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SUNY Chancellor Johnson Awards $50,000 In Seed Funding To Winner of High-Tech Start-Up Pitch Competition at SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Re-Nuble, which develops an on-site nutrient system for farmers to manufacture their own fertilizer, won the competition and was presented with a $50,000 check as seed funding to help the start-up commercialize its product
September 17, 2019
Event Connects High-Tech SUNY-Based Entrepreneurs with Nation’s Largest Source of Seed Funding
Re-Nuble Awarded First-Ever TAF MVP
Albany – State University of New York Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson today awarded the first Technology Accelerator Fund Most Valuable Pitch (TAF MVP) winner, a high-tech start-up company competition, which capped a day-long event for New York State entrepreneurs at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Re-Nuble, which develops an on-site nutrient system for farmers to manufacture their own fertilizer, won the competition and was presented with a $50,000 check as seed funding to help the start-up commercialize its product.
"This competition is a great example of New Yorkers, particularly our students and faculty, utilizing their talents, skills, and entrepreneur spirit to develop the latest cutting edge technology and innovation into valuable products," said SUNY Chancellor Johnson, an engineer and entrepreneur herself during her career. "I applaud Re-Nuble on their winning pitch, and will continue to follow the exciting work of each of these ten up-and-coming companies."
The competition featured pitches from 10 start-up companies currently working with some of the world’s most advanced technologies. Each start-up is affiliated with a SUNY campus business incubator or accelerator program. The pitch competition followed an all-day event hosted in partnership with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), which welcomed the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Road Tour on its first-ever visit to Albany. SBIR is a major national source of funding for start-up companies on the verge of commercialization, investing $3 billion annually. Nearly two dozen agency administrators attended the event, meeting with about 275 entrepreneurs to provide feedback and help them refine their ideas.
"SUNY is proud to connect some of our most inventive and entrepreneurial minds to this key source of federal seed funding," said SUNY Polytechnic Interim President/SUNY Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Grace Wang. "We are committed to helping our SUNY-based start-ups convert cutting edge research into market-ready products and services that can stimulate economic growth and lead to advancements in a variety of important fields."
"Every year, we meet entrepreneurs from around the country looking to turn their big idea into another great American innovation story. We are committed to supporting America’s small businesses owners wherever they are," said SBA Acting Administrator Chris Pilkerton. "This tour reflects our continued commitment to ensuring that these innovators are aware of SBA’s resources to help them reach that goal."
Joining SUNY and the SBA in sponsoring the Albany SBIR Tour are SUNY Summer Startup School, NY Small Business Development Center, Innovate 518, UAlbany Innovation Center, ip.com, NYSTAR, and Empire State Development.
The SUNY TAF MVP Competitors include:
Aviate Audio was founded in 2017 and is developing a wireless device for musicians who use traditional ‘effects pedals’ or ‘stomp boxes that can be controlled by the musician at the instrument. Aviate Audio is a University at Buffalo Incubator client.
beYOUty Tech was founded in 2019 and is developing technology to enable real-time personalization of beauty products for every user. beYOUty Tech is a member of the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator at Binghamton University.
Excelsior Biofilms was founded in 2017 and is developing a way to treat microbial biofilm infections beginning with wound dressings. Technology invented at Binghamton University. Excelsior Biofilms is also a member of Koffman Southern Tier Incubator at Binghamton University.
Ferric Contrast was founded in 2017 and is developing an iron-based replacement for gadolinium-based Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) contrast agents. Technology invented at the University at Buffalo. Ferric Contrast is also a University at Buffalo Incubator client.
FlexSurface was founded in 2014 and is developing a new catalyst technology which will meet the increasingly stringent emissions regulations and will replace systems that contain low levels of Platinum Group Metals. This technology was developed at Binghamton University.
Mechanismic was founded in 2017 and is developing a kit called SnappyXO which will deliver an all new way to engage students using STEM robotics. This technology was invented at Stony Brook University.
POP Biotechnologies was founded in 2016 and is developing a versatile platform that can be used for rapid, cost-effective screening, development and manufacturing of vaccines. POP Biotechnologies is a University at Buffalo Incubator client.
Re-Nuble was founded in 2011 and is developing an on-site nutrient system that enables farmers to manufacture their own fertilizer on-site using otherwise unusable waste produce. Re-Nuble is a client of the Clean Energy Business Incubator Program at Stony Brook University.
SupreMEtric was founded in 2019 and is developing a new tool for on-site crime investigation in the form of a portable device for non-destructive and confirmatory identification of all bodily fluids. This technology was invented at the University at Albany.
sxRNA was founded in 2017 and is developing a mechanism to perform RNA switches which can then be integrated into many applications new including RNA-based medicines, diagnostics, and molecular tools. This technology was developed at the University at Albany and SUNY Poly.
About SUNY’s Technology Accelerator Fund
Launched in 2011, TAF strategically invests in SUNY’s most disruptive innovations developed by faculty and students to accelerate their development and commercialization. SUNY and its Research Foundation have invested over $2.8 million to successfully advance the commercial readiness of 50 SUNY innovations. The program has also catalyzed the investment of an additional $14.5 million from external partners, including federal agencies, industry licensees and angel investors.
About the State University of New York
The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive system of higher education in the United States, with 64 college and university campuses located within 30 miles of every home, school, and business in the state. As of Fall 2018, more than 424,000 students were enrolled in a degree program at a SUNY campus. In total, SUNY served 1.4 million students in credit-bearing courses and programs, continuing education, and community outreach programs in the 2017-18 academic year. SUNY oversees nearly a quarter of academic research in New York. Its students and faculty make significant contributions to research and discovery, contributing to a $1.6 billion research portfolio. There are 3 million SUNY alumni worldwide, and one in three New Yorkers with a college degree is a SUNY alum.
To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunity, visit www.suny.edu.
Tech-Driven Vertical Farming Company Kalera Names New CEO, Daniel Malechuk
“I’m honored and excited for the opportunity to lead Kalera in this new phase of expansion and continued innovation as we bring nutritious, healthy, leafy green vegetables to more people locally and around the globe,” said Daniel Malechuk, new CEO of Kalera
The company also announces new Vice President of Sales, J. Michael Carr, to focus on expansion into foodservice and grocery markets
September 17, 2019 08:04 ET | Source: Kaleraphoto-release
Technology-driven vertical farming company Kalera announced that it has hired veteran foodservice and grocery industry executive Daniel Malechuk as CEO. Kalera’s Co-Founder and current CEO, Cristian Toma, will move to the role of Chief Technical Officer. The company also announced that J. Michael Carr has joined as VP of Sales.
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, technology-driven vertical farming company Kalera announced that it has hired veteran foodservice and grocery industry executive Daniel Malechuk as CEO. Kalera’s Co-Founder and current CEO, Cristian Toma, will move to the role of Chief Technical Officer. The company also announced that J. Michael Carr has joined as VP of Sales.
“I’m honored and excited for the opportunity to lead Kalera in this new phase of expansion and continued innovation as we bring nutritious, healthy, leafy green vegetables to more people locally and around the globe,” said Daniel Malechuk, new CEO of Kalera. “Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work across many different disciplines within the food industry — from both the buyer side and supplier side — while consistently growing the size and scale of the business, all of which will be critical to my position at Kalera.”
“Daniel is a world-class executive with extensive experience managing and growing some of the world’s best food and grocery companies,” said Cristian Toma, Chief Technical Officer of Kalera. “As we enter the growth stage of this business and the world recognizes the value of our fresh, clean, local produce, we need a different sort of management — where knowledge of the factors that drive the large produce markets are as vital as the technology that got us started. This is an exciting time in the company’s growth and the collective experience of Daniel and Michael, in both foodservice and grocery, will help propel us forward.”
A food industry veteran, Malechuk began his career as a District Manager at ALDI, where he helped the company expand into new markets and was subsequently promoted to Director of Corporate Purchasing at ALDI’s US headquarters. There he headed several of the company’s perishable programs and focused on global sourcing, purchasing, marketing, and product development. In addition, he developed and spearheaded the company's corporate seafood sustainability policy and also developed a product that won the national Private Label Manufacturers Association's Salute to Excellence award.
After his tenure at ALDI, Malechuk served as an executive in several of the country's leading food and produce companies in both sales and supply chain, as well as having full P&L leadership roles. While at Shamrock Foods, Malechuk led the retail division and drove explosive revenue and profitability growth and expansion across the Southwest. Daniel also served as Vice President at Keysource Foods, where he led company strategy and sales operations and negotiated contracts with top executives for the world's largest food companies, including ConAgra, Carnival Corporation, PF Chang’s, ALDI, and Sysco.
J. Michael Carr, the new Vice President of Sales, previously held the position of Director of National Sales Planning and Retail Operations at Village Farms International, North America’s largest publicly traded natural and organic hydroponic greenhouse grower. Carr joins Kalera to expand the company’s reach and relationships with suppliers, restaurants, and grocery stores.
Last year, Kalera opened the first hydroponic HyCube growing center on the premises of the Orlando World Center Marriott. This HyCube followed similar installations that were already operational at the company’s headquarters. Kalera is now scaling operations to include a new growing facility in Orlando, which will be the single largest indoor vertical farm in the Southeastern United States. The new facility will have the capacity to produce upwards of 5 million heads of lettuce per year. The company plans for accelerated growth and will build additional facilities as production capacity is further expanded in the US and internationally.
Central to Kalera’s business is good science. The company is planting non-GMO seeds, and over the past several years has perfected plant and data science-driven methods to naturally optimize the factors that make plants thrive. Kalera manages these natural factors in a way that makes plants reach their maximum potential, resulting in the highest quality produce, grown locally with consistent high-yields year-round.
By using a closed-loop irrigation system, Kalera’s plants grow while consuming 95% less water compared to field farming. While a head of lettuce grown in a field may use as much as 60 gallons of water, Kalera’s systems result in a healthier plant with less than five gallons.
The company utilizes cleanroom technology and processes to eliminate the use of chemicals and remove exposure to pathogens. With indoor facilities situated right where the demand is, Kalera is able to supply an abundance of produce locally, eliminating the need to travel long distances when shipping perishable products and ensuring the highest quality and freshness.
About Kalera
Kalera is a technology-driven vertical farming company with unique growing methods combining optimized nutrients and light recipes, precise environmental controls, and cleanroom standards to produce safe, nutritious, pesticide-free, non-GMO vegetables with consistent high quality and longer shelf life year-round. The company’s high-yield hydroponic production systems are automated, data-driven facilities that grow vegetables faster, cleaner, at a lower cost, and with less environmental impact.
The Future of Food - AppHarvest Is Growing A Better Tomato
Gosnell said the technology is “very unique” for the United States, but it's been used elsewhere in the world where the need for sustainable, indoor agriculture is more pressing
By JEREMY D. WELLS Journal-Times
September 11, 2019
Dean Crockett, with AppHarvest, helps a participant put on a VR headset for a virtual greenhouse tour.
JEREMY D. WELLS | JOURNAL-TIMES
There is little that Appalachian foodies appreciate more than a good, garden fresh tomato in season. They may debate the best way to bread a fried green tomato, or the proper condiment for a juicy tomato sandwich (the correct answer is salt and pepper only, by the way, so there is no need to argue about what brand of mayonnaise), but one thing that is undeniable is the love for the savory fruit. Once summer is over, though, and garden fresh tomatoes are gone, the excitement pales.
