“The Future of Agriculture”: Goochland Tech Students Get New Vertical Farms While Demand Grows At Area Food Banks

GOOCHLAND COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) — Farm to table has a whole new meaning.

“It’s literally grown, sometimes even harvested and consumed in the same room,” said Meredith Thomas with Babylon Micro-Farms. 

Vertical Farming is one of the fastest growing trends in food production. Some call it the future of agriculture. Now, students at Goochland Tech will get the chance to learn all about it while their local community reaps the benefits. 

In a new partnership between GoochlandCares and Goochland Tech, two new vertical farms have been installed at the high school. According to Babylon Micro-farms, the Charlottesville company who made the farms and installed them in early August, “a single micro-farm takes up only 15 square feet but has the productive capacity around 2,000 square feet.”

The farms are active year-round and all aspects of farming are controlled by a cell phone app. 

“It’s a hydroponic farm designed to take the green thumb out of growing,” Thomas said.

She added this kind of farming is more environmentally sustainable — it uses no soil, no pesticides and roughly 90 percent less water.

“The nutrients and PH are controlled by sensors that check the water every single morning, and add nutrients, or PH balancing solution, or even water,” Thomas said.

Students will be taught about vertical farming while also supplying food to the pantry at GoochlandCares, which distributes food to neighbors in need.

“The pantry will receive both nutritious, locally grown fresh produce year-round and dishes prepared by the students with the harvests from the farms,” said Janet Matthews with Babylon Micro-Farms.

8News has witnessed long lines outside of food banks in our area for months. In Chesterfield on Friday, cars filled two lanes for over half a mile leading up to the Chesterfield Food Bank. That kind of backup has been seen on Ironbridge Road every weekend for the past several months. 

Before COVID-19 spread around the world, the Chesterfield Food Bank was helping anywhere from 8,000 to 12,000 people a month. Now, they say nearly 30,000 people utilize the food bank’s distribution programs each month — with 200 to 400 volunteers offering their help every week.

Chesterfield Food Bank averaging a million meals per month during the pandemic, triples in donations

“The recent COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the weak links in our country’s food distribution system, affecting everyone especially those who are most vulnerable. We hope that this partnership will be a model for many other food pantries to have a reliable in-house resource to provide fresh food,” said Sally Graham, Executive Director of Goochland Cares.

On Wednesday, the food pantry’s manager, Terri Ebright, said her team is “ecstatic” about the food that will be coming in. She said the demand for food has also grown at her pantry during the pandemic. “Our clients are relying on us even more.”

Goochland Tech Culinary Arts instructor David Booth said the new farms are a big deal for students.

“Right now I’ve got five different lettuces in there that I know half my students have never seen or tasted before,” he said. “It’s one of those things you don’t even really have to design a lesson plan around,”

“I just see it as a boundless opportunity. I really do,” Booth said.

You can learn more about how vertical farming works here.

By Alex Thorson

Posted: Sep 16, 2020 / 09:01 PM EDT - Updated: Sep 16, 2020 / 09:19 PM EDT

Virginia Researchers Are Studying ‘The Sound of Plants Dancing’ To Better The Future of Agriculture

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By Katherine Hafner

The Virginian-Pilot  9/7/2020

What Do Dancing Plants Sound Like?

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© Virginia Tech/The Virginian-Pilot/TNS Some of the pepper plants being studied by researchers at Virginia Tech. The researchers record the plants' long-term movements — sped up into \"dances\" — then convert those patterns into sound as a way to evaluate plant health based on responses to environmental conditions.

It seems like the start of a philosophical essay question. But researchers at Virginia Tech think the answer could be one tool wielded in the future of agriculture in the commonwealth and beyond.

Using experimental technology, the scientists are trying to figure out how the sonification of plant movements could be used to assess plant health and aid farmers who need to monitor their greens at an industrial scale.

They are focused on indoor or so-called controlled-environment agriculture. Think greenhouses with LED lights and plants in hydroponic systems, using liquid nutrient solutions instead of soil.

“When you grow a plant inside a building, you really control ... introducing any insects or pathogens, minimizing the use of pesticides” and the like, said Bingyu Zhao, the lead researcher and associate professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences. “But you can still have disease problems or sometimes they could have environmental stress.”

Maybe the temperature’s too high, he said, or the nitrogen levels are off. “It’s all not good for the plant growth.”

Imagine a grower using an indoor facility with dozens of rows of plants. Unlike in a small backyard garden, they can’t continuously check on every individual plant to monitor the effects of all those variables.

