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Hydroponics In The GCC - History And Emerging Trends
During World War II the shipping of fresh vegetables to overseas remote islands was not possible; and also feeding the soldiers, where troops were stationed. They couldn’t be grown in the soil. Then, Hydroponic technology was tested as a viable source for fresh vegetables during this time
K.V.Bhaskar Rao
Grower - Hydroponics Specialist,
Consultant, Mentor, Faculty,
Trend Setter And Speaker
During World War II the shipping of fresh vegetables to overseas remote islands was not possible; and also feeding the soldiers, where troops were stationed. They couldn’t be grown in the soil. Then, Hydroponic technology was tested as a viable source for fresh vegetables during this time. US Air Force built one of the first large hydroponic farms on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, followed by additional hydroponic farms on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Pacific, using crushed volcanic rock as the growing medium and, on Wake Island west of Hawaii, using gravel as the growing medium. These hydroponic farms helped fill the need for a supply of fresh vegetables for troops stationed in these areas.
The American Army and Royal Air Force built hydroponic units at various military bases to help feed troops. In 1952, the US Army's special hydroponics branch grew over 8,000,000 lbs. of fresh produce for military demand. Also established at this time was one of the world's largest hydroponic farms in Chofu, Japan, consisting of 22 hectares. History says that in 1945 during the II world war, the US Air Force built large hydroponic facilities in Habbaniya in Iraq, Bharain and the Persian Gulf, to support troops stationed near large oil reserves. So, we know that hydroponic cultivation of vegetables was prevalent during that time in the Middle East and GCC.
Climate change, water stress & environmental degradation are affecting large populations around the world & represent a major threat to international hunger, human security & wellbeing. Technology development, implementation, indigenization to suit local conditions (labour and capital) along with skill development for personnel is the key to the success of agriculture in a rapidly urbanizing world. Based on predicted population growth and urbanization, food and water demand will create greater challenges by 2050. The world will be required to produce more food, with less water and a declining rural workforce.
Urban agriculture (CEA which includes hydroponics/ rooftop/ aquaponics/ aeroponics) is the new culture that is catching up everywhere and more in the GCC. We do have far too many participants in this industry who have too little actual crop production knowledge and / or experience. This challenge can be met with training/skill development to generate employment and food security with rational use of resources and thus producing safe, healthy & nutritious food. Educate individuals and companies to the new farming technology as innovation and capacity building is the only accelerators to this new endeavour.
Increasing awareness regarding the risks of consumption of contaminated food is a driving demand for crops and vegetables that are cultivated in a safe and controlled environment. Hydroponic plants are an ideal choice in this scenario as hydroponic systems eliminate the need for soil, which is where pathogens incubate. Moreover, the increasing rate of urbanization in developed regions is expected to cause a major shift towards a preference for hydroponic vegetables. Consumers with changing tastes are willing to pay a premium for an assortment of produce offering freshness, quality, flavour, safety, and convenience. Young and affluent Western food-loving consumers are driving the growth and demand for imported foods in the Middle East.
Locally grown vegetables, indigenous/ native herbs, microgreens, wheatgrass, salad greens, and the concept of “farm to fork” are becoming increasingly common in the marketplaces of GCC. Thanks to alternative agricultural practices such as hydroponic farming. Most GCC countries are now taking definite steps towards being self-sustainable with certain food items that often are served at the dinner table. RTE salad mix or even the snacking section like cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, and the likes are hitting the hypermarket shelves.
Many Arab countries rely heavily on groundwater to meet their water requirements for economic and social development, such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, and Libya, with more than 80% groundwater dependence. Even in countries with the relative abundance of surface water such as Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, which have flowing rivers, reliance on groundwater is increasing due to growing demand for water – sometimes due to up streams’ control of flow. Groundwater is facing depletion in many GCC countries, which threatens its sustainability and the existence of the sectors that depend on it.
Hydroponics in the GCC has the following “cut above the rest” pointers to establish long-term investment benefits in all ways. It is a “win-win” situation for all the stakeholders.