Everyone who loves them has had the experience of picking up a gorgeous, plump, firm, red tomato in a grocery store, getting home and slicing into it with anticipation, only to find that it's dry and tasteless.
“Like the cardboard box it came in,” is a common description of these “hot house” tomatoes that you find in the winter.
But the problem, explained Matt Gosnell with AppHarvest, isn't necessarily that it was grown in a hot house. In fact, many of the so-called “hot house tomatoes” might have actually been grown outdoors.
The problem, he explained, is in the picking.
Because of the long transport time from California or Guatemala that these off-season fruits undertake, they aren't picked at the peak of ripeness. Instead they are picked early and allowed to ripen on the truck as they are moved to market.
AppHarvest expects to fix this problem. By growing fruit much closer to the markets where it will be sold, they can afford to leave their tomatoes on the vine longer, allowing them to ripen properly and for their flavors to develop.
If they have their way, next winter you might be able to pick up a grocery store tomato that is every bit as juicy and tasty as the ones from your own summer garden. This is all thanks to a growing technology that has already been thoroughly tested in other countries around the world.
“There are a couple of unique things about it,” said AppHarvest's VP of Development Matt Gosnell. “First we have to talk about our retention pond, which is ten acres and will hold a three-month supply of rain water we will use and recirculate through our facility and hydroponic system, so it will be a near net-zero water facility,” he said.
This means they won't need to purchase any outside water to grow their crops, and they won't be contributing to waste water disposal for the community.
But the other thing tomatoes need is light, and they plan to make use of those sunny days as much as possible.
“We're collecting rainwater; we're also using sunlight. That differentiates us from the vertical farms you might have read about where you retrofit a warehouse, stack trays (and use all artificial light),” he added.
That doesn't mean they won't be using any artificial light. They've got a state of the art LED system, and lights will be used to regulate the temperature in the environment, but the plants will get the full spectrum of the sun's rays to grow the plants as close to nature as possible.
“Our strategy is: we're here in Kentucky which gives us a lot of land, and we want to use what God gives us, which is the sun and the rainwater, so the warehouse model isn't exactly what we're going after. Our facility is 60 acres under glass, 2.7 million plus square feet. This is a monster. Three quarters of a mile from one end to the next. So, in terms of the controlled environment itself, it uses different technologies depending on what type of produce you're growing. In this case, tomatoes, which like high heat.
So we're using combination high pressure sodium lighting, which is traditional for tomatoes, as well as interspersed LEDs. It's actually going to be the largest LED lighting system in the world, under glass. That, at the same time, brings our energy costs down and also provides us with a heavier fruit, more dense fruit. So it's a win-win for us. We spend a little more money up front, and we get a great return on it, in terms of more volume, more product, as well as making us a more sustainable facility.”
Gosnell said the technology is “very unique” for the United States, but it's been used elsewhere in the world where the need for sustainable, indoor agriculture is more pressing.
“We're getting this technology from people who have been doing this very efficiently for decades. I'm talking about the Dutch, principally. The Israelis are also very good at this. These are people that had to do this. Post WWII the Netherlands was in heavy food need, so they developed this technology out of necessity and perfected it over the decades. So we're bringing that technology to Kentucky.”
Another advantage of this system over traditional agriculture is the efficiency of space.
“We can grow in one acre what would take ten acres (in traditional field based agriculture),” Gosnell said. “This is a result of controlling the environment, controlling the water, controlling the nutrients, pH, and giving a plant exactly what it needs. So, compared to open field agriculture, not only are you more efficient, but you take the guesswork out of the possibility of worsening storms, too much or not enough water, pests. These things, we take all the guesswork out of it.
So we've got a predictable four to five harvests a year. We can give you the date. We can give you the volume. Because we know exactly what we're growing and the quantity... We're really excited that this is going to be our first project, of what we hope is going to be many, here in the bluegrass.”
The other side of the product's value in being produced locally, once it's grown, is the shipping.
“If you look at a tomato market, specifically, six billion pounds of tomatoes are consumed each year in the United States. Almost four billion of that comes from Mexico,” Gosnell said. “So we've all had the experience of biting into what looks like a very ripe and tasty tomato, only to find it utterly tasteless. This is because it's picked when it's not yet ripe, it's sprayed, it's put on a truck.
Then it's five to six days north to a market. So we're saying, 'Hey, we're going to get you something grown in Kentucky. It's going to be fresher. It's going to taste a lot better. It's going to be healthier, with more nutrients. And we're going to get it to you in a quicker time at a decreased price than what you are paying now.' So it's a win-win-win for us all around, and it's been a really exciting thing to see come to fruition.”
Contact the writer at jwells@journal-times.com.
AmHydro’s Joe Swartz On The “Shiny Object” Problem Plaguing Indoor Ag
All photos courtesy of American Hydroponics and Joe Swartz. Joe Swartz, Vice President of Contain vendor American Hydroponics (AmHydro), is a fourth-generation farmer from Western Massachusetts. When it came time for him to take over, he went looking for a way to do things differently
All photos courtesy of American Hydroponics and Joe Swartz.
Joe Swartz, Vice President of Contain vendor American Hydroponics (AmHydro), is a fourth-generation farmer from Western Massachusetts. When it came time for him to take over, he went looking for a way to do things differently. His family had faced numerous challenges with conventional outdoor agriculture, from the state’s short, 120-day growing season, to an uncle who died prematurely due to pesticide exposure.
Joe decided the solution was indoor agriculture, and since 1984, he’s grown just about everything you can imagine with every possible setup. We caught up with Joe to talk about why it’s important to educate the public about indoor ag, and how media hype can distract from the fundamentals of good farming.
What’s AmHydro’s approach, and what makes it unique?
Ironically, AmHydro started about the same time I started to grow, unbeknownst to each other. We have always focused on the philosophy of making growers successful by employing the correct technologies in the appropriate situation, not trying to sell this system or that system, but looking at a given situation and assembling the correct technologies to effectively grow.
In fact, I think AmHydro has more successful growers around the world than any other hydroponics company. We have growers in 66 countries around the world, soon to be 67, and we’re really very, very pleased with that.
What are some of the most common challenges about getting started in indoor agriculture?
There are lots of different technology companies trying to get your attention. The biggest challenge I see right now is a lot of inappropriate technology that’s being promoted, especially in the media and online, because people think certain things look really interesting or cool. We call it “shiny object” technology. These are not effective technologies.
A lot of vertical farming technology, where you’re essentially trying to cram as many plants into a give area as you can, from a horticultural standpoint, that isn’t correct. Plants have very specific needs in terms of environmental management and space management, and a lot of these systems ignore the basic horticultural concepts that are required for successful production.
You’re saying you think all vertical farms and plant factories don’t work?
Not all plant factories, but unfortunately that model is by far—and I mean by a factor of thousands—by far the most challenging segment of controlled environment agriculture in terms of making an economic return.
If you look at the industry, look at where the expansion is in hydroponics. Companies like Gotham Greens and BrightFarms are expanding rapidly because they have a cost-effective production model. Tomato operations such as Houweling’s and NatureFresh and Sunset are all expanding rapidly. Again, they’re utilizing effective technology.
What’s been the main benefit of working with Contain?
We were actually one of the first companies that Contain worked with. They believed in our model, and we believed in the model they had, which was helping provide financing solutions so that more people could enter this industry. We thought it was a great model — people who understood controlled environment agriculture and were offering financing models. Good people and proper technology is a good combination.
We’ve had a few projects where there would have been difficulty in locating financing, and they went through Contain and were able to do it, so it was an effective model. We hope to do more of that in the future.
What advice do you wish you got when you started growing?
I think I would’ve pushed myself to focus on the basics of correct horticulture. That means to learn as much about the lifecycle of the plant, the lifecycle of insect and disease pests, to understand the different living ecosystems that go on in a facility like that. At the end of the day this is still farming. With a lot of the technological advances, people forget that.
Why are some banks and investors reluctant to get into indoor ag, and how can we change that as an industry?
It’s a very capital-intensive business. It is expensive to set up and to get started. That’s always been one of the big pain points of getting into the industry.
And I do think that investment and interest in technologies that are not productive damages the industry. In the 1980s, Weyerhaeuser and Pepperidge Farms and General Electric and all these huge corporations began building large greenhouses here on the East Coast, and utilizing the pond system, and talking about lettuce factories, and these are all automated systems, and by 1990 all of our food is going to be grown in these indoor food factories. They all failed spectacularly, and millions and millions of dollars in investment were lost, and it damaged the credibility of the industry. It’s taken a long time for the industry to recover. Unfortunately, we’re heading down the same path today.
AmHydro does a lot of public education. Why is that important?
We feel very strongly that education is the key to everything. Basically you are looking at a very intensive form of growth that requires knowledge in terms of growing and business management to be successful. The more we educate our growers, the more successful they are.
What’s the most exciting trend in indoor agriculture?
The most exciting trend is the level of public awareness about the business, both from a consumer buying hydroponically grown produce, to people who want to get involved in the industry. This is the highest level ever.
When I was in agricultural college in the ‘80s, I was in a classroom of young people with 30, 35 students. I come back now to the University of Massachusetts and I lecture to 300 students, so the level of involvement has skyrocketed, and that’s tremendous, and I couldn’t be more excited.
This conversation transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Learn more about Contain and funding your indoor ag business at our website.
Tags: Agriculture Indoor Agriculture Startup Finance Contain
WRITTEN BYNicola Kerslake
We’re Contain Inc. We use data to improve access to capital for indoor growers, those farming in warehouses, containers & greenhouses. https://www.contain.ag/
Atlanta Suburb Working With Organizations, Government To Build Up Urban Agriculture
Atlanta nonprofit Food Well Alliance is a collaborative network of local food leaders heading up a new program it believes will be a game-changer for urban agriculture in cities across metro Atlanta
City of East Point Mayor Deana Holiday Ingraham signs the City Agriculture Plan MOU with Allison Duncan, Atlanta Regional Commission Principal Planner (left) and Food Well Alliance’s Kim Karris, Executive Director; Will Sellers, Deputy Director and Sarah Benedict, Operations Coordinator.
Photo © Caleb Jones
The City of East Point has been selected to pilot a new City Agriculture Plan in partnership with the Atlanta Regional Commission
August 28, 2019
Posted by Patrick Williams
Atlanta, GA — Atlanta nonprofit Food Well Alliance is a collaborative network of local food leaders heading up a new program it believes will be a game-changer for urban agriculture in cities across metro Atlanta. According to a press release, the City Agriculture Plan will do exactly what its name says: bring growers, community leaders, and city officials together — guided by the planning expertise of the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) — to develop city-wide plans that prioritize urban agriculture. The end goal? Thriving community gardens and urban farms providing greater access to locally grown food across the metro Atlanta region, which translates to healthier people, environments, and communities.
After a thorough exploration process with seven metro cities earlier this year, Food Well Alliance has announced the City of East Point has been selected to pilot the new City Agriculture Plan. The plan will begin with a community engagement and asset-mapping phase led by Food Well Alliance, followed by a six-month planning process undertaken with support from ARC. Once the plan is developed, Food Well Alliance will guide the implementation of the plan and provide a minimum of $75,000 in funding to help the community bring it to life.
“We are thrilled the City of East Point will be joining us in this exciting new endeavor,” said Food Well Alliance Executive Director Kim Karris. “We believe that East Point is uniquely poised to take bold steps and become a national model for urban agriculture. The work begins today, and it couldn’t come at a more crucial time. Metro Atlanta is one of the fastest growing regions in the country, and our cities are rapidly becoming more developed. This threatens the long-term viability of community gardens and farms. The City Agriculture Plan paves a way for city officials to work directly with growers and community leaders to determine the policies, ordinances, and programs that will move the needle most effectively.”
