm has been operating, technology has improved a lot—more efficient LED lighting, water recycling, and air management systems, Anderson says. “But the principle of what we’re doing is remarkably simple, giving crops the nutrients they need and a medium to grow in.”
Ballard is now busy sourcing funding to expand farther into the tunnels while investigating sites for other controlled-environment farms in other parts of the world and in different structures.
“When we started, the plan was to produce a supply for London,” Ballard says. “But as the retailers have taken an interest, we’re now looking to serve their distribution centers beyond the M25 [London’s encircling motorway].”
As GU grows, it looks to similar farms for inspiration. In South Korea, subterranean vegetable farms are cropping up at underground stations on the Seoul metro, thanks to a start-up called Farm8, while in Tokyo, abandoned utility tunnels built to service a skyscraper city that never materialized have also been converted into GU-style farms. In Hamburg, Germany, a vertical farm called &ever uses methods similar to GU’s to harvest salad crop using just 5,920 square feet of indoor growing space. Producing an equivalent yield outdoors would require 161,458 square feet of open field.
Increasingly crowded cities are getting imaginative when it comes to farmland. “But these farms don’t have to be underground at all,” says Ballard. “It can be in an abandoned factory or disused warehouse aboveground. The model is simply redundant space.” Even so, with at least six more abandoned tunnels beneath London alone, GU’s subterranean farm may not be the only game of its type in town, or underneath it, for much longer.
VIDEOS: Vertical Farming Goes High-Tech And Underground
Vertical Farms Are Evolving Into A Major
Food Industry Powered by Sophisticated
Technologies And Production Methods
Growing fresh produce in underground areas
Transforming a tunnel into a vertical farming operation
Infarm allows customers to pick the produce themselves
Vertical farming companies are facing an array of challenges
Technology and lower costs are critical for the industry’s sustainability
Innovation is vital to solving the world’s greatest challenges
Farmers around the world are heading towards an uncertain future. Apart from the prospect of feeding the global population that’s set to reach around 10.9 billion by 2100, they are also facing climate change-induced floods, droughts, and heatwaves. Fertile land is in ever shorter supply as soil erosion intensifies. Farming is also to blame for some of these problems as the CO2 footprint of food accounts for 17 percent of total global emissions. And by the time plants get transported to supermarkets, they lose 45 percent of their nutrients. As it becomes increasingly apparent that traditional agriculture is unsustainable, growing food in an artificial environment is emerging as a potentially better way forward.
Instead of plowing fields, farmers would produce food in vertically stacked trays. Soil would be replaced by nutrient-rich water, while LED lights would act as the sun to ensure plants photosynthesize. This practice, known as vertical farming, offers many benefits. The indoor environment protects crops from extreme weather events and pests, which means that food grows fast and there’s no need for pesticides. Also, food is grown close to cities, which not only reduces food miles and the related carbon footprint but also provides consumers with fresh and tasty crops.
However, vertical farming faces certain challenges as well. Companies have to constantly innovate to cut production costs and turn a profit, which is vital for the survival of this industry. But entrepreneurs remain optimistic. The global vertical farming market is forecasted to reach $12.77 billion by 2026 and people are becoming increasingly aware that there’s a better way to feed the populGrowing fresh produce in underground areas
High rents and the lack of space have prompted some modern urban farmers to go underground. In London, for instance, a farm called Growing Underground operates from a World War II bomb shelter located 33 metres below Clapham High Street. Owned by Stephen Dring and Richard Ballard, the vertical farming facility produces an array of herb and salad mixes, including parsley, red mustard, coriander, and pea shoots. Fresh produce is then sold through Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Ocado, and several other retailers. Some restaurants have also expressed interest in buying fresh produce, says Ballard.
He also points to many advantages of vertical farming. For instance, his farm delivers 60 harvests a year, compared with around seven that can be achieved in traditional agriculture. Furthermore, Growing Underground is carbon neutral and uses 70 percent less water than typical farms. The only major cost he’s trying to reduce is the electricity that powers the lights. And his ambitions are global. “The UK is the hardest market for growing salad. We’ve got very low prices in the supermarket, so if we can make it work here we can make it work anywhere,” says Ballard.
Underground vertical farming is thriving in other British cities as well. The Liverpool-based social enterprise Farm Urban, for example, provides customers with a weekly box of living salad leaves, edible flowers, and fragrant herbs. Jens Thomas, the company’s technical director, says that the product is pesticide-free and “it’s grown using 90% less water than if it was grown in a field; it’s zero-waste; and it’s hyper-local.” Farm Urban is trying to promote healthy and sustainable living. For each box of greens customers buy, the company delivers a box of greens to a local school. This activity is part of the Greens for Good campaign that aims to reconnect people with locally-grown food.
In New York, the vertical farming business Farm. One is also growing. Its underground farms produce over 500 different herbs, edible flowers, and microgreens year-round, using specialized software to manage multiple operations, such as seed, harvest, and flavor optimization. Founded by Rob Laing, the company supplies fresh produce to various New York-based restaurants, including Atera, Ai Fiori, Benno, and Flora Bar. All deliveries are made by bike and subway. Also, visitors can book a tour of the farm or take a class in hydroponics to learn how to grow vegetables in a soil-free environment.
Transforming a tunnel into a vertical farming operation
Successful vertical farming businesses can also be launched outside of cities. NEXTON, a South Korea-based startup, has built vertical farms in a former highway tunnel, located 190 kilometres south of the capital city of Seoul. Growing salads, leafy greens, and strawberries beneath mountains has many advantages. For one, the 6,500-square-metre facility naturally maintains a temperature that ranges between 10 to 20 degrees Celsius, which translates into lower energy spend for cooling or heating. Furthermore, labor costs are reduced by automating various operations. And as farming is done without pesticide or herbicide, with sensors monitoring humidity and CO2 concentrations, customers receive both healthy and affordable products.