* Huge potential in areas with poor arable land like the Middle East. You do not have to use "New Technology" it is Proven.
* Offers the chance to Grow food 12 months of the year even in warm climates. Increased Yields - more product is grown and harvested per M2.
* A huge reduction in the quantity of water currently used in the food chain, reduction in the use of fertilizers and energy currently used to produce food.
* Opens immediate employment opportunities in harvesting, retailing, and distribution, thus, stimulates new markets locally and nationally.
* Satisfy local demand = less imports = greener solution thus zero carbon footprint. Increased turnover of produce - crops grow faster and more often.
* Harvesting takes place at a more comfortable height - no bending over and better ergonomics. Promote more favorable working conditions.
* A healthier crop using fewer pesticides provides health benefits to the consumer. Improved Quality of Yields - more nutritionally sound and therefore tastes superior.
* Complete control over nutrient balance - controlled growing creates a healthier crop.
* Closed recirculation irrigation system conserves water. Nutrient solutions may be re-used in other areas.
Few parameters that would enhance and enable the growth potential in this sector can be achieved by the following. 1. Single window clearances, without stringent regulations on the import of soil conditioners, hydroponic grow media (cocopeat), Plant Protection Chemicals (PPC), Seeds, grafted cuttings, rooted plants, tissue-cultured saplings, and all planting materials to enhance diversity and try incorporating new species for cultivation to feed the local population.
2. Create “Local” or locally grown stamp to help leverage local farmers for direct entry into co-operatives, supermarkets etc. First preference to locally grown produce.
3. Create “ugly produce” sections for local growers only (as unflavorable local weather conditions or other reasons lead to visual imperfections but with the same taste and nutritional values).
4. All local farms mandatory to adopt Global GAP methods of cultivation to ensure safe & hygienic food, instead of so-called “organic”. Training and educating farmers and cultivation labour to ensure food safety.
5. Source all farm-related services for infrastructure development like greenhouses, irrigation systems, cooling systems, indoor vertical farms, LED/grow lights etc from locally approved vendors – economy
gets stronger and remains within the country. According to a report, food consumption in the GCC is expected to grow at 4.2% CAGR, with cereals leading the regional numbers. A quick rundown of the fastest-growing categories, per country:
* Kuwait’s fastest-growing market is Fruits, at a 7.9% CAGR.
* Oman’s fastest-growing market is Dairy, at a 6.1% CAGR.
* Saudi Arabia’s fastest-growing market is Dairy, at a 5.7% CAGR.
* UAE’s fastest-growing market is Fruits, at a 5.3% CAGR.
* Qatar’s fastest-growing market is Meat, at a 3.7% CAGR.
* Bahrain’s fastest-growing market is Cereal, at a 3.5% CAGR.
With a booming population growth, expected to increase 6.5 million by 2021, and shifting demographics, some key trends are unlocking new opportunities in the market:
* Youth heavily exposed to western diets drive a growing demand for international foods.
*The rise of working women led to growth in ready and packaged meals.
* A more tech-savvy population open new opportunities in retail, with advancements in e-commerce and new outlet concepts such as hypermarkets and food trucks.
* With some of the highest overweight population rates in the world, all GCC countries are looking at healthier products. n
Email: kazabhaskar@gmail.com
April 2021 Floriculture Today
Chicago Proposed Home of Second Second Chances Farm
Garfield Produce, located in the East Garfield Park area in Chicago, is working together with Second Chances Farm to establish the Second Chances Farm Chicago in the Windy City
Garfield Produce, located in the East Garfield Park area in Chicago, is working together with Second Chances Farm to establish the Second Chances Farm Chicago in the Windy City. Garfield Produce is an indoor vertical farm and a licensed wholesale food establishment whose mission, values, and passion closely match ours.