As the City Agriculture Planning process gets underway in East Point, six other metro Atlanta cities that rallied to pilot the program will receive funding support to catalyze their own urban agriculture initiatives: Alpharetta, Clarkston, Hapeville, Lawrenceville, Lovejoy, and Pine Lake. “The level of enthusiasm demonstrated in all seven cities shows us that we are onto something - that people want community spaces to reconnect to where their food comes from - so we are going to keep building on the momentum,” Karris said.
Nearly 500 people attended Community Food Forums held in the seven cities this February and March to learn more about City Agriculture Planning and share their ideas. Over time, Food Well Alliance aims to help develop City Agriculture Plans in all 54 cities in its five-county region serving Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett counties.
Funding for the City Agriculture Plan pilot has been made possible by The Zeist Foundation and Food Well Alliance founding benefactor, the James M. Cox Foundation.
“We are truly humbled and honored by being selected to create and implement the first City Agriculture Plan in the region,” said City of East Point Mayor Deana Holiday Ingraham. “This amazing partnership with Food Well Alliance and the Atlanta Regional Commission will be impactful and transform our City. The intense focus on community engagement and leadership throughout our City Agriculture Planning process will help ensure sustainability of the projects implemented to systemically address our food access challenges.”
“The City of East Point is extremely excited about its partnership with Food Well Alliance,” said Maceo Rogers, CEcD, director, Department of Economic Development for the City of East Point.
“It marks the beginning of a new collaboration between the City, residents, businesses and metro area organizations all uniting together to take a holistic approach to transforming the overall health of the community through access to local food production, community gardens, and farms.”
“Local agriculture is a key part of developing healthy communities,” said Sam Shenbaga, manager of ARC’s Community Development Group. “ARC is proud to support community agriculture and put our resources behind initiatives that improve our region starting at the local level."
Test For Organic Produce Detects Food Fraud
“Our method does not reveal whether pesticides have been used, but whether organic plants have been fertilized correctly. As such, the method complements existing analytical controls and, overall, provides a much more detailed picture of the growing history,” explains Laursen
TEST FOR ORGANIC PRODUCE DETECTS FOOD FRAUD
AUGUST 28TH, 2019
BY MICHAEL SKOV JENSEN-COPENHAGEN
A new method can determine whether an “organic” piece of produce is legit or fraudulently labeled.
By looking at fertilizer for organic plants, the method provides a deeper, more accurate portrayal of whether eco-labelled produce is indeed organic. According to experts, imported organic fruits and vegetables are susceptible to food fraud.
Increased consumer demand and higher profits for producers have made organic foods susceptible to food fraud.
“While a major eco-labelling scandal has yet to occur in Denmark, we often forget that our diet is sourced globally, and that our foods are often imported from countries where problems have been documented. For example, in southern Europe, where a large quantity of organic fruits and vegetables are sourced,” according to Kristian Holst Laursen, assistant professor in the plant and environmental sciences department at the University of Copenhagen. He has been developing food fraud detection methods for the past decade.
“Our method can be used to distinguish organic vegetables from conventionally farmed produce by looking at how plants have been fertilized,” says Laursen. The scope of fraudulently labeled tomatoes, potatoes, and apples and other produce is unknown as there has never been an examination of their fertilizers.
ISOTOPES, NOT PESTICIDES
The new method focuses on the isotope signature in a plant by isolating sulfate, a chemical compound that can reveal how a particular plant was grown. Humans, animals, and plants all have isotope signatures that provide information about the environment in which we live and how we live—diets included.
The current way of finding out whether an item is organic or not focuses on identifying pesticide residue. According to Laursen, this method is far from secure. For example, the use of pesticides on a neighboring field or traces from former conventional production on a now organic field can taint crops. Moreover, the analysis of pesticide residues is unable to reveal whether all of the rules for organic production have been complied with, such as the absence of inorganic fertilizers.
“Our method does not reveal whether pesticides have been used, but whether organic plants have been fertilized correctly. As such, the method complements existing analytical controls and, overall, provides a much more detailed picture of the growing history,” explains Laursen.
FOOD FRAUD
When a consumer purchases an organic vegetable, they’re often paying a premium for the method of cultivation, such as in soil without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Organized criminals are trying to exploit these conditions and profit in a global food fraud industry worth billions.
“Nobody really knows the extent of this type of fraud, but we have seen bad examples from abroad that extend well beyond organic products. Rice made of plastic, wine with toxins, artificial honey, etc. There is not always a health risk associated with food fraud, but it is clear that when you pay a higher price, you expect the product that you are paying for. And, of course, honest producers must be protected,” says Laursen.
Laursen’s research group is working with the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration and the method is ready for further testing, approval, and use by public agencies and commercial interests. The paper appears in Food Chemistry.
Source: University of Copenhagen
Original Study DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2019.03.125
Lead photo: (Credit: Getty Images)
TAGS AGRICULTURE CRIMES FOOD
Hydroponic Farming Having A Huge Impact On Agri Sector
Hydroponics farming has created a huge impact on Qatar’s agriculture sector as local fresh produce is becoming sustainable all-year round, prominent Qatari agriculturist and Agrico managing director Nasser Ahmed al-Khalaf has said
August 19, 2019
Nasser Ahmed al-Khalaf
Hydroponics farming has created a huge impact on Qatar’s agriculture sector as local fresh produce is becoming sustainable all-year round, prominent Qatari agriculturist and Agrico managing director Nasser Ahmed al-Khalaf has said.
“We continue to grow and develop more farms (in Qatar) even during the summer. We never stop and have been producing every day since 2015,” he told Gulf Times.
Agrico, a private Qatari agricultural development company established in 2011, aims at helping the country achieve self-sufficiency.
The company developed a highly sophisticated hydroponics system capable of producing various types of organic and pesticide-free vegetables and fruits such as tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, green leafy vegetables, spring onion, egg plants, zucchinis, mushrooms, hot and sweet peppers, and melons, among others, all year long.
Al-Khalaf said all their production is hydroponic-based, which gives higher yield, better quality of vegetables and fruits, and consumes 90% less water compared to conventional system of farming.
Between farms and backyards, he noted that eight different areas (and still increasing) in the country are being developed for hydroponic farming.
“We have three major farms, which we developed other than Agrico, and they are now producing even during the summer,” al-Khalaf stressed.
“I have one farm at 20,000sqm and still increasing in size. Another farm at 10,000sqm and another farm at 100,000sqm, he added.
“All these farms have been developed, operated and marketed by Agrico using its technology,” al-Khalaf said. “We provide for them the total solution from development, operations and marketing.”
It is learnt that local farms recorded a substantial increase in the production of fresh vegetables since the blockade on Qatar.
According to al-Khalaf, similar hydroponic systems designed for backyard farming are also being built, which aims to sustain every family’s vegetable needs.
The development of farms in the country is also unlocking their full potential and further increase yields that would meet the growing demand for fresh produce, according to al-Khalaf.
He encouraged compatriot entrepreneurs to invest in agriculture, especially in hydroponics farming. He described it as “a good and healthy” business.
“Hydroponics is the future of agriculture”, al-Khalaf stressed.
Planting The Seeds For Dramatic Changes In Agriculture
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released an important report titled “Climate Change and Land,” which chronicled the impact the agricultural industry is having on climate change
August 15, 2019
marsraw/Pixabay
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released an important report titled “Climate Change and Land,” which chronicled the impact the agricultural industry is having on climate change. Demonstrating the significance of that report, Alan Sano, a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Farmers Don’t Need to Read the Science. We Are Living It.”
But what is most interesting about the IPCC’s report is that they assume that traditional farming practices can be modified to address the crisis we face. Their recommendations are mostly focused on dealing with the fact that “global food production is now thought to be responsible for up to 37% of greenhouse gas emissions.” But there are other issues that make our traditional approach to farming unsustainable.
The global population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050.
Every hour, we lose 175 acres of farmland to real estate development.
A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year.
Scientists say that the earth has lost a third of its arable land over the last 40 years.
A quarter of humanity faces a looming water crisis.
Agriculture accounts for about 70% of global water withdrawals.
Nitrate from agriculture is now the most common chemical contaminant in the world’s groundwater aquifers.
Those are just some of the reasons why those searching for a sustainable solution are exploring the alternative of hydroponics—specifically with something that has come to be known as “vertical farming.”
Rick LeBlanc identified the additional benefits of vertical farming, including the fact that it “allows us to produce more crops from the same square footage of growing area.” For example, “1 acre of an indoor area offers equivalent production to at least 4-6 acres of outdoor capacity,” while using 70-95 percent less water than traditional farming.
As Danny Danko explains, “hydroponic cultivation — the growing of plants without soil — is a science as ancient as the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon and as modern as a future NASA mission to Mars.” It has even played a role in feeding U.S. troops since World War II.
During World War II, American troops overseas grew vegetables hydroponicaly to ease the burden of transporting perishable food to barren islands in the Pacific Theater and the arid regions of the Middle East…
The military kept growing hydro long after WWII, as Lt. Col. Marcus E. Cooper, Quartermaster, 1st Cavalry Division reported during the Korean War, “While we were in Kumchon we began to receive our first shipments of fresh vegetables. These were airlifted from the hydroponic farms in Japan. We had a standing priority on fresh foods for the hospital, then for the front-line troops. These vegetables were a real morale-builder.”
LeBlanc points out that the biggest downside to vertical farming right now is financial feasibility, due to the high capital costs associated with start-up. But he notes that “the financial situation is changing, however, as the industry matures and technologies improve.” That is where the federal government could play a huge role, similar to what was accomplished with renewable energy by the stimulus package, as described by Michael Grunwald.
Obama promised that he would double renewable power generation during his first term, and he did. In 2008, people had the sense that renewable energy was a tiny industry in the United States. What they forget is it was a tiny dead industry — because these wind and solar projects were essentially financed through tax credits, which required people with tax liability, and everybody had lost money, so nobody needed [the tax credits]. By changing those to a cash grant, it instantly unlocked this industry.
Any so-called “Green New Deal” will need to provide seed money (pun intended) to explore dramatic changes to how we think about agriculture and farming. The potential we’ve already seen from hydroponics and vertical farming could lead us in that direction.
Spotlight On Urban, Vertical And Indoor Agriculture
Should food be grown in cities? If so, how? These questions have a long history, with the last few hundred years taking in the Garden City movement where towns were designed to include homes, industry and agriculture, the ‘Victory Gardens’ of the First and Second World Wars and, more recently, the food miles debate
By Helen Breewood, originally published by Food Climate Research Network
January 22, 2019
Should food be grown in cities? If so, how? These questions have a long history, with the last few hundred years taking in the Garden City movement where towns were designed to include homes, industry and agriculture, the ‘Victory Gardens’ of the First and Second World Wars and, more recently, the food miles debate.
Meanwhile, futuristic visions of the food system often feature city-centre skyscrapers full of fresh fruit and vegetables, carefully tended by a fleet of robots, with precise doses of fertiliser, water and exactly the right wavelengths of light administered by an intelligent computer – and perhaps open to city dwellers looking to unwind among some greenery or learn how their food is produced. Entrepreneurs Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, for example, paint a rosy picture in their book Abundance, in which they claim that just 150 thirty-storey farms could feed the whole city of New York.
