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Farmers At Growing Underground Launch Fresh Branding As They Announce B Corp Status And Growth Plans
Since 2015, Growing Underground crops have been generating proprietary data, improving technology and methods to increase yields and reduce resources to create a net carbon negative growing system
Growing Underground announces its status as a B Corp brand, making it the first B Corp salad brand available in mainstream UK supermarkets. Meanwhile, owner Zero Carbon Farms (ZCF) is the first certified B Corp vertical or controlled environment farm in the UK and Europe. B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. Growing Underground boasts a fully net carbon negative growing system, meaning that it off- sets more carbon than it emits.
Target-busting investment shows industry and individual support for the vertical farming movement
Since 2015, Growing Underground crops have been generating proprietary data, improving technology and methods to increase yields and reduce resources to create a net carbon negative growing system. Now the AgTech brand has formed a strategic partnership with one of the leading fresh fruit and veg suppliers to the UK, Reynolds, allowing the brand to distribute nationally.
To scale up its innovative farming mode even further, ZCF is currently undertaking a share offering. The financing has met with strong industry interest and investor endorsement and included a deliberately targeted crowdfunding campaign that hit its target in less than 24 hours. The offering has been over-subscribed and in total over £4 million has been raised, which will be used to expand into a second site in North London this summer.
“Growing Underground continues to grow in every sense,” comments Richard Ballard, Co-Founder & Farmer-in-Chief, Growing Underground. “We’re looking forward to translating our carefully crafted model and sustainability credentials into an industrial-scale distribution network, accelerating the world’s transition to carbon negative farming and continuing to transform the future of sustainable food production in the UK.”
Read the complete article at: Fresh Plaza
For more information:
Growing Underground
www.growing-underground.com
9 July 2021
UNITED KINGDOM: 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.
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Lead photo: Luke Ellis supplies residents and restaurants with herbs and greens. COPYRIGHT LUKE ELLIS
Future of Agriculture Grows Under Seoul’s Subway Stations
The Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Metro, and the agriculture company Farm8 have come together for this project
Experts introduce the facility during the opening showcase of Metro Farm at Sangdo Station in September 2019. (Farm8)
Walking down the stairs from exit No. 2 of Sangdo Station in southwestern Seoul, its not easy to miss a white and green signboard that reads “METRO Farm.”
A method of what‘s known as “smart farming,” Metro Farms can create nature-friendly environments while being located inside urban subway stations, using AI and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
Sangdo Station’s exit No. 2 was originally left unattended, merely serving its purpose as a meet-up plaza. Since September 2019, the space is now a farm full of sprouts and herbs.
The 394-square-meter cultivation facility is a complex space consisting of an “Auto-Farm,“ where robots manage basic sowing and harvesting, a “Farm Cafe,” which sells fresh salad and juice, made from crops harvested on the same day, and “FarmX,” a zone where visitors can learn about the future of agriculture.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Metro, and the agriculture company Farm8 have come together for this project. In 2004, Farm8 started out as a firm that produced and distributed vegetable salads. Over time, the company shifted gears to conduct research on indoor farming as a method of sustainable agriculture that can operate regardless of weather conditions and has succeeded in developing high-tech distribution centers.
The three organizations worked together to enhance the ecological sensitivity of Seoul as a city, and allow young people living in urban districts to experience agriculture with their own eyes.
Children line up in front of a Metro Farm to experience and learn about agriculture in January 2020.(Farm8)
“We tried our best to make Metro Farms a lively experience, where visitors can get a grasp of its possibilities and to be recognized a place where technology meets nature,” senior manager of Farm8 Yeo Chan-dong told The Korea Herald.
Since the very first showcase of Metro Farm at Dapsimni Station in eastern Seoul in May 2019, Yeo explained that they have made progress in creating urban agricultural jobs and expanded Metro Farms across the city.