On October 1st and 2nd, Garfield Produce’s co-founders, Mark and Judy Thomas visited Second Chances Farm in Wilmington after hearing about us during an Opportunity Zone seminar in Chicago earlier this summer. They had previously reached out to Ajit to open discussions about expanding the Second Chances Farm model to Chicago and invited him to visit Garfield Produce.
On October 21st and 22nd, Ajit visited Garfield Produce and toured vacant buildings in Opportunity Zones in Chicago. After discovering a strong connection to second chances for both people and neighborhoods, Ajit and Thomas’s pledged to continue the conversation.
Mark and Judy
Mark Thomas spent several days between November 8th and 13th at Second Chances Farm in Wilmington to further discuss the possibilities. He toured the facilities, met the returning citizens, engaged with the management team, and crunched some numbers. Both Ajit and Mark shook hands-on making the idea of establishing a Second Chances Farm in Chicago a reality in 2021-2022.
Mark, a graduate of an Ivy League college with an MBA and a CPA, was a top executive at the Tribune Company in Chicago for most of his career. He and his wife, Judy, a top corporate attorney, lived in the affluent western suburbs of Chicago. To get to work, they had to drive through the under-resourced areas on the west and south sides of the city, many of which still had the ruins of burned-out buildings from the Martin Luther King riots decades earlier.
Judy Thomas, co-founder, Garfield Produce
“I’d drive right through these impoverished landscapes and never give it a second thought,” says Mark. “But the workforce under my direction changed drastically when the Labor Union took over. Our established workforce was primarily older white males who were Italian, Croatian, and Irish. Suddenly, they were asked to manage a workforce that was around 22 years old, from the east and south sides of Chicago, mostly black and half female. This was when I became keenly aware of the problems that exist in inner-city areas of the United States.”
Mark remembers telling his wife the stories he’d heard during the day, and the shocking experiences he’d had. One employee, he says, shot another employee in the break room because they were from rival gangs.
“So, I said, Judy, it would be great if we could ever get to the point that we could create a small company so that we could hire people who lived in these tough areas,” says Mark. After Mark and Judy retired, that’s exactly what they did.
“We had done some volunteer work at an organization called, ‘Breakthrough Urban Ministries,’ which is in Garfield Park, a very tough area about 30 miles west of downtown Chicago,” Mark says. “It started out as a men’s shelter, then moved to a woman’s shelter, and then a flex area where teenagers could come, and then they started preschool programs. Our biggest frustration was that people would emerge from our job readiness programs, only to find there were no jobs. White flight had taken all the jobs and businesses away.”
In 2013, after having done extensive research and attending seminars about indoor vertical farms, Mark and Judy established Garfield Produce.
“We have a lot of experience with growing produce hydroponically, and a very strong brand in the Chicago area,” says Mark. “We look forward to finding a way we can combine our strengths with Second Chances Farm’s to continue to serve the struggling neighborhoods of Chicago by providing both jobs and healthy, nutritious foods.”
For more information:
Second Chances Farm
www.secondchancesfarm.com
16 Nov 2020
Aquaponics Can Have Both Environmental And Cost Benefits
Although aquaponics systems, which combine conventional aquaculture with hydroponics, have become a hotly debated topic in future food production, data on the economic feasibility of aquaponics is relatively limited
Aquaculture is the farming of fish and other aquatic animals, while hydroponics involves growing plants without any soil. Both approaches have been successful on their own, however, combining fish and vegetable production — so-called aquaponics — could also be profitable, according to a new analysis published on 19 May in the journal Aquaculture Research (1).
Although aquaponics systems, which combine conventional aquaculture with hydroponics, have become a hotly debated topic in future food production, data on the economic feasibility of aquaponics is relatively limited.
To figure out how realistic the approach might be, researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) analyzed one year of real production data from an existing aquaponics system — the “Mueritzfischer” — located in Waren (Müritz) in Germany. The research system was build as part of INAPRO, an EU-funded project led by IGB aimed at demonstrating the viability of an innovative aquaponics system.