Choi Jae-bin, the CEO of NextOn, also uses non-tech tactics to boost production. For instance, the music of Beethoven and Schubert is played in the 600-metre-long tunnel as Jae-bin believes it will help plants to grow faster. And his plan is to build more farms in urban areas. “Plants easily grow at home, at nearby stores, at hamburger restaurants, or even at metro stations. I think the system to grow crops far away from a city and transporting it will disappear,” he says.
Infarm allows customers to pick produce themselves
Infarm, a Berlin-based startup, has already achieved in several European countries what Jae-bin plans to do in South Korea. The German company builds modular farms that are placed in customer-facing locations, such as schools, grocery stores, restaurants, and shopping malls, enabling customers to pick the produce themselves. Clients can also add more modules if they want to increase the farming output, while the production is monitored and controlled through a cloud-based platform. Essentially, the whole thing functions as a ‘farming as a service’ operation that combines the IoT, Big Data, and cloud analytics.
The company is working with 25 major food retailers in Germany, France, and Switzerland, including Migros, Casino, Intermarche, Auchan, Selgros, and AmazonFresh. Furthermore, it has installed more than 200 in-store farms, as well as 150 farms in distribution centres. And in 2019, Infarm raised $100 million in Series B investment round. The funding will be used to expand research and development, sales, and operation teams. Also, the startup plans to increase its presence in the UK and negotiate partnerships with retailers in the US and Japan.
Vertical farming companies are facing an array of challenges
While the rise of vertical farming companies has been impressive, the industry is facing many challenges and its survival depends on reducing costs and increasing productivity. Take, for example, the fact that deploying even a small, low-tech vertical farm with the 1st generation technology costs around $280,000. On the other hand, the cost of setting up more complex farms with advanced tech can go over $15 million. There are also operating expenses such as lighting and labour that can further pressure companies’ bottom line, making it hard to compete with organic and traditional producers.
So it comes as no surprise that return on investment (ROI) in vertical farming projects is mediocre at best. The current market prices don’t make the situation any easier either. A kilogram of vertically-grown leafy greens is around $33, while organic produce costs $23. To gain a competitive edge, vertical farming startups need to take several measures.
Technology and lower costs are critical for the industry’s sustainability
The first step in ensuring the long-term profitability of vertical farms is transitioning to 2nd generation technology. This means that in addition to automatic control of irrigation, humidity, lighting, CO2, and other relevant parameters, farms should also be capable of autonomously collecting data and optimizing growing processes. They also need to implement cutting-edge machines that will autonomously run planting and weeding operations in the facility, and harvest sort and package produce for shipping. These improvements can enable the second generation of vertical farms to yield 55 times more produce than conventional farms.
Increased automation will also cut labour expenses. Intelligent Growth Solutions, a UK-based agritech business, has reportedly developed an automated farming system that uses modular structures to reduce labour needs by up to 80 percent. Furthermore, LED lighting efficiency is likely to improve by an additional 70 percent by 2030, reducing the energy spend. Boaz Toledano, a business consultant specializing in vertical farming, says that “lighting improvements should reduce OPEX [operating expenses] by 12%, and automation should cut OPEX by a further 20%+”.
Companies can also reduce costs by setting up farming operations underground. This would not only help them avoid the high cost of renting in urban centres but also enable them to enjoy the benefits of having a steady temperature. Underground facilities also offer better protection against natural disasters and can be more easily adapted to producers’ needs.
Innovation is vital to solving the world’s greatest challenges
New technologies are moving the food industry forward. Vertical farming, though still gaining traction, could help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges, such as food shortage. Tasked with feeding the growing global population, today’s agriculture producers still primarily rely on farming practices that hurt the environment. As it becomes clear that traditional farming is unsustainable, innovative entrepreneurs and scientists have come up with a potential solution. Vertical farming is increasingly hailed as an alternative food production method that can provide people with healthy and fresh produce. Thriving in undergrounds, stores, and restaurants around the world, vertical farms are becoming a major industry. But their survival depends on the ability of businesses to lower food production costs and increase productivity.
This article is written by Richard van Hooijdonk
Trendwatcher, futurist, and international keynote speaker Richard van Hooijdonk takes you to an inspiring future that will dramatically change the way we live, work, and do business. All lectures
UNITED KINGDOM: Underground Farm Based In Former Clapham Air Raid Shelter To Open New Site In Suburbs
Growing Underground cultivates micro herbs and salad leaves in a former Second World War air raid shelter, 33 metres beneath the streets of the capital. Using LEDs, hydroponics, data analytics, and 100 percent renewable energy, the 65,000sq farm has been delivering fresh produce to hundreds of restaurants and supermarkets since 2015
Growing Underground cultivate micro herbs and salad leaves in its 65,000sq urban farm located 33m below the streets of London.
It is now pushing for new investors in a bid to expand its operations and revolutionize Britain’s agriculture
REBECCA SPEARE-COLE
The Evening Standard
A massive underground farm in Clapham is set to open a new site on London’s outskirts in a bid to ramp up its sustainable agriculture operations.
Growing Underground cultivates micro herbs and salad leaves in a former Second World War air-raid shelter, 33 metres beneath the streets of the capital.
Using LEDs, hydroponics, data analytics, and 100 percent renewable energy, the 65,000sq farm has been delivering fresh produce to hundreds of restaurants and supermarkets since 2015.
Now, it is looking to open a new site, at an undisclosed location in the city suburbs, to grow produce next to distribution centres that supply supermarkets across the UK.
Growing Underground
The farm’s corresponding push for investors comes at a time when the pandemic has exposed systemic problems and vulnerabilities in global supply chains.
It also chimes with David Attenborough’s recent warning about the critical importance of moving away from exhaustive farming practices to innovative solutions, in his new film A Life on Our Planet.
