Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
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
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.
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
From Bomb Shelter To farm: The Latest Food Revolution
When you think of growing anything ‘underground’, the first thing you may envisage is some kind of criminal activity. But, there’s a food innovation gaining traction around the world, specially in London, and while it might be coming from beneath the streets, it’s all above board
14 Nov 2019
Sponsored by KETTO
Food for thought
When you think of growing anything ‘underground’, the first thing you may envisage is some kind of criminal activity. But, there’s a food innovation gaining traction around the world, specially in London, and while it might be coming from beneath the streets, it’s all above board.
Here's what you need to know about the latest underground food revolution...
Growing Underground
The fully-working Growing Underground farm is located 33 metres beneath the busy streets of Clapham, in the abandoned tunnels of a former World War II air-raid shelter.
The urban farm covering 65,000 square feet lie 120 feet under Clapham High street and are home to 'Growing Underground', the UK’s first underground farm. The farms produce includes pea shoots, rocket, wasabi mustard, red basil and red amaranth, pink stem radish, garlic chives, fennel and coriander, and supply to restaurants across London.
Salad without soil?
Urban farmers, Richard Ballard and Steven Dring are using the latest hydroponic systems and LED technology to grow fresh microgreens and salad leaves, in a stable, sustainable and pesticide-free environment.
A spigot supplies nutrients and water to the roots of the plants and artificial light and warmth is provided by LED lighting. The site is powered with renewable energy.
Instead of using soil, seeds are planted into mats made out of old carpet offcuts. Once the seeds germinate, they are put under lights to mimic sunlight.
Science behind the sprouts
So what is hydroponics? According to the Royal Horticultural Society, it is “the science of growing plants without using soil, by feeding them on mineral nutrient salts dissolved in water.”
Hydroponics does not use soil, instead, the root system is supported using an inert medium such as perlite, Rockwool, clay pellets, peat moss, or vermiculite.
Location, location, location
Its central London location is convenient to distribute the vegetables to hotels, restaurants and shops, reducing the food miles for businesses and consumers. The farm also boasts using 77% less water than conventional agricultural methods.
The system is completely unaffected by the weather and seasonal changes, which means they can be grown 356 days a year.
All photos: Getty Images
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.
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.
Urban Underground Farming
BY STAFF REPORTS ON DECEMBER 30, 2018 WORLD NEWS
SEATTLE — According to the U.N., the world population is more than seven billion and is expected to reach more than nine billion by 2050. With a vast majority of the population migrating to urban areas, cities are forced to expand. This puts a strain on rural land space and food production; urban underground farming is being seen as the solution.
Steven Dring, a co-founder of Growing Underground believes poor topsoil management and the percentage of freshwater used in industrial agriculture are compounding matters.
Dring feels that unless farmers start replenishing the soil’s nutrients, the lifespan of the world’s topsoil is only 80 to 120 years. Urban underground farming — a solution to the aforementioned problems — utilizes existing underground structures and hydroponics to yield large crops using minimal water.
Hydroponics and Urban Underground Farming
Hydroponic technology uses porous material in place of soil as well as low-energy LEDs instead of natural light. Plants can even sit in nutrient-rich waterbeds where the water is captured and recycled.
LEDs mimic photosynthesis, a process by which plants convert light of certain wavelengths into chemical energy that is stored for future use. The LED light’s low heat creates an ideal temperature for growth in the absence of sunlight.
Additionally, growing beds are stacked vertically to maximize the space of underground farms.
Underground Farming Around the World
Worldwide, growers are cultivating food beneath the soil. Underground farms already exist in England, France and Bolivia. Sweden and Wales have undergound farms that are in development.
England
A World War II air-raid shelter 100 feet below the streets of London was transformed into an urban underground farm by Growing Underground’s Steven Dring and his business partner Richard Ballard.
The farm provides two and a half acres of space for plant growth. Its depth regulates ambient temperature and its filters free the air of pests while hydroponics ensure the growth of crops.