The 540-square-meter facilities produce fish and vegetables on a large scale in a combined recirculating system. The fish and plants are grown separately within the two recirculating systems and sensors are used to continuously monitor can connect the two systems when needed to create optimal growth conditions.
The authors examined two different scenarios and performed an extensive profitability analysis. One scenario showed that the aquaponics approach can be profitable if facilities are sufficiently large. Using this scenario, the researchers developed a model case, which they used to calculate figures for different sized facilities.
Under the right conditions, aquaponics can have both environmental and cost benefits, according to the authors. The main barriers to the commercialization of aquaponics are the high investment costs and high operating costs such as for fish feed, labor, and energy, particularly in countries like Germany. Another challenge is that profitability largely depends on the market environment and the production risks, which can be difficult to predict.
Lead author Goesta Baganz believes there might be huge potential for aquaponics in urban areas: “The already profitable model case would cover an overall space of about 2,000 square meters. This would mean that professional aquaponics would also be possible in urban and peri-urban areas, where space is scarce and often relatively expensive.”
“If, therefore, urban aquaponics can make a profit on such a scale, there is even greater opportunity for local food production, which is becoming increasingly important throughout the world as urbanization progresses”, Baganz explained.
In a global context, Professor Werner Kloas, who led the project, said: “Considering current problems like climate change, population growth, urbanization as well as overexploitation and pollution of natural resources, global food production is the largest pressure caused by humans on Earth, threatening ecosystems and the stability of societies. Consequently, one of the key societal goals is to achieve eco-friendly, efficient food production,”
(1) Baganz, G. et al. Profitability of multi‐loop aquaponics: Year‐long production data, economic scenarios and a comprehensive model case. Aquaculture Research (2020). DOI: 10.1111/are.14610
Growing Up In The Garden State: Vertical Farms Prove To Be Bright Spot on N.J.'s Agricultural Horizon
New Jersey’s numerous vertical farms represent a bright spot on the Garden State’s agricultural horizon
In Newark, AeroFarms converted a 75-year-old, 70,000-square-foot steel mill into the world’s largest indoor vertical farm in 2015, which is soon to become the world’s second–largest when AeroFarms completes construction of its new 150,000-square-foot vertical farm in Danville, Va. Photo courtesy of AeroFarms
While New Jersey is famously known as the ‘Garden State’ based on its bountiful produce, numerous forces here and abroad indicate that the delicate balance between food growers and consumers is reaching a dangerous tipping point. Among key concerns, the world population is currently growing faster than the food supply, agriculture accounts for nearly 25% of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, and modern commercial farming practices have led to a rise in dangerous and costly food-borne and antibiotic-resistant illnesses. Closer to home, a recent report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed that between 1982 and 2007, New Jersey lost a greater share of its agricultural land to development than any other state in America, putting further strain on a local industry already under pressure.
Proving that necessity is the mother of invention, however, a new crop of innovators is tackling these challenges head-on. Based on the benefits of “vertical farming” – a process by which crops are grown indoors in vertically stacked layers within highly controlled environments – New Jersey’s numerous vertical farms represent a bright spot on the Garden State’s agricultural horizon.
A Strategic Solution
“Vertical farms lead back to the need to build a world in which the current food system must support the needs of an expanded population with a rapidly dwindling set of resources,” said Irving Fain, founder, and CEO of Bowery Farming, a 5-year-old, Kearny-based indoor farming company that’s addressing the impending climate and food crisis by using the power of technology to grow fresh, high-quality produce closer to the point of consumption. With two commercial indoor farms located in Kearny and a third recently launched in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area, “Bowery’s model and proprietary technology, BoweryOS, enable the growth of high-quality crops year-round, regardless of whether or seasonality, using zero pesticides and over 95% less water,” Fain said.
“We’re re-appropriating industrial space to grow crops indoors at a rate that’s 100 times more productive per square foot of land than that of traditional agriculture,” noted Fain, who said that Bowery’s data-rich systems and ability to control the entire growing process enable it to trace every individual crop back to its original seed and deliver superior produce to restaurants and stores (including Whole Foods and Stop & Shop locations) within days of harvest.