Growing Underground’s COO Richard Ballard told the Standard: “Any business starting today has got to think about its impact on the environment and society, and that is one of the key drivers for us.”
Growing Underground is farm in WW2 air-raid shelters under the streets of Clapham (Growing Underground)The underground farm has become a pioneer in the UK’s controlled environment agriculture industry (CEA) — a technology-based approach towards food production.
Mr. Ballad said: “Technology around LED lights has really evolved so it has become possible to grow an enormous amount of produce in a small space.“
We also recirculate water with a hydroponic system so we reduce our impact on resources. We don’t use pesticides and in terms of transportation we grow very close to the point of consumption, so we reduce food miles and food waste.
We use recycled products for our substrates and the carpets that hold the seeds, so we are working within a circular economy concept,” he added.
The farm also uses only renewable energy from the provider Good Energy, and Mr. Ballad said they plan to become entirely carbon neutral by 2021.
But what distinguishes Growing Underground from other CEA operations is that they chose a redundant underground space, which does not require them to use up resources on air movement and temperatures like a greenhouse would.
“Being underground we get a consistent temperature all year round so we don’t need a lot of electricity and power for controlling the environment,” he said.
The farm is run on operation shifts seven days a week, with at least seven people working a day, harvesting greens like Thai basil, coriander, pea shoots, rocket, and mustard leaf. The produce is also grown to be very high in nutrition.
Clapham underground is home to 'Growing Underground', the UK’s first underground farm. (Getty Images)
Besides selling the produce and (before the pandemic struck) running tours of the underground farm, Growing Underground has also amassed a huge amount of valuable data over the last five years.
The environment is measured with data points around the farm, which is used to find “the perfect temperature, perfect yield, pH of the water, oxygenation of the water and the spectrum of the lights” for growing a product.
For example, in the last five years, Growing Underground has reduced the number of days for cultivating coriander by 50 percent as well as increasing its yields by 25-30 percent.
"The data has meant we can tailor environment recipes for the products, giving us a very efficient method”.
Mr. Ballad also said that technology and innovation behind CAE is making agriculture a more attractive industry for young people in developed economies, citing research that found the average age of farmers across the world is 60-years-old.
He said: “This is a new trained way of agriculture — looking at data, looking at the science of growing and intensifying yields and getting the most of a small space as opposed to traipsing across fields and pulling things out.”
Now, after five years of building and growing under Clapham North, Mr. Ballard said it is the “right place and the right time to take agriculture to the next level”.
Growing Underground is taking a “two-pronged” approach, Mr. Ballard said.
“We already have our first London site and Clapham is big enough to supply a huge amount to the capital’s foodservice market through places like New Covent Garden Market,” he added.“
But we want to get out there to the wider market as well and we feel that building a second site that supplies into the retail markets and the wider foodservice is where we want to be.”
This new second site, which is still in the final stages of negotiations, will be on the outskirts of London in order to easily supply the rest of the country.
The company is also looking at other sites where they can build fully automated production lines with seeds in at one end and products out the other.
Mr. Ballard said: “We have a few potential sites in our sights and we are just in negotiations at the moment.”
“The plan is to use space close to a current distributor of produce so we are building a proximity farm that feeds directly to that customer.“
And we only need a small space within the current infrastructure of a building to grow produce.”
Upscaling will also mean that the farm can start producing a wider range of crops, that are too costly to grow in CEA at the moment, he said.
For Mr. Ballard, Growing Underground is not just about making a profitable and sustainable method of agriculture but it's about building a business that tunes into a changing world.
Growing Underground is looking to expand
(Photo: Paul Marc Mitchell)
“We are facing massive problems with the global food production system and we have seen empty fresh product shelves in supermarkets,” he said.“
We’ve had Brexit, the pandemic, and many more once-in-a-lifetime extreme weather events than we used to see. In the UK, there have been more storms and extreme weather affecting crops as well as hotter summers.
“And all related to this is climate change. Statistics from the UN saying we have got 40 harvests left due to soil degradation and intensive farming practices.“
So this is a really good time to be looking at alternative sustainable agriculture methods to take us into the middle of this century.“
This probably going to be one of the most disruptive things that has happened in Agriculture since the Agricultural Revolution itself,” he said.
More about: | Growing Underground | Clapham | Controlled Environment Agriculture | farm
UNITED KINGDOM: Liverpool's Underground Urban Farm Producing Greens Boxes For Residents
Since launching its Greens for Good project last year, Farm Urban has been busy delivering boxes and towers to businesses and schools across the city
By Lisa Rand Community Reporter
11 APR 2020
The farm, underneath the Baltic Triangle, produces leafy greens hydroponically in vertical towers
Greens for Good is a project by Farm Urban, based in a tunnel under UTC Life Sciences in the Baltic Triangle
A Liverpool urban farm based in a Victorian tunnel underneath the Baltic Triangle is to provide boxes of leafy greens to Liverpool's isolating residents during the lockdown.
Modern mansion with swimming pool around the corner from Lark Lane
Since launching its Greens for Good project last year, Farm Urban has been busy delivering boxes and towers to businesses and schools across the city.
The social enterprise is based beneath the UTC Life Sciences building on Upper Parliament Street, where it produces leafy greens in vertical towers grown hydroponically under controlled conditions.
Yet, with many of their customers closed during the current crisis, Farm Urban has now "pivoted" its activities to work to keeping Liverpool's residents in good supply of healthy fresh produce during lockdown - and the team have adopted a military-style approach of splitting their team in two for the duration of the pandemic to ensure crop production continues even if team members become unwell.
Managing director of Farm Urban, Dr. Paul Myers told the ECHO: "Before all this, we were mainly focusing on our boxes of greens going into offices, and for every box that we sold into the office that would go towards greens in school kitchens."We also worked with businesses installing large scale systems. and that's now ground to a halt.