But look closer, and the picture becomes less clear. Isn’t urban farming an old tradition, in the form of allotments or community gardens? Aren’t commercial greenhouses already highly automated? Is it really more efficient to build a huge structure and use artificial lights, instead of just transporting food from farmland using rapid modern supply chains? If high-tech skyscraper farms are really more efficient (in terms of resource use or environmental impacts per unit of output) than field-based farming, why limit them to urban areas where land is expensive?
This purpose of this blog post is to disentangle some of the many intertwined concepts here: urban, indoor and vertical farming. The diagram below is one attempt at showing how several different forms of food production can be classified as urban, indoor, vertical or a combination. I’ll outline some of the main factors and questions surrounding their implementation. This post does not aim to answer all the questions raised, nor make a judgement on which types of urban, vertical or indoor farming are ‘best’ or most sustainable. Its purpose rather is to stimulate ideas and discussion among FCRN members. Do give your thoughts and feedback via the FCRN Google Group.
This post focuses mostly on high-tech farming rather than, say, allotments. It also focuses on higher-income countries. However, urban farming is of great importance in the context of lower-income countries – see, for example, the paper Sustainable urban agriculture in developing countries. A review and the work of the RUAF Foundation, which is a “global partnership on sustainable urban Agriculture and Food Systems”. For more information on different aspects of urban, indoor and vertical farming, see the resources listat the end of this post.
Image: one possible way of classifying agriculture according to whether it is urban, indoor, vertical or a combination of these. An alternative visualisation of these categories could be a 3D graph with three axes: rural to urban, outdoor to indoor, and horizontal to vertical. In this latter option, individual items could be placed at the appropriate point along each axis, instead of being classified as strictly urban or rural (say).
Urban agriculture
Image: Fadi Hage, Greenhouses at Lufa Farms, the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouses. Montreal neighborhood of Ahuntsic-Cartierville. Wikimedia Commons.
The location of agriculture can be defined on a spectrum from rural to urban, with urban or semi-urban encompassing a wide variety of situations such as windowsills, allotments, private gardens, public parks, multi-storey farms, industrial estates, rooftop gardens and even disused underground rail tunnels or ‘guerrilla gardens’ (areas of land that people cultivate without having formal legal rights to do so, such as unused building sites).
Proponents of urban agriculture claim that it has both environmental and social benefits.
On the environmental side, these include lower transport emissions, introducing green areas and biodiversity into cities, food waste reductions, greater efficiency of water use, and greater ease of using urban waste streams as a farming resource or linking with renewable energy production.
On the social side, listed benefits include fresher food, community cohesion, stress relief and mental health improvements, training and employment opportunities, and increased access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Matt Barnard, CEO of hydroponics startup Plenty argues that fruit and vegetables can be made cheaper by cutting out transport costs – and that therefore more people might be able to afford to buy them.
However, not all these benefits have a strong evidence base, not all apply to all types of urban agriculture, and there are also potential disadvantages to consider.
An example of a benefit that only applies to a specific form of urban agriculture is aesthetics. Anna Birgitte Milford, Research Scientist in the Division of Food Production and Society at NIBIO, is currently studying rooftop greenhouses in Bergen, Norway. She argues “A rooftop greenhouse can also, if done well, become an aesthetic landmark in any city, and this has a lot of social value.” However, commercial urban farms might not be open or visible to the public – and, as Milford points out, the aesthetic aims of a greenhouse may conflict with achieving optimal plant growing conditions. Mike Hamm, who is C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at the Centre for Regional Food Systems, Michigan State University, adds that while one of the arguments used to promote some urban farms is that organic agriculture would be easier because pests can be excluded, this attribute would be absent in the case of open green spaces.
Similarly, while employment opportunities may be created by some types of urban farming, highly automated urban farms may not create many jobs. Nevertheless, social enterprises can be designed specifically to provide educational opportunities, access to green space or other social benefits (see for example the box below about Gorgie City Farm).
There could be trade-offs between emissions savings from transport reduction and the high energy or material use of some forms of urban agriculture (for more on the resources used by indoor agriculture, see below).
According to Milford, it is difficult for rooftop greenhouses to be economically viable because of the additional material cost required to safely construct rooftop greenhouses and because of the higher costs of urban compared to rural land. However, successful examples do exist: Lufa Farms, which operates commercial rooftop greenhouses in Québec, claims to be running a profitable business.
While Hanna Tuomisto, Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki, says that freshness is one possible advantage of urban agriculture (indeed, many urban agriculture companies focus on freshness as a selling point, including Plenty, Lufa Farms and Farm.One), freshness is only important for some types of crops, such as salad leaves and soft fruit. There will almost certainly be little advantage in growing less perishable crops, such as grains, in urban locations.
Image: GroCycle Urban Mushroom Farm, Grocycle press kit
According to Peter Wootton-Beard, Lecturer in Agri-Technology at Aberystwyth University, another advantage of urban farming is that it becomes easier to use so-called ‘co-located’ resources or waste streams as inputs for the farm, including “nutrient recycling technologies such as anaerobic digestion, insect production, micro algae production (both for protein) and the use of waste heat and CO2 from CHP [combined heat and power] plants or electricity generation.” Thinking along similar lines, Diamandis and Kotler have suggested that the energy to run artificially-lit urban farms could be extracted from sewage, a waste stream that is readily available in urban areas. Another enterprise taking advantage of urban resource streams is GroCycle, which uses waste coffee grounds from cafes as a substrate to grow mushrooms in a disused office building. It would be less practical to transport the coffee grounds to a rural area, because they go mouldy quickly.
Gorgie City Farm: An example of urban agriculture
Image: Kim Traynor, Gorgie City Farm, Geograph, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh, UK, is an urban farm designed to promote education, volunteering opportunities and social inclusion. It offers free entry to visitors along with educational tours and workshops. As well as selling fruit and vegetables to local shops and restaurants, the farm showcases traditional animal farming methods. The farm is a charity and accepts donations rather than being economically self-sustaining through food production.
Indoor agriculture
Image: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, Surrounding the town of El Ejido, Almeria Province, southern Spain is a sea of greenhouses, stretching for tens of kilometres.
Indoor farming encompasses a range of food production methods such as cold frames, polytunnels, unheated greenhouses, heated greenhouses and so-called controlled environment agriculture (CEA), with tight control over many aspects of the growing environment (e.g. LED lighting with tuneable wavelengths to replace or supplement sunlight). What these methods have in common is a greater ability to control the growing environment than with outdoor production.
Some claimed advantages of indoor farming include better working conditions (e.g. less heat stress compared to working outdoors), greater control over pests and diseases, improved food safety, less vulnerability to extreme weather, the ability to produce all year long, lower emissions of pollutants such as excess nutrients and pesticides to the air, soil or waterways, and the ability to fine-tune crop flavours by adjusting growing conditions.
However, the energy and resource use of indoor farming can be high, depending on climate. For example, it takes so much energy to heat greenhouses in France that tomatoes grown in them have a higher carbon footprint than imported tomatoes grown in unheated greenhouses in Morocco, even after accounting for transport (Payen et al., 2015).
Speaking of relatively high-tech indoor systems, Mark Bomford, who is Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Programme, says “CEA comes at a higher energy cost per unit than field production for the same thing, which in most analyses means a higher environmental cost”, citing the thesis of Yoshihiko Wada, who in 1993 used real-world data to calculate the environmental impacts of tomato production in comparable hydroponic systems with conventional open-air farming. According to Bomford, Wada found that “sustaining the production of 1t tomatoes in a high-yield CEA system would actually require 15 times the ‘ecological footprint’ land for the same 1t of tomatoes in a low-yield field system [emphasis added]”. Bomford has advised several CEA startups, and mentions that these startups have generally viewed the high environmental impacts of CEA as a challenge to be overcome through greater efficiency.
Bomford does think that CEA has some advantages – namely, making working conditions safer and employment more seasonally stable – but suggests CEA may be best suited to single-storey sun-lit systems on relatively cheap rural land, and that multi-storey CEA farms on expensive urban land – i.e. the popular futuristic skyscraper farm vision – may be limited to a small market niche. Hamm agrees.
The relative ease of automation in indoor systems raises questions over control and ownership of technology and knowledge. For example, Infarm remotely controls all of its growing units (see box below). Although cofounder Erez Galonska says that the system will “re-empower the people to take ownership of their food”, might it actually mean that growers no longer develop expertise in recognising and responding to a plant’s needs? Plenty won’t share details of its hydroponics technology (source), but Liverpool’s Farm Urban, in contrast, gives out free instructions for building mini aquaculture kits.
Infarm: an example of indoor farming
Image: Infarm, First vertical farm to table restaurant opens its doors, Instagram
Berlin-based startup Infarm makes modular, automated farming systems that are designed to be used in locations close to consumers, such as supermarkets, restaurants, bars and schools. Infarm happens to be not just indoor but also vertical and – generally – urban.
The systems are remotely run by Infarm’s central control system to provide the right light spectrum, temperature, pH and nutrient levels for the crops. Retailers and others who hire the growing units won’t have to control the units themselves, other than to harvest the produce.
Infarm claims that one in-store farming unit is equivalent to 250 m2 of farmland (presumably in terms of production capacity) but uses 95% less water, 75% less fertiliser and no pesticide. It isn’t clear how Infarm’s carbon footprint or energy use compare to field-based farming.
There are also economic implications if the demand for manual labour decreases through automation. While it may benefit farmers in some circumstances – for instance, some UK farmers are concerned that there may be a labour shortage under the UK’s proposed post-Brexit immigration system – might automation also put people out of jobs or contribute to the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who own the technology?
Wootton-Beard says that indoor farming “means the possibility of near complete control over the environment, opening up the possibility to tailor the environment to alter flavour, nutritional profile and other characteristics of food plants.” However, such a tightly controlled growing environment may imply strict biosecurity and hygiene measures and a lack of public access – which would preclude some of the social benefits cited by promoters of urban and indoor farming. Wootton-Beard notes the discrepancy between public perceptions and what might realistically happen, saying people “have seen the concepts for urban skyscrapers and food production integrated with living accommodation, which whilst not impossible, is much less economically viable [than] a factory style production line approach.”
Another question is reliability: while Wootton-Beard points out that indoor farming is “agnostic of climate change, political instability, trade deals, and supply chain complexities”, might high-tech indoor systems instead be vulnerable to failure through mechanical breakdown, electronic faults, or malicious hacking of the control systems? Are these risks higher or lower than the risks of pests and extreme weather in outdoor systems?
Some indoor farming businesses say that fewer pollutants are released to the environment, compared to outdoor systems. For example, hydroponics startup Plenty says its system means “absolutely zero pesticides going into the soil, groundwater, and your food.” However, Bomford suggests that comparing controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to conventional farming is “not really fair” unless the same crops are being compared, saying “Advocates of CEA often miss their targets in their marketing material, pointing to the environmental abuses of agricultural sectors that will never be viable indoors (i.e. they might invoke the ‘dead zone’ in the gulf of Mexico, despite the fact that CEA tech will not change corn and soy practices, or invoke the subsidence of land in California due to groundwater removals, despite the fact that CEA tech will not change tree nut, cotton, or alfalfa growing practices) and then present a solution for a completely different sector – generally niche specialty crops.”