So Zhao got the idea to set up cameras to do it instead, using a small number of pepper plants for observation.

The high-resolution cameras capture the continuous movements of the plants. Over times, patterns develop.

These “micro movements” are mostly naked to the human eye, Zhao said. But they become apparent when sped up in time-lapse videos.

The even more unconventional part comes next.

The researchers take the data they’ve collected on plant movements and convert it into sound in a process called sonification.

In that way, a human could hear patterns present among the plants. The idea is to eventually be able to link certain sounds to indicators that a plant needs better light, for example.

Computers, analyzing the data at a large scale, could learn “what is a good sound and what is a bad sound,” Zhao said.

He works with professors across other disciplines in engineering and in the School of Performing Arts to bring together the different elements.

The plant movement project is just one part of the university’s new statewide SmartFarm Innovation Network, said Susan Duncan, associate director of the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station.

Two years ago, the school brought together stakeholders in the agriculture and food processing fields from around Virginia to hear their concerns and interests, she said.

One big takeaway: technological innovation was on everyone’s mind. In order to maintain a future workforce and catch up with evolving needs, they needed to think outside traditional agricultural techniques, she said.

So the decentralized network was born, consisting of 11 off-campus research centers including the Hampton Roads Agricultural Research And Extension Center in Virginia Beach. Though the center in our region isn’t involved in the “dancing plants” project, it has plenty of its own areas of study, including water quality and boxwood blight disease.

There are more than 100 research projects connected to the network delving into the future of agriculture.

With growing plants indoors, for example, “you can’t just say, ’I’m going to put this LED light over my plant and see how it goes,’” Duncan said. “There’s a science behind it.”

In the operating room, surgeons often use sound to be able to keep track of routine measurements such as blood pressure while performing surgery, Duncan said.

Applying that to plants, she said, is “how they can help guide us to make decisions for them.”

“It’s kind of a cool concept. If they start ’screaming,’ whatever that sounds like, we can pay attention.”

©2020 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.)

Visit The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) at pilotonline.com

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“If We Really Want To Make A Change, We Should Intensively Invest In Innovation and Technique In Africa”

Christine Zimmerman Discusses Vertical Farming Trends

Vertical farming is a rapidly growing industry, and there are many challenges and opportunities. In this interview with Christine Zimmermann-Loessl, Chairwoman at the Association for Vertical Farming, she discusses the latest trends and developments within the vertical farming sector worldwide.

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What are the latest trends within vertical farming?

Zimmermann-Loessl stated that there is a very clear trend in automation and fully automated systems. Especially in the USA, Japan, and Europe. “The main trend here is that we see robotics and AI machine learning that will even play a bigger role than it does now. Another trend is scaling, as people start to understand the necessity of vertical farming. I still hear from the majority of greenhouse growers, to have a fully automated greenhouse, the vertical farmers say: no we can be more efficient and it can be much more controlled. However, there are so many input factors that cannot be perfectly controlled in a greenhouse. In order to have reliable minimal resources and yield, vertical farming is a better solution.”

Zimmermann stated that once the energy problem issue is solved, they can connect the issue with solar and teach students about it in the AVF demonstration center. Using solar is possible and there are the costs to have the proof of concept.

Have you seen positive developments in vertical farming regarding COVID-19?

As there are strict hygiene standards, higher than in any other farm, there is a very clean environment. “We are beyond ahead COVID-19 measurements and this needs to be communicated even better.” According to Zimmermann, a great advantage of indoor farming the high hygiene standards. Working with a hygiene room quality and improving these standards. “We have seen a lot of growth, also at the AVF as we gained 11 members. Start-ups have the ambition to grow out of that start-up phase.”

She also notes that vertical farming has had more understanding of politics and politicians, but also on a national- and municipal level. They understand that there is a need to secure the future, being less dependent on external factors. “We had to communicate all these advantages even better. The majority doesn’t know them yet and we have to improve that”, she adds.

What is the quickest growing country in terms of vertical farming techniques?

“That’s a tough question. I think that in Germany really took off in the past two years. We have Fraunhofer Institute in Aachen with two brand new systems that haven’t been on the market before with that high level of innovation. The Orbiplant, from Fraunhofer, shows how economical VF can be today. It is built from material on the market for automation or transport systems highly automated and allows cheap production prices. Another company, Lite+Fog, where I see innovation at a level of experience with a new system design and water-saving fog for the roots instead of hydroponics.

Zimmermann continues that Japanese farming company Spread, its Techno farm, is really the state of the art. It’s a proven operation and they produce for the market. “However, Orbiplant and Lite+Fog are still in a demo size compared to the commercial farms of SPREAD and the fully on-demand farms now. We have a differentiation to make between these three.”