Read Entire Article
Old MacDonald Had A Carpark? The Urban Farms Growing In Unlikely Places
Demand in cities for locally sourced food is growing, but space is at a premium. No wonder urban farms are flourishing everywhere from carparks to air-raid shelters
Tue 17 Dec 2019
Growing Underground in Clapham, south London, an urban farm in former air-raid shelters.
Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Demand in cities for locally sourced food is growing, but space is at a premium. No wonder urban farms are flourishing everywhere from carparks to air-raid shelters.
The delivery man arrives back at the farm, his produce drop-offs for the day complete. He’s greeted by ecstatic barking from his three dogs, one of which leaps into his arms, licking his face enthusiastically.
It’s a familiar scene from any farm, anywhere in the world. But this delivery man didn’t drive through muddy fields or down country roads to get here. He freewheeled his bicycle down the blue-striped spiraling entrance of an underground car park.
This is La Caverne, the only subterranean agricultural operation in Paris. It is housed within 9,000 sq m of a disused multistorey parking facility beneath a social housing complex. Since 2017, Jean-Noël Gertz, a thermal engineer and founder of agricultural start-up Cycloponics has used this space to grow mushrooms and endives and deliver them to the organic shops of the city’s inner north.
Cycloponics co-founders Jean-Noël Gertz (left) and Theo Champagnat with some of their subterranean produce. Photograph: Kasia Wandycz/Paris Match via Getty Images
Gertz shows me around the facility, which winds deeper and deeper. One level down, a conveyor belt runs across several numbered parking bays, along which staff separate endives from their gnarly roots and pack them into crates for delivery. Endives, grown entirely without sunlight, are a perfect crop for a below-ground venture like this. Reportedly discovered by a Belgian farmer who tried to hide chicory roots from the taxman in his cellar only to find they grew delicious, tender leaves while they were down there, endives are now the fourth most popular vegetable in France
As we descend even further, Gertz has the straightforward air of someone who thinks running a farm out of an underground car park is a perfectly normal thing to do. He says he doesn’t mind spending most of his time below ground. “We have a lot of space here and we walk a lot, we’re all in very good health,” he says. With limited land, the only idea is to grow food underground and leave the land above for peopleSaffa Riffat, World Society of Sustainable Energy Technologies
Odd as it seems in the heart of the city, this kind of agriculture may soon become widespread as demand for organic, locally produced food grows and car use declines. Underground farms have sprung up in other major capitals such as London and New York.
This particular one runs three storeys deep below a public housing complex in Porte de La Chapelle. Built-in the autocentric 1970s, by the time Cycloponics moved in there were just 40 vehicles left. The area has double the poverty rate of the Paris average, and 30% of residents under 25. Owning a car is simply no longer an option for many people.
Indeed, across Paris, 58% of working households do not own a car. As mayor Anne Hidalgo continues to discourage driving and encourage public transport, the city is looking for new uses for these vast subterranean spaces.
Endives, which grow without light, are the perfect crop for an underground farm.
Photograph: Kasia Wandycz/Paris Match via Getty Images
Since 2016, the town hall’s Pariculteurs programme has offered up spaces like this – as well as rooftops and courtyards – to businesses willing to turn them green. Businesses like Cycloponics can bid for these spaces in a public call. Parisculteurs estimates that by 2022, there will be 1,240 tonnes of fruit, vegetables, mushrooms, herbs and 1.3m plants grown in Paris every year.
Saffa Riffat, the president of the World Society of Sustainable Energy Technologies, says that if the world is going to feed 9 billion people by 2050 agriculture will have to move underground. Riffat is leading a project at Nottingham University on how to convert the 12.5 sq km of abandoned mines in the UK into farms.
Anything that’s local in provenance and sustainable is going to pay a larger and larger role in people’s purchasing decisions Steven Dring, Growing Underground
“With limited land, the only idea is to grow food underground and leave the land above for people,” he says.
He gives the example of China, where vast swathes of land are too contaminated to farm and many people are being sent to the big cities to live.“
People are moving from the countryside to the city so there’s [fewer and fewer] farmers to grow food. So, we have to move the overall infrastructure of growing food from the countryside to cities,” he says.
Clapham, south London, is home to Growing Underground, a massive hydroponic operation in a second world war air-raid shelter. While La Caverne specializes in vegetables that don’t require sunlight, Growing Underground uses LED lighting to grow herbs, microgreens, and salad leaves – something that’s only become possible in recent years with advances in technology, says co-founder Steven Dring. Eight to ten years ago, the lighting available would have made the tunnel too hot to grow anything down there, he says.
An employee carries boxes of micro-green salad from the elevator Growing Underground. The farm’s clients include Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Ocado. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
Growing Underground supplies restaurants and supermarkets with 15 different product lines and has deals with Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Ocado, among others.
“Anything that’s local in provenance and sustainable is just going to pay a larger and larger role in people’s purchasing decisions,” Dring says.
Most of what we eat in Paris is cultivated, raised or produced 600km from where we live Julien Roudil, Le Producteur Local
Back at La Caverne, Gertz takes me to see the mushrooms. Neat rectangular bales are suspended from the ceiling in rows, small clusters of mushrooms sprouting out of each. Steam pours out of overhead pipes and the floor is under a centimeter of water in parts. “We have to recreate autumn in here,” he says.
Unlike the familiar carpark sound of footsteps echoing in concrete, the air here smells like a fusty forest floor. It is thicker, damper and warmer than the crisp early winter day above ground.
Controlling the temperature year-round is one of the major advantages of underground farming.
Suspended bales grow champignons de Paris in artificially autumnal conditions.
Photograph: Kasia Wandycz/Paris Match via Getty Images
The disadvantages, Gertz says, involve frequent water leaks and having to haul the farm’s waste up to ground level to dispose of it – not to mention the Herculean effort required to clean the polluted space to the standards required for organic certification.