An average of 7.5 million people take the subway each day in Seoul, according to Seoul Metro. This means that passersby will naturally encounter Metro Farms on their way to work, home or to meet family and friends.
“Our assignment for the new year is to make Metro Farms more popular and sustainable,” Yeo spoke with confidence, “In other words, not only presenting the experience but eventually making a system for the crops grown to be made a competitive quality to suit the needs of the public.”
By Kim Hae-yeon (hykim@heraldcorp.com)
Paris Is Turning Abundant Car Parks Into Underground Farms
Falling ownership in car sales in Paris has increased the space of abandoned car parks in the city. This venture has taken a green turn as the city is transforming old car parks to grow mushrooms or even salad
Falling ownership in car sales in Paris has increased the space of abandoned car parks in the city. This venture has taken a green turn as the city is transforming old car parks to grow mushrooms or even salad.
Paris had built too many underground car parks in the 1960s and 70s, when the city tried to keep with the mushrooming housing blocks, building underground parking for residents hence became inevitable.
Sources allege, beneath Paris there are millions of square meters of car park. Figures however allege, a steady decline in car ownership in Paris, a trend which city authorities are keen to encourage. The drop in the number of car owners is also attributed to the new, convenient cab and bike services to move around the city.
As a result, some of the car parks find themselves surplus to the requirements. The city is hence calling for new ideas which can transform Paris’s underground to reveal its full potential. A number of competitions have taken place with this focus.
Urban farmers - Cycloponics were selected as one of the winners for rejuvenating three car parks in Paris. One of their projects was the redundant La Chapelle, a no-go area used by drug dealers and prostitutes. The space now is however blooming. The group made the space conducive for cultivating main crop: oyster, shiitake and white button mushrooms. They also grow chicory, a northern French delicacy that grows in the dark.
The produced harvest is sold through nearby organic grocery stores, which also means urban food is grown and consumed within a short distance. This method also reduces the pollution that comes along with the transportation.
In France there are a lot of regulations around operating a business underground not least for security reasons. Other businesses have been rejected for applications. Permits for such kind of farming have however been possible.
The city’s car parks are as a result experiencing a green makeover.
Posted in Environment, NewsTagged Paris, underground farms
These Tech Start-Ups Are Changing What It Means To Farm
Feeding a rapidly expanding population without depleting the Earth’s finite resources, is one of the major challenges of the 21st century
The future of farming? Image: REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin
01 Jul 2019
Briony Harris Senior Writer, Formative Content
This article is part of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions
Feeding a rapidly expanding population without depleting the Earth’s finite resources, is one of the major challenges of the 21st century.
These four entrepreneurs - who have all been selected as the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers for 2019 - have a vision to transform the way we farm in order to help feed the world.
Mini-farms in underground parking lots
In an abandoned car park in downtown Beijing, trays and trays of planting beds are stacked on top of each other.
This is a mini-farm, right in the heart of the city, and it supplies nearby hotels with lettuce, celery, herbs, kale and other green vegetables.
“It’s no longer impossible to grow food where people work and live”, says Stuart Oda, who co-founded the agriculture start-up Alesca Life in 2013, referring to the amount of disused urban infrastructure available, including things such as old shipping containers.
LEDs provide the light, and mineral nutrients are added to water instead of soil. Internet-linked devices monitor humidity, acidity levels and the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, allowing such variables to be adjusted to increase yields.
“Our system allows us to automate all of the major points of human error that could lead to a loss of crop,” Oda says.
Stuart Oda shows his container farms to the UAE’s minister for food security . | Image: Stuart Oda
The proximity of the mini-farms to the customers means that the produce is fresh, and reduces transport and packaging.
Alesca Life has signed an agreement to distribute 1,000 container farms across the Middle East, Africa, China, and North America.
Oda’s decision to launch his company was prompted by the change he could see happening all around him in China, including rapid urbanization, population growth and land degradation of traditional farms.