Vertical agriculture
Image: Farm. One press kit
Vertical farming can refer both to multi-level farms where the plants grow on stacked shelves of horizontal substrates, and to systems where the growth substrate itself is vertical, as in the Leafy Green Machine™, a ‘farm in a box’ where vertical strips of plants hang under artificial light in a converted shipping container (see the box below for more information). ‘Green walls’ of plants are also used for decoration, air purification, cooling of buildings or reducing stress, and less commonly for food production (e.g. the Edible Walls exhibit at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, curated by FCRN member Judith Friedlander). Vertical farming is highly compatible with growing techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics, which don’t need soil.
One significant benefit of vertical farming is space-saving, relative to conventional ‘horizontal’ farming. This is particularly useful in urban areas, where land is more expensive than in rural areas. Vertical farming therefore offers the possibility of providing very fresh food by squeezing into urban locations near consumers – albeit perhaps at a premium, due to the energy use and high land costs. Perhaps vertical farming could compensate for some farmland lost to urbanisation. However, Tuomisto points out that some people are concerned “whether the plants from hydroponics have the same nutritional value [as] plants grown on soil.” For further discussion of this question, see this piece from the New York Times: Are Hydroponic Vegetables as Nutritious as Those Grown in Soil?
On the other hand, perhaps urban land would be better used to provide housing to reduce emissions from commuting – particularly since urban land is expensive compared to rural land. Furthermore, the space-savings benefits of vertical farming could also be applied in non-urban settings, such as growing food in cargo ships which would otherwise be empty on their return journey.
As Tuomisto tells me, vertical farming generally requires artificial lighting because otherwise the lower layers of plants would not receive enough sunlight. For this reason, vertical farming systems also tend to be indoor systems (although outdoor multi-level cropping systems could conceivably be classified as a form of vertical farming). Artificial lights, together with cooling systems to remove the heat they produce, require a lot of energy. Tuomisto says generating this energy sustainably may be a challenge, but adds that vertical farming systems may become more efficient in future through optimisation of lighting, cooling and fertiliser and water usage. However, Hamm suggests that gains in energy efficiency can’t beat using sunlight.
The cooling requirements of vertical farms are a contrast to horizontal heated greenhouses. In the latter, the relatively large ratio of surface area to volume means that a lot of light can get in, but that heat is lost rapidly (at least in a cold climate).
Perhaps there is an optimum shape of vertical greenhouse (maybe with only a few layers) where the heat produced by both natural and artificial lighting is approximately balanced by the greenhouse’s passive rate of heat loss. Such a greenhouse might need relatively little additional heating or cooling.
Tuomisto also cites high material costs as a disadvantage of vertical farming, raising questions as to whether vertical farming provides environmental benefits (see below for a discussion of the carbon footprint of one vertical farming system). We may have some answers soon, as Tuomisto is in the early stages of conducting a Life Cycle Assessment study of a four-layer hydroponic system in Finland. As well as considering the direct environmental impacts of novel farming systems, we should also consider interactions with the wider food system. For example, might land spared by vertical farming become available for carbon sequestration, e.g. through reforesting or BECCS?
Freight Farms: an example of vertical farming
Image: LED lights, Freight Farms Press Kit
The Leafy Green Machine™ (LGM) produced by Freight Farms is a vertical hydroponic growing system inside a shipping container. It has been used in urban areas such as Paris and Oslo and has also been placed on some conventional rural farms, where it adds the ability to grow herbs and salads all year round.
Freight Farms claims that its system, which has an area of around 30 m2, can produce as much food in one year as two acres of farmland (it isn’t clear whether this is measured by weight) and uses 90% less water use compared to conventional agriculture. The system costs $85,000 to buy and around $13,000 per year to run (including electricity, water and growing supplies), according to Freight Farms.
Freight Farms gives some illustrative figures for inputs and outputs, although these vary according to the outside climate: per week, 875 kWh of electricity, 160 litres of water, 15-20 hours of labour and $75 worth of nutrients can produce (for example) 52 kg of butterhead lettuce or 23 kg of spinach.
Freight Farms doesn’t give the carbon footprint of growing food with the LGM. However, if as a very rough estimate we take a carbon intensity of 414 g CO2 eq. per kWh of electricity (the UK’s electricity mix on 3 January 2019, according to Electricity Map), then the electricity to run the Leafy Green Machine™ for a week would cause emissions of roughly 362 kg CO2 eq. That’s around 7 kg CO2 eq. per kg of lettuce, or nearly 16 kg CO2 eq. per kg of spinach – only accounting for electricity, not fertiliser, water or construction of the LGM.
How does that compare to conventional production? According to Clune et al., who reviewed the carbon footprints of food production across the world, typical carbon footprints are 3.70 kg CO2 per kg of lettuce (based on heated greenhouse production) and only 0.54 kg CO2 eq. per kg of spinach. That means food produced in the LGM has a carbon footprint at least 2 to 30 times higher than for conventional production, not accounting for transport.
Does reduced transport compensate for the increased carbon footprint of growing food in an LGM? It seems unlikely: transporting food across several thousand kilometres might only produce around 0.7 kg CO2 eq. per kg of lettuce, according to Mike Hamm.
Of course, if the LGM were to be used with lower-carbon electricity, the carbon footprint of the food produced would fall. In France, for instance, where the large contribution of nuclear power means the electricity mix produces only 74 g CO2 eq. per kWh (3 January 2019, Electricity Map), the LGM carbon footprints would fall to (as a minimum) 1.2 kg CO2 eq. per kg of lettuce and 2.8 kg CO2 per kg of spinach – which, for spinach, is still much higher than conventional production.
The LGM may have some advantages, but climate impact is not necessarily one of them.
In conclusion
There is a great deal of enthusiasm for new forms of farming. Milford even tells me “I have probably never been met with more enthusiasm when searching for stakeholders to a project.” However, perceptions are not always realistic. Wootton-Beard says “I have found that people tend to be orientated towards the utopian visions for indoor farming, and imagine it to be some sort of science fiction strangeness”, while Bomford claims “Public perception of CEA often seems a fantastical construction.”
Urban, indoor and vertical farming encompass a wide variety of systems, each of which have different benefits and drawbacks. Perhaps many of the systems considered here do have some role to play in our future food system, with each type being suited to serving different environmental, social or economic goals.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to our interviewees and to other FCRN members who have helped to produce this blog post by pointing out useful resources, including Anna Birgitte Milford, Hanna Tuomisto, Peter Wootton-Beard, Mark Bomford, Mike Hamm, Judith Friedlander, Annie Leymarie, Steve Gillman and Angelika von Heimendahl.
Tags: building resilient food and farming systems, urban agriculture, vertical farms
Fifty Percent of Consumers Would Buy 'Vertical Agriculture' Products
Rising populations and worsening weather conditions due to climate change make it difficult to produce enough healthy and fresh food. A contribution to solving this problem could be provided by so-called vertical agriculture
Georg-August-University Göttingen observes:
Rising populations and worsening weather conditions due to climate change make it difficult to produce enough healthy and fresh food. A contribution to solving this problem could be provided by so-called vertical agriculture. Here, the vegetables and fruits are grown on floors one above the other. This system requires neither direct sunlight nor farmland, as the plants grow in nutrient solutions under artificial light or daylight. A team of scientists from the University of Göttingen has investigated the acceptance of vertical cultivation systems. The results have been published in the journal Sustainability.
Researchers from the Department of Marketing for Food and Agricultural Products surveyed around 500 consumers from Germany on various vertical farming systems. The rating was for a refrigerator-sized appliance for home use, a medium-sized greenhouse in supermarkets, and a vertical farm that can be built into former industrial buildings. For 81 percent of consumers, environmental friendliness is an important issue.
Only seven percent had already heard of vertical agriculture. Interestingly enough, half of the participants would buy fresh products from vertical farming systems. It also shows that the larger the system, the higher the likelihood that it will be considered sustainable. The small systems for household use were rated worse overall.
Focus on sustainability
"Our results show that the development of vertical farming systems should focus in particular on sustainability. Only systems that are truly environmentally friendly will convince consumers," says Kristin Jürkenbeck, PhD student and lead author of the study. "The topic of sustainability is becoming increasingly important for consumers in all areas of life, as illustrated by the public discussions. This must not be ignored by the big companies," says Prof. Dr. med. Achim Spiller, Head of the Marketing Group for Food and Agricultural Products.
Publication date: 8/12/2019
The Farms of The Future Were Built For Outer Space. Will They Work On Earth?
It will be years until NASA is ready for a journey to the red planet, but if Earth continues to suffer from climate change, Mars could come to us.
It will be years until NASA is ready for a journey to the red planet, but if Earth continues to suffer from climate change, Mars could come to us.
August 13, 2019
Visitors look at vegetables growing under artificial light on a vertical farm, in the IKEA: Gardening Will Save the World garden, in London on May 20th, 2019. (Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images)
On Mars, we'll all farm underground. Our crops will grow in a greenhouse, where large, parabolic mirrors focus the sun's weak rays and transmit them through fiber optic cables. We'll harvest vegetables to eat—but also the purified water that evaporates from their leaves. We'll all be vegan, because raising animals for food will be too expensive. And, most importantly, the plants will give us oxygen.
"That's the starting point to a whole civilization right there," says Utah State University researcher Bruce Bugbee. This is Bugbee's vision, one he's been dreaming of and testing and revising for years as a plant engineer with NASA.
Astronauts going to Mars can eat all the freeze-dried food they're able to ship, but if humans are going to survive on the planet they'll need to plants to produce oxygen. Not just any photosynthesizer will do: Mars is a difficult environment, with many challenges for farmers. Crops will need to be able to thrive in a small area, retain their nutrient content, and still taste good. Structures where they grow on the surface will need to withstand basketball-sized meteorites. The technology used to grow the plants will take massive amounts of energy. Mars also presents the ultimate recycling challenge, since astronauts can't pack all the water and nutrients they need on a two-and-a-half-year space flight.
Bugbee and his colleagues have been working on all these problems for decades, in a sometimes fantastical bid to support life on Mars (and, in the meantime, on space shuttles). Decades ago, NASA researchers ruled out some of the easiest plants to grow indoors, like algae: not enough sustenance, Bugbee says. Very tall crops like corn and sugarcane were also nixed because they wouldn't fit easily into the plant habitats.
What the astronauts really wanted was something green. "They say that having the texture and flavor and color and aromas of fresh foods apparently—and I believe it—really does add to the experience of eating," says NASA plant physiologist Raymond Wheeler.
Scientists started looking at traditional field crops like lettuce, tomatoes, and broccoli. Right now, astronauts are growing mixed greens 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station, using two small, sealed greenhouse units called Veggie. NASA researchers have planned and adjusted and measured for everything—including which types of lettuce tastes best in space. Astronauts' clogged sinuses already make it so they "can't taste much of anything," according to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, but the researchers are also curious to see whether the space environment affects a plant's flavor compounds and nutrient levels. Panels of specialists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston typically conduct formal taste tests, but sometimes the researchers sample a leaf or two themselves.
What Bugbee and his team didn't expect is that the technology they created for this grandiose, futuristic mission would become somewhat eclipsed by those using it to farm on more familiar terrain.
In 2017, NASA commissioned a space farming project to figure out how to grow food on Mars, but they were also hoping to make some discoveries that could improve crop yields overall. The problems that space farmers of the future will face are similar to those already plaguing earthbound agriculture as climate change grows worse, including a dwindling water supply and poor soil. Now, researchers in Utah and three California universities—NASA's partners with the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space—are working on projects that can sustain life not just on Mars, but on Earth.