This business model is more cost-effective than the U.K.’s traditional greenhouse farming. The only consistent expense is for the LEDs. Greenhouse farmers use two heat sources: natural light and LEDs due to short summers. They also use importation to keep a steady supply.
Dring believes his company is not replacing traditional farming and instead it’s just complementing it.
France
In Paris, the startup, Cycloponics, uses a once abandoned parking garage measuring 37,700-square-feet to grow crops. It is located beneath an affordable housing complex.
They use hydroponic farming to harvest microgreens and bricks of composted manure to grow mushrooms.
Cycloponics produces four and a half pounds of greens each month and even harvests chicory, which requires no natural light. The team produces 660 pounds of the crop each month via urban underground farming.
Sweden
Plantagon CityFarm is building an underground farm in an old newspaper archive underneath an office tower in Stockholm.
The company will not only grow food in vertical towers under LEDs but also heat the building. Instead of capturing the light’s heat and venting it out of the room, it will be sent into a heat storage system to heat offices.
It also plans to sell its food locally, which will eliminate shipping costs and pesticide use as well as reduce fossil fuel emissions.
The company’s innovative approach to urban underground farming is attracting Singapore and Malaysia; both of the countries have a shortage of farmable land.
Wales
Abandoned coal mines across Wales are being scouted as new sites for underground farms in the U.K. The country’s coal industry went down in the 1980s, leaving mine shafts and tunnels unoccupied. These coal mines are now being revived via urban underground farming.
The project is seen as a cost-effective way of supplying largescale crops for the growing global population. Advocates say these farms can yield up to ten times more food than regular farms.
Coal mine farms can grow plants in nutrient-rich water or suspend them in midair and mist them with water and nutrients. LEDs or fiber-optic technology can tunnel sunlight deep into the ground — both inexpensive methods — while the carbon-capture technology can take advantage of natural carbon dioxide.
If coal mines are to become underground farms, there will be technical, legal and financial hurdles to overcome before beginning construction. This project can generate income and minimize remediation costs. In fact, many hill farmers in Wales are living paycheck to paycheck, so the income from underground farming can benefit them greatly.
Bolivia
The idea of urban underground farming can be applied to an arid environment like Bolivia’s Andean Plateau. This area contends with frequent drought, frost, high winds and increasing temperatures.
Bolivian underground farms are known as Walipinis. Only their roofs are visible for they blend into the plateau’s arid landscape. Internally, bricks absorb the sun’s heat and act as conductors to create warm and humid conditions all through the year. These farms protect crops from nature’s elements and ensure food security for farmers’ families.
Walipinis help farmer and llama breeder, Gabriel Condo Apaza, improve his family’s diet and save money as they no longer have to purchase food from markets. Businessman, Michael Gemio, refurbished abandoned Walipinis and turned them into an eco-farm. He hires local families to develop the Walipini technology.
Walipinis require only a small amount of water to operate. Despite droughts and high temperatures, the existing small streams are able to supply the required amount of water.
Conclusion
Due to rapid urbanization, global cities face problems such as unemployment, an inability to meet growing food demands, poor health and pollution. Urban underground farming is the solution to these problems. As long as cities implement appropriate policies, underground farms can operate at an optimal level.
– Julianne Russo
Photo: Pixabay
Abandoned Mines Could Become The Farms of The Future
Academics are exploring the use of abandoned mines and other subterranean facilities in the UK and China as alternatives to traditional agricultural land.
December 22, 2018 | By John McKenna
Coal mines and inner-city tunnels could be transformed into farms to help feed the planet’s growing population.
Academics are exploring the use of abandoned mines and other subterranean facilities in the UK and China as alternatives to traditional agricultural land.
“There are millions of redundant coal mines and tunnels in the world which could be linked to new tunnels for crop production,” says Professor Saffa Riffat, Chair in Sustainable Energy at the University of Nottingham.