“There’s a real sense of urgency to dealing with these challenges and I want to dedicate all my productive years, including my passion and my youth, to addressing them,” he says.
2. Finding a market for ugly fruit and veg
Christine Moseley has witnessed massive food waste at first hand.
During the harvest of romaine lettuce, Moseley watched as 25% of each plant was put into uniform packaging, while the rest was discarded.
“I knew then we had a broken food system. It was my ‘aha’ moment and I vowed not to stop until I found a way for that produce to be utilized for consumption,” she told Forbes.
That was when she decided to start Full Harvest, a B2B platform to sell rather than waste unsightly or unwanted fruit and veg.
Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN.
In the US alone, 9 billion kilos of ‘ugly’ and surplus produce are wasted each year simply due to the cosmetic standards of grocery stores.
Supermarkets often only buy perfect produce
Image: Reuters/Ngwyen Huy Khan
Full Harvest connects food companies with trucking firms and farms so that they can make use of the imperfect and surplus produce.
This not only makes good use of the food, it also stops water being wasted and limits carbon dioxide emissions from agriculture.
3. Preventing waste with NASA’s hyperspectral imaging
Hyperspectral imaging sees information on parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that human eyes cannot. That means it can test the freshness of food - from beef steaks to avocados - without even touching it.
The technology - first developed by NASA for aerial imaging - detects the internal quality and chemical composition of food products.
ImpactVision then uses machine-learning techniques to assess the quality of the product, providing food companies with real-time information about their stock.
With an avocado, for example, the images can determine the fruit’s ripeness and reject any rotten ones. Previous systems have depended on sampling - and then wasting - fruits.
“Using advanced imaging and machine learning, we help food companies learn about the quality of their food products non-invasively, providing real-time continuous data,” says ImpactVision’s CFO Rachael Gan.
“That leads to optimized decision-making during processing that in turn reduces waste.”
Can you tell which avocado is ripe without touching . Image: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko
ImpactVision is now working with several leading food producers and supermarkets in the US and believes the data it gathers has the power to transform food supply chains in the same way as GPS transformed navigation.
As food quality control is digitized, this new technique could also help spot contamination and prevent costly food recalls at a later date.
Have you read?
4. More productive seeds
“Seeds are the heroes of modern agriculture. If we improve seeds, then we determine how much land, how much water, how much fertilizer will be used,” says Ponsi Trivisvavet, CEO of Inari Agriculture. “We can solve these major environmental problems by going back to the root cause - the seed.”
Image: FAO
Inari operates a seed foundry where a plant’s genes are edited - some genes may be knocked out, others inserted and others fine-tuned. "Everything we do would probably happen naturally over the next 1,000 years or so,” says Trivisvavet. “We’re just speeding up that process.”
Three changes were simultaneously carried out on tomato plant seeds in order to grow the size of the branch, increase the number of flowers and expand the size of the fruit. This led to an increase of productivity of more than 90%, something which has never happened before in the history of crop development, according to Trivisvavet.
The same technology is being used for soybeans, where the genes of the seed are being edited to increase the number of pods per node, and the number of seeds per pod.
Inari’s seed foundry uses AI-powered computuational crop design to understand the genomes of the crop and how they interact with each other.
“The gene editing itself is easier than identifying where the changes need to be made,” Trivisvavet says. “AI tells us where the changes need to be.”
Among the areas being worked on is making crops more drought-resistant and less dependent on fertilizer.
“We’re working out how to feed the world without starving the planet,” Trivisvavet says.
“If we can grow food with less inputs, then we can return land to nature and lighten the ecological footprint of farming.”
Written by Briony Harris, Senior Writer, Formative Content
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Old Coal Mines Can Be 'Perfect' Underground Food Farms
By Matt Lloyd BBC Wales
December 2, 2018
Experts say former mine shafts could be used to grow food |GETTY IMAGES
Abandoned coal mines across the UK could be brought back to life as huge underground farms, according to academics.