"I think the reason NASA funds us is a powerful human fascination with being able to go inside a closed system and grow your own food," Bugbee says. "What if the atmosphere went bad and we had to build a big dome ... and go inside and live in it?"
In 1988, Wheeler built the first working vertical farm—growing plants on shelves, typically in a warehouse or storage container—at the agency's Kennedy Space Center. Wheeler's farm was 25 feet high and equipped with a hydroponic system for growing plants in water and high-pressure sodium lamps, the type commonly used for street lighting. All together, it was 20 square meters of growing space—almost 90,000 times less than the size of the average outdoor United States farm. According to Wheeler's calculations, it would take 50 square meters of plants to provide enough food and oxygen—and remove enough carbon dioxide—for one human in space. (Astronauts won't be using sodium lamps, though: A few years after Wheeler's innovation, a different group of NASA-funded researchers patented another significant piece of technology to indoor farmers: LEDs, which require much less electricity than sodium lights and are now used to power most greenhouses.)
Wheeler was focused on optimizing the area inside a chamber aboard a NASA space shuttle—and up seemed like the best way to go. "One of the things you have to think about in space is volume efficiency," he says. "You're vertically and dimensionally constrained." The team had to pick shorter crops: wheat, soybeans, potatoes, lettuce, and tomatoes.
In space, resources are limited: NASA scientists have to extract and reuse the nutrients from excess plant material and human waste; they collect water from the condensation that collects in the closed chambers. Here on Earth, water is also growing increasingly precious—climate change will make droughts more frequent and severe, devastating crop yields and making some staple crops like corn and soybeans obsolete. Every day, Earth looks a little more desolate, a little more like Mars.
When Wheeler started, the term "vertical farming" didn't exist yet. Today it's a $10 billion industry attracting interest from Silicon Valley and start-ups all over the world. Its acolytes believe the technology will one day completely replace conventional field agriculture, allowing businesses to grow crops year-round and indoors, insulated from the next drought or flood and the effects of climate change. "People imagine that we'll grow everything indoors, in skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan," Bugbee says. "It's a wildly popular idea."
Sonio Lo, the chief executive officer of the biggest vertical farming company in the world, Crop One Holdings, says she believes vertical farming can "liberate agriculture from climate change and geography."
Crop One broke ground on the world's largest vertical farm last November in Dubai: a five-story, 130,000-square-feet warehouse, capable of producing three tons of leafy greens a day. The company is also growing chard, arugula, and other greens in large, sealed rooms—year-round. "I made my whole management team stand in the supermarket and give out samples of what we were growing in the middle of the Boston winter," Lo says.
Soon people across the U.S. can try it too. Crop One is building new farms in the northeast, southwest, and California, where it will grow food to sell through its FreshBox Farms brand.
While researchers have been quick to condemn vertical farming's promises as over-hyped, even the industry's greatest critics acknowledge that this approach eliminates some of the challenges with conventional agriculture: Since vertical farms are located in compact warehouses, they're often located much closer to their markets than, say, the corn belt is to a city, allowing producers to cut down on food waste and save on transportation costs—a major contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The lettuce grows in a controlled environment, free of pests and pathogens, meaning farmers can grow food without pesticides or herbicides, which have a massive environmental and human-health cost. Vertical farmers can also recycle their nutrients—like astronauts do in space—preventing phosphorus or nitrogen from flooding into the world's waterways and wreaking havoc with algal blooms. And indoor growth systems can be very productive: When all the conditions are right, researchers have surpassed record crop yields in the field by as much as six times.
Lo says that a vertical farm using 100 percent renewables has one-tenth of the carbon impact of a conventional farm. But few companies have reached this goal; most are still moving toward a combination of renewable energy and non-renewables to power the electric lights used to grow the plants. It takes a lot of land to generate that much solar—about five acres of solar panels to supply the light for just one acre of indoor farm, Bugbee estimates. That's why many have resorted to fossil fuels, breaking one of vertical farming's great promises. "It takes massive amounts of fossil fuel energy, so, environmentally, it's really a disaster," Bugbee says. "Those people have used many of the principles that we've developed through NASA."
Bugbee's current project could help with that. His lab at Utah State is using LEDs and fiber optics to grow plants under different types of lights, with different ratios of colors—ultra violet, blue, green, red, far red (out of the limit of human vision)—to manipulate both photosynthesis and plant shape. The goal, he says, is to find "the most efficient system possible." Right now, the technology is too expensive: millions of dollars to light one building. But eventually, he believes fiber optics will replace electric lights for good.
But there are other qualms with vertical farming: Instead of helping to colonize space—the future that Mars researchers envision for their technology—vertical farms might take over city real estate, at a time when housing costs are extremely high. In some countries and some industries, it already has: Japan has had flourishing plant factories for the last 10 years. The fledgling cannabis industry has also started to ramp up its indoor production, poised to become even more profitable.
Lo says it won't be long until greens grown indoors cost the same as those in the field. "Field-grown food will continue to rise in cost, and course the climate is also changing," she says. "From a cost perspective, vertical farming will become competitive very quickly."
Others are more skeptical: "Economically, will they succeed? That question is still ongoing, because they always have to compete with field agriculture," Wheeler says. "What's their cost to pay for electric power? What are their labor costs? Are these operations sustainable? All of this is sort of a living experiment right now."
Technology for farming in climate change may be a by-product of NASA's research, but it has helped the agency ensure funding for its work in space. In response to the skeptic who doubts whether it's worth figuring out how to farm for a Mars mission we might never see, one only has to point to vertical farms in Boston or Seattle that already use some of NASA's innovations.
But Bugbee believes these earthly pursuits can be just as futuristic (or deluded) as those meant for space. "People that do it say they're going to save the planet ... but they have to have a lot of fossil fuels," he says. "It'll tell you all kinds of rosy pictures about it—that it saves water, it saves fertilizer."
He's not quite comfortable with his research being used to prop up this industry, now flooded with billions of dollars of venture capital. "I'm not doing it to make this more possible on Earth," he says. "We get asked all the time about the spinoffs: Could you do this, could you do that."
We may never make it to Mars. It will be years until NASA is ready for a journey to the red planet, and many more until Bugbee would be able to build his greenhouse underground, tucked away from meteorites. But if Earth continues on this collision course, Mars could come to us.
TAGS CLIMATE CHANGE VERTICAL FARMING NASA OUTER SPACE PLANTS AGRICULTURE
BY EMILY MOON
Emily Moon is a staff writer at Pacific Standard. Previously she worked at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana. She is a graduate of Northwestern University.
Workshop To Feature Hydroponic Technology - September 5, 2019
The workshop, which is sponsored by Purdue Extension, Purdue’s Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture and the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, will focus on teaching attendees about hydroponic production technology
Ashley Langreck | AgriNews Publications
July 31, 2019
Krishna Nemali examines hydroponically grown lettuce in the horticulture and landscape architecture greenhouse at Purdue University. Provided photo/Purdue University
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The fourth annual Greenhouse and Indoor Hydroponics Workshop will be from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 5 on the Purdue University campus.
The workshop, which is sponsored by Purdue Extension, Purdue’s Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture and the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, will focus on teaching attendees about hydroponic production technology.
Lori Jolly-Brown, who is serves as the Extension events and communications coordinator for the horticulture and landscape architecture department, said the morning session of the workshop will focus on how to get started in hydroponics, where to purchase and find materials, how to fertilize plants, ways to keep bugs away and a wide variety of other topics.
After lunch, Jolly-Brown said, attendees will have the chance to tour one of Purdue’s state-of-the-art greenhouses and indoor hydroponic facilities, while also having the opportunity to participate in hands-on activities.
Jolly-Brown said individuals will be able to interact with workshop organizer Krishna Nemali, a Purdue assistant professor and a controlled environment agriculture Extension specialist.
“They will get to see Nemali’s hydroponic research and vertical farming displays,” Jolly-Brown said.
Jolly-Brown said the workshop is geared toward commercial producers and growers, those just getting started in hydroponics, as well as those who are involved in hydroponics production technology as a hobby.
To register for the workshop, visit https://bit.ly/2OjqTBn.
Ashley Langreck can be reached at 800-426-9438, ext. 192, or alangreck@agrinews-pubs.com. Follow her on Twitter at: @AgNews_Langreck.
Tags Lori Jolly-brown Agriculture Economics Department Of Agriculture Indiana
Korean Ag-Tech Company Exports Smart Farming Solution To UAE
According to the source, n.thing will grow and sell Romaine lettuce in Abu Dhabi with Planty Cube
31 July 2019
The n.thing will grow and sell Romaine lettuce in Abu Dhabi with Planty Cube. (Image source: Elsemargriet /Pixabay)
South Korea’s Agricultural Technology Startup n.thing Has Started Exporting Indoor Farming Solution Planty Cube To The UAE
As reported in The Investor, the autopilot farm system is expected to allow farmers to grow greens in fully insulated indoor operations in areas with high aridity.
According to the source, n.thing will grow and sell Romaine lettuce in Abu Dhabi with Planty Cube.
Seeing the local market response, the types of greens will be diversified and production volume will rise, stated the company.
A number of smart farming companies in the Middle East is adopting smart methods to grow vegetables as the same in traditional method is very difficult due to hot arid climate, shortage of farmland and shortage of water.
US: Idaho - Family Farm Serves Mushrooms To Treasure Valley
Mason and Tia Groves built the entire farm from three shipping containers and now have their mushrooms shipped to five restaurants in the Treasure Valley, to Cliff’s Country Market in Caldwell and to the Nampa Farmers Market
By RACHEL SPACEK rspacek@idahopress.com
July 29, 2019
PARMA — Tia Groves described her husband, Mason Groves, as an “entrepreneurial person with passion oozing out of his pores.” Last fall, that passion took the form of a hand-built, family-run mushroom farm in Parma.
On Wednesday morning, Tia Groves walked in and out of the three shipping containers-turned-mushroom farms with baby Abel on her hip. Groves Country Mushroom Farm had its first full month of operation in November and plans to continue growing mushrooms year-round to keep up with the demand.
Mason and Tia Groves built the entire farm from three shipping containers and now have their mushrooms shipped to five restaurants in the Treasure Valley, to Cliff’s Country Market in Caldwell and to the Nampa Farmers Market. They are also in a number of community supported agriculture bundles, a service in which people can get local produce delivered to them on a regular basis.
Tia Groves said she believes there are at least two other mushroom farmers in the Treasure Valley. She said that the competition among the three is minimal since they see a demand for mushrooms in the valley.
The couple met at Vallivue High School in 2009. The couple spent a few years apart when Mason Groves spent time on a fishing boat in Alaska and Tia Groves went to school and worked in Chicago. They rekindled their relationship in 2014 back in the Treasure Valley.
After having their first child, Jett, the two realized they couldn’t raise a family on an Alaskan fishing boat and decided to move back to the valley.
When searching for a way to make a living in the valley, Mason Groves, who said he has always been fascinated by agriculture, came up with the idea of growing mushrooms after talking with his grandfather, a longtime crop farmer in Parma.
“After that I dove right in,” he said.
Mason Groves said he started reading books on how to grow mushrooms and starting small growing facilities to work it out in trial and error.
Still, to make a living, Mason Groves continues to work on a fishing boat in Alaska, away from his family. He said growing mushrooms started as a way to make money while also being with his family. He is trying to get out of the commercial fishing business.