If hyperlocal city produce seems like the ultimate 21st century demand, there is actually a surprising precedent for growing mushrooms under the streets of Paris. Throughout the 19th century, farmers grew champignons de Paris – button mushrooms – in the abandoned quarries below the city. Stones taken from these underground caverns gave the Hausmann buildings of the capital their distinctive rose-grey hue, and left behind a perfect environment for the fungus to thrive.
The mushrooms were pushed out of the city that gave them their name with the construction of the Métro at the turn of the 20th century. Now, the popularity of the Métro and the decline in car use is what’s bringing them back.
In 2020, with the opening of Cycloponics’ second Paris location, and alongside their shiitake and oyster brethren, champignons de Paris will be grown within city limits once more, 90 years after they disappeared. La Caverne already produces 100-200kg of mushrooms a day, selling to places like Le Producteur Local, an organic supermarket and non-profit cooperative of 45 producers that stocks meat, cheese and vegetables all grown within 150km.
A rooftop farm in Paris run by Agripolis, an urban farming company. Photograph: Agripolis
“You have to realise that most of what we eat in Paris is cultivated, raised or produced 600km from where we live,” says director Julien Roudil, pointing out that much of what a Parisian household regularly consumes is in fact readily available within just 60km.
Although he’s a champion of local produce, Roudil says Paris will probably never be able to feed itself entirely, no matter how many rooftops or carparks are converted into farms. The popularity of locally grown produce already outstrips the local land available for farming, he says, and there’s not enough space available in Paris to supplement that at a reasonable price.
Dring is more optimistic about the prospects of greater London becoming self-sufficient, whether by growing on rooftops, on barges on the Thames or in bunkers. “All these different technologies will be complementary to each other. I think London will certainly be sufficient within 100 miles,” he says
London’s Urban Farms Move Underground
As London-born architect Carolyn Steel points out in her book Hungry City, “The relationship between food and cities is endlessly complex, but at one level it is utterly simple. Without farmers and farming, cities would not exist.”
November 04, 2019
These farmers hope to solve a major problem
of urban food production: space.
Photography courtesy Growing Underground
As London-born architect Carolyn Steel points out in her book Hungry City, “The relationship between food and cities is endlessly complex, but at one level it is utterly simple. Without farmers and farming, cities would not exist.”
In an overcrowded city like London, with its housing shortages and box-flat living, urban farmers are facing an ever-increasing challenge of where to grow their produce; how to withstand the weather and the city’s pollution, and in ways that utilize any and all available space.
When Richard Ballard was completing his degree in film studies, he thought it would lead toward a film career. Instead, it led him down a rabbit hole—or rather, a tunnel. In 2015, Ballard, alongside business partner Steven Dring, founded Growing Underground—the self-described first subterranean urban farm in the world—in an old Second World War bomb shelter below London’s Northern line. Ballard learned about these abandoned tunnels during his studies, and he began to wonder why, in a city desperate for space, no one was making better use of them.
Growing Underground uses the natural insulation of underground tunnels, 100-percent renewable energy to power its LED grow lights and a recycling hydroponic system. The farm produces 1,200 packs of pesticide-free micro-cresses daily, and it looks to solve one of the major concerns of urban food production: space. Currently, the farm uses only 20 percent of the historic tunnels; the small team of 25 make expert use of the 520 square meters. There are plans to expand next year, thanks to the success of operations and additional funding.
Despite their growth mindset, (“Everyday is a school day here,” Ballard says during a recent tour), nothing about Growing Underground’s operation is accidental. Visiting the tunnels requires a clinical sterilization process: Jewelry must be removed. Hairnets, boots and a good hand scrub are required before stepping into the pink-hued, temperature-controlled cave. The wafting smell of radish surrounds the first batch of purple sprouts, precisely stacked in floor-to-ceiling shelves. Other varieties include coriander, garlic chives, sunflower shoots, fennel and more. Seeds are propagated in a separate area before cycling through the corridor’s lights until they are ready to be harvested. For some plants, such as pea shoots, this six-day cycle allows for approximately 60 harvests per year—ten times more than most traditional methods.
Growing Underground’s unusual approach has helped lead the way in reimagining what urban farming looks like, creating room for newcomers such as Harvest London, a company using controlled-environment technologies and vertical gardening to create bespoke “climate recipes.” They hope to dissuade chefs from flying in produce by mimicking the environment locally without compromising on flavor; a timely endeavor given the potential risk to food sourcing in a post-Brexit world.
Growing Underground hosts tours for customers and corporations alike, hoping to inspire the possibility of sustainable practices to all who visit.
VIDEO: Growing Underground
Best job title EVER! Food Futureologist Morgaine Gaye on the importance of technology and farms like ours for the future of food. With our co-founder Richard and Ben Thompson for BBC Breakfast
Growing Underground@GrownUnder
Best job title EVER! Food Futureologist Morgaine Gaye on the importance of technology and farms like ours for the future of food. With our co-founder Richard and Ben Thompson for BBC Breakfast @BBCBreaking @BBCBreaking @BBCWorld
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The Future of The Agriculture Industry Is Vertical Farming
It’s only a subtle whiff in the air that indicates something might be hidden beneath the surface. But more than 100 ft below a nondescript building in south London’s district of Clapham, vegetables and herbs are growing in former raid shelters.
Vertical farming uses LED lights and nutrient-infused water to create optimal growing conditions for plants. Credit: Jeff Gilbert
23 July 2019
It’s only a subtle whiff in the air that indicates something might be hidden beneath the surface. But more than 100 ft below a nondescript building in south London’s district of Clapham, vegetables and herbs are growing in former raid shelters.
“You will hear trains rumbling four storeys above us, that's the Northern line,” says Steven Dring, co-founder of Growing Underground, a vertical farming start-up.
The shelters, built between 1939 and 1942 in tunnels under one of London’s busiest train lines, became a place of refuge for 8,000 people fleeing the Luftwaffe aircraft over the skies of London during the Battle of Britain.