“In the UK there are over 1,500 redundant coal mines, and in China, there are over 12,000 abandoned coal mines (0.6 million m3), 7.2 billion m3 of tunnels and about one billion m3 of civic air defence tunnels.”
Farm demand
The United Nations predicts the world’s population will grow by 1 billion to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, and 9.7 billion by 2050.
This increase – coupled with an expanding global middle class that is demanding higher-quality food – will require a near doubling of current food production levels, which today still leave 815 million people chronically undernourished.
Instead of simply doubling the amount of agricultural land and all of the economic and environmental implications that would come with that, farmers and scientists are exploring new techniques for growing our food.
Riffat and his University of Nottingham colleagues are embarking on a two-to-three-year study of underground facilities in the UK and China.
They claim that a variety of crops could be grown in the subterranean farms using hydroponic planters, where plant roots are fed with nutrient-rich water. This water could be sourced from groundwater used directly or water that is condensed from ambient air.
Coloured LED units would enable photosynthesis in the absence of sunlight, while plants could breathe CO2 that has been captured from industrial emissions and stored underground.
Dome grown
Growing food inside in artificial conditions is nothing new: in Iceland, where winter can last for six months, crops have been produced in geothermal domes all year round for the past 20 years.
However, today hydroponics is being combined with digital technology to make indoor farming more efficient than ever before, leading some to call it the future of agriculture.
And in many cities – where the majority of the planet’s projected population growth will occur – vertical farms are appearing. These “skyscraper farms” are claimed to yield more than 32 times the level of crops per square metre as agricultural land.
However, Riffat warns that “vertical farming systems are expensive to manufacture and install, and require a large amount of water and energy for heating and cooling”.
“They are also vulnerable to extreme weather conditions, wars and terrorism,” he adds.
He argues that underground farms would be less exposed to many of these risks.
Such underground farms already exist: in London one company has converted old Second World War air raid shelters into a hydroponic farm that produces herbs and salads for London’s hotels, restaurants and supermarkets.
The article was published on the World Economic Forum’s website.
Photo credit: Daniel Mennerich on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-NDCopy
Underground, Smart Farm Takes Root In South Korea
Operators of this high-tech facility in South Korea say it is the world’s first indoor vertical farm built in a tunnel.
LED, rather than the sun, shines on vertically stacked layers.
BY JUNG-YOON KIM ASSOCIATED PRESS
Choi Jae Bin, head of NextOn, stands inside a high-tech farm in a former tunnel in South Korea. Associated Press/ Han Myung Oh
OKCHEON, South Korea — Behind a blue wall that seals a former highway tunnel stretches a massive indoor farm bathed in rose-tinted light.
Fruits and vegetables grow hydroponically – with no soil – in vertically stacked layers inside, illuminated by neon-pink LEDs instead of sunlight.
Operators of this high-tech facility in South Korea say it is the world’s first indoor vertical farm built in a tunnel. It’s also the largest such farm in the country and one of the biggest in the world, with a floor area of 25,000 square feet, nearly half the size of an American football field.
Indoor vertical farming is seen as a potential solution to the havoc wreaked on crops by the extreme weather linked to climate change and to shortages of land and workers in countries with aging populations.
The tunnel, about 120 miles south of Seoul, was built in 1970 for one of South Korea’s first major highways. Once a symbol of the country’s industrialization, it closed in 2002. An indoor farming company rented the tunnel from the government last year and transformed it into a “smart farm.”
Instead of the chirrups of cicadas, Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” resonates in the tunnel in hopes of stimulating the crops’ healthy growth.
“We are playing classical music because vegetables also love listening to music like we do,” said Choi Jae Bin, head of NextOn, the company that runs the vertical farm.
Sixty types of fruits and vegetables grow in optimized conditions using NextOn’s own growth and harvest systems. Among them, 42 are certified as no-pesticide, no-herbicide and non-GMO products, said Dave Suh, NextOn’s chief technology officer.