While Mason Groves is away fishing, Tia Groves and Justis Kelly, the farm’s only other employee, work on harvesting and moving the mushrooms between shipping containers.
Kelly is living near the farm for the summer and helps harvest the mushrooms twice a day.
One of the greatest challenges, Mason Groves said, was the consistency involved in growing a product.
“This is a weekly crop — you are on a schedule, doing the same thing every week, and any hiccup that shows up impacts the clients that are expecting mushrooms every week,” he said.
THE PROCESS
Mushrooms, Tia Groves explained, typically thrive in the Pacific Northwest, where it is cold and moist nearly year-round.
“In order to grow them in a climate like this, we try to mimic the way they would grow there,” she said.
Groves Country Mushrooms are grown indoors, in three shipping containers, so the farmers can regulate the temperatures of the containers to keep them cool and moist despite the weather outdoors.
Currently, the farm is growing three different colors of oyster mushrooms, chestnut mushrooms and lion’s mane. Tia Groves said in the fall the farm can grow as many as 11 different types.
The first shipping container on the farm has a refrigerator where the harvested mushrooms are preserved and where they await being shipped to consumers.
The second shipping container contains bags of wood chips and the mushroom spawn, what the mushroom grows from. This shipping container acts as the incubation chamber for the bags of wood chips and spawn to form mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony.
After the bags fill with mycelium, they go into the last shipping container, or the fruiting chamber, where the mushrooms eventually sprout. The fruiting chamber is the foggiest and most humid of the containers. Once in the fruiting chamber, a slit is made in the bags of mycelium, allowing oxygen and light in so the mushrooms can grow.
The mushrooms start sprouting as pin sets, miniature mushrooms, and then grow into full clusters.
Once the mushrooms are in full clusters, they are harvested and put in the refrigerator in the first shipping container.
The excess wood chips and used mycelium from the plastic bags gets composted onto a pile on the farm. The compost is used on other parts of the Groveses’ property, like vegetable and flower beds. Mason Groves said they would eventually like to use the compost to grow other vegetables.
Water is used throughout the shipping containers to clean the space and regulate the environments inside. Once the water is used, it drains into a settling tank and is used on the compost pile.
Mason Groves said what little water is used in the process doesn’t go to waste.
Tia Groves said the family hopes to introduce new types of mushrooms to their farm in the fall and spring. She said the small farm is still in a trial-and-error period.
According to a ResearchAndMarkets.com report, the global mushroom market accounted for $38 billion in 2017. In the United States, the value of mushroom production was $1.22 billion in 2017, an 8 percent increase in value since 2007, according to a report commissioned by the American Mushroom Institute. The total crop in the United States was 929 million pounds of mushrooms.
Groves Country Mushrooms is expecting to triple in size by the first of the year after they move into a new building and keep the three shipping containers.
Mason Groves said the Treasure Valley community has been helpful and nice as the couple’s mushroom operation has gone through some ups and downs. He said their customers are countable on one hand, and he has personal relationships with all of them.
Rachel Spacek is the Latino Affairs reporter for the Idaho Press. You can reach her at rspacek@idahopress.com. Follow her on twitter @RachelSpacek.
All Photos: Brian Myrick / Idaho Press
U.S. Truck Driver Shortage Is On Course To Double In A Decade
The driver deficit swelled by more than 10,000 to 60,800 in 2018 from a year earlier, according to a study by the American Trucking Associations
By Thomas Black
July 23, 2019
The U.S. trucker shortage is expected to more than double over the next decade as the industry struggles to replace aging drivers and recruit more women.
The driver deficit swelled by more than 10,000 to 60,800 in 2018 from a year earlier, according to a study by the American Trucking Associations. The shortage is expected to ease slightly this year as U.S.-China trade friction slows freight demand and after trucking companies boosted pay to attract recruits.
The relief won’t last as replacing an aging pool of drivers gets harder in a tight labor market, said Bob Costello, chief economist for the trade group. The shortage is most acute for long-haul drivers, where the average age is 46, and workers are on the road for weeks at a time.
The ATA estimates that 160,000 driver positions will go unfilled in a decade.
“If things do not change, that’s where we will end up,” he said. “At some point, you go from being an operational pain-in-the-neck for the supply chain to real issues for all of us as consumers.”
In addition to increasing pay, trucking companies are trying to recruit more women, young people and former military personnel. Women make up less than 7% of drivers, and the industry is pushing to entice more with technology that makes trucks easier to drive and more comfortable.
The Arlington, Virginia-based ATA also wants regulators to lower the age for commercial drivers who can cross state lines by three years to 18. Its proposal would increase training and supervision. Cutting the age increases the recruiting pool and enables people to drive straight out of high school instead of choosing another industry, such as construction, Costello said.
Lead photo: An instructor, right, speaks with a student after practicing parallel parking with a truck at Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge.
Photographer: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg
"If There Is A Will, It Can Go Fast"
Last year the TBM-Irisweg biomass plant in Bleiswijk was put into operation. The installation - with a capacity of 14.8 MW - is connected to the RoCa pipeline
John Ammerlaan, Plantenkwekerij Leo Ammerlaan, about biomass plant:
Last year the TBM-Irisweg biomass plant in Bleiswijk was put into operation. The installation - with a capacity of 14.8 MW - is connected to the RoCa pipeline. John Ammerlaan from Plantenkwekerij Leo Ammerlaan/Plantise is a co-owner and user of TBM-Irisweg. "The great thing is that we only purchase heat when we need it."
TBM-Irisweg is a collaboration between the Brabant company TBM and Plantenkwekerij Leo Ammerlaan/Plantise. In addition to heat, also 1.1 MW of electricity is generated in the installations by a number of steam generators.
How did the biomass plant come about?
“In 2014 we had plans for geothermal energy on the Irisweg. During the discussions about this, we got into conversation with a party with plans for biomass. So that was TPM. Initially, it was about a biomass plant in an existing location because of an existing scheme. In retrospect, it was better to place the boilers and biomass storage in a separate building at our company’s location. After we submitted a project change, things started moving fast."
What happened next?
“In June 2016, it turned out to be possible to build the power plant in a new location; in July work started with drawing up the plans and the power plant was put into operation last April. If there is a will, it can occur fast. That is therefore different compared to the discussions around the heat network: That is not progressing fast. And that is not in the interest of horticulture."
How does the plant work in practice?
“The wood chips come from the region. These are incinerated: the heat is supplied to the grid, to the RoCa pipeline. We also purchase the heat from the biomass plant via the grid. The great thing is that we only purchase that heat when we need it. This is good for us, but also for the installation: if it were only dependent on us, then you would often have to deal with excessive power fluctuations in the biomass installation, which can have negative effects.”
And what does your own energy management look like?
“Because of the biomass plant we use decentralized heat production for part of our company and we use less gas. We still have a number of CHPs and a boiler: but now we use these a lot less. But I expect that horticulture will still need gas and CHPs in the coming ten years. We are not off the gas yet.”
Source: Greenport West-Holland
Publication date: 7/18/2019
Forging A Way Forward In Urban Agriculture
With the population of Americans living in rural parts of the country growing ever smaller, the agricultural community must begin to consider the ways in which it engages with the urban population
By Bailey Corwine
With the population of Americans living in rural parts of the country growing ever smaller, the agricultural community must begin to consider the ways in which it engages with the urban population. Recently a group of key stakeholders, including state and county Farm Bureau leaders and staff, met to discuss the role Farm Bureau plays in cultivating agriculture in an urban setting.
The Urban County Farm Bureau Coalition Summit II was the second such meeting of the coalition, which is working to broaden conversations and develop relationships between traditional farmers and ranchers in rural settings, modern agriculturalists in urban settings, elected local officials, Capitol Hill lawmakers and consumers in a variety of demographic areas.
“We’re always looking for ways for Farm Bureau to be more active and engaged on the county level when it comes to promotion and education, member engagement and building relationships, especially with urban legislators,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Summit attendees heard presentations from Jason Henderson, associate dean of the College of Agriculture at Purdue University, and Hubert Hamer, administrator of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, as well as thoughts from Marie Ruemenapp and Katherine Williams, chair and vice chair of the National Urban Extension Leaders, respectively.
The urgency of connecting urban America with rural America was stressed by each speaker.
“We’re at a crossroads in many different ways,” Henderson said. “But this is the exact right time to engage urban consumers.”
Ruemenapp echoed this statement, saying “the time is now” to have conversations about bridging the gap between America’s farmers and ranchers and the people they feed. She also highlighted the potential for partnerships between Farm Bureau and the Extension service.
The summit wrapped up with a discussion between Randy Kron, Indiana Farm Bureau president, and Jamie Johansson, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, covering perspectives from their states and the work that is being done to connect with the urban population.
“Going forward, it’s going to be even more important that we are engaging our urban members,” Johansson said. “Those people in our urban centers really are on the front lines in terms of explaining what we do out in the countryside.”
The Urban County Farm Bureau Coalition is led by a steering committee, which is chaired by Marion County (Ind.) President Jack Haefling. The county Farm Bureau surfaced the idea of a coalition focused on connecting urban county Farm Bureaus after a strategic planning exercise. The group has exhibited at two AFBF annual conventions and at the 2019 Farm Bureau FUSION Conference.
Bailey Corwine is an intern in the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Communications Department. She will graduate from the University of Arkansas in December with a degree in agricultural communications.
How Tech Is Helping The Agriculture Sector Curb Carbon Emissions
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed stated that 2018 was a record-breaking year for climate, but 2019 doesn’t look much better. As the list of extreme weather events and climate shocks grows, so does our shared responsibility to act
A worker harvests Image: REUTERS/Edgar Su at a vertical farm in Singapore.
26 Jul 2019
Alzbeta Klein Director and Global Head, Climate Business , International Finance Corporation (IFC)
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed stated that 2018 was a record-breaking year for climate, but 2019 doesn’t look much better. As the list of extreme weather events and climate shocks grows, so does our shared responsibility to act.
For the agricultural sector, these weather events are particularly devastating, with increased cycles of more frequent floods and drought hitting many farmers. The good news is that, two years ago in Bonn, the world’s governments finally acknowledged for the first time that agriculture has a major role to play in our changing climate. Following a series of intense all-night discussions and years of division and deadlock, governments at COP23 finally agreed on the connection between industrialized farming and our warming climate.
The world’s leading climate scientists have concluded that how we farm and use our land (whether for food production, forestry, or other types of land use) is responsible for about one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. If we include emissions caused by the processing, transport, storage, cooling and disposal of the food that we consume, then that figure rises to more than 40% – an unthinkable price for how we farm and eat.
With the global population set to rise from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion between now and 2050, world governments are faced with an overwhelming dilemma: how to feed the future without putting irreparable strain on our planet’s already overburdened soils and oceans? I believe that technology can get us there.
Agricultural technology – or agtech – approaches like precision farming, drought- and pest-resistant seeds, mobile phones and digital technology platforms are a solution. They boost farmers’ profits by cutting costs and increasing yields and benefiting customers the world over. But more technological innovation is needed. Fortunately, some of the International Finance Corporation’s partners are at the forefront of innovation when it comes to agtech.
Take Planet Labs, an innovative geospatial start-up that uses 149 earth-observing satellites to generate a daily stream of high-resolution images of the earth’s surface for farmers to understand crop and soil changes from pre-season to harvest.