Nearly a century later, the underground space has seen a radical transformation, as a pinkish hue now floods the tunnels lined with trays growing the garden-variety of produce: pea shoots, red mustard, fennel, radishes, rocket leaves, coriander, baby leaves and more.
For Growing Underground, so-called vertical farming promises to change the way food is produced through facilities that optimise vegetable growth and bring production within touching distance of town centres.
The industry itself is expected to be worth more than $11bn in just over six years, and has seen a commitment in the UK from the government, which is preparing to invest $24.8m through its Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund in innovative projects that boost agricultural productivity at a time when traditional farming is facing an uphill battle.
The average cost per acre of agricultural land has jumped almost 5,000pc from 1966 to $9,800 in 2017, while the amount of land available for farming has declined, as almost 450,000 hectares were lost to urban developments last decade.
“It's efficiency, this is how we need to grow,” Dring says. “It's about controlling that environment forensically to give the plants exactly what they want all the way through their life.”
To grow its produce, the Clapham-based company first sows seeds into a recycled piece of carpet that acts as a substrate for germination to take place in the dark.
Once the seeds have started to spring to life, they are incubated in vertically stacked trays, which are exposed to LED lights dialled into the exact brightness needed by the plants, and a carefully-crafted infusion to optimise growth, taste and yield.
“All the nutritional composition you would have in soil we put into water through a nutrient mix that is exactly what's required by the plants,” Dring says.
Credit: Jeff Gilbert
The company has found success with its products, becoming a key supplier to supermarket giants such as Waitrose, Whole Foods and Marks and Spencer, and are far from the only ones taking advantage of this new way of producing food, as a host of companies have started to experiment with vertical farming - all while swooning investors.
AeroFarms, a New Jersey-based vertical farming company, raised $100m at the start of the month in a funding round led by the investment vehicle of IKEA-owner, Ingka Group. It’s a move that brings the firm a step closer to “unicorn” status with a post-funding valuation of $500m, and will help it boost the production of its pesticide-free produce.
Meanwhile online food retailer Ocado, which announced an almost $1bn tie-up with Marks and Spencer earlier this year around its delivery business, declared its intention to step into vertical farming after revealing a $21m investment in the space last month, including in Scunthorpe-based Jones Food Company, operator of Europe’s largest indoor farm.
At the time, Tim Steiner, chief executive of Ocado, said that he hoped locally-grown herbs and vegetables could one day be delivered “to a customer’s kitchen within an hour of it being picked”.
But the influx of money into vertical farming didn’t always seem likely. According to Dring, the agriculture sector was “under-optimised” just a decade ago, with little attention directed towards the disruptive potential of technology.
Some keen-eyed investors caught a glimpse of potential early on. Take Graham Ramsbottom, chief executive of Wheatsheaf, the agricultural investment arm of the centuries-old Grosvenor Estate, headed by the Duke of Westminster.
Set up in 2012, Wheatsheaf took an early bet on Aerofarms when its first facility was “in a disused disco”. Ramsbottom, who has been involved in the agriculture industry for more than 30 years, said he saw little change in the way food was produced in that time, but found the data-led, precision approach on offer from vertical farming to be an interesting road forward.
“We grow food in open environments that have huge variability around climate,” he says. “If you take one acre of land from one side of the field to the other, you can have huge variation in terms of shading, temperature, type of soil, pest damage.”
The shift away from traditional agriculture has indeed picked up pace, but some criticism has been levelled at vertical farming, with concerns about the amount of energy needed to maintain facilities that are essentially growing plants 24/7.
“There's no doubt the energy equation is one of the big calculations that anyone looking to set up a facility like this does need to do at the outset,” says Belinda Clarke, director of trade body Agri-Tech East. Ramsbottom also claimed that he was “cognizant” of the issue before investing.
The growth of lettuce in a vertical farm, for example, requires 3,500kWh a year of energy for each square metre it is grown in due to the demands of artificial lighting, versus the 250kWh of energy needed to grow lettuce in a greenhouse.
As Clarke points out, managing these kinds of facilities “does require a degree of sophistication” that ensures management of the appropriate conditions, delivery of water, and correct humidity, all while keeping pests and diseases out.
But there could be workarounds to the energy conundrum. Prioritising the use of low-energy LED lights and recycling water can cut costs, while more innovative solutions can support the industry too. Clarke points to a facility run by Japanese tech giant Fujitsu, which uses “spare heat” to warm up a vertical farming system producing lettuce.
Another issue at hand is the high capital input cost involved in the initial setup of a facility, which is why the Agri-Tech East director thinks vertical farms need to be deployed in an “appropriate” way.
For some farmers eyeing up the opportunities in vertical farming for crops like wheat, potatoes or sugar beet, the benefits may not stack up, while for others in more challenging climates, the business case is evident.
“If you're in an environment which is very environmentally inhospitable, for example, or in a disaster recovery zone or something like that, then there is a real opportunity to augment the food production,” Clarke says.
The case for vertical farming has gone beyond just business. According to the United Nations, the world population is expected to reach 9.7bn by 2050, and the carbon intensive demands of current agricultural processes will be unsustainable if climate change is to be tackled.
“It's getting really hard to deny climate change [and] there’s going to be another India and China effectively on the planet by 2050,”says Dring.
Growing Underground has seen a “significant focus” from Asia and the Middle East, regions which are moving “to protect their food security and supply chains” as swelling middle-class populations will demand more and better quality produce.
It’s one reason why vertical farming is likely to stick around, but ultimately, any reason to produce food more effectively is one to grab a hold of.
“It's really doing what plants have always done,” says Ramsbottom, “in an environment where you can truly understand it.”
These London Vegetables Can Survive A Bomb Blast
Richard Ballard and Steven Dring have been growing vegetables and micro-herbs that can survive a bomb blast.