Five miles away in Newark, AeroFarms converted a 75-year-old, 70,000-square-foot steel mill into the world’s largest indoor vertical farm in 2015 (soon to become the world’s second-largest when AeroFarms completes construction of its new 150,000-square-foot vertical farm in Danville, Va.). Growing a range of fruit, vegetables, and greens (under the “Dream Greens” label) without sun or soil in a fully controlled, indoor environment using a patented aeroponic growing system for faster harvest cycles, predictable results, superior food safety and less environmental impact, the company’s annual yields are reportedly 390-plus times higher per square foot than conventional farming. Harvesting up to two million pounds of highly nutritious, premium-quality produce per year, AeroFarms was recently named one of Time’s ‘Best Inventions of 2019.’
Farming 8,000 square feet of grow space within a historic greenhouse in Newark’s Branch Brook Park, Radicle Farm grows hydroponically using a nutrient film technique (NFT) and flooded tray system. Though not a vertical farm per se, “vertical growing makes sense within densely populated urban areas, and field farming and ground-level greenhouse growing will also continue to play a major role for quite some time,” said Radicle Farm Co-Founder Tony Gibbons.
Hackensack-based Greens Do Good is proving that vertical farms can not only be rooted in food delivery but in social responsibility as well. At the 3,600-square-foot facility, which opened in April 2019, all proceeds from the growth of its dozens of different microgreens, lettuce, and herbs – all grown without soil, pesticides or herbicides – go to REED Next, a nonprofit organization that provides continued education, life experience and work opportunities to adults with autism.
“We believe that growing healthy food with minimal impact to the environment is the future of farming, and Greens Do Good is transforming the way our local community sources healthy produce by providing the freshest ingredients in a sustainable and socially responsible way,” said Jennifer Faust, REED Foundation’s director of Communications. “In a state like New Jersey, where urban communities don’t have space, access or optimal year-round outdoor growing conditions to provide fresh produce, Greens Do Good is solving that problem by creating a sustainable social enterprise that not only helps individuals with autism but provides our community with produce that’s delivered hyper-locally on the same day it’s harvested, 365 days a year.” At its core, Faust said, “we’re a community partner providing sustainable produce to local businesses while supporting adults with autism, a greatly underserved population.”
With a similar desire to support its community, Bowery works closely with Table To Table, a food rescue program that delivers perishable food to organizations that serve the hungry in Bergen, Essex, Hudson and Passaic counties and also has developed lesson plans to aid local teachers and students in discussions about the modern agricultural landscape and its challenges.
Building A Better Future
Often located in urban settings in order to bring agriculture back to city centers, vertical farms incorporate the utmost in sustainable products and practices. At Bowery, for example, energy-efficient LED lighting mimics the spectrum of the sun for crops, while rooftop solar panels, a clean gas backup generator, and a battery energy storage system further reduce the company’s energy use and carbon emissions in New Jersey. “In addition, Bowery uses over 95% less water by recirculating it continuously and only replenishing the amount that’s used by the plants or lost during daily operations,” Fain said.
Part of a current network of 2,000 vertical farms in America within an industry that’s estimated to grow to over $3 billion by 2024, New Jersey’s vertical farms are proud of the contribution they’re making to meet the state’s food challenges while transforming agriculture around the world.
“Bowery was founded on the fundamental belief that technology applied at scale can solve difficult and important global problems, with agriculture sitting at the nexus of many of these issues, and our mission is to grow food for a better future,” said Fain, whose company was honored as one of Fast Company’s “2019 Most Innovative Companies in AI.” Based on its benefits and success, he said, “we see indoor farming becoming an even more meaningful and integral part of the farming and agriculture industries in the next 5 to 10 years and look forward to continuing to experience the positive impact of vertical farming on the environment.”
By Susan Bloom | For Jersey’s Best | April 21, 2020