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Vertical Farming: On The Up
The cost of energy – financially and environmentally – remains the greatest challenge to scaling up vertical farming. Even using off-peak energy, and with ever more efficient LEDs coming on the market, the energy requirements are high
Ramona Andrews Author
24th April 2019
Standing 12 metres high and with 17 stacked levels of indoor growing space, lit with LEDs in a mixture of red, white and blues – is this really the future of farming?
Lincolnshire-based Jones Food Company’s (JFC) vertical farming system is capable of producing over 400 tonnes of baby leaf salad a year in about 5,000 square metres of indoor space. While there has been development in growing berries, tomatoes and other fruiting plants through these systems, the technology is not yet there to make these crops scalable and JFC is concentrating efforts on baby leaf and herbs. As co-founder Paul Challinor explains, the intention is to make the business commercial from the beginning “rather than having a trial shipping container to look at how it could develop”.
Other city hydroponic growers, such as New York’s Sky Vegetables, a rooftop farm in The Bronx and Growing Underground, a hydroponic farm located 33 metres below the streets of Clapham in London, see their role as an incredibly short supply chain for produce directly into the city.
But not everyone has the same end goal – Grow Bristol has built a vertical farm inside a shipping container on disused land, offering an opportunity for public engagement and connecting urban communities to food, rather than to provide high quantities of salad to the city.
The Jones Food Company grows over 400 tonnes of salad a year. Image Holly Challinor
The sky isn’t the limit
The cost of energy – financially and environmentally – remains the greatest challenge to scaling up vertical farming. Even using off-peak energy, and with ever more efficient LEDs coming on the market, the energy requirements are high.
Jaz Singh of Innovation Agri-Tech Group, behind an indoor farm in Bracknell, Berkshire, says: “It doesn’t really matter what time of day your energy is getting produced. It’s about how you cycle it. You can turn the evening into effectively daytime if you’re doing it in a fully closed environment.”
For Grow Bristol’s Oscar Davidson, the future of vertical farming must be in renewables, such as biogas or through anaerobic digestion, and ideally on-site generation. This is echoed by another hydroponics expert Kate Hofman, of GrowUp Urban Farms, who says: “From my point of view, the only purpose of doing this kind of farming is to be able to grow food more sustainably…you’ve got to use renewable energy and at the moment it’s too expensive to buy off the grid, so we’ve got to be co-located.”
GrowUp tested a pilot aquaponics urban farm (aquaponics combines raising fish with hydroponics, feeding the plants fish waste), but the system has not proved financially sustainable in its original East London location due to high land rental costs. For Hofman, in theory, the more production moved indoors, the more land can be freed up for other uses, less intensively farmed and even used for carbon sequestering.
Moving beyond salad
Described by Davidson as a “gateway crop to the technology”, salad greens are easy and quick growing (baby leaf salad takes four to five weeks to mature, microgreens just over two weeks), require minimal nutrients and provide multiple crops per season.
Oscar Davidson and Dermot O’Regan of Grow Bristol
But will we be seeing more than just baby leaf and herbs anytime soon? There has been researching into crops including sweet potatoes and broccoli, and Singh says he has had some success trialing strawberries. But this poses a greater financial risk with the longer growing time required, and the extra light hours needed.
It all comes back to considering the whole cycle of growing and supply, including energy use. Vertical farming is becoming ever more environmentally and economically sustainable, and if these startups continue to develop at the current rate, a lot more of the food in our fridge could be grown in the tower block down the road.
Is vertical farming organic?
Vertical farming often uses hydroponic growing systems that do not use soil
The Soil Association does not currently class hydroponic growing as organic – in the UK, plants classified as organic need to be grown in soil, whereas in the US, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) does not make this requirement.
That said, there are no pesticides involved in the growing at JFC and other hydroponic farms, and the no pesticide factor is often a major motivator for people choosing organic. Hofman says: “I would wonder that the organic movement’s reliance on soil was good for the time it was created, but there’s actually the opportunity to think a bit more broadly about how both systems might be able to coexist or work together.”
Davidson adds: “There are other things to consider, where has that been grown, what was the conditions of the workers who have grown that crop? So yes, we use a lot of energy to grow our crops with our lighting, but we don’t use big agricultural machinery that uses diesel, we don’t use petrol fertilizers, and we don’t use endless amounts of groundwater.”
US: Study: Organic Farming Is Worse For Climate Change
The MIT Technology Review also highlighted other recent research which has concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices because of land-use changes
October 22, 2019
According to a study recently published by Nature Communications, organic farming can reduce pollution produced from farming however it takes considerably more land, which means considerably more greenhouse gases would be released in order to clear that land.
The MIT Technology Review also highlighted other recent research which has concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices because of land-use changes.
"Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas. For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference -- for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent," says Stefan Wirsenius, who was responsible for a similar study in Science Daily. "The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation."
A 2017 Nature Communications study revealed that in the United States, it would require a 16-33 percent increase in land use to switch to all organic farming. However, that number skyrockets in parts of Europe because of particularly high yields.
“Looking at the farm scale doesn’t really tell you what a large-scale transition to organic would look like,” Dan Blaustein-Rejto, associate director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that promotes technology solutions to environmental challenges, told the MIT Technology Review. “Only a study like this, that takes a system-wide perspective, really does.”
Three Must-Hear Speakers At Organic & Non-GMO Forum - October 29-30, 2019
Key speakers at this year’s fifth annual Organic & Non-GMO Forum, here at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis on October 29-30, will address the ever-growing plant-protein solutions arising in the sector, and provide a view inside the decisions that led the world’s largest brewery to work directly with farmers in establishing its first organic product
MINNEAPOLIS, September 23, 2019 – Key speakers at this year’s fifth annual Organic & Non-GMO Forum, here at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis on October 29-30, will address the ever-growing plant-protein solutions arising in the sector, and provide a view inside the decisions that led the world’s largest brewery to work directly with farmers in establishing its first organic product.