He said the tunnel provides temperatures of 50 to 72 Fahrenheit, enabling the company to optimize growing conditions.
The company’s high-tech, indoor farm grows crops on vertically stacked styrofoam shelves under LEDs, above, safe from extreme weather. Associated Press/Han Myung Oh
High-tech smart farms used also in places like Dubai and Israel where growing conditions are challenging, can be a key to developing sustainable agriculture, experts said.
“Society is aging and urbanization is intensifying as our agricultural workforce is shrinking,” said Son Jung Eek, a professor of plant science at Seoul National University. Smart farming can make it easier to raise high-value crops that are sensitive to temperature and other conditions.
Only slightly more than 16 percent of South Korea’s land was devoted to farming in 2016, according to government statistics. The rural population has fallen by almost half over the past four decades, even as the overall population has grown nearly 40 percent.
The Agriculture Ministry announced earlier this year that it will invest in smart farm development nationwide, expanding their total area to 17,000 acres from the current 9,900 acres.
Turning a profit can be challenging for indoor vertical farms given the high cost of construction and infrastructure. NextOn cut construction costs in half by using the abandoned tunnel and developing its own LED lights and other technologies.
The proprietary technologies reduce water and energy use and the need for workers, cutting operation costs, Suh said. Sensors in each vertical layer measure variables such as temperature, humidity, light, carbon dioxide and micro-dust levels to maintain an optimized environment for each crop.
The crops will cost less than conventionally grown organic vegetables, Suh said.
The farm will supply vegetables to a major retailer and bakery chain, NextOn said.
Next up: More tiers of crops in the remaining two-thirds of the tunnel to grow high-value fruits and medicinal herbs.
Suh said the medicinal plant market is currently dominated by a few countries and regions.
“Our goal is to achieve disruptive innovation of this market by realizing stable mass production of such premium crops,” he said.
Manhattan’s Only Underground Chef’s Farm Supplying Rare Herbs to NYC Restaurants
New York City’s farm-to-table scene just got even fresher. Farm.one is an underground vertical farm in the business of forward-thinking. With a little help from LED lighting and a climate controlled environment, it grows its produce year-round, one story below the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s streets.
New York City’s farm-to-table scene just got even fresher. Farm.one is an underground vertical farm in the business of forward-thinking. With a little help from LED lighting and a climate controlled environment, it grows its produce year-round, one story below the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s streets.
Located underneath the 2-Michelin star rated Atera, Farm.one has made a name for itself as a convenient alternative for restaurants that want produce that is not only hyperlocal but also delivered within hours of its harvest. Rob Laing, CEO of Farm.one, gave Untapped Cities an inside look at the rare micro-greens, herbs and edible flowers sought after by New York City’s most celebrated chefs.
After an April 2016 introduction inside the Institute of Culinary Education in downtown Manhattan, Farm.one expanded to its current space at 77 Worth Street in Tribeca. It currently uses hydroponic technology, growing its pesticide-free products in a water-based nutrient solution as opposed to soil. Although underground, the plants receive the perfect amount of sun year round, and are kept in an environment with optimal temperatures and humidity levels for growing.
This, combined with the ability to manipulate the light intensity and overall indoor environment, allows the farm to perform in a year-round capacity that is not restricted by outdoor conditions or season. In fact, venture capital funding for vertical farming saw a 653 percent increase from 2016 to 2017 alone, demonstrating that this innovative agricultural alternative has a promising future.
All that is produced at Farm.one is grown to order specifically for New York chefs, and delivered via bike and subway to restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This eliminates waste and food miles, meaning no emissions are created as the herb shipments are transported. In the age of sustainable farming as well as cognizant consumption, Farm.one also makes sure packages its product in reusable containers.
Everything from Bronze Fennel and Sweet Thai Basil to Epazote and Zaatar Marjoram is grown in the same underground space, demonstrating the breadth of Farm.one’s yield available to those on the buying end. Over time, the team at the farm hopes to build the widest selection of edible herbs and greens in the world.