Planet Lab’s goal is to take images of the Earth’s entire surface every day to make climate change visible, accessible and actionable, according to Tara O’Shea, Planet’s director of forestry. Founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, the company visualizes daily changes across the Earth’s surface in real time. Until now, satellite imagery data was not frequent enough to react to crop stress in a timely manner. Planet’s daily imagery has been a game changer in the digital ag space – enabling farmers to manage their precision agriculture at scale and farm more efficiently, profitably, and sustainably.
Agriculture isn’t just a rural concern. As urban density increases around the world, and more and more people move to cities, locally sourced food is taking on greater importance. Crop One Holdings is a “vertical farming" company that is transforming the landscape of indoor farming in urban areas.
The term vertical farm is relatively new. It refers to a method of growing crops – in Crop One Holding’s case, leafy greens and lettuce – usually without soil or natural light, in beds stacked vertically inside a controlled-environment building. One of the company’s 320 sq ft units can substitute up to 19 acres of farmland and use 1/2500th of the water usage of field-based growing. In Boston, a Crop One Holding one-acre farm produces yields equivalent to that of a regular 400-acre farm.
Crop One drastically reduces the length of transportation as well as carbon use, due to the farms’ proximity to consumers. There is no soil used in the growing, nor any chemical intervention or pesticides. Competitive field products are usually 12 to 15 days old by the time they are delivered to a store, resulting in significant losses for the retailer.
Vertical farms that rise to the challenge of climate change are still in the early stages of development, but a recent $40 million joint venture between Crop One and Emirates Flight Catering to build the world’s largest vertical farming facility in Dubai suggests that agtech business models are showing potential to scale across markets.
That’s good news for my climate business team at IFC, who are helping existing and potential agribusiness clients acquire and leverage new agricultural technologies for both large scale and smallholder farms. Our “climate-smart” approach targets animal protein, land and crops, and food losses, yielding $1.3 billion in investments since 2017. Agtech can accelerate these investments and help farmers adopt more sustainable agronomic practices.
At this year’s One Planet Summit, IFC signed two agreements with the Kenya Tea Development Agency Power Company Ltd. (KTDA Power): one that enables carbon credits, and another that will support KTDA with various advisory activities such as financial literacy training for farmers, soil testing for productivity improvement and development of a wood-sourcing strategy.
How we farm matters. In addition to record-breaking temperatures, super typhoons and drought, Deputy Secretary-General Mohammed has also spoken about how 5G technology and AI can build smarter agricultural systems.
Feeding our growing population requires revolutionary transformations in farming and land cultivation. Adopting pioneering agricultural technologies with the potential to increase yields while limiting greenhouse gas emissions is an essential step. If agriculture is to continue to feed the world, then we must enable technology to shape the farms of the future.
An Agricultural Robot Makes Its Debut In Fujian
The white agricultural robot, with 5G technology and many sensors, can move between two rows of green leafy vegetables in a greenhouse, collect data on the plants and send them to the control room
Online People 2019: 07
Fuzhou, 07/11/2019 (The People Online) - While industrial robots have become commonplace in factories throughout eastern China, the country's agricultural sector is seen by some as a place where few technologies they can take root, due to the high cost and the sophisticated natural environment involved in the cultivation of food.
But a research institute and a start-up based in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian province, east of China, are determined to change perception by jointly developing an agricultural robot.
The white agricultural robot, with 5G technology and many sensors, can move between two rows of green leafy vegetables in a greenhouse, collect data on the plants and send them to the control room.
Developed by the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of Fujian and Fujian Newland Era Hi-Tech Co Ltd, the robot is part of its efforts to build a functioning autonomous farm.
Unlike industrial plants where robots can follow pre-established routes and perform fixed jobs, such as feeding standardized electronic parts, agricultural environments are much more complex, said Zhao Jian, deputy head of the Institute of Digital Agriculture of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of Fujian .
"Agricultural robots also have to adapt to a wide variety of crops, livestock and highly differentiated aquatic products," said Zhao.
To solve the challenges, the research institute and Newland have jointly developed a more sophisticated artificial intelligence system. The computer algorithms, as well as the positioning hardware, map construction, route design and avoid obstacles, have been optimized to adapt to the agricultural environment, taking into account fertilization, plant irrigation, bumpy roads and other factors natural.
The robot's head is equipped with two 5-megapixel cameras that make "eyes" and two 7-megapixel cameras that make "ears." With the sensors at the top of its head and mouth, the robot can also detect wind speed, carbon dioxide levels, humidity, temperature and other data about the natural environment of the greenhouse.
The farm robot has succeeded in verifying its compatibility with 5G mobile communication technology, which allows data to be analyzed by computers enabled by artificial intelligence in the control room more efficiently.
"Currently, the robot can automatically inspect farms and collect data samples that are used to drive various applications. It can determine the health condition of the plants and decide if pest control measures are required," said Chen Li, deputy director of Newland Marketing.
According to Chen, the robot remains a prototype and, based on this, the two sides hope to increase investments to develop versatile robots that can even harvest fruit with a bionic hand in the future.
"Based on the mass agricultural data and images we have acquired, we hope to build a plant growth model optimized to achieve automatic control of the growth environment and early warning of pests and diseases," Chen added.
China is now the largest industrial robot market in the world. As labor costs continue to rise, the demand for robots will be stronger in China, said Wang Tianmiao, president of the Intelligent Manufacturing Research Institute of Beihang University.
Lead Photo: An agricultural robot moves between two rows of plants in a greenhouse in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian Province. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Exploring The Power And Politics of Urban Agriculture
Urban Agriculture is a deep dive into who gets to till soil in the city and why. It looks at one central question posed on the syllabus: What do gardens do for people?
In the video above, students in MET’s Urban Agriculture class visit the Fenway Victory Gardens. Photo by Cydney Scott. Video by Jason Kimball
New MET class examines the subject’s roots in Boston
July 8, 2019
On an early June evening, Zachary Nowak and the students in his Urban Agriculture class are strolling through the Fenway Victory Gardens, the nation’s oldest victory garden, admiring the pristine beds of lettuce and mop-headed peonies growing there. But this outing is far more than a walk in the park. Sitting in the shadow of the Prudential and Hancock towers, the Fenway Victory Gardens predates both, a vestige of World War II, when citizen gardeners raised vegetables to aid the war effort.
Urban Agriculture students touring the Fenway Victory Gardens, the nation’s oldest victory garden, to learn more about what people grow in their garden plots. Photo by Jason Kimball
Today the garden remains, seven sunny acres divided into 500 individual plots surrounded by towering multimillion luxury condos and office buildings. How that occurred is what Nowak wants to discuss with his students. After the war, he explains, the Victory Gardens never reverted to city parkland as intended because the Fenway’s upper-middle-class residents used their clout to keep the gardens going, for decades successfully fighting off various proposals to build on the site.
“On the one hand, thank God. I mean, imagine if this was a big IRS building,” says Nowak, a Metropolitan College lecturer, gesturing to the patchwork of plots. “But I also don’t want you to lose sight of the fact that this is a public place and certain people are being allowed to enjoy it and others not. So there’s a trade-off here.”
Urban Agriculture is a deep dive into who gets to till soil in the city and why. It looks at one central question posed on the syllabus: What do gardens do for people? Nowak leads students on an exploration of local community gardens, school and prison gardening programs, and the guerilla gardens that appear on abandoned city lots as a way to better understand power and politics in the city.
Class instructor Zachary Nowak, a MET lecturer, says he’s interested in what urban agriculture says about the political economy we live in. Photo by Jason Kimball
Students visit the rooftop garden at Boston Medical Center, interview gardeners at some of the city’s historic community gardens, and explore the racial and ethnic dynamics that can frequently determine who gets to garden in the city and where. Nowak is uniquely qualified to lead the class. He finished a PhD in American studies at Harvard University last year, and as a postdoctoral fellow, he currently teaches classes at Harvard on the history of the built and natural environment. (He is working on a book about the social history of train stations in 19th-century American cities as well.)
He also lived in Italy for 12 years, where he cofounded a “sustainable studies” program at the Umbra Institute in Perugia and tended his own urban garden. He draws on those varied experiences for the class, he says, as well as on research in a variety of disciplines; economic concepts like neoliberalism and the role of government in urban agriculture are central to class discussions.
“The class is really not about urban agriculture” per se, Nowak says. “It’s about what urban agriculture can tell us about the political economy that we’re living in.”
A rogue garden
Some of those lessons were on display during a class trip to the Berkeley Community Garden in Boston’s South End, a 140-plot garden that has been a neighborhood fixture since the 1960s. Lesser known are its origins as a rogue garden planted by Chinese immigrants who wanted to grow traditional Chinese vegetables they either couldn’t afford to buy or couldn’t find in local markets. They tilled the soil along Berkeley Street, where housing had been razed for a highway on-ramp that never materialized, and began to cultivate the land.
The Urban Agriculture class explores the racial and ethnic dynamics that can frequently determine who gets to garden in the city and where. Photo by Cydney Scott
That was more than 50 years ago, a scruffier era in the South End. Today, the low-slung community garden sits within one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods, surrounded by multimillion-dollar brownstones and wine bars.
Students went to the Berkeley garden to interview its gardeners and found that Chinese immigrants continue to garden there.
Grad student Jared Kaufman (MET), a freelance food writer interested in food policy, says the visit was a highlight of the course. Many gardens there remain dedicated to growing Asian vegetables, beans, or the distinctive hairy gourds that hang from the top of elaborate cages.
Other plots were devoted to cutting flowers, salad greens, and herbs, or transformed into postage stamp–size sitting areas. Kaufman says the visit raised questions about whether soaring property values and gentrification in Boston threaten the existence of some gardens.
“Support from the city can wither away at any moment,” he says, especially if the city has an incentive to see a site return to the property tax rolls.
Graduate student Jared Kaufman (MET) during a class tour of the Fenway Victory Gardens. Photo by Jason Kimball
Grad student Priyokti Rana (SPH), who is pursuing a master’s degree in public health with a focus on epidemiology and biostatistics, says the visit exposed unexpected tensions about the role the garden plays in the neighborhood: while some South End residents complained that some garden plots looked messy or smelled bad, she says, others described them as a lifeline.
Rana interviewed Helen, an aging Chinese gardener, who grows hairy gourds and other vegetables in her plot as her main form of recreation. “That was so interesting,” Rana says. “The class was definitely more political than I expected.”
Students also consider the role of government in urban agriculture, particularly if community gardens are used to justify government cutbacks in social service programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps.
Grad student Sarah Hartwig (MET), a graduate assistant in BU’s Programs in Food & Wine, is working on a master’s in gastronomy. She says the class debated the implications of neoliberalism and whether community gardens are an answer to food insecurity.
“By filling that vacuum, urban gardens often inadvertently reinforce the system they were responding to,” Hartwig says.
That’s the kind of big thinking about tiny plots of land that fuels lively class discussions. Nowak says he also tries to give students high- and low-tech tools that will help them comprehend and absorb extensive reading assignments more quickly. This includes teaching his self-developed system of highlighting texts and speed reading. (He jokes that he was a grad student for so long, he’s really good at it.)
To honor the Berkeley Community Garden’s guerilla garden legacy, the class is creating signage in English and Chinese that tells the story of its history and evolution and will be posted at the garden.
Anyone walking by the gardens today, Nowak says, would have no idea what it’s about, its role in the community, or its unique staying-power. “It’s like residents have got a place on the Cape, right there outside their door,” he says. “It doesn’t always happen like that.”