That’s because these two urban farmer-founders have been using a Second World War air-raid shelter as their first controlled environment agriculture site for their London-based agtech startup Growing Underground.
The pair first rented this space from Transport for London back in March 2015. For the last few months, they have been offering “Founder Tours” of their hydroponics-grown produce to a curious mix of scientists, reporters, agri-tourists, investors, politicians, environmentalists, film scouts and celebrity chefs eager to graze on sprigs of wasabi or pea-shoots..
Dring wastes little time in setting the scene: “Five-inch steel plate on the roof, designed to take a direct hit from a 500-pound German bomb,” he explains tersely. “The walls are 6 feet thick in places. Double helix staircases. Lift shaft down the center. Goes down 130 feet. By the time you get downstairs, you’ve got 70,000 square feet of space.”
What was all this space doing disused in the heart of South London?
AgFunderNews freelance reporter Richard at Growing Underground
It’s one of many historical quirks relating to the world’s first underground passenger railway, known to Londoners as the Tube. The interior looks like vaulted Tube tunnels. Which is because this was one of eight bomb shelters, designed to hold up to 8,000 people each, that were built to be converted, in peacetime, to a second and faster Northern Line. The aim was to reduce crowds and commuter times. Yet in post-war Britain, these eight shelters were never linked up (a perhaps irritating fact for today’s rush hour commuters on the Northern Line.) Instead, it was used for static purposes throughout the Cold War, including government document storage, before falling into disuse.
The elevator trundles downwards. By farm level, you still hear the sounds of the Northern Line; its trains rumbling along two storeys above.
Test Tube For the Future of Farming
Dring then throws on a white doctor’s coat over his tweed jacket. He dons a blue hairnet and a pair of wellington boots before washing his hands. It is as though he were about to step into an operating theater. Working down here is about science and the future of farming far more than historical posterity when it comes down to it, he says as we step inside the farm.
The tunnels glow pink, with layers of hydroponic vegetable beds growing under the Finnish firm Valoya’s wide spectrum LED growing lights. Scientists from the University of Cambridge, led by Dr Ruchi Choudhary, have set up sensors to track and analyse growth rates under variable conditions.
“We have been monitoring environmental conditions for the past three years, to identify optimal growing conditions, while minimising resource use,” says Melanie Jans-Singh, a member of the research team.
The data generated are bound for the Alan Turing Institute for data crunching.
The founders expect the findings from these data will help the Growing Underground team to simulate conditions in a widening variety of underground conditions with a broadening range of herbs and vegetables.
“We know the environmental recipe for about 100 products. We’ve grown micro-herbs, baby leaf salads, pea shoots. We’re starting trials on whole head lettuce,” says Dring. According to company estimates, circa 700 kg of fresh produce is delivered per week currently. This is projected to rise to over 4200 kg at full capacity across a mix of products.
To meet and ultimately surpass these targets, the founders say plans are now afoot to expand into the remaining space at their Clapham site in South London. (Much of it is still empty and sublet occasionally for movie sets.) But they are planning to expand to at least three other underground sites nationally. “There are tens of millions of square meters of underground space that we have been offered in the UK, and out of that we have identified the relevant sites,” he says.
What about logistics? Aside from being closer to market, Dring, who has a background in logistics, has already brokered partnerships with major UK retailers, including Marks and Spencer, Waitrose, Ocado, farm-to-consumer eGrocer Farm Drop, Planet Organic, and specific high-end restaurants who they supply via New Covent Garden, a fresh produce hub. “We are projected to penetrate that to a level that would require us to have four farms in the UK.”
Soil degradation, population growth, further automation and climate change will all play into the hands of underground farming globally, the founders claim, offering year-round and locally sourced fresh produce with low energy inputs.
In the UK context, one groundbreaking study by PWC from 2014 estimated that up to 95% of UK supermarket Asda’s fresh produce supply chain is at risk from climate change. Already, hotter, less predictable seasons have disrupted supplies of strawberries and lettuces in the UK in recent years. Underground, seasonal temperature fluctuations are largely taken out of the equation, meaning there could be many other climate-adapting countries where subterranean farming may fill a niche in the not too distant future. “The conversations we’re having include China, the Middle East, India, South Korea, the United States. We’re at that point of making sure we are taking advantage of global opportunities,” says Dring, declining to comment more specifically on vague references to joint ventures in the offing.
Funding in an Age of Plenty
So far, Growing Underground, with its team of twenty-two, has raised £2.7 million through crowdfunding platform Crowdcube, and a slice of corporate investment from G’s Global, a large scale vegetable producer and distributor.
Recent funding rounds for similar-minded companies provide cause for hope for this team and their focus on indoor controlled environment farming. In 2017, indoor vertical farming company Plenty managed to raise $200 million of Series B funding, led by Softbank’s Vision Fund. Similarly, in December 2018, Bowery Farming, the New York-based indoor farming group, secured a $90 million Series B round, led by Google’s venture arm GV.
Plenty and Bowery grow produce in vertically-stacked warehouses. Cambridge researcher Jans-Singh says the Growing Underground case study is a slightly different proposition. “By being underground,” she writes, “the boundary temperatures of the greenhouse are more stable year-round, thus reducing the need for heating and cooling, and the farm can function without heating in winter, by simply reusing the waste heat of the lighting.”
Even so, could the breakthroughs of companies like Plenty and Bowery be misleading beacons of hope from across the Atlantic? After all, the London scene is another fundraising environment. If London’s political and media scene are anything to go by, things are looking up. Growing Underground has received warm words of support from politicians like London Mayor Sadiq Khan and his predecessor Boris Johnson. They’ve even secured high profile advice from celebrity chef Michel Roux Jr, an early convert. But as they open their Series A funding round soon, it still remains to be seen if their political and media sparkle translates into investors venturing underground with similar conviction that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Nevertheless, funding or no funding, Dring reckons his firm is in hot pursuit of his deeper-pocketed American rivals: “We’ve taken a different approach to our peers in the US. We’ve proven the profitability of the model, developed then tested the technology, optimised the farm through data capture and analysis, stressed the logistics, built a solid customer base, and now it’s time to rapidly scale”.