Next, check out 10 Urban Farms in NYC and 10 of NYC’s Sustainability Initiatives.
The Underground Farm Delivering Rare Herbs to New York’s Top Chefs
The Underground Farm Delivering Rare Herbs to New York’s Top Chefs
Bespoke greens and flowers are grown-to-order in Manhattan.
FEBRUARY 14, 2018
Farm Manager Tom Rubino harvests marigolds at Farm.one. ALL PHOTOS: SARAH BLESENER
The sprouts and flowers are as recherché as they are delicious: nepitella, wood sorrel, papalo, micro cressida, afilia pea shoots. While diners may see garnish as little more than a sprig of green to fork aside, chefs see garnish in multiple dimensions—hue, flavor, texture, scent—and have exacting requirements in each. Meeting those requirements, which for millennia depended on the turn of the season or the whimsy of the weather, is now achieved in a Manhattan basement.
Farm.one is a blossoming underground vertical farm in the heart of Tribeca. Inside, farmers grow rare, bespoke, and chef-tailored micro-greens, herbs, and edible flowers for some of the most celebrated kitchens in New York. Several days a week, my job is to slalom through the city’s sidewalk traffic, turtle-backed with bags of the day’s harvest, and hand-deliver the morning’s pickings. (Consider this an official disclosure, although I am not an employee of the company.) Besides herbally gratifying chefs cloistered in the steam and aluminum of famous kitchens—and occasionally being gifted with the most delicious nibbles of my life—I’ve gotten a peek into what may well be the future of urban farming.
There are three clear perks of growing urban greens indoors: One, you can’t get much fresher than farm-to-fork in a few hours. Two, transportation emissions are no dirtier than the courier’s exhalations (Farm.one, at least, only delivers by bike, foot, or train). And three, by eluding meteorological vicissitude, growing to order is like strutting up and hand-sticking a dart right in the bullseye.
Preparing Red Veined Sorrel, a very popular micro known for its tart, bitter flavor and appearance.
Justin Chen, a sous chef at Jungsik, the two-Michelin star, Korean fusion joint, leans in to study the tangerine gem marigold stem pinched between his fingers. I ask what he looks for in Farm.one’s micro greens and flowers, which he occasionally sends back when they’re not “up to spec.” “Consistency,” he replies. In high-end dining, Chen adds, “There’s no room for error.” That’s why keeping tight control on the grow conditions at the farm is so critical.
Related Stories
New York City Officials Hunted Down 10 Food Poisoning Outbreaks Using YelpWild Boars Are Putting One of France's Smelliest Cheeses at RiskWhy Chuck E. Cheese's Has a Corporate Policy About Destroying Its Mascot’s Head
The tangerine gem marigold, a speck of a blossom no bigger than an iPhone home button, is for a petit four—that post-dessert, single-bite confectionary that seems to magically ablate from plate to memory in a single delicious swallow. Jungsik’s petit four looks fit for a centerpiece on a dollhouse dining table. The potted-plant-shaped bon-bon is made up of a dark chocolate shell lined with meyer-lemon caramel and ginger-and-white-chocolate ganache, and a tiny tangerine gem marigold flower sprouts out of the chocolate sable “soil.” If the flower were any bigger (the taste is subtle—like a sweetened tea with lemon) it would overpower the orchestral intricacy of the meyer lemon, caramel, and ginger chocolate. “The size,” Chen reiterates, “is what lets a chef correctly balance flavors [and] find visual symmetry in a dish.”
Red Veined Sorrel Seedlings being grown in Rock Wool Cubes.
One of the experts in charge of giving chefs the esculent tools to achieve such symmetry is farm manager Tom Rubino. Rubino walks the basement farms seven days a week, tweaking controls and sampling from the approximately 100 varieties of plants. His favorite is oxalis, a whale tail-shaped leaf that comes in beet purple or Irish green and has a puckering, citric flavor—something you seem to taste in your forehead as much as your mouth. “It tastes like grape skin,” Rubino says. “When I was a kid, I used to eat grape skins.”
