The Future of The Agriculture Industry Is Vertical Farming
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.”