Image: Martin Cervenansky
Video: Underground Farming Could Transform The Way Your Coriander, Watercress And Rocket Is Grown
March 22, 2019
KEY POINTS
In London one farm is using LED technology and hydroponic systems to produce greens 33-meters below the surface.
Growing Underground has been collaborating with the University of Cambridge’s Energy Efficient Cities Initiative to analyze a range of data from its facility.
While we may associate farming with sunshine, fresh air and pretty patches of land, innovation and technology are beginning to change where food is grown.
In London, for instance, one farm is using LED technology and hydroponic systems to produce greens 33-meters below the surface. The company, aptly named Growing Underground, says its process uses 70 percent less water than a traditional, “open-field farming.”
Hydroponics, as the Royal Horticultural Society puts it, relates to “the science of growing plants without using soil, by feeding them on mineral nutrient salts dissolved in water.”
With a focus on reducing food miles, Growing Underground says its produce – which includes mustard leaves, pea shoots and coriander – can be delivered within four hours of picking and packaging.
For several years now, Growing Underground has been collaborating with the University of Cambridge’s Energy Efficient Cities Initiative to analyze a range of data.
“We automatically log temperature and humidity but also manually record crop growth,” Melanie Jans-Singh, a PhD student at Cambridge, told CNBC’s Sustainable Energy.
“We try to analyze all these relationships between energy, crop growth and environmental conditions in order to be able to grow plants as best as possible with a minimal amount of energy,” Jans-Singh added.
The utilization of underused areas of urban space – Growing Underground’s site is located in a former air raid shelter – is set to play an increasingly important role in the way people grow crops.
“The Growing Underground farm is a very good example where a derelict space has been put to good use,” Ruchi Choudhary, reader in architectural engineering at Cambridge, told CNBC.
This idea, Choudhary explained, could be pushed further by tapping into environments that were rich in waste heat and carbon dioxide, such as hospitals and school buildings.
Video: London Farm Experiments With Growing Underground
By CBS
March 19, 2019
LONDON (CBS) Farmers in London are taking their crops from tunnels to tables. The underground technique is changing the way city consumers get their greens.
One-hundred below London's busy streets there are rows of green farmland like you've never seen before.
''Leafy greens are possible, microgreens, heads of lettuce,' said Richard Ballard, the founder of Growing Underground.
The project relies on a World War II air raid shelter to hold its tasty harvest. The first of its kind, this farm provides an innovative alternative for urban agriculture by growing herbs like parsley, chives, and cilantro.
Unlike traditional farms, the sun is replaced with LED lighting. The temperature is also carefully controlled, allowing crops to grow year-round. Farms based in cities have a smaller carbon footprint.
'Here we can harvest, we can deliver to our customers. Some of them very, very close by, in just a few hours," said Eric Nynkson, a chef at the restaurant Esca. It's one stop on their delivery route -- located just above the farm.
Nynkson uses the herbs in his signature dishes. ''It makes it very good looking and presentable," he said.
The crop concept surprises custormers like Steven Watson.
Steven Watson: 'Really? I didn't know that. I mean it tastes amazing. It tastes really good.
Reporter Gwen Baumgardner: You can't tell the difference?
Steven Watson: No, no different, really good, really fresh.
Growing underground's success has encouraged other cities, like New York, to start planting similar farms.
''There's a vast amount of underground space all over the world," Ballard said.
Meaning, the next farm could soon be growing right under your feet.
Farmers hope to expand their underground crops from herbs to full sized vegetables. The founders of Growing Underground say they don't want to replace traditional farming, just provide more alternatives for cities.
Vegetables Are Being Grown Underneath London in a WWII Bunker
February 19, 2019
News Editor, LIVEKINDLY | New York City | Contactable via: kat@livekindly.co
There is a thriving subterranean farm powered by renewable energy in an old World War II bunker in South London, 108 feet below the pavement.
The farm is completely temperature-controlled, allowing for Growing Underground to hand-deliver fresh microgreens such as pea shoots, red amaranth, fennel, and mustard leaves to local restaurants and retailers year-round. Seeds are sown on upcycled carpet mats and grow with the help of pink LED lights and a hydroponic system that uses 70 percent less water than traditional farms.
Being based in London allows Growing Underground to reduce the need to import from farms miles away, helping local businesses reduce their carbon footprint.
Are Hydroponic Farms The Future?
Co-founder Richard Ballard believes that the company’s methods could help sustain the future of farming. He spoke on the subject at a TEDx Talk in Clapham last June and regularly co-hosts public tours of the underground farm.
Hydroponic farms are scalable, allowing for versatile use by businesses and institutions. In Bristol, Suncraft, a vegan restaurant from the team behind The Gallimaufry, serves fresh greens from the on-site hydroponic farm.
Last May, an elementary school in New Jersey began Princeton University’s Vertical Farming Project, where students from preschool through fifth grade get hands-on experience. The organic produce is then used for meals in the school’s cafeteria.
On a larger scale, Dubai is building the world’s largest hydroponic farm that will grow the equivalent of produce from 900 acres of farmland in a $40 million 130,000-square foot facility. It’s expected that the farm will be capable of producing 5.3 tons of leafy greens daily upon its completion later this year. The produce will be served on airlines and in airports throughout the city.
Las Vegas-based vertical farming company Oasis Biotech also aims to bring sustainable produce to a desert city. Based in an old industrial property, the hydroponic farm aims to grow one million pounds of produce annually that uses 90 percent less water than field crops.
Growing Underground’s greens are available at London retailers such as Whole Foods Market, Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Ocado, and Planet Organic. Its vegetables are also served at restaurants throughout the city.