The farm has between two and six levels of grow beds, and totals only about 1,500 square feet in three separate facilities. The plants either drop their roots directly in water, or into a grow medium—a coconut-husk concoction that gives the roots something to grip. Eliminating soil is just one of the ways to maximize and tightly control grow conditions. The farmers also tweak the pH of the water, adjust airflow and humidity, lock in the temperature, and toy with both the wattage and spectrum of the LED lights. They’re basically trying to outdo nature, not letting the plants “succumb to overcast skies,” Rubino tells me.
Shift Hand Manager Katherine Chester in the facility.
Like letting a dog off a leash in an open field, when you give a chef options, they tend to run with them. One chef wants only orange—not yellow or red—tangerine gems. Another wants clearly defined veins in the red-veined sorrel. Other demands include micro-cumin, Neon Rose Magic, Yarrow crowns, and nasturtiums with only purple rims.
On a December day, I watch Victor Amarilla admire those purple rims. But when he pops the little, lily-pad-looking leaf into his mouth, he frowns. “The flavor’s almost there,” he says. As the head chef at Le Turtle, the popular Chrystie Street French restaurant, he receives a twice-weekly delivery from Farm.one. To ensure the nasturtium pop enough, Rubino had to find the right seed for Le Turtle’s needs, and is now growing an exclusive small forest of nasturtium in one corner of the farm. The perfect nasturtium has a slight crunch, a slow, mouth-full wave of heat, and finishes with a flicker of pepper. When Amarilla gets a flavor he likes, he’s apt to pumps the air with his fists.
Petite Anise Hyssop Tops and Purple Oxalis Flowers from Farm.one placed on a dish.
Amarilla is not the only chef using farm.one to color his plates with edible whorls and frizz. One frozen day in late January, I watch chef Chris Owen, of the plant-based pizza restaurant Double Zero (part of the Matthew Kinney restaurant group), nibble on purslane, which he describes as a “juicy, cucumbery” wonder. He imagines aloud how it would taste on his chocolate cake. Little jade-looking purslane leaves inside sweet confections are the kinds of surprises that Owen likes to throw at Double Zero’s diners.
“Farm.one grabs things at the early stages of their lives, when they’re more interesting,” Owen tells me. He’s looking for red and pink flowers for his Valentine’s Day special—maybe some dianthus for his apple cider cheesecake. He also wants some acidic flavors, maybe some sorrel blossoms. As we chat, he sneaks me a bite from a tray of shiitake faux-bacon, which just came out of the wood-burning oven, and browses through a stack of farm.one samples encased in plastic clamshells.
Wood Sorrel Flowers are known for their bright yellow color and tart, slightly sweet flavor.
Double Zero’s aim is “to make vegan foods more accessible,” for which high-quality simplicity is critical, Owen explains. “Over-processing is a problem with veganism.” But be it vegan, classic French, fusion Korean, or omakase, pretty much whatever rare and delicious doodad or efflorescence you imagine can be grown in farm.one’s underground vertical fields.
“The first impression, and maybe 50 percent of the total experience in a restaurant is based on visuals,” Owen argues. Twice a week I deliver him a few dozen purple-and-yellow viola blossoms so he can make that first impression a kaleidoscopic one.
Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
Subscribe to the Atlas Obscura Newsletter and get our latest, delivered straight to your inbox.
© 2018 Atlas Obscura.
Sign up for our weekly email.