Mine shafts and tunnels are seen as "the perfect environment" for growing food such as vegetables and herbs.
The initiative is seen as a way of providing large-scale crop production for a growing global population.
Advocates say subterranean farms could yield up to ten times as much as farms above ground.
President of the World Society of Sustainable Energy Technology, Prof Saffa Riffat, believes the scheme would be a cost-effective way of meeting the growing need for food.
It could also breath new life into many mines that have been closed since the decline of the UK coal industry in the late 1980s and a cheaper alternative to vertical farming in giant greenhouses.
NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY How it would work
The idea has already gained support from mine owners, including the Land Trust and Coal Authority, while the Chinese government has also expressed an interest.
There are an estimated 150,000 abandoned shafts and 25,000km-sq of disused mines and tunnels in the UK.
"I'm very excited about the enormous potential. Rather than import so much food by air, rail and sea, we could grow a lot of it here and in huge quantities," said Prof Raffat.
"I wish I had thought of this idea when they were making all the miners redundant. We may have been able to offer them an alternative job."
So what are underground farms, and how would they work?
A problem solved?
By all predictions, global population will continue to grow with the figure in the UK set to reach 80 million before the end of the century, according to the United Nations.
Increasingly, people are opting to live in cities rather than rural areas, putting a strain on food production and land space.
"We have a major issue with food production and supply with the world's population expected to reach nine billion by 2050," said Prof Raffat, of Nottingham University.
"We need to do this for our future. We have a growing demand for food, especially in the cities, but less space to grow it."
ZERO CARBON FOOD | Richard Ballard (left) and Steven Dring grow food in a former air-raid tunnel in London
Why tunnels?
A former World War Two air-raid shelter 100ft (30.5m) under Clapham Common, London, is already being used to grow greens for local supermarkets and restaurants.
Unlike current agriculture, farming underground is unaffected by irregular seasons, climate change and the extreme weather witness throughout 2018.
Almost all the ingredients needed for growing crops such as lettuces, carrots, mushrooms and strawberries are already in place.
The air temperature and humidity levels are generally temperate and constant while there is a ready water supply as well as carbon dioxide.
"Tunnels and shafts would need less energy with heating, so are very attractive for food production. They're almost perfect," said Prof Raffat.
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How would it work?
Crops would either be grown in water or suspended in the air and sprayed with water and nutrients.
Lighting would either be from LED lights which are now "extremely cheap to buy and run" or fibre-optic technology which can tunnel sunlight up to 40 metres into the ground.
Carbon-capture technology would capitalise on the naturally occurring CO2.
NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY
Is it viable?
Currently, mass-producing crops requires large areas of land.
However one 7m-sq shaft can produce 80 tonnes of food per year, according to Prof Riffat, approximately eight to 10 times the amount of food grown on the same area of land above ground.
"You're looking at about £30,000 to set up one shaft and the running costs are very low - less than the energy consumed by three houses each year. With natural sunlight, the costs are even less."
What has been the reaction?
The Land Trust owns and manages many former colliery sites that have been converted into public spaces.
"It's a great idea and one that we have previously considered ourselves," said chief executive Euan Hall.
"There are obvious challenges, not least that many shafts have been capped or have been built on, but there are lots of coalfields where there's no community around them, where this is clearly something worth looking at.
"A lot of hill farmers in Wales are living hand to mouth so anything that helps diversity and brings a new form of income would be very welcome."
A spokesperson for the Coal Authority said it was "open to considering new ideas" as part of its innovation strategy.
He added: "As an organisation, we constantly review new ways to develop our mining legacy in an effort to minimise remediation costs, generate income from by products and create a future for these important and unique areas.
"Any schemes involving former coal mines would inevitably throw up many technical, legal and financial challenges that would need to be overcome."
NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY | Shafts close to cities to provide a steady supply of fresh food.