Keynote speaker Tyler Lorenzen – CEO of PURIS, the largest pea protein production company in North America – will share the story of the 35-year journey of PURIS, from its humble beginnings as a soybean processor to becoming one of the leading suppliers of plant-based food ingredients, and a critical supplier to this expanding market. So critical in fact that it received just this month a $75 million investment from Cargill. The funding will be used to more than double production at PURIS’ existing 200,000 square-foot facility in Dawson, Minnesota.
"This is more than a pea protein facility. This is the future of food,” said Lorenzen in a press release. “The Dawson facility will not only support PURIS farmers in the U.S. with a crop that regenerates their land and that is sustainable because it provides soil health advantages, but will also support the growing demand for great-tasting plant-based products in the marketplace. This investment will grant PURIS the ability to support more food companies, more farmers and more consumers faster.”
PURIS’ path to success included the creation and scaling of an end-to-end system of sustainable plant-based foods and ingredients grown and processed in the USA, which Lorenzen will outline in his keynote address at the Organic & Non-GMO Forum: “Seeding and Scaling the Plant-Based Food Future.”
Supporting Transitional Producers: Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold’s Contract for Change
Jess Newman of Anheuser-Busch
In this session, executives from Anheuser-Busch – Azania Andrews, vice president of marketing for Michelob ULTRA, and Jess Newman, director of U.S. agronomy for Anheuser-Busch – will share the how and why of the company’s launch of its USDA certified organic light lager, the first in the nation from a national beer brand.
Andrews and Newman will discuss the market drivers for the new beer, Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold, introduced in 2018, and their newly-launched “Contract for Change” initiative put in place to support farmers’ transitioning to growing organic barley.
Azania Andrews of Anheuser-Busch
“There aren’t any light beers from mainstream brewers offering an organic product,” Andrews told Men’s Health in an interview. “We wanted to make a light beer for those who prioritize eating and shopping organic.”
Hear more from these speakers, and the previously announced keynote speaker David Vetter, a trailblazing organic farmer from Nebraska and subject of the documentary “Dreaming of a Vetter World” at the Organic & Non-GMO Forum. Register at ongforum.com and follow us @ONGForum. See also the full agenda and list of attending companies.
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The Organic & Non-GMO Forum is hosted by HighQuest Group, a north-of-Boston, Mass.-based strategic advisory, conference, and media company serving corporations, financial investors and governments across the global food and agribusiness value chains. highquestgroup.com
Organic vs. Non-Organic: Does It Make A Difference?
Organic isn’t as black and white as it seems. Eating plentiful amounts of fruits and veggies will benefit you no matter how they are grown and organic junk food is still junk!
We Investigate If Buying Organic Foods
Really Makes A Difference For Your Health
By: Dana Angelo White, M.S., R.D., A.T.C.
Steve Debenport
Are you breaking the bank on organic produce and other organic foods? The word “organic” has become synonymous with all kinds of nutrition superlatives, but healthy is not a mandatory part of the definition. We are setting the record straight and giving you the facts so you can make the most of your next shopping trip.
What Are Organic Foods?
The USDA defines organic foods as those items grown and produced without the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides and other prohibited substances. This process is strictly policed by the USDA in efforts to protect the foodstuffs and the land it’s grown on. Their website reads:
“Produce can be called organic if it’s certified to have grown on soil that had no prohibited substances applied for three years prior to harvest.”
All the government oversight, certification expenses and other financial issues associated with growing organic produce (such as lower yields and alternative pest control practices) means organic foods come at a higher price point. Despite these remarkable differences, there is not much solid science to support that organic produce is any more nutritious than conventionally grown items – an organic apple has the same nutrients as a non-organic one. Confused yet? Understandable. Food labeling can also get tricky. Only foods that contain nothing but organic ingredients can be labeled “100% organic,” while foods deemed “organic” only need to be 95 to 99 percent organic. And yes, there’s more: Foods made with 70 to 94 percent organic ingredients can flash the title “made with organic ingredients."
What About Dirty and Clean Food?
Some folks may look to other organizations for guidance to help make sense of organic dos and don’ts. The Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce sets out to rank traces of non organic residues found on regularly consumed produce items. They review available data each year to create the trendy “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen” lists indicating which 12 produce items carry the highest amount of pesticide residues and which 15 carry the lowest. According to the EWG: “People can lower their pesticide exposure by almost 80 percent by avoiding the top 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead.” But these “dirty" and "clean” labels should not deter you from eating fresh fruits and vegetables whether they are grown organic or conventionally. When you take a closer look at the research even the highest loads of deductible pesticides found in the dirty dozen do not appear to pose imminent harm to those that eat them. For example, kale ranked high on the pesticide residue list this year, but the amount it contains is still pretty negligible – meaning it would be impossible to eat enough of the leafy green for it to be harmful.
What About Packaged Organic Foods?
Organic foods come in all shapes and sizes and you can easily find organically-produced junk food. Organic cookies, fried snack foods and other less-than-healthy foods are little or no better for you than their conventionally grown counterparts. Treat these highly processed foods with the same caution and moderation you would any other highly processed junk food.
How About Local Organic Food?
Locally grown produce often comes from smaller farms that don’t have to use the same types or amounts pesticides as large farms that service grocery stores. Talk to your local farmer about their use of pesticides and decide if going local seems like a better fit than organic for your home.
Bottom Line: Organic isn’t as black and white as it seems. Eating plentiful amounts of fruits and veggies will benefit you no matter how they are grown and organic junk food is still junk!