How Smart Monitoring Is Helping An Urban Farm to Flourish
Growing Underground, which launched in 2015 and is located in former WW2 air-raid shelters, uses hydroponic systems to sustainably produce the pesticide-free crop. The tunnels are leased from Transport for London (TfL), which was happy to see them being put to work having laid dormant for 60 years.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-smart-urban-farm-flourish.html#jCp
How Smart Monitoring Is Helping An Urban Farm to Flourish
January 18, 2018, University of Cambridge
Microgreens and salad leaves. Credit: Growing Underground
An innovative and award-winning urban farming facility is creating energy-efficient growing conditions in tunnels 120ft below the busy streets of Clapham in London. Microgreens and salad leaves are thriving with the help of a smart monitoring programme that records temperature, humidity and CO2 levels.
Growing Underground, which launched in 2015 and is located in former WW2 air-raid shelters, uses hydroponic systems to sustainably produce the pesticide-free crop. The tunnels are leased from Transport for London (TfL), which was happy to see them being put to work having laid dormant for 60 years.
The aim of Growing Underground is to bring edible crop production to the heart of the city while minimising the carbon impact of food transportation. The verdant trays of fennel, garlic chives, pea shoots and coriander, among others, can be picked and on a plate in a restaurant within hours. The forward-thinking company, which sells its greens through Ocado and Marks & Spencer and aims to be carbon neutral, has just been awarded the BBC Future Food Award.
Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) Co-Investigator Dr. Ruchi Choudhary, who leads the Energy Efficient Cities initiative (EECi) at the Department of Engineering, started working with Growing Underground in 2015, following an energy-optimising project completed for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This retrofit study of the greenhouses at Kew saw the development of a simulation model that incorporated the heat and mass transfer associated with plant transpiration into the dynamic energy simulation of the greenhouse structures.
"The idea was to expand the energy-optimisation project into urban farming and the collaboration with Growing Underground provided the ideal environment," says Melanie Jans-Singh, an EECi Ph.D. student investigating the integration of urban farming to cities reusing wasted resources. Rebecca Ward, a Research Associate at the EECi, who developed the greenhouse energy simulation at Kew, is also part of the team working with Growing Underground.
In March last year a range of instrumentation, including wireless sensors and web cams that monitor temperature, humidity, CO2, air velocity and light, was installed in a section of the tunnel that is currently being used for growing crops. More sensors were added this summer to help to maintain a constant tunnel temperature of between 20-25C. "There are big spatial variations of temperature in the tunnel but everywhere needs to have the same conditions," explains Melanie, who has spent the past six months building and calibrating the sensors. "Most sensors need cables. Our sensors are wireless and are designed to cope with the humidity underground."
There are two tunnels on different levels – in total 65,000 square feet of burrows with the capacity to accommodate up to 8,000 people – and Growing Underground has plans to expand the business next year.
Urban farming is growing rapidly in Japan and South East Asia, where the facilities are referred to as plant factories which are located in dedicated new buildings. "While our focus is urban farming we are looking to repurpose spaces rather than using new buildings, and these could be tunnels or rooftops that are not currently being used," says Melanie.
Data collected from the instrumentation is informing the heat and mass transfer model of this unique 'tunnel greenhouse'. "Our monitoring is helping Growing Underground to optimise the yield while reducing energy consumption. If, for example, there is a doubt about how the plants are growing at a certain spot, I can refer to the measurement of air velocity so that we can identify the precise conditions. When the plants are growing better in one area than another, the instrumentation helps us to work out why."
Real-time monitoring means that conditions can be changed according to the analysed data. Ventilation is the chief energy consumer at the Growing Underground project and monitoring data has enabled adjustments that have cut consumption for ventilation without affecting yield.
The founders of the partially crowd-funded company, Richard Ballard, who discovered the tunnels when he was a film student scouting for locations, and Steven Dring, who has a background in logistics, are able to access the data 24/7. The analyzed data itself is of value; it creates a 'lifetime performance passport' which provides the asset owners, present, and future, with a rich source of information.
"We have been very lucky to partner with the University of Cambridge. Ruchi and her team have really helped us monitor and develop the space which will enable us to eventually get the optimum growing environment," says Richard. "They have provided us with monthly reports which have allowed us to make adjustments to improve temperature, humidity and air velocity, and now we are working together to improve CO2 levels through enrichment."