And in terms of newly constructed farms?

"I have visited Farminova, Turkey, and it’s very interesting to see how in such an agricultural country a company takes on the innovative food business. Cantek Turkey, the owner Hakan Karaca decided to go into vertical farming and built a system in one of his warehouses, near Antalya, to bring the topic forward. They see the need for sustainability and innovation.” Zimmermann said that Italy is also becoming an interesting country for vertical farming. Companies such as Planet Farms and Ono Exponential Farms that have fully automated new constructions. “People need to build up their trust in technology and the produce from it. In Europe, they have a prejudice against artificial environment by technology, but in Asian countries such as Japan and Singapore they don’t. They’re much more open to it, also in the new farming technology because it offers safe, fresh, local products. They see the shrinking traditional farming in their countries and growing imports."

Are we at a maturity stage in vertical farming yet?

“Not at all. When we started we were in an infant stage. Now we are at age 12 to 14. From an age perspective, we are not mature enough yet. It would be really good to have official government backing. Not just money-wise, but also policy-wise. We want more agriculture sustainable methods. One of these is indoor vertical farming. Once that statement comes, it would help VF implementation a lot.”

Why do you think that governments haven’t done that yet?

“It’s all about the necessity. ‘Why do we need it? We have greenhouses. We have industrial agriculture. Now, with severe droughts, even in Europe, more politicians see the need. I am part of the dialog forum for the 'Future of Agriculture', where all major stakeholders gather in Berlin twice a year. I get to meet all the associations from traditional farming and few of them have heard of vertical farming. Not to talk about embracing, saying it could be a part of agriculture production. However, it’s still a long way to go for communication, marketing, and raising awareness.

"We need more innovation- and vertical farming centers around the cities and rural areas to enable our hands-on learning and demonstration. If we do that, farmers will see it and understand it better. We start with the farmers. More young people are coming in the industry. We will rely on vertical farming systems to maintain reliable food production. It will play a major role if we want to protect the ecosystem when we have over 10 billion people on this planet.”

What would you address as the most frequent struggles within the industry?

“Investment is still a major struggle. Either banks don’t understand the business model of high-tech farms, because they have only know traditional agriculture business models. Or investors don’t have a sufficient understanding of vertical farming. They want a quick ROI and don’t know that they need patience. So, in order to find the right investor and money, it’s not that easy. If you want to scale, you have to have a proof of concept. But more money is needed to go to that next level.

"It ‘seems easier’ in the USA and Asia. Looking at the UAE, which is taking off with vertical farming, partially because the government is supporting it now too. Their food supply chain is in the hand of a couple of people and they were used to importing all food. It takes time to build a new food chain and trust in new suppliers."

In what underdeveloped countries do you see the most potential for vertical farming?

“Absolutely, we just founded our regional chapter by our team. We cannot serve the interest in India anymore, so we decided to have a local team there. It’s taking off like crazy. Now, we have two members in Africa and we get at least two requests per week. In South Africa, it can be seen that there’s a lot of equipment development. Which gives them the highest level of technology compared to the rest of Africa.

"We see a lot of the need to train farmers and really implement vertical farming in Africa. We just received new proposals from Cameroon to train 1200 farmers on vertical farming in the Northwest. So far, our partner in Cameroon has built the center already and we only need the equipment yet and training can start. It’s great to see what they do. If we really want to make a change, we should intensively invest in innovation and technology in Africa. We can grow forest there, instead of turning more land into agriculture and reduce CO2 even more. They are willing to do that and know what they need. It’s not up to us to tell them what they do. If AVF would have the financial power, we’d be there tomorrow to help them."

Where do you see the most positive reactions towards vertical farming? 

"In Asia, we can find mature markets, especially in Singapore and Japan. People are willing to buy and understand the concept. China is an important market from a global perspective. A lot of projects in vertical farming are happening there, but the government policy to protect traditional agriculture has such a big importance for the government. Therefore, it’s very tricky to launch vertical farming in the right way. They have megacities and over 1.3 bln people so the demand is huge. But, they only have 12% of land and so there are many opportunities for farming. However, there’s a huge challenge for vertical farming as it’s very hard to implement it on a bigger scale." 

For more information:
Association for Vertical Farming
Christine Zimmermann-Loessl, Chairwoman
czl@vertical-farming.net 
www.vertical-farming.net 

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Publication date: Wed 26 Aug 2020
Author: Rebekka Boekhout
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