The collaboration between business and academia benefits all stakeholders. Growing Underground is providing the case study for further research and the academics are delivering data that will help the crops, and the company, to flourish.
In the longer term, the EECi team would like to create a how-to guide to adding a 'greenhouse' to a space not previously used for this purpose, identifying the conditions required to turn a space into a greenhouse. "We are using this case study to create a baseline simulation tool for integrating urban farming into unused urban space," says Melanie. "The second part of my Ph.D. will focus on finding optimal spaces in cities for urban farming. I will look at the whole of London and investigate other typologies of unused spaces within cities for the purpose of urban farming."
Additional aspects will be introduced to the simulation model with the purpose of optimising energy efficiency. "We will consider how we can integrate co-benefits between plants and buildings. When a building has heating there is a lot of waste heat produced. The waste heat (and perhaps also CO2) can be harnessed for a productive purpose." Melanie will also look at how urban farming could help to improve air quality, energy use and water use.
"Once we understand the synergies through our simulation model, any city can be considered in this way," says Melanie.
Rebecca, who built the energy-optimisation simulation model for Kew, is now applying her modeling talents to Growing Underground. The EECi team visits the Growing Underground tunnels once a month to check the instrumentation, report back to Richard and Steven and, occasionally, enjoy the fruits of their labour. "The fresh salad leaves and herbs really are good," says Melanie. "They're very tasty."
Explore further: Underground air-raid shelter feeding London restaurants
Provided by: University of Cambridge
Unused Tokyo Tunnel Gets New Life As Underground Veggie Farm
Conveyor manufacturer Itoh Denki and electronics maker Fujitsu have set up an automated underground vegetable farm in a disused utility tunnel in Chiba Prefecture, just east of the Japanese capital.
December 27, 2017 1:15 pm JST
Unused Tokyo Tunnel Gets New Life As Underground Veggie Farm
Stable temperatures cut electricity bills by two-thirds at automated plant
YASUTERU SHIMOMURA, Nikkei staff writer
It is hoped the fully automated underground farm in Chiba Prefecture will be able to produce 5,000 vegetables a day
CHIBA -- Tell anyone you think vegetables will soon be emerging from the ground on a conveyor belt and they will more than likely think you are mad. But that is exactly what will soon start happening in a Tokyo suburb.
Conveyor manufacturer Itoh Denki and electronics maker Fujitsu have set up an automated underground vegetable farm in a disused utility tunnel in Chiba Prefecture, just east of the Japanese capital.
Related stories
- Company in focus: Singapore's Olam spreads 'smart farming' in Asia and beyond
- Interview: Asian farmers can't meet rising food demand: Rabobank
- Thailand's new investment chief eager to spur 'smart farming'
Urban farms, vertical farms, even space farms have all been touted as solutions to the world's food security challenges. All, however, come with hurdles in terms of cost, sustainability and space.
This new concept not only has the potential to produce vegetables at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption, but also need never even be seen.
Thanks to the stable year-round temperatures, the farm can operate using just one-third of the electricity of a conventional vegetable farm.
The hope is that, by 2020, the plant will be shipping 5,000 heads of lettuce and other produce a day.
The vegetables are grown into seedlings overground before being taken down to the facility on a conveyor belt. Once ready for shipment, they are brought back up, packed and shipped. Apart from the sowing and packing, every step of the process is automated.
Underground, the vegetables are grown in 2.4- by 1-meter cases under light-emitting diodes that spur growth and fed nutrients through tubes.
At a balmy 18-20 C all year, the facility has no need for costly air conditioning and temperatures can be controlled by fans.
Dubbed "Makuhari farm vechica," the facility occupies 4,000 sq. meters of space, 10 meters below ground. The two companies spent 100 million yen ($882,744) building the farm on space rented for 770 yen per